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

The show came, and now has passed. The G7 visuals were meant to underline the prolongation of the unipolar moment and its purported values – Macron described it as a ‘family’ get-together, after a long hiatus, and Johnson remarked that it was so reminiscent of a ‘return to school’, with old mates crowding around, after the ‘hols’. The West is back, facing off against the autocratic ‘beasts from the East’ – so says the new narrative of the U.S. and the EU – said without a trace of irony – as democracies are mobilising against the threat from ‘the East’. The West is best; democracy is best; and works better, too … and shall win any race!

But visuals and re-booted mission statement apart, where does this take us? Well, nowhere substantive, beyond Boris Johnson’s celebration of G7 bonhomie. The NATO summit however, did elevate Russia to an ‘acute threat’, whilst China was lowered a rachet, to being only a ‘systemic challenge’. Why so?

Well, the NATO statement represented something of a Faustian Bargain. West Europeans (Macron and Merkel essentially) were resigned to the fact that they needed to give Biden some ‘China Threat’ language in the final communiqué to bring him – and America – back aboard the multilateral Eurobus. The Europeans have pressing trade ‘bones’ (steel and aluminium tariffs), that they wish to pick with Washington. So they didn’t want China entirely demonised; they need it too much. They wanted it instead, ‘differentiated’. That is to say, they argue that China presents differential threats – military, trade, tech and cultural – each of which should be treated differently. Macron says this approach represents the spirit of his Euro strategic-autonomy campaign.

But on Russia, it was an easy outcome. The NATO dog was allowed to be ‘wagged’ by a ‘tail’ of East European Russophobes and everyone emerged from NATO happy. Russia was mentioned unfavourably 63 times, to China’s only 10 times. China emerged differentiated. We will have to see how successful Europe is castigating China roundly over Xingjian and Hong Kong human rights, and egging on Taiwanese autonomy, whilst at the same time, begging Xi to put his hand in his pocket to help save Europe’s disintegrating economy.

Bear this in mind as we contemplate the panglossian aura projected by some commentators onto the Biden-Putin summit: NATO Secretary-General, Stoltenberg, says NATO won’t simply “mirror” Russia: It will de facto outspend it, and surround it. Surround it with multiple battle formations, since “we now have implemented the biggest reinforcements of our collective defence since the end of the Cold War”. The NATO communiqué is adamant: The only way for military spending is up.

Yet the Biden-Putin meeting nevertheless was intriguing. Nothing of substance (beyond the prospect of diplomatic talks), but no fireworks either. What lies behind this?

It seems more to do with Biden’s political ‘management’ doctrine which (naturally) is far removed from Trump’s Art of the Deal. It seems he deployed the same two-step approach with Putin that he follows with the U.S. Congress in terms of bipartisan infrastructure talks: Try to take the most optimistic path, give it some time; but be prepared to ditch it if it yields poor, or no, results.

The summit then was less about trying to detach Russia from China, than framing the parameters to that which might be done, and to those acts which will cross ‘red lines’. Biden said that he wanted Putin to hear directly from him what the U.S. considers unacceptable. “My agenda is not against Russia. There were ‘no threats’, no hyperbole, just ‘simple assertions’. The relationship is not about trust, but self-interest and verification”, Biden said.

After the meeting, Biden set it out clearly: “I did what I came to do: Number one, identify areas of practical work our two countries can do to advance our mutual interests, and also benefit the world. Two, communicate directly that the United States will respond to actions that impair our vital interests or those of our allies. And three, to clearly lay out our country’s priorities and our values – so that he [Putin] heard it straight from me”. “And I must tell you, the tone of the entire meetings — I guess it was a total of four hours — was — was good, positive. There wasn’t any — any strident action taken. Where we disagreed — I disagreed, stated where it was. Where he disagreed, he stated. But it was not done in a hyperbolic atmosphere”.

So now it is clear – It is clear why Putin accepted the meeting. Biden already had indicated that he did not want his incumbency to be overshadowed by Russia, as it had been for Trump. This was stage one – laying out the landscape. He then spelled out explicitly the following stage: “We’ll find out within the next six months to a year, whether or not we actually have a strategic dialogue – that matters”.

