Is the World Heading to a Berlin-Moscow-Beijing Entente, or to a Tetrapolar Order? By Jorge Trevino
The post WW2 world order ended in 1991. All the Cold War institutions resulted from WW2 named the United Nations (UN), the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), if true they still exist, the truth is that their importance and relevance are far from what they used to be in the past, with the UN and the WTO being two empty eggshells with little to none practical function other than talkative forums for empty words and deaf ears.
The ideology’s conflict between Capitalism and Communism, resulted from the end of WW2, are also over. The dissolution of the Soviet Union ended with the break up of the Eastern European Communist bloc (with its Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, COMECON, and their military arm, the Warsaw Pact) and the rape of Russia (as William Engdahl put it plainly in an interview published the 11th of May this year for The Saker, on regards his new book, The Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance) by Washinghton’s war hawks and Harvard financial elites that stole all of the former Soviet natural resources that came up with Russia’s worse economical crisis since the end of WW2. The story about how the theft of 2,600 tonnes of Russian gold reserves ended up in the U.S. Treasury vaults exemplifies quite well the way the American financial elites literally “raped” Russia and created, funded and adviced most of the Russian oligarchs from the Yeltsin era, with origins deeply linked to certain American bankers connected to the CIA.
In parallel, the Sino – Soviet animosity was an intrinsic part of the Cold War order. After Nikita Krushchev demonized Stalinism in 1956, China and Russia disagreed progressively on the interpretation of Marxism and the Chinese authorities denounced the Soviets as “Revisionist Traitors”, which put the two powers into a definite ideological collision path. Geopolitically speaking, the Sino – Soviet split was a pivotal event as relevant as the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War – because it facilitated the Sino – American rapprochment from the early 70’s isolating Russia and keeping it away from what many said could have been an alliance with the potential to have changed the whole system of international relations during the Cold War.
All of that ended the same day the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991. All of a sudden the world woke up in the morning of the 27 of December 1991, with the astonishing news that the USSR not longer existed and that the Cold War was over. From one day to the other, the most powerful military alliance of the world, NATO, found itself without an enemy.
The reverberations of such an event were collosal: Ideology’s antagonism dissapear from Europe overnight, the conflict between the two most powerful military blocs in the world ceased, the EU and NATO absorbed most of the former Soviet satellites approaching Russian borders, and the U.S. was presented as the Unipolar World Leader with the European Union (EU) playing aside as its major “ally and friend”.
A new world order, although quite short, was then in the making, as Mikhail Gorbachov and George Bush promulgated. The U.S. was the absolute winner of the Cold War, from where it became the unrivalled leader for two decades. But the Hegemonic Stability Theory (HST), which claims that the international system is more likely to remain stable when a single nation-state is the dominant world power, proved false. What it really happened instead, was that the American unipolarity corrupted the lack of counterbalance nature imposes to things in order to balance life, and the world order became a system of chaos with colour revolutions and change of regimes appearing in Africa, the Middle East and wherever the pax americana were to be challenged: Rememeber Yugoslavia, Irak, Morocco, Egypt, Lybia, Sudan and Syria.
Things started to get really nasty when it became clear that the Western elites were pushing for a no sovereignity corporate-style global government with no boundaries and free of movement. Just three years ago it appeared clear that the world was heading towards such a system. Even President Obama said once “Globalization is here to stay”, but then it came Brexit, and then it came Donald Trump. The two atlanticist powers changed train and reversed what until then was used to be seen as unstoppable forces heading toward an unknown abyss.
Soon, the Capitalist-Communist ideology debate from the second part of the 20th century was replaced with the new more accurate 21st century opposite cosmovisions between Globalists and Nationalists. A debate not yet sufficiently discussed but that vaguely summarized says that the formers tend for the dissapearance of the nation-state and soverignity, free trade and free mobility of citizens toward the homologation of salaries and labour conditions worldwide. That is to say a fanatically globalized approach that headed to the elimination of differences and everything that make us culturally rich and diverse. A sort of totalitarian regime not far from what the Soviets created where disidence is forbidden and punished..
While the latters pushes for the opposite putting their national identities, their cultural backgrounds, and their own race’s proclivity, at the top of their agenda, providing a hard push to the nation-states and therefore, toward protectionism and the defence of the local and native populations.
Brexit (if it comes to happen or not, I don’t think it will) and The Donald are the two most visible faces (but not the only ones) of this Nationalist wave against Globalization.
