Pepe Escobar
Or will he become Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab and drag us all into the depths of a nuclear abyss? A new book by academic Glenn Diesen, The Ukrainian War & The Eurasian World Order, published in mid-February, raises the question decisive question of the young 21st century: Will the Hegemon accept a new geopolitical reality or will he become Captain Ahab from Moby Dick and drag us all into the depths of a nuclear abyss? An extra touch of poetic beauty is that the analysis is carried out by a Scandinavian. Diesen is a professor at the University of Southeastern Norway (USN) and associate editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs. He spent time at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, working closely with the inimitable Sergey Karaganov. Needless to say, he won’t be approached by the European media; the angry shouts – “Putinist!” – are prevalent, even in Norway, where it has been one of the main targets of cancel culture. Anyway, that’s irrelevant. What matters is that Diesen, an affable, highly educated man and an ultra-sharp scholar, is aligned with the cream of the culture that asks the questions that really matter; among them, if we move towards a Eurasian-Western world order. Apart from a meticulous deconstruction of the proxy war in Ukraine that devastatingly discredits – with proven facts – the official narrative of NATOstan, Diesen offers a concise and easily accessible mini-history of how we got here. He begins to present his arguments by going back to the Silk Roads: The Silk Road was an early model of globalization, although it did not give rise to a common world order, since the world’s civilizations were mainly connected with nomadic intermediaries.The demise of the heart-based Silk Road, actually roads, was caused by the rise of European thalassocratic powers that reconnected the world in a different way. However, the hegemony of the collective West could only be fully achieved by applying divide and rule throughout Eurasia. In fact, we did not have “five centuries of Western rule,” according to Diesen: rather it was three, or even two (see, for example , the work of André Gunder Frank). In a Long Term Historical Vision that barely registers. What The Grand Vision does now is that “the one world order” produced by the control “of the vast Eurasian continent from the maritime periphery is coming to an end.” Mackinder is hit by a trainDiesen hits the nail on the head when it comes to the Russia-China strategic partnership, about which the vast majority of European intellectuals have no idea (a crucial exception is the French historian, demographer and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, whose latest book I reviewed here: A charming formulation of the way forward, Diesen shows how “Russia can be seen as the successor to the Mongol nomads as the last custodian of the Eurasian land corridor,” while China revives the Ancient Silk Roads “with economic connectivity.” Consequently, “a powerful Eurasian gravitational pull is thus reorganizing the supercontinent and the world in general.” Providing context, Diesen has to make a mandatory detour to the foundations of the Great Game between the Russian and British empires. What stands out is how Moscow was already pivoting towards Asia from the late 19th century, when Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte began developing an innovative roadmap for a Eurasian political economy, “borrowing from Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List». Witte “wanted to end Russia’s role as an exporter of natural resources to Europe, since it resembled ‘the relations of colonial countries with their metropoles.'” And that means going back to Dostoevsky, who argued that Russians are so Asian as Europeans. The mistake of our policy during the last two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans (…) It will be better for us to seek alliances with the Asians. Dostoevsky meets Putin-Xi. Diesen also has to make the obligatory references to Mackinder’s obsession with the “heartland”, which is the basis of all Anglo-American geopolitics of the last one hundred and twenty years. Mackinder was afraid of railway development – especially the Trans-Siberian by the Russians – since it allowed to Moscow to “emulate the nomadic skills of the Scythians, Huns and Mongols”, essential to controlling most of Eurasia. Mackinder focused especially on railways which acted “primarily as feeders of oceanic trade”. Ergo, it was not enough to be a thalassocratic power: The ‘heartland’ is the region to which, under modern conditions, maritime power can be denied access. And that is what leads to the Rosetta Stone of Anglo-American geopolitics: prevent the emergence of a hegemon or a group of states capable of dominating Europe and Eurasia that could threaten the dominant maritime power. This explains everything, from World War I and II to NATO’s permanent obsession with preventing by all means a