This suits both men. Putin has been able to probe the American limits and mindset – and Biden’s ‘staged process’ offers too, the prospect of a less fraught political atmosphere, in the lead up to the Duma elections this September. Something of consequence to Putin. This represents Putin’s strength, managing diverging interests (i.e. such as patiently ‘managing’ the erratic, irascible Erdogan)

For Biden, the hope must be to have put the U.S.’ hysteria over Russia in ‘a well-defined box’, thus allowing him to focus on his central objective of a pivot to China. This Biden two-stage approach is mirrored in his Iran policy: He expressly indicated that a return to the JCPOA was intended to yield – at the very least – having Iran’s nuclear programme boxed-in, whilst stage two – if conditions were right – would be to somehow de-toxify the region of the Iranian-Arab Sunni grudge, sufficiently for America to pivot out from all the Middle East quagmires, to complete the Obama pivot to Asia.

Tom Friedman, the voice of the Establishment in the NY Times, encapsulates the current ‘Beltway-think’ succinctly:

“Iran is too big to invade; the regime is too ensconced to be toppled from the outside; its darkest impulses, to dominate its Sunni Arab neighbours and destroy the Jewish state, are too dangerous to ignore; and its people are too talented to be forever denied a nuclear capability.

“So, when dealing with Iran, you do what you can, where you can, how you can, but with the understanding that (1) perfect is not on the menu and (2) Iran’s Islamic regime is not going to change …

“The Biden team believes that Trump’s maximum-pressure campaign did not diminish Iran’s malign behaviour in the region one iota (it will show you the data to prove it). So, Biden wants to at least lock up Iran’s nuclear program for a while, and then try blunting its regional troublemaking in other ways. At the same time, Biden wants to put more focus on nation-building at home and on countering China”.

The question, of course, is once the showtime passes, what will Russia China and Iran make of it all? Biden has his vision. Many will applaud it; but others may question whether it has any inherent longevity, beyond its six-month trial pause. Moscow will understand that it is no ‘pause’ at all for Russia. Biden simply passed the ‘bash Russia’ baton to the Europeans and to NATO, and they grasped at it with relish.

The point of course was to allow the Democrats to pursue legislatively their radical vision for America – with less distraction. The Achilles’ Heel to the Biden ‘America is Back’ flag-waving however, is that it is contingent on an old storyline (American exceptionalism, and its proclaimed ‘virtues’), whose source lies with the American religion of 1776. It is this foundation which the shock-troops of BLM and Project 1619 (the foundation of America through slavery) precisely wish to pull down, overthrow, and to replace those ‘virtues’ with a completely different cannon of beliefs.

All the world has watched the purposeful disruption – as the Millenarian forces of ‘our democracy’ have sought to dissolve America’s foundational storyline, stigmatising white supremacism as a threat to the state, and as ‘domestic terrorism’. The world clearly sees the widespread public restiveness, and a weak administration with insufficient strength in Congress to follow through with transformative legislation. Moreover, multiple spending splurges promise to bring galloping inflation – the eternal political killer.

The sudden lifting of the (once ‘perpetual’) COVID emergency powers, and the growing scepticism at ‘lockdown-based science’, signals the end to the unlimited accretion that the virus ‘gave’ to state power. The ‘science-based’ rationale is in disarray (especially, as now the details of U.S. early ‘gain of function’ collaboration with Wuhan, are being leaked). One can sense a paradigm shift in mood amongst the U.S. public.

The ’emergency powers’ have ended too soon for the likes of the Davos élites: COVID lockdown was weaponised both to be disruptive – and concomitantly, to speed Trump’s ouster. But it was also always intended by the Re-set ‘crowd’ to be the bridge to span the gap between the immediate dispensation of the COVID emergency, and stage two – that of the Global Climate Crisis ‘emergency’ (which also would likely require ‘climate lockdowns’, we are told). These were the disruptive events (the deus ex machina), that would be used to legitimise global monetary governance and the ushering in of a truly radical ‘overhaul of our economic structures, and doing capitalism differently’.

But the cracks in this agenda seem to be accelerating. The oligarchs ‘behind the Re-set curtain’ seem flummoxed by the turn of events – and at the hostility their agenda has generated. The pushback is not confined to just lockdowns; but an ‘exhausted majority’ is revolting at ‘correctness’, and the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools and in the workplace. The Atlantic reports a poll showing that among the general American population, a full 80% believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74% ages 24-29; and 79% for those under age 24. On this issue, the woke and their handlers, find themselves in a clear minority, across all ages.

