Lordre: China

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Five reasons Imran Khan will return to lead Pakistan

There are good reasons to believe the unfairly removed Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, will achieve political victory and be able to lead the country again.

#1 All opponents gather together

Because they conspired to create the current government, any blame for shortcomings in government policy will fall on all of Imran Khan's opponents in a single blow to them all, creating the distinct impression that Imran Khan is the only alternative to their rule. This may turn Imran Khan into a far more powerful figure than he already was, as the people will see him as a force equal to all his enemies. The anti-PTI parties may be perceived as one entity and be ineffective at competing with each other as if they have independent visions, because they may all be perceived to share blame for the country's problems equally following Imran Khan's removal. The 'imported' government are simply the same group responsible for decades of mishandling the economy and are likely to only worsen life across the nation, discrediting any claim that they needed to remove Imran Khan to save the economy.

#2 Imran Khan's popularity

Despite efforts to tarnish his character on an international level, Imran Khan has remained popular within Pakistan. Pakistan's people don't seem susceptible to the influence of the international media, which labours to discredit Imran Khan. People get their information from each other, which causes smear campaigns to be less effective against an honest leader. This seriously complicates the efforts of the new authorities, because they desperately needed to perform a character assassination on Imran Khan and seem to be clueless about how to achieve this. Instead, we could see Imran Khan become even more popular.

#3 Reversed US coups are a thing

US coups have been reversed quite effectively in other parts of the world. Foreign propaganda campaigns and repressive rule have proved ineffective against mass movements in countries such as Brazil and Bolivia. In Brazil, former president Lula da Silva was impeached and jailed and his successor Dilma Rousseff faced impeachment as well. However, Lula is now free once again and is making a successful political comeback, being expected to return to power and replace Jair Bolsonaro in the October election. In Bolivia, despite a US-encouraged coup against him that created a floundering puppet regime for a single year, Evo Morales' popular Movement for Socialism returned to power. As such, even if Imran Khan is jailed on some false charge, this will only be a temporary setback for his movement. In such an event, people will contrast his behaviour with his opponents fleeing abroad when under investigation. If he were to stay in Pakistan against all pressure, this could only make him appear to be a more patriotic and righteous person. Despite whatever hardships he and his movement may be put under, his return to power and his reversal of the US-led regime change is an eminently realistic and likely outcome based on precedents in other countries.

#4 US impatience

The US helped Imran Khan's opponents into power with a goal to get specific policies enacted in Islamabad that are against the nation's interests. These policies are actually foolish and unlikely to be implemented even by the usurper government. The hope to separate Pakistan from China in the economic and military spheres is likely to be at the top of the wish list of US diplomats, but will never be implemented as the cooperation of Islamabad and Beijing is likely too advanced at this point. As a result, the US will only increase pressure once again on the current authorities in a vain attempt to get the results they want. This will ultimately empower Imran Khan, who will be in a position to simultaneously show the current authorities as ineffective at maintaining relations with the US, while at the same time being the US's corrupt puppets. The usurping authorities will appear to be corrupt and incompetent even at their one purpose of serving the US's will.

#5 Instability

A lack of acceptance of the perceived usurpers is widespread. The resulting weak mandate to rule will result in an inability to effectively handle or be perceived to handle internal and external security threats. If any kind of violence or terrorism grows, perhaps encouraged by the ongoing political crisis, the dubious legitimacy of the regime itself will be first thing to be blamed for any ineffectiveness on the part of authorities. This will intensify any such crisis, perhaps also causing the Army to lose confidence in this regime and creating the possibility that they will prefer the return of Imran Khan.

With patience, it is likely that Imran Khan and his party will return to power. Bumbling conspirators and corrupt leaders may destroy themselves. They will to fail to satisfy anyone, abroad and at home, and it is possible that conniving elements of the establishment will realise that going against the people's will was impractical and destabilising even for their own interests.

Considering the agendas listed for their most recent meeting, it is noticeable that the Bilderberg forum is focusing less on the supposedly empathy-driven management of world human welfare and much more on the survival of the West. The West, meaning the narrow portion of the world whose most influential people attend these very meetings.

The new focus on ongoing conflicts like Ukraine's reveals that this group is not focused on managing the world’s economic wellbeing but the group’s own members’ desires and insecurities.

Shifting agendas away from world human welfare

If you look at the agendas from 2010 onwards, there is a certain shift from more scientific global concerns to increasingly narrow political ones, driven by a craving by the Western liberal attendees for victory and conquest over other countries and ideologies they personally disapprove of. Notice, in particular, the disappearance of the importance of climate change, formerly a key pressing issue in globalisation and a real basis for global cooperation, now abandoned by these supposedly caring leaders and experts for their preservation of their own political influence. Fear is the motive of their discussions - their own fear, not society's.

Some will begin to ask, was climate change ever real for those people? And, if it is no longer real for them, why should any of their current concerns be taken seriously outside their club? It seems that the most pressing global issues are less interesting to them than what they personally fancy or caters to their personal interests.

The same pattern is apparent at the World Economic Forum, which prioritised talking about the conflict in Ukraine, highlighting global fractures and amplifying conflict rather than maintaining the false liberal tenet of global cooperation. It is striking that the ideological principals guiding Western society just fluctuate depending on what would be satisfying to its richest and most influential individuals at the moment, getting us to scratch their itches. Globalisation and harmony one minute, national power and domination the next. Free markers one minute, state intervention the next.

'Me, me, me'

What we see here is that these forums for bigwigs, experts and public figure seem to be losing their pretence of being caring and responsible managers over global welfare, indicating this was never authentic in the first place. They are out for themselves.

What has happened can be compared with Bill Gates’ apparent obsession with conspiracy theories about himself (also see that one of the Bilderberg agendas is again "disinformation") and his need to save himself from campaigns against his character. Rather than acting like the bewildered but well-meaning philanthropist he claimed to be, and removing himself from a controversial situation, he is increasingly obsessed with defeating a political enemy, even coming into conflict with Elon Musk.

What happened to the experts who focused on the bigger picture of global society and health? Why should we care about their terror at conspiracy theorists in their own society and apparent geopolitical threats from Russia and China to their influence?

Eventually, we will begin to ask: what need do we have for a conference among individuals whose main interest is just their own avoidance of being hanged by the people? Is saving some self-important pencil necks we know very little about, from being snapped, really necessary for the public good and urgent for society to pursue?

Liberalism without prosperity?