solid rapprochement between Germany and Russia. The small multipolar helmsman Diesen offers a succinct perspective of the Russian Eurasians of the 1920s, such as Trubetskoi and Savitsky, who promoted an alternative path to the USSR. They conceptualized that, with the Anglo-American thalassocracy applying In Divide and Rule Russia, what was needed was a Eurasian political economy based on mutual cooperation: a stark prefiguration of the Russo-Chinese drive toward multipolarity. Indeed, Savitsky could have been writing today: “Eurasia has previously played a unifying role in the Old World. Contemporary Russia, absorbing this tradition, must abandon war as a method of unification. We reached the post-Maidan of 2014. Moscow finally got the message that trying to build a Greater Europe “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” was a certain failure. Thus was born the new concept of the Greater Eurasian Partnership. Sergey Karaganov, with whom Diesen worked at the Russian Higher School of Economics, was the father of the concept. The Greater Eurasian Partnership repositions Russia “from the periphery of Europe and Asia to the center of a large superregion.” In short, a pivot towards the East, and the consolidation of the Russia-China partnership. Diesen unearthed an extraordinary passage from the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, which demonstrates how the Little Helmsman was in 1990 a visionary who prefigured multipolar China: In the In the future, when the world becomes tripolar, tetrapolar or pentapolar, the Soviet Union, however weakened it may be and even if some of its republics withdraw from it, will remain a pole. In the so-called multipolar world, China will also be a pole (…) Our foreign policy remains the same: first, oppose hegemonism and power politics and safeguard world peace; and second, work to establish a new international political order and a new international economic order. Diesen breaks it down by pointing out how China has to some extent reproduced the American three-pillar system of the early 19th century, in which the US developed a manufacturing base, a physical transportation infrastructure and a national bank to counter British economic hegemony. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) appears; the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); the AIIB; the de-dollarization campaign; the China International Payments System (CIPS); the increasing use of the yuan in international trade; the use of national currencies; Made in China 2025; the Digital Silk Road; and, last but not least, BRICS 10 and the NDB, the development bank of the BRICS. Russia matched part of it, as in the Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) of the Eurasian Economic Union ( EAEU) and in advancing the harmonization of the financial arrangements of the BRI and EAEU projects through the SCO. Diesen is one of the few Western analysts who truly understands the push towards multipolarity: The BRICS+ is anti-hegemonic and not anti-Western, as its goal is to create a multipolar system and not to assert collective dominance over the West. Diesen also argues that the emerging Eurasian World Order “is apparently based on conservative principles.” That is correct, since the Chinese system is impregnated with Confucianism (social integration, stability, harmonious relations, respect for tradition and hierarchy), part of the acute sense of belonging to a different and sophisticated civilization: that is the foundation of building the Chinese nation. Russia-China cannot be brought down Diesen’s detailed analysis of Ukraine’s proxy war, “a foreseeable consequence of an unsustainable world order,” is extrapolated to the battlefield where the future is being decided and new world order: “either global hegemony or Westphalian multipolarity.” By now, everyone with a brain knows how Russia absorbed and retransformed everything launched by the collective West after the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO). The problem is that the rarefied Western plutocracy that really runs the show will always refuse to acknowledge reality, as Diesen frames it: Regardless of the outcome of the war, it has already become the graveyard of liberal hegemony. The vast majority of the Global South sees clearly that, although what Ray McGovern indelibly defined as the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex) presents the Russia-China partnership as the main “threats” -in reality those that created the “gravitational attraction to reorganize the world order towards multipolarity”- cannot overthrow Russia-China geoeconomically. So there is no doubt that “the conflicts of the future world order will continue to become militarized.” That’s where we find ourselves at the crossroads. There will be no peaceful path to the Westphalian world order. Fasten your seatbelts: it’s going to be a bumpy ride.Strategic Culture Foundation / observatoriodetrabajadores.wordpress.com—Full text at:
