The Geopolitical Tectonic Shift, Part 3 – International Relations
This series of blog posts is written in broad strokes, absent granular analysis, sources or footnotes. That is what you get in the Daily Posts, the Home page of this site. The purpose of these posts is to emphasize the underlying cause of the multi-faceted madness now afflicting the Western world and the spillover everywhere else – the Geopolitical Tectonic Shift (GTS). Otherwise, it would make no sense at all.
Following WW2, except for the ten years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the superpower adversaries have been in a state of Cold War. For those ten years, USrael and its vassal states ruled supreme. From their point of view, it was truly the End of History, the Empire seemingly having re-established “full spectrum dominance.” But then the wind shifted.
From basking in an exuberant following wind, they suddenly found themselves confronted by a freshening headwind. The puffed up, arrogant West was being buffeted by the gathering force of multi-polarity, spear-headed by a newly revived Russia and a now confident China. The Rest of the World (RoW) was coalescing behind them. It was a slave revolt that would have enraptured Spartacus.
The Empire responded in its time-honored fashion. After all, their motto has always been ‘might makes right.’ And war makes money, lots of it. What’s power for, after all? That simple formula concisely describes imperialist Capitalism.
So it was war after war after war, as had been the case throughout most of American history, until they had to deal with being up against a peer adversary, two of them no less. The time-honored belligerence and arrogance, bolstered by truly breathtaking ignorance, would surely set things right.
This time it’s a proxy war, set in motion through yet another regime change coup. And it only cost $5B, as the new Wicked Witch of the West (Victoria Nudelman, replacing Hillary Killary) proudly crowed. That every war she has promoted, which is all of them, has been lost doesn’t seem to have bothered her or her neocon buddies (now joined at the hip by the neolibs) at all. That’s not what it’s about. What matters is profits for the Oligarchy, the Corporatocracy, the ZioNazis, the Deep State, the Ruling Class, or whatever one chooses to call the Powers That Be. They smugly, and absurdly, call their racket the “Rules Based Order.”
It takes a skilled helmsman to steer close to a headwind. But something ominous had happened. There was no one on board with the requisite skills and experience. The keen-eyed ruthlessness and moxie of former captains seemed to have disappeared after the assassination of JFK. Lyndon Johnson had what it takes but he was done in by Vietnam, the first clue that something was seriously amiss. Since then, it’s been a series of third rate psychopaths and sociopaths (except for Jimmy Carter, a good man but not up to swimming with the sharks), culminating in Sleepy Joe.
It’s an easy guess that Joe Biden will eventually be acknowledged as the worst President in American history. Well, it’s all about timing, as is often said. The Titanic had collided with the GTS and there’s nothing that anyone could do to save her. The only hope is that the US, the Eurolemmings and the other lapdogs will learn to adapt to the new reality. That is, as long as we can avoid being turned into radioactive toast.
Roger Tucker
July 18, 2023
2 Comments
ASHLEY HOWES
I can’t now comment on Part 2 which I somehow missed.
As to the expansion of the West 500 years ago, I was recently reading a book by Admiral Menzies about Admiral He’s voyage around the world. Apparently the Chinese had cracked on board longitude calculating around 1417 so a few years later they went around the world to map it from pole to pole and everywhere in between in every direction. Which – acc. to Menzies – they did. The problem is that in a change of Emperors after Admiral He got back the whole thing was censored, vernichted, so now the story is (yet another) controversy with revisionist and an official camps.
Then there is a second book I didn’t read yet which describes a later visit by Admiral He to Venice in 1434.* I didn’t read it all yet but in the first part he recounts the part of the journey up to Cairo where he explains that at that point there had been steady traffic between Cairo and Mumbai and China for at least six centuries. Large ships, many of them, steady flows. And from Cairo to Rome there had been regular traffic for almost two millenia at that point. This means the links between East and West were far more established than our histories tend to tell. I am looking forward to reading what happened when the delegation got to Venice. Probably most of that has been scrubbed too but there must still be records in various libraries.
Long story short: it wasn’t just rapacious pirate mentality on the part of the West: what happened is that for reasons have not yet studied, several Chinese Emperors, urged by a highly conservative Mandarin class who controlled them, insisted upon shutting down extended maritime voyages and trade. They turned inwards. And their turning inwards created a gap that was then filled by emerging Western exploration which was enabled by mining gold and silver in the Americas. They could sail to India and China – the most advanced civilizations – and trade their gold and silver for valuable goods to sell back in Europe. If the Chinese had not retreated, it is doubtful if the small numbers of Western ships could have made much inroads into Asia but because they did… well the rest is history. Of course there is more to it than that, but my impression is that by the mid 1700’s China went into a long-cycle Depression probably caused by their pulling in their horns in the 1400’s during which time the West gradually learned how to flex muscle – as well as make guns.
Well, in any case: China is now expanding her sphere of influence again having pulled in its horns in the 1400s. Gonna be interesting…
*Menzies: 1434 The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (2008) (I can send it to you if you like).
Roger Tucker
Thanks for the history lesson, Ash. It’s sobering to realize that most of what we call history is self-serving mythology. It’s painfully obvious these days, as we see radically different views of what’s unfolding before our eyes. It seems clear enough that the RoW is on the path to multi-polarity, gradually replacing the Western unipolar realm as the dominant force. And the ability to rewrite history from its point of view comes with that. The adversaries will no longer be the West versus the RoW, rather it’s shaping up to be the Eurasian world, led by Russia and China vs. the Globalists, the Davos crowd, who are everywhere. I´m rooting hard for the former.