By Pepe ESCOBAR

By now what we may call a Triple Threat has been established as the catalyst anticipating the launch of Operation Z.

1. Ukraine developing nuclear weapons. Zelensky himself hinted at it in the Munich Security Conference.
2. U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine. Confirmed, tersely, by none other than the Sinister Cookie Distributor neocon wife in the uber-neocon Kaganate of Nulands, who described them as “biological research facilities”. ”
3. An imminent attack on Donbass with massive civilian deaths. It could have been in March, according to documents seized by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Or even in late February, according to SVR intelligence, which was monitoring the line of contact on a minute-by-minute basis. This is what eventually prompted Operation Z as a Russian version of R2P (“Responsibility to Protect”).

So after years of CIA-instigated shouts of “conspiracy theory!” and less than zero “fact checkers” activity, it turns out “it was all happening in Ukraine”, as divine messenger Maria Zakharova once again pointed out: “We have found your own products. We have found your biological material.”

The first-class investigative work of Dilyana Gaytandzhieva on Pentagon bioweapons was fully vindicated.

Based on documents received from Ukrainian biolab employees, the Russian ModD revealed that research with samples of bat coronavirus, among other experiments, were conducted in a Pentagon-funded biolab.

The purpose of all this research – which included another Pentagon project to study the transfer of pathogens by wild birds migrating between Ukraine and Russia and other neighboring countries – was “to create a mechanism for the covert spread of deadly pathogens.”

In trademark pysop mode, everything was turned upside down by the United States government: those evil Russkies could take control of biological samples, so any “accident” involving biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine would have to be blamed on Russia.

The White House, in yet another flagrant display of unredeemable stupidity, accused Russia of “false claims” and China of “endorsing this propaganda”.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov came up with the adult perspective: “The whole world will be interested to know what exactly the American bio-laboratories in Ukraine were doing.”

Down on the ground

Meanwhile, defying the fog of war while being targeted by Kiev’s free distribution of weapons without any measure of control, civilians on the path of Operation Z confirmed over and over again that Azov neo-Nazis prevent them from escaping encircled towns and villages. These Banderastan fanatics are the shock troops transforming Ukraine into a large Idlib – according to His Master’s Voice’s plan.

Neo-Nazis are doing exactly what ISIS/Daesh did in Syria: hiding behind civilians taken as hostages. Azov are the white clones of ISIS/Daesh. After all they learned their tactics from the same masters.

They will be bolstered by a fresh contingent of 450 fighters just arrived from – where else – Idlib, including lots of non-Syrians from Europe and the Maghreb. Most though are al-Qaedites and members of the Syrian branch of the Turkestan Islamic Party. Their transit point: the Syria-Turkish border, a smuggling free-for-all.

As it stands, the most detailed macro-view of how strategic Operation Z is developing has been outlined here.  The inestimable Andrei Martyanov describes it as a “combined arms police operation”: a delicate crossover between formation-level warfare (“combined arms”) and a police operation to arrest and/or destroy criminals (the full extent of “demilitarization” and “denazification”).

For an undiluted, down and dirty, eye to the ground perspective (translated into English), it’s hard to beat Russian military man Alexander Dubrovsky. He stresses how the objectives of the operation are “strategy and tactics”; and proceeding with haste is out of the question in this “completely new page in the art of war.”

Cutting through the fog, no one could realistically expect any breakthrough out of the meeting between Foreign Ministers Lavrov and Kuleba on the sidelines of the Diplomatic Forum in Antalya – as much as Turkey may have played a constructive role.

The non-government in Kiev is simply not allowed by the Empire to negotiate anything. The only tactic in town is stalling. Operation Z – or “the war” – could be stopped with a simple phone call from the Comedian in Kiev.

Lavrov at least was quite explicit on some key issues. Russia does not want war; never used oil and gas as a weapon; and wants Ukraine to be neutral.

The West, Lavrov added, refuses to understand the concept of “indivisibility of security”; those who supply Ukraine with weapons and send mercenaries should understand “they’re responsible for their actions”; and referring to the hysterical sanctions swamp, he stressed, “we will do everything to no longer depend on the West in any strategic sectors of our life.”

It’s quite enlightening to juxtapose Lavrov with clueless NATOstan “analysts”, totally ignorant of Eurasia and pontificating about “a new ideological conflict between irredentist tyrannies and liberal democracies”. It’s about sovereignty, stupid – not ideology.

NATOstan of course is incapable of understanding the process of Nazification of Ukraine – the key theme of any serious political/cultural/sociological analysis. It’s not an accident that the list of nations supporting the neoNazi-infested collapsed government in Kiev happens to largely coincide with the list of nations that refused to vote in favor of the UN resolution condemning the rehabilitation of Nazism.

In historical terms, these “analysts” might learn something by reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard. Bulgakov considered Ukraine as an avowedly reductionist version of “the steppe”: culturally barren, not capable of creating anything, destined to barbaric destruction. It’s important to remember that when Ukraine attempted to constitute itself as a state in 1918-1920, cultural and industrial centers such as Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Kharkov, Luhansk had never been Ukrainian. And western Ukraine for a long while was part of Poland.

All aboard the Eurasian train

On the economic front, the dogs of hybrid war bark while the Eurasia integration caravan marches on – with the Empire irretrievably being pushed outside of the Eurasian landmass.

In a phone call prior to the Lavrov-Kuleba meeting in Antalya, President Erdogan suggested to Putin setting up a trading mechanism in gold and also rubles, yuan and Turkish lira to beat the Western sanction hysteria. The source is Abdulkadir Selvi, very close to Erdogan. No Russia-China official comment yet.

The key fact is that Russia, China, and for that matter the entire Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – responsible for at least 30% of global GDP and the bulk of the Eurasian market – don’t need the West at all.

As Peter Koenig, a former senior economist at the World Bank points out, “Western GDP has a different basis, with blown out of proportion services, whereas the GDP of the SCO and the Global South is production-based. A huge difference when one looks at the backing of currencies: in the West there is literally none. Eastern currencies are mostly backed by national economies, especially in China and soon in Russia too. That leads to self-sufficiency, and no longer reliance on the West.”

In the larger geopolitical spectrum, the non-stop war of attrition by the Empire against Russia with Ukraine as a pawn is a war against the New Silk Roads; Maidan in 2014 took place only a few months after the launching of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), then OBOR (One Belt, One Road) in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. It’s also a war on the Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership. In sum: it’s an all-out war on Eurasia integration.

And that bring us to the key aspect of BRI: Eurasia rail/road connectivity – between China and the EU and with one corridor traversing Russia. The coordinated NATOstan sanction hysteria is not only against Russia, but also against China.

For the Beltway, BRI is beyond anathema: it’s almost like the Beast of the Apocalypse. As a response, the West even has concocted puny schemes such as the American B3W (“Build Back Better World) and the EU’s Global Gateway. Their impact, so far, does not even qualify as negligible.

Ukraine in itself is not a problem for BRI; traffic is only 2% of eastbound China-Europe freight trains. But Russia is another story.

According to Feng Xubin, Vice Chairman of the China-Europe Railway Express Transportation Coordination Committee, the freight settlement system between China and Russia may be in trouble: “At present, freight is denominated in dollars […] If the West cuts off Russia’s intermediate settlement channel in the international financial system, it means that the settlement system for freight charges between China and Russia will not be able to proceed normally.”

From the EU’s point of view, trade interruptions are not exactly a good deal. China-EU freight traffic increased over 100% last year.

For instance, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) are co-financing a 67 km high-speed rail stretch from Istanbul to the Bulgarian border.

Sanctions on Russia will definitely affect the trans-Eurasia supply chain – on transportation, ports, insurance, communications. Yet quite a few sanctions may be revised later on, as the EU itself starts to feel the pain.

China will have an abundance of Plan Bs. The key northern BRI corridor remains China-Kazakhstan-Russia-Belarus-EU, but there is a possible detour via the Caspian, in Aktau in Kazakhstan. There will be extra incentive to fully link the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway with the Turkish grid. And there will be extra movement in the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), with Baku connecting to the Iranian Caspian Sea coast and by rail to ultra-strategic Chabahar port.

So we may be heading towards extra impetus for BRI’s multimodal southern corridor – bypassing Russia: that means a boost for Turkey, the Caucasus and the Caspian. And no losses for China. As for Russia, even if this re-routing may last for a while, it’s not such a big deal. After all from now on Russia will be developing intensive trade towards the east and south of Eurasia, and not towards the sanctioning West.

