The Ukraine conflict is opening up debates about the current and future nature of the international system. Led by the US, Western countries frequently claim thar Russia’s military operation threatens the global “rules based order”. Hence, they do acknowledge that a profound change is taking place.
Others meanwhile claim the rise of a new, multipolar world order. This argument finds supporters all around the world outside its Western parts.
The Initiative on a New International Order (NINTO), inaugurated last year by the International Relations Bureau of the Turkish Vatan Party, has held an international online conference on May 7, dealing with this topic. The conferences title was: “The construction of a new world in the context of the Ukrainian military operation led by Russia”.
The following questions were discussed among others:
- What is the rationale behind the expansion of NATO towards the East?
- Which countries is NATO threatening?
- Does the Ukrainian crisis reflect a conflict between Russia and Ukraine only?
- Can the Ukrainian operation led by Russia be regarded as a sign that the initiative has changed hands from the Atlantic System led by the U.S. to the Developing World struggling against unipolar hegemony?
- What kind of consequences are to be expected to result from the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the E.U. in terms of international cooperation among the developing countries in the economic, financial, and political spheres.
United World International will present in the coming days the speeches held on the conference. Today we present the speech of Fernando Esteche, Professor for International Relations at the Mar del Plata University, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
What is happening today in Eastern Europe is a slow war promoted by NATO as the military arm of financial globalism against Russia and against Europe.
Against Russia to neutralize its potentialities; against Europe to ensure its subordination and disrupt the possibilities of autonomy.
Russia does not invade Ukraine to conquer it. Russia raised red lines of contention that are not only its red lines own. These are also red lines of China, Iran and India. Russia also came to the defense of its own territory and population (Crimea) and allied states (the Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic), besieged in a war of extermination by the puppet government of Ukraine.
This is not a war initiated by the Russian Special Operation, but rather the continuation of a war that was implemented by NATO in 2014 after the overthrow of Ukrainian President Yanukovych of the Party of Regions.
Already in the early 90’s when the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics occured, NATO agreed with Gorbachev not to advance on what had been Soviet space so as not to militarize the area. However, it successively incorporated ex-Soviet countries into NATO from 2004 onwards: first the Baltics, then the rest, adding 14 countries, with NATO doubling the number of its original members, despite this commitment.
Together with the network of bases in the Caucasus and the articulation of the AUKUS, including the attempt to incorporate Japan after the imminent collapse of the QUAD these steps produce what is known as a ring of military containment over Russia, but also over China. The two countries are surrounded with military bases and nuclear weapons. China and Russia are the main conflict hypothesis raised as systemic enemies by Stoltemberg himself.
The intention of NATO as the armed arm of Financial Globalism is;
- To control the Eurasian bridgehead that would prevent the consolidation of Russia as a power integrated with Ukraine and disrupt a multipolarist Eurasian axis.
- Insist on the attempt to consolidate an Atlanticist European security nucleus made up of the France – Germany -Poland-Ukraine corridor, subalternized to North American power. In this, Washington has serious problems with France and Germany.
- Avoid deepening the autonomous productive economic take-off in Europe independent from the United States.
- Control the periphery of Eurasia and gain in depth to prevent any emerging power from disputing the primacy of the United States in Europe.
- Underlying is the idea of fracturing Russia or weakening it.
The offensive on Ukraine is provoked by the Biden-Johnson Atlanticist tandem with their own needs, but functional in the same strategy.
Great Britain, with its Global Britain strategy, plans to recover or build its leadership over Europe, after Brexit.
The United States is trying to revitalize NATO and strengthen its influence and deployment in the old continent. Vain attempts to sustain its declining global hegemony.
Countries or governments like Poland lend themselves to this maneuver with private interests. Europe is being used as a remote theater of operations for the benefit of distant metropolises. It is a deferred war.
France fears for its own interests already violated in the AUKUS that made it lose millions of supply contracts in Australia to the North American military industrial complex, not to mention the growing expulsion of its gravitation in Africa; but fundamentally, it is trying to preserve its foreign trade, which is mostly with China. Germany, still baffled by its new government, but on the verge of making or breaking an energy cooperation alliance with Russia. This is where the NATO attack intends to exercise influence.