But then something happened. While the U.S. was playing his unipolar leadership, drunk of power, two giants, an Eurasian and a Far Eastern started behavioring as “Revisionist Powers” demanding participation in the world affairs and respect for their regional interests.
The Ukrainian and Syrian conflicts have to be seen under this frame.
But Obama went crazy and thought that he could manage to carry on two battles at once against two heavy weights of the international relations. And he was wrong. And then he made what political scientists have agreed was his worst political miscalculation ever and the reason he’s going to be recalled for the future populations. He rendered Russia into China’s arms. As simple as that. After following a strong anti-Russian stance in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and launching the “Russians Are Coming” hysterical campaign reaching epical sociopathy, he realised China, without saying much, had became so powerful that started not only launching and enforcing its own independent foreign policy with many times backing up Russia in Middle Eastern affairs. Not only that, the new almost formal Sino-Russian alliance even dare to counteract American war games in the Middle East, something the U.S. has historically considered as a direct declaration of war. But things were far worse than that. Xi Jinping Belt Road’s Initiative (BRI) conceived a wild Chinese development strategy aimed at connecting and developing the Eurasian transport infrastructure that will link the Chinese manufacture centres to the European markets. And that was too much for Uncle Sam.
Until then, the EU was still was an intrinsic part of the American system of alliances. A sort of “First Class Vassals” with nice way of life but uncapable to contradict or have a stance opposite to their master and pimp.
Obama then launched his “Pivot to Asia” policy. An anti-Chinese provocation policy in the South China Sea alleging “Freedom of navigation” concerns (which by the way haven’t occur so far) from China’s historical territorial disputes against some South Pacific states, an issue the Chinese authorities have managed to deal positively by making infrastructure investments in the South China Sea nations
Anyway, if the Americans conceived NATO as a mechanism to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”, as NATO’s first Secretary General Hastings Lionel Smay put it plainly in 1952, then Obama did the opposite. By adding up a second front against China, he ended up rapproching Russia to China: Two nuclear powers, permanent members of the Security Council and, together, very able to counterbalance American neo-imperial stances around the globe.
Unfortunately for the U.S. this doesn’t ends up here. Donald Trump, or whoever leads American foreign policy right now, are just repeating the same miscalculation of uniting adversaries against themselves now confronting the EU in many stances but suffice to mention the U.S. abandonment of the Paris climate accord, the U.S. abandonment of the Iranian nuclear deal (JCPOA), the Jerusalem embassy move to Jerusalem, the threat of sanctions against Germany and other European states if the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany moves on, the pressures on European states to increase their military budget to 2% of their GDP according to NATO’s requirements, the Middle-Eastern migration issue flooding Europe with migrants resulted from American foreign policy of chaos in all the MENA (Middle East and Northern Africa) region.
As the former U.S. envoy to NATO, Ivo H. Daalder, put it recently, “The Europeans will come to the conclusion that they’re better off going their own way. And that point is rapidly approaching”.
And yes, it’s really approaching and Trump stance on world affairs are praying for it without realizing that such an event would result catastrophically to the U.S. as a world super-power, a role is reaching its breaking point if no one in the U.S. changes clash course right away.
It’s been well studied that Empires die from economic internal causes rather than from international clashes. In that terms, things are no different for the U.S. The U.S. is also on a collision course with its $20 trillion dollars public debt (only public, private is apart) and his military trillion annual budgets promise to keep that mountain of debt on the rise. With each time more countries retiring from the petro-dollar, it’s sure that the “unlimited” demand for U.S. dollars will decline and with it the capacity of the Empire to fund its eternal wars.
A Berlin-Moscow-Beijing entente could proove lethal for American Empirial stances in the world. Putin’s words in the frame of the Saint Petesbourg’s Economic Forum on May 25 have to be seen on that direction:
“Emmanuel (Macron) said that Europe and the U.S. have mutual obligations, Europe depends on the U.S. on the realm of security, but you don’t have to worry about that, we’ll help, we’ll provide security”.
Merkel’s and Macron’s visit to Putin and Xi Jinping in the last two weeks could be signalling that a break through could be on the making in the Western bloc, a breakthrough with the potential to change the whole shape of international relations.
And if that change is on the making, then it might be that we could be heading not to a tripolar order (U.S.-China-Russia) but to a tetrapolar (U.S.-EU-Russia-China).