If done properly, Russia’s wide rivers and preexisting canals with some upgrades could have an impact on international trade and create some previously impossible shipping routes.

Recently the Russian government revealed a plan to radically change cargo transport within the nation that could even have an international geopolitical impact. There is a quest to revolutionize the transport of goods going on globally. As it stands today, looking back on the 20^th  century, technology still looks much like it did during the early Cold War. We have trucks on highways, trains, boats and jet airplanes. True, all of these major forms of transporting goods have become more efficient, there are some very fast trains out there now, and in terms of sea transport everything is vastly cheaper than ever before. This has helped lead to the rise of today’s China. Without cheap sea exports they’d be living in a much different, less wealthy nation and that is exactly why Washington and friends do things like make that lovely AUKUS agreement and surround the South China Sea to the best of their ability.

Image: The unsung metallic hero of the rise of modern China.

Washington wants China to be surrounded so they can have the ability to cut off Beijing’s access to their cargo hauling golden goose. This is why the Chinese came up with the whole idea of the Belt and Road Initiative. This allows China to circumvent NATO encirclement and could be one of the biggest and most expensive “plan B” projects in human history.

On the other side of the world there is a sort of Green transportation pseudo revolution mostly starring the brilliant showmanship of Elon Musk and his offers to the scientifically illiterate public. Self-driving semi-trucks and the mysterious “HyperLoop” prop up his empire’s bloated stock prices. This growing trend of “vaporware” in all forms of development in the West where feelings and excitement about a technology outweigh its viability and feasibility is quite an interesting phenomenon. The concept of the Green New Deal is really the apex of this “feels = reality” way of looking at technology and development. Although the methodology may be off, it is certainly worth the West’s time to keep searching for some new development in transport that could be a game changer.

Image: Big but not nearly big enough, Russia needs to update its canals, locks and river fleet.

And so, China in terms of transport wants to maximize and diversify routes, the West is looking for some sort of zero-carbon-emission futuristic Green answer to a problem that may not exist, and Russia is going to put a large stack of chips down on the most medieval form of cargo transport – river hauling. We live in interesting times.

The Russian government is considering investing up to $10.3 billion to update the nation’s river freight capabilities. Considering the fact that river transport is pretty much dead (or at the very least extremely limited in scale) in most of the world this decision sounds strange. The Ohio & Erie Canal near my place of birth is the perfect example of this. It was a slow, limited capacity, surprisingly expensive form of moving goods that is reliant on an infrastructure that is very “organic” and susceptible to flooding, drought and all sorts of other issues that trains and trucks are not. In fact, it combines the linear nature of train hauling with the limited capacity and weather factors that affect semi-trucks into a worst of both worlds. So why would the Russians put so much money down on a technology that was obsolete in America before WWI started?

If we read the tea leaves, the logic looks something like this. With some modifications including widening and deepening some locks and upgrading other infrastructure, the miracle of ultra-cheap shipping by freighter on the high seas could work within Russia itself. Essentially it is taking this Chinese transport model and plopping it onto pre-existing rivers and canals at home which can be accomplished relatively “cheaply” by government project standards. The length of Russia’s river system would allow it to become almost like a new Suez or Panama canal for certain nations.

Image: Many boats already use the route in Red, with some upgrades, container ships could do so as well.

This project may sound like something very minor and internal for Russia but it has the potential to have a major effect on the world geopolitically. At the very least it has been pointed out that with these infrastructure upgrades put in place, some sort of mega freighter could travel freely between the Azov/Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Baltic Sea and the White Sea. This would make Iran become neighbors with Europe in a transport sense overnight and would certainly give Tehran some breathing room as their nation’s geography makes it very “blockadable” by sea. It could also help relieve some of Kazakhstan’s difficulties of being highly landlocked.

Turkey and Russia have often been at odds historically and their ability to blockade the Black Sea has always been a problem. So it would be to Russia’s advantage to have an alternative means of shipping from the Black Sea if need be.

Image: The Russians want to develop the Arctic, having many major north-south lying rivers sure helps connect it to the rest of the country.

The Rivers of Siberia have the potential to be able to take the riches of that region and transport them by containerships all over the world, pending those boats can make it up to the Arctic Ocean and not run aground. Putin has been a big advocate of developing the Arctic for many reasons, this being one of them. Although Siberia is famous for its minerals and wood, it also produces a lot of food and this infrastructure will help Russia continue to grow as a major food producing titan which is a factor in the great relationship between Moscow and Beijing. The food production capabilities of Southern Siberia are beyond comprehension, but have been kept dormant by the region’s landlocked isolation.

If done properly, Russia’s wide rivers and preexisting canals with some upgrades could have an impact on international trade and create some previously impossible shipping routes. This will not be done overnight but it is something for geopolitics fanboys to keep an eye on which ironically harkens back to the very birth of Russia, which heavily used river transport from its inception up until the fall of the USSR. Russia was born with this infrastructure mostly in place now it is time for the Russians to make sure that mega container ships can start using it.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

-Abraham Lincoln

It should be obvious that the world is being sucked into a new Cold War, with old school iron curtains, anti-communist rhetoric and even nuclear sabre rattling pushed by unipolar war hawks in the west. Unlike the first Cold War, this new variant strain features Russia and China working closely together along with Iran and a growing chorus of nations who are increasingly integrating into the Belt and Road Initiative.

What crime have these Eurasian nations committed such that the U.S./NATO military industrial complex has placed targets on them?

Simply that they have chosen to not submit to a unipolar technocratic scientific dictatorship.

Instead of embracing a dystopic destiny locked inside a shrinking geopolitical cage as Boris Yeltsin or Zhao Ziyang were happy to do not too long ago, today’s Eurasian intelligentsia has recognized that the only solution to the multifaceted crisis threatening civilization is located in the future. This may sound like a simplistic platitude to some, but from a geostrategic standpoint, the future is where creativity lives.

When resources are monopolized and systems of rules shaped by a sociopathic elite antagonistic to the basic rights of humanity, the only viable pathway of resistance to engage in successful combat is to change the rules of the rigged game and create new resources. This is done by increasing the opportunity to 1) make new discoveries which 2) create new resources, 3) translate newly discovered principles into new technological improvements that 4) increase the productive powers (mental, spiritual and physical) of humanity. If steps 1-4 don’t exist in the present, then where are they to be found?

I say it again: The Future.

The concept of positive future ideals teleologically (1) driving society forward was a powerful notion that once governed much of western civilization. The idea that man was made in the living image of a Creator, capable of participating in the continuous process of creation itself was an empowering notion which animated some of the greatest upward leaps in scientific progress, liberty, sovereignty, increased quality of life and population growth ever seen. In the early United States, this concept became known as “manifest destiny”… that God had a plan to expand the best of civilization and extend the fruits of progress to all in order to fulfill the Biblical mandate that humanity was expected to “be fruitful and multiply” and “replenish the earth and subdue it”.

While many goods to humanity arose out of this idea, it was also a double-edged sword that did great damage if used by tyrants, slave owners, or imperialists who ignored the reality that ALL humanity was endowed by the creator with inalienable rights, and not just a select few who felt they had the right breeding, religion, language, or racial characteristics.

A popular painting extolling the virtue of manifest destiny during the pioneering days of the 19^th century which at times resulted in great good and at many other times, justified great evil

A New Eurasian Manifest Destiny Awakens

In Russia, this future orientation has taken the form of a sort of 21^st century “Russian Manifest Destiny” which aims to extend civilization into the Siberian Far East and Arctic, and beyond Central Asia, Mongolia, Japan, China and beyond. While many are accustomed to myopically analyze world events from a “bottom up” mode of analysis, it is clear that

Since 2018, Russia’s eastern development ambitions have increasingly merged with China’s northern extension of the BRI dubbed The Polar Silk Road which has amplified the growth of railways, roads, telecommunication hubs, ports, energy projects and sea corridors through regions long thought inhospitable to human civilization.

China has seen the birth of its own version of “Manifest Destiny” in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative, which was unveiled in 2013, displaying a power of transformation, interconnectivity, and win-win cooperation beyond anything even its greatest fans imagined eight years ago. Within a short period of time, over $3 trillion has been spent on small, medium and large-scale infrastructure projects now involving 140 nations (to varying degrees of participation.)

Glancing across the thousands of BRI projects springing up around the globe, we find the greatest array of rail lines (including high speed: maglev and conventional), integrated development corridors, new smart cities, new industrial hubs, pipelines and advanced science initiatives touching on space exploration, atomic power, fusion research, quantum computing and much more.

