In 1904, the British geographer, Halford Mackinder, read a paper named “The Geographical Pivot of History” at the Royal Geographical Society. In the paper he advanced a hypothesis on the influence of geographic reality on world power relationships. This is sometimes regarded as the founding moment of the study of geopolitics. Looking at the whole planet, he spoke of the “heartland” – the great landmass of Eurasia – and the Islands – the large islands of the Americas and Australia and the small islands of the United Kingdom and Japan. (Parenthetically, he does not seem to have much concerned himself with Africa or South America.) For most of history, Europe was an isolated and not very important appendage of this great world mass, subject to continual raids from the nomads of the Heartland, and the outer islands played no part in world events.

All this changed about five centuries ago when what he called the “Columbian Age” began. That is to say, the time when Europe discovered sea power. This gave the Islands a great dominance over the Heartland. In 1905, however, he saw the situation changing with the construction of railways which could connect the Heartland. In 1919 he produced his famous “triad”:

<<Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland.

Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island.

Who rules the World Island commands the world.>>

His fear then was Germany+East Europe=world dominance. But the triad was not intended to be true for all time – he would not agree thirty years later that the USSR’s rule over East Europe plus the World Island meant rule over the world; Mackinder adapted his theory to the realities as he saw them. And, after the Second World War, he believed that the Islands (USA+UK+allies) could control the Rimlands and therefore lock out the Heartland (USSR). The “Rimlands” were an later addendum to his 1904 theory: these were the territories subject to influence by sea power; that is the edges of the Heartland.

His theory has been in and out of favour – because it was taken up by some nazis (Germany must conquer the Heartland to gain world dominance) geopolitics became tainted for a time. Some think that it’s a textbook – Washington must maintain naval superiority; the Middle East is a key area of conflict because the Heartland can break the Rimlands in half there; Russia lusts after a warm water port and so on. This is an overstatement: Mackinder believed that he had elucidated an important driving factor in world power relationships – not some deterministic law but a important principle.

And so he had. We take it for granted today, familiar as we all are with world maps and world globes, but the discovery of The Ocean was a hugely important event in world power relationships. By “The Ocean” I do not mean the trivial observation that, eventually, all land ends at the water’s edge, but the understanding that the water is all connected. Here is an interesting projection of the world map as seen from the perspective of fishes – the Spilhaus Projection. It’s all blue except for bits around the edges and the blue continues, round and round, through the Bering Strait. This connectedness was not obvious until about 500 years ago when Spanish and Portuguese navigators made it so. A good illustration of the connectedness of The Ocean is the career of the British Admiral Nelson: his career in the Royal Navy took him to the Caribbean, the Arctic, India, the North American Station, the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas and the Atlantic Ocean. All of them equally reachable from the principal base at Portsmouth. This was the great world-shattering discovery that made Europe ruler of the world – once you put out to sea, you can go anywhere. Or at least to anywhere in the Rimlands where most people live. With that discovery – and the accompanying technology – Europe ceased to be a minor isolated appendage at the edge of the world; it was able to surround the Heartland. And so we have the tremendous dominance of Europe over the world for the last five centuries. (Not just mastery of the Ocean of course: Europe’s greater killing skill and its ever-attending diseases were powerful aids to conquest too.)

There is a great weakness to the Heartland’s power. Mackinder began his 1904 paper by listing the difficulties with the Heartland. Its rivers flow the wrong way – either into the inaccessible Arctic or into internal lakes like the Caspian or Aral Seas. There are too many deserts and too many mountains. There isn’t enough rainfall. Much of its territory is too cold, too far north and too forested. Distances – from the perspective of muscle-powered transport – are immense. The Heartland is simply not hospitable and therefore, will never have much of a population. The Rimlands, on the other hand, are much more populated and always will be. In short, the Heartland can never have the population to dominate the Rimlands and, without sea power, it can’t get to the Islands. Perhaps the closest that the the Heartland peoples came to conquering the world was when Temujin unified the Mongols. But there, as history has many times shown, when the horse people arrive in the cities, the cities win in the end; only in the Russian lands did the khanates linger for much longer than three generations. Therefore – and it seems that Mackinder came to realise this – the Heartland is less of an actor in geopolitics than a subject: it is valuable if possessed by, say, Germany, or if its controlling power can break through and gather some of the Rimlands.

Mackinder’s theories are considered to have influenced Zbigniew Brzezinski who saw it as very important for Washington to control “continental bridgeheads” in the Rimlands. For example Afghanistan and the Middle East. (Mackinder saw the Isthmus of Suez as key position – “the weakest spot in the girdle of early civilisations”). From the perspective of 2021, enough said – the USA has received no benefit at all from its fiddling around in these areas. Indeed, when the history of the end of the Imperium Americanum is written, these two areas will occupy many pages of text: utter failure. On paper Afghanistan may look like a “bridgehead” but it is, in fact, impenetrable to outsiders. And the Middle East has too many people who are, as Putin put it: “more cunning, clever and strong than you, and if you play these games with them, you will always lose”. Some bridgeheads are best left to theory.

But time marches on. Mackinder in 1904 was very impressed by the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway (then with a spur through Manchuria; the all-Russian route was only finished in 1916) and predicted

<<the century will not be old before all Asia is covered with railways… it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce.>>

The curse of the Heartland had always been the immense difficulty and slowness of movement – sea movement was always faster and easier – but railways could change all that and he saw this first trans-Heartland railway as a world-changing event. Today the line is double-tracked and electrified and its capacity is continually increasing. In fact, today it is theoretically possible to take passenger trains from Yakutsk – about as deep in the Heartland as one can imagine – to London and then a taxi to the Royal Geographical Society and contemplate a copy of Mackinder’s original paper.

As it happens, his prediction has come true, although not as soon as he expected. But it’s not Russia that’s building trains through the Heartland today: this video of high speed railway construction by country over time says it all. China first appears in March 2003; has the most rail in March 2009 and, when the video ends in December 2019, has well over half the world’s total. And it shows no signs of stopping – high speed railways are a vital component of its Belt and Road initiative and Laos was just connected. And China has just produced a 600 kph prototype maglev train, already having a 400 kph one in service.

And now, a century and a quarter later, we come to something that I’m sure Mackinder never envisaged and that is the Heartland plus population. Russia plus China: millions of well-educated, well-situated people, lots of science and technology, an enormous percentage of the world’s manufacturing capacity together with all the natural resources one could want. The Heartland plus population plus manufacturing plus resources. There’s still more: the Islands have relied on their sea power for centuries but Russia has a large and competent navy and China now has more ships than the U.S. Navy (and probably more than all of NATO too).

What a shame Zbigniew Brzezinski isn’t alive to enjoy the fruits of his efforts! In The Grand Chessboard he warned that the greatest danger to continued America primacy would be a Russia-China alliance. He was (idiotically?) confident that U.S. diplomacy could prevent that from happening. Quite the contrary – the arrogance of his “New American Century” followers have driven Moscow and Beijing together.

The Heartland plus population plus production plus sea power: that’s the end of the “Columbian Age”.

The battle lines for the future of humanity were made explicitly clear during this week’s Eastern Economic Forum held in Vladivostok under the theme of “Opportunities for the Far East in a World Under Transformation”.

President Putin set the tone of the event by noting:

“The strategic vector for the development of the Far East is towards a new economy, those areas for economic, scientific and technological development that shape the future, set long-term trends in entire industries, countries, and regions of the world. Here a broad range of opportunities for international cooperation opens up as well as the chance to really look at the development of the traditional sectors and branches of the economy.

Over the course of the three day event, 380 agreements totalling 3.5 trillion rubles were signed vectored around a long term growth strategy for Russia’s underdeveloped North East which. These agreements bring together dozens of nations and private interests into a new long term strategic framework that is not only opening up one of the last undeveloped frontiers on Earth, but which also ties Moscow’s destiny ever more firmly into the Asian Pacific. This is no surprise since China’s growth model has set the tone for an alternative political-economic order and Russia’s relationship with that new order is among the highest priorities for anyone in Russia committed to survival.

Unlike those western states locked within a unipolar sinking ship who have forgotten how to think long term, or even conduct business from an honest win-win cooperative outlook, Russia announced the accelerated creation of five modern Arctic cities that will house 300 thousand to 1.5 million citizens over the coming years. Additionally, a decree was signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin for 10 year financing agreements amounting to 500 billion rubles “to build new highways, communal infrastructure, energy and industrial facilities”.

Russia’s Energy Strategy 2035 (first unveiled in 2015) was advanced in leaps and bounds with agreements to increase the gas distribution system from 68.6% to 82.9% in 14 years, and to vastly expand hydrogen energy development to 200,000 tons by 2024 before rising to 2,000,000 tons by 2035. During the summit, a plan was laid out for three hydrogen production clusters to be created with 1) a northwest set of clusters to service Europe’s growing needs, 2) a set of eastern clusters to export hydrogen to Asia and finally 3) a set of Arctic clusters which will be a key driver in opening up and modernizing Russia’s north.

While there are several pathways to create hydrogen fuel, the most effect option which Russia has selected in its current model uses electrolysis carbon capture technology from natural gas. However, Rosatom has announced an even more robust approach to hydrogen development in the form of nuclear reactors that not only provide reliable, high quality energy to power the industrial and residential needs of a nation but also generate massive quantities of hydrogen as a carbon-free by-product.

At a June 2020 initiation of a prototype reactor designed to produce hydrogen at the Kola Nuclear plant, a representative of Rosatom said:

“The purpose of the Competence Center will be validation of technology for the production, storage and transportation of electrolytic hydrogen. We are now at the very beginning of a long journey.”

