A BRAVE NEW WORLD: UNITED STATES, RUSSIA, CHINA, INDIA .....AND EUROPE

Foreword

The world is in a very dramatic situation with remarkable geopolitical changes that are underway.  What's happening is that a familiar world is no longer led by the United States and Europe. It is the end of an era: that of Western domination of the world system, a domination that began with the European empires and then passed to the US empire after the Second World War.

It's actually the end of a very long cycle that dates back to 1492 and onward because it started with a voyage that changed the world fundamentally.

The world became a European-led world with a lot of cruelty, inequality and domination. And with a lot of remarkable technological development that came along with it but that was utilized as a form of power and oppression as well. The United States dominated the world for about half a century after 1945.

Background

Until the 16th century, China was the global power. The Silk Roads were the axis of the globe's rotation and a crossroads of civilizations from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Pacific Ocean, with commercial, scientific, and philosophical exchanges and the birth and spread of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. But Columbus's arrival in America and Vasco da Gama's circumnavigation of Africa changed the world's geopolitical situation. Europe, from an insignificant appendage of the Eurasian landmass, from a stagnant and isolated region, suddenly and unexpectedly found itself at the center of the world becoming the hub of communication and a mediator between the West and the East.

History was then distorted, manipulated, and re-written with the West that since immemorial times dominates the world and Asia considered underdeveloped, barbarian and inferior.

From the late 20th century to the present: the world has witnessed disastrous initiatives by the US and Europe committed to maintaining a position of dominance between East and West.

But, despite the narrative and celebration of the West, the forceful return of ignored peoples and civilizations is taking place! Therefore, the West needs to address, consciously and without hysteria, a process that is now irreversible.

Recent oil and gas exploration and survey by British Petroleum (BP) have confirmed that Middle East, Russia, and Central Asia own 70% of global oil and gas reserves.

Xi Jinping said in Astana (Kazakhstan) in 2013: “The time has come to build a Silk Road Economic Belt. We are people of different races, faiths, and cultures, but striving for development and progress: this is not the birth of a new world, but the rebirth of the old”.  Soon after, Samarkand (Uzbekistan) , hub of the Silk Road, was declared a World Heritage Site, the "Crossroad and Melting Pot of World Cultures".

US Mistakes and Misjudgements

Since 1946 (Churchill's  Iron Curtain speech given at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri) there was a very dangerous Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, but there was no doubt that it was a world dominated by the West. The main point is that all of this is over. In fact, it ended a quarter of a century ago, but it wasn't recognized as such after the fall of the Soviet Union, while a new multipolar world was emerging, especially with the rise of China, but also with the economic growth of India and other countries.

The United States, on the other hand, was claiming something completely different. Not only a world led by the West, but the US as the only superpower in the world. This was a great illusion, a great act of arrogance, and a very poorly calculated one.  US  asserted its  unipolarity precisely at the moment when the Western-led world was coming to an end. And so for a quarter of a century there was  a clash between reality and arrogance, in which the United States, and to some extent Europe (and within Europe especially Great Britain) have continued to think that the West rules the world, that it can tell  Putin,  Xi Jinping,  Modi and Lula what to do, it can tell anyone what to do , and yet the reality is that of a world undergoing fundamental changes.

Current situation

Now we're in a very different world and the voices of other parts of the world are really important and growing and that means that in the media and in the political life in the western world there's a lot more anxiety while in China  and in India  there is no pessimism. The world is changing in the right direction actually and opinion surveys demonstrate that in Africa there's a tremendous amount of optimism. Actually Africa is the most optimistic single continent in the world while anxiety is highest in the United States because nobody likes to be pushed off the perch.  But the fact of the matter is the world's becoming a lot more interesting, diverse, interconnected. The world that is taking shape will hopefully be more equal, more open, actually benefiting from a lot of the breakthroughs in technology.

United States of America

US political system has collapsed. It has one person rule which is not exactly the way to run a society of 340 million people and 30 trillion dollars of output.  The US is in a niceness shortage, in a calmness shortage, in a geopolitical crisis with a lot of instability from all of the upheavals of climate which are going to get worse for the next 50 years.

