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).

The progress they have made towards their goal is impressive, even allowing for its likely initiation as long ago as 1945.  They have bought the parties of government all across the West, installing the Jewish-authored politics of hyper-individualism + immigrationism + anti-racism + economism on the right and the Jewish-authored politics of radical equalitarianism + immigrationism + anti-racism + economism on the left, and brought the two together on a faux centre-ground that neatly excludes everything Europeans actually want.  They have created a gigantic internationalist and, latterly, technocratic structure which hands down policies to governments.  They have re-made China as the future economic superpower and, latterly, as the world’s first technate.  They have bought holdings in all the western corporations, including media corporations, and imposed their agenda via future-funding conditions.  And so on.  It’s a staggeringly vast project, but it’s not enough.  They have to fashion this shift to geo-economics both so the global south can be ushered in but also to bind the political hands of China and Russia.

The western elites’ method to date has been a somewhat hectoring policy engagement, but not through the traditional means of inter-state diplomacy (which only further humiliaties).  Rather, the international agencies and the foreign aid industry constitute a technocratic layer attaching funding to “good governance” of the nation states of the south, and “good governance” to slipstreaming the western geo-economic or, more pertinently in this case, anti-political system.  But, of course, local leaders are not unaware that the western elites gain a controlling stake in their countries’ civil societies over their heads, or that their own way of doing things, which is a way of power, brute if necessary, is what is really under attack.

For a long time it seemed that this must work.  If the inaugural meeting of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) at Yekaterinburg on June 16th, 2009, and the subsequent formalisation of the group the following year, rang any alarm bells they did not ring very loudly.  But then, BRIC’s initial centre of gravity was economic.  The stated objective was an increase in share of global trade.  If there were other ambitions in Moscow or Beijing they were not being forcefully advanced.  Under the known quantity of Hu Jintao, Chinese “peaceful development” was pursued with soft-power in international relations.  Everything was very business-like - a tenor established four decades earlier in Deng’s time.  The western elites saw what they wanted to see, and did not enquire further.

Meanwhile Putin was still Putin, of course, busying himself with killing people in the Caucasus.  But then his Ukrainian puppets – first Leonid Kuchma then Viktor Yanukovych - repeatedly lost control of their Moscow-designated satrap, leading via two popular revolutions to a military reaction in the form of the FSB-fomented war in the Donbas, begun on 12th April, 2014.  Still western elites said and did very little.  One might reasonably conclude that if they had not already lost it earlier, they lost the war for their Globality then.  It must have been becoming clear to them that Putin was executing an imperialist strategy, both as an assertive response to western globalism but also as an acknowledgement that if the future hegemon is to be a China absolutely bent on imposing its will upon the world, then Russia must possess sufficient geopolitical mass to stand as itself.

By now, in Xi Jinping China had a new leader who broke with the old model of cautious and veiled discourse.  By 2015 the first signs of what would become known as Wolf Warrior Diplomacy were emerging, particularly in defence of Beijing’s intentions in Hong Kong.  Confrontational and combative, it is part of Xi’s foreign policy strategy “Major Country Diplomacy”, which has step-changed China’s role on the world stage, even to the extent of engaging in an open ideological struggle with the West.

Where this is all heading is certainly not unknown in Washington.  The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission was set up to report on it periodically to Congress.  Part at least of the December 2020 report is available online, and all the following excerpts are from the second part of the first chapter titled, The China Model: Return of the Middle Kingdom.  They are written in restrained, institutional language, from which you may infer that the full implications of each statement are as bad as one might suspect.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks to revise the international order to be more amenable to its own interests and authoritarian governance system. It desires for other countries not only to acquiesce to its prerogatives but also to acknowledge what it perceives as China’s rightful place at the top of a new hierarchical world order.

page 80-

Reclaiming what Chinese leaders view as China’s rightful place, the “Middle Kingdom” (the literal translation of Chinese word for China) at the center of world affairs, would fulfill the CCP’s promise to the Chinese people to restore their past glory—a key pillar of the Party’s legitimacy. Beijing’s ambition places China at the top of the international order, able to freely exploit the markets, resources, and networks of others. At the same time, Beijing seeks to constrain the ability of others to influence its behavior or access what it controls.

