[Image: Mr Fish]
Publication date: 2021-09-26
Two recent events provide a little window, even a framing, for geopolitical analysis. Those events are the 20th Anniversary meeting of the Heads of States under the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the announcement of the US/UK/Aus "security alliance".
One never knows when a seed is planted what quantity of fruit may be harvested from it. Initially as a forum for dialogue between China, Russia and the central "stans", the SCO has grown to a very influential organisation including the majority of the nations, peoples and landmass of the Asian continent. This organisation and the core Treaty of Good Neighbourliness, along with the collective west's self-weakening distraction in running wars from full blown, to hybrid, to varying "skirmishes" has created the multipolar world in which we find ourselves. A brief reflection on these diversions gave me:
Wars: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia
Hybrid: Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Georgia, Belarus, Ukraine, Nicaragua, and then the Chinese province of Hong Kong, with Taiwan on the horizon.
All of this is just post the 9/11 crimes. Campaigns against many other nations must be absent. The changing covert intelligence alliances before 9/11 are rather intriguing.
Covert action is cheaper and less politically costly than war, but does not make much money for the weapons contractors. This balance in political control through diplomatic pressure, banking and finance (see John Perkins in sources), covert operations or direct warfare shows the cards in the pack used by any powerful nation or group of nations. Its the relative choice of cards used which is interesting, particularly when contrasted with their stated ideological objectives. This, I think, is the great study of the post WWII years, particularly as it is placed in the foreground of the de-colonialisation and non-aligned movements. While there have been, and continue to be professed, political ideological tensions (autocracy, democracy; socialism, "free" markets) these do appear as mirages in the desert of money and power of the capitalist west.
The recent AU-SUK, sorry AUKUS, declaration is the latest ploy in the "Pivot to Asia" announced by former USA President Obama in the Australian Parliament. Against the backdrop of the SCO and the USA's disasterous attempts to court Vietnam and failed attempts to court India the declaration is a strange beast. The likely outcome seem to be that Australia will spend vast amounts of money upgrading its submarine facilities to host these, likely leased, Highly Enriched Uranium powered submarines, and in so doing bind the nation to one side of a conflict which the USA has been signalling for years. In doing so, Australia angers its greatest trading partner. ASEAN as a political/trading block is also extremely alarmed. The USA has so annoyed one of its significant allies France that it withdrew its ambassador. France has since gained a rather grovelling apology (when read in diplo-speak) from the USA. France has not returned its ambassador to Australia and Australia's desire for access to European markets may have just become a little more problematic. The French will not forget; a rift has been created within NATO. France now calls for a European Army! This is incredibly unlikely, and thus is political posturing, but it is quite a shot across the bow. For, would that happen, it would undermine one of the most significant USA economic sectors, military hardware and servicing.
Cognizant of the "cards at play", looking at key moments of significant global economic change and similar moments for changing political alliances unearth the barren fields into which seeds may be planted. On the economic side, the first big change is the USA destroying the Bretton Woods system when it revoked the ability for USA dollars to be exchanged for gold. This creates the Petro-Dollar in which exchanges for oil are to be made in those dollars via USA banks with the oil profits to be invested in USA Treasury bonds. This was the first step of the "financialization" of the USA currency.
The USA’s banking/investment sector was experimenting with novel financial instruments in the 1980's and following the dissolution of the USSR went into overdrive in the 1990's. The 2000 odd dot-com bust, was a tremor for the almighty 2007/2008 bust in which "triple A" rated debt "assets" loaded with loans that would never be repaid went belly up. The USA's finance sector had created a spot of bother so big that trillions of tax payer dollars were gifted to the banks to stop the whole empire imploding.
Leading up to this was a massive relocation of production labour to China from the USA's manufacturing sector for increased profits due to cheaper labour: Globalization. Before this, for millenia, the Chinese had been hoarding gold, but ramped that up post the Deng Xiaoping directed economic reforms in China. With the SCO and "Friendly" treaty established, China and Russia continued with this gold acquisition and other financial diversification. China had been supporting the USA dollar via purchasing Treasury bonds as this enabled the trade flow. This is now a weapon in their hands, a massive pile of bonds which could be sold. China and Russia have non-USA dollar transaction mechanisms and have diversified their central bank reserves away from reliance on the dollar.
China pushed for, and achieved, having their national currency the Renmimbi included in the IMF's "Special Drawing Rights" (SDR) basket of essential currencies. The "west" has been declaring an impending financial disaster as China heavily invested in real estate development and local infrastructure with the profits of its roaring economy since the 1990's. It may have recently arrived a little, but in the last decade China has been investing in a very longer term strategy known as the BRI, with the Russian variant known as the EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union). A return on these investments requires political stability. Thus, one will see calls for this from the SCO members. This stability will strengthen the economic performance of the SCO members and hey, political stability and increased economics is good for the peoples of these nations too (if well invested). Read between the line's of "please dont go over 15 minutes" President Biden's 40+ minute speech to the 76th session of the UN General Assembly to see a desire to not allow this stability. Here's a sample:
And as the United States turns our focus to the priorities and the regions of the world, like the Indo-Pacific, that are most consequential today and tomorrow, we’ll do so with our allies and partners, through cooperation at multilateral institutions like the United Nations, to amplify our collective strength and speed, our progress toward dealing with these global challenges.