The strategic necessity for hydrogen and also nuclear power has finally struck many nations who have woken up to the reality that the windmill/solar panel boondoggles that technocrats managing a Global Green New Deal have been pushing might look nice in computer models, but are completely dysfunctional when measured against the actual productive needs of humanity.

Keynoting the summit, President Putin made the point that the Arctic hosts an array of mineral and energy resources that will not only service the coming decades but coming centuries with Arctic offshore deposits of oil amounting to 15 billion tons and 100 trillion cubic meters of gas. New ports will continue to be built and upgraded while Russia’s Trans Siberian rail line (and associated 4300 km Baikal-Amur Mainland railway) will feature vast upgrades to accommodate a rise of traffic from the current 120 million tons/year to 180 million tons by 2024.

Describing the Northern Sea Route which will cut over 10 days as ships move goods between China and Europe (while decongesting the Straits of Malacca and Suez Canal), Putin stated:

“I would like to note that over the past 10 years, the volume of cargo transport along this route has increased by an order of magnitude. I think I have my numbers right; sometime in 1986 a little over 7 million tonnes were shipped, last year it was 33 million tonnes, and by 2024, this figure should be 80 million tonnes. I am positive that these are not the final figures.”

In order to encourage long term investment and civilization building (rather than the resource stripping practices dominant under Globalization), Putin announced a vast array of tax incentives and reduced insurance premiums for companies willing to build vital infrastructure and industrial hubs for automotive, agriculture and mining programs in the Arctic zones. Predicting any shifty financiers licking their lips at new opportunities for tax havens, the Russian leader also emphasized that only companies engaged in directly productive work would reap these benefits.

Intent on reversing the devastating trends of negative population growth that Russia suffered during the dark years of Perestroika and which have never properly recovered, Russia has unveiled a modern form of homestead program offering lands, easy loans and other financial incentives for families who wish to migrate into these high priority regions. Included in this program are ample opportunities for trade schools with good paying jobs for young people and migrants as well.

Providing a brilliant strategic remedy to the build-up of full spectrum dominance military encirclements in the Pacific, Russia has placed a large emphasis on the economic development of the Kuril Islands as a primary focus for the Eastern growth agenda. In his speech, Putin made sure to emphasize the benefits Japan would incur by partnering on these initiatives which fall far outside of the Asian Quad security doctrine which certain Strangelove-esque characters would much prefer define Asian military planning.

In both rail upgrades, new energy corridors, migration flows, new cities and arctic shipping, Russia’s relationship with China’s Belt and Road Initiative is huge.

Without this relationship having reached a mature level of harmonization as a powerful inter-civilizational partnership, it is difficult to imagine what a hopeless disaster zone much of the Central European, Asian and Middle Eastern economies would be at this moment.

With the International Northern-South Transportation Corridor begun in 2002 stretching from Russia to India with maritime and land routes touching dozens of countries now taking on new life as a win-win design in total synergy with the east-west New Silk Road corridor, the importance of the integration of the Eurasian Economic Union with the BRI Framework can not be overstated.

For example, Not only did China’s recent $400 billion deal with Iran transform the Greater Eurasian Partnership around a new chemistry of energy, transport and security agreements, but Russia and Iran have together advanced a harmonization of their power grids around two routes: 1) via Azerbaijan and 2) via Armenia and Georgia. Additionally, this summer, Russia and Iran signed off on 20 year agreement covering political, economic, security, military and defense cooperation.

With these new pro-development programs in place, a new environment is quickly being shaped outside of the increasingly defunct “rules based order”. This alternative system is bringing hope to Afghanistan, Syria, and every other nation caught in the fires of empire. Reflective of this new hope, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid has stated:

“Chinese assistance will form the foundation of Afghan development. One Belt, one Road will revive the ancient Silk Road. China will be our gateway to international markets”.

With the BRICS Summit just around the corner and the BRICS Development Bank poised to hopefully take on new life as a driving force of long term development alongside the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank, one can only hope that wiser forces among the nations of the west (and those among the global south trying to foolishly operate within two opposing worlds) will recognize which future is worth living in.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Are geopolitical analysts in the west seriously delusional enough to believe that Russia and China can be undermined?

It was only one month ago that the world found itself trapped on a fast track to nuclear war between NATO powers and Russia over tensions that had been brought to a boil in Ukraine. Of course, it wasn’t only a Nazi-ridden Ukraine that was being used as a trigger for a major showdown, as evidence of Belarus regime change and even assassination attempts became publicized and MI6-Bellingcat antics were justifying new waves of anti-Russian sanctions across the trans Atlantic community. These antics even led to the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the Czech Republic, media psyops attempting to lay blame on the Kremlin for cyber attacks on American pipelines. Additionally, a zero-tolerance policy towards the completion of the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline appeared to be a non-negotiable red line for Washington up until recently. No matter where you looked, the spectre of nuclear war abounded for all to see and only companies specializing in the sale of bomb shelters were content with the direction of world events.

And then something changed.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that certain power brokers among the Great Resetting crowd of the west realized that a smoldering earth of radioactive decay was not one they wished to rule over (or under) and that Russia had no intention of backing down in the game of nuclear chicken then being played.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Russia’s advanced hypersonic nuclear missile delivery systems were not a part of the game theory-based computer models which war game scenario planners had designed to justify the full spectrum dominance encirclement of Russia for the past 20 years. While a “limited nuclear war” sounded like an acceptable risk decades ago, and among the “least-worst” possible outcomes designed into computer models until recently, the next generation technologies unveiled by Russia have demonstrated to the saner among the Dr. Strangeloves of NATO that this path would not bear the fruit they once hoped.

A New Calculus Emerges

It appears, from direct statements made by President Biden and Jan Psaki over the past week, that Washington’s decision to pull back from the precipice of nuclear oblivion on the Ukraine front was premised on a new strategic equation that rests on two wildly foolish assumptions:

• The belief that the foundations of the Russian-Chinese alliance contains fatal fissures which can be exploited by savvy diplomatic maneuvering and

• The belief that Russia somehow really desires to be popular and rejoin the “cool kids” of the G7 leading the international liberal order

For these two assumptions to shape the calculus of western logicians playing on a “great game” whose rules they don’t understand yet still wish to dominate, it is assumed that Russia, who shares a 2600 mile border with China, must certainly feel “squeezed” by the great dragon’s supposed plans for global dominance.

While obviously a display of extreme projection from within the inferiority complex-ridden minds of western game masters, it is thus assumed that Russia may yet be swayed into joining a real power block capable of countering China’s imperial Belt and Road Initiative.

For some, this may seem difficult to believe considering Russia and China’s continued re-commitments to work together in defense of the multipolar alliance and their common understanding of the joint unipolar threats that have been striving relentlessly to carve them up from within and from without for decades. Yet demonstrating the delusional calculus now at play, Biden stated on June 16:

“Russia is in a very very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China. They want to desperately remain a major power. They desperately want to be relevant.”

Apparently ending the age of post-9/11 regime change since entering Syria in 2015 and annihilating ISIS, while extending S400 defense systems across the world and merging the EEU with China’s BRI are not enough to qualify Russia as a “major power” in Biden’s mind, let alone being “relevant” in the age of U.S. hegemony.

But Biden took it even further stating:

“Russia doesn’t want to be known as the upper Volta with nuclear weapons’. It matters. And I found it matters to almost every world leader-no matter where they’re from- how they’re perceived, their standing in the world. It matters to them.”

To understand the thinking behind this second statement, it must be understood that a fundamental belief among all behaviorists (of which Biden is no exception being ruled by teams of them and being little more than a synthetic shell himself of impulses devoid of any actual substance himself), is that one of the fundamental drives of all soulless/blank-slates is the desire to be popular. Being popular and adapting to the force of popular opinions works in all anarchist mobs, school yards and especially politics (which is seen as the ultimate game of popularity for any substance-free rhetorician). The force of popular opinion will thus cause anyone to modify their beliefs, opinions, and behavior in conformity to whatever “norms” shape their environment. While one would think it obvious that Putin was not the sort of individual to fall prey to this shallow definition of “practical” human nature, Biden and his handlers appear to think otherwise.

White House spokeswoman Jan Psaki amplified this view saying:

“I think the president’s view is that Russia is on the outside of the global community in many respects… what the president is offering is a bridge back. And so, certainly he believes its in their interests to take him up on the offer.”

So while the outcome of the Putin-Biden meeting resulted in some inarguably positive steps towards the creation of mechanisms to avoid blowing up the world, re-activating START, committing to solid rules of engagement in the Arctic and other Russian border regions in post-Soviet space (at least those are the hopes conveyed by those attending the meeting), China has become the new primary target of western ire.

Where Russia is defined as one among many authoritarian regimes capable of abrasive disturbances but ultimately controllable in the long run, the Chinese have been labelled a much greater threat to western unipolar hegemony as a force playing a long game with the economic capacity, power and will to bring an entirely new security, financial architecture online founded upon principles of multipolarity, long term real economic growth and cooperation for all participants.

Why Russia would feel “squeezed” by this fact is an absurdity beyond belief.

After all, China is not the one who has lit fires across Russia’s underbelly, promoted a decade of shock therapy, Balkanization, NATO expansion, funded color revolutionary tactics, or corralled the world community to impose sanctions onto her.

The fact is that Russia and China enjoy a vastly increasing rate of trade now topping $100 billion annually (compared to the mere $20 billion of US-Russian trade), are both de-dollarizing at accelerating speeds, while working on a common strategic philosophical concept of self-interest and economic value unseen anywhere among the technocratic Hobbesian bubbleheads of the west are facts that unite both great nations in a solid unassailable partnership that keeps oligarchs up at night.