- page 85

Contrary to the post-World War II international system, the CCP desires a new framework that requires other countries to defer to its own economic, security, and political interests, creating a dynamic in which China’s power and interests take precedence over rules.

... Also key to the CCP’s model is the goal of legitimizing the use of coercion to interfere in other countries’ politics and to engineer consent for its policies, contrary to accepted practice and its own claims of noninterference.

- page 86

It is through the “community of common human destiny” that the CCP will finally secure what General Secretary Xi has called “the ultimate demise of capitalism and the ultimate victory of socialism,” and he has ordered CCP cadres to be faithful and to be prepared to make sacrifices to achieve this goal.

... It also makes the case that other countries should join it in rejecting the liberal democracy-dominated international order because this China-centric governance system presents an equally if not more viable option and will not expect them to liberalize or protect human rights.

- page 86

The “Community of Common Human Destiny”: China-Centric Global Governance

Beijing’s ideological framework for its global leadership ambitions is loosely drawn from what both CCP officials and Chinese academics view as China’s rich philosophical and historical traditions combined with elements of the CCP’s Marxist-Leninist system. Regardless of specific terminology, the highest levels of CCP leadership explicitly endorse basing modern Chinese governance on its ancient heritage.

...Tianxia is a term to describe the historical view of a hierarchical international system characterized not by rules and borders but by China’s central role and the moral authority of the leaders in Beijing over other power centers, which complements the CCP’s Marxist-Leninist view of itself as the elite vanguard. As a proposed global governance concept, the “community of common human destiny” is based on the assumption that China’s development and the world’s development are interdependent and that the Party should be the primary force guiding this symbiosis.

- page 87

Crucially, Beijing is not advocating simply for its perspective to be more influential, but rather for it to be effectively the only perspective that matters, as is the case within China. The CCP’s discourse power depends on its ability to make international narratives converge with its own, drowning out or silencing dissenting narratives. For example, Chinese officials frequently urge other countries to refrain from criticizing China and to adopt the “correct” or “proper” view of China and their relationship with it.

- page 88

The international norm of sovereignty determines that with very few exceptions, states are inviolable as individuals, but the “community of common human destiny” seeks to replace this system with a theory of international relations purporting to treat the world as a single integrated society under Beijing’s guidance. Just as Beijing’s interpretation of human rights prioritizes collective development over the rights of individuals, the “community of common human destiny” would subsume the agency and interests of individual countries to the goal of collective harmony on China’s terms. If the CCP succeeds in normalizing its views of governance, individual rights, and economic exchanges, the result could fundamentally undermine these rights in a large swath of countries (including the United States and its allies and partners) and intensify the United States and democratic countries’ current ideological competition with the CCP.

- page 113

The report states that China-as-hegemon does not intend to dispel or weaken the existing structure of internationalism but to fit it to its goals.  That structure is the delivery mechanism for technocracy, and the unavoidable implication is therefore that Beijing will re-form and exploit the mechanism to its own ends, as it inevitably will given that it is the world’s first technocratic state.  In such a light Putin emerges as more realistic about China than ever the western elites were as they freed the country from its chains of Maoism and isolation, and vested it with western manufacturing, technology and intellectual property.  The answer to the question “what were they thinking” is that they were thinking with ineffable complacency only of themselves.  Putin’s imperialist war-mongering, his model of empires, his and Xi’s socialism of the masses, his and Xi’s BRICS+ strategy, and the Middle-Kingdom’s “community of common human destiny” all constitute the one fiery riposte that geo-economics cannot buy off ... the lust for power in perpetuity.

It might be too early to write off the western elite’s geo-economic model.  Russia might be humiliated by Ukraine.  Putin might be assassinated by his own circle of Siloviki (or “men of force”).  China’s drive for global dominion might be blunted for a time by a reinvigorated America, even under Trump.  To one degree or another these things are all possible.  But short of such a miracle, it is now beginning to look like Götterdämmerung for the vainglorious class which deigned to destroy our world, and who for their hubris will now see it, as well as themselves, destroyed by an Other.