Geopolitics of multipolarity (Beijing lecture) — Alexander Dugin

I have written about this previously in the comments. Alexander Dugin summarized the main points pretty well. To understand the dynamic going on now in international relations, foreign affairs, military affairs, geopolitics, geostrategy, and choice of tactics, it is necessary to understand this outline in some detail. This is the grand chessboard on which the great game is being played presently between the land powers and their allies and the sea powers and their allies. The stakes are world domination for the foreseeable future, if this is a future given the enormous power of weapons of mass destruction that may be brought into play.

Geopolitika
Geopolitics of multipolarity (Beijing lecture)

Alexander Dugin

See also by Alexander Dugin at Geopolitika

The main principles of multipolar world order

• Philosophically: real pluralism, diversity, multitude of subjects
• Anthropologically: inclusive humanism, multinaturalism
• Geopolitically: complex system of regional powers (Gross Raum)
• Economically: free trade without (neo) liberal dogmatic
• Politically: diversity of political systems (dependeing on historical traditions of each people)
• Culturally: positive acceptance of different identities

We need to begin forming the philosophy of multipolarity that should replace the liberal globalist theory (end of history, Western hegemony, world capitalism, unipolarity and so on)

The basis of the MPW is Russia-China multipolar allience. If there is such allience, MPW exists already today. Russia is one of the two major nuclear powers. China is one of the two major economic powers. If we unite Russian and China in multipolar allience, MPW is already here. India joins immediately after. Entrance of India and Pakistann in SCO is symbol of great importance.

BRI project wnen it includes Russia, is precisely the decisive step toward this multipolar allience. Putin recently suggested to link to BRI Northern Polar Road. So BRI goes eurasian....

Dugin calls it traditionalism as opposed to Western liberalism, but it sounds like a version of liberalism that integrates traditionalism instead of a version of liberalism that regard liberalism and traditionalism as mutually exclusive.

Multipolarity: Greater Eurasia vision

F. William Engdahl — Behind the Anglo American War on Russia

Perhaps they had a chance back during the Obama days when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed her amusing “Reset” in USA-Russia relations to the new Medvedew Presidency following Putin’s rotation to the seat of Prime Minister in March 2009. Had Washington been a bit more perceptive and offered serious alternatives, it is conceivable that Washington would today have a geopolitical isolation of their second major problem on the Eurasian Continent, namely, the Peoples’ Republic of China. Recently the US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, Wess Mitchell, testified to the Senate where he candidly revealed the true reasons for current Washington and London campaigns and sanctions against Russia. It has nothing to do with faked allegations of US election interference; it has nothing to do with poorly-staged false flag poisoning of the Russian Skripals. It’s far more fundamental and takes us back to the era before the First World War more than a century ago.

NEO
Behind the Anglo American War on Russia

F. William Engdahl

Katehon — Alexander Dugin: China, the Great Game, and Globalism

Geopolitics as Trump takes over in the US from the vantage of Alexander Dugin:  Trump sees China as the primary threat to the US and not Russia.

Katehon
Alexander Dugin: China, the Great Game, and Globalism

F. William Engdahl — Mackinder Reincarnates–Now Hungary Joins Silk Road

Geopolitics in the 20th and 21st centuries.

New Eastern Outlook
Mackinder Reincarnates–Now Hungary Joins Silk Road

F. William Engdahl

Tony Wikrent — “If You Are Not Building a Nation, Then What the Fuck Are You Doing?”

May good points but I think that Tony is confused about the role of political and economic geography, geopolitics, and geostrategy. While the points he makes about development are well taken, they are largely orthogonal to the points that Alfred McCoy make about position relative to Halford Mackinder, and he might have included Nicholas Spyckman, too. Now, development is coming together with geographical position in Eurasia. This is likely to have much greater impact on much greater land space than the US has had owing to the relatively isolated position of the US geographically, which required amassing sea power like England previously.

The point is that if one doesn't understand how the players view the game as a set of rules on a particularly configured board, then one is not going to understand the moves that they are making and liable to make based on objectives and tradeoffs. It's therefore essential to understand the "grand chessboard," whatever one thinks of it. It is a high stakes game that the players take very seriously.

Naked Capitalism
“If You Are Not Building a Nation, Then What the Fuck Are You Doing?”
Yves Smith
Guest post by Tony Wikrent

Alfred W. McCoy — Washington's Great Game and Why It's Failing

For even the greatest of empires, geography is often destiny. You wouldn’t know it in Washington, though. America’s political, national security, and foreign policy elites continue to ignore the basics of geopolitics that have shaped the fate of world empires for the past 500 years. Consequently, they have missed the significance of the rapid global changes in Eurasia that are in the process of undermining the grand strategy for world dominion that Washington has pursued these past seven decades.

This is a summary of things I have posted in the past at MNE about geopolitics and geostrategy.

However, I don't like the term "decline." The post is not so much about America's supposed decline as about failure to understand and act on basics of geopolitics and geostrategy that are grounded in geography.

America's geographical situation as an "island" continent is a plus for defense but a minus for dominating world events from the geographical core. Russia and China are well placed for that, being situated at "the geographical pivot of history." With Russia having too much land and too may resources to employ itself and China with too many people and too few resources, their eventual cooperation is ordained by geographically position at the core.

There is no way that the US can permanently dominate them individually or prevent them from combining resources. The only thing possible is a delaying game, and that comes with risks, e.g., the overreach that has ended empires previously. America is already stretching itself in the attempt to project power globally and cover all the bases with bases, for example.

The present strategy of containment and destabilization is creating what Pepe Escobar calls "the Empire of Chaos." That is not a strategy as much as a recipe for disaster.

Moreover, trying to impose liberalism is illiberal. The US is therefore caught in a policy contradiction that is obvious.

Tom Dispatch
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Washington's Great Game and Why It's Failing

Alfred W. McCoy | J.R.W. Smail Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould — America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest

"We are, and I don't want to sound alarmist but I am alarmed, closer to the actual possibility of war with Russia than we have ever been since the Cuban missile crisis. That's how bad it's been." (Stephen Cohen)

Paul Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Gould — Russia historian Stephen Cohen points to the neoconservative establishment for America's latest outbreak of what can only be referred to as late-stage imperial dementia. Neocons Robert Kagan and wife Victoria Nuland have certainly done the heavy lifting to make Ukraine the staging ground for what appears to be a NATO blitzkrieg on Moscow. But whatever the determination of the neocon plot, they are only the barking dogs of master imperialist Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose grand design has been creeping over the globe since he stepped into the Oval office as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter in 1977....

Today it's Brzezinski's son Ian who finds Moscow at the root of America's problems regardless of the facts. He recently recommended to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the authority to make war on Russia should be taken out of President Obama's hands and given to NATO's top commander, General Phillip Breedlove; a man accused by the German government of exaggerating the Russian threat in eastern Ukraine by spreading "dangerous propaganda". 

The time has come for the American public to be let in on what US foreign policy has become and to decide whether the Brzezinski family's personal obsession with fulfilling Mackinder's directive for conquering the pivot of Eurasia at any cost, should be America's goal as well.

Sputnik | Opinion
America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

Artyom Lukin — Mackinder Revisited: Will China Establish Eurasian Empire 3.0?

As readers of this blog know, I have been emphasizing Mckinder's Heartland Theory, Eurasia, the World Island, and the Geographical Pivot of History. It is central to Western geopolitics, geopolicy, geostrategy, and military grand strategy.

China has emerged as a new contender for control over Mackinder’s “Heartland.”

This is the way Western strategists are going to view and contemplate steps to counter it, since it would end plans for Western global domination.

This post is mostly about the economic impact rather than military.

In China’s Eurasian vision, economic considerations are intertwined with geo-strategic. Economically, China will benefit from establishing a huge integrated area under its leadership. Strategically, this continental zone of Chinese influence will be largely impregnable to hostile U>S. interventions, should a grave crisis occur in Sino-American relations. The U.S., possessing unrivaled naval capabilities, may well inflict damage upon the maritime margins of China’s geo-economic empire, but it will hardly be able to strike at its terrestrial core centered around Eurasian Heartland.

Russia – China’s Own Canada? 

China will not be able to create its Eurasian fortress without collaboration, or at least acquiescence, from the other great Eurasian power – Russia. Although a far cry from the heydays of the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union, Russia still controls much of the crucial Heartland areas – as its own territories in northern Eurasia and zones of political influence in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. 

It looks increasingly likely that Moscow, despite erstwhile Eurasian ambitions of its own, will not stand in the way of Beijing’s grand designs. Locked in a bitter fight with the West over Ukraine and other issues, Russia has no choice but to move closer toward China.…

It is now China’s turn to try and create its own version of “Eurasian empire.” Unlike Mongol and Russian dominions, which were primarily based on military force and coercion, the Chinese are deploying economic power. At present, it is simply impossible to know what kind of empire this one is going be. It could be a benevolent China-centric economic integration zone similar to the German-led EU or Brazil-led Mercosur. But one cannot rule out an attempt by Beijing to assert political hegemony in Eurasia in a more traditional imperial sense. 

Beijing’s endeavors to integrate Eurasia under Chinese aegis are seen as a serious challenge by many in Washington – a threat even. As Mackinder’s Britain viewed with alarm Russia’s growing clout in the continental heartland, today American policymakers are concerned that much of Eurasia will come under the sway of an Asian power whose ways are starkly different from the West’s and whose future strategic intentions are at best uncertain.…

These are some highlights. The whole post is worth a read.

The Diplomat
Mackinder Revisited: Will China Establish Eurasian Empire 3.0?
Artyom Lukin | Associate Professor at the School of Regional and International Studies, Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia

Francis P. Sempa — Is China Bidding for the Heartland?

Beijing doesn’t have to choose between land and sea predominance. It could have both.

The Diplomat
Is China Bidding for the Heartland?
Francis P. Sempa | Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy

Pepe Escobar — The Birth of a Eurasian Century

A specter is haunting Washington, an unnerving vision of a Sino-Russian alliance wedded to an expansive symbiosis of trade and commerce across much of the Eurasian land mass -- at the expense of the United States.

If you've been following the links I have been putting up on geopolitics, geostrategy, the Great Game, Mackinder's heartland theory, Spykman's rimland theory, and Brzezinski's grand chessboard, you'll immediately see why that sentence is setting off alarm bells in the National Security Council and the Pentagon, as well as NATO HQ. The significance of Ukraine and the Crimean naval base will also be clear to you, as well as the US Asian Pivot in order to encircle Russia and China to the East by NATO and to the West by the US Seventh Fleet.


What difference does this make economically? Let me count the ways. Theh first thing that obviously comes to mind is, of course, military expenditure. But infrastructure is also key in developing the potential of the land mass, as Escobar explains about Pipelineistan and the new Silk Road that China has embarked upon.


Unfortunately, Escobar is out of paradigm with MMT and miscontrues the effect on the USD, although this doesn't seriously impair the kernel of his analysis.

While we watch the spectacle unfold, with no end game in sight, keep in mind that a new force is growing in Eurasia, with the Sino-Russian strategic alliance threatening to dominate its heartland along with great stretches of its inner rim. Now, that’s a nightmare of Mackinderesque proportions from Washington’s point of view. Think, for instance, of how Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser who became a mentor on global politics to President Obama, would see it.

In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski argued that “the struggle for global primacy [would] continue to be played” on the Eurasian “chessboard,” of which “Ukraine was a geopolitical pivot.” “If Moscow regains control over Ukraine,” he wrote at the time, Russia would “automatically regain the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”

That remains most of the rationale behind the American imperial containment policy -- from Russia’s European “near abroad” to the South China Sea. Still, with no endgame in sight, keep your eye on Russia pivoting to Asia, China pivoting across the world, and the BRICS hard at work trying to bring about the new Eurasian Century.

On geopolitical and historical terms it is rather implausible that war can be avoided given this scenario, unless "this time it is different," or there's a miracle. The Western alliance is not going to be sitting still as this plan unfolds, and the overwhelming military force and economic might still lies with the Atlantic powers and Japan.

However, the notion that a collapsing dollar will take all this down is nonsense. Escobar is off the rails here.

In addition, the onset of climate change threatening both geographical change and resource shortages makes increasing conflict practically a certainty.


Looks like we are setting up for another round.

TomDispatch
The Birth of a Eurasian Century
Pepe Escobar

Francis P. Sempa on Mackinder and Spykman

Mackinder's heartland theory and Spykman's rimland theory of political geography provided the basis for Zbigniew Brzezinski' The Grand Chessboard as a basic document shaping US geopolicy and global strategy. Sempa provides useful summaries. This background is key in understanding US foreign policy, US military policy, US economic policy, and US trade policy. It's about power.

American Diplomacy
Mackinder's World

Spykman's World
Francis P. Sempa

John Pilger — The Strangelove Effect - or How We Are Hoodwinked Into Fighting a New Cold War

While President Obama seeks more money for nuclear weapons than at the peak of the Cold War, the era of the comedy movie, Dr. Strangelove, it's no joke that the United States is seeking to dominate the Eurasian landmass, stretching from China to Europe.

The Heartland.

Truthout
The Strangelove Effect - or How We Are Hoodwinked Into Fighting a New Cold War
John Pilger