A snag in the Global North's global domination?

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.

Read More »

Your anti-war conscience is politically homeless

Russia's military campaign in Ukraine, launched last month, could be the beginning of a long and bloody war. Being already seen as such, it has likely alienated many individuals in the West who formerly sided with Russia against a morally dubious Western foreign policy establishment.

One of the places where those opponents of the West's moral skeleton liked to gather, following the 2003 Iraq War which largely discredited the West as a positive moral agent in the world, was the now heavily censored and cyber-attacked RT (formerly Russia Today). There, such individuals appeared as viewers, journalists, and guests for many years to express their anti-war views.

The doves fly

For anyone watching RT during the opening of Russia's offensive into Ukraine in February 2022, it would be impossible not to notice the great unease of the English-speaking anchors during this Russian government-funded news network's live broadcasts. It is likely that such individuals were recruited in the first place because of their unease with Western foreign policy, which made them more likely to sympathise with and be willing to present Russia's position to English-speakers for many years. Russia's sudden decision to employ force will have changed everything, leaving many of them shaken and confused. Why did Russia apparently choose to rain its own bombs on a country, rather than foiling America's dubious schemes and rejecting its excuses, as had been the case in Syria? That will be burdening their consciences.

Many disbelieved that Russia was planning a major military escalation in Ukraine, holding the Kremlin's promises to the world as true. Those who had supported the Russian media against Western military actions, out of a principled rejection of military intervention everywhere, will find it difficult to maintain that support (see Max Keiser, formerly of the Keiser Report, as an example).

Did Russia make the right choice?

It may be that the Kremlin made a strategic mistake by trying to dominate Ukraine militarily (I concurred with the British government about this in January). We live in an era of failed foreign interventions by even the most technologically sophisticated countries, which is why many will anticipate a slow Russian defeat and withdrawal from Ukraine. Ukrainians are not incompetent or cowardly, having made up a significant portion of the most competent and brave soldiers of the former USSR, so it would be wrong for Russia to think they are easily cast aside.

On the other hand, the Kremlin may have not made a mistake in Ukraine at all. The twin objectives of "demilitarisation" and "denazification" may be impossible to achieve if pursued to total completion all across Ukraine (a scenario vulnerable to "mission creep"), but they can easily be accomplished to a point that Moscow no longer needs to worry. A battered Ukrainian military, pushed back to the west of Ukraine, left with no threatening hardware, can be guaranteed by Russia's brutal and overwhelming firepower. A number of Ukrainian radicals can be assassinated or captured to showcase "denazification". Following such steps, Russia could withdraw. They could also almost certainly defend a number of seized Ukrainian cities indefinitely and annex them formally or informally, managing over time to convince their largely Russian-friendly populations to welcome the change.

Whatever the case, Russia's leadership must have known they would lose much support in the West. The only conclusion can be that, faced with NATO expansion into Ukraine, Russian leaders felt that the problem was so severe and so strategically dangerous that it was worth huge sacrifices to overcome it. It was worth losing any remaining soft power Russia had in the West, in favour of applying hard power in Russia's near abroad. NATO was being intransigent, refusing to rule out nuclear missiles being placed in Ukraine to target Moscow, declaring Russia as its enemy and Ukraine as its frontline partner against Russia.

Anti-war? You are outgunned

Considering the obstruction faced by anyone sympathetic to Russian worries or just simply critical of Western policy in Western societies, it is not surprising that Russia would decide to throw them under the bus. They were never likely to accomplish any significant influence or power anyway. Russia's might still ultimately lies in its unrivalled missile power and vast force of armoured vehicles on its territory, so they decided to exert this power rather than something more subtle.

Those who based their interpretation of world events solely on morality, and were led to side with Russia or China for that reason and reject the interventionist US and NATO, were doomed to be disappointed. International relations is not a moral affair, unfortunately. There are no values, only interests. Sooner or later, any national government will assert its interests in the most brutal way, reminding us all of what a state really is.

Russia is neither good nor bad, and that's what is so shocking to those who used morality to guide their interpretation of international events. Likewise, the United States is neither good nor bad, although the case can certainly be made that it is incompetent and confused, and that has always been the chief complaint that seems to have the most merit.

People who are anti-war ultimately get pushed aside by those favouring force, if we are in a situation where force can work. This is because being anti-war is solely a personal philosophy, not an expression of anything necessarily aligned with the national interest. As long as there are national interests and diplomatic quarrels, force will be part of the spectrum, the continuation of politics by the steel gauntlet of those who have might, if mere talk failed.

Read More »

Biden's neglect towards Afghans exposes sad truth

Being a sore loser about his defeat and incompetent retreat in Afghanistan, US President Joe Biden seems okay with stealing money from grieving mothers and putting children at risk.

Afghans, including even the Taliban, had nothing to do with 9/11 or international terrorism. However, American neoconservatives need targets to attack, and the Afghans seemed shootable to them.

Now, yet another neoconservative-stuffed administration finds it okay to take money from Afghans and hand it to 9/11 victims in a demonstration of what they really represent. This is intended to perpetuate the belief in American righteousness and victimhood, even as these neoconservatives stand unapologetically over the bodies of those they killed.

Twenty years of defeat

The United States occupied Afghanistan for twenty years, supposedly to hunt down Osama bin Laden, who was dead for half the time of that occupation. When the US entered the country in 2001, Afghanistan was in civil war, with the Taliban holding the capital but facing substantial resistance. The US allied themselves with the Northern Alliance, who were resisting the Taliban. According to the righteous neoconservative logic, an American presence would bolster a powerful coalition and secure inevitable victory.

When the United States departed Afghanistan in 2021, in despair and shame, the Taliban held almost total control over the country before US forces had even exited. With barely a shot fired, and with American troops forced to watch and be humiliated in front of the world, the Taliban were able to overtake the country in a way that had not been possible even prior to the US intervention. The US, or at least those who still maintain control over its foreign policy right now and faced no consequences for their careers, failed all their objectives and were kicked out of the country.

To give some idea of what that failure meant, let us consider the words of Joe Biden:

"We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need"

Every moment, every dollar spent, and every soldier killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan was a waste. The strategies and predictions of US think tanks and foreign policy experts all failed to materialise. All the propaganda and self-important rhetoric about democracy and freedom, which continues unabated but has shifted to other conflict zones like Ukraine, led nowhere.

Rewarded for creating misery

Rather than firing the people who caused the biggest foreign policy defeats in their history, America and its allies listen even more to the instincts of neoconservatives such as Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland, who maintain a familiar aptitude for false claims, false expectations, civilian casualties, and slow defeat. It is as if they have no thinkers with an interest in foreign policy other than these quacks who have a hundred percent chance of being wrong.

When hearing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying the US is acting differently in #Ukraine than #Iraq because the US is trying to prevent a war this time, remember that he directly supported the Iraq War.

He is literally the liar he is trying to contrast himself with.

— Lordre (@LOrdreNet) February 20, 2022

By punishing the Afghan people when they needed help, Biden makes it clear that twenty years of alleged support for them was a sham as the US attempted to spread its own influence and power in the region. We should not forget that it is under moral pretexts and international media fanfare that the US coldly murders civilians and tries to station soldiers in every strategic region of the world.

We should be thankful for the end of the war in Afghanistan, but be under no illusion that it marks the end of American cruelty and oppression. The neoconservative (or interventionist, if you like) army at the heart of American foreign policy is continuously re-hired and sent to all conflict zones in the world to get more civilians killed, drag America further through blood and mud, and then fail.

Read More »