In his NBC Interview with Keir Simmons before meeting Biden, Putin said of the Russian-Chinese relationships: “Can I be completely honest? We can see attempts at destroying the relationship between Russia and China. We can see that those attempts are being made in practical policies. And your questions, too, have to do with it… We (China and Russia) are neighboring countries. One does not choose one’s neighbors. We are pleased with the unprecedentedly high level of our relationship as it has evolved over the last few decades, and we cherish it, just like our Chinese friends cherish it, which we can see.”

Long Term Sino-Russian Strategies

For anyone still ignorant of the sorts of long term strategies that unite Russia and China (and a growing array of nations jumping on board this multi-polar life raft), a few examples can be found in the BRI’s Arctic extensions into the Polar Silk Road, the visionary Russian-Chinese space programs now unfolding vectored on a jointly constructed lunar base, space mining and breakthroughs in nuclear power (including fusion energy) with a focus on exporting this invaluable technology to all nations hungry for real development.

By “real development”, I don’t mean the sort of green boondoggle outlined in the “Clean Green Initiative” or Build Back Better for the World (B3W) programs showcased with delusional pride at the G7 which profess to put China in its place by extending private credit to windmill and solar panel farms across the world. It is a demonstrable fact that these forms of low quality energy not only cripple any nations’ capacity to sustain heavy industry and capital intensive infrastructure, but also pull those foolish enough to join such a green initiative into a piranha tank of debt slavery, decarbonization mandates enforceable by trans-national mechanisms and of course, depopulation.

The question remains: Can Putin use the behaviorist assumptions prevalent among the western elite to humanity’s advantage in order to buy time, complete the Nord Stream 2, and consolidate some important anti-nuclear war mechanisms in order to lower the tension of war sufficiently to navigate through the stormy waters ahead or is it already too late? The answer to those questions will be shaped in some measure by the actions of patriots among the west who wish to have a future. This wish means understanding and acting towards the sorts of policy reforms that put nation states above the power of private finance, human life above computer models and cooperation with the Greater Eurasian Partnership above the interests of sociopathic oligarchs.

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

Empires live and die by their illusions. Visions of empowerment can inspire nations to scale the heights of global hegemony. Similarly, however, illusions of omnipotence can send fading empires crashing into oblivion. So it was with Great Britain in the 1950s and so it may be with the United States today.

By 1956, Britain had exploited its global empire shamelessly for a decade in an effort to lift its domestic economy out of the rubble of World War II. It was looking forward to doing so for many decades to come. Then an obscure Egyptian army colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal and Britain’s establishment erupted in a paroxysm of racist outrage. The prime minister of the day, Sir Antony Eden, forged an alliance with France and Israel to send six aircraft carriers to the Suez area, smash Egypt’s tank force in the Sinai desert, and sweep its air force from the skies.

But Nasser grasped the deeper geopolitics of empire in a way that British leaders had long forgotten. The Suez Canal was the strategic hinge that tied Britain to its Asian empire — to British Petroleum’s oil fields in the Persian Gulf and the sea lanes to Singapore and beyond. So, in a geopolitical masterstroke, he simply filled a few rusting freighters with rocks and sank them at the entrance to the canal, snapping that hinge in a single gesture. After Eden was forced to withdraw British forces in a humiliating defeat, the once-mighty British pound trembled at the precipice of collapse and, overnight, the sense of imperial power in England seemed to vanish like a desert mirage.

Two Decades of Delusions

In a similar manner, Washington’s hubris is finding its nemesis in China’s President Xi Jinping and his grand strategy for uniting Eurasia into the world’s largest economic bloc. For two decades, as China climbed, step by step, toward global eminence, Washington’s inside-the-Beltway power elite was blinded by its overarching dreams of eternal military omnipotence. In the process, from Bill Clinton’s administration to Joe Biden’s, Washington’s China policy has morphed from illusion directly into a state of bipartisan delusion.

Back in 2000, the Clinton administration believed that, if admitted to the World Trade Organization, Beijing would play the global game strictly by Washington’s rules. When China started playing imperial hardball instead — stealing patents, forcing companies to turn over trade secrets, and manipulating its currency to increase its exports — the elite journal Foreign Affairs tut-tutted that such charges had “little merit,” urging Washington to avoid “an all-out trade war” by learning to “respect difference and look for common ground.”

Within just three years, a flood of exports produced by China’s low-wage workforce, drawn from 20% of the world’s population, began shutting down factories across America. The AFL-CIO labor confederation then started accusing Beijing of illegally “dumping” its goods in the U.S. at below-market prices. The administration of George W. Bush, however, dismissed the charges for lack of “conclusive evidence,” allowing Beijing’s export juggernaut to grind on unimpeded.

For the most part, the Bush-Cheney White House simply ignored China, instead invading Iraq in 2003, launching a strategy that was supposed to give the U.S. lasting dominion over the Middle East’s vast oil reserves. By the time Washington withdrew from Baghdad in 2011, having wasted up to $5.4 trillion on the misbegotten invasion and occupation of that country, fracking had left America on the edge of energy independence, while oil was joining cordwood and coal as a fuel whose days were numbered, potentially rendering the future Middle East geopolitically irrelevant.

While Washington had been pouring blood and treasure into desert sands, Beijing was making itself into the world’s workshop. It had amassed $4 trillion in foreign exchange, which it began investing in an ambitious scheme it called the Belt and Road Initiative to unify Eurasia via history’s largest set of infrastructure projects. Hoping to counter that move with a bold geopolitical gambit, President Barack Obama tried to check China with a new strategy that he called a “pivot to Asia.” It was to entail a global military shift of U.S. forces to the Pacific and a drawing of Eurasia’s commerce toward America through a new set of trade pacts. The scheme, brilliant in the abstract, soon crashed head-first into some harsh realities. As a start, extricating the U.S. military from the mess it had made in the Greater Middle East proved far harder than imagined. Meanwhile, getting big global trade treaties approved as anti-globalization populism surged across America — fueled by factory closures and stagnant wages — turned out, in the end, to be impossible.

Even President Obama underestimated the seriousness of China’s sustained challenge to this country’s global power. “Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community,” two senior Obama officials would later write, “shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy debate erred.”

Breaking with the Beltway consensus about China, Donald Trump would spend two years of his presidency fighting a trade war, thinking he could use America’s economic power — in the end, just a few tariffs — to bring Beijing to its knees. Despite his administration’s incredibly erratic foreign policy, its recognition of China’s challenge would prove surprisingly consistent. Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster would, for instance, observe that Washington had empowered “a nation whose leaders were determined not only to displace the United States in Asia, but also to promote a rival economic and governance model globally.” Similarly, Trump’s State Department warned that Beijing harbored “hegemonic ambitions” aimed at “displacing the United States as the world’s foremost power.”

In the end, however, Trump would capitulate. By January 2020, his trade war would have devastated this country’s agricultural exports, while inflicting heavy losses on its commercial supply chain, forcing the White House to rescind some of those punitive tariffs in exchange for Beijing’s unenforceable promises to purchase more American goods. Despite a celebratory White House signing ceremony, that deal represented little more than a surrender.

Joe Biden’s Imperial Illusions

Even now, after these 20 years of bipartisan failure, Washington’s imperial illusions persist. The Biden administration and its inside-the-Beltway foreign-policy experts seem to think that China is a problem like Covid-19 that can be managed simply by being the un-Trump. Last December, a pair of professors writing in the establishment journal Foreign Affairs typically opined that “America may one day look back on China the way they now view the Soviet Union,” that is, “as a dangerous rival whose evident strengths concealed stagnation and vulnerability.”

Sure, China might be surpassing this country in multiple economic metrics and building up its military power, said Ryan Hass, the former China director in Obama’s National Security Council, but it is not 10 feet tall. China’s population, he pointed out, is aging, its debt ballooning, and its politics “increasingly sclerotic.” In the event of conflict, China is geopolitically “vulnerable when it comes to food and energy security,” since its navy is unable to prevent it “from being cut off from vital supplies.”

In the months before the 2020 presidential election, a former official in Obama’s State Department, Jake Sullivan, began auditioning for appointment as Biden’s national security adviser by staking out a similar position. In Foreign Affairs, he argued that China might be “more formidable economically… than the Soviet Union ever was,” but Washington could still achieve “a steady state of… coexistence on terms favorable to U.S. interests and values.” Although China was clearly trying “to establish itself as the world’s leading power,” he added, America “still has the ability to more than hold its own in that competition,” just as long as it avoids Trump’s “trajectory of self-sabotage.”

As expected from such a skilled courtier, Sullivan’s views coincided carefully with those of his future boss, Joe Biden. In his main foreign policy manifesto for the 2020 presidential campaign, candidate Biden argued that “to win the competition for the future against China,” the U.S. had to “sharpen its innovative edge and unite the economic might of democracies around the world.”

All these men are veteran foreign policy professionals with a wealth of international experience. Yet they seem oblivious to the geopolitical foundations for global power that Xi Jinping, like Nasser before him, seemed to grasp so intuitively. Like the British establishment of the 1950s, these American leaders have been on top of the world for so long that they’ve forgotten how they got there.

In the aftermath of World War II, America’s Cold War leaders had a clear understanding that their global power, like Britain’s before it, would depend on control over Eurasia. For the previous 400 years, every would-be global hegemon had struggled to dominate that vast land mass. In the sixteenth century, Portugal had dotted continental coastlines with 50 fortified ports (feitorias) stretching from Lisbon to the Straits of Malacca (which connect the Indian Ocean to the Pacific), just as, in the late nineteenth century, Great Britain would rule the waves through naval bastions that stretched from Scapa Flow, Scotland, to Singapore.