One week ago the US declared itself outside of the world trade system; two weeks ago outside of the climate challenge; three weeks ago out of the sustainability challenge; four weeks ago  outside oft he WHO.  But the the US is just 4.1% of the world population.

China and India

China and India have been at loggerheads for 60 years as the British drew an arbitrary borderline in the Himalayas, and that has meant border dispute and conflict between China and India since India gained independence in 1947 and the People's Republic of China was formed in 1949. They're still fighting over a line that a guy named McMahon drew arbitrarily in 1880 never having been up to the Himalayas.

By the way, a theorem maintains that all problems in the world go back to the British! That's true in the Middle East. It's true in the Himalayas. It's true all over Africa. It's true in much of the world. 

In any event, the Indian and Chinese foreign ministers got together and said: "What are we fighting about? We should trade more. We should invest more." And then very positive statements came from Prime Minister Modi and from President Xi.

The same happened  with  three other countries that are at loggerheads for no reason in the world:  Korea, Japan and China.  They are divided because the United States says: “You're on our side (Korea and Japan) and they're the enemy (China)”. The three got together because Korea and Japan saw the US not such a great  protector of their interests and decided to improve relations with China.

And Iran and Saudi Arabia (defined by the US to be the fundamental schism of Shia and Sunni with US policy playing the Sunnis against Shia) made a rapprochement last year  brokered by China. The United States would never have done it but China was very helpful.

US, China and India

US are all geared around the idea of itself as number one. But this will be a a world in which China and India will be playing a much larger role together with the African Union  and Saudi Arabia

It's a world of diversity: much better food, much better conversation, much better places to live and visit, much more conferences, meetings and problem solving. But for US strategist, it looks very grim and dangerous. 

It would have required a lot of capacity and committing together to improve the situation with  the major powers working very hard. The only one that made a major effort was China. Actually  Europe said a few things at the beginning but got caught in the Ukraine war which  was a disastrous mistake because the United States doesn't know how to make peace and blew the chance after 1991 to help create a true collective security arrangement in Europe. Instead, it expanded NATO.

China launched the Belt and Road Initiative, which is very big and positive thing. Africa launched the African Continental Free Trade Area, which is a very important and positive development.

A fundamental change

Two points about fundamental change.  First, adding together the population of the United States (around 340 million) the European Union, and the United Kingdom - the North Atlantic world - we arrive at around 900 million people, just over 10% of the world's population. How can it be that 10% of the world today (where technology and internet are everywhere, where capabilities, including nuclear weapons, have spread to nine countries around the world, and so on) believe they rule the entire world?

How can anyone think that others don't have their own vision, their own power, their own ability to resist unilateral demands? This means living in an illusion in the Western world, in a context of political ignorance, where Washington, Brussels, London, Berlin, Paris still think they are the center of the world,

BRICS and SCO

Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa (BRICS) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) represent half the world's population and half the world's GDP. BRICS includes the five original members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, but now also Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the Emirates and Indonesia, a global group that extends from Brazil to China, thus encompassing Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Russia, and Asia.

And then the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), born as an Asian and Eurasian group, specifically East Asian and Eurasian, with China, Russia, India, Pakistan and four of the five Central Asian countries—Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan—to which Indonesia and several other partners have since been added. This is an Asian grouping, called the Asian NATO.

SCO and BRICS are very closely linked. They don't have an identical composition, but they have two fundamental realities in common.

First, they are the fastest-growing part of the world economy. Second, they don't want Donald Trump telling them what to do. And the best thing about this was said by Brazilian President Lula a few months ago: “We don't need an emperor”.

US, even today, in its delusion, is striving for hegemony. It's not propaganda, it's the declared policy of the United States,  it is called primacy, or, as the military puts it, full-spectrum dominance.

China's economy is already larger than the US's. China has much greater industrial capacity in many technologies. It will dominate the electric vehicle sector, the solar power generation, the zero-emission shipping, etc.

The colonial heritage

Somebody says: "Well, Europe exploited its colonies but at least spread its knowledge and science, and so on. In reality Europe did it, but  through empire, war, conquest, forced famine, and many other things that accompanied the European empire. It could have done it through trade, exchange, and decent human relations with other countries.