So, the bottom line is that the narrative of ‘West is best; its virtues sacred’, is compromised. And this remains widely recognised across the globe, despite the EU’s gushing response. Some of these inherent tensions were clearly on display during the recent mini-intifada launched by Hamas, after the Israeli riot police entered al-Aqsa mosque. On the one hand, Biden sang the song of traditional American virtue, supporting unreservedly Israeli actions. While, on the other, the progressives in his party sang about the oppression of Palestinians and their Rights. Which is it to be? The world watches. Will America’s foundational values be overthrown, or is a Thermidorian reaction already beginning to unfold? Will the former all unwind with the 2022 U.S. mid-term elections?

So, as the world makes its’ accounting in wake of Biden’s ‘progress’ through Europe, they will note that nothing emerged that would change the direction-of-travel of the global strategic balance. More than anything, it is the evolving shift in the strategic balance that counts. And the geo-strategical balance is not in the U.S.’ favour – it is tilting against the U.S.

As long ago as March 2018, Putin described in detail (in an address to a joint session of Federal legislatures), the operational capabilities of new defence systems that were ready for release, or were far advanced in the testing and production pipeline. These included hypersonic missiles flying at Mach 10 and more. He claimed that the new weapons systems marked the first time in history that Russia had moved ahead of the West in innovative, unparalleled performance of its arms. “Putin insisted that the new weapons systems signified the restoration of strategic parity with the United States”. That is the point. Elsewhere today, Iran has achieved a strategic parity with Israel; and China is advancing towards a weapons lead over the U.S.

So these states will have watched the show, but after it, they simply will continue with their own agenda of global transformation. They know that saying ‘West is Best’ just doesn’t cut it anymore globally. Washington would do well to discount von Leyen’s gushing love-in with Biden – it means very little.

Boris Johnson sees himself as the heritor of a world bestriding Imperial mantle, but in truth he cannot bestride the Irish Sea. The overshadowing of the G7 summit by his peculiar concern that Irish sausages should not be eaten by those in Northern Ireland who do not believe in evolution, was a fascinating examplar of British impotence as he failed to persuade anybody else to support him. It looks like Danish bacon for the shops of Belfast and Derry will have to be imported through Dun Laoghaire and not through Larne. Ho hum.

The really interesting thing about the G7 summit is that it wasn’t interesting. Nobody expected it to change the world, and it won’t. John Pilger pointed out the key fact. Twenty years ago the G7 constituted two thirds of the world economy. Now they constitute one third. They don’t even represent most of the world’s billionaires any longer, though those billionaires they do represent – and indeed some of the billionaires they don’t represent – were naturally pulling the strings of these rather sluggish puppets.

It used to be that any important sporting event in any developing country would feature hoardings for western multinationals, such as Pepsi Cola and Nestle baby milk. Nowadays I am watching the Euros football pitches surrounded by electronic hoardings in Chinese. The thing about power is this; it shifts with time.

None of the commitments made on covid or climate change constituted any new money, any real transfer of wealth or technology. It was a non-event. Nobody will ever look back at anything beyond the personal as having started last weekend in Cornwall.

From there, pretty well the same people moved on to pretend to bestride the world militarily at NATO, where the first job was to pretend they had not lost the long Afghan war they have just, err, lost.

At NATO, they stuck out their tongues at China, which has upset them a lot by becoming the world’s most powerful nation. China was accused of an aggressive military posture, which is amusing in its utter lack of truth. Other than some construction of tiny artificial islands (which China is in fact wrong to claim can generate maritime claims according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea), it is very difficult to understand on what this NATO accusation of aggression is based.

If China really is trying to outdo many centuries of western Imperial conquest – stretching up to the recent destructions of Libya and Syria – by building tiny artificial islands, it is a plan of extreme cunning and patience. NATO seem to have discovered their new enemy by reading Ian Fleming.

Let me tell you something that actually is true. I cannot think of any instance in world history of any power enjoying the level of economic dominance currently enjoyed by China, and yet showing such restraint and lack of interest in Imperial conquest. It is not China which is sailing aircraft carriers towards Boris Johnson, it is the other way round. In fact the restraint China shows in not carrying out the simple task of sinking Johnson’s silly aircraft carrier, undermines the propaganda of thousands of NATO press officers and social media operatives, including the UK’s very own 77th Brigade and Integrity Initiative.

It is even sillier to attempt to terrify us all with the thought that the Russians are coming. I know it upsets the Putin fans when I say it, but Russia’s share of the world economy has declined just as the G7 share has. As Russia was always, and still is, poorer than the poorest of the G7 nations, the NATO attempt to portray Russia as a great threat is really rather silly. If there is truth in the story of a couple of super military intelligence officers traveling widely but not killing many people, and of cunning Russian computer hackers engaging in cyber warfare while leaving cyrillic fingerprints behind, in a manner strangely identical to the CIA guidance on how to lay Russian false flags as shown in the Wikileaks vault 7 releases, then it is still difficult for me to understand why this would all require trillions of dollars in military hardware to stop it.

Interrupting hacking with Trident missiles seems neither cost effective nor proportionate. But then I am not an ace NATO military strategist.

Follow the money. Of course the NATO show is all about diverting simply incredible amounts of our money and resources into the military industrial complex, which is permanently profitable for politician backhanders; the arms industry remains the only “legitimate” industry more corrupt than banking, which is quite a feat.

I shall sleep safe in my bed at night knowing that the money NATO spends just this year to keep me safe from the Russian and Chinese tanks which are absolutely poised to roll up Princes Street, could have eliminated malaria forever. God bless our glorious leaders.

craigmurray.org.uk

U.S. President Joe Biden and his Western allies are trying to frame global challenges in a way that ultimately avoids dealing with the most urgent problem that really matters – the explosion in inequality under the capitalist economic system.

The poverty, hardship and litany of social problems, including the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, that stem from the grotesque inequality that capitalism produces are – and should be – the number one challenge for all nations, particularly those in the West where the issue is most acute.

However, instead of addressing what should be blindingly obvious, Biden and other Western so-called leaders are framing the challenges in a cock-eyed way. That means the problem of capitalist inequality accumulates and gets worse. (And yet right-wing American media pundits have the ignorant stupidity to describe Biden and his Democrat party as being “radical leftists” and “Marxists”. Jeez, give us a break!)

Listening to Biden and the others at the Group of Seven summit over the weekend, one would think that the greatest challenge of our time is the purported clash between “democracies and autocracies”. That is, between the United States and its Western allies on one hand, and on the other hand Russia and China.

Yes, the G7 forum did mention other challenges facing the world: the Covid-19 pandemic and adverse climate change. They are of course priority concerns that need to be addressed. But the number one challenge of capitalist inequality is nowhere heard during the hours and hours of tedious discussions. How incredible is that?

In what is perception management or narrative control, Biden and the other Western politicians promulgate alleged adversity from Russia and China as somehow an existential problem of our time. (Russia and China are always calling for normal dialogue and relations, by the way). Biden says things like “the United States, the European Union, NATO and G7 allies will stand united together to confront Russia and China”.

OK, he tries to sound as if he doesn’t want an all-out war, but the logic of Biden and his allies is ultimately one of war.

On coming to Europe in his first overseas trip as president, Biden openly stated that he was rallying allies under U.S. leadership against what he disparaging calls “autocracies”. Biden’s tour of Europe was to “re-establish U.S. leadership”, reported CNN. While AP said the American president was “eager to reassert the United States on the world stage… pushing democracy as the only bulwark to rising forces of authoritarianism.”

The series of summits at the G7 and with EU leaders and NATO allies was framed in such a way as to be the prelude to a showdown-like meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on June 16. What’s all the belligerence for? Can Biden not just meet another important world leader – Russia’s Putin – and discuss in an earnest and cooperative manner vital issues about the pandemic, climate change and nuclear disarmament. No, of course, Biden can’t. Because he and other Western politicians are held hostage mentally by their own false propaganda about alleged Russian malign conduct.

When Biden arrived in England last week ahead of the G7 summit his first speech was at a U.S. airbase, at Mildenhall in Suffolk, where he addressed troops. He depicted his mission in Europe as akin to the challenge of the Second World War. He talked about bomber aircraft taking off from that very base and fighting against Nazi Germany.

