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Trump in an age of innocence, when a deal would be done in a day.

“Peace” is a versatile concept.  It has a spiritual context, of course, and a funereal and memorial one.  Then since the sixties it has had a vee-signed, marijuana-driven usage originally followed by the word “man” but these days by “bro”, which more or less sums up the depth of consideration thus far given it by Donald Trump.

Not everyone on the international stage is so blasé.  The honest ones, of whom there are far too few, employ it in the proper humanistic sense of a just deliverance from conflict into a longed-for and enduring state of safety and such concord as is possible when the guns have fallen silent but there is still a lot of hatred in the air.  As the hatred subsides so the meaning of peace matures into the one given generally to civic life in times of ease and gentility, which is only what all peoples expect and deserve from life.

But there are individuals in the charmed circles of power … liars and ambitious men, “men of force” ... who hold the expectations of the common man in contempt, and who talk of peace as something quite other than his expectation.  Their meanings tend to be party to the same struggle as the wars they also engage in when they can.  Thus in the Kremlin’s case peace is as much a weapon as any rocket or gun:

During a telephone conversation with US President Donald Trump on March 18, Russian leader Vladimir Putin put forward a number of conditions for the introduction of a 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine. In particular, to stop mobilization in Ukraine and the rearmament of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Kremlin reported.

Trump seems to have been blissfully unaware that Putin’s peace is not at all a shallow and instant thing like his.  It is ideological, public, formal, structured, and purposive.  Its purpose is the expansion of Russia:

“Russkiy Mir” is a Russian quasi-ideology aimed at the expansion of influence abroad and uniting the states considered by the Kremlin as its backyard on the basis of Russian language common history in the Moscow’s perception and Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). As a political concept it gained some importance in 2000s, particularly after Vladimir Putin started using it in his public speeches, making an appeal to the “compatriots” abroad.
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With “Russkiy Mir” Putin’s Russia attempts to establish itself as a civilization-forming state and as a leading geopolitical actor.
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It is also worth mentioning that as the concept, first of all, serves political interests of the Russian authorities, it is populist and adaptive. In such a way under the umbrella of “Russkiy Mir” a number of cultural and historical narratives are united, even though they initially may seem to have no relation to it. Still, in the end, rewriting history with the focus on whitewashing the image of USSR, appropriating the victory over Nazism, labeling every attempt to critically evaluate history as “fascist” also work in favor of “Russkiy Mir”. Putin’s Russia grants itself with the messianic title of the vanquisher of absolute evil – and with the opportunity to fight against what it considers fascism again. Systemic cultural appropriation also adds to the picture. It enables the portrayal of formerly colonized states as having a poor culture, with is partially appropriated and partially discredited, while “Russkiy Mir” is pictured as a culturally rich opposite. The Kremlin consistently discredits pro-democratic policies in target societies, employing disinformation and promotion of destructive narratives, then attempting to offer “Russkiy Mir” as an appealing alternative to such policies.

This is the “peace” which, within the framework of Russia’s war on the Ukrainian people’s will to independence and autonomy, is Vladimir Putin’s guiding light.  Even allowing that the Americans are providing him with a helping hand, nothing Donald Trump can say would steer him away from it.  But does Trump want to say anything anyway?  What evidence is there that he and his government are moved to defend the all too western moralities of the post-1945 settlement?  His denial last week of intelligence and satellite imagery to the Ukrainian military – shocking in its suddenness and effect – was perfectly timed for the Russian and North Korean push in Kursk.  It removed Zelensky’s hard-won bargaining chip and cost hundreds of Ukrainian lives.  Taken with the shameful staged assault on the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office it speaks of “right-wing” America’s near-total moral collapse.

It was on display again in Tuesday’s 90 minute telephone call between Trump and Putin, summarised thus by David Blair in the Telegraph:

Putin has played his familiar trick of agreeing to something that binds Ukraine’s hands much more tightly than his own.