Europe faces imminent decline if it intends to decouple from Asia. The governments may be captives of the perfidious charm of the imperialist pressures, but the peoples are here to twist that fate of opprobrium and misery.
Ukraine may be the first great defeat of Atlanticism in the face of multipolarism; it may be the defeat of Atlanticism against Europeanism and Eurasianism; it may turn out to be the defeat of the old tactic of economic warfare in a world that looks to Asia unconcerned about the dollar and the West. It is the first great chapter of the new world. And we are not talking about winning or losing militarily. Even in the worst possible situations of military results, the world has already changed, the structural damage to the support towers of Atlanticist unipolarist globalism has already been materialized.
The economic war becomes stronger than in 2014 due to the systemic importance of Russia and China, and the sanctions on Venezuela in addition to those on Cuba and the Islamic Republic of Iran. These sanctions show us a facet of hybrid warfare, that results for its promoters inconducive. This tactic pierces and strikes at globalization. It can even pierce the dollar as a reserve currency, as a means of payment and as a unit of account, in short, as a global currency. We alredy see different countries diversify their foreign currency reserves.
It is a measure that, far from nullifying the capacities of the besieged countries, triggers conditions that remained dormant, creating new situations that are probably irreversible. The currency issue is a clear example.
The sanctions have resulted in acts of looting with direct theft of sovereign reserves in gold (Venezuela) or foreign currency (Russia, Iran) by the United States and its allies. This has caused fear and caution in all countries with a consciousness of sovereignty when it comes to accumulating their own reserves.
In an outburst of sincerity, on March 1, German Economy Minister Robert Habeck warned that sanctions against Russia could cause enormous damage to the global economy. And he said: “Sanctions cannot be imposed on Russia that the West itself could not bear.”
The battle in Ukraine disrupts the global economic and geopolitical order as energy trade changes, supply chains are reconfigured, payment networks are fragmented, and countries reconsider holdings the dollar as reserves.
There is a level of interconnection in the transnational productive and financial system that could only be decoupled in specific technological and financial nuclei, but isolated, not as a system. Disconnection from China is impossible. The disconnection from the great world manufacturing workshop is unthinkable. There is no externality! The disconnection from Russia and its role in providing energy and food to the world cannot even be imagined.
There are no separate self-supporting blocks. The framework is so complex that we find ourselves in situations like Japan or Australia with contradictory interests and behaviors. The Indian path of multiple alignment proposed by Foreign Minister Jaishankar is not only being applied by the country presided over by Narendra Modi, but is also being practiced by different countries.
Before the Russian Special Operation on Ukraine, Putin and Xi Jinping signed a document in which they set tolerable limits to tolerable Atlanticist provocations. And they set out the proposal for a new world. The document will reject the idea of the United States as a global gendarme, also removing its favorite argument to sanction rogue governments, thus firmly establishing that “a nation can choose the forms and methods of implementing democracy that best suit its state particular, depending on its social and political system, its historical background, traditions and unique cultural characteristics. It is solely up to the people of the country to decide whether their state is democratic.” And they set specific limits in a section that was titled “Democracy and human rights should not be used to pressure other countries.”
The text expresses firmness regarding what they understand as attacks by Atlanticist imperialism against their security and against world peace. They unequivocally point out the dangers of North American biological weapons, later discovered in Ukraine in Hunter Biden sheds; they state the risks of militaristic nuclear proliferation adventures expressed in the AUKUS agreement with a caveat; They are clear in declaring themselves as allies in all fields in the face of possible attacks and warn about global security put in check in each Biden adventure.
They affirm the post-war status quo, and are encouraged to reaffirm that in their understanding, there are no excluded areas of cooperation since there is no planned cooperation against third countries. But if that status quo is no longer respected, then they will have to attend to the new real balance of forces.
Europe will have to measure the times of the recovery and consolidation of its autonomy and assume the possibility of its independent polarity in a new order, or resign itself to collapse.
It is clear that despite everything expressed, far from slowing down its predatory action, globalism continues to accentuate its warmongering, its policy of conditioning and patrolling, be it in the Malvinas, in the bases of Cyprus, the Chagos archipelago and many others occupied for the installation of bases established by and for NATO offensives.
