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

Reuters — Trump is shaping new 'liberal' order to block Russia, China, Iran, says Pompeo

"Neoliberal order." There, fixed it for you.

In a twist on Trump’s “America First” policy, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Trump was not abandoning its global leadership but instead reshaping the post-World War Two system on the basis of sovereign states, not multilateral institutions.

“In the finest traditions of our great democracy, we are rallying the noble nations to build a new liberal order that prevents war and achieves greater prosperity,” Pompeo told diplomats and officials in a foreign policy speech.

He actually said that and with a straight face.

Translation: America will no longer "lead from behind" though proxies, but directly as the imperial power.

Alluding to Trump’s policies in a speech on Monday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini warned of “the rule of the jungle” replacing the rule of law.

Maybe this explains Trump's hair. Does he think he is the lion king?

Reuters
Trump is shaping new 'liberal' order to block Russia, China, Iran, says Pompeo

Robin Emmott

See also at Reuters

“I am certain that, at some time in the future, President Xi and I, together with President Putin of Russia, will start talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race. The U.S. spent 716 Billion Dollars this year. Crazy!” Trump wrote in a tweet, the day after he returned from the Group of 20 meeting in Argentina.

Trump to discuss 'arms race' with China, Russia some time in the future

Alastair Crooke — The Metaphysics to Our Present Global Anguish

Clearly, from the very outset, Trump has been “perceived by the globalist neo-liberal order as a mortal danger to the system which has enriched them” Jatras observes. The big question that Jatras poses in the wake of these events, is how could such collective hysteria have blossomed in to such visceral hostility, that parts of the ‘Anglo’ establishment are ready to intensify hostilities toward Russia – even to the point of risking “a catastrophic, uncontainable [nuclear] conflict”. How is it that the élite’s passion ‘to save globalism’ is so completely overwhelming that it demands their risking human extinction? Jatras suggests that we are dealing here with hugely powerful psychic impulses....

These millenarian revolutionaries - exponents of the new Scientism, who hoped to force a shattering discontinuity in history (through which the flaws of human society would be excised from the body politic) - were, in the last resort, nothing other than secular representatives of the apocalyptic Judaic and Christian myth.

The American millenarian ‘myth’, then and now, was (and is), rooted in the fervent belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States, ‘the New Jerusalem’, to represent humanity’s best hope for a utopian future. This belief in a special destiny has been reflected in a conviction that the United States must lead – or more properly, has the duty to coerce - mankind toward that future.

The secular crusades.

Reading the piece through, and I recommend doing so, it is difficult not to draw the obvious parallels.

As I have been saying, we are witnessing the clash between liberalism and traditionalism. It is explosive, since it involves the most deeply held values and ideas, and there are seemingly incompatible.

Alexander Dugin deals with this in The Fourth Political Theory. He holds that the first three and liberalism, fascism and communism. Liberalism has defeated the fascism and communism, which are moribund but not yet dead. Now liberalism is confronting traditionalism, and the outcome is already war, where traditionalists are defending their territory.

Islam viewing this as the new crusade, a view reinforced by G. W. Bush's use of the term. This "crusade" even has a name and number and a Wikipedia article"

However, particularly in predominantly Muslim parts of the world, the term crusade produces the same sort of negative reaction as the term jihad does in much of the West.

The US is now actively engaged in banning Confucius Institutes sponsored by the PRC, the purpose of which is teach about Chinese culture and provide instruction in Mandarin.

Many traditionalists, particularly, in Eastern Orthodox countries view this conflict as one between traditionalism and liberalism, with liberalism promoting moral and cultural degeneracy, as well as between their Orthodox faith and Western Christianity, both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

"Psychic" indeed. And maybe psychotic?