The basic appeal of liberalism, and more so the neoliberal economic policy that dominated the world for decades, is meant to be the prosperity it optimises (or at least prevents the loss of). Unfortunately, faced with acute conflict in the world, proponents of this ideology may be increasingly instead turning to sacrifice and austerity in the name of 'civilisation', promoting a geopolitical struggle against competing poles of power like Russia and China. This puts liberalism in the position of, in the future, not presiding over a prospering people but a starved and hobbled people who wonder what it is all for.

Without offering prosperity, liberal democratic states offer nothing. By trying to convince people to enter a global confrontation with opposing continents, and forget about global welfare and even food supplies, the liberal regimes will throw away the only thing they were meant to be about. What hope is there, then, for their survival?

There is something insidious about the biological warfare warnings by the Russian and Chinese governments coinciding with acute geopolitical conflict, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the obsession of Western governments and elites with vigilant public health policy.

A US military paper described “public resistance to public health measures” as a military threat to the US preparedness to withstand a biological attack. It is also a threat to US preparedness to launch such a germ warfare attack on an adversary, because it impairs the ability to carry out necessary inoculations of US troops and civilians at home ahead of just such an attack, to avoid the viral weapon backfiring on America.

Inoculation against what, again?

The US government's supposedly defensive Project Bioshield includes the aim of developing vaccines. This makes no sense. Inoculation campaigns would require knowledge of the exact biological threat, both in terms of its identity and the timing of its deployment as a weapon. You would require samples of the specific viral threat to already exist in the lab, to even begin work.

What is Bioshield going to develop a vaccine against, if it doesn't know what the enemy-manufactured virus will be? Inoculations are by definition a preventative measure against a known threat. In a military sense, it is about protecting one's people and resources and preserving them for future action. The development of a military vaccine only seems to make sense if a military is developing an offensive viral weapon and wants to inoculate its own troops to stop the weapon infecting its own forces.

Winning the vaccination debate is a US military objective

The option to impose mandatory inoculations of the population, and especially military forces, is a necessary part of any preparation for biological warfare, whether the attack is to come from an adversary or your own military. The state would necessarily have to forcibly inoculate large parts of its own population, in order to make sure the lethality of its own weapons does not backfire on its people and resources and undermine victory.

Western societies would not simply accept mandatory inoculations without society undergoing the necessary debate over the issue, and we seem to be past that stage now. The intentional politicisation of Covid-19 and very forced attempt to have a public debate over the necessity of mandatory vaccinations (even though the situation was not serious enough for that) could have been preparation to help build offensive biological warfare options against Russia and China. In a way, it is like building nuclear bunkers.

Russians and Chinese spotted something

Then, we come back to the biological weapon claims of the Russians and Chinese, whether one trusts them or not as a source. They allege that the United States has a very aggressive biological warfare program, with facilities near both of these adversary states. They are clearly unnerved, even paranoid. This may be more to do with them noticing Western states apparently hardening themselves for a biological warfare situation at home, taking advantage of the pandemic to overcome any social and political objections to the idea of the sudden inoculation of entire nations on the state's command.

West seems sure of victory

Finally, there is the uncompromising warmongering of Western states, which is uncharacteristic of countries that are held in check by the traditional threat of mutual destruction in a nuclear war. Clearly, Western governments believe they can actually eliminate Russia and China as threats within a short timeframe. This is apparent in their triumphalist attitude, which exceeds their apparent capabilities, as if they intend to lean on indirect or covert means of attack. While many may see the threat in "colour revolutions" (staged uprisings and street violence led by staff at Western embassies), germ warfare also fits such a description. The West talks like it has an ultimate secret weapon, and that weapon could take the form of viruses.

Many of the individuals responsible for advising Western policies (World Economic Forum attendees, for example) have developed an obsession both with pandemics and with enemy regimes at the same time, as if both are certainly on their minds and considerable energy has gone towards both. They also hate alternate sources of information, and especially anti-vaxxers. Their vision is of a society that can live with very harsh public health policies, and also be resolute in its commitment against the "enemy". This is the ideal combination before launching a germ warfare campaign.

Germ warfare preparations failed?

Then again, we can just as easily go back to the US military paper's gloomy conclusion mentioned at the beginning of this post. It may be that anti-vaxxers have ruined everything for them and destroyed their plans.

The extent of rejection of vaccines in Western countries, and official frustrations with much of society's lack of acceptance of harsh health policies, suggest that Western preparations for germ warfare have failed, and our own societies are insufficiently controlled to allow our governments to wage this war. The truth may be that China has a much more compliant population, giving its regime the best capability to both resist biological attacks and launch them.

If Western governments think a biological attack is a viable way to get rid of Russia and China, they are playing with fire. Russia has taken a very aggressive tone since the war in Ukraine started, and would respond brutally to such an attack if it traced it (maybe going straight to nuclear weapons), while China would be able to withstand it and counterattack to deadly effect.

Russia and China’s dismissals of the US and the West’s authority in the international system (the rules-based order) by pointing to Western wars such as the Iraq War of 2003 or the 2011 bombing of Libya are in turn rejected in Western circles as ‘whataboutism’. But is this succinct reply a sufficient defence of the West?

Someone saying 'what about', and bringing up the other fellow's own failings or sins, like any ad hominem attack, is not necessarily a false argument. If someone’s whole point in an argument is that you are a thief, and you are in fact a thief, then their argument is in fact valid.

In logic, ‘Whataboutism’ is only a false argument when its structure contains a conclusion that does not really follow, for example, 'you are a thief too, therefore I am not a thief'.

No-one really says anything so absurd, so to accuse someone of this logical fallacy is ridiculous. The Russians and Chinese have never made the claim that they are innocent of crimes because they can show the West also commits crimes.

Western hypocrisy is the point

When Russia and China defenders point to the West’s hypocrisy, they are never asserting a false conclusion or falsely claiming to refute a Western allegation. They are just refusing the discussion entirely, because they have another topic they would prefer to talk about.

To claim this refusal of the subject, in favour of attacking the West’s hypocrisy, is an ad hominem fallacy, is no more correct than to claim that Russian diplomats refusing to talk about hot dogs is an ad hominem attack on the intellects of American barbecue-goers, and that Russian answers must be about hot dogs or else they are doing ‘whataboutism’. If you think someone is talking nonsense, you don’t have to address the minutiae of it. If you want, you can wisely change the subject to their credibility, which should have been established first anyway.

As soon as ‘what about Iraq?’ is asked, the United States’ moral authority and its right to confront other nations on moral issues in the first place becomes the subject of the discussion. Under those conditions, whataboutism is a valid argument. We are rewinding the discussion to where it should really start. We are judging the moral character that the US and the West are tacitly claiming (which they need to establish first, before appointing themselves to accuse other nations), so facts that hurt their character are valid to bring up.

'What about whataboutism?'

