Unpublished

Previously unpublished articles on the shared future emerging from the ashes of Ukraine and the decline and fall of the US republic

UPDATE:?Emerging from the ashes of NATO expansion, Ukraine has joined Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and many other countries as victims of Pax Americana. NATO operations in Ukraine are not a battle against Russian expansionism, as portrayed in countless US government media campaigns and think-tank analyses, but rather a rear-guard military action to protect NATO retreat.?

The indictment of former US President Donald Trump sets a precedent for the future of the US republic. The illegal acts that Donald Trump may have instigated, participated in or committed are no different to those of his predecessors. From now on, any and all US presidents face state or political purging.

A SHARED FUTURE

EMERGING FROM THE ASHES OF NATO EXPANSION

“Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.” (Sun Tzu)

Emerging from the ashes of NATO expansion, Ukraine has joined Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and many other countries as victims of Pax Americana. NATO operations in Ukraine are not a battle against Russian expansionism, as portrayed in countless US government media campaigns and think-tank analyses, but rather a rear-guard military action to protect NATO retreat. Since the 2014 Maidan, Ukraine’s GDP has been reduced by more than half as NATO planners prepared the next line of defence against peaceful economic development underpinned by Russian energy and commodity exports and China’s Belt and Road (BRI) deployment to an extended periphery stretching across Eurasia to Europe and Africa including South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Caspian Sea region.

The fear in Washington is that China’s vision for a peaceful settlement in Ukraine reflects the views of a majority of members in the 78th session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA 78), which will open on Tuesday, 5 September 2023. This explains, in large part, the Biden administration’s balloon hysteria before the Munich Security Conference (MSC), which was designed to obscure Russia’s solid gains in Ukraine, NATO’s inability to materially and financially sustain the Zelensky regime, remove reports of Nordstream sabotage from media mastheads, and sideline China’s efforts to build a comprehensive and consensual approach to peace in Ukraine. Moreover, the US amplification of balloon hysteria has now been compounded by post-Munich “warnings” that imply China is materially aiding Russia’s special operations in Ukraine. The warnings, which lack any factual evidence, are a continuing attempt to sideline China’s “position paper” on Ukraine peace that has been prepared in close consultation with the expanding BRICS membership and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) members and/or observers, including India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt.?

In fact, China’s role as the leading mediator for peaceful development owes much to frustrated US power projection in Afghanistan (Biden 2021c). The cold-war mind-set of the United States is manifested in its efforts to extend veto power over European voters and end Europe’s thirty-year period of expansion and prosperity underpinned by the provision of affordable and reliable Russian energy and growing trade with China. The United States has conducted extensive political subversion campaigns against the UK by supporting Brexit, directing support away from Angela Merkel and coordinating the cancellation of substantial military contracts in France, to name but three. The US was caught red-handed spying on Angela Merkel, colluding with Denmark to tap into telecommunications cables to spy on Germany and other EU countries, sabotaged the Nordstream pipelines, and kept Julian Assange in prison, because wiki-leaks exposed a multitude of US covert crimes and misdemeanours. However, it is the weaponisation of geoeconomics that has proved the most damaging to both Europe and the United States.

Ever since President Richard Nixon unpegged the dollar from gold, due to the inflationary effects of the war against Vietnam and trade deficits with its allies, the US economy’s share of global trade has declined significantly. To offset the rising cost of maintaining its global alliance structure, during the 1980s the US forced both Germany and Japan to revalue their currencies. Germany later switched to Russian energy and the Euro, while Japan, which refused to make peace with Russia and access its abundant and proximate energy supplies, suffered severe economic stagnation and catalysed the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis (AFC). Bill Clinton’s “democratic expansion” led to a bloodbath in the Balkan’s and Somalia and the Bush administration’s disastrous War on Terror accelerated US economic decline by funnelling US resources into non-productive military expenditure as cuts to domestic infrastructure and social programs deepened, which in combination eventually catalysed the 2008-9 Global Financial Crisis (GFC).

China’s response to the GFC was to extend its capital and markets to ASEAN and eventually toward the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The US response was outlined in the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” and a strategy of militarisation of the Asia-Pacific region and tacit support for Japan’s de-pacification of its US imposed post-WWII constitution. Despite requests by Russia to integrate more closely with Europe, European leaders foolishly agreed to US demands for increased NATO membership and funding and geographical expansion of military operations in exchange for an enlarged European Union (EU). However, the “endless wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq drained US political and economic vigour and ignited new calls for EU “strategic autonomy”. US efforts to evict Russia from the Mediterranean in Syria, the Black Sea in Ukraine and constrict Russian access in the Baltic all failed. While US special operations continue in Syria and Iraq, its attempts to colonise Afghanistan and subvert Central Asian governments to destabilise the peripheries of Russia and Iran and choke China’s western gateway province of Xinjiang have also met with abject failure. Thus, in 2021 the Biden administration hastened the withdrawal from Afghanistan to concentrate its activities in a Democratic Club of mini-lateral alliances (NATO, Quad, AUKUS) that would primarily focus on Ukraine and Taiwan.

However, president Biden’s continuation and expansion of the Obama and Trump administration policies toward China and Russia, encapsulated in his “Democracy versus Autocracy” slogan, has met its 1812 overture in Ukraine. The global COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vast deficiencies of the US economy to withstand external shocks, the enormity of its profligacy and wealth inequality, frayed social welfare net, and crippling addiction to the dollars “exorbitant privilege” as global reserve currency. The consequences of decades of poor economic choices and belligerent foreign policies were exhibited by increased neuralgia and anxiety over Russia and China. The US policy reaction to its waning global influence has been to double-down on past mistakes and begin leeching the economies of its allies to sanction and or restrict trade with China, increase military spending, militarise the Asia-Pacific region and finance the corrupt regime of Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy.