Today, the world is much more equal, of course, in terms of literacy, education, technology, and industrial capacity, even surpassing the Western world in some fields. And yet, the West still has the idea that it must preserve a Western-led world, but that phase is over.

And Americans find themselves  with one of the least competent presidents of the United States who was a real estate developer, without any training in geopolitical matters. Understanding global change requires something more.

It would be much better to worry about the national health system than to worry about governing the world after losing the empire. But that still exists, and the same goes for France. And God only knows what's going through Merz's mind in Germany. Europe continues to fight its illusions of its past centuries   well into the 21st century.

The idea that Russia's greatest goal in the world is to invade Western Europe is madness, such a blatant violation of any basic understanding of history that it's hard to believe any adult would say it, much less an adult in a position of responsibility.

Yet Europe is twisting itself around, completely pointlessly, because of fears that have no basis in reality, and those fears are not being allayed because  European leaders no longer understand. If they wanted to understand the other side, they could just pick up the phone, take a flight, invite a counterpart over for a coffee, and they would actually learn something.

Donald Trump

Ultimately, reality is a multipolar world.  The illusions remain those of Western dominance, and within that, of US dominance. That gap between reality and illusion is wide and extremely dangerous. Donald Trump illustrates this almost daily by issuing orders to the Chinese, Brazilians, Indians, or Russians. Literal orders. “You must have an unconditional ceasefire” he tells Russia. “You must stop a judicial process” he tells Brazil. “You must stop buying Russian oil” he tells India.

These aren't just demands expressed without diplomacy or intelligence, and he even publishes them in a social media post, demanding obedience from supposed vassals who in reality far outnumber the Americans. He tells them what to do every day, and then he has these completely ignorant, completely incompetent henchmen around him, who destroy any vestige of diplomacy.

President Truman needlessly dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and did so carelessly, but he was right when he said, "Ultimate responsibility lies with the president, and what we need is a presidency that works, that really works." And right now US doesn't have it. Every day the US is navigating by sight because inside the White House there isn't even the minimum level of knowledge necessary to understand what they're doing. Trump is reacting to  pressures by the neocons and  the military-industrial complex that has been rooted in the American system for 80 years. But in reality, a president's job is to say no! That's truly the president's job, and he's not doing it; he can't do it.

European Autocracies

In Spain, Vox, the far-right party, has 17% of the vote.  In Germany, too, the AFD party is the leading party in the polls. In France Macron,  grappling with the dilemma of whether to hold elections, after the government  fell ( and the National Front becomes the leading party according to the polls)  has imposed another minority government, given that the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic allows a government to be imposed without parliamentary confidence.

Then there's talk of autocracies because the tongue moves ( Aristophanes said) like a whirlpool, so it must have its own movement. That's the picture. One wonders why parties so obviously hostile to this pro-European philistine are so successful. They are so successful because the structure that has been put together over so many years, the so-called European Union, is a total failure that has only brought about hardship.

It brought hardship when it was imposed without a referendum the euro, which effectively halved the real value of wages in a few months, and it brought hardship because at a certain point EU decided to arm Ukraine at its own expense.

And this ultimately translates into concrete hardship. The sanctions against Russia have ruined agriculture,  have ruined the shopping baskets of ordinary people due to the price of energy. It's obvious that ordinary people who don't split hairs are wondering why they have to continue to suffer through all this.

And then there's this stupid formula of autocracies that's laughable. And just consider what the electoral systems of so-called democratic countries are like. For example, this madness where in Germany if you don't have at least 5% of the electorate, you don't even have a single elected representative.

So, to keep the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) party out of Parliament, they managed to get 4.9% of the vote.  It remained outside Parliament, and only in this way was Merz able to cobble together a government.

And then the cake on the icing: in an unprecedented decision, the Romanian Constitutional Court annulled the presidential elections due to suspected Russian interference in favor of the sovereignist Călin Georgescu, who came first in the first round. 

Autocracies are born from the rules they establish. Autocracy means a government of democratic countries that imposes itself against the will of the people. This means autocracy. So by using an electoral system that rewards those who are not in the majority in the country, an autocracy is created. There's little that can be done.