In fact, invoking the term ‘whataboutism’ when facing Russian and Chinese claims about the West may itself be a form of ‘whataboutism’ (in this case it takes the form ‘what about whataboutism?’), and an example of this as a real logical fallacy. Western apologists in this case really are falsely inferring that they have refuted Russian and Chinese accusations of Western hypocrisy by dismissing them as logical fallacies, when the accusations may not be logical fallacies but distinct and accurate claims that hurt the West's standing.

Someone being guilty of a crime himself arguably destroys his moral authority to judge others committing the same crime and removes his right to take the podium to talk about another fellow's crime. His own actions in committing the crime make his moral authority and statements on anyone else’s crimes dubious, and call his motivations into question. It may show that he is actually just looking for a monopoly on force or the right to commit crimes, rather than sincerely addressing crimes.

When used to challenge someone’s moral authority or ideology, ‘whataboutism’ is a valid and healthy starting point before addressing someone’s claims in the first place. It is not only logically valid but devastating to an opponent, if they cannot withstand it.

WHOAREYOUism

Whataboutism is not a rude interruption to the West's accusations against any regime. It is a legitimate attempt to rewind the conversation to where it ought to begin. The correct phrasing actually goes: 'who are you'?

If the West’s claim is that it represents some kind of moral purity or higher authority, which is indeed its claim when it uses the term ‘rules-based order’ to describe a vision of itself safeguarding international rules and norms, then for Russia and China to point out that it is untrustworthy because of its hypocrisy is fatal to the West.

‘Whataboutism’ is the winner. A ‘rules-based order’ proposed by cockroaches is no way to start cleaning the world, because their very nature disqualifies them from talking about it.

If you are seeing a lot of stories saying something bad about China in your news feed, don’t bother clicking on any of them. They are all paid for by the US government.

Last year, the US government allocated a quarter of a trillion dollars from its budget to simply stifling China, all out of resentment at that country’s competition with the United States.

Since that time, the US government allocated half a billion dollars specifically to negative news coverage of China, with or without any relationship to the truth.

Whether it relates to the pandemic, to the situation in Xinjiang, to the Solomon Islands, to Taiwan, or whatever else, every negative story about China may as well have been spotted being printed at a US government office. It all ought to be rejected as rubbish, without us even looking at it.

Racist state propaganda

The stories about China are despicable and racist in character, and have likely contributed to soaring anti-Asian hate crime in the United States. This rivals how the establishment press cultivated Islamophobia during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is as if, even as it condemns racism, the warmongering armada we call the "West" bumps into civilisations and races it deems inferior, declaring war on them one after the other. However, each and every case it attempts to build against these victims consists of lies and recycled canards of past centuries, including vile rumours that the supposedly inferior races are the source of plagues.

Sponsoring conflicts on rivals' borders

The US is actively pursuing a policy to aggravate all conflict with China, under the same model as it did against Russia in Ukraine, where it fanned the flames of war on the Russian periphery for no purpose other than creating endless security threats to a "rival". That model is applied, in almost exactly the same way, with regard to Taiwan. There is clearly a strategy to drag China down into misery and conflict, out of resentment at its development.

Fortunately for the Russians and Chinese, the US and Britain seem to be acting on a very tight schedule, attempting a Herculean task of trying to defeat all the rival states across the world in the course of only a few years, beginning with the strongest - Russia and China. Whether this will be more successful than the failed attempts to bring down Iran, North Korea, Cuba and even the Taliban, is yet to be seen.

Hysterical responses to the Solomon Islands signing a security agreement with China reveal hypocrisy over the Ukraine crisis of 2014 and subsequent conflict of 2022.

NATO’s Secretary General stated that the defining struggle in the world has become one of big powers forcing smaller powers to serve their interests, or letting them choose their own path, arguing that the Western alliance group is firmly in favour of free choice.

The argument was clear: Russia was behaving very irregularly and violating national sovereignty, by expecting to have any say on hostile troop deployments into countries adjacent to it.

Nothing At All Treaty Organisation

Unfortunately for NATO, such firm principles for which the world's most powerful military alliance stood were inadvertently denounced and shown to be utter nonsense by NATO countries. As soon as the Solomon Islands chose to align with China on its own free will, the US issued warnings of unspecified consequences. Therefore, it became suddenly unacceptable for nations to align in any way against others.

The hypocrisy on display now proves that the attempt of NATO governments to stand and fight for any set of principles at all could not last much more than a couple of months. This powerful alliance is proved to not stand for anything, much as the US’s own ideology is confused and America immediately steps on its own commitments like rakes, as soon as it tries to lay them down.

Menaces to democracy

The Solomon Islands may have chosen to side with China entirely of its own free will. Ukraine, in contrast, only sought alignment with NATO and the EU after extensive interference in its internal affairs and a violent takeover supervised by Western officials in 2014.

The Solomon Islands is now to be portrayed as some sort of threat to democracy, merely by the fact it is inconvenient to the West (i.e. "democracy"). In reality, the country is a democracy threatened by coercive Western powers that clearly have no interest in the wishes of the people.

One would be wise to expect fake mass protests sponsored and led from US diplomatic buildings in the Solomon Islands, covered by all the cable news channels and praised by them. In addition, expect any scale of bribery and attempts to subvert the wishes of the people of that land, perhaps in the months or even weeks to come.

The sinking of the Moskva and several concurrent strikes on Russian border towns by Ukraine seem like a coordinated escalation aiming to provoke a like response from Russia.

Whether it is its intention or not, Ukraine's actions will probably result in the Russian public wanting an increased use of force in Ukraine, which had been held back due to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertions that the Russians and Ukrainians are a common people.

Deliberately goading Russian escalation

The United States will help Ukraine to target disputed Crimea, considered core Russian territory by Moscow. The US may not recognise Russian sovereignty over Crimea, but the Russian government does. Therefore, should such strikes occur, they will be considered no different than strikes on the centre of Moscow ordered from Washington.

Even as it engages in the above risky policy, the United States is giving CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) suits to Ukraine, as if to prepare them to fight in radioactive wastelands. It seems as though the Ukrainians, led by the US, are expected to destroy their own country to save it, just to assert their nationalistic zeal.

The United States speculates openly about when Russia will get desperate enough to use a tactical nuclear weapon. Based on the tone, it seems as if they are certain it will happen, and are willing to maintain all policies with no interest in preventing it.

Scorched earth?

All of this shows clearly that the United States doesn’t stand with the people of Ukraine. It is primarily looking at frustrating Russia rather than preventing harm to Ukraine. Someone who stands with the people of Ukraine would not want it to become a nuclear wasteland, nor would they even believe it is wise for it to fight Russia in the first place.