These corridors of development have stretched through northern lines via Russia as well as Central Asian states which includes the “Middle Corridor of the BRI”. More recently, we have seen the blossoming of a southern route from China to Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon also take form with Syria finally signing up on January 12^th, 2022. Nations across Africa have also enthusiastically jumped on board with over 48 of 54 African nations signing onto the BRI. Currently, 18 Ibero American and 20 Arab states have also joined the program.

Must Diversity Be Sacrificed for Unity?

Both China and Russia have extremely large nations with vast potential in terms of undeveloped resources, manpower, and technological needs, but they also host a diverse array of smaller cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic groups from all walks of life.

The vast majority of Russia’s 146 million citizens live in the Westernmost 1/5^th of the country with 80% of the population living in or near urban zones extending from the Baltic to Caspian Sea. In the expansive north-eastern regions of Siberia (occupying a landmass 1.3 times the size of Canada), only 24 million citizens are diffused throughout this underpopulated land.

China faces similar problems with its population density and developed sectors locked up not in the west, but narrowly along its eastern pacific coast. Nearly 94% of China’s population still lives in the east of the Heihe-Tengchong Line with the vast inner heartland housing only 6% of the Chinese population.

Russia hosts 193 ethnic groups comprising nearly 20% of its population and although China’s Han population is by far the largest demographic (representing 91% of the population), there are 56 distinct ethnic groups representing 113 million people, many of whom live scattered across Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

The pressing quandary faced by Eurasian leaders planning out their programs of outward expansion can be stated in the following manner: How is it possible to extend scientific and industrial development across multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic territories both domestically and internationally without destroying the cultural heritage of the hundreds, if not thousands of smaller cultural groups along the way? Must development always occur at the expense of cultural diversity of smaller ethnic groups as has been too often the case in world history, OR is there an organic way to balance both factors?

How NOT to do Manifest Destiny

The irony is that up until recently, the concept of Manifest Destiny has been traditionally associated with the United States which shares many demographic characteristics with both China and Russia with the vast majority of population concentrated in the eastern half of the continent.

Sadly, the forces who shaped American expansion- especially during those first 125 years when Manifest Destiny had its greatest influence, have too often failed this test miserably. In its first 12 decades of life, the USA grew from 13 backward colonies in 1776 to 45 industrially-advanced states in 1900. Throughout those years, the wiser anti-slavery voices of Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Sumner, William Seward, and William Gilpin were too often subverted by an anglophile deep state parasite class that ran both Wall Street in the north and the southern slave power.

This multiheaded hydra lurking within the heart of the USA had its own perverse ideas of “Manifest Destiny” which stood in diametric opposition to the ambitions of the great statesmen listed above.

Where abolitionist-leading figures like Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton encouraged the sharing of knowledge, technical skills, science and the fruits of technological progress to both blacks and natives without forcing religious conversions or crushing their local traditions, the deep state in both northern and southern zones of influence sought to only expand their power through the conquerors whip.

The southern perversion of Manifest Destiny promoted by Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis and Albert Pike envisioned increased black slavery and Native Americans crushed under the heel of the “superior” white race, and cordoned off into cage-like plantations or reservations never to have a say in their own destiny. Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act emptied out valuable lands quickly handed over to southern cotton planters who quickly expanded the influx of black slaves from Africa vastly increasing the tension between free vs slave states leading to the inevitable Civil War of 1861-65.

It is often forgotten that under the Mazzini-connected freemasonic-laden presidency of Franklin Pierce (1853-1857), then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis (later Confederate President) and General Albert Pike were in charge of advancing a “southern alternative” to the trans continental railway through slave states. Unlike the northern line (begun by Lincoln in 1863) which was designed to spread industrial growth and ultimately connect with China, (2) the southern version simply served as an iron cage to keep the enslaved under the control of masters. In this way, the confederate “Manifest Destiny” was no different from the Cecil Rhodes racist vision of the Cape to Cairo rail line that sought to keep the continent under the British heel or today’s EU-London “Green Belt Initiative”/OSOWOG Plan to force green energy grids from Africa to India.

During the Civil War, the British were more than happy providing weapons, warships, logistic support, intelligence hubs in Canada and funding to the rebels nearly resulting in Lincoln fighting a war on two fronts early on (one against the south and the other against the British Empire) (3).

While the legitimate defenders of American Manifest Destiny sought to avoid war, relying instead on diplomacy to grow their territories (see: the Louisiana purchase of 1804, Oregon Territory in 1848, or Alaska purchase of 1867), the “America” of Wall Street and Virginia’s slave power were always happy to pick a fight with a neighbor to spread their imperial ambitions (see the Mexican war of 1846-48, or overthrow of Hawaii’s monarchy in 1893).

Unfortunately, those American traditions that once resisted imperialism have withered away, with today’s republic a poor shell of its former self, purged of genuine patriots in positions of federal power. Today’s USA has hollowed out its industrial base, destroyed its cultural connection to Christian values and its faith in scientific progress resulting in an alienated nation of nihilistic consumers without a vision for the future.

The Growth of Eco-Colonialism in the 20^th Century

The racist program of ghettoization of natives in the form of tribal reservations has segregated First Nation tribes from the rest of society for generations, keeping them locked into cycles of dependence, poverty, substance abuse, infant mortality rates and suicide magnitudes higher than the national average.

This manipulation of Native Americans has also seen these abused people used by game masters attempting to block broader continental development projects under a policy of “human ecosystems-management”. Since the late 1960s, it has become increasingly fashionable to treat native populations as just extensions of their local ecosystems- both of which are presumed to exist in stationary equilibrium by computer models which have been used to calculate conservation regions and optimal population growth for decades.

For anyone struggling to understand why the large-scale economic growth policy advanced by the likes of Franklin Roosevelt and JFK were derailed in the late 1960s with the onset of the Vietnam War, understanding this racist use of native reserves and ecosystem management is vital. The vast growth of conservation parks and federal lands kept off limits from all infrastructure investment was not the effect of warm-hearted nature lovers as many have been led to believe, but rather the effect of a cold calculated policy by geopolitical gamemasters intent on keeping society locked into a small controlled world of “limited resources”.

Image: Conservation lands (top) and national reserve parks (below): National Academy of Sciences of North America

While liberal imperialists shed crocodile tears for the plight of natives long abused by selfish white colonizers, they were too happy supporting mass sterilization of native women throughout the 1970s, and keeping the natives without clean drinking water, reliable electricity, healthcare or even access to quality jobs.

One of the most vocal proponents of the trans-continental railway (extending into Eurasia) was Lincoln-ally William Gilpin (Colorado Governor during the Civil War) who astutely identified the reservations to be “like blocks of stone in the wall of a jail against the frontier line”.

Under the veil of this new type of modern colonialism, money was often infused into the coffers of corrupt tribal leaders who have been happy letting oil cartels exploit their resources while keeping their people locked in cycles of dependence and zero technological growth.

From this perspective, one can see a clear parallel in the application of a similar neo-colonial policy applied to Africa.

China: A Manifest Destiny with Dignity

Despite the loud denunciations from the western Five Eyes-managed political class, China’s approach to both African BRI partners and their own minority groups stands in stark contrast to this nefarious tradition of exploitation and cultural genocide deployed by the western oligarchy for generations.

What we have seen in places like Tibet and Xinjiang are cultural heritage centers, exploding literacy rates, the celebration and teaching of traditional languages, songs, stories and dances given full government patronage.

While evidence of this cultural growth has grown across all minority ethnic zones, we have also seen a dramatic growth in longevity, population density, quality of life, poverty reduction, infant mortality reduction, and access to advanced industrial skills, clean water, internet and abundant electricity.

On a religious level, over 24,400 mosques currently exist in Xinjiang, not to mention 59 Buddhist temples and 253 churches. In only eight years, the bane of Saudi-U.S. funded terrorism in China has been dealt with without a single Arab state bombed back to the stone age which is no small accomplishment.

In Tibet, high speed and conventional rail has connected the local communities that had long lived in poverty, to broader global markets with durable technical skills and training growing vibrantly among the younger population.

Buddhist temples are also thriving with the full support of the government. NED-controlled propaganda outlets in either region would have you remain blind to these demonstrable facts of Chinese life.

While concessions favoring Chinese firms are certainly built into most BRI-connected projects springing up across Southwest Asia, Africa, and beyond, the fact is that infrastructure (both hard and soft), new industrial hubs and educational opportunities are springing to life at breakneck speed.