While Portugal’s strategy, as recorded in royal decrees, was focused on controlling maritime choke points, Britain benefitted from the systematic study of geopolitics by the geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, who argued that the key to global power was control over Eurasia and, more broadly, a tri-continental “world island” comprised of Asia, Europe, and Africa. As strong as those empires were in their day, no imperial power fully perfected its global reach by capturing both axial ends of Eurasia — until America came on the scene.

The Cold War Struggle for Control over Eurasia

During its first decade as the globe’s great hegemon at the close of World War II, Washington quite self-consciously set out to build an apparatus of awesome military power that would allow it to dominate the sprawling Eurasian land mass. With each passing decade, layer upon layer of weaponry and an ever-growing network of military bastions were combined to “contain” communism behind a 5,000-mile Iron Curtain that arched across Eurasia, from the Berlin Wall to the Demilitarized Zone near Seoul, South Korea.

Through its post-World War II occupation of the defeated Axis powers, Germany and Japan, Washington seized military bases, large and small, at both ends of Eurasia. In Japan, for example, its military would occupy approximately 100 installations from Misawa air base in the far north to Sasebo naval base in the south.

Soon after, as Washington reeled from the twin shocks of a communist victory in China and the start of the Korean war in June 1950, the National Security Council adopted NSC-68, a memorandum making it clear that control of Eurasia would be the key to its global power struggle against communism. “Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass,” read that foundational document. The U.S., it insisted, must expand its military yet again “to deter, if possible, Soviet expansion, and to defeat, if necessary, aggressive Soviet or Soviet-directed actions.”

As the Pentagon’s budget quadrupled from $13.5 billion to $48.2 billion in the early 1950s in pursuit of that strategic mission, Washington quickly built a chain of 500 military installations ringing that landmass, from the massive Ramstein air base in West Germany to vast, sprawling naval bases at Subic Bay in the Philippines and Yokosuka, Japan.

Such bases were the visible manifestation of a chain of mutual defense pacts organized across the breadth of Eurasia, from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe to a security treaty, ANZUS, involving Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. in the South Pacific. Along the strategic island chain facing Asia known as the Pacific littoral, Washington quickly cemented its position through bilateral defense pacts with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia.

Along the Iron Curtain running through the heart of Europe, 25 active-duty NATO divisions faced 150 Soviet-led Warsaw Pact divisions, both backed by armadas of artillery, tanks, strategic bombers, and nuclear-armed missiles. To patrol the Eurasian continent’s sprawling coastline, Washington mobilized massive naval armadas stiffened by nuclear-armed submarines and aircraft carriers — the 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean and the massive 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.

For the next 40 years, Washington’s secret Cold War weapon, the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, fought its largest and longest covert wars around the rim of Eurasia. Probing relentlessly for vulnerabilities of any sort in the Sino-Soviet bloc, the CIA mounted a series of small invasions of Tibet and southwest China in the early 1950s; fought a secret war in Laos, mobilizing a 30,000-strong militia of local Hmong villagers during the 1960s; and launched a massive, multibillion dollar covert war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

During those same four decades, America’s only hot wars were similarly fought at the edge of Eurasia, seeking to contain the expansion of Communist China. On the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953, almost 40,000 Americans (and untold numbers of Koreans) died in Washington’s effort to block the advance of North Korean and Chinese forces across the 38th parallel. In Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1975, some 58,000 American troops (and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians) died in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the expansion of communists south of the 17th parallel that divided North and South Vietnam.

By the time the Soviet Union imploded in 1990 (just as China was turning into a Communist Party-run capitalist power), the U.S. military had become a global behemoth standing astride the Eurasian continent with more than 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters, more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of nearly 600 ships, including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups — all linked together by a global system of satellites for communication, navigation, and espionage.

Despite its name, the Global War on Terror after 2001 was actually fought, like the Cold War before it, at the edge of Eurasia. Apart from the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Air Force and CIA had, within a decade, ringed the southern rim of that landmass with a network of 60 bases for its growing arsenal of Reaper and Predator drones, stretching all the way from the Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily to Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam. And yet, in that series of failed, never-ending conflicts, the old military formula for “containing,” constraining, and dominating Eurasia was visibly failing. The Global War on Terror proved, in some sense, a long-drawn-out version of Britain’s imperial Suez disaster.

China’s Eurasian Strategy

After all that, it seems remarkable that Washington’s current generation of foreign policy leaders, like Britain’s in the 1950s, is so blindingly oblivious to the geopolitics of empire — in this case, to Beijing’s largely economic bid for global power on that same “world island” (Eurasia plus an adjoining Africa).

It’s not as if China has been hiding some secret strategy. In a 2013 speech at Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University, President Xi typically urged the peoples of Central Asia to join with his country to “forge closer economic ties, deepen cooperation, and expand development space in the Eurasian region.” Through trade and infrastructure “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea,” this vast landmass inhabited by close to three billion people could, he said, become “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”

This development scheme, soon to be dubbed the Belt and Road Initiative, would become a massive effort to economically integrate that “world island” of Africa, Asia, and Europe by investing well more than a trillion dollars — a sum 10 times larger than the famed U.S. Marshall plan that rebuilt a ravaged Europe after World War II. Beijing also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank with an impressive $100 billion in capital and 103 member nations. More recently, China has formed the world’s largest trade bloc with 14 Asia-Pacific partners and, over Washington’s strenuous objections, signed an ambitious financial services agreement with the European Union.

Such investments, almost none of a military nature, quickly fostered the formation of a transcontinental grid of railroads and gas pipelines extending from East Asia to Europe, the Pacific to the Atlantic, all linked to Beijing. In a striking parallel with that sixteenth century chain of 50 fortified Portuguese ports, Beijing has also acquired special access through loans and leases to more than 40 seaports encompassing its own latter-day “world island” — from the Straits of Malacca, across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along Europe’s extended coastline from Piraeus, Greece, to Zeebrugge, Belgium.

With its growing wealth, China also built a blue-water navy that, by 2020, already had 360 warships, backed by land-based missiles, jet fighters, and the planet’s second global system of military satellites. That growing force was meant to be the tip of China’s spear aimed at puncturing Washington’s encirclement of Asia. To cut the chain of American installations along the Pacific littoral, Beijing has built eight military bases on tiny (often dredged) islands in the South China Sea and imposed an air defense zone over a portion of the East China Sea. It has also challenged the U.S. Navy’s long-standing dominion over the Indian Ocean by opening its first foreign base at Djibouti in East Africa and building modern ports at Gwadar, Pakistan, and Hambantota, Sri Lanka, with potential military applications.

By now, the inherent strength of Beijing’s geopolitical strategy should be obvious to Washington foreign policy experts, were their insights not clouded by imperial hubris. Ignoring the unbending geopolitics of global power, centered as always on Eurasia, those Washington insiders now coming to power in the Biden administration somehow imagine that there is still a fight to be fought, a competition to be waged, a race to be run. Yet, as with the British in the 1950s, that ship may well have sailed.

By grasping the geopolitical logic of unifying Eurasia’s vast landmass — home to 70% of the world’s population — through transcontinental infrastructures for commerce, energy, finance, and transport, Beijing has rendered Washington’s encircling armadas of aircraft and warships redundant, even irrelevant.

As Sir Halford Mackinder might have put it, had he lived to celebrate his 160th birthday last month, the U.S. dominated Eurasia and thereby the world for 70 years. Now, China is taking control of that strategic continent and global power will surely follow.

However, it will do so on anything but the recognizable planet of the last 400 years. Sooner or later, Washington will undoubtedly have to accept the unbending geopolitical reality that undergirds the latest shift in global power and adapt its foreign policy and fiscal priorities accordingly.

This current version of the Suez syndrome is, nonetheless, anything but the usual. Thanks to longterm imperial development based on fossil fuels, planet Earth itself is now changing in ways dangerous to any power, no matter how imperial or ascendant. So, sooner or later, both Washington and Beijing will have to recognize that we are now in a distinctly dangerous new world where, in the decades to come, without some kind of coordination and global cooperation to curtail climate change, old imperial truths of any sort are likely to be left in the attic of history in a house coming down around all our ears.

tomdispatch.com

On January 6th, Barbara Wessel, a columnist for Germany’s Deutsche Welle (DW), headlined a common European sentiment: “Trump has Europeans caught in a trap: Europe is suffering under the way Donald Trump makes political decisions on the fly. The only option left is to appeal to Iran’s interest in self-preservation”. But Iranians can’t stop the sanctions against itself, and can’t stop Trump’s other outrageous aggressions. Wessel’s false underlying assumption was that Europe must lecture Iranians. That’s like lecturing to Jews during WWII: “The only option left is to appeal to Jews’ interest in self-preservation.” Victims already do everything they can to stop their being victimized; they cannot stop the victimizer from victimizing them. They don’t cause it. Europe must, at last, say “No!” to US, the tyrant over the entire world — Bolivia, Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and more. Wessel, however, understood, at least, that the dangerousness actually comes far more from the US, than it does from Iran. So, she recognized that her thinking on this whole matter was confused. She stated:

Any illusions about the possibility of an even partially rational cooperation on foreign policy with the government in Washington have long been shattered. Cynical remarks by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who accuses the Europeans of not giving enough support in the Middle East, underline their helplessness. … Even experienced observers of US Middle East policy have been unable to explain how this [Trump’s “bring American soldiers home”] fits in with the strike against Soleimani. … Europeans find themselves in the trap of a kind of US foreign policy that is marked by the emotional eruptions of an unpredictable president and his power-drunk neocon supporters. … Basically, their [the US Government’s] only explanation for killing Soleimani is: “Because we can.” … Granted, Europe looks weak and helpless when, in joint statements, Europeans call for de-escalation after their presumed partner, the US, has just done everything it can to escalate the situation. … The new year will quickly show how strong the current tendency to suicide is among all those involved. …

The presumption on which such sentiments are based is that things must go on as before, and EU must continue to be allied with US, instead of with the rest of the Eurasian Continent — but this presumption (EU with US instead of with all the rest of Eurasia) has been false ever since the US Government went wild in its response to the mainly Saudi Arabian 9/11 assault against the US and Israel cheered that event, and Iran got blamed by the US government for 9/11 as being “The top state sponsor of terrorism” (which was yet another lie), and Obama perpetrated a coup replacing Ukraine’s democratically elected Government with a US-imposed fascist and rabidly anti-Russian government such as Obama wanted to be next-door to Russia. He even was intending to replace Russia’s largest naval base, which is in Crimea, by yet another US naval base, to be installed there. None of this is in Europe’s interest. Nor is it even discussed in Europe or in any other vassal-region of the US empire. It’s censored-out there.

