Modi in Moscow … that hospital in Kiev

The world is witnessing an irreversible shift to multipolarity. Four days ago I wrote of a duality now playing out between a fading – hence triply dangerous – hegemon, and the restoration of Westphalian principles of the sovereignty of nation states; with its corollary of international anarchy managed not by the unilaterally imposed and UN-dismissive “rules based order” of a Pax Americana, but by Balance of Power. And I’ve on numerous occasions given my reasons for saying the inability of a US led West to accept this places humanity in danger as never before.

Empires thrive on divide and rule in forms which, in their dying days, sow chaos at every turn – and risk reaping the same with interest. That much is clear to anyone not fully hypnotised by media whose inability to be truthful stands exposed, also as never before, by collective failure to condemn – without ifs, buts or howevers – mass murder in Gaza. But not all of their skewed ways of seeing are so obvious. Take the assumption, its orientalism barely conscious, that China and Russia are worse than the slavery and colonially enriched genocidal West. Here’s Simon Tisdall opining in The Observer last year that The world still needs a policeman: let’s hope the US doesn’t quit …

Evidently, the US often messes up. Yet do critics of American “hegemony”, deeply flawed, self-serving and arrogant though it undoubtedly is, really believe autocratic bullies such as Xi or war criminals such as Putin would do a better job as global policeman? Pull the other one, it has bells on. ¹

Let’s for the sake of argument pretend that carnage, chaos and terror across the middle east in this century alone never happened. The claim that any global gendarme is needed, rather than international law underpinned by balance of power, is a solution in search of a problem.

And if we don’t choose, even for the sake of argument, to so pretend? See The whataboutery of Simon Tisdall.

An equally false perspective flows from years of foreign policy based on “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” . We can counter in general terms. We can say that’s all well and good for an empire at its uncontested zenith, but the checks, balances and greater complexity of a multipolar world call for the diplomatic skills of a Metternich; skills lost to the US ² when the USSR imploded and Neocons saw a barn door opening on a New American Century; when Karl Rove could say “we make our own reality”, and Madeleine Albright that “we are the indispensable nation”.

Such hubris is not conducive to the cultivation of diplomacy. It begets philistinism. That a stance of ‘With Us Or Against us’  betrays monumental hubris is obvious. Only slightly less obvious is its dulling of the intellect, blunting its sensitivity to nuance. Take the way Washington assumed it had New Delhi firmly onside, for a raft of overstated reasons reducible to Sino-Indian tensions real but overstated. In short, decades of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”  left the US incapable of grasping that far from being threatened by Russia’s friendship with India, China welcomes it. And that far from being threatened by Russia’s friendship with China, India sees opportunity.

Discussing these things, in the context of Prime Minister Modi’s visit this week to Moscow, are Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris. Commendably concise, they want just over eleven minutes of your time.

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My second weekend offering returns to the subject of yesterday’s post on the Kiev hospital hit by a missile on Monday. And who better to weigh competing claims of culpability than Scott Ritter, the former UN Weapons Inspector who refused to endorse a lie that took the collective West into mass-murder in Iraq?

This video is more than an hour but we need only view from 12:44 to 21:38, when Scott segues into Poland’s talk of a No Fly Zone over Lvov. Like me, he neither rules in or out a false flag by Ukrainian forces. Unlike me he’s rooted in decades of specific and internationally esteemed expertise. If your sole exposure to all this is our systemically corrupt media – and to clueless ‘fact-checkers’ like Melissa Goldin – why not give up nine minutes of your time for a chap who really does know his stuff?

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1. I’ve no doubt Simon Tisdall genuinely believes what he says. He is not a deep thinker and journalists are as much consumers as unwitting purveyors of propaganda. It’s unlikely he could sufficiently free himself of an instinctive orientalism to see that attacks on Chinese and Russian ‘authoritarianism’ – crafted by and delivered to folk whose total knowledge of how either is governed could be written on one side of a postage stamp – form a major ideological arm of the West’s efforts to slow the waning of 500 years of rule.
2. Skills lost too to Israel. Who needed diplomacy when the world’s sole superpower had your back?