But the relative lack of substance in the readout must itself raise suspicions. Two presidents do not need to talk for 90 minutes to serve up the thin gruel in the public account of their call. What else did Mr Trump and Putin discuss and what private agreements might they have made? Ukraine and the rest of Europe are not party to these talks: they can only guess at what could be happening behind the scenes.

The only certainty is that the dismal pattern whereby Putin concedes nothing and offers nothing, while Trump declines to respond with any hint of steel, remains the order of the day.

If the Americans continue in this vein, disavowing any firm, suppressive action to raise the ante against Russia, one will have to conclude that they, too, mouth words of peace when they really only mean conquest, and do so because they believe that the global contest of power requires such immorality.

In that belief Donald Trump’s America will have friends besides Putin: others with visions of a similarly “peaceful” dominion.  For example, as a counterpoint to Putin’s Russkiy mir, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government are advancing the doctrine of Mavi Vatan.  Should Putin achieve his maximalist aims in Ukraine one then waits to see if Viktor Orban can pull together an integralist cohort from among Hungary’s six other neighbours in Middle Europe and the Balkans.  I think it quite likely, given the level of pro-Russian sentiment there, as well as the desire to annex parts of Ukraine that Putin may deign to gift them for the purpose of dividing Europe.  I think humanity is moving ... being pushed, actually ... ever further from the nationalist desideratum of an age of the people’s will, which is a will to peace, yes, but not at the cost of national dissolution and foreign dominion.  It is doing so because it is moving further from democratisation’s fatal, very 20th century transformation of that people into a bloodless demos, a mere electorate governed by a permanent political class.  We are moving once again into an age when “greatness” is sought among the nations of men; but it is a greatness expressed in power over other nations when power is the possession of an untouchable and imperial, authoritarian few.

If that view of the historical process is wrong then we should now see Donald Trump understand the complete humiliation he has suffered at Putin’s hands.  Being useful to Putin only makes him Putin’s idiot - an idiot whom Putin is, of course, pleased to parade before the dictators and big men of the southern hemisphere.  The situation has clarified, perhaps even for Trump.  The debasement of America is fundamental to Putin and Xi’s global Great Game, and no American president can play it and win.  American greatness will not come via American humiliation, but Putin’s and Xi’s greatness will.  They know it, and they will not be separated in their pursuit of it.  Trump’s vanity alone ought to provoke the necessary reaction.  We should then see him double-down on his determination that peace shall prevail, but only if he switches tack to bring Putin to heel before turning to face Xi’s challenge in the Pacific.  That means a full-hearted and massive re-arming of the Ukrainians with the best equipment the American arsenal possesses.  Then, perhaps, another kind of negotiation will be possible.

But, of course, for that to become a reality Trump and his administration must grasp that Ukraine’s strength is America’s strength, and it is first and foremost a moral strength.

It would be charitable to conclude that the 45th and 47th president of the United States of America is a regular if inordinately successful guy and a great and fearless patriot with an instinct for the wants and interests of the common man.  OK, he’s not a very subtle person.  He can deliver himself of some quite surprising, not to say shocking, public statements.  His dedication to the security of Israel is fawning and slavish if politically necessary, probably.  But he’s the first US president in decades to speak the language of ordinary Americans.  So in the vernacular, cut the guy some slack while he blows away the whole friggin’ mess that is Dems in federal government, right?

But with Trump we are not just talking about pulling down the progressive order in federal government.  He is seeking a new order internationally as well as domestically.  It turns out that his new international order has nothing to do with “peace”, and is not directly concerned with Ukraine at all.  It turns out that his vaunted economic nationalism, always assumed to be just a domestic, blue-collar cause, is also economic imperialism.  It is, from a Russian imperialist perspective, also an opportunity to throw Trump a hydro-carbon or two to bind him to his and Xi’s grand strategy, and not the other way round.  Which would make this less Nixon and Mao than Molotov and Ribbentrop, with Putin playing the role of Ribbentrop.  As of today Beijing is plainly betting on that, because it has given its support to the “negotiations”.

The big reveal

From Day 1 of his second term the reborn Donald Trump has been pursuing a politics for the world which, it seems, none outside his own circle in the Republican Party saw coming, and very few if any have fully grasped even now.  This politics has three broad goals:

i) To put a stop to the decades of progressive marxisation and malaise in American life, especially economically, and thereby to ring in a new dawn of American power, prestige, and prosperity.

ii) To force the European states to address their post-Berlin Wall political, moral, and fiscal decadence and weakness, so that they may shift from that same destructive trajectory of mass immigration and marxisation to one of political self-rediscovery and self-preservation (crucially, the “self” here being the state, not the natives of the state).

Thus freeing Washington to pivot towards ...

iii) Ending China’s long march towards global military, economic, and political hegemony, principally by confronting it in the Indo-Pacific Ocean.

The start-point for the Trump administration is Ukraine.  Hence the unwelcome energy with which it has distanced itself from the expectations of the European democracies and NATO, while showering Putin with outrageous largesse under the rubric of peace negotiations.  It was the big reveal.  The deceit and childishness which has characterised the campaigns of Trump and Musk against the Ukrainians is pure theatre, but in the scheme of things they’re nothing more important than positioning.  Ukraine itself is not important except as a bargaining chip, its sacrifice a clear signal to Putin that he could even create his fourth Russian empire in the West if he can defeat the Europeans and keep the American military quiet.  BUT ... he can’t have his new world order with himself and Beijing at the apex.  America will remain the hegemon in a force-based Glazyevian system of empires.  The post-war rules-based order is dead.  Starmer’s love object of international law is without a point.  Democracy is no longer the international standard for good and just government.  A force-based system doesn’t have to care about good or justice.  It’s just the wrong metric.  NATO, meanwhile, will be left without the American guarantee, which effectively guts it and leaves Europe militarily defenceless.  Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference now makes perfect sense, warning the European political elites that their three decades of spending the so-called peace dividend on weak and sickly liberal-universalist causes has to change, and change now.  Virtue signalling elitism is done for.  Universalism has drained European politics of all moral authority.  The old values will have to be rediscovered if self-defence is to mean anything or to have any hope of success on a future battlefield.

Likewise, Trump’s alarming expansionist talk about annexing Canada and Greenland, and sending the military to take control of the Panama Canal, also now makes sense.  The global order of an empire of empires isn’t a fanciful confection of a few Russian dreamers like Glazyev.  It is the alternative order to the west’s model, and as the once and future hegemon America, too, must have its empire, albeit principally an empire of corporate expansion.  Nixon’s week in China also had a pay-off for corporate America (if at a terrible cost to the American working man).  Eventually it led via neoliberalism to the Davosian technocracy we encounter today.  The Trump administration, mindful that it is weaker than the people and must maintain the institutions of democracy, will hope that Americans actually benefit this time.  But any such good will be incidental.  The politics are fatally vested in the maintenance of American corporate and hegemonic power, not in Americans per se.  Trump is not a real nationalist.  The Republican Party cannot encompass real nationalism because the liberal project which is America is wholly antithetical to it.

Further, the eastern imperial model is oligarchic and elitist, intending state dictate and socialism for the masses of the world.  It is also worth emphasising that it does not at all preclude the Davos corporate and financial elites from its Great Game.  The dissenting right, in its lumpen way, has assumed that Davos is western, and its globalism with it.  No, it is only the politicians who are western.  The rest is worldwide because the Money Power behind it is worldwide.  With the one exception of Israel, it will adapt itself to any polity provided racial universalism obtains or could obtain therein.

All that said, there are points of potential push-back against the Trump agenda. Ukrainian fighters for one (the Ukrainian media is already relaying intelligence reports that Putin plans to announce his victory over NATO on the 24th February anniversary of his invasion).  American voters for another.  Resistance in the established order for another, and from anyone else who does not relish a political betrayal which benefits the murderers of Moscow.  Perhaps the Russophile civic nationalists in Germany and elsewhere will not be able to show their faces once Moscow’s gaze falls on Ukraine’s fellow Europeans to the north and west; and we might get some real nationalism in Europe.

The full complexity of east-west relations according to Western reactionary opinion

There are times when the absence of an ethnic nationalist worldview in those who proclaim themselves nationalist (but not specifically, say, National Socialist, or traditionalist, or fascist) really limits communication.  What, after all, is our common frame of reference?  David Lane’s minimalist Fourteen Words accurately summarise the existential essence of all nationalism.  But the formulation is reductive, and can in no way function as an holistic ideology functions, ie, it cannot situate us in a pre-existing, broad-scale system of life-affirming truth by which a people may orient itself in Time and Space.  It is because of the systemic nature of an (actually very rare) epochal philosophy that it can, first, unify a political constituency and, second, energise a mass re-organisation.

But we do not possess that philosophy today.  We are, in consequence, caught in a pre-revolutionary cycle that cannot complete.  We have no unifying ideological standard around which to rally.  Along comes a large but perfectly uncomplicated political question, and we lack the framework to determine where justice lies.

Today such a question is: Do the people of Ukraine have a right to fight the violent imposition of Russian empire, and to struggle for national autonomy?  No ethnic nationalist should have a moment’s difficulty answering that.  But, instead, a substantial majority have lost their heads completely in contemplation of a second question: How dare America and the West challenge Russia’s security needs?  Of course it is a false question.  A need for expansion is not a need for security.  The theft of natural resources, farming produce, and even children is not a requirement for the creation of buffer zones.  It speaks of ancient tribute.  But Muscovy is an empire with an origin in its own payment of tribute to the Asiatic aggressor, and thus even into our time it has remained an empire with an historical culture of entitlement to further empire, and the wealth thereof.  That, not security, is the well-spring of Russian foreign policy.

Explaining this to the holders of “right-wing opinions” is a challenge.  Indeed, it feels like I’ve been challenging the dominant and reactionary pro-Russian sentiment and anti-American prejudice of on-line nationalists and trad-cons since the very first jolt forward of the first T72 in Vladimir Putin’s fateful full-scale invasion of 24th February 2022.  They don’t like it.  They don’t listen.  Their judgement is overwhelmed by anger at the globalist machinations of the Western hierarchy, and they don’t look any further.

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What does it mean when a mind which can only conceive of economics, which only desires and schemes and labours for an empire of economics and a social order constructed solely upon economics … what does it mean when that mind is confronted by another, with an implacable will to violence and power?

Perhaps not in America so much, but on this side of the pond the message now seems to be filtering into the mainstream media:

... the democratic world needs to confront its own deficiencies if 2024 is to prove more successful than 2023. Chief among them is a tendency to prioritise the short term and to neglect vital matters such as defence spending and military-industrial production capacity. Countries like Britain will also have to be more confident about adopting a more assertive international role if other powers step back.

Over the past few years, the Government has made a good start, leading from the front in the early days of the Ukraine invasion, and signing innovative new partnerships such as the Aukus pact. But the time for complacency is over.

The sixth Jewish–Arab War and Iran’s Houthi rebels aside, it is - very obviously – the war in Ukraine which has generated this naval-gazing among the political and chattering classes of the West.  It’s not that Putin’s Russia is especially strong.  To put it mildly, its military has been unexpectedly average in Ukraine, certainly in offensive terms.  It has only really excelled at missiling train stations, markets, and maternity hospitals.  As an occupying force it has proven adept at stealing children – a crime against humanity for which the international court has issued an arrest warrant for “the chief” himself.  Diplomatically, his best friends are the mullahs in Tehran, the dear leader in North Korea, and Hamas.  Which speaks for itself.  Politically, the Russian state is under the spotlight in a way it never was in the prior thirty years of its kleptocratic existence.  It is revealed to be the worst kind of police state – indeed, an autocracy sustained by routine repression and lies, corrupt courts, and extra-judicial murders. 

The economy’s performance under sanctions has been better than expected in the west.  But we shouldn’t kid ourselves, or believe the Federal Treasury stats.  It’s no triumph to lose western markets and to be forced to flog cut price energy to India and China.  At a time when Russian airlines can’t keep planes in the sky for want of spare parts, and over a million of Russia’s brightest and best have fled abroad to avoid a meaningless death in an unwanted foreign war, government has just sanctioned “grey market imports” (ie. smuggling).  Now, with the announcement of a military spend for the next financial year of 6% of GDP, the chief has been forced to move the economy onto a war footing.  The last but one Russian value, which economics must serve, is thereby exposed.  It is power demonstrated by violence (for power without demonstration does not know itself, and those who have no power of their own cannot know it).  Only the chief’s position and reputation are more fundamental to the national condition.

No, it’s not that Russia is a force to be reckoned with, or even that a Russian geopolitical strategy must necessarily be a danger in itself, if contained within certain operational bounds.  Rather, it’s the too solid fact of the unbounded Russian value of power demonstrated by violence which is causing sleepless nights in the financial and governmental capitals of the West.  Why?  Because key to the western elites’ path to the future is a gentle and graceful relinquishment of American monopolarity and even of the dollar’s reserve status.  They have to transcend the politics of nation statehood, which is simply the wrong interest-base and a restraint on the global vision itself.  In its place they seek to drive forward their desired Re-Set not via the power principle, which is too costly and unpredictable for their taste, but via the money principle.  More precisely, they want to lever economic power as it exists today into geo-economics ... a singular and universal but, of course, immane system for the perpetual ascendency of the financial class (upon whom the whole western elite structure parasites and attends).

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Three Russian dolls and one other emerging but not yet not fully in view.

We mere citizens of the West, we voters for the Uniparty, we victims of propaganda do not get to hear the words spoken in the highest geo-strategic reaches of the US State Department, or in the Pentagon, or in the CIA, much less in the rival bodies in Moscow and Beijing.  What trickles out of the mouths of presidents and ministers is the usual finessed, platitudinous semaphore by which vast power structures publicly communicate with one another.  Sometimes a “government source” or someone “close to such-and-such” will add vital context, on or off the record, which is presumably then pored over by analysts a world away.  But precious little of the resultant analysis ever reaches the mass of Americans or Russians or Chinese.  Every leader’s statecraft and long and short-term geopolitical strategies are locked away in the black box that is government.  Basically, the masses are only required to think one simple thing at a time.  We must support our leaders in “difficult” (ie, costly) decisions.  We are to be compliant workers and consumers.  Under no circumstances are we to make domestic difficulties.

If opacity is necessary in certain (obvious) respects, nonetheless it is a primary cause of the fine mess which is “right-wing” opinion on Moscow’s war in Ukraine.  Many, many people still operate from the mechanical assumption that, no matter how inhuman the Russian military’s deeds, “the West” … meaning Washington + NATO …  is the real evil-doer in this world.  So Moscow gets a free pass.  Scarcely anyone troubles to analyse the geopolitics.  Russia as an historical geopolitical dynamic … expansionist Russia, therefore … the Russia which has bloody borders, and whose small neighbours can never be entirely safe … that Russia goes unexamined while the past excesses of American power are held up for ritual condemnation and blamed for everything.  It’s a wilful blindness.

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Bakhmut under fire [Daily Aviation]

As anyone who isn’t a Stone Age, bone-in-the-nose, bow-and-arrow tribesman in some patch of the Andamans must now know, last Friday was the anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s misconceived 3-day conquest of Ukraine.  By a year ago on Saturday the Spetznaz squads roaming Kiev were meant to have decapitated the government.  By a year ago yesterday the designated Putin puppet was meant to have made the short flight from Minsk to Hostomel for the drive through cheering crowds to the city centre for his victory broadcast from the president’s office.  Putin’s masterly use of surprise would be taught at military colleges for generations.

Where we are, instead, has been summed up by countless opinion pieces across what, in military speak, is now called “the information space”.  One pithy and accurate piece was published on Friday’s anniversary at Geopolitical Monitor by occasional contributor Nicholas Velasquez.

He summed up the current disposition at the front in a single sentence:

The stockpile phase of the Russo-Ukraine war has ended and it is clear that the conflict is now attrition based.

The stockpile, it should be noted, was always expected to be the likely deliverer of Russian victory.  Western military specialists spoke from the beginning about the several million shells and deep stores of missiles of all kinds available to the invader.  After Kiev, when the Russian command’s focus was scaled back to the east, Russian shell consumption was estimated during the successful artillery battles for Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk at 20,000 shells a day.  But, ultimately, the stockpile was not deep enough.  The old Soviet artillery strategy of soaking the ground, allied to the widespread employment of missiles on civilian targets, has resulted in shell starvation and reliance on ageing and non-optimal missiles plus the forty or so that Russian manufacturers can actually produce each month.  The result is the switch to attrition (which is, of course, also a traditional Russian military strategy).

Accordingly, the world waited for the grand offensive to begin, and Russian numbers to overwhelm the defenders.  It now transpires that it did, in fact, begin about a fortnight ago, which one can see in the jump in Russian dead reported by the defenders.  Of course the losses render the generation of the required mass much slower than intended.  Yes, there is a build up, and pressure is increasing on the defenders entrenched in and around Bakhmut.  But so far meaningful advances remain elusive, in part surely because the dead tend to be experienced soldiers while their replacements are green mobiks who are not particularly sure why they are fighting.  Western media are reporting that Putin “is considering” mobilising another 500,000 men.  But his army doesn’t have the capacity to train that number for an offensive operation in much under a year.  It also doesn’t have the hardware to support them.  All it can do is to continue the same asymmetrical attritional process and hope that an exhausted West is driven to, in turn, drive the Ukrainians to the negotiating table.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are able to hold on so far, and are organising for an offensive when Western weapon and ammunition supplies allow – thought to be late spring/early summer, when the spring rains, the rasputitsa, are over and the ground is baked hard.  Their language is of a victory before winter comes again in which case, if it holds now, the fortress of Bakhmut will have survived more than a year under siege.  Unsurprisingly, this prospect is concentrating minds in Europe’s capitals and in the Kremlin about the consequences of defeat for Russia.  In his GM article Velasquez lays out what is at stake:

If the West, led by the United States, supports a peace deal where Russia gets even a mile of land in Eastern Ukraine, it sends a message to authoritarian regimes with designs on foreign lands that they can seize land by force of arms with impunity so long as the invaded state acquiesces. If the United States supports any peace settlement featuring any territorial concession it will serve as a tacit acknowledgment that the post-World War Two international order is dead.

… with the consequence that ...

Though international peace and stability should always be the object of the security policy of the West and the United States, peace in it of itself is not a noble aspiration if it can produce a world where malign states may wage war on their weaker neighbors with impunity. The Western states, as the primary architects of the rules-based international order, are responsible for its maintenance. As a result, the West must ensure that Russia’s revisionist aspirations are defeated in Ukraine and at the negotiating table.

All that is true enough.  However, I do think it stops short of the real motivation of Washington, which is to defend not the rules-based order per se but the Western investor, central banking and corporate elites’ geo-economic model for the Globality.  In that respect, internationally recognised legal restraints on the ambitions and predations of military powers are a fundamental precondition (not, of course, through any intent on the part of the Allies after WW2, but certainly by the effect of those restraints today).  Why, because the Western elites have to escape the limitations of “the West” in order to become the economic masters of the whole globe.  So Washington - the political arm of those elites - must re-engineer all the machinery of its own global hegemony in a multipolar environment secured by every other national elite consenting to leave the conflicts of history and borders behind forever.  At least that’s the expectation.  But, as stated on several MR threads, there are two other models for the Globality in play, and both are geopolitical in kind.  One, sometimes denied, subtly hidden from the historical light, is the CCP’s.  The other is Putin’s eurasianist model.  A nightmare of only superficially economic blocs, each ruled over by a single militarily dominant force, it is the polar opposite of the Western elites’ idea and an absolute challenge to the rules-based order.  The war in Ukraine is precisely a battle, and probably the final battle, in the existential conflict of these two models.  Defeat will be terminal for one of them, and it will be the Russian one.

