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we are indeed in need of a new world order......

The Penny Drops - The World Is Multi-Polar

In 2007, during his famous speech in Munich, the Russian President Vladimir Putin pointed to the inevitable rise of a multipolar world.

He started out by defining the opposite state:

However, what is a unipolar world? However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making.

It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.

The unilateral tendencies of the U.S. and the West in general were described as dead ends:

[W]hat is happening in today’s world – and we just started to discuss this – is a tentative to introduce precisely this concept into international affairs, the concept of a unipolar world.

And with which results?

Unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions have not resolved any problems. Moreover, they have caused new human tragedies and created new centres of tension. 
...
We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?

He pointed to the inevitable changes in the world that were arising to counter this trend:

The combined GDP measured in purchasing power parity of countries such as India and China is already greater than that of the United States. And a similar calculation with the GDP of the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – surpasses the cumulative GDP of the EU. And according to experts this gap will only increase in the future.

There is no reason to doubt that the economic potential of the new centres of global economic growth will inevitably be converted into political influence and will strengthen multipolarity.

There it is, multipolarity, the 'bad word' that the U.S. did not dare to take serious. Putin was laughed at, and then condemned, for making those very clear predictions.

But today multipolarity has risen.

Today we live in multilateral world. We see Russia, China and many smaller countries united in their will to preserve their rights and security. The cold-war is gone. The somewhat unilateral decades which had followed it are now over. We are in need a new world order.

In the U.S. that penny has finally started to drop.

It has not yet reached the ground. We do not know on which side it will land.

Two days ago U.S. President Joe Biden spoke at a campaign even. Among lots of the usual blah-blah this paragraph stood out:

We were in a post-war period for 50 years where it worked pretty damn well, but that’s sort of run out of steam. Sort of run out of steam. It needs a new — a new world order in a sense, like that was a world order.

There it is -  one can see the penny, slipping out of his hand and falling down.

The time for the U.S. to preserve some of its influence in the rising new world order is short:

Look, we’re at an inflection point in history — literally an inflection point in history, and that is that decisions we make in the next four or five years are going to determine what the next four or five decades look like. And that’s — that’s a fact.

The Ukrainian news site Strana, which was first to point to Biden's acknowledgement of global change, describes the implications of that thought (machine translation):

It should be noted that the "damn good" post-war 50-year peace that Biden spoke about arose as a result of the most brutal war in the history of mankind. It also appeared due to the agreements of the USSR and the United States, which essentially divided the spheres of influence in Europe.

If we proceed from this historical context, then Biden, it turns out, offers either to win a military victory over the Russian Federation and China, with which the United States is currently at enmity, or to negotiate with them and arrange a "new Yalta" with the division of spheres of influence.

On which side will the penny land? The side of a new global war? Or on the side of new negotiations?

We do not know.

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Putin had predicted that the pursuit of unilateral power would automatically lead to the end its pursuer. As Biden acknowledges, the U.S., in its delusion, is ripping itself apart.

Prior to the campaign event Biden had given a public speech from the White House.

 

Adam Tooze reflects on it:

Biden:American leadership is what holds the world together.

The President wasn’t just improvising. He has not done a lot of speeches from the Oval Office. A speech-writing team crafted that extraordinary line.

It reflects deeply held views on the part of Washington. Back in February 2021, the newly appointed Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave several speeches and interviews in which he repeated the line:

The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.

This idea, that there is a “place” in the world, which is that of “America as the organizer”, and that without America occupying that place and doing its job, the world will fall apart, or some other power will take America’s place as the organizer, is deep-seated in US policy circle.

As a metaphysical proposition it is silly and self-deluding. It is bizarre to imagine that the world needs America to “hold it together”. America itself is hardly in one piece.

He describes the negative global consequences of delusional U.S. thinking to then muse about the outcome:

What is the impact of a dysfunctional US political system, where the more reasonable wing of the ruling elite cling to ideas about America’s role that are systematically self-deluding. You could say that hypocrisy is normal. It is the besetting sin of liberalism. But in light of the scale of looming global problems and the shift in the balance of power that has already taken place, let alone that which may still to come, how long can this tension be maintained and what will be the price?

He seems to ask if the now falling penny will ever hit the ground:

The only thing that seems for sure is that we should avoid falling into the trap of what I’ve called fin-fiction or fin-fi, which assumes that because these tension seem unbearable they must therefore resolve in some logical way, for instance in the speculation over the end of dollar hegemony, or what appears be the Biden fantasy of a return to the normality of American leadership.

I am skeptical even of invoking terms like “interregnum”, signifying a temporary hiatus between orders of power.

What gives us confidence that our current situation is temporary and that some new order, like the old, will emerge?

Is that not another version of the kind of thinking that says the world “needs organizing” by a power sitting at the head of the table - in “America’s place”?

That question, to me, seems to miss what multilateralism really means. It does not mean unilateralism with a different country in the lead. It means a somewhat democratic UN system, with an expanded Security Council that includes the large population countries of each continent.

It means to follow international law.

Will the U.S. come back into that system? Or does it need a global war to decide the outcome?

Posted by b on October 23, 2023 at 13:57 UTC | Permalink

 

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/10/the-penny-drops-the-world-is-multi-polar.html#more

 

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bedtime story.....

 

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Biden's American bedtime story falls flat
Repeating nostrums from the height of the unipolar moment, the president insists the US must support two ongoing wars because its leadership "holds the world together."

 

The president’s Oval Office address on U.S. support for Ukraine and Israel was long on ideological declarations and short on real justifications for his administration’s policies. 

Repeating nostrums from the height of the unipolar moment, Biden insisted that the U.S. must support both ongoing wars because it is the “indispensable nation” and that “American leadership is what holds the world together.” The president also asserted that Ukraine and Israel’s success was “vital for America’s national security,” but his defense of this claim amounted to little more than a revised domino theory that failure in one place would lead to disasters elsewhere. 

If Ukrainian and Israeli success were truly “vital” for U.S. national security, it is doubtful that the U.S would remain in a supporting role. The fact that the U.S. has so far avoided direct intervention in both conflicts strongly suggests that even Biden doesn’t really think that vital U.S. interests are at risk in either place. If so, he would be right that vital interests aren’t threatened. It might be preferable if two non-allies prevail in their respective wars, but it cannot accurately be called vital to U.S. security. 

Biden is exaggerating what is at stake to demand more support for both wars at the same time when each should be debated on its own merits.

The danger here is that the president has said publicly that vital interests are at stake in both wars when they are not. That creates a potential trap for the U.S. Biden has made it easy for hardliners to throw his own words back in his face if the situation deteriorates in either conflict. Then he would be under pressure to commit the U.S. to fight more unnecessary and potentially very costly wars. 

President Biden’s choice to shoehorn both wars into the same address to build support for funding both is unlikely to persuade skeptics. The two conflicts are different enough in significant ways that trying to make them into part of the same global fight is hard to take seriously. The pairing of tyrants and terrorists in Biden’s speech is a Bush-era rhetorical move that reminds us of the errors that can result from lumping together radically different adversaries. 

In the Ukraine war, Russia is the one illegally occupying territory that it seized by force. In the conflict between Israel and Hamas, Israel is the illegal occupier, and it has been occupying another people’s land for more than half a century. The long history of dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians under Israeli rule makes it impossible to treat both conflicts as simple stories of democracies under siege, but that is what Biden tried to do to justify rushing even more military assistance to the region’s most powerful state.

While Biden deserves a little credit for acknowledging that Hamas doesn’t represent the Palestinian people, his lockstep support for the Israeli military campaign, including the crippling siege of Gaza, shows that he is not respecting this distinction in practice.

Biden claimed that if adversaries are not stopped “they keep going” and “the threats to America and the world keep rising,” but that seems extremely unlikely in these two cases. Russia lacks the capabilities to wage an offensive war against countries beyond Ukraine, and even in the worst-case scenario where Ukraine is defeated outright the Russian government would have to be suicidal to try to keep going west into NATO territory. 

The president’s desire to exaggerate the larger threat from Russia leads him to call into question NATO’s ability to deter attack. In the other conflict, the threats to America seem much more likely to keep rising if the U.S. ties itself closely to Israel as it wages a devastating war in Gaza. 

The assumption that the U.S. is the “indispensable nation” and that its leadership “holds the world together” is an article of faith in a discredited creed. It isn’t true, and there are plenty of examples from Vietnam to Iraq to Syria how U.S. “leadership” has stoked division and conflict to the detriment of all. That belief in America’s “indispensability” fueled some of the worst blunders and crimes in recent American history, and it has done a great deal to undermine and harm U.S. and international security in the twenty-five years since Madeleine Albright uttered that phrase. 

It is an astonishingly arrogant belief that holds that the security of the rest of the world hinges on constant U.S. interference. When applied to policy, it condemns the United States to fight or otherwise be involved in foreign wars for the rest of its existence. Far from holding the world together, that will have a destabilizing and destructive effect in many regions as the U.S. keeps trying to prove how “indispensable” it is despite its relative decline.

It is worth remembering that Albright’s formulation didn’t just emphasize that the world depends on the U.S., but that it depended on the U.S. because we “stand tall and see further than other countries into the future” and therefore the U.S. would be justified in using force when it saw fit. As Andrew Bacevich has observed, Albright’s claim was nonsense: “The United States does not see further into the future than Ireland, Indonesia, or any other country, regardless of how ancient or freshly minted it may be.” 

The U.S. has no special prescience or greater understanding of the world than other countries, and in many cases it is painfully clear that our leaders have trouble seeing what is right in front of them. 

Perhaps the most troubling thing about Biden’s appeal for more support for both wars is his lack of concern about how overstretched the U.S. already is around the world. In an earlier interview with 60 Minutes, the president dismissed concerns that the U.S. was taking on too many extra burdens:

“We're the United States of America for God's sake, the most powerful nation in the history-- not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.” 

The president’s remarks smack of hubris. Ignoring the limits of U.S. power has typically led our government to overreach in dangerous and self-defeating ways. We have to hope that the president’s overconfidence is not tempting fate.

Biden’s address may have satisfied other believers in America’s “indispensable” role, but it is bound to fall flat with Americans that don’t share that belief and the many more out there that want their government to concern itself more with the domestic problems of this country.

Biden’s sermon-like appeal for more war funding may succeed in Congress in the short term by using pre-existing support for Israel to rally more support for Ukraine, but it could also sour the public on support for both conflicts because of the ever-increasing demands on U.S. resources. The president insists that it is a “smart investment” that will “pay dividends,” but to a growing number of Americans it seems to be nothing more than throwing good money after bad.

 

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/biden-israel-ukraine/

 

 

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SEE ALSO: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/43171

 

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desperation....

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Larry Johnson, a retired CIA intelligence officer and US State Department official, told Sputnik that Putin had “correctly framed the issue as one of growing desperation on the part of the United States to try to stir up trouble in as many places around the world as possible.”

 

 

“It’s sort of like the drowning man in the ocean who’s frantically, without a life jacket, trying to grab ahold of something - anything - to stay afloat,’ Johnson said. “And in this kind of desperation there is lashing out, creating dangers for others.”

 

Johnson said Putin was “exactly correct in noting the need to ensure that nobody in the Russian Federation is attacked because of their religion or their ethnic background, that all will be treated equally.”

 

https://sputnikglobe.com/20231030/ex-cia-agent-us-lashing-out-like-flailing-drowning-man-in-sowing-middle-east-chaos-1114609551.html

 

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