Across Africa, we have found local cultural traditions thrive in tandem with the same policy we have witnessed in Tibet and Xinjiang. If this is news to you, try putting down the Epoch Times and watching some local African news or CGTN’s African channels.

China’s approach stands in stark contrast to those IMF-World Bank-USAID programs that have systematically kept poor nations in usurious debt-trap enslavement for decades providing money to buy a few fish, but never allowed the capability to fish for themselves. China, on the other hand has encouraged the growth of vast construction projects, manufacturing hubs, and perhaps most importantly, advanced engineering skills.

Overcoming Russia’s Monetarist Obstacles

In Russia, a privatized central banking system still largely influenced by monetary protocols shaped by the IMF has made actualizing Putin’s Far Eastern vision much more difficult than in China where a vibrant state owned banking system provides an invaluable instrument of long-term growth. Russia’s private central bank, established (in its current form) in 1990, still suffers from deep-seeded structural ties to the IMF, WTO and liberal ideologues swarming across the bureaucratic landscape ensuring that a doctrine of “balanced budgets” and free markets takes precedence over the emission of productive credit.

Despite these blocks, Russia’s unique version of Manifest Destiny has begun to spring into life with Sergei Shoigu’s “grand masterplan for Siberia” starting with the construction of five new cities housing 500,000 to a million citizens.

Additionally, the plans to expand and improve both the 9300 km Trans-Siberian Railway and its 4300 km southern Baikur-Amal Mainline rail being modernized, double tracked and integrated ever more deeply into Mongolia, China and even Japan. This dovetails the expanding International North South Transportation Corridor from Moscow to India via central Asia and Iran which should now be seen as another dimension of BOTH the BRI and Far East Vision [see map below]. As the project advances, freight traffic along these rail lines will increase from 120 million tons/year to 180 million tons/year in 2024.

This rail expansion is tied closely to Russia’s Development Plan for the Northern Sea Route adopted in 2019 and which seeks to increase annual shipments to 80 million tons by 2024. On top of ports and new arctic mining hubs, this plan includes the construction of 40 new vessels (including more nuclear icebreakers), railways, and northern seaports which will see 10 days of shipping time slashed from goods between China and Europe.

If this wasn’t enough, on January 15, 2022, Putin announced that proposals to construct a long awaited Arctic railway to the Barents Sea must be submitted by May 10 2022.  This rail will extend to the Indiga Port in the Nenets Region which will host a year-round arctic port with a capacity of processing 80-200 million tons of cargo/year.

China and Russia have agreed to build Arctic science research centers in 2019 in order to “promote the construction of ‘Silk Road on Ice’”, while new designs for a new international scientific research base in Yamal called Snezhinka (aka: “Snowflake”) will be opened in 2022. In both instances, pure scientific research on Astro-climatology (the Arctic is the densest entry point for interstellar cosmic radiation which plays a driving role in climate change), species evolution and chemistry will be done in such new centers. Perhaps the most exciting fields of research will involve the testing of new artificial ecosystem designs requisite for sustaining human life comfortably not only in the Arctic but also on other celestial bodies like the Moon or Mars. Both nations have after all, agreed to co-develop a permanent lunar base which will be unveiled in the coming decade.

If we can avoid the trappings of nuclear war, then the discoveries that will be made along this exciting new chapter of inter-civilizational development are beyond the capacity of any computer model to predict, but they will happen nonetheless. The unleashing of creative discoveries by educated, inspired, goal-oriented human minds will increasingly awaken new technologies, and redefine humanity’s relationship to the periodic table of elements as new uses are found for the atom with wider access to the thousands of isotopes that still have yet to find a role in our economic systems. In this way, space and time itself will be condensed as magnetic levitation rail, nuclear propulsion systems and new energy sources will be brought online revolutionizing our ideas of “near”, “far”, “slow” and “fast” in dramatic ways.

Just think of the many months one would have to travel from old to new worlds in colonial days, to the mere hours such a transit takes on a hypersonic plane today. This is the sort of quantum leap expected as the 300 days transit to Mars currently required with chemical rockets will fall to a matter of weeks with nuclear propulsion.

Perhaps one might wish to accuse me of an overabundance of idealism, but so what?

This process is already unfolding before our very eyes, as political and scientific realities which many thought impossible only a decade ago, have already begun changing the trajectory of our collective future. If humanity’s phase shift into a mature self-conscious species is subverted once more… at a time when thermonuclear weapons litter the globe, there is no guarantee that we will get another chance.

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

Notes

(1) The term “teleological” refers to the idea that there is an intrinsic purpose or design shaping the material world, and that human ideas of law, and even economic ambitions are only good to the degree that they square with this purpose built into the fabric of the universe.
(2) One of the Trans Continental Railways most vigorous champions was Senator Charles Sumner, who passed a resolution in defense of the 1867 Alaska purchase (through which rail and telegraph lines were planned to move from the Americas through Eurasia via the Bering Strait crossing): “To unite the East of Asia with the West of America is the aspiration of commerce now as when the English navigator (Meares) recorded his voyage. Of course, whatever helps this result is an advantage. The Pacific railroad is such an advantage; for, though running westward, it will be, when completed, a new highway to the East.”
(3) This 2^nd front against Britain was nearly sparked in 1861 due to the Trent Affair

By Giorgio CAFIERO

Marking a major boost to Sino-Syrian relations, on 12 January, Syria joined the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s ambitious infrastructure development strategy stretching from East Asia to Europe.

For analysts with an eye on Syria, the development was expected. In November 2021, President Bashar al-Assad discussed his country gaining membership in the BRI with his counterpart in Beijing, Xi Jinping, following high-level meetings between officials of both states in previous months.

The move will likely help Syria deepen its cooperative and economic ties to other countries in the BRI, and enable it to circumvent the effects of harsh US sanctions on the country.

China clearly seeks to bolster the government in Damascus. Over the past decade, and for various reasons enumerated here on The Cradle, conflict-ridden Syria has been a country of increasing interest to Beijing.

Economy and the long game

China’s BRI agenda has been one main point of mutual interest: As Beijing sees it, Syria represents a corridor to the Mediterranean Sea which bypasses the Suez Canal and revives ancient trade routes connecting China to the African and European continents.

The incorporation of coastal Tartus and the capital city of Damascus into the BRI could boost Beijing’s economic footing in the Levant and Mediterranean.

Although nearly 11 years of warfare in Syria have prevented the Chinese from leveraging the Arab state’s geostrategic location to advance Beijing’s BRI, China’s leadership has carefully focused on playing the long game.

Now, in the post-conflict era, with Syria in need of massive reconstruction and infrastructure projects, China’s BRI has been brought into play.

Ancient links and modern opportunities

As a BRI member, Syria will look to further integrate itself economically into West Asia. In desperate need of foreign investment for the process of redevelopment, the Syrian leadership views China as a key investor and partner to rebuild the war-ravaged nation.

Importantly, during this period, China’s good will has grown among Syrians, in large part because of Beijing’s bold initiatives to thwart direct western military intervention at the UN Security Council and other institutions.

It is safe to assume that China will, at least eventually, be able to leverage its popularity among Syrians to take advantage of new economic opportunities in the country’s post-conflict future.

At the ceremony of Syria’s admission into the BRI, held this month in Damascus, Fadi Khalil, who heads Syria’s Planning and International Cooperation Commission, hailed the initiative. He invoked the historic roles of Aleppo and Palmyra in the ancient Silk Road and spoke about the potential for future Sino-Syrian relations within the framework of greater bilateral and multilateral cooperation.

Khalil and Feng Biao, Beijing’s ambassador to Syria, signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Syria’s admission into this Chinese initiative, which other Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, have previously joined at different levels of commitment.

Other recent developments underscore the extent to which Syria and China are deepening their ties. At the start of this year, Beijing aided Syria by sending over more than a million COVID-19 vaccine doses, according to Syrian state-owned media.

Despite the many ways in which Syria sees itself benefitting from membership in the BRI, the West Asian framework for this project will be no bed of roses.

A geographic wrench in the works

For Beijing, it is important that Iraq establish a long-term BRI corridor to both Syria and Jordan. While the BRI route between Iran and Syria – that traverses Iraq – has yet to be agreed upon with Baghdad, the Chinese must have many valid concerns about the security risks of doing business in Syria and Iraq.

China recognizes that “Iraq continues to top the list of high-risk investment destinations” in this grandiose project. Obviously, the same can be said about Syria where ISIS and other extremist militants continue to wage acts of terrorism, notably on the country’s borders with Iraq and Turkey.