Like operation Barbarossa, NATO has overextended its lines of supply and industrial capacity to wage war and alerted its friends and foes to its economic piracy and diplomatic duplicity. Both Napoleon and the Nazi’s were able to control their media through constant propaganda, disinformation and deception, false flag operations and falsified reports of military losses. However, the current NATO campaign is a reminder that no amount of personal genius, political prowess, allocated capital, diplomatic duplicity or military power can sustain an unpopular war for any length of time.

Aside from Russian military gains and Ukrainian losses, NATOs policy of conflict escalation now faces the prospect of the combined political, diplomatic and economic opposition of the Global South. Over 80% of the world's population and 60% of the world’s economy is coalescing behind China’s “position paper” on a peaceful settlement for the Ukraine crisis. Between the recently concluded Munich Security Conference, the 15th?BRICS summit in August 2023 and the 78th?UN General Assembly in September 2023 are months of intense rounds of diplomacy and political positioning between the G7 and NATO on one-side and the combined membership weight of the BRICS, SCO, ASEAN, Latin America, African Union (AU) and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), on the other-side.

In the post COVID-19 environment China has once again emerged as the primary contributor to global economic growth and principal mediator between the Global North and Global South. China’s focus on multilateralism with the United Nations at its core offers a more integrated global order in which connectivities, circulations and transformations are equitably underpinned by standards and rules partially or wholly shaped by all the poles and substantively influenced by Chinese civilisational wisdom. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Global Development Initiative (GDI) and Global Security initiative (GSI) are concrete examples of China’s vision for peaceful economic development through win-win cooperation and independent choice of economic development model.?China’s forthcoming “position paper” on peaceful resolution to the Ukraine crisis provides a guide for the 193 members of the United Nations, on constructing a peaceful path to build a vision of a shared future for mankind - 人类命运共同体.

The Editor

FALL FROM GRACE

TRUMP INDICTMENT IS AN INDICTMENT OF THE US REPUBLIC

The indictment of former US President Donald Trump sets a precedent for the future of the US republic. The illegal acts that Donald Trump may have instigated, participated in or committed are no different to those of his predecessors. From now on, any and all US presidents face state or political purging. Khrushchev’s denunciation of the dead Stalin severed the lineage and legitimacy of the USSR’s ruling communist party and eventually led to its collapse. In Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Peru, Ecuador and other localities where US imperial power is exercised presidents are routinely denounced, indicted, arrested, imprisoned and pardoned. However, once the spell of infallibility, immunity and impunity strips idolatry from US presidents, so too are the pellucid political and moral myths stripped from the US democratic experiment.?

The United States fall from grace occurred long ago. Constant victory guaranteed glory and god’s blessing on its people. Victory over the British, Spanish, Mexican, Japanese, German and Soviet empires manifested in further imperial expansionism and ever greater hubris. The fallacies of political and material exceptionalism obscured genocide, slavery, militarism and violent global vigilantism. Only two of the world’s extant former empires resisted total subjugation - Russia and China.

In its efforts to subjugate China and Russia, the United States has repeated the greatest mistake of all empires - over extension. By conducting global military and economic campaigns to impose its imperial might the US has stripped vast populations around the world, and its own people, of security and material and physical well-being. Moreover, in the wake of its ostensibly greatest triumph, the defeat of Japan and Germany in 1945, the United States turned on its USSR and Chinese allies via economic warfare and regional proxy wars. However, glory was ripped from the facade of its anti-communist and democratisation mission with losses in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and many more. Ukraine has now joined that long list of failures and Taiwan awaits a US-led apocalypse.

The core of US power and wealth manifested in the post-WWII global multilateral structure, which was to some degree always self-serving, has been eroded by the realisation that the world’s continental and sub-continental groupings are entirely capable of operating beyond the Washington consensus. China is now the world’s greatest economic power, Russia remains the greatest repository of natural resources, and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) is now a greater contributor to global economic vitality than the G7 grouping of former imperial powers dominated by the United States and militarily allied within NATO and the Indo-Pacific Alliance (IPA).

Eisenhower had warned the country of the dangers of the military-industrial complex, Nixon was a warning that exorbitant privilege, energy and gold were more powerful than expeditionary navies and armies. Reagan signalled the dangers of debt fuelled military expansionism and plutocratic excesses of neo-liberalism that funnelled wealth from the workers and middle classes to the richest one per cent. Clinton’s sexual immorality was pushed aside by further military expansionism and proxy wars, in Europe, Africa and West Asia. Bush plunged the world into the War on Terror and Obama intensified both wars and political subversions to force destruction and destitution upon tens of millions and the complete disruption of Western Asia and North Africa. Trump launched the Indo-Pacific strategy, extended economic warfare and disrupted the institutional balance of domestic politics via insurrection. The elderly Biden has assimilated all the flaws of his predecessors and propagates them under the banner of “Democracy versus Autocracy”.?However, it is the severely polarised and corrupt political structure of the US that is plunging into economic bankruptcy, social anomie, industrial insufficiency, military defeat, domestic terrorism, political autocracy and demise of the Republic.

The Editor