Then Biden linked that background to his meeting with Russia’s Putin. He said with a tough-guy tone: “I’m heading to the G7, then to the NATO ministerial, and then to meet with Mr Putin to let him know what I want him to know. And at every point along the way, we’re going to make it clear that the United States is back and democracies of the world are standing together to tackle the toughest challenges and the issues that matter most to our future; that we’re committed to leading with strength, defending our values, and delivering for our people.”

Building his historic narrative, President Biden then went on to say: “Here’s why this all matters so much right now: I believe we’re at an inflection point in world history — the moment where it falls to us to prove that democracies will not just endure, but they will excel as we rise to seize the enormous opportunities of a new age. We have to discredit those who believe that the age of democracy is over… We have to expose as false the narrative that decrees of dictators can match the speed and scale of the 21st [century] challenges.”

So Biden is making out that there is an equivalence between the historic fight against Nazi Germany and the “dictators” of Russia and China.

This has become a mantra in Washington under Biden, that the biggest historic challenge right now is between “democracy and autocracy”. And if we accept that narrative framework, then the intended conclusion is that we must accept American leadership. This is what the U.S. political establishment is trying to push with its frontman Joe Biden, and lamentably the European political class is falling into line. The upshot is that the world is being led into a dead-end of confrontation between the West and Russia and China. Why can’t the world just work together in cooperation and mutual multilateral benefit? Because the United States’ global power is predicated on hegemony which in turn requires control through setting up hostile blocs.

In the same week that Biden and his Western allies were declaring that they were seeking to address global challenges, and defending the “rules-based order” (whatever that means), a blockbuster revelation was reported and hastily buried by the corporate media. It was reported that billionaire capitalists in the U.S. paid no taxes. People like Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, paid negligible or no tax on hundreds of billions of dollars in increased wealth. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. American CEOs and the entire capitalist ruling class have seen their wealth burgeon in recent years and they have paid little to nothing to society in the form of tax. This is while workers and their families are increasingly paying more tax, losing jobs, homes and their health.

This pathological, destructive and unsustainable condition under capitalism has seen vast chasms in inequality and poverty in all Western societies, but especially so in the United States. A handful of billionaires have more combined wealth than half of the population. That is the inherent and inevitable dysfunction of the capitalist system which degenerates into an oligarchy, not a democracy. When Biden talks blithely about “our democracies” what he really means is “our oligarchies”.

Capitalism and its inequality is the number one enemy of today’s world. That is the objective and empirical reality that is staring the world in the face. But don’t expect the American and European so-called leaders to acknowledge or even be aware of that. They’re only tinkering with a terminally broken system, for example, in proposing harmonizing corporate taxation or investing in infrastructure. Distracting from a full-on challenge to the capitalist system by an organized majority of working people is the function of Western misleaders. They’re too busy tilting at windmills and telling us that Russia and China are the enemy. That’s the tragedy of our time. But it has to stop. It can’t go on. It is unsustainable and killing our world.

The G7 represents much about the world order that is totally unsustainable: elite wealth promoting false conflicts among nations instead of implementing genuine cooperation and peace.

Posing as problem-solvers of the globe’s ills, the leaders of the so-called Group of Seven (G7) nations are gathered in an English seaside resort this weekend for an annual summit. It’s a spectacle that has lost any illusion of luster. Indeed, the gathering of such an elitist and effete group looks ridiculous against the backdrop of urgent global needs for cooperation and development.

A fawning media headline hailed the forum as “democracy’s most exclusive club”. How’s that for an absurd contradiction that inadvertently speaks of grotesque reality?

It is US President Joe Biden’s first overseas trip since he entered the White House nearly five months ago. He will be convening with counterparts from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan, as well as leaders of the European Union.

The G7 forum has existed since 1976 and it is a fair question to ask what has it ever achieved in terms of actually helping global development? The forum has become something of an anachronism that no longer reflects the realities of a world that has changed significantly from nearly half a century ago.

The G7 nations claim to represent over 70 percent of the world’s wealth. Yet in economic output terms, the group currently accounts for only about 30 percent. The imbalance speaks of shameful structural inequality and therefore the so-called advanced group is really an emblematic sign of the problem that Western capitalism creates, not solves.

There is a palpable sense of embarrassing spectacle. Posing as “great and good” the politicians in Cornwall look “impotent and frivolous”. In the past year, the world has been hit by a pandemic and most of the globe’s 7.7 billion population remains unvaccinated while the United States and Britain have hoarded their supplies of vaccines. Biden comes to the summit “pledging” that the US will soon donate 500 million doses of anti-Covid-19 shots to the rest of the world. That offer has been dismissed as a “drop in the bucket” given the billions of people needing immunization.