With serious issues stemming from terrorism, social unrest, economic woes, and violent political instability, Iraq and Syria are two countries plagued by countless security uncertainties.

Although Chinese firms tend to accept higher levels of security risks than western companies, securing the BRI in Syria’s volatile neighborhood will prove no easy task for Beijing and its West Asian trade partners.

A far more stable and secure BRI economic corridor to Europe would be via northern Iran – a route already secured – then extending directly from Iran into Turkey. Yet the ice-cold state of Ankara-Damascus relations, China’s view of Turkey as an uneasy BRI partner, and NATO pressures on Ankara to avoid Beijing and Tehran, all contribute to practical challenges that will not be easy for the BRI’s financiers to quickly overcome.

But the Sino-Syrian deal this week shows that China is moving forward with its West Asian framework, despite these obstacles. One wonders whether Beijing has reason to believe Iraq’s acquiescence to the BRI is already in the bag. There is little point of developing the Syrian part of the project, without the Iraqi bridge necessary to secure Iran’s connectivity to Syria.

Washington’s reconstruction obstacle: The Caesar Act

On 17 July, 2020, the US began implementing the most sweeping sanctions which Washington has ever imposed on Syria.

Formally known as the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 (or Caesar Act), the Biden administration continues to target Syria with Trump-era sanctions which pursue entities or individuals worldwide – including third-party actors – conducting business with government-dominated bodies of the Syrian economy, such as gas, oil, construction, engineering, and banking.

When China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Damascus in July 2021, he met with Assad and other high-ranking Syrian government figures.

That visit by Beijing’s top diplomat was an early indication of China’s seriousness about strengthening ties with Syria, despite Washington’s continued imposition of wide-ranging sanctions on the state.

During his visit to Syria, Wang emphasized his government’s staunch opposition to the foreign-backed ‘regime change’ agenda targeting the Assad government. Beijing frames its pro-Assad stance within the context of supporting Syria’s sovereignty as an independent nation-state.

Throughout the past 11 years of warfare in Syria, China has maintained four core beliefs on the conflict: First, that the Syrian people need to reach a political solution; second, that a political transition in Syria is necessary; third, that top priorities include nation-wide reconciliation and unity; and fourth, that the international community has an obligation to help Syria.

The BRI, while initiated and heavily financed by the Chinese, is ultimately a multinational project involving dozens of countries, many of them US-allied, and interconnected with Syria via history, religion, culture, and economy – past and present.

A project this global is unlikely to come to a grinding halt because of a domestic US government ruling on trade formulated thousands of miles away from the activity.

Fighting terrorism in Syria and China

Another issue that has driven the Beijing-Damascus joint agenda in recent years is China’s ‘securitization campaign’ or ‘pacification drive’ in Xinjiang.

Assad’s government has publically condemned western efforts to use the plight of Uighurs for the purpose of creating a wedge between China and Muslim-majority countries.

Syria, like most Arab-Islamic countries, has defended Beijing in the face of the US and other western governments which allege that Chinese authorities are guilty of waging ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang, where about 12 million Uighurs, mostly Muslim, reside.

Mindful of the fact that Uighur jihadists came from Xinjiang to Syria to fight the Syrian government in the ranks of Islamic State and other violent extremist groups, Damascus and Beijing see themselves as having common cause in a struggle against terrorism and extremism.

In 2017, Syria’s ambassador to Beijing said that roughly 5,000 terrorists from Xinjiang were transported, mostly via Turkey, to Syria during the conflict. Chinese authorities have voiced serious concerns about the now battle-hardened and indoctrinated extremists potentially returning to China to carry out acts of terrorism.

Likewise, Beijing rejects the view of western governments that Assad is guilty of serious crimes. China’s leadership believes that the Syrian government deserves praise for its fight against forces which sought to overthrow Assad and his government.

When Wang was in Syria last summer, he said that “the Syrian government’s leading role in fighting terrorism on its soil should be respected, schemes of provoking ethnic divisions under the pretense of countering terrorism should be opposed, and Syria’s sacrifice and contribution to the anti-terror fight should be acknowledged.”

The future of the Sino-Syrian relationship

Currently in the US there is strong support from both sides of Washington’s political aisle for stringent Trump-era US sanctions on Damascus. In fact, this year, Biden’s administration has come under bipartisan pressure to intensify the US government’s enforcement of the Caesar Act.

Given the existing polarization and hostility in West Asian geopolitics, it is difficult to imagine Washington lifting the Caesar Act in the foreseeable future. Ultimately, this means that the US will probably continue to target Syria’s economy with crippling sanctions.

Within this context, Damascus has all the reason in the world to pursue strategies that can help it minimize the harm caused by Washington’s financial warfare.

“China can play an important role in weakening the impact of the Caesar sanctions,” said Dr. Joshua Landis, head of the Middle East department at the University of Oklahoma, in an interview last year with The Cradle.

“In Iran, China has done this,” Landis explained. “Iran’s oil exports, which were devastated by sanctions, have begun to grow again, largely because China is purchasing Iranian oil again. China is the workshop of the world so it can supply most of the goods that Syria needs. China is also strong enough to thumb its nose at US sanctions. As the US increasingly forbids US companies from dealing with Chinese firms, China has greater incentive to punish the US by breaking sanctions on countries like Iran and Syria.”

Now that Syria has joined the BRI, it is safe to conclude that the Chinese will play an increasingly important role in terms of Syria’s strategies for withstanding sanctions imposed by the US.

The odds are good that, as time passes, China and Syria’s geopolitical and geo-economic value to each other will only expand.

thecradle.co

With the recent pledge by China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan for renewed defense of Afghanistan’s sovereignty and right to develop, many have jumped the gun to celebrate a little prematurely.

While watching a hegemonic wanna-be global overlord choke on humble pie is certainly satisfying, and while Afghanistan unquestionably has a renewed hope to recapture its ancient role as a pearl on the Silk Road uniting all cultures of the globe, something darker is also afoot. A process reminiscent of the events of 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski, then leading a trilateral Commission takeover of the USA using a dim-witted puppet president, managed to launch a program known as “Operation Cyclone”.

This clandestine operation was premised on the lies of Zbigniew’s Team B analysis of Soviet ambitions to supposedly dominate the world and which thence justified a program that utilized billions of dollars in tax payer money to fund the growth of Mujahedeen terrorist cells and narcotics in a bid to light a fire under Russia’s soft underbelly and suck the unsuspecting soviets into a bloodletting that would be sold to an incredulous western population as “Russia’s Vietnam.”

Over forty years later, the results of Zbigniew’s duplicitous proxy war are well known.

The Soviet Union was certainly bled, leading to its ultimate dissolution under Gorbachev and the world was given the gift Islamic terrorism- funded, armed and trained generously by CIA, MI6 and ISI operatives.

Additionally, organized crime syndicates of the world also grew their influence in leaps and bounds as the world center of opium production was moved from its former zones of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar to more fertile soil in Afghanistan, providing both the funding needed to light the region on fire for decades while also amplifying a new opium war against ALL of civilization. The conspicuous integration of the DEA and CIA during this period which coincided with the heroin boom and also the flooding of crack cocaine into the ghettos of the USA under CIA director George Bush Sr (also a defender of Zbigniew’s Team B takeover of U.S. intelligence estimates) cannot be ignored.

Signs of Darkness

Signs of the re-activation of this old script with a modern twist are already visible on numerous levels, not the least of those signs being witnessed in the strange decision to demolish the CIA torture annex in Kabul in response to the August 26 attack by the mysterious ISIS-K on the Kabul airport which killed 170 civilians and 13 U.S. soldiers. Why was it the case that U.S. and British intelligence agencies issued warnings of an attack at that location and time long before it occurred and yet did less than nothing, other than shooting civilians and bombing three households after it happened?

Why would the U.S. military deem it wise to destroy a CIA base which has been a strategic central point of command of all clandestine activities in the region for the past two decades in response to this completely foreseeable event?

Recently a Lebanese analyst, commenting on the observations of the leader of Hezbollah wrote that “the U.S. have been using helicopters to save ISIS terrorists from complete annihilation in Iraq and transporting them to Afghanistan to keep them as insurgents in Central Asia against Russia, China and Iran”.

This observation is not unique to Nasrallah, but has been echoed at various times over the past three years by the Russian government, Syrian state media and leading officials in Iran including former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif who noted as early as March 2018 that “this time, it wasn’t unmarked helicopters. They were American helicopters, taking Daesh out of Haska prison. Where did they take them? Now, we don’t know where they took them, but we see the outcome. We see more and more violence in Pakistan, more and more violence in Afghanistan, taking a sectarian flavor.”