But what does the US gain from nuclear detonations in Kiev, or elsewhere in Ukraine? We can only suppose the US might want this outcome just to incriminate Moscow and to convince the world of Western moral superiority, as the US had previously been the only country to ever use nuclear weapons in a war (a fact rival countries like to remind it of). It may also secretly view Ukraine as Russian territory, itself, and be wanting the lands burned and uninhabitable to punish the Russians.

If the US believes its power is in terminal decline, it might believe that incriminating a rival regime in the most barbaric act of the Twenty-First Century would give the United States vast moral authority against such rival regimes. Ultimately, it could mean excluding such regimes from the United Nations entirely, giving total control of the international system to Washington.

Russian and Chinese restraint

Russia seems not likely to use nuclear weapons yet, as there is no sign it is even interested in a troop surge or a strategic bombing campaign yet, although Russian generals suggested they could target Ukraine’s decision-making centres.

The US is encouraging conflicts at the peripheries of its rivals, while confusing gullible audiences at it home that it is somehow deterring aggressors. The same is certainly true of Taiwan, where almost the exact same policy is being pursued, despite it spectacularly failing to prevent conflict in Ukraine. This shows they are not sincere about preventing conflicts, in fact seeking conflicts and building traps at the doorsteps of their rivals in the hope to weaken them.

Much of the Western press and leadership are portraying the East-West conflict over Ukraine as a temporary issue that will be quickly remedied by regime change against what they see as problematic leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin. In some ways, they are correct.

Since the end of the original Cold War, the main tension in the world was emerging in the North-South relationship, not the East-West conflict, making the current geopolitical situation something of an anomaly. Except for direct contests over hegemony, the main struggle in the world has always been between the exploiter and exploited, or the ruler and the ruled.

War against the Global South

With wars mainly being "interventions" targeting Global South nations like Iraq and Libya, and the Global North having a distinct advantage, able to project the image of itself as a global policeman under the authority of the United Nations Security Council, for a time it seemed as if a simmering North-South conflict was becoming the accepted reality.

The alterations to the language of war in the 1990s and early 2000s to speak of humanitarian intervention, rogue states, terrorism and global policing showed a shift, conscious or otherwise, to waging wars on the economically undeveloped nations. Military technology and wargames changed to target lightly armed resistance groups, rather than peer opponents.

What is happening now, with the renewal of conflict between the West and Russia, is an unexpected hiccup in the dominance of the Global North and especially the Western powers. Russia had essentially been considered a solved problem and a defeated enemy for over thirty years, and the West had moved on to other targets. Russia refusing to be dead, and being capable of challenging the West again, is a potentially fatal impediment Western goals.

The wrong battle

For the West to now be bogged down in a contest with Russia essentially means that the Global North is unable to fight the battle it wanted to fight, namely a battle to maintain dominance over the Global South. The West is mainly responsible, failing to create Global North alliance structures that would include Russia and potentially even China in a world order that would see the North dominate the South.

The selfishness of, very probably, individual politicians and thought leaders in the United States and United Kingdom is most likely to blame for the failure of the Global North to form a united front against the Global South (a godsend for the peoples of the latter). It seems like the idea of having Russians and Chinese as part of the club was just unacceptable to English-speaking elites, who would prefer that the "civilised" world and its economically vital activity are only led by people who look and sound like them.

Russia and China are essentially too "developed" now to be considered an economic periphery that can be conquered or exploited by the West. Countries like India, Pakistan and Iran can also increasingly be considered "developed" and don't really fall into the "Third World" stereotype either, as they may have done in the past.

What next?

While there may be attempts by the East and West to use the Global South as a proxy battlefield again, like they did in the original Cold War, the degree of resistance there against all such interference will likely increase. The Global South was on the rise in its own right, with an increasing willingness of local regimes to defy any expression of global authority or global good, and instead take possession of their own resources. Leaders such as Chavez, Morales, Gaddafi and others were not anomalies but part of a trend that was sure to continue, and will continue.

Even if Western regimes are not impeded much, or Russia and China are quickly disposed of and the Global North falls under Anglo-Saxon authority, their attempts to police and control the Global South will still go severely awry. We will still see terrorism, devastating wars and refugee flows that, in addition to climate change, will complicate Western dominance. They will be unable to pacify the populations of the Global South, who will continue to elect leaders who defy foreign exploitation and dominance. As such, even the most optimistic forecast for the West is one of war, waste, misery and the defeat of global hegemony in the long term.

The thousand cuts to the globally dominant Western powers were already going to be a death sentence for it, even without the West encountering a resurgent Russia and having to fight an intra-North battle.

While the war in Ukraine may be sad for people with blonde hair and blue eyes, it offers much-deserved relief for some people of the Global South. Perhaps they may be spared, for a time, from being the focus of murderous rampages by the supposedly civilised West. The situation in Ethiopia seems to have calmed around the time the conflict grew in Ukraine. We should be mindful, however, that the Western-inflamed humanitarian disaster in Yemen is unabated. As the wars in Bosnia showed us, violence may briefly return to the Global North, but is almost continuously exported to the Global South.

Any metrics according to which countries are deemed better or freer than others are entirely arbitrary, set by countries that happen to have the most influence and want to glamorise themselves.

The creation of such charts proves nothing, and tells us more about the people who would make them than any of the countries on them. You would only engage in that sort of measuring contest because your own regime has a serious problem - its obsession with the others - which is bad enough behaviour for us to write off your regime as the worst of the lot. I will not need any analysis of these Indians who have been shot by the cowboy, to be able to tell that the cowboy is the worst person present.

Who makes these charts?

The defenders of the economic core basically define success into existence, manipulating the structures of knowledge so that our very perception of success is favourable to their national and class interests. At present, the world's economic core is still largely based in Western countries, even if it is slowly shifting towards China.

Few will deny that it is a pleasant life in the West, when compared with many other countries. However, this is the result of centuries of stable police-order and the continuous economic plunder of weaker nations. We deny other countries the ability to enforce or normalise the sort of internal order that our countries achieved long ago, instead sanctioning or destroying countries that threaten to become powerful or more state-like before they can join the club. Countries that undergo a necessary nation-building process but violate human rights along the way, rather than being seen as being in a developmental stage to true statehood, are treated as abominations by us at some opportunistic moment such as a civil war. We plunge them back to the state of nature, as in the case of Libya in 2011, forcing them to have to develop into a polity all over again.