Yet the American president and his “elite” allies are posing as saviors of the world, a world that they have largely ignored.

If G7 leaders had any genuine intention of global development, they would seek to work with other major nations instead of demarcating the world into artificial camps under misleading labels of “democracies” and “autocracies”. The latter pejorative term has been applied to China and Russia. Both of these nations have done much more in getting vaccines to other countries, only to be disparaged by Western opponents for having alleged cynical interests in using “vaccine diplomacy”.

The elitism and divisiveness that underlies the concept of G7 is something that should be repudiated as a relic of a bygone era.

Today, China is the world’s biggest economy, according to some reckoning. Or at least the second biggest after the United States. China has overtaken the US as the largest trade partner for the European Union. Why isn’t its leader, President Xi Jinping, attending the forum in England this weekend?

Apologists would say because the group has “shared values” of “democracy” and “human rights” which China does not possess. Sorry, but that sounds like lame excuses for making gratuitous global divisions. The real reason is that the G7 is an instrument for asserting American hegemony and trying to exclude perceived rivals.

The arbitrariness of the G7 is an indication that it is a political construct for partisan objectives.

Back in 1998, the group abruptly became the G8 after the admission of Russia to the fold. That was during the leadership of Boris Yeltsin whom the United States was trying to co-opt as part of its global hegemony. When Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin and charted a more independent geopolitical course, then Russia fell out of favor with the Americans and their Western partners. In 2014, the Ukraine crisis engendered by Western meddling provided the pretext for ejecting Russia from the club. Not that Moscow gives a fig about that.

But the point is the arbitrariness and anomalies that make up the G7.

It’s a petty theater to showcase Western elite concerns rather than the democratic concerns of humanity. For his part, President Biden wants to demonstrate that “America is back” after four years of policy chaos under his predecessor Donald Trump. In doing so, Biden is trying to corral Western partners to adopt a more hostile stance towards China and Russia. He is due to meet with the Russian leader on June 16 in Geneva, and the G7 has been used as a platform for Biden to espouse belligerence towards Russia. What’s that got to do with solving a pandemic crisis, addressing climate change, or promoting global development to improve the lives of billions of poor? Precisely, none.

For British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, he gets the chance to play a “world statesman” (instead of the buffoon that he really is) who is supposedly rebranding his nation as “Global Britain” following the ragged and bitter departure from the European Union.

It’s easy to dismiss the Group of Seven as a useless talking shop for pompous politicians. Yes, it is that of course. Nevertheless, the manifest consequences are serious enough and should focus global efforts to seek real solutions, rather than indulge in vain distractions. What the group signifies is the apartheid world that Western capitalism creates: massive inequality and the futile destructiveness of foisting divisive relations onto the rest of the world that leads to conflict and ultimately war.

With bitter irony one of the subjects on the agenda this weekend is “sustainable development”. The G7 represents much about the world order that is totally unsustainable: elite wealth promoting false conflicts among nations instead of implementing genuine cooperation and peace.

It’s a big ask for a frail 78-year-old U.S. president to rally the world around a series of myths and falsehoods. Biden flies to Europe this week to galvanize allies under strong American leadership of supposed shared “democratic values” in a “historic confrontation” with the “autocracies” of China and Russia.

President Joe Biden’s worldview is so disconnected from reality that it is going to prove difficult mentally for him to consistently and coherently make the case over a series of summits in the next week.

That’s why he has his more youthful Secretary of State Antony Blinken (59) tagging along when Biden meets G7 leaders in England on June 11-13, followed by a NATO summit on June 14 in Brussels as well as top-level discussions with European Union leaders. After all that, Blinken is “to participate” in the face-to-face meeting between Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 16 in Geneva, according to the U.S. State Department.

The latter detail in the busy itinerary – Biden’s first overseas trip since taking office in January – is the most salient. It is unprecedented that the U.S. foreign secretary should “participate” in what was previously billed as a one-on-one meeting between the American and Russian leaders. There is no indication so far from Russian media reports that Sergei Lavrov – Blinken’s counterpart – is to take part in the Geneva summit.