Strategic Culture Foundation
The Metaphysics to Our Present Global Anguish
Alastair Crooke | founder and director of the Conflicts Forum, and former British diplomat and senior figure in British intelligence and in European Union diplomacy

Alastair Crooke — Sanctioning the World, the US Inadvertently ‘Locks & Launches’ Multipolarism

If these US policies are not sustainable, what then? The primal flaw to the neo-con maximum leverage doctrine is its lack of any easy ladder down which to climb that does not appear to be a national US humiliation. Usually, if pressure doesn’t work, it is assumed that it was because there was not enough of it – for example, Trump attributes the weaknesses to the JCPOA to Obama failing to let the Iranians stew in sanctions for long enough. Obama cut the pressures too early in Trump’s view – and hence got a ‘flawed agreement.’

A deeper point – and one made by the Chinese in respect to North Korea – is that others do not think in the way of President Trump. The radical utilitarianism evident when Trump says that Jong Un will be “safer, happier and richer” if he accepts Trump’s ultimatum reflects precisely the shallow materialism, on which the global political tide has turned. The so-called ‘populist’ call for a return to traditional national values precisely is a rejection of JS Mills type of utilitarian politics. It is, as it were, the wish to return to being human, in a rounder way....

Strategic Culture Foundation
Sanctioning the World, the US Inadvertently ‘Locks & Launches’ Multipolarism

Alastair Crooke

The world just changed. "Putin did it."

Sunday reading.

LobeLog
Unipolar Strategy in a Multipolar World
Paul Pillar

Une parole franche
Missile-gate
Gilbert Doctorow | European Coordinator of The American Committee for East West Accord Ltd.

Russian and Eurasian Politics
Putin’s ‘Missile Speech’: Butter, Guns, and Security Discourse
Gordon M. Hahn, Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, www.cetisresearch.org.

The Vineyard of the Saker

Putin’s stunning revelations about new Russian weapons systems

The Saker

Moon of Alabama
Russia Shows Off New Weapons - Tells U.S. To "Come Down To Earth"

b

RussiaFeed
Worth a thousand words: Diagrams and charts of new developments in Russia’s defense systems
Seraphim Hanisch

RT
Russia ‘threatens our ability to dominate’ – US general to Congress

Asia Times
The US must harden its response to Putin’s new Cold War

Richard N. Haass | President of the Council on Foreign Relations

The National Interest
Russia's Big Military Buildup: Why Is America So Shocked?

Dave Majumdar | defense editor for The National Interest

 Irrussianality
Artificial conflict
Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

The Vineyard of the Saker
How far can the Americans be pushed?

Ghassan Kadi

Paul Grenier — Russia, America, and the Courage to Converse

Despite its claims to “open-ness,” liberalism in its late modern Western form becomes self-contained to the point of closure. Allied with such power constructs as the “liberal world order,” globalization (a word that came into common usage only after the fall of the Soviet Union) tends towards the homogenization of political space and the radical constriction of pluralism.

Notice a trend toward closure? It's affected conventional economics in addition to politics. Plurism, the hallmark of liberalism, is over — dead and buried.

The American Conservative
Russia, America, and the Courage to Converse

Paul Grenier, founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy

Russia Feed — Russia not willing to be a part of US-proposed UN reforms

Russia rejects US rejection of UN as chief guarantor of the international order.

The UN has long been in the sights of the American right, and Donald Trump is a true believer in that position.

Chairman of the State Duma Committee for International Affairs Leonid Slutksy … said that Russia views the UN Trump Reform as a major step in the “US coordinate system” towards a unipolar world order and toward a reduced role for the UN in the architecture of the 21st century.

Nyet!

Russia Feed
Russia not willing to be a part of US-proposed UN reforms

Nafeez Ahmed — Pentagon study declares American empire is ‘collapsing’

Report demands massive expansion of military-industrial complex to maintain global ‘access to resources’ 

n the first of a series, we report on stunning new evidence that the U.S. Department of Defense is waking up to the collapse of American primacy, and the rapid unraveling of the international order created by U.S. power after the Second World War.

But the Pentagon’s emerging vision of what comes next hardly inspires confidence. We breakdown both the insights and cognitive flaws in this vision. In future pieces we will ask the questions: What is really driving the end of the American empire? And based on that more accurate diagnosis of the problem, what is the real solution?

"We need a blank check."