Interrupting the story of another nation

A supreme irony of Western bombardments of other countries is that our own standards of civilised behaviour are the result of the most brutal enforcement of order in our countries, and our own perfection of the art of mass murder. Somehow, we seem to believe that a country like Syria needs no Lincoln in its own history, its civil war is unacceptable, and it should instead have suddenly become a fairly developed capitalist country with no intermediate stage. In reality, the evolution of Western states relied on fairly authoritarian methods and incredibly deadly weapons to get to where we are. The main reason we deal with mass protests and avert civil conflicts better than our supposed moral inferiors in poorer countries like Libya and Syria is simply due to having developed (through murderous experience) safer technologies of repression like teargas and rubber bullets, along with better-trained security forces.

The West's talk of the faults of other countries is dishonest, anyway, and just a set of lines for the West to play its role of gunslinger in a conflict. We discuss "democracy" during the course of an intervention, only as a cynical deception aimed at our own population. There is no truth to the idea of our countries spreading democracy, whatsoever, as democracy by definition originates from a sovereign people and not from a foreign power or alliance structure. Any intervention, as occurred in Libya and Syria, is an offense against democracy.

Goalposts are moving

Metrics of success can be altered in order to pursue new aims. This was one of the goals of the Great Reset, advocated by those who gather at Davos. They wanted responsibility to the environment and society to be somehow measured as criteria of success, rather than just something like economic growth. One could see this as an attempt by Western countries to shift the goalposts, realising that they are being overtaken by China, so that they desire to alter the meaning of success so that they can go on convincing everyone that they are still more successful than China.

The adjustment of the metrics of success, in fact, discredits indexes that that try to portray some country or group of countries as better than others or more ahead. If one can simply convince people that other things are more important or better indicators of success and happiness than GDP, for example, then why is GDP cited to prove anything? A country like Cuba certainly will rank ahead of the US in a number of ways (healthcare, anyone?), so why does the US not surrender to the superior nation?

To conclude, what (or rather who) makes a country successful is the person writing the criteria that will be used to assess success. It has nothing to do with preventing armies of homeless people on the streets, reducing child mortality, providing free healthcare, or any other thing that might be most pleasing to people.

Far from deterring an attempt by China to achieve reunification with Taiwan by force, might sending weapons to Taiwan actually encourage a military scenario?

Preparing for a military conflict in Taiwan, like in Ukraine, may only make one inevitable. The arming of a hostile power on the doorstep of one's "enemy" can only be perceived by them as creating a springboard for damaging them via some form of provocation and border conflict.

While war is not preferable, having an enemy constantly knocking on your door and making menacing sounds about its military power at your doorstep requires countermeasures. Taiwan's development of missiles that can hit mainland China ought to be of particular concern to Beijing's military experts.

From Ukraine to Taiwan

If Taiwan is at the command of Washington, as Beijing no doubt suspects, then the US could encourage the outbreak of a local conflict at any time of its choosing in order to damage China. As we saw with Ukraine, it seemed that everything was done to provoke the Russians into what the US hopes to be a costly occupation and a strategic defeat for them.

Ever-increasing stockpiles of Western weapons, bellicose rhetoric and eventually a threat to build a nuclear weapon were undertaken by Ukraine's government prior to Russia's attack, almost as if they wanted to do whatever it took to convince Russia that an attack was the right move. Clearly, China also has red lines with Taiwan. If Taiwan announced that it would build nuclear weapons to "deter" China, for example, this could prompt China to take military action urgently in Taiwan.

Western talking heads and politicians will have us believe that arming Ukraine gave the Russians pause and made them think twice about what they were already planning to do. There is no recognition of the fact that an opposing alliance pouring its weapons onto one's doorstep might actually provoke the military action one hoped to deter.

Put yourself in their shoes

If you ask someone here in the UK, there may be an almost a complete inability to see this situation as the equivalent of Russia arming an independent Texas against the US or China arming an independent Scotland against England. Many minds won't be able to process that comparison, because of a failure to even momentarily identify with the "enemy". The badness of the enemy is taken to be an uncontested fact that even the "enemy" population must surely see.

I see an inability to comprehend the idea that the other side might think similarly to us, almost like a failure of the theory of mind (the ability that arises in infants to understand the motives of others, by realising that they also have mental states too). Without a theory of mind, you will be unable to tell if someone else will resist being stabbed with sharp sticks, like you would, because you are no longer able to imagine being in their position. You might imagine another person as some unpredictable monster and attribute everything to this, rather than trying to understand that they are an agent like you.

Of course Britain would take military action against another country that tried to threaten us by arming an enemy on our doorstep. Even if many soldiers died, the patriots would insist on sending more, and heap praise on the fallen. No foreign weapon supply would deter us in that situation, and in fact it would just outrage us and encourage us even more. Unfortunately, we are now unable to imagine that other countries might think similarly, even when any glimpse at the facts will show that they do.

Events in Ukraine are intense and the outcome is unclear. Just about every moral judgment seems to have already been issued. Minds are made up. Virtually all sanctions are being applied to Russia.

The US was trying to pivot to what it sees as the China threat, not Russia. The sanctions applied to Russia are therefore unscheduled, reactive, and possibly disruptive to America's own global strategy.

US thrown off balance by Russian surprises

Because of the degree of coordination between Russia and China, Moscow's decision to act bullishly against NATO-groomed Ukraine may be a calculated move to somehow benefit Beijing and help overturn Washington's domination. The Western leaders react predictably, and all their attention is going to be on Russia for some time.

Events are unfolding similarly to the start of the original Cold War (which was "hot" when it began), but in Ukraine rather than the Korean Peninsula. We are in a period of acute hostility and denunciation that nobody can escape. Crackdowns on allegedly pro-Russian "treason", which encompasses mere remarks and media appearances, may resemble the talk of the 1950s. The dismantlement of global security and arms control treaties guarantees a horrifying nuclear war scare. Both sides will feel as if we confront a faceless, dark, silent enemy whose views and motives we are prohibited from seeing. All news will be the most vulgar propaganda, with barely a shred of truth.

None of the horror will last, however. A kinder politics is always inevitably around the corner, be it ten years away or twenty years away, when thinking people grow tired of the established warmongers and their canards.

Western sanctions on Russia could take a long time to really make people reconsider any foreign policy choices, if they have any effect at all and are not just political gestures to placate our own populations in the West. Difficulty getting something like microchips and the latest mobile phones could, at a guess, take multiple years to actually alarm society in Russia, and they may simply be able to get decent alternative products from China.

Future reset to occur on basis of respect with Russia

The disputes surrounding Ukraine, which at the time of writing were being addressed in a violent and chaotic manner that is difficult to track, could be resolved long before sanctions could hope to damage Russia, and be steadily lifted by dovish future administrations in Western governments. At that point, a certain respect for Russia's security would have developed, rather than merely casting everything the Russians do as villainy.