As Velasquez puts it:

Putin, though a liar on most issues, is correct to fear that the West wants to “inflict a strategic defeat” on Russia. The West should inflict a strategic defeat on Russia that echoes throughout the Russian decision-making apparatus, such that it changes Moscow’s strategic culture from here on out.

In other words, while Russia’s future is without doubt as a part of the international architecture, perhaps even sharing in China’s economic hegemony, in military defeat there can be no eurasianism, none of the imperial adventurism, land grabs, frozen conflicts, and satrapy of old.  It is likely that Russia will be stripped of Kaliningrad and Transnistria, and Crimea too, if the Ukrainians do not take it themselves.  Across the southern republics borders will be re-drawn.  For the first time in four and half centuries Muscovy must find sufficiency in the peoples and the immensity of its own landmass.

That being so, only one question remains for the Western elites to ponder: can they really constrain Chinese ambitions, particularly in the southern hemisphere, within a geo-economic globalist corset?  In essence, is the very idea of a multipolar world an impossibility and a blind denial of the nature of men?

There is a tendency for prominent politicians, central bankers, and other panjandrums of Western public life, inevitably men and women of a globalist bent, to refer to their coming global order not only as an historical inevitability ... the product of vast and insuperable forces ... but also as a struggle fraught with the possibility of tragic failure.  There is a sizeable “if” about the whole idea.  Notwithstanding their measureless power, these people worry that The Globality may, in fact, prove elusive.  What can this mean?

After all, there is no resistance anywhere in the West to their project.  The democratic process is a captive or, if it cannot be captured it is ignored or, if it cannot be ignored, it is repeated until the “right” answer comes back.  The main political parties were long since captured, the political class corrupted.  All offer the same narrow policy platform.  The dateline corporations are on board (despite reservations in some cases).  The astonishing technologies which are developing in computer science and the life sciences are being successfully piggybacked.  Thus the means to impose control through a digital currency, be it linked to a health passport or not, already exists.  The means to permanently surveil the movements, purchases and public statements of the population exists.  The utilisation of the dicta of Sustainable Development to cover nitrogen and methane, and so meat production, thereby “requiring” the expropriation of farmland and the forcing on the “useless eaters” of no doubt highly profitable non-meat substitutes, is coming into effect already in certain pilot countries.  It is true that the wired trans-human is still more science fiction than reality, as is the end of ageing.  But other programmes are more advanced, and not a few fully realised.  So with all this rolling along nicely, why do our glorious elites speak with such uncharacteristic diffidence?

Our glorious elites speak with such uncharacteristic diffidence because they cannot be certain of the compliance of their non-Western counterparts.  Specifically, they fear that:

(a) The ambitions of non-Western leaders remain stubbornly within the old limits of personal and national aggrandisement.

(b) The Western elites and their technocratic framework are perceived to be foisting yet more arrogant and grasping post-colonial dictate on southern hemisphere nations.  “Arrogant” and “grasping” the elites probably don’t mind too much.  But “post-colonial” hits a nerve.  Theirs is, after all, just another control system originating in the West.

It is the first of these fears, however, which is most disruptive, and which has brought the Western elites into open and existential conflict with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

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Given that the West is saddled with a tradition of freedom and democracy (which its elites want to retire, of course, but never mind for now), and given that a Sino-Russian global hegemony is the end-game of the Ukraine adventure, should we not look into the Eurasian face, mindful of its natural affinity for authoritarianism and conformism, and ask the final question:

Would it be easier for us to fight for our people’s life and land in a Western hegemonic system or in a socialist system under the tutelage of, principally, China, with input from Russia, India, and Iran, if these are indeed the alternatives?