Germany, France, Italy, Spain and all the rest of Europe, actually belong with all the rest of the Eurasian Continent, rather than with the formerly democratic but now fascist United States across the Atlantic Ocean. A federal Eurasia, composed of free and independent states within a wider United States of Eurasia, would have 4.618 billion population, almost half of the entire world, and wealth to match that, and economic growth which far exceeds that of what will then be left of the US-and-its-allied-countries: UK, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. All other nations would ally either with Eurasia or with that US group — American and those three core allies (Saudi Arabia, Israel, and UK). NATO is America’s aggressive alliance, which routinely invades countries that pose no threat to either US or Europe (such as Iraq). America’s plan for NATO is to expand it worldwide, so that the US will automatically have European allies for invasions in places such as Latin America. NATO needs to be replaced by a united Eurasian defense force, which will be able to counterbalance, within its sphere, the world’s largest military. The US has around 1,000 military bases, of which around 300 are inside US Though officially the US spends 37% of the global military budget, it actually spends around half of all global military expenditures, but hides around one-third of its annual military spending by listing those costs in other federal Departments, such as the US Treasury Department, so as not to seem as militaristic as the US Government actually is. It’s actually a global empire — the largest that the world has ever known. Europe is, and can only be, vassals in that empire. The alternative requires new thinking, and is not to spend more money on the military, but to recognize that when Russia ended the Cold War in 1991, the war secretly continued, and still does continue, on the US side — and Russia and China recognize that this is America’s intention. Europe must stop the Cold War, because only Europe can do that.

Barbara Wessel’s commentary presumes, instead, that Europe’s leaders have no ability to say no to the US That presumed passivity is only bad habit, inherited from a Europe which was wrecked by WWII. That’s no longer the reality today. Instead, Europe, joined with Asia, will be the global superpower that can finally end America’s endless wars —simply by not joining them. Eurasia will be the world’s dominant power, if Europeans want a future that is better than the past, instead of catastrophic. Either way, the future won’t be much like the past. Europe needs to wake up now, from its vassalage since WWII ended. Simply continuing that would produce a horrible future.

Another DW columnist on January 6th, Konstantin Eggert, headlined “Opinion: Putin’s power games may get out of hand”, and he was even more supportive of Germany’s vassalage to the US regime. He presented a strong case that by murdering Soleimani, Trump had pulled the trump card in the US-v.-Russia game by eliminating the key person upon whom Putin had been relying in order to transfer dominance in the Middle East away from US and toward, instead, Russia. Soleimani was that key individual for Putin’s success in this. “According to sources in Moscow, Putin knew Soleimani very well: He played a key role in creating the Russian-Iranian alliance that saved Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria from what seemed in 2015 an imminent demise.” With Soleimani now gone, Eggert predicted that regardless of what Iraq’s Government might want, the US would refuse to terminate its occupation of that country, and Iran would be in a much weaker position than before. He said that “Putin has every reason to wish the Iranians backed off from confrontation with the United States,” so as for Russia to avoid being drawn into World War III. “Putin’s best chance to avoid this drama is to play peacemaker — not alone but in the company of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Turkey’s Erdogan, who are rushing to meet him in the coming two days. Berlin and Ankara do not want to see the Middle East explode and will be asking Putin to use his close ties in Tehran to hatch a deal and fend off confrontation.” In this sense, the missile that hit Soleimani on January 3rd hit not only Iraq and Iran but EU and Turkey. Eggert therefore advises America’s vassals to remain America’s vassals because Russia now is trapped and Putin might not fold his hand and might not simply let Iran become ultimately swallowed-up — Merkel etc. should urge Putin to fold his hand, is the implication here. Eggert’s implication is that, in the final analysis, might makes right, and that therefore any resistance against it (for example, if Putin continues to resist) would only be harmful. Or, as he puts it: “With the Iranian regime massively undermined or destroyed, Moscow’s position in the Middle East and Vladimir Putin’s personal prestige as the world’s topmost authority on stopping ‘regime change’ and someone who never leaves allies in the lurch, will be badly hit and revealed as much weaker than it seems.” Eggert sees Trump’s assassination of Soleimani as, in effect, a master-stroke, which has severely weakened Putin. Of course, if Europe’s leaders will act this way, then Eggert’s might-makes-right view will be vindicated, by them.

Europe is the US regime’s indispensable ally. If EU breaks away from US and joins with the rest of the Eurasian continent instead, at least the possibility will exist for avoiding a hellish future of continued and accelerating vassalage to the US regime for the entire world. Passivity and might-makes-right slants such as “Putin’s power games may get out of hand” (instead of “America’s assassination of Soleimani places entire world in danger”) are choices — not inevitable — and Europeans will ultimately be the individuals who will be making the choices here. Europeans will decide whether the US is the world’s enemy; or, instead, whether Russia, China, Iran, and, really, all the rest of Asia, will be treated as if they were that (like the US regime wants). Ganging-up against the victims — if that is to be the European response — would be a choice, not an inevitability (such as DW implies). It will be up to Europeans whether to order all US troops to leave, and to tariff all imports from America, and to sanction and boycott US brands and increasingly replace them with Eurasian ones instead. Trump can be trumped, but only Europe has the clout to do it. The future will be decided by Europeans. The voices of passivity, such as DW, are doing the bidding of Europeans’ enemy — not of the entire world’s future: a Eurasian-led world.

In the past six years, Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China met each other for sustained conferences on no less than 30 occasions.

President Xi paid a state visit to Russia from June 5 to June 7 where he and President Putin held bilateral talks which resulted in the two leaders signing an agreement to step up global strategic stability in the modern-era. Then from June 8 to June 10, both leaders also attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

There was nothing sinister or secret about these meetings. On the contrary, they were extensively covered in the Russian and Chinese media. And they celebrated major advances in the growing cooperation two of the largest and most powerful nations in the world.

The trade volume between Russia and China is expected to continue to accelerate and reach new heights, doubling the current record level of $108 billion, the Russian economy ministry said.

Trade between Russia and China in agricultural products and processed food alone rose by nearly 30 percent in 2018 to over $5 billion. Overall bilateral trade volume is now at $108 billion, a rise of 25 percent in only one year and looks to rise even faster.

The significance in these developments to the global balance of power and patterns of investment and trade is very clear. Russia is fast becoming a food exporting superpower likely to reach a level it has not experienced since before World War I.

Already, Russia succeeds in selling wheat at a profit more cheaply and cost effectively to Indonesia than Australia, Jakarta’s next door neighbor.

The economic sanctions slammed on Russia by the United States and the European Union (EU) nations and Canada after Crimea and the two eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk opted out of Ukraine following the Maidan coup in 2014 have backfired spectacularly.

They were meant to force Russia to its knees and bully it into accepting the ongoing neo-colonization of Eurasia by Washington, Wall Street, London and Brussels. Russia was meant to accept the diktat of the Kiev coup d’état and many more or face being plunged back into the hellish starvation of the 1990s.

(That dark era is still falsely lauded throughout the West as a supposed “brief golden age of freedom” rather than the horrific Great Depression on Steroids which, as I saw repeatedly with my own eyes during those years, it truly was.)

However, instead, the sanctions backfired. They proved the superiority of mercantilist industrial and investment reality over the Free Trade, One World dreams of neocons, neoliberals and the like that I sought to expose in my own 2012 book “That Should Still Be Us.”

Following imposition of the sanctions on Russia, domestic food processing and many other domestic industries boomed to fill the demand caused by the end of unlimited processed foods and other consumer imports. Russian agricultural production soared.

Inadvertently, US and EU bungling created a vast domestic protected market across Russia and its Eurasian neighbors. Now the maturing companies and industries created by that market are poised to expand across the Middle East and Asia.

This astonishing development explains why the St. Petersburg Forum continues to grow in scale and value so rapidly every year. It also explains why the media and leaders of the West remain so ludicrously blind to Russia’s growing prosperity and success.

They prefer to cling to the racist contemptible fairytale that the Russian people are incapable of business, industrial and agricultural success and excellence. They never visit Russia to see the reality with their own eyes. They prefer to live in a ludicrous world of their lurid imaginations. (And from Peter Pan to Harry Potter, who has been better at creating dream worlds than the British or the Americans in Hollywood?)

Also, Western leaders are blind to the slow but steady and systematic achievements of Russia and China under Presidents Putin and Xi because those leaders are literally invisible to their Western counterparts.

Western democratic leaders with the partial exception of US President Donald Trump are economic illiterates who believe blindly in free trade, open borders and chaotic growth. They cannot recognize the value of planning slowly, carefully and steadily with long term investment strategies. From Abraham Lincoln to Lyndon Johnson, US leaders could and did think, plan and act this way: But never since.

This is too slow for the instant gratification, “make a quick profit and damn all the rest” mentalities of Wall Street and the City of London and their political puppets today to comprehend. Slow-but-sure moving long range industrial and communications infrastructure development is simply invisible to them.

That is why the leaders of the West today are literally blind to the enormous shifts in world power that have been slowly, massively gathering momentum since the start of this century. But blindness cannot prevent the Rise and Fall of Nations. Soon the true realities of the New World will be clear to all.

Three almost uninterrupted centuries of Russian self-comparison, self-assessment, self-identification with the West and ever deeper involvement in the intra-Western geopolitical and imperial competition have come to an end. Harsh lessons Russians have drawn from its three centuries of intimate interaction with the West — its Occidental Era — were reinforced by the post-Cold War failure to create a ‘common European home’ from Vancouver to Vladivostok, leading to the conclusion that Russia had betrayed the meaning of its national seal – the double-headed eagle looking both west and east. Although Russia still references the West as a competitor as well as standard in some respects, Vladimir Putin’s Russia now rejects the post-modernist West and its neo-imperial civilizational, indeed, ‘civilizationalist’ ambitions in Russia’s neighborhood. Instead of seeking to be part of the West or defeat the Western geopolitical paradigm, it seeks along with China and, in some respects, India and several more regional powers in building an alternative global civilization to that in the post-modern West.

Three Centuries Facing West

Ever since Peter the Great cut his ‘window on Europe’ along the White Sea in 1703, Russia, with fits and starts, has been on a journey defined by, headed towards, and often driven by the West. Peter’s great, yet often culturally superficial and largely technical reforms set Russia off on its Western journey. Peter literally forced Russia to model itself on Europe and measure itself in European terms. This remained true whether Russia’s relations with the West were in a condition of comity and cooperation or were competitive, even conflictive. In other words, first Europe and then the larger West became Russia’s ‘significant Other’, which Russia constantly referenced. The Petrine reforms and the century of Russia’s Western-defined Enlightenment that followed consolidated Russia’s referencing its European Other. Moreover, by Empress Elizabeth’s reign (1740-1762) the Russian court and aristocracy viewed themselves as Europeans. From Peter the Great forward, Russia also oriented its foreign affairs on Europe, continuously shifting in its alliances between competing European powers in accordance with the structural and geographical vicissitudes of European geopolitics, Russian interests, and her domestic needs and inclinations in any given period under any given emperor or empress.

Russia’s turn West had its costs and benefits. Most of the latter affected Russia’s domestically. From Peter the Great’s reforms, Russian development and modernization was most often driven by an influx of cultural, economic, social, and political innovations developed in Europe.

At the same time, this pattern of externally-borrowed engines of development had its downsides. Peter’s forced, brutal, and condescending modernization march forged a great divide in Russian society over whether or not Russia should orient itself on the Western model or return to its ancient Slavic traditions violated by Peter. Western ideas and sometime direct political meddling and intervention led to internal conflict, political destabilization, Western-backed palace coups (Elizabeth and Catherine the Great) and even revolution. It was, after all, a Western influence, Marxism, that would produce the worst decades in modern Russian history from 1917-1945. Marxism and its handmaiden Leninism brought revolution, civil war, state terror, and alienation from the Western states that it otherwise could have allied with and thereby prevented or at least contained and then rolled back Nazi Germany’s rise.

No such divide emerged over whether or not Russia should retain Peter’s foreign policy turn to the geopolitical game in the West. Costs for Russia’s entry into the European great game were significant, often exorbitantly so. Reversing the chronological order, its involvement in European alliances led to its entanglement in World War I, which would be the death knell for a Romanov autocracy, which had achieved world-leading economic growth rates and begun the process of transition to a constitutional monarchy and likely soon democracy. The Marxist ideology that came to dominate within the opposition to the autocracy and in the Bolshevik Party that helped to overthrow the Romanovs was of European origin, not Russian. Moreover, the Marxist-influenced revolution and the Leninist coup were facilitated by German support for Russian radicals, most notably the hijackers and ultimate victors of the revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Half a century earlier, Russia’s stability, albeit coerced under Nicholas I, was breached by Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War at the hands of western Europe’s great powers in alliance with the Ottoman Porte. Another half-century earlier, Russia’s entanglement in European alliances and the beginning of Europe’s first revolutionary wave produced Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Russia. Russia’s defeat of Napoleon, the Russian army’s liberation of Europe from the tyrant of brotherhood, liberty and equality, and Tsar Alexander I’s and Russian forces entry into Paris put St. Petersburg in the driver’s seat of Europe for the first time. Alexander’s vision of a community of constitutional and liberal monarchies failed, but Russia became more deeply embedded in the European great game than ever before. The result was growing European ambitions in southeastern Europe and the Black Sea region and another major European against Russia, indeed world war, over Crimea.  

Going back to Russia’s first deep foray into European politics, Peter the Great proposed during his ‘diplomatic mission’ (actually a cultural and technological fact-finding and knowledge-gathering mission) to Holland, Britain, Austria, Poland and elsewhere in 1697 that the European powers unite with Russia in a grand alliance against the Muslim Ottoman Turkish Porte. They rejected this proposal and instead convinced Peter to essentially lead an alliance against Sweden. Thus, Russia entered Europe’s constantly warring and shifting alliance ‘system’ at some risk to its national security but in service of the same great power and imperial ambitions driving Europe’s politics. It is worth noting that well before Peter’s reign, Russia had fallen victim to a Polish-led, Vatican-backed plot to spread Catholicism using an apparently Russian impostor to the throne. At the beginning of the 17 the century, the Poles manned, armed, and financed the initial invasion force of the ‘False Dmitrii’ (likely an impostor impersonating the thought-killed but supposedly saved son of Ivan the Terrible, the tsarevich Dmitrii). Seizing Moscow, he briefly sat on the Russian throne before being killed in a coup, which threw Russian into chaos, famine, and civil war prompting Polish military interventions and an outright invasion before a Russian national insurgency rose in 1612 and expelled the Poles and bandit Cossacks marauding across the country. Decades before this period Russian call the ‘Smuta’ or ‘Time of troubles’, the Polish-Lithuanian Union invaded Russia under Stepan Batory.

If not for the domestic developmental advantages of trade with, and cultural influence from the West, Russia might have been better off concluding before Peter’s turn West that it should borrow from the Chinese the idea of a wall to close the country  off from the western intervention (cultural, political and military), rather than diving headlong into European politics and leaving the country open to one degree or another to cultural, territorial, and military encroachment for centuries to come.

Although many Western and Russian historians are fond of blaming Russia’s non-democratic political culture and imperialist strategic culture for the Bolsheviks’ rise to power, the fact remains that it was Europe’s geopolitics, World War I, European Marxism due to its own decay and deviation from the Enlightenment, and the Germans’ financial and logistical support for Lenin and the Bolsheviks that brought totalitarian and messianic communist imperialism to power in Russia. It is important to not further that Romanov Russia survived its military defeat to Japan a decade earlier and made important democratic concessions to the democratic and socialist oppositions in doing so. This and Russia’s booming economy on World War I’s eve demonstrates, the potential for a democratic transition under the Romanos that would have avoided the Bolshevik catastrophe. Germany’s war machine and machinations with Lenin confounded this trajectory as much if not more than any distinctly Russian factor.

In sum, prior to Russia’s reincarnation as the Soviet Union, Western cultural influence, political influence and intervention, and military invasions constitute a weighty downside for Russia in the historical ledger of its relations with the West.

The Bolsheviks reinforced the worst in Russian political and strategic culture, leading to Stalin’s totalitarian crucifixion of the country and the Cold War. The Soviet regime was a Russian third way between the suspect Western model and the discredited traditional Russian autocratic model. World War II or the Great Patriotic War reinforced Russians’ sense of the Wester threat. Nevertheless, the Soviet project’s failure led to a return to Europe and the West.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika increasingly referenced Western models and his ‘new political thinking’ in foreign policy produced the end of the Cold War and the vision of a ‘common European home’ extending from Vladivostok to Vancouver.

Unfortunately, Russia’s post-Cold War ‘democratic transition’ and trajectory west were not a predestined outcome. Great focus and work on the part of the West was needed to help assist Russia in breaking the tight bonds of the disastrous Soviet economic, political, cultural, and strategic legacy. By the time of Gorbachev’s rise to power, the hyper-centralized Soviet economy was but a third the size of the U.S. economy and most of the former consisted of military-related production. Huge Western investments were needed to assist the transition to the market, but they never came. Politically, the Soviet system had neutered civil society, never nurtured a culture of compromise, created new ethnonational groups but denied them and pre-Soviet nationalities of the Russian Empire full expression. This not only helped explode the Soviet regime and state but threatened the multinational new Russia, especially in the context of the economic depression that ensued. To this domestic decline can be added the mode of the USSR’s regime transformation, especially in Russia. As a result of the August 1991 failed hardline coup Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and later but belated intent to fashion an imposed transition to democracy and the market under the transition ‘pact’ otherwise known as the Union Treaty was overtaken by Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s civilian bureaucratic-led revolution from above, meaning the illegal seizure of power by actors using state organs rather than a civil society movement to dismantle the ancien regime and replace it with a new one. This meant that the elite, if not the country as a whole, was of the old regime. It had a limited commitment to, and understanding of what was meant by representative democracy and free markets. Moreover, since the old elite and ancien regime’s institutions are often used and retained at least in part rather than swept away in revolutions from above as opposed to society-led revolutions from below, the post-Soviet Russian state was composed not just of numerous old regime apparatchiki but the institutions they peopled under the Soviet Union. These helped effectively limit, divert, distort and even block much of the transformation. 

Then came the West’s broken promise not to expand NATO beyond reunified Germany. ‘Russia’ had given up its external empire, was reeling in economic and psychological depression, and fighting a potentially Islamist Chechen insurgency (that became outright jihadist a decade later), and the most important Western policy was to decide to expand NATO to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The echoes of the ‘Smuta’, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler already could be heard by many in Moscow. Russia’s sprint to Europe became a cautious stroll.

Then came NATO’s bombing of Belgrade and the West’s recognition of Kosovo’s independence. Russia’s cautious stroll to Europe came to a halt, symbolized by the reversion of Russian Foreign Minister Yevgenii Primakov’s plane back to Moscow after having been headed to Washington for talks. NATO expansion continued.

Then came prospective NATO member Georgia’s bombing of Tskhinvali, the Georgian-Ossetian/Russian August 2008 war, and two Western-backed color revolutions in Ukraine, the latter engineered by neo-fascist snipers’ murder of police and civilians on 20 February 2014 in violation of an international agreement to resolve the revolutionary crisis. To be sure, Russia had provided Milosevic with cover, harassed Saakashvili’s Georgia, recognized South Ossetiya’s and Abkhazia’s independence after the 2008 war, and backed corrupt Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych regimes in Ukraine. But this is part of the European great geopolitical game. The West after all violated a UN resolution guaranteeing Serbia’s territorial integrity in recognizing Kosovo, closed its eyes to massive corruption in Ukraine under Viktor Yushchenko and does so today, propping the Poroshenko regime up with tens of billions of IMF dollars, and continues to cover up the truth about the February 2014 Madian snipers’ massacre and the rise of fascism around the Maidan regime.

The 2014 Ukrainian crisis and the West’s duplicity surrounding the reasons for its support for regime change in Kiev (EU and especially NATO expansion) was the death knell for Russia’s 300-year turn West. A new era in Russian policy — the post-Petrine Eurasian era — has begun. Russian self-assessment and self-identification with the West and ever deeper involvement in the intra-Western imperial and geopolitical power struggle have come to an end.

Putin’s Russia now rejects the post-modernist West and its neo-imperial civilizational, indeed, ‘civilizationalist’ ambitions in Russia’s neighborhood and beyond. Instead of seeking to be part of the West or defeat the Western geopolitical paradigm, it seeks along with China and, in some respects, India and several more regional powers in building an alternative global civilization to that in the post-modern West, with which Russia, China and others will merely seek to coexist. Russia’s Eurasia-centric Asian pivot does not exclude adopting many best practices from the West and even one day rejoining a somewhat transformed West. It does mean that Russia and like-minded states in Eurasia writ large (Eurasia, Far East, south Asia, Persian Gulf and Middle East) will seek to protect themselves from Western hubris, meddling and diktat and concentrate their development efforts independently from Western international institutions. Russia and its allies — yes, Russia has allies — will develop on their own cultural terms, on their own timetable, and in their own self-defined direction.

Throughout Russian history, Russian leaders and/or anti-Western circles within and outside the state apparatus have retold the events of Western infamy I have recounted above, embedding them in the sediment of Russian political and strategic culture and the national memory. Sometimes, to be sure, the Russian regime and others have overstated, even conjured out of whole cloth aspects of these or other Western wrongs against Russia in an effort to bolster Russia’s position in foreign affairs and/or the ruling group’s legitimacy domestically. In other words, sometimes the Russian state recounts these Western wrongs accurately, and at other times it overstates them for both domestic and foreign political purposes. Unfortunately so have other states, including Western ones. More importantly, Western states unfortunately have provided the real history of ‘Western’ aggression and interference in domestic affairs against Russia, which Kremlin leaders can deploy as well as build up and exaggerate. The latter was especially true during the Soviet period prior to Gorbachev’s perestroika and the end of the Cold War. The practice is being revived again, as relations between Moscow and the West deteriorate.

It cannot be excluded and in fact it remains likely that Russia will someday return again to the West for much self-identification and foreign economic, cultural and political gain (democratization). After all, the ‘Other’ identity in Russia’s split personality is European.

Russia turned West after the most ideologically bitter estrangement of the Cold War, when ‘Russia’ and the West stood nose to nose in a scorpions’ embrace of mutually assured destruction to which they may now be returning given developments of de-control in conventional, nuclear, space, and cyber weapons. So Russia ‘returned’ once and can so again, provided the West extends a welcoming hand as US Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush wisely did to Gorbachev.

For now while what the West does in relation to Russia and others will still matter very much to most Russians, especially as regards Ukraine. There the rise to power of an outright ultra-nationalist regime could mean another Russian-Western ‘Crimean’ war.  However, what the West thinks of Russia will matter very little. Russia has for now cut its cultural and identity umbilical cord with the West. It is Eurasia and China bound.

gordonhahn.com

The overland integration of the BRI, led by China and Russia, aims to create different transit routes for goods as well as different areas of economic development along the new Chinese Silk Road. A great opportunity is thereby opened up for Chinese banks and for private investors interested in creating infrastructure or developing potential industrial poles in the countries involved in this grand Chinese initiative.

Hong Qi, president of China Minsheng Bank, recently said during an economic forum held in Beijing regarding investments in the BRI that there is potentially about $10 trillion worth of investments in infrastructure in the countries that make up the BRI, such as in railways, urban development, logistics and cross-border e-commerce.

At this point, more than $10 billion has already been committed in investments, thanks to companies already present in over thirty countries and regions along the BRI, with the ongoing intention of financing these loans through China’s public and private sectors. According to data from the China Banking Regulatory Commission, a total of nine Chinese banks are involved in the financing of projects, with 62 branches having been opened in 26 countries. A further $10 billion could come from European countries as a result of investments stemming from the China-CEEC forum.

Despite a delay in investment, and especially in the development of such projects, analysts believe that the BRI is the ideal ground for making regional cooperation agreements based on trust and win-win prospects for future integration of the region. Thus, not only are public and private banks involved in investments but the Asian Investment Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) and the Silk Road Fund are also part of the financial package that should lay the foundation for the accelerated development of the Chinese BRI. Confirming a new approach to the development of the BRI, Chinese investors during the first ten months of 2017 proposed projects totalling $11 billion in the 53 countries involved.

The effort is mainly focused on the development of railway networks, hospitals, and power plants. Such basic infrastructure will lay the groundwork for further development in countries involved in the BRI that otherwise have little capacity to invest in such projects themselves. According to Zhang Zansheng, an accredited researcher at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, the first marker is set for 2020, the year that  "further tangible progress" should be made in the development of the BRI, mainly referring to railway links between different Asian regions and the Mediterranean. Reflecting how things are already changing, dozens of trains leave monthly from European countries to reach China, the latest being one from Italy, leaving from the province of Pavia, a few kilometers from Milan.

Robin Xing, Chief China Economist for Morgan Stanley, echoed many analysts in predicting that 2018 and 2019 will be the two key years where tangible implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative will start to become apparent. These projects and investments will increase global trade with the countries involved in the BRI, which could see a 10% increase in their exports to China over the next 10 years, the practical results of the investments in ports, railways and industrial centers.

The People's Republic of China continues to treat investments and risks with a pragmatic and realistic attitude. Accordingly, the main investors in the BRI comprise state-controlled industries and banks, which allows for sufficient control by the central authority in the event of major problems. With investments amounting to at least $60 billion per year, involving more than 1,676 projects, and representing about 0.5% of Chinese nominal GDP, for the moment Beijing wants to have full control over the whole project, a strategic interest that is perfectly understandable.

The BRI is generating many innovations, including a possible new sea route through the Arctic. Although the project is yet to be fully developed, China is beginning to invest in cooperation projects with Russia to exploit this new route. The Russian Federation is the only country to have nuclear-powered icebreakers. Beijing intends to follow its Russian partner in this project in order to pave the way for its freight containers. Cost savings in terms of transport from China to Europe would be in the region of 30-40%. The Northeast Passage can only be crossed during about four months of the year, due to thick ice and unfavorable weather conditions that otherwise exist. Experts forecast that this route will be increasingly free of ice in coming years, and therefore will become more passable. Given the enormous shipping times to be saved, China and Russia have already started cooperating in order to be ready to develop and exploit this new and strategic route.

Considering the great importance of shipping routes, the ability to reach the Mediterranean is of fundamental importance. As things stand now, China is hampered by several strategic vulnerabilities, such as the Strait of Malacca or the passage through the Suez Canal, two choke points that are susceptible to a naval blockade by the US in the unlikely event of war between these major powers. This is not to mention the Panama Canal, which guarantees transit from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and Gibraltar, which controls access to the Mediterranean Sea. Certainly with an Arctic route, passage would be much faster, as well as be free from the possibility of blockade.

At the moment, the land route to Europe represents a viable solution, but one that also brings with it continuous challenges and several possibilities. One involves transporting goods from the north through the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union. The second involves going through the south, with a passage through Turkey to arrive either at the Greek port of Piraeus or in Venice. Some sort of competition is bound to occur in the future within the European Union, with countries jostling to become the main transit hub between Europe and China. The link between China and the European Union represents a critical issue for the BRI, with a traffic of goods in the order of tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars. At the moment, all the parties involved are aware of a much wider problem for the BRI. Freight trains from Europe to China are often empty, without major exports to the People's Republic of China, a problem that makes overland transport routes unprofitable. In this regard, the European Union must accelerate its economic recovery by aiming to exploit new trade routes that offer benefits for all countries involved. As usual, obstacles lie ahead, especially in the geopolitical arena, with the BRI representing a strategic challenge to American hegemony in Asia and Europe.

With this in mind, there is a need to move away from the dollar when it comes to loans and investments made to finance BRI infrastructure projects. This does not prevent the development of new projects for the time being. But China and other countries involved should pay more attention to this vulnerability that hangs over the whole project. Beijing should therefore accelerate use of an alternative currency in this grand project.

The economic power of the United States depends on the continued need for the rest of the world to have dollars available. This Chinese project aims to integrate countries such that Washington is denied it hegemony over Asia, Europe and the Middle East. For such reasons, it is fundamental that Beijing arms itself with every weapon available in its arsenal to defend itself from the sabotage that Washington will inevitably visit on the project. Avoiding a currency that the United States controls would be a good starting point.

So, right in the heart of Bali, spellbound after a serious conversation with a dukun — a spiritual master — it struck me: this should be the new Yalta, the perfect setting for a Trump-Xi-Putin summit setting the parameters ahead for the ever-evolving New Great Game in Eurasia.

Balinese culture makes no distinction between the secular and the supernatural — sekala and niskala. Sekala is what our senses may discern. Niskala is what cannot be sensed directly and can only be “suggested”. Massive geopolitical shifts ahead could not be more shrouded in niskala.

Captive to the vertiginous velocity of the here and now, the West still has much to learn from a highly evolved culture that prospered 5,000 years ago along the banks or the river Sindhu — now Indus — in what is currently Pakistan, and then migrated from the Majapahit empire in Java to Bali in the 14th century under the pressure of advancing Islam.

In Hindu-Balinese religious philosophy, for every positive force there is a counterbalance, a destructive force. The two are inseparable — coexisting in dynamic equilibrium. Western dualism is so unsophisticated compared to it.

In the Suthasoma — a great Mahayana Buddhist epic poem composed in central Java at the time when Buddhism was merrily mixing up with Shivaist Hinduism — we find an outstanding verse: Bhineka tunggal ika (“it is different but it is one”).

That also happens to be the motto of Indonesia, emblazoned in its coat of arms, below the golden Garuda mythical bird. It’s a message of unity, like the American e pluribus unum. Now it looks more like a message presaging Eurasian integration via the New Silk Roads; it’s not by accident that Xi Jinping officially launched the Maritime Silk Road in 2013 in Indonesia.

With the Trump era about to begin, our current geopolitical juncture looks and feels like a massive Wayang kulit — a Balinese shadow play.

The historical origin of the shadow play lies most possibly in India, although it has been performed all across Asia. Good and evil coexist in shadow play — but Hinduism seeks to depict the clash as a sort of quirky partnership.

Kulit means skin, covering. Wayang is the puppet, made out of cow hide, painted and braced with sticks that the dalang — the puppet master — manipulates at will.

Every Wayang kulit performance is a story told by a dalang through voices (which he must impersonate), shadows on a screen, and atmospheric music. The dalang — a sort of priest — incarnates all characters and must know the stories he tells by heart.

Only a select few in the West qualify as dalangs — especially in the geopolitical sphere. The real dalangs are in fact totally invisible — deep down in niskala. But then we have their emissaries, the visible, media-savvy, media-worshipped dalangs. Back to them in a New York minute.

The white bull and the Asian girl

Now compare the Balinese shadow play — acting out sekala and most of all niskala — with the made-in-the-West approach; the Ariadne’s thread that might, just might, extricate us from the current geopolitical labyrinth by applying an exceedingly overhyped commodity: logic.

First, a rewind; let’s go back to the birth of the West, as in Europe. Legend tells us that one fine day Zeus happened to set his roving eye on a girl with big, bright eyes: Europa. A while later, on a beach in the Phoenician coast, an extraordinary white bull showed up. Europa, intrigued, got closer and started to caress the bull; of course, that was Zeus in disguise. The bull then annexed Europa and darted toward the sea.

Zeus had three sons with Europa — and left her a spear that never missed its target. One of these sons, as we all know, was Minos, who built a labyrinth. But most of all what legend taught us was that the West was born out of a girl — Europa — who came from the East.

The Obama administration, leading the West “from behind”, counter-attacked with a pivot to Asia (for which, read containment of China) and Cold War 2.0 (demonization of Russia)

The question now is who will find the Ariadne’s thread to extricate us from the labyrinth, which five centuries after the Western-led Age of Discovery has brought us to The Decline of the West, with its leader, the United States, in the forefront.

The Obama administration, leading the West “from behind”, counter-attacked with a pivot to Asia (for which, read containment of China) and Cold War 2.0 (demonization of Russia)

The whole EU project is facing utter collapse. The myth of European/Western cultural and political superiority — cultivated over the past five centuries — lies in the dust, as far as “all Asiatic vague immensities”, as Yeats wrote in The Statues, are concerned. This is bound to be the Eurasian century.

A sound way forward would have been what Putin proposed way back in 2007 — a unified continental trade emporium from Lisbon to Vladivostok. The idea was later picked up and expanded by the Chinese via the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) concept.

Instead, the Obama administration, leading the West “from behind”, counter-attacked with a pivot to Asia (for which, read containment of China) and Cold War 2.0 (demonization of Russia).

Enter the Western dalangs

And that leads us, on the eve of a possible, new geopolitical era, to what the foremost, visible Western dalangs may be concocting across niskala.

Sekala exhibits out-of-control 24/7 hysteria in sectors of the US deep state over “evil” Russian deeds, with neocon and neoliberalcon Obama administration remnants pushing Cold War 2.0 to its limits. Yet niskala, where Henry Kissinger and Dr. Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski operate, is where the real (conceptual) action is.

It’s no secret that the “urbane”, “cerebral”, “legendary” Kissinger is now advising Trump. The long-term strategy might be characterized as classic Divide and Rule, but slightly remixed: in this case an attempt to break the Russia-China strategic partnership by allying with the — theoretically — weaker node, Russia, to better contain the stronger node, China.

From a “Nixon in China” moment to a “Trump in Moscow” moment.
It’s a no-brainer that vain sycophants of the Niall Ferguson variety will bathe Kissinger’s cunning in rivers of hagiography — oblivious to the fact that Kissinger might be entertaining a way more profitable sideshow, in the form of booming business for his star-studded consulting firm Kissinger Associates Inc., which happens to be a member of the US-Russia Business Council, side by side with ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase and Big Pharma anchor Pfizer.

So, in a nutshell: exit regime change, enter benign containment. Here’s Kissinger at his Primakov lecture, almost a year ago, already sketching how Washington should deal with Moscow: “The long-term interests of both countries call for a world that transforms the contemporary turbulence and flux into a new equilibrium which is increasingly multipolar and globalized … Russia should be perceived as an essential element of any global equilibrium, not primarily as a threat to the United States.”

Multipolar Kissinger extolling “no threat” Russia — one wonders why the Clinton machine back then did not expose the old man as yet another Putin bromance hostage.

Also months before Trump’s victory, but in marked contrast with Kissinger, Brzezinski was in deep red alert territory, alarmed by the “erosion of US military-technical advantages”, as detailed for instance in this CNAS report.

Brzezinski gloomily asserted the obvious — that a militarily inferior US “would spell the end of America’s global role” and the result would “most probably” be “global chaos”.

His solution then was for the US to “fashion a policy in which at least one of the two potentially threatening states becomes a partner in the quest for regional and then wider global stability, and thus in containing the least predictable but potentially the most likely rival to overreach. Currently, the more likely to overreach is Russia, but in the longer run it could be China.”

There you have it, over and over again: Divide and Rule, to counteract the unruly “threats”.

In a predictable, Western navel-gazing way, Brzezinski assumes China may not choose to go against the US, as it is “in their interest to belong to the dominant pack”. Yet the “dominant pack” is not the US anymore; it is Eurasian integration.

Brzezinski, after the Clinton machine/Obama debacle, is now no more than a sore loser. So he was forced to slightly shuffle the cards. Unlike Kissinger, and faithful to his rabid Russophobia, his Divide and Rule is centered on seducing China away from Russia, by which means “American influence is maximized”.

In a predictable, Western navel-gazing way, Brzezinski assumes China may not choose to go against the US, as it is “in their interest to belong to the dominant pack”. Yet the “dominant pack” is not the US anymore; it is Eurasian integration.

OBOR, or The New Silk Roads, is the only wide-ranging geoeconomic/ geopolitical integration project on the market. While Kissinger may remain, arguably, the ultimate realpolitik dalang, Obama mentor Brzezinski is still a hostage of Mackinder. The Chinese leadership, for its part, is already way ahead of both Mackinder and Alfred Mahan; the New Silk Roads aim to integrate, via trade and communications, not only the Heartland (One Belt) but also the Rimland (the Maritime Silk Road).

A partnership with the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) will be essential to the whole project. Few will remember that as Cold War 2.0 was running amok back in September, the Eastern Economic Forum was doing business in Vladivostok, with Putin proposing a “digital economy space” all over Asia-Pacific and China pledging further involvement in the development of the Russian Far East.

So what we have now is arguably both top Western dalangs trying hard to adapt to the new normal — Eurasian integration via OBOR/EEU — by proposing conflicting, benign versions of Divide and Rule, as US intel keeps hangin’ on, in far from quiet desperation, to the old confrontational paradigm.

As the key nodes — the Triple Entente? — of Eurasian integration, Moscow, Beijing and Tehran are very much aware of a stranger bearing gifts shrouded in niskala. A stranger aiming, variously, at Moscow selling out Tehran in Syria, as well as with the nuclear deal; Moscow parting ways with Beijing; Beijing selling out Tehran; and all sorts of wayang containment/plunder permutations in between.

That will be the key story to follow further on down the (New Silk) roads. Yeats memorably wrote that, “mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.” Yet the show always must go on — dalangs East and West let loose in deep niskala. Welcome to the 21^st century Tournament of Shadows.

atimes.com