Zarif’s words echoed those of Iranian Chief of Staff Major General Mohammad Baqeri who said: “After witnessing ISIS and other organized terrorist groups losing their ground in Iraq and Syria, they are now relocating them to Afghanistan.”

Additionally, U.S. mainstream media has been preparing the western zeitgeist with strange interviews with leaders of Al Qaeda and ISIS-K in recent weeks. First the state-funded PBS broadcasted a suspicious interview with Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (aka: Al Nusra aka: Al Qaeda) leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani who was repackaged in a business suite and sold as a “moderate resistance fighter” in Syria. Then just days before the August 26 Kabul attack, CNN’s Clarissa Ward interviewed an ISIS-K commander in a silhouetted frame to protect his identity. When asked if he would continue the campaign of international terror, the unnamed terrorist stated “instead of currently operating, we have turned to recruiting only, to utilize the opportunity to do our recruitment. But when the foreigners and people of the world leave Afghanistan, we can restart our operations.”

To top things off, the incredibly talented Bulgarian researcher Dilyana Gaytandzhieva noted on June 22 that the U.S. Army contracted four companies to purchase $350 million worth of weapons made by eight companies located in Serbia, Bulgaria and Croatia which are destined to flood into Syria as part of a program called Task Force Smoking Gun. This 2017 program was part of a U.S. Special Operations Command Unit Task force which carried out the Syrian ‘train and equip program’ designed to overthrow the Assad regime using Al Qaeda affiliates as freedom fighters. In her report, Gaytandzhieva wrote:

“According to the U.S. Federal Procurement Data System, the eight companies have already received orders with an estimated value of $25 million each or $200 million combined under the 5 year-long Pentagon program for non-U.S. standard weapons supplies. These are foreign weapons which are not compatible with the U.S. military standard, hence cannot be used by the U.S. army and will be delivered as military aid to third parties.”

China Will Fill the Vacuum

It is 100% certain that China has great hopes to invest in Afghanistan’s bountiful rare earth, copper and iron deposits, as well as rail, roads, fibre optics, energy plants and communications bringing Afghanistan into the evolving Belt and Road Initiative. However, the expanded presence of Chinese engineers in the region will put China at risk of asymmetric attacks.

Over the past 15 years, projects like the 2007 Mes Aynak copper mining operation and 2011 Faryab and Sar-i-pul oil development deals have stalled due to the frequent occurrence of U.S.-backed terrorist attacks on Chinese engineers and workers. Just this summer, 9 Chinese engineers were killed in Pakistan when an explosive device detonated sending a busload of workers off a cliff. These workers were en-route to work on the large Dasu hydroelectric dam that is part of the CPEC.

China is additionally concerned that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement which has cut its teeth fighting alongside its Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan may also spring to new life. It was only in November 2020 that Secretary of State Pompeo removed the group from the U.S. list of terrorist groups despite the fact that the United Nations Security Council had released a report in May 2020 stating that the ETIM “has a transnational agenda to target Xinjiang, China, and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, as well as Chitral, Pakistan, which poses a threat to China, Pakistan and other regional States.”

The refutation of China’s anti-Muslim genocide myth promoted by western MSM was laid out in a recent interview by this author here:

Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen has attempted to allay China’s fears saying: “Those who are intending to carry out sabotage activities in other countries or have their foreign agenda would not be able to remain in the country.”

However, it is still too early to validate such claims as the ETIM alongside ISIS cells certainly abound in the mountainous northeast regions enjoying support from western clandestine operations and parallel networks still active in Pakistan such as Lashkar-e-Islam and Tehrik-e-Taliban as outlined in the aforementioned UN report.

The need to cut off all Al Qaeda operations are vital at this time and thus the convergence of the “big four” nations of Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan are so vital. With Iran having been inducted into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as of September 17 joining both Pakistan and India as full members, it is understood by all relevant parties that a new security doctrine is needed in the region premised on win-win cooperation.

This is most apparent when one considers that the living force for the multipolar alliance’s long-term success is hinged upon the continued success of China’s 130 nation strong Belt and Road Initiative whose four of the six primary networks pass through Xinjiang and the region which Brzezinski lit on fire four decades ago to keep the “world island” divided and weak.

The Chinese and their growing array of partners have come to the fundamental insight that the only way to destroy terrorism is not by bombing nations to smithereens, but rather by providing the means of improving the lives of people. This is the true meaning of “civilization” that not merely builds infrastructure for the sake of shareholder value, but uplifts and ennobles the hearts and minds of a people who have been caught too long in the darkness of ignorance, despair, war and poverty. This is the only antidote for global terrorism, the plague of drugs that have ravaged countless lives, and even the poisonous misanthropy underlying the decaying “Rules-Based International Order”.

The author can be reached on his Substack

The collapse of the American project in Afghanistan may fade fast from the news here, but don’t be fooled. It couldn’t be more significant in ways few in this country can even begin to grasp.

“Remember, this is not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a television audience on August 15th, the day the Taliban swept into the Afghan capital, pausing to pose for photos in the grandly gilded presidential palace. He was dutifully echoing his boss, President Joe Biden, who had earlier rejected any comparison with the fall of the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, in 1975, insisting that “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.”

Both were right, but not in the ways they intended. Indeed, the collapse of Kabul was not comparable. It was worse, incomparably so. And its implications for the future of U.S. global power are far more serious than the loss of Saigon.

On the surface, similarities abound. In both South Vietnam and Afghanistan, Washington spent 20 years and countless billions of dollars building up massive, conventional armies, convinced that they could hold off the enemy for a decent interval after the U.S. departure. But presidents Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam and Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan both proved to be incompetent leaders who never had a chance of retaining power without continued fulsome American backing.

Amid a massive North Vietnamese offensive in the spring of 1975, President Thieu panicked and ordered his army to abandon the northern half of the country, a disastrous decision that precipitated Saigon’s fall just six weeks later. As the Taliban swept across the countryside this summer, President Ghani retreated into a fog of denial, insisting his troops defend every remote, rural district, allowing the Taliban to springboard from seizing provincial capitals to capturing Kabul in just 10 days.

With the enemy at the gates, President Thieu filled his suitcases with clinking gold bars for his flight into exile, while President Ghani (according to Russian reports) snuck off to the airport in a cavalcade of cars loaded with cash. As enemy forces entered Saigon and Kabul, helicopters ferried American officials from the U.S. embassy to safety, even as surrounding city streets swarmed with panicked local citizens desperate to board departing flights.

Critical Differences

So much for similarities. As it happens, the differences were deep and portentous. By every measure, the U.S. capacity for building and supporting allied armies has declined markedly in the 45 years between Saigon and Kabul. After President Thieu ordered that disastrous northern retreat, replete with dismal scenes of soldiers clubbing civilians to board evacuation flights bound for Saigon, South Vietnam’s generals ignored their incompetent commander-in-chief and actually began to fight.

On the road to Saigon at Xuan Loc, an ordinary South Vietnamese unit, the 18th Division, fought battle-hardened North Vietnamese regulars backed by tanks, trucks, and artillery to a standstill for two full weeks. Not only did those South Vietnamese soldiers take heavy casualties, with more than a third of their men killed or wounded, but they held their positions through those long days of “meat-grinder” combat until the enemy had to circle around them to reach the capital.

In those desperate hours as Saigon was falling, General Nguyen Khoa Nam, head of the only intact South Vietnamese command, faced an impossible choice between making a last stand in the Mekong Delta and capitulating to communist emissaries who promised him a peaceful surrender. “If I am unable to carry out my job of protecting the nation,” the general told a subordinate, “then I must die, along with my nation.” That night, seated at his desk, the general shot himself in the head. In South Vietnam’s last hours as a state, four of his fellow generals also committed suicide. At least 40 more lower-ranking officers and soldiers also chose death over dishonor.

On the road to Kabul, by contrast, there were no heroic last stands by regular Afghan army units, no protracted combat, no heavy casualties, and certainly no command suicides. In the nine days between the fall of Afghanistan’s first provincial capital on August 6th and the capture of Kabul on August 15th, all of the well-equipped, well-trained Afghan soldiers simply faded away before Taliban guerrillas equipped mainly with rifles and tennis sneakers.