Bleah.
Parallel to these major financial shifts, during the last decade the USA has engaged in and failed with numerous war/hybrid-war/coup/soft-power type efforts. The whole "middle east" trip to fantasy land has failed for everyone except Israel and the weapons manufacturers. The "lets not even tell our allies" evacuation from Afghanistan, Iran having more influence over Iraq since forever, Syria's resistance (with help) of a new form of media fuelled and massaged religious extremist war, and the slave market debacle of Libya, are a collage of incompetence. A side effect has been a destablization of politics in Europe as countries there have had to accept millions of refugees. While these USA/NATO induced political challenges have hit Europe and created a fracture in NATO, similar, but to a lesser volume, have hit the bordering nations of Afghanistan, notably Iran and Pakistan. In the end, the SCO seems to have been able to withstand this and emerge stronger from it.
One of the most curious parts of all of this post-9/11 craziness is USA/NATO not noticing the foreground. All of this flipping and flopping lead the non-blob aligned nations to realise that the "west" and the USA in particular are "not agreement capable" which lead them to seek agreements amongst themselves. So revelatory was the Trump presidency about how the USA operates that a newly emerged political force, Silicon Valley, had to shut him up. No free speech for the crazies and none for the President either! To compliment the "west's" foreign policy strategic myopia the USA and its Euro/NATO allies flung economic sanctions everywhere and even declared someone a head of state who had never even stood for election in that position. How stupid do you have to be? "We are promoting democracy in Venezuela! And we declare this guy who never stood for election as the President. Long live democracy by foreign power intervention!"
One can imagine the foreign ministers of China, Russia, Iran, Venezuala, Syria etc. sitting down and saying, "Okay, what have you got?". Russia "fuel, food, mil-tech", China "all forms of non-military production, and engineers", Iran "Oil, of whatever type you need", Venezuela "lots of heavy crude", Syria "sorry, war on, but significant geo-strategic position on the Eastern Mediterranean". Then comes, what do you need? China "raw resources, and transport infrastructure for it", Russia "stable borders, a little political support and arms sales", Iran "get the fuk'n USA and Israel off our back", Syria "food, oil and stop the inflow of terrorists", Venezuela "better local international political support, a little mil-tech, processed oil and heavy crude processing capacity". Ledgers are drawn, exchanges established by goods, not in USA dollars, and off they go.
The Davos declared the "Great Reset" as the western elite's vision of the global economic future. China, Russia, the SCO and the global south dont seem so interested in "burn it all down and build back better", but using investment and cooperation based on existing structures as a more controllable path forward. Speaking at CEPAC (a forum of Caribbean and Latin American states) China's President Xi recently offered for these 33 states to join the SCO, or at least for the two organisations to more closely collaborate and extend the "new silk roads" across the Pacific to the mineral wealth of South America.
Orchards need seeds, or more precisely grafting, a pairing of organisms to maximize output. This current multipolar world seems to have eventuated by a commonality of lack of vision by the west and its leader the USA, and a converse application of careful planning, or at least intelligent reaction to events, by those opposed.
You reap what you sow, and tend.
Sources
The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11: U.S. Complicity in the Terror Spectacle and the Urgent Need to End It, Aaron Good, Ben Howard and Peter Dale Scott, CovertAction Magazine, 2021-09-11
Clear Away the Hype: The U.S. and Australia Signed a Nuclear Arms Deal, Simple as That, Vijay Prasad, CounterPunch, 2021-09-24
Remarks by President Biden Before the 76th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, President Joseph Biden Jr of USA, The White House, 2021-09-21
Confessions of an Economic Hitman - John Perkins | Short Documentary, John Perkins, Javed Khan youtube channel, 2013-11-16
The Post-American World; Crooke, Escobar, Blumenthal and Marandi lay it all out, participants are in the title, Zeinab Ghasemi (youtube channel), 2021-012-01
Do Not Subscribe: This blog does not and will not ever issue "notifications". Do not "subscribe", it wont help. Use RSS. The URL is the obvious: https://yesxorno.substack.com/feed .
If you like what you read here then thank the author by sharing it.
Copyright and Licensing
This work is copyright to the blog's author with CC BY-SA 4.0 licensing. Have fun, reuse, remix etc. but give credit and place no further restrictions. Lets build culture. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode