In Ukraine, Farewell to the 'New World Order'

Hostilities in the Ukraine are now in their second month, devastating the country, destabilizing economies around the world and provoking fears of a wider conflict. It is a war in which there are no heroes: Putin is a military aggressor, Zelensky is the beneficiary of the U.S.-inspired 2014 Euromaidan coup, and Biden and other Western leaders are reckless provocateurs. Interestingly, it has been said that Ukraine is not only about Ukraine or even about Russian imperialism but also about the expansion of neo-Liberal global reach into the economic structure (via SWIFT, the International Monetary Fund, etc.), military organization (via NATO) and the political order of other nations, along with regime change in Russia or its reduction to a pariah state.

There is considerable agreement among scholars and experts that substantiates the hypothesis. Former Portuguese Secretary of State for European Affairs Bruno Maçães points out that “the West feels entitled to pursue its particular vision with all the tools of state power—in many cases, military power… Western values and norms [need] to be interpreted and enforced, and the most powerful nations in the West have always arrogated that task to themselves.” 

More recently, in a wide-ranging interview in The New Yorker with specific reference to Ukraine, University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer argues that “the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for this crisis.” Mearsheimer’s hypothesis is clearly predicated on Thucydides’ classic History of The Peloponnesian War. The issue unraveled there is extraordinarily complex, but Thucydides isolates the root cause of the conflict in Athenian power projection and Sparta’s fear of military encroachment and market domination. Each of the belligerents felt it had justice and reason on its side—the concept of πρόφασις (prophasis—the reason or excuse for going to war), which Thucydides carefully distinguishes, will obviously vary, depending on whether you are an Athenian or a Spartan, an American or a Russian. Who is the real aggressor? 

It's all about prophasis.

Mearsheimer, like his historical predecessor, underscores fear or apprehension as the central prophasis. “There is a three-prong strategy at play here,” he writes: “E.U. expansion, NATO expansion, and turning Ukraine into a pro-American liberal democracy.” Russian “fear” of Western power projection on its intimate borders is, for him, the crucial issue.

Mearsheimer is not an oracle—he was patently misguided in his denunciation of the “Israel lobby”—but his view on the Ukrainian imbroglio is persuasive. Moreover, whether he is wrong or right on Ukraine pales in comparison with the geopolitical events now massively underway. Certainly, if Western expansion is the plan, it does not appear to be working.  Unintended consequences will often prevail. As Robert Burns famously wrote, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley.” 

The quagmire in which the West now finds itself is deep, but Zelensky’s urging NATO to “close the skies” is an option that, so to speak, will not fly, short of igniting a major, perhaps nuclear, war that no sane person wants. Indeed, at this point in time, perhaps the most convulsive effect of American and European policy is the unanticipated decoupling of a major part of the world from the so-called New World Order and from a global market ideology, both promoted and imposed by Western powers

Additionally, the laying of crushing sanctions on Russia—the current version of the “Megarian decrees” invoked to exclude Megarian merchants from Athenian markets and, according to Thucydides, one of the initial sparks of the Peloponnesian War—has been an abysmal failure. The result should have been predictable: “enormous economic repercussions” and recessionary pressures at home and the strengthening of the Russian ruble, which has rebounded from its near collapse to become one of the world’s best-performing currencies, currently pegged at 83 to the dollar. 

Putin’s requiring payment in rubles from “unfriendly” nations for Russia’s energy and commodity exports has also helped to recapitalize the ruble. In effect, the severing of Russia from the West has solidified the country’s trade relationships with non-compliant nations like China, India and the Arab bloc, as well as encouraged it to replace its reliance on the international SWIFT banking and messaging network with the Chinese alternative, the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, or CIPS. Russia and China are also intent on promoting growing cooperation with BRICS, an overlapping economic group consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, in order tooptimiz[e] global economic governance.” According to Ross Kennedy of the Securities Studies Group, this collaboration will eventually lead to a notable increase in non-dollar and non-euro denominated trade.”

This rupture has led to the emergence of what scholars call “Civilization States,” a term coined by ethnopologist Emil Pain as “civilizational nationalism.” Whether this is a pioneering or a regressive development is irrelevant; it is a fact. The concept is elaborated in Taras Kuzio’s just published Russian Nationalism and the Russian-Ukrainian War, which is not kind to Putin, and in an important essay by Fabian Linde referring to countries, in Emil Pain’s words, that affirm an “ideology of separateness” intended to consolidate “society on the basis of concepts of a common historical and cultural essence and to counterpose [one’s] own special and unique community to ‘foreign’ communities.” 

In opposition to the universalist philosophy of the West, such countries embrace their own history, culture, traditions and “currency first” legislation, establish their own trade and diplomatic rules for dealing with the international community, focus on linguistic and religious continuities, stress the importance of longstanding parental and kinship relations as a means to social coherence, and strive to become self-sustaining cultural mega-units via multipolar trade and currency partnerships with other civilization states. In Russia’s case, as noted, these would be China, India and the oil-producing Arab states. Smaller nations, as well, are considering following Russia’s example. The dominoes are beginning to fall. 

In the words of Samuel Huntington from The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, “a civilization is the broadest cultural entity” where people “feel culturally at home.” Former Cambridge University sociologist Göran Therborn similarly describes civilization as “an ancient cultural configuration… the deepest layer of contemporary cultural geology,” a more comprehensive and historically unified totality than the discrete political organization and constitutional frameworks of nation states. In essence, a civilization state is a more encompassing prescriptive category than that of the nation-state. 

How's that globalism workin' out for ya?

As Indian General Secretary of the ruling Bharatiya Janatra Party Ram Madhav has deposed, “Asia will rule the world, and that changes everything because in Asia we have civilizations rather than nations.” Analogously, Bruno Maçães recalls, during a visit to China, being told by his handler: “Always remember that China is a civilization rather than a nation state.” Nation-states, Maçães reminds us, “are a Western invention. Civilizations are an alternative to the West… a common, increasingly integrated political and economic landscape.” The civilization-state refuses to sacrifice its specific culture for the sake of the secular and cosmopolitan unipolar project adopted by Western societies. Nor does it consider the so-called “international community of nations” as more than a convenient Western figment.

Another basic distinction between the Western nation-state in its contemporary evolution and the Eastern civilization-state in its current emergence has to do with borders. While retaining its governing apparatus, the modern nation state is increasingly porous, opening its borders to refugees legal and illegal and rampant immigration. The development of a centralized banking network equally plays into the dissolution of independent monetary policy—that is, the nation-state has opened its fiscal borders as well. The civilization-state, while larger in its population mass and in its embracing of long-enduring cultural values and historical antecedents, is paradoxically smaller in the sense of keeping its borders closed to outliers and resisting global control of its currency protocols, trading provisions and supervening organizations. 

This is very bad news for the missionary universalism of the neo-Liberal unipolar West and its presumably unstoppable historical thrust toward a global neo-liberal system, which Francis Fukayama enthusiastically touted in The End of History and the Last Man. As a result of a momentous miscalculation regarding the Ukraine conflict, treating it as a pretext to augment its own political, military and fiscal hegemony, the days of Western supremacy appear to be over and the Globalist fantasy dead in the water. 

Fukuyama: maybe not the "end of history" after all.

According to CBS, in a meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov painted a picture of a new and different “world order,” saying the world was "living through a very serious stage in the history of international relations” and that Russia and China, along with others, will move to create a new and unique multipolar world.

The march of Western nations toward an interlocking fiscal system based on the petrodollar as the world’s reserve currency and governing the world’s trade arrangements and political future seems helpless before the tectonic shift of Eastern and Eurasian polities toward a new system of communal and economic interdependence. The civilization-state is in process of supplanting the independent-but-allied Western model of decentralised states regarded since the Peace of Westphalia as the global paradigm for political organization and cross-national codification of a particular set of laws and treaty obligations—often, be it said, more honored in the breach than in the observance. The conflict in Ukraine has been the catalyst of a scalar reconfiguration in the political orbits of nations and civilizations.

In The Rise of the Civilizational State, Christopher Coker warns that we are “living in a world in which civilization is fast becoming the currency of international politics.” The evangelical zeal and self-interest of Western-centric liberalism, with its one-size-fits-all rule-based political structure and its dominant financial institutions as embodied in the nation-state, is coming to an end. “The west may be out of the business,” he writes, “of shaping history for everyone else, or even itself.” The best laid schemes of military planners and state politicians do often gang aft a-gley.

THE COLUMN: 'Events, Dear Boy, Events'

And so, just like that, Covid hysteria has suddenly receded, the manifest limitations of "green energy" have revealed themselves, and "gun control" suddenly doesn't seem so urgent in light of plucky little Ukraine's citizen-soldiers. Inflation is soaring, pocketbook issues are back on the table, and the outbreak of a real shooting war in the Ukraine, in which people are fighting and dying, has suddenly yanked the word "catastrophic" back from the realm of mental illness and into reality. As the late British prime minister Harold Macmillan is supposed to have replied when asked what was his greatest challenge: "Events, dear boy, events."

Amazing what happens when reality bites. The small stuff, the transient concerns, the self-indulgence in lunacy and cultural suicide suddenly slips away, revealing bedrock truths beneath. The prolonged propaganda assault by the national media, led by the unabashedly racialist New York Times, on the traditions and institutions of this country has screeched to a halt as people stare in disbelief at supermarket receipts and gas pump prices and watch the shelling of Kiev on their televisions. Perhaps now words like "assault" and "hostile environment" won't be thrown around with such gay abandon:

So much for the dreaded "assault" rifles, which now seem to have some usefulness after all. Note as well that these "assault" rifles aren't firing themselves, but are instead wielded by responsible adults in an actual hostile environment in defense of their lives, their families, and their homelands—exactly the conditions under which the Congress and the several states ratified the second amendment.

Vladimir Putin's aims have been clear for decades to anyone who knew anything about Russian history. Raised in the Soviet Union, he regarded the collapse of his country as a great tragedy, but he is not trying to restore anything like the U.S.S.R. Rather, his ambition is to reanimate the Rodina of Tsar Alexander, the scourge of Napoleon who also played a large part in the formation of modern Europe at the Congress of Vienna. To that end, he has cemented an alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church—the historic soul and animating spirit of the country—which forms, along with the coterie of gangsters that emerged from the ruins of the KGB, his power base.

He's long had his eyes on Kiev, in many ways the heart of Mother Russia but unfortunately for him occupied by his Slavic cousins, the Ukrainians who, having experienced the Soviet Union, have little desire to re-unite. Like Poland, Ukraine lives in a bad neighborhood between two ugly neighbors, Germany and Russia , one in which the borders keep switching around. But the foolish American notion of pushing the moribund corpse of NATO eastward, into Albania, Bulgaria, and the Baltics has been seen by Putin and the Russians as both a humiliation and a provocation.

"Climate change," too, has been back-benched for a while. Not a peep out of the usual suspects complaining about all the carbon emissions from the land and air power unleashed on the Ukraine by Putin and the sorry shambles of the once-formidable Red Army as their genuine assault on a neighboring sovereign nation has seemed to sputter. But never fear, intrepid eco-warriors such as John "Mr. 16 Weeks in Nam" Kerry, who racked up more medals-per-hour than Audie Murphy, are here to keep the focus where it belongs:

And to think that this man was almost president of the United States. Then again, an even bigger fool currently sits in the Oval Office. Like Kerry, Joe Biden is a lifelong government functionary with no real-world experience but a huge chip on his shoulder over what he perceives as non-recognition of his genius. Biden is that Irish archetype, the braggart on the far barstool mouthing off and trying to provoke the real men of the community into taking a poke at him. The more they ignore him, the angrier he gets. Until reality slaps him in the face.

What is Biden to make, then, of his abysmal approval ratings, his demolition of the American economy in order to satisfy his "green" saboteur/enablers, and his consummate ineptitude at handling the levers of government except signing "executive orders" shoved under this nose by chief of staff Ron Klain. With his first act in office, the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, Biden suddenly threw the booming Trump economy into reverse without even hitting the clutch, causing the engine to conk out. By choking off energy supplies—the lifeblood of the economy—in order to appease the Luddite god of the malevolent Greens, Biden has now been reduced to begging other countries, including Russia, into selling us oil. How's that for diplomacy?

All but the most demented Democrats, however, hate personal privation, so now of course there are calls to restart the pipeline again. Forget the former fretting over the environment and "public health"—the all-purpose excuse for punitive fascism these days. Ah, but how some outfit calling itself the "Natural Resources Defense Council" crowed just thirteen months ago:

The takedown of the notorious Keystone XL (KXL) tar sands pipeline will go down as one of this generation’s most monumental environmental victories. After more than 10 years of tenacious protests, drawn-out legal battles, and flip-flopping executive orders spanning three presidential administrations, the Keystone XL pipeline is now gone for good. The project’s corporate backer—the Canadian energy infrastructure company TC Energy—officially abandoned the project in June 2021 following President Joe Biden’s denial of a key permit on his first day in office. But the path to victory wasn’t always clear.

Many had hoped that the disastrous project was finally done for in November 2015, when the Obama administration vetoed the pipeline—acknowledging its pervasive threats to climate, ecosystems, drinking water sources, and public health. But immediately after taking office, President Donald Trump brought the zombie project back to life, along with the legal battles against it. By the time President Biden took office in 2021, ready to fulfill his campaign promise to revoke the cross-border permit, the dirty energy pipeline had become one of the foremost climate controversies of our time.

That was then, this is now:

Friday, U.S. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Montana) called on the Biden administration to immediately restart the Keystone XL pipeline project. “President Biden set us on a dangerous path when he decided to kill the Keystone XL pipeline on Day One in office. What’s happening in Russia and Europe is a stark reminder of the need to support American energy development, not hinder it. Energy security is national security, and a global energy dominant America is a safer world. Biden must restart the Keystone XL pipeline now.”

A spokesperson for Montana’s other U.S. senator, Jon Tester (D-Montana), said, “Senator Tester was Montana’s leading champion for the Keystone Pipeline for more than a decade, and he was bitterly disappointed when the project was canceled. Senator Tester will continue to work aggressively to support responsible natural resource development that will create good-paying Montana jobs, secure our energy independence, and defend our national security.”

This push from Daines comes as oil prices jumped to $100 a barrel this week, as tensions escalate between Russia and Ukraine.

Which brings us to the latest, highly politicized "thinking" on the Left regarding the prolonged and by now thoroughly tiresome Covid hoax. Via the power of the media, a standard coronavirus (akin to the flu) with a 99 percent survival rate, and which claimed the majority of its victims from the ranks of the elderly and the morbidly obese, was transformed into the Black Death, and unleashed an army of meddlesome, fearful Karens upon the nation. Now that the transparent falsity of the claims the government made for the virus and for the efficacy of the vaccines is beginning to sink in, suddenly the "science" is not so settled after all, and maybe it's time we—you guessed it—declared victory and pulled out.

These are addressed to a man who just two months ago gleefully threatened a winter of "severe illness and death" on the unvaccinated. Instead, predictably, now that Heisenberg has left the building Covid has essentially vanished. But for the past two years, we had the luxury of obsessing about a passing illness that posed almost no danger to most of us, but did hand the government the tools to lock us down, create health passports, restrict the free movement of peoples, and abrogate the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, assembly, and religion.

And whaddya know? No more mask mandates on Capitol Hill for Brandon's big State of the Union speech tomorrow night!

The US Capitol's attending physician said Sunday that masks will be optional on Capitol Hill starting Monday, just a day before President Joe Biden will deliver his State of the Union address in the House chamber. Citing new guidance from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Brian P. Monahan said in a memo that "individuals may choose to mask at any time, but it is no longer a requirement."

"New guidance." Thanks, but Real Americans have had just about enough of governmental "guidance." A bright shining lie, as I wrote in these pages not long ago. You know they're just itching to do it again, but we need to make one thing perfectly clear: no more "mandates," ever.

Even Saturday Night Live is making fun of them. So you know this prank is running out of steam.

"There is a great deal of ruin in a nation," observed Adam Smith in the 18th century. But how much