Let's add that Merz, after the miracle of kicking out a troublesome party from Parliament, one of the first things he said was ”We'll make the German army the most powerful army in Europe”.

Then he also said "Well done, Netanyahu, for doing our dirty work." Moreover Germany itself had amended its own Constitution with the old Parliament, so as to be able to invest a billion euros in weapons.

As for  the European Union. it hasn't declared war; it's not a state; individual member countries do that, and many of the European Union's member countries have participated in wars in Iraq,  Libya, in the bombing of Belgrade which was a terrorist war against Yugoslavia, with multiple effects. Moreover, the depleted uranium bombs that now fill the Adriatic Sea after that prank also caused serious illnesses among the soldiers who participated in that undertaking.

As for the infamous war on Iraq, it should be remembered - something that is never mentioned - that Ukraine was also part of the NATO-led coalition against Iraq in 2003. So Ukraine invaded Iraq because it is undoubtedly a fact, but obviously Western  newspapers, TV news, radio and so on were and are silent.

Is Russia a threat to Europe?

What are the assets, the material values that Russia might want from Europe? Mineral deposits? Uranium stockpiles? Natural gas deposits? Oil fields? Cultivable land? No, it is quite obvious that in all these things it is Europe that is lacking, in addition to being a net importer of the related products. Europe can only offer Russians vacation spots.

Russia has a territory of over 17 million square kilometres, the European Union as a whole is just  4 million square kilometres. So the Russian territory is more than 4 times that of the EU. The EU population density is 105 inhabitants per square kilometre, the Russian population density is 8 inhabitants per square kilometre. So Russia already has a significant problem in occupying its own territory.

Since when does a country with infinite land, comparatively few population, but colossal mineral and energy resources, want to conquer a territorially small, overpopulated and resourceless area? In fact, historically it has always been the opposite: Western Europe has repeatedly tried to conquer the Russian East, according to the iron geopolitical logic by which areas with a high population density, and few resources seek to expand into areas with a low population density and vast resources.

Is European rearmament perhaps necessary because Russian military spending is aggressively superior to that of Europe? Europe is currently spending 38% more on armaments than the Russian Federation. And Europe has approved to double its rearmament in the next few years.

So, if EU is still truly worried about the threat of war represented by a possible Russian aggression, what attitude would be advisable? There is a universal rule in relations between countries, and that is that the best guarantee of security is provided by shared interests: if you have interests, investments, supplies in a country, you have a fundamental disincentive to jeopardize all of this with a war.

Therefore, if the European leaders wanted to reduce the danger of a Russian threat, the way to achieve this is very easy: remove sanctions, reopen trade and investments, reopen the North Stream 2. Suddenly the reasons for a conflict would decrease vertically, and simultaneously, with low-cost raw materials and energy resources, the European capacity to supply goods of interest to the rest of the world (including Russia) would increase.

Given that on the geopolitical level the EU would have reasons to attack Russia, while Russia has no reasons to attack Europe, the EU strategy of:

a) increasing military spending explicitly oriented towards anti-Russian function

b) maintaining sanctions and permanent blockade of trade relations with Russia

represents precisely the most effective strategy to maximize the risks of a conflict.

In the name of security needs Europe is thus increasing insecurity.

Conclusion

With the impending global shift in power from the West to Asia, particularly China and India, the world is entering a new era where Asia's economic, population, and military power will surpass that of North America and Europe combined, requiring new strategies for global cooperation on issues like climate change and trade. Russia's role in this changing landscape is also a factor.

The recent meeting in China between Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has garnered global attention. People see this meeting as more than just a normal diplomatic photo op. They see it as a strong protest against US domination in the world and a brave step towards de-dollarization. It had a lot of meanings and symbols, but the effects go even deeper and affect economies, regions, and countries around the world. This suggests that the world may finally be changing from a unipolar one after the Cold War to a truly multipolar one.

For Washington, this trilateral summit is a wake-up call. US attempts to isolate Russia, contain China, and draw India firmly into its orbit did not work. The broader narrative of multipolarity is gaining legitimacy. With the three Eurasian giants openly calling for “a new global order” and backing it with institutional proposals, Washington faces the reality that its dominance has faded.