A final point to consider is that full sanctions on Russia mean the West no longer has any tools in its sanctions box for influencing Russia. If all these sanctions are aimed at Russian policy in Ukraine, more sanctions can't be allocated to deal with other Russian actions, for example, if the Russians choose to be more violent in their intervention in Syria. The West could end up in a position where it has more grievances against Russia than sanctions it can use to retaliate for them, having exhausted them all on Ukraine.

In such a position, Western leaders may be forced to offer sanctions relief in exchange for Russian help on entirely new crises, or the West will appear to be out of options. In seeing as much, Moscow now has every reason to carry on annoying Washington and doing everything to make it uncomfortable around the world, until Washington offers sanctions relief in exchange for Moscow ceasing its own actions.

Comprised mainly of two parts, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, Bosnia is an irregularity on the map of Europe.

The beautiful Balkan region has long been unstable, with Sarajevo being the flashpoint where the First World War began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and with attempts to create multi-ethnic states consistently ending in failure there. With the massacres of the Bosnian Genocide, it is a land filled with grudges.

A history of disintegration

The "clash of civilisations" theory of Samuel P. Huntington would hold that the former Yugoslavia is always potentially conflict-ridden because it has seen the competing presence of Catholic, Islamic and Greek Orthodox civilisation. The theory may be too simplistic, but the region is indeed a hotspot of historical grievances.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire failed, Yugoslavia failed, and what exists there now has no particular guarantee against failing again. As geopolitical tensions rise, especially between NATO and Russia in Europe, lines are being drawn again in Bosnia.

Battle lines drawn

Republika Srpska is turning away from the central government in Bosnia and is seeking an imminent breakup. It is being equipped with weaponry from Russia and China, in anticipation of the breakdown of the international liberal order that is now openly challenged. Meanwhile, the Western-allied component that rules from Sarajevo seeks NATO membership. If conflicts heat up around the world once again, there may be no avoiding a war of further disintegration in Bosnia.

The position of the central government in Sarajevo is, of course, fundamentally hypocritical. Their country unilaterally seceded from Yugoslavia, and yet now they declare that there may be no secession from their authority by Serbs. There is no moral justification for supporting Bosnian separatism and rejecting Serb separatism.

In the event of a renewed conflict, there is no denying the inferior strategic position of the Serbs. They are cut off from their natural allies, the Russians, just as they were in the First World War, and enveloped by the NATO powers. However, the Serbs have been swallowed by many empires before, and have proven to be a bellyache to them. They were no gift to the Ottomans, to the Austrians or to the Nazis, and Western-allied Europe would be foolish to volunteer to go through the same symptoms.

Rather than defeat anything during the so-called war on terror, the United States instead caused a proliferation of threats. Despite having lost, it decided to restart Cold War tension in Europe and Asia.

Under such circumstances, the possibilities available to undefeated terrorist groups are almost infinite. While it is a good thing that local forces may now be entrusted to defend their own interests against terrorists without Western intervention, international terrorist groups may quickly gain the ability to inflict disaster on the new Cold War belligerents while their backs are turned.

End of Days

We have no idea how groups such as ISIS and al-Qaeda view the developing Cold War between People's Republic of China and Russian Federation on one side, and the United States and European Union on the other. However, most likely, they view it as a chance for respite and an opportunity to plan new attacks.

By far the worst possibility is an apocalyptic one. Terrorist interlopers could infiltrate the battlegrounds of this new Cold War and stage operations aiming to draw the superpowers into destroying one another in a nuclear escalation, threatening everyone on the planet in the process. Terrorist groups like al-Qaeda are considered to be irrational actors in international relations, so they may believe this is a doable and beneficial operation for them. Even if they understand the consequences, ISIS or al-Qaeda leaders could decide they will bring about the end of days.

The Russian front

One policy that could present an opportunity for ISIS is the expansion of NATO across Eastern Europe, potentially up to the Russian border. This presents a region where militant anti-Russian sentiment in countries such as Ukraine results in a willingness to accept help from anyone, including potential international terrorists, in an effort to confront what they see as the Russian threat. They want to join NATO, but an anti-Russian ISIS or al-Qaeda fighter or a neo-Nazi is just as much of an attractive ally for them and they are delighted with them all.

Imagine a day of tension along a huge, thousand-mile frontier between NATO and the Moscow-led CSTO alliance. That is what the frontier would be like, if Ukraine joined NATO. Somewhere - anywhere - along that broad front, is an ISIS cell in possession of a small armed drone they put together in cooperation with anti-Russian fighters in Ukraine. Their intention, against the wishes of the Ukrainian government and NATO, is to attack the Russians with it, and provoke an incident. The Western side is too naïve to have imagined the scenario, and the Russians are too focused on the massive NATO threat to see the subsequent explosion as anything other than the opening of a NATO attack on the local Russian nuclear forces based in the area. Without any delay, the Russians launch tactical nuclear weapons at assigned targets inside NATO Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland, fearful that any delay may give the West a chance to neutralise these weapons. Every subsequent escalation would then be a loss to the West and East, and yet a victory for ISIS who secretly started it.

Avoiding the premature end of the world

The solution to the above scenario would be for NATO to step back from the Russian frontier, agreeing to a demilitarised zone (DMZ) of buffer states or regions between the two sides, since this would avert a situation of continuous tension and distrust along a thousand-mile frontline. To agree to such a DMZ, NATO would have to realise that a tense frontier simply takes power away from political leaders, decreases security for all, and possibly empowers third parties and low-ranking officers with the ability to start a war neither side wants. As well as giving ISIS or al-Qaeda the ability to start World War Three, a NATO-Russia frontline could even give solitary lunatics this ability if they shoot over the border between the two sides.

The delusion that one can simply abdicate from an existing war without winning it, and declare a different war, is extremely perilous. On the one hand, it suggests that Western politicians exaggerated the terrorist threat over a period of twenty years. Perhaps they don't really take it as seriously as they said they did, seeing it just fine to forget about it without even having accomplished anything nearly like a victory, but rather a defeat in Afghanistan. On the other hand, it may signal a false belief that a mortal enemy was defeated when it wasn't. A US decision to take the fight to Russia and China, when ISIS is still out there looking for opportunities to destroy both sides, may well be as idiotic as the West hypothetically deciding to focus all their resources against the Soviets before the Nazis had been defeated.

No cooperation on terror threats

Finally, even discounting the above scenarios as unrealistic, which they might be, the new Cold War potentially eliminates all possibilities of cooperation against international terrorism. The Russians and Chinese, and possibly the Turks (because the West is so much against them too) refusing to cooperate on terrorism could be fatal to the West. It could result in Europe being abruptly flooded with tens of thousands of armed militants keen to take the battle into Westerners' living rooms, high on victory in Afghanistan.

It is no accident that the opponents of racism are also often the opponents of war. That's because war causes racism, racism causes war, and warmongers have the moral character of the most violent racists.

Anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City rose by well over three hundred percent, in December. In San Francisco, they rose by over five hundred percent. Such attacks are taking place after Donald "the China virus" Trump left office.

Is this a random occurrence, or could it be tied to the that hate-filled rhetoric against China - or, to use the preferred term - "the Chinese"? Could it be the work of those who want us to believe we live on the verge of some great and imbecilic call to arms for the nation? 1914, repeated as farce?

Jingoism and violence

The endless, riotous war talk against "the Chinese" and "the Russians", portraying people's nationality as an inherently negative feature, deliberately peddled by politicians in the US and the UK, whips up paranoia and hate. Ironically, it will engender bigotry towards Eastern European people as much as the Russians, and towards Pacific Islanders as much as the Chinese.

Jingoistic hate speech, protected by things like parliamentary privilege in the UK, is typical of political discourse one might expect a hundred years ago. Skeletons are crying out to us to shut up and learn something from the past.

The disease of warmongering

If the purpose of democracy is to elect moral representatives, it has proven to be an ineffective filter in the US and UK, instead collecting some of the most vile specimens who can be summoned in human form. Those we flatter as "hawks" are better characterised as boils on the flesh of humanity.

Many of the warmongers in the US Senate and Congress have stocks in American defence contractors and are essentially war profiteers. Those who don't, yet still pursue the militarist rhetoric of interference and domination in foreign conflicts, are more contemptible. They, for the sake of the flaws of their own narcissistic personalities, perpetuate suffering and prejudice for nothing more than personal glory and machismo.

On 4 February 2022, China and Russia declared what they are all about. Multipolarity, multilateralism, and order are what they hope to offer other countries.

Defying the Western "rules-based order", the Russian and Chinese declaration expresses a commitment to the "international law-based world order". It calls for multilateralism over unilateralism, and the defence of the internal affairs of states against outside interference. In short, for them, the law takes precedence over moral proclamations in international relations.

Defenders of sovereignty

The Russian-Chinese declaration is a statement of opposition to Western meddling in other countries. The US's blatant attempts at regime-change when governments are not complying with Western liberal norms, as occurred in Syria, Venezuela and countless other countries, are recognised in the statement as something Russia and China are going to try to prevent.

It has to be pointed out that incitement of conflict and regime-change, like the West carried out in Ukraine in 2014, is the severest and most blatant kind of violation of national sovereignty. It is the precise kind of meddling that the very concept of sovereignty ever meant to abolish, violating the self-determination of peoples and forcing them to adhere to another country's model and ideology under its direct supervision even from thousands of miles away.

With their declaration, the Russians and Chinese express their willingness to thwart US-allied attempts at regime-change in other countries. It is an assurance to all the member states of the United Nations wishing to preserve their internal order against interference and ensure that they continue to develop naturally rather than being plunged into chaos by outsiders. This is a vision with cross-civilisational support all across the world, being appealing to a set of states so diverse it includes Serbia, Turkey, Ethiopia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Peru and even Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Unlike the Western unipolar disorder, currently bogged down in conflicts in Ukraine and completely defeated in Afghanistan, the multipolar order China and Russia suggest is an uncontroversial configuration that could actually be viable across the entire world.

A helping hand to all countries

It should not be underestimated how appealing the Russian-Chinese declaration will be to other nations. While everything the United States proclaims to member states of the United Nations is a vague threat or a demand for compliance with the US's will, the Russians and Chinese are pledging to mitigate this destructive behaviour by being supportive of countries under US pressure.

In other words, while the US tries to bulk up its aggressive military alliances, denigrate the rule of law everywhere, and overthrow the governments of the world, the Chinese and the Russians are driven by no objective other than preventing such capricious intimidation and violence. Instead, international law will steadily begin to gain teeth under Chinese and Russian protection, and Western attempts at regime-change will increasingly stall as the West's economic and military power gradually recedes.

Abolition of the US-led disorder

With its ideological proclamations and military alliances, the US can't avoid being bogged down in multiple conflicts with a whole host of different countries. It is driven by a craving for confetti-filled skies affirming its supreme importance, and for continuous tickertape parades of glory and victory for itself. What the US wants to accomplish, again and again, is the familiar world where its capricious authority, not the law, is paramount and countries must listen to America's every word. It wants to handwave away the sovereignty of other states and civilisations, declaring itself as the sole judge of whether a regime is legitimate, and judging them by comparison with its vain self. That is what is meant by the rules-based, or liberal international, order.

As of 2022, the US regime still views all other countries as inferior, devoid of agency, subject to US policy, or even completely under US jurisdiction. Such an attitude is in conflict with anyone who has a genuine interest in the shared wellbeing of humanity and would prefer the course of human history to take a path for the good of all rather than the glorification of a few.

In short, the hegemonic goals of the United States are fundamentally opposed to the goals of the United Nations and the authority of its Security Council. Unless the US is able to discard unilateralism, the UN could eventually reform against it and the US could eventually find itself or its NATO proxy states in opposition to UN peacekeeping forces backed by a majority of nations.

Rather than a communist bloc, it is now the multitude of diverse but law-abiding individuals and nations desiring some form of stability that are the "other side". Far from seeking a chaotic world devoid of US leadership and fraught with abuse, they recognise the liberal powers as the main sources of chaos.

Russia has been accused of hypocrisy by the United States and NATO, after its satellite destruction test reportedly created debris and panic in orbit.

If you have seen the movie Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, you are familiar with the problem. In fact, this recent event was exactly the plot of the movie, including such details as which country did the deed of taking down a satellite with a missile.

Some may even have been irked when Gravity came out, because back then the most recent offender in destroying satellites was China, yet the movie chose to cast Russia as the aggressor as is so often done in American media. Now, it seems, Russia has finally stepped up and played its movie role for real.

The blame game

Of course, Russia rejected claims that the debris created in the test endangered any space installation. Moreover, Russia pointed to similar satellite destruction tests by the US, China and India. Both sides accused each other of hypocrisy, with the US saying Russia's actions directly contradict its words.

When it comes to hypocrisy at this moment, Russia may be somewhat guiltier than America, and so too could be the Chinese when it comes to their activity in space. For something to be hypocritical, one's words have to contradict one's actions. Russia and China have steadfastly stated that they oppose the weaponisation of space. They may be using a narrow definition, speaking of the stationing of weapon systems in orbit rather than the temporary course of projectiles through space, but to send weapons into space to blow things up is certainly not conducive to preventing the weaponisation of space.

It is the presence of ICBMs, which move at such high altitude that they enter into space, that motivated the desire of the US to weaponise space in the first place, dating even back to the 1980s. Since the US has openly created the Space Force as a branch of its military, and declared space to be a war-fighting domain, the US is not breaking its word when it carries out military activity in space. It is doing exactly as it promises. The Russians and Chinese, however, are playing a diplomatic stalling game in which they likely intend to shame American advances in military space technology.

Warfare inevitably advances

The Russian and Chinese position is roughly equivalent to the Spartans decrying the Athenian use of arrows. Complaining about the other side's developments as being unsportsmanlike, appealing to arbitrary definitions and rules about what constitutes the right and proper way to kill people and blow things up, is unavailing in the end. It could also be deterring huge strides in technological development that could ultimately save humanity itself if we eventually come to depend on space colonies to escape disasters on Earth.

Russia can blow up whatever it wants to blow up, but there is no point in Russia crying foul about the other side coveting powerful technologies that could accomplish military supremacy. Russia has very capable engineers of its own and has surpassed the United States in some areas, such as hypersonic missiles. So, too, has China. This should teach these countries that the answer is not to complain about American advances, but to make advances of their own.

Every breakthrough in space is good

At the end of the day, enemies or not, we are all human, and it is in the human interest to fully exploit space for every benefit to our security and colonise the other planets of the Solar System. The stumbling block to this has been funding, and if one organisation on Earth is not short of funding, it is the US Department of Defense.

This is not a call for American conquest of the Solar System, but an acknowledgment that someone has to start the process and it would be wrong to simply stall them.

There are signs that Russia and America are taking sides in the conflict in Ethiopia. But who is worse than the other?

Throughout the Tigray crisis, Russia has been supportive of the Ethiopian government managing its own internal affairs. On the opposing side, the American State Department maintains a list of condemnations of the same regime's handling of its affairs.

The Tigray Region's people have genuine grievances against the government of Ethiopia, and increased autonomy may be the solution. However, with separatist rebels seizing core territories from the central government and threatening to march on the capital Addis Ababa, it is clear that something is not right with what should be a very much local conflict for the rights of a region.

While the United States has expressed disapproval of the rebels' advances, it is also clear that the US is no friend of the Ethiopian regime anymore, having applied sanctions against it. As always, the sincerity of US intentions with regard to human rights and their sanctions in response to abuses should be doubted. The US staunchly backs notorious human rights-abusing regimes nearby, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia.

It should also be considered that Ethiopia was a US ally since the fall of the former Soviet-backed Derg regime in the country. It had sought to maintain policies favourable to the US, including good relations with Israel, and was more reliable to the US than the uncooperative regimes of adjacent Eritrea and Sudan. Why America might choose to undermine its own ally and convince it to move into the Russian and Chinese camp, giving Moscow a new ally at no cost, is difficult to understand.

One may compare the possible battle for Ethiopia with the far more severe but now frozen conflict in Syria, where the US also placed sanctions on the central government. In Syria, however, the US went a step further and directly armed rebels in the country. This turned out to be a mistake, as the rebels were not really on the brink of victory and were later pushed back by the central government with Russian assistance from 2015 despite receiving their own aid from the United States.

Ethiopia may have irritated the US by growing closer to China rather than Russia, but Russia stands out as more vocal and more passionate than its economic powerhouse ally when it comes to war and conflict. Russia, not China, wants its place on modern battlefields with the US, and it seems to want to be on the opposing team to America.

Russia’s position on conflicts is usually just the UN’s position

By and large, Russian and Chinese positions on foreign policy are not radical or revisionist in nature. In almost every case, Russian and Chinese demands align entirely with the United Nations. Despite the unfavourable coverage of Russian foreign policy in the Western press, it is the United States rather than Russia that more often seems to ignore international law and the consensus of the United Nations.

The US routinely declares governments to be illegitimate and announces a new regime, as it did with Venezuela. This is a violation of the norms of international law and undermines any sincere hopes for a rules-based order, which requires not wantonly interfering in other states and instead going to recognised international bodies with one's concerns. One country's government, whether Western or not, cannot simply act as a kingmaker by declaring part of the world under new management, faxing out communiques for the press to reprint obediently and tell everybody the news.

China and (with some exceptions) Russia are fierce defenders of international law. They back up regimes not because they like them or approve of their human rights record, but because they are the recognised government and guarantor of stability in a country. In their view, regime change is reckless and irresponsible and promotes chaos, as observed in Iraq and Libya. It is an obligation in international relations that you recognise the sovereignty of another state, even if it is the not the kind of state you would establish yourself.

Surely, you might then say, Russia is at a disadvantage to America. Russia is stuck defending old regimes, while America gets to topple them with sanctions and every other tool in its toolbox? Surely, every government in the world will flip gradually to the side of America? This is the thinking that seems to guide aggressive American foreign policy, but the Russians see things differently.

Russia, and possibly America too, may not have the resources or requisite influence to overthrow all the world's governments and set up new ones. Russia does tend to go for lower-cost strategies or wait for the other side to become tired, whereas America tends to throw money at problems. All things being considered, the Russian approach seems to be working better.

Russia winning allies effortlessly while the US struggles to retain them

While America failed to turn Syria into a friendly country despite pouring significant funds and ten years of its time into the effort, Russia won a major ally with very little effort and less time just by shoring up the Syrian regime in its time of need (it even profited from weapons sales and acquired a large military base). While America devises sanctions to pressure its former long-time ally Turkey to do its bidding, Russia simply doesn't do that and therefore is a more appealing partner to Turkey.

Russia is able to appeal to America's allies to change sides based on the mere fact that America is so unappealing as an ally. America doesn't want the outcomes other countries want; it wants what America wants and has no tolerance for the interests of others. By just tolerating other regimes and their goals (what has been called a multipolar world in Russian foreign policy advocacy), Russia is able to steadily ally with everyone at very little cost, whereas America has to enter a costly confrontation with each government in the world.

While the US may decide to overthrow the government of Ethiopia, and may see Tigrayan rebels as possible servants in a new regime, such a step would not convert more of the world or even this one country to America's cause. The Russians and Chinese are not going to help the Ethiopian government oppress the Tigray Region and create a spectacle for Americans. They will simply pursue a peaceful settlement in the country. Tigrayan fighters, if they really received American backing and were victorious, would eventually just desire a peaceful homeland rather than to act as agents of destruction against some regime, and the Americans would begin to hate them.

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