The oil exporting countries of Our America such as Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Brazil may benefit from higher energy prices. The same goes for food-and other commodity-producing countries. This strengthens them in terms of the possibility of thinking of a re-creation of an autonomous regional blockade that once again incorporates Venezuela and Brazil.The latter will have to resolve between the multipolarism of its BRICS strategic alliance or its submission to Atlanticism.
Venezuela, “un-cancelled” by the United States, could once again produce 3 million barrels of oil per day. Venezuela in the South American region continues to have the necessary conditions to lead a regional integration process in the scheme of the multipolar global south. Due to its economic structure and its political capacity to identify the historical possibilities of building anti-imperialist sovereignty.
But we must not fail to note the consolidation of the imperialist redeployment in the region, which has strengthened its ability to overdetermine the conduct of the countries. Latin America is today submerged in a growing neo-colonization from which few countries escape. That is why the birth of this new multipolar era finds it with very favorable objective conditions but lacks subjectivity in that sense as a region.
The implosion of the conservative and pro-American Lima Group, which also lost momentum due to the electoral results themselves -even in Peru-, does not indicate a shift in the region’s geopolitical position; nor should the potentiality or character of the progressive Puebla Group be overestimated.
The difficulties of functioning of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) at the arduous expense of the Mexican government are very clear. The battle in Ukraine and the US-led repositioning of the OAS have revealed the alignments of the governments in the region.
Venezuela and Nicaragua (and obviously the heroic Cuba) as the beachhead of the new imperial redeployment are the governments and countries most attacked by the United States; and how each government positions itself in this regard speaks of its alignment or level of autonomy or subjection with respect to Juan González, principal director of the National Security Council for the Western Hemisphere of the USA.
Among the wide range of political conditioning devices with which imperialism works, we have the neo-coup combined with traditional coups; the constitution of new rights of different types such as the Pentecostal Praetorian of Bolsonaro in Brazil or Kast in Chile; or the new business neoconservative right of Macri in Argentina, Lacalle Pou in Uruguay and Piñera in Chile; lawfare, when not open persecution and outlawing or annihilation of popular leaders; destituent sabotage; and finally the transformism expressed in a large number of the leaderships called new progressivism.
The Bretton Woods organizations have been revitalized and are a determining vector in the conditioning and political over-determination of the countries that cannot get rid of the debt and financing trap. Argentina once again becomes the laboratory of its most deplorable schemes. The same through the regulations of the World Trade Organization and the blockades it imposes.
But from the battle of Ukraine that comes to inexorably install Multipolarism, even contemplating the aforementioned document of Putin and Xi, and in the eventuality of regulated truces of this moment of desperate imperial war, we also understand that our region, if it does not introduce national anti-imperialist political actions, will end in an eventual “new Yalta”, consecrated as space and influence of the USA.
It is clear that after the recovery of the government by the MAS in Bolivia, the victory of AMLO in Mexico supported by sectors of the left, and the following the victory in Argentina of Alberto Fernández with the imprint of Cristina Kirchner heralded the possibility of articulating a new axis of autonomous regional development.
The expectation in the very likely victory of Lula, without touching on the framework of alliances that support that possibility – very similar to what empowered the government of Dilma Rousseff but also dis-empowered it; adding the victories of Peru, Honduras and Chile:This all gives rise to a certain enthusiasm in the possibility of a new cycle of popular governments. But the truth is that this is about transformism (Gramsci) and that the persistence of neoliberalism within each country, as well as a foreign policy of automatic alignment with the Empire, as evidence shows.
Here it would be necessary to retrace case by case. But in general terms and for the purposes of this presentation, we must repeat what has already been said, returning to the crudeness of the debate on the reactionary nature of reformism: That the absence of a strategy with a vocation for power also disables it as a movement of revolutionary gradualism. That will lead us once again to support transformism as an imperial device for the construction of order.
The possibility of a rearticulation of regional unity depends again on the will of Brazil. Here, the already campaigning Lula announces a new Bank of the South and a basket of Latin American currencies. But these announcements do not seem to contemplate or measure the state of neo-colonization of the region, although they are auspicious in terms of the possibility of being able to at least try and thus finish dismantling the residual structure of domination of financial globalism in order to integrate us as a region into a more just and equitable world.
13% of the planet, basically Anglo-Saxon, can no longer dominate the other 87% of the world. The unipolar world is being fatally unraveled.