What this unusual arrangement suggests is that Biden is not up to the task of dealing with Putin in an equal setting. The American president’s health and mental acuity have been under the media spotlight after several public gaffes in which Biden has forgotten names of his aides and has seemed befuddled in recalling details. The Democrat-supporting U.S. media have been criticized for giving Biden an easy time from their soft approach towards the president.

This raises further questions about Biden’s health condition when he has to have his top diplomat at his side during the forthcoming summits, especially the final one with Putin whom the American president disparaged previously as a “killer”.

It is all the more taxing on Biden given that his mission is more about contriving a narrative than actually engaging with reality. The contrived narrative is the attempt to rally European and other Western allies under American leadership against “autocratic adversaries” China and Russia. In other words, fabricating a new Cold War. The trouble is the fabrication is based on myths, falsehoods, smears, delusions, and outright lies. All in all, that’s a tall order for a president who tends to get people and names mixed up and who appears to struggle at finishing press conferences with coherent thoughts.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post before his big tour of Europe, Biden presented his mission thus: “My trip to Europe is about America rallying the world’s democracies”.

In a familiar mantra of the 46th president, he demarcated the world into two camps: one under “strong American leadership” with “shared democratic values”, and the other purportedly represented by rival “autocracies” of China and Russia. This is nothing but the recreation of a Cold War whereby Washington polarizes the world into hostile entities in order to give itself a position of “moral leadership” as a guise for imperialist hegemony.

To accept this mythical framing of the world, then it is necessary to demonize the designated adversaries. Lamentably, the European allies of America (more accurately, “vassals”) are all too credulous in accepting the provocative fantasies.

Nevertheless, sometimes self-interests intrude and the Europeans find the American depiction of the world too much to bear. Hence, there is pushback from the European Union on Biden’s attempts to sabotage the economic partnership between the 27-member bloc and China. There are limits to which the EU will go in damaging the landmark Comprehensive Investment Agreement it signed with Beijing in December.

Likewise, Germany is not tolerating any attempts by the Biden administration to scupper the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Russia which will be vital for fuelling German industry. Again, self-interest kicks in to bring mundane common sense into conflict with the American mythology of a Cold War.

Notwithstanding, Biden’s itinerary is purposed to orchestrate an adversarial transatlantic position towards Russia and China.

In his Washington Post op-ed, Biden pointedly outlines how his first meetings are aimed at drumming up American leadership pitted against Moscow.

The president wrote: “So, when I meet with Vladimir Putin in Geneva, it will be after high-level discussions with friends, partners and allies who see the world through the same lens as the United States, and with whom we have renewed our connections and shared purpose. We are standing united to address Russia’s challenges to European security, starting with its aggression in Ukraine, and there will be no doubt about the resolve of the United States to defend our democratic values, which we cannot separate from our interests.”

Note the inane assertion as if fact that Russia is threatening Europe’s security and is aggressing Ukraine, when in reality it is the U.S. and NATO powers that are weaponizing a rogue regime in Kiev against Russia. The U.S. has supplied $2 billion in weaponry to Kiev since the Western-backed coup d’état in 2014 and NATO forces are on the ground in Ukraine. It is NATO forces building up offensive power around Russia, not the other way around.

Biden threw in a few bromides such as “the United States does not seek conflict” with Russia, and he mentioned his extension of the New START treaty back in February (preventing an arms race is hardly a claim to virtue). But these platitudes aside, Biden went on to make lame accusations about Russia’s “interference in our democratic elections”.

It can be confidently posited that President Putin will demolish the baseless claims that Biden is attempting to put forward in Geneva. It will be an intellectual slamming match, not simply due to Putin’s formidable command of detail and argumentation, but largely because the American side has an untenable case owing to its fundamental fallacies.

Let’s just say, the American case against Russia and China is a weak charade of myths and lies, full of hypocrisy and contradiction. It would be hard enough for an agile mind to maintain the implausible narrative that underpins America’s bid for global hegemony. It’s all the more difficult for an aging president to keep up the performance.

That’s why Blinken is staying close to his boss during the whirlwind tour. Because Biden is liable to spin out of control and reap an embarrassing collapse.

The State Department said Biden will be coming from his meeting with allies with “the wind at his back” as he goes on to challenge Putin. More accurately, it should be said, with Blinken propping up the president by reminding him of the dubious script.