By Glauco D’Agostino
In the ongoing geopolitical dispute, an aggregation of countries awaits. We call them emerging. They have already come out, while some others are sinking. The emerging players are waiting, playing for the long term. It’s about waiting. What inconveniently proclaimed itself West will hang himself. No need to push too hard.
In a conversation with friends of Rotary, I stressed a few days ago that programming culture needs to grow over time. A mental habit. China and Russia, for example, have practised it for a long time under their communist regimes, bankruptcy, of course, and liberticide. It is why they have distanced themselves from it and, over time, have behaved like good disciples to learn how to handle the tools that lead to development. Silently. With a thousand contradictions, of course, and, however, some forcing foresaw in their programming.
Opposite, there is a drunk West with muscular power, arrogant in its role of exclusive leadership, proclaiming the end of history with the victory of liberal democracy and predatory economic neoliberalism as inalienable rights of man. The self-proclaimed West (from the United States to Japan to Australia) convinces itself it is at the centre of the world, better it is the world. Without deepening the concept of liberal democracy, the differences of those who apply it with different meanings, what is the difference between free market and liberalism, without taking into account the needs of those who do not participate in this banquet, look from afar and are satisfied to have acquired a concept that they did not have before. Thus the starving people, who always starve, now know there is a right to drugs, for example, the one that led to the Celestial Empire erosion as the drug market held by the West was too skimpy without the Chinese market. And so on with Hong Kong and everything else. But these are historical digressions, written in one go because the writer has the propensity to remember the long times of history rather than dwell on the news of the day so dear to leading analysts. So let’s go back to current events.
Point 6 of the Beijing BRICS Declaration says: “Recalling the BRICS Joint Statement on Strengthening and Reforming the Multilateral System adopted by our Foreign Ministers in 2021 and the principles outlined therein, we agree that the task of strengthening and reforming the multilateral system encompasses the following:
- Making instruments of global governance more inclusive, representative and participatory to facilitate greater and more meaningful participation of developing and least developed countries, especially in Africa, in global decision-making processes and structures and make it better attuned to contemporary realities.”
Xi Jinping says: “We need to uphold openness and inclusiveness and pool collective wisdom and strength. BRICS countries gather not in a closed club or an exclusive circle, but a big family of mutual support and a partnership for win-win cooperation.”
For his part, Putin talks about “promoting trade settlements outside the US-dollar system,” “developing reliable alternative mechanisms for international settlements” in this regard, and “exploring the possibility of creating an international reserve currency based on the basket of BRICS currencies.”
It is the framework in which the Ukrainian crisis moves. Other than Donbass and Zaporizhzhja (in Ukrainian), Zaporozh’e (as named when I was studying in Moscow) or Aleksandrovsk (for lovers of the Tsarist Empire), being careful not to end up in the clutches of the now disqualified Corriere della Sera Italian newspaper. The diversionary manoeuvres of the interested oligarchic information hide the real problem by talking about howitzers and missiles of various power, unlikely victories, imminent regime change and other nonsense. Here the real problem is the weakening of a global currency that no longer bears the weight of the lack of modernisation of the country that manages the issuing institution in solitude. Other than human rights and international courts of dubious reputation carrying out vendettas for third parties. The situation is much more revolutionary than it appears compared to the Atlantic-inspired world order. Atlantic, not Euro-Atlantic, as someone insists on saying to save his soul.
“Those who seek to create monopoly, blockade and barriers in science and technology in order to disrupt other countries’ innovation and development and hold on to their dominant position are doomed to fail,” Xi Jinping continues. The phrase restricts the range to science and technology, but it sounds like a warning to all fields.
A question of style, the article headlines! Without imitating ‘Ndranghetos languages like some Western leaders (we omit the names for a matter of style!), the Chinese Communist leader teaches a free market lesson to the West, increasingly oriented to centralising the economy and resorting to sanctions. Of course, Xi cannot give lectures on the internal level, but the West cannot give them either on the inner ground or on the foreign one.
The western escalation to the centralisation of the economy has mainly developed since the 2000s through the enormous production of weapons useful to support the “special counter-terrorism operations” (not wars, a kind of Russian ones in Ukraine) that go to support the American GDP in trouble over the control of investment funds. But Bush’s Soviet-style intervention in the economy does not hold up because the great American innovating soul is in crisis and now based on speculatory free finance, which is the fig leaf to disguise a control of the world now clearly declining. Why? Because, unforeseen by Fukuyama, other actors appear on the world stage who manage the free world market better than the Nobel laureates in Oslo and Stockholm who advise Washington. Thus, while the world gets excited about Greta Thunberg and her claims exposed to the UN, Africa turns to Beijing to remedy the pangs of hunger, as Washington and Brussels think it is well to mend their accounts that no longer allow “fiesta,” triggering wars of destabilisation, but for human rights, in half of Africa, the Middle East and even on the borders with China. So much so that the danger is Islam.
Beijing is watching. It does not get upset. It is already looking forward to 2080. A matter of planning! And in the meantime, it mobilises diplomacy and brings together key players around it, motivating them through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS: altogether, half the world. In Washington, someone worried. What are we going to do? Simple! We use the weapon of sanctions, which is a weapon that only starves people and does not kill them under bombs. So off with the monopolistic season of unilateral and secondary sanctions, according to the teachings of the free market, of course.
Thus the United States (and stupid Europe in tow) make enemies half the world, including two powers they consider minor but that are still nuclear powers and hold vetoes at the UN Security Council. In addition, in the General Assembly wording of the political orientation of the member countries, one does not vote by census or by the number of aircraft carriers as the Western oligarchs expected, but by the liberal-democratic system of one country-one vote. So in the resolution against Russia (expected unanimously because the world has determined the aggressor for the invasion of Ukraine), also vote Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Zimbabwe, Laos, and even Nicaragua, think about it. Who knows how the Islamic Republic of Iran, under American sanctions since immemorial time, did vote, since now it is a candidate to join the BRICS together with Argentina. I don’t want to list the votes against and of abstentions and cross them with those under American sanctions. Stuff we leave to the geopolitical accountants.
But Washington realises that the countries it has sanctioned are more than 40, in addition to personal sanctions (an invention in international law) involving dozens of heads of state and government and thousands of cousins, brothers-in-law, half-brothers, official and LGBTQ+ lovers, and requires its intelligence to find more because they need a lesson. An attitude of an ethical state rather than a liberal-democratic one. But this time, that para-racist attitude targets a new enemy: Russia. Thus, Washington winds up against the Islamic world that has offended before and now all the Russian speakers it demonises today. Let’s hope it doesn’t occur for someone (but it’s not excluded) to invent a naval blockade around China. It would be enough when the American version of human rights was questioned in Kiribati, endangering the security of the United States in the Pacific.
A little colourful story, isn’t it? Western media spread less of the story on the economic-financial (and mental) stability of the all-powerful West. By human rights, wars, sanctions and imperial attitudes, could a structural crisis stop when affecting the health of its now crumbling institutions, involving the craving for consumption of its citizens, and limiting the ability to enter the shocking 21st century? Because it is a matter of derangement and not without consequences. Around the corner, a multipolar world is pressing to be heard and does not ask America an octroyée right. It conquers it by fighting for its survival against a power that profited from its transient military advantage and seized a term, the West, on the meaning of which not all “Westerners” perhaps agree under diverging cultural bases.
The attack on the West comes neither from China nor from Russia! Hands off the West!