Incidentally, the Vietnam War was sold to the public based on the "spread of freedom and democracy," and the domino effect. I was serving on active duty as an officer in the US Naval Reserve at the time and according to the DOD, maintaining access to resources in Southeast Asia and denying them to the enemy was a chief reason for making US  domination of the region a high strategic priority.

Here we go again.

The document is particularly candid in setting out why the U.S. sees these countries as threats — not so much because of tangible military or security issues, but mainly because their pursuit of their own legitimate national interests is, in itself, seen as undermining American dominance.

Russia and China are described as “revisionist forces” who benefit from the U.S.-dominated international order, but who dare to “seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance.” Russia and China, the analysts say, “are engaged in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority, will, reach, influence, and impact.”

The premise of this conclusion is that the U.S.-backed “status quo” international order is fundamentally “favorable” for the interests of the U.S. and its allies. Any effort to make global order also work “favorably” for anyone else is automatically seen as a threat to U.S. power and interests....

The document also sets out the real reasons that the U.S. is hostile to “revolutionary forces” like Iran and North Korea: they pose fundamental obstacles to U.S. imperial influence in those regions. They are:

“… neither the products of, nor are they satisfied with, the contemporary order… At a minimum, they intend to destroy the reach of the U.S.-led order into what they perceive to be their legitimate sphere of influence. They are also resolved to replace that order locally with a new rule set dictated by them.”

Far from insisting, as the U.S. government does officially, that Iran and North Korea pose as nuclear threats, the document instead insists they are considered problematic for the expansion of the “U.S.-led order.”...

Summing it up.

This is a war, then, between US-led capitalist [neoliberal] globalization, and anyone who resists it.

And to win it, the document puts forward a combination of strategies: consolidating the U.S. intelligence complex and using it more ruthlessly; intensifying mass surveillance and propaganda to manipulate popular opinion; expanding U.S. military clout to ensure access to “strategic regions, markets, and resources”.

Even so, the overarching goal is somewhat more modest — to prevent the U.S.-led order from collapsing further:

“…. while the favorable U.S.-dominated status quo is under significant internal and external pressure, adapted American power can help to forestall or even reverse outright failure in the most critical regions”.

The hope is that the U.S. will be able to fashion “a remodeled but nonetheless still favorable post-primacy international order.”

INSURGE intelligence - Medium
Pentagon study declares American empire is ‘collapsing’
Nafeez Ahmed

Mattis — Russia, China Challenging US Military Dominance

The nerve of them.

Mattis noted said these developments put the entire international order [read US hegemony] at risk.

"A return to great power competition, marked by a resurgent and more aggressive Russian Federation and a rising, more confident, and assertive China, places the international order under assault," he wrote.

The Defense Department has requested a $639 billion budget for next year.

Sputnik International
Mattis: Russia, China Challenging US Military Dominance

Andrew Batson — What is the real driver of the Russian revanche?

Important. Another paradox of liberalism. Liberalism creates its own enemies.

Andrew Batson's Blog
What is the real driver of the Russian revanche?
Andrew

SouthFront — US Calls Itself ‘World’s Moral Conscience’

Yikes! The American elite as a combination of global pope, police, and judge.

SouthFront
US Calls Itself ‘World’s Moral Conscience’

VV2

Fredrico Pieraccini — The Strategic Triangle that Is Changing the World

Away from the current chaos in the United States, major developments are progressing, with Iran, Russia and China coordinating on a series of significant moves crucial for the future of the Eurasian continent. With a population of more than five billion people, constituting about two-thirds of the Earth's population, the future of humanity passes through this immense area. Signaling a major change from a unipolar world order based on Europe and the United States to a multipolar world steered by China, Russia and Iran, these Eurasian states are carving out a leading role in the development of the vast continent. As part of the challenges faced by these leading multipolar countries, the disruptive events originating in the post-WWII Euro-Atlantic world order will need to be tackled....

Strategic Culture Foundation
The Strategic Triangle that Is Changing the World
Fredrico Pieraccini

Federico Pieraccini — From Bush to Trump: Culture, Economy and War. The Pillars of the New World Order

Good summary of American geopolitics and geostrategy since WWII.

Strategic Culture
From Bush to Trump: Culture, Economy and War. The Pillars of the New World Order

Federico Pieraccini

Andrew Korybko — The Afro-Eurasian Blueprint For A Multipolar World Order

The global trend towards multipolarity is now an undeniable fact of reality, though it’s still far from an unquestionable certainty for the future. Hybrid Wars and other asymmetrical destabilizations could disrupt the emerging multipolar world order (MWO), and it’s for this reason why a cohesive strategy must be formulated for safeguarding against these scenarios and ensuring the continued full-spectrum integration of all relevant partners. The following is a blueprint for achieving just that, and should be read as a series of guidelines and recommendations for decision makers to follow.…

Contra a unipolar Western world order based n US supremacy, I mean, exceptionalism.

Somewhat longish, but not more than needed to make the necessary points.

(SCO = Shanghai Cooperation Organization)
Katehon
Andrew Korybko: The Afro-Eurasian Blueprint For A Multipolar World Order

J. Hawk — The Post-Obama World Order

J. Hawk speculates on where the world is heading, depending on the outcome of the US presidential election.

SouthFront
The Post-Obama World Order

J. Hawk

Philip S. Golub — China rewrites the global rules

Recognising the challenge, the US intensively lobbied allied states in Asia and Europe to stay out of the AIIB, arguing that it would not meet IMF and World Bank standards of transparency, environmental and social responsibility, and democratic governance. The argument would have been more convincing had the IMF not been the arm of coercive Euro-Atlantic discipline for the South. With the exception of Japan, the US proved unable to sway its closest partners.… 

The decision to found the NDB and AIIB is the outcome of a movement building since the 1990s in East Asia and Latin America in reaction to IMF mismanagement of regional financial crises. The 1997-8 Asian crisis convinced many East Asian policy makers that it was time to take the future into their own hands and seek greater autonomy. The creation of the new system has huge implications: the ability to set policy frameworks and maintain international regimes through multilateral institutions is an essential dimension of power in world politics. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers wrote that October 2014 (when the AIIB was formed) “may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system….

Multipolar geopolitical political systems based on national sovereignty are potentially much less stable than unipolar systems, but only if the unipolar system is run in the interest of all instead of a hegemon. The US blew this opportunity badly. Now the future is uncertain as power blocs and spheres of interest again form.

Le Monde Diplomatique — English
China rewrites the global rules
Philip S. Golub
ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

Gilbert Doctorow — The Unipolar World Is Ending

At the same time, the de facto division of the world into two poles of self-interest is consolidated by overarching competing ideologies. The ideologies are not as comprehensive as the Communism/Free World ideologies of the Cold War. But they are crisply defined and effective rallying points nonetheless. And like the ideologies that were supposedly made irrelevant with the Cold War’s demise in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1992, the new ideologies deal with how human society shall be organized and what are its highest values.

On the side of the EU and the USA, democracy, precisely as practiced in America, neo-liberal economics, and human rights in their latest and most expansive edition that has barely taken root among US and European progressives, are the defining elements of what constitutes a good society. By definition, only such societies are stable and peace-loving. Those countries which differ with the golden standard must be brought into line to ensure a peaceful world. This can be done any which way: by subversion or non-military coercion to bring about regime change, or by pure military force if non-military methods fail to bring about the desired results.

On the side of Russia and China, there is the belief that for nation-states true freedom means freedom to follow their own development course and to organize their societies in keeping with national traditions. Moreover, they staunchly defend the principles of Westphalia, meaning the equality of sovereign states and non-intervention in the internal affairs of other states.

For all of these reasons, the Concert of Powers that the global leading minds have been invited to discuss by the Valdai Club this week is an irrelevancy. We are well and truly back on track to a bipolar world, which, in any case, many IR experts have long believed is more stable, hence more promising of global peace, than an ever shifting balance of power among five or six major players.…

This is an assessment of international relations and geopolitics that I basically agree with. Good history lesson as backgrounder, too.

Russia Insider
The Unipolar World Is Ending
Gilbert Doctorow

See also for another backgrounder.

Irrussianality

Russia And The East

Paul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Konstantin Kizhel — Indian expert says US hegemony created many current problems

The United States is unable to cope with the growing number of new challenges in the world, Professor at the School of International Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi Arun Mohanty told TASS First Deputy Director General Mikhail Gusman on Wednesday.

"One of the key objectives of BRICS is to transform the current unipolar global political and economic order. It is not an easy task. Nevertheless, there have been changes in the global order over the years. US-led global order is unable to cope with the growing number of new problems in the world," Mohanty said.

"It has been found that nearly two decades of unipolar world have witnessed more conflicts and much more threats to world peace than four decades of the bipolar world. The hegemon does not have enough resources and power to stabilize the situation in the world at its terms. On the contrary, US hegemony has created a lot of today’s problems," Mohanty said.

"BRICS countries have vowed to transform the unipolar world order into multi-polar global order. They have achieved some significant success in their endeavor especially considering the fact that the association is barely 6 years since its first summit was held in 2009 in Yekaterinburg," the expert stressed.…

The problem arises from the US leadership conflating elite interest with national interest, and US national interests with world order.

TASS
Indian expert says US hegemony created many current problems

Konstantin Kizhel

Ulson Gunnar — East Must Provide Alternative to, Not Replace Western Hegemony

The issue is the rules governing the world economy under globalization. The West wishes to impose translational rules, whereas the East wishes to base the rules on the primacy of national sovereignty. The Western leaders are internationalists, but Western peoples by and large are not. 

The emerging nations are much more influenced by socialism and Marxism, which have been internationalist. However, now it the Eastern leaders, even the Communist Chinese, that pushing for multipolarism and national sovereignty.

The dialectic is now chiefly about who writes the rules of the game. To paraphrase President Obama, if America doesn't make the rules, a nation like China will. That puts it about as clearly as can be stated. This sets a collision course that can only result in conflict unless the US backs down from unipolarism.

New Eastern Outlook
East Must Provide Alternative to, Not Replace Western Hegemony

Ulson Gunnar

See also Vladimir Terehov, The results of the Regular Shangri-La Dialogue

On May 29-31 the (14th) session of the Shangri-La Dialogue took place in Singapore, which since 2002 has regularly been held under the auspices of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies – one of the leading think tanks specializing in the assessment of the status and prospects of development of the political map of the world. 

The forum was initiated to discuss security issues in the Asia-Pacific Region. Its main participants are Ministers of Defense or high-ranking officials of the military departments of the leading countries in the region such as China, Japan, the US, Russia, India, Australia and others. 

For over ten years, the Shangri-La Dialogue has become one of the most important policy platforms in the Asia-Pacific region, that is attended and one’s vision of key regional problems is stated, it is considered essential by responsible representatives of all the major players.

The US is only in a position to impose its rules unilaterally as long as it maintains not only military superiority but also the credibility of using it without having to accept significant enough damage to act as a deterrent. The Chinese interpret the US position about freedom of navigation and airspace as really about control of the sea and air. That is, the ability to control trade routes rather than keeping them free.

Sandhya Jain — Rise of a multi-polar Asia – a view from India

Moscow straddles a multipolar world and a multipolar Asia. Given that the bulk of its vast territories embrace the Asian landmass, it would be a mistake not to think of Russia as an Asian power. 

The reality that it is already a multipolar Asia would not have escaped Beijing, which in recent years is expanding its global footprint while seeking a commanding presence in its Asian neighbourhood. Given its deep economic and strategic ties with Moscow, Beijing obviously recognises that Russia will pursue its interests in Central Asia, Europe, Iran and the Islamic world, with India, and elsewhere....

The interests of all four nations [Russia, China, India, and Iran] converge in many areas. 

In fact, China’s One Belt One Road, India’s Cotton Route and Project Mausam, and the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), are all complementary projects based on the old land and sea-based trade routes of the ancient world. Even in the centuries BC, the land and sea commerce between India, Persia, Egypt, up to the African coast, was protected by different dynasties; China joined this trade only under the Han dynasty, but expanded it exponentially...

The Vineyard of the Saker
Rise of a multi-polar Asia – a view from India
Sandhya Jain