After losing their salaries and rations to graft for the previous six to nine months, those hungry Afghan troops simply surrendered en masse, took Taliban cash payments, and handed over their weapons and other costly U.S. equipment. By the time the guerrillas reached Kabul, driving Humvees and wearing Kevlar helmets, night-vision goggles, and body armor, they looked like so many NATO soldiers. Instead of taking a bullet, Afghanistan’s commanders took the cash — both graft from padding their payrolls with “ghost soldiers” and bribes from the Taliban.

The difference between Saigon and Kabul has little to do with the fighting ability of the Afghan soldier. As the British and Soviet empires learned to their dismay when guerrillas slaughtered their soldiers in spectacular numbers, ordinary Afghan farmers are arguably the world’s finest fighters. So why wouldn’t they fight for Ashraf Ghani and his secular democratic state in far-off Kabul?

The key difference would seem to lie in the fading of America’s aura as the planet’s number one power and of its state-building capacities. At the peak of its global hegemony back in the 1960s, the United States, with its unequalled material resources and moral authority, could make a reasonably convincing case to the South Vietnamese that the political mix of electoral democracy and capitalist development it sponsored was the way forward for any nation. Today, with its reduced global clout and tarnished record in Iraq, Libya, and Syria (as well as in prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo), America’s capacity to infuse its nation-building projects with any real legitimacy — that elusive sine qua non for the survival of any state — has apparently dropped significantly.

The Impact on U.S. Global Power

In 1975, the fall of Saigon did indeed prove a setback to Washington’s world order. Still, America’s underlying strength, both economic and military, was robust enough then for a partial rebound.

Adding to the sense of crisis at the time, the loss of South Vietnam coincided with two more substantial blows to Washington’s international system and the clout that went with it. Just a few years before Saigon’s collapse, the German and Japanese export booms had so eroded America’s commanding global economic position that the Nixon administration had to end the automatic convertibility of the dollar to gold. That, in turn, effectively broke the Bretton Woods system that had been the foundation of U.S. economic strength since 1944.

Meanwhile, with Washington mired in its self-made Vietnam quagmire, that other Cold War power, the Soviet Union, continued to build hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles and so functionally forced Washington to recognize its military parity in 1972 by signing the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Strategic Arms Limitation Protocol.

With the weakening of the economic and nuclear pillars on which so much of America’s paramount power rested, Washington was forced to retreat from its role as the great global hegemon and become a mere first among equals.

Washington’s Relations with Europe

Almost half a century later, the sudden, humiliating fall of Kabul threatens even that more limited leadership role. Although the U.S. occupied Afghanistan for 20 years with the full support of its NATO allies, when President Biden walked away from that shared “nation-building” mission, he did so without the slightest consultation with those very allies.

America lost 2,461 soldiers in Afghanistan, including 13 who died tragically during the airport evacuation. Its allies suffered 1,145 killed, including 62 German soldiers and 457 British troops. No wonder those partners held understandable grievances when Biden acted without the slightest notice to or discussion with them. “There is serious loss of trust,” observed Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to Washington. “But the real lesson… for Europe is this: Do we really want to be totally dependent on U.S. capabilities and decisions forever, or can Europe finally begin to be serious about becoming a credible strategic actor?”

For Europe’s more visionary leaders like French President Emmanuel Macron, the answer to that timely question was obvious: build a European defense force free from Washington’s whims and so avoid “the Chinese-American duopoly, the dislocation, the return of hostile regional powers.” In fact, right after the last American planes left Kabul, a summit of European Union officials made it clear that the time had come to stop “depending on American decisions.” They called for the creation of a European army that would give them “greater decision-making autonomy and greater capacity for action in the world.”

In short, with America First populism now a major force in this country’s politics, assume that Europe will pursue a foreign policy increasingly freed from Washington’s influence.

Central Asia’s Geopolitics

And Europe may be the least of it. The stunning capture of Kabul highlighted an American loss of leadership that extended into Asia and Africa, with profound geopolitical implications for the future of U.S. global power. Above all, the Taliban’s victory will effectively force Washington out of Central Asia and so help to consolidate Beijing’s already ongoing control over parts of that strategic region. It, in turn, could prove to be the potential geopolitical pivot for China’s dominance over the vast Eurasian land mass, home to 70% of the globe’s population and productivity.

Speaking at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan in 2013 (though nobody in Washington was then listening), China’s President Xi Jinping announced his country’s strategy for winning the twenty-first-century version of the deadly “great game” that nineteenth-century empires once played for control of Central Asia. With gentle gestures that belied his imperious intent, Xi asked that academic audience to join him in building an “economic belt along the Silk Road” that would “expand development space in the Eurasian region” through infrastructure “connecting the Pacific and the Baltic Sea.” In the process of establishing that “belt and road” structure, they would, he claimed, be building “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”

In the eight years since that speech, China has indeed been spending over a trillion dollars on its “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) to construct a transcontinental grid of railroads, oil pipelines, and industrial infrastructure in a bid to become the world’s premier economic power. More specifically, Beijing has used the BRI as a geopolitical pincers movement, a diplomatic squeeze play. By laying down infrastructure around the northern, eastern, and western borders of Afghanistan, it has prepared the way for that war-torn nation, freed of American influence and full of untapped mineral resources (estimated at a trillion dollars), to fall safely into Beijing’s grasp without a shot being fired.

To the north of Afghanistan, the China National Petroleum Corporation has collaborated with Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan to launch the Central Asia–China gas pipeline, a system that will eventually extend more than 4,000 miles across the heart of Eurasia. Along Afghanistan’s eastern frontier, Beijing began spending $200 million in 2011 to transform a sleepy fishing village at Gwadar, Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea, into a modern commercial port only 370 miles from the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Four years later, President Xi committed $46 billion to building a China–Pakistan Economic Corridor of roads, rails, and pipelines stretching nearly 2,000 miles along Afghanistan’s eastern borderlands from China’s western provinces to the now-modernized port of Gwadar.

To the west of Afghanistan, Beijing broke through Iran’s diplomatic isolation last March by signing a $400 billion development agreement with Tehran. Over the next 25 years, China’s legions of laborers and engineers will lay down a transit corridor of oil and natural gas pipelines to China, while also building a vast new rail network that will make Tehran the hub of a line stretching from Istanbul, Turkey, to Islamabad, Pakistan.

By the time these geopolitical pincers pull Afghanistan firmly into Beijing’s BRI system, the country may have become just another Middle Eastern theocracy like Iran or Saudi Arabia. While the religious police harass women and troops battle festering insurgencies, the Taliban state can get down to its real business — not defending Islam, but cutting deals with China to mine its vast reserves of rare minerals and collect transit taxes on the new $10 billion TAPI gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan (which desperately needs affordable energy).

With lucrative royalties from its vast store of rare-earth minerals, the Taliban could afford to end its current fiscal dependence on drugs. They could actually ban the country’s now booming opium harvest, a promise their new government spokesman has already made in a bid for international recognition. Over time, the Taliban leadership might discover, like the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Iran, that a developing economy can’t afford to waste its women. As a result, there might even be some slow, fitful progress on that front, too.

If such a projection of China’s future economic role in Afghanistan seems fanciful to you, consider that the underpinnings for just such a future deal were being put in place while Washington was still dithering over Kabul’s fate. At a formal meeting with a Taliban delegation in July, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi hailed their movement as “an important military and political force.”

In response, Taliban head Mullah Abdul Baradar, displaying the very leadership that American-installed President Ashraf Ghani so clearly lacked, praised China as a “reliable friend” and promised to foster “an enabling investment environment” so that Beijing could play “a bigger role in future reconstruction and economic development.” Formalities finished, the Afghan delegation then met behind closed doors with China’s assistant foreign minister to exchange what the official communiqué called “in-depth views on issues of common concern, which helped enhance mutual understanding” — in short, who gets what and for how much.

The World-Island Strategy

China’s capture of Eurasia, should it be successful, will be but one part of a far grander design for control over what Victorian geographer Halford Mackinder, an early master of modern geopolitics, called the “world island.” He meant the tricontinental land mass comprising the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. For the past 500 years, one imperial hegemon after another, including Portugal, Holland, Britain, and the United States, has deployed its strategic forces around that world island in a bid to dominate such a sprawling land mass.

While for the last half-century Washington has arrayed its vast air and naval armadas around Eurasia, it generally relegated Africa to, at best, an afterthought — at worst, a battleground. Beijing, by contrast, has consistently treated that continent with the utmost seriousness.

When the Cold War came to southern Africa in the early 1970s, Washington spent the next 20 years in an arm’s-length alliance with apartheid South Africa, while using the CIA to fight a leftist liberation movement in Portuguese-controlled Angola. While Washington spent billions wreaking havoc by supplying right-wing African warlords with automatic weapons and land mines, Beijing launched its first major foreign-aid project. It built the thousand-mile Tanzania-to-Zambia railway. Not only was it the longest in Africa when completed in 1975, but it allowed landlocked Zambia, a front-line state in the struggle against the apartheid regime in Pretoria, to avoid South Africa when exporting its copper.

From 2015 on, building upon its historic ties to the liberation movements that won power across southern Africa, Beijing planned a decade-long trillion-dollar infusion of capital there. Much of it was to be designated for commodities-extraction projects that would make that continent China’s second-largest source of crude oil. With such an investment (equaling its later BRI commitments to Eurasia), China also doubled its annual trade with Africa to $222 billion, three times America’s total.

While that aid to liberation movements once had an ideological undercurrent, today it’s been succeeded by savvy geopolitics. Beijing seems to understand just how fast Africa’s progress has been in the single generation since that continent won its freedom from a particularly rapacious version of colonial rule. Given that it’s the planet’s second most populous continent, rich in human and material resources, China’s trillion-dollar bet on Africa’s future will likely pay rich dividends, both political and economic, someday soon.

With a trillion dollars invested in Eurasia and another trillion in Africa, China is engaged in nothing less than history’s largest infrastructure project. It’s crisscrossing those three continents with rails and pipelines, building naval bases around the southern rim of Asia, and ringing the whole tricontinental world island with a string of 40 major commercial ports.

Such a geopolitical strategy has become Beijing’s battering ram to crack open Washington’s control over Eurasia and thereby challenge what’s left of its global hegemony. America’s unequalled military air and sea armadas still allow it rapid movement above and around those continents, as the mass evacuation from Kabul showed so forcefully. But the slow, inch-by-inch advance of China’s land-based, steel-ribbed infrastructure across the deserts, plains, and mountains of that world island represents a far more fundamental form of future control.

As China’s geopolitical squeeze play on Afghanistan shows all too vividly, there is still much wisdom in the words that Sir Halford Mackinder wrote over a century ago: “Who rules the World Island commands the World.”

To that, after watching a Washington that’s invested so much in its military be humiliated in Afghanistan, we might add: Who does not command the World Island cannot command the World.

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Two major developments in international commercial conveyance were reported in August and September, but neither of them received much cover by mainstream western media. First was the news that the China-Europe rail link was proving outstandingly successful, as recounted by the Xinhua news agency and Spain’s EFE, and second came the story on September 6 that the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany was about to come on line, which was covered by the Oil Price website and to an extent by Deutsche Welle which didn’t mention the official statement by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. But the New York Times, for example, did not consider the development newsworthy in even a minor fashion, and a search of the paper’s website was entirely negative, as it was for all the west’s major outlets.

It is intriguing that these two significant affairs were so comprehensively disregarded rather than being welcomed in most western capitals, and it goes some way to explaining the shaky state of international relations to examine some of the reasons behind the seeming antipathy of western governments and media to successful cooperative ventures involving China and Russia.

Opposition to the Nord Stream project has been widespread and hard-hitting, with Poland, for example, being particularly critical. In July its deputy foreign minister met with the visiting Counsellor of the U.S. Department of State, Derek Chollet and declared that “Poland considers this project to be detrimental to the security of not only Ukraine, not only Central Europe, but also to the security of the whole of Europe, making the EU dependent on Russian gas, contrary to earlier declarations regarding the need to diversify energy sources.” Predictably, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, she who greatly assisted the 2014 coup in Ukraine, said it is a “bad pipeline” and spoke with relish about the lurking sanctions that would be imposed “should Moscow use the pipeline as a political weapon.”

The “political weapon” argument is interesting, mainly because this pipeline is all about bringing reasonably-priced natural gas to about 26 million households in Europe. That is, it’s about people, not politics. Of course there is an economic benefit to Russia, whose gas is being piped for 1230 kilometres (764 miles) under the Baltic, and it would be surprising if there were no commercial gain, because, as the U.S. would be first to aver, that is one of the many positive results of international trade.

But there are many U.S. legislators who have different views and no regard for the benefits to European citizens or anyone else. The U.S. agency Radio Free Europe reported Senator Rob Portman (Republican-Ohio) as tweeting that “Nord Stream 2 will strengthen Russia, undermine America’s national interest, and threaten the security of Ukraine — a key U.S. ally,” while Democratic Representative Marcy Kaptur said that “Congress must reject any deals that fail to protect transatlantic security and Ukraine’s sovereignty.”

The only thing affecting Ukraine in the Nord Stream success story is the resultant inability to charge the 3 billion dollars a year which it receives for permitting transit of gas through its territory. This is capitalism. Many people may not like it, but that is how America works and it is strange indeed that U.S. legislators can bring themselves to stand against the movements of free enterprise. On the other hand, the LA Times noted that “Nuland said the U.S. continues to oppose the pipeline but said Biden had waived sanctions against the German company constructing the pipeline and its top executives because the penalties would have been counterproductive to broader U.S. interests.” So the campaign against Nord Stream 2 had nothing to do with people or principles. It was entirely anti-Russia and centred on “U.S. interests”. Which brings us to another success story that the West doesn’t like.

China’s Belt and Road Iniative (BRI) is a global project, described by the Council on Foreign Relations as “one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived. Launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping, the vast collection of development and investment initiatives would stretch from East Asia to Europe, significantly expanding China’s economic and political influence. Xi’s vision included creating a vast network of railways, energy pipelines, highways, and streamlined border crossings . . .”

The Economist Intelligence Unit notes that in the second quarter of 2021 the level of trade along the BRI “continues to increase, despite ongoing Covid‑19 waves, with China’s exports of electronics and furniture benefiting from the work-at-home trend . . . merchandise trade with the countries along the BRI increased by 38% year on year in the first half of 2021, accounting for 29.6% of China’s total trade with the world . . . China’s imports from countries along the BRI increased by 66.6% amid a rise in commodity prices,” which is all impressive and seemingly positive for China and its partners. But U.S. legislators do not see the BRI that way. It is considered a menace to the world, and especially to the United States.

The U.S. Senate’s Strategic Competition Act of 2021 can be expected to become law in amended form but with the unchanged thrust that “The People’s Republic of China is leveraging its political, diplomatic, economic, military, technological, and ideological power to become a strategic, near-peer, global competitor of the United States. The policies increasingly pursued by the PRC in these domains are contrary to the interests and values of the United States, its partners, and much of the rest of the world.” There could be no clearer declaration by Washington’s legislators that, no matter what may have been said by President Biden in his telephone call with President Xi on September 9, there will be no reduction of U.S. pressure on China.

Mr Xi made the point that “Whether China and the United States can properly handle mutual relations is a question for the century that concerns the fate of the world, and both countries must answer it,” but there is no evidence that the U.S. Congress or Executive Branch are approaching Sino-U.S. relations with other than the proverbial Big Stick.

The opinion of Congress is that “although it casts the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a development initiative, the People’s Republic of China is also utilizing the BRI to advance its own security interests, including to expand its power projection capabilities and facilitate greater access for the People’s Liberation Army through overseas military installations.” And it is this sort of twisted declaration that sets a low for Washington’s conduct of international affairs. Because China has only one “overseas military installation” (a port facility at Djibouti in the Horn of Africa), while on September 10 it was reported that “the U.S. controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.”

It is not surprising that so many nations find it difficult to regard U.S. foreign policy with equanimity when legislators in Washington indulge in such unashamed exaggeration. It may be unpleasant for those in power in Washington, and, unfortunately, for very many other people in the United States, to have to realise that Russia and China are important nations that wish in a perfectly legal manner to extend their economic influence.

It seems they cannot understand that when Russia outlays ten billion dollars on laying a pipeline and stands to earn annual billions from sale of its transported gas, it would be economic insanity for the Moscow government to in any way attempt to use the pipeline to indulge in “aggression and malign activities.” Similarly, China would be economically unwise and indeed strategically foolish to jeopardise the growing success of the Belt and Road by being other than cooperative and responsible in dealing with its 138 BRI partner nations.

Washington should face up to facts and accept that the U.S. must cooperate with China and Russia rather than maintaining its current aggressive stance. The New Cold War is entirely counterproductive and it should be recognised that there are benefits for all nations in developing and improving means and methods of trade. The U.S. administration might imagine it will show weakness if it decides to work together with Beijing and Moscow, but it would demonstrate common sense and foresight to ditch the Cold War and concentrate on cooperation.

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