Those were the days, during 1955, when at the legendary Bandung Conference in Indonesia, the newly emancipated Global South began to dream of building a new world through what would be organized in Belgrade in 1961 as the Non-Aligned Movement.
The Empire of Chaos (and Lies) would never allow the Non-Aligned to play an important role. So she played dirty: everything from violent subversions and bribery to coups and proto-color revolutions. But now the spirit of Bandung lives again through a kind of Non-Aligned 2.0 on steroids: It’s a “newly aligned movement”, with Eurasian integration leaders at the helm.
The new power trio
We could sense in which direction the geopolitical wind was blowing when gathering the new one power troika in Tehran. Unlike Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in 1943, Putin, Raisi and Erdogan did not meet to divide the world. They met to discuss how a new world is possible – through bilateral, trilateral and multilateral relations, and the strengthened role of a range of relatively new geopolitical and geoeconomic institutions.
Russia and China were at the helm of all key decisions. Their diplomacy led Iran to become a full member of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization). Their momentum is pulling key players from the Global South to join the BRICS+ bloc. Russia is on the way to convince Turkey to join BRICS+, SCO and EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union, ed. trans.), and is also helping to bring Tehran and Ankara closer, as well as Tehran and Riyadh. Russia largely influenced the process of reshaping West Asia.
This push for Non-Aligned 2.0 – in which China is a major player – is in stark opposition to how the Empire of Chaos (and Lies) has been weaving its poisonous web through the War on Terror since the turn of the current millennium. The empire tried to subjugate what it called MENA (short for “Middle East-North Africa”) by means of two invasions/occupations (Afghanistan and Iraq), one total devastation (Libya) and a prolonged proxy war (Syria). All of the above failed in the end.
And this brings us to the striking contrast between these two foreign policy approaches, explicitly illustrated by the spectacular fiasco of the teleprompter reader and the “leader of the free world” during his visit to Jeddah (he was not even allowed to go to Riyadh), in contrast to Putin’s performance in Tehran.
Not only are we witnessing the creation of an informal alliance between Russia, Iran and Turkey, but also that this alliance is quietly telling the Empire: Get out of Syria before you suffer another humiliation there. And there is a message for the Kurds: stay away from the Americans and recognize the authority of Damascus before it is too late.
Ankara would never admit it publicly, but Sultan Erdogan – who opposes US troops in Syria as much as Putin and Raisa – seems to have corrected his earlier plans regarding the sovereign Syrian territories.
In the end, it could happen that the much-hyped Turkish military operation in northern Syria will be limited to containing the Kurdish YPG. But the main activities will revolve around how the alliance of Russia, Iran, Turkey and Syria will make it virtually impossible for the Americans to steal Syrian oil.
As Russia is now in full confrontational mode in its conflict with the collective West – as can be seen from every appearance of Putin, Lavrov, Medvedev and Patrushev – and is also firmly aligned with China and Iran, it is inevitable that every other player along the Western Asia (and beyond) to pay full attention to this new dynamic of the geopolitical game.
Caspian hub
Linking West and Central Asia, the Caspian Sea has finally gained central geopolitical and geoeconomic attention, with the landmark consensus of the five littoral states at the Caspian Summit in late June to ban NATO access to Caspian waters. Moreover, the leadership in Tehran quickly realized that the Caspian Sea was the perfect, accessible corridor connecting Iran to the heart of Russia via the Volga.
So it is not surprising that Putin himself proposed in Tehran, to the satisfaction of the Iranians, the construction of a key section of the highway on the route from Saint Petersburg to the Persian Gulf. Sour icing on the cake for the nostalgic “Great Games” camp, which on that island that “ruled the seas” suffers a series of heart attacks: they would not be able to digest that the Russian “empire” finally gets full access to the warm waters of the Persian Gulf (it means to Great Britain; cf. prev).
Thus we return to the absolutely crucial renewal of the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INTSC) project – which will play a role for Russia and Iran parallel to that of the Belt and Road Initiative ( “Belt Road Initiative – BRI”) has for China. In both cases, they are multipurpose pan-Eurasian trade and development corridors immune to interference from the Imperial Navy.
Here we also see the renewed significance of the hyper-strategically important liberation of Marijupol and Kherson by Russian and Donetsk forces. The Sea of Azov is now de facto configured as a Russian lake, and the same will eventually happen to the rest of the (currently Ukrainian) Black Sea coast, including Odesa.
So we have an ultra-strategically significant Caspian-Black Sea water corridor – with everything via the Volga-Don canal – incidentally connected to the Mediterranean via the Black Sea, and in the north, all the way to the Baltic and the rapidly developing Atlantic-Pacific connector, the Northern Sea Route. We can call it the waterways of the Russian heartland.
The NATO/Five Eyes/Intermarium combination has absolutely nothing to counter these (ground) facts on the heartland terrain, except to throw a bunch of “chimars” into the Ukrainian black hole. And of course, to continue to deindustrialize Europe. In contrast, those along the Global South with a keen understanding of history – in the Hegelian context of the great debate of ideas – and adept at geography and trade relations are busy preparing to embark on (and profit from) the new track.
Strategic ambivalence
As fun as it is to study all the examples of Russia’s game of strategic ambiguity to the point where it paralyzes the entire bloated Western intelligence apparatus, what stands out as the most important is how Putin – and Patrushev – are deliberately raising the pain threshold in order to tactically exhaust not only the Ukrainian black hole but also the whole NATOstan.
Western governments are collapsing. Sanctions are lifted – practically in secret. An icy winter is guaranteed. And there is the coming economic-financial crisis, that monster from hell, as Martin Armstrong described it: “There is no way this can end other than bankruptcy. If they go bankrupt, they are worried that millions of people will rush to the parliaments of Europe… This is really a huge financial crisis that we are facing. Borrowing has been going on year after year since the end of the Second World War, without any intention to return anything”.
Meanwhile, Moscow is revving up the turbines of the machinery it will launch (In the fall? In the middle of winter? Next spring?) – the all-encompassing “mother of all offensives,” capitalizing on an ongoing series of interconnected strategies that have already stunned and confounded every known NATO “analyst.”
This explains why, at most of his public appearances, Putin appears to be happily whistling JJ Cale’s “Call Me the Breeze”. In his crucial exposition on Forum of strong ideas for the new timeenthusiastically announced the development of “truly revolutionary” and “giant” changes that will lead to the creation of a new, “harmonious, fairer and safer world order, focused on the welfare of the community”.
But it will not be for everyone: “only truly sovereign states can ensure high growth dynamics”. This implies that the unipolar world order, together with the countries of the collective West, which are hardly sovereign, are destined to fail, as they “become a brake on the development of our civilization”.
Only self-confident sovereign states, which do not expect anything constructive from the collective West, can afford to describe it as “racist and neo-colonial”, burdened by an ideology that “increasingly resembles totalitarianism”. In the old days of the Unaligned, these words would have been answered with assassination.
Will the “rules-based international order” be preserved? There is no way, says Putin: the changes are “irreversible”. Unaligned 2.0 welcomes those whose knees have buckled.
New Standard translation
strategic-culture.org
Cover photo: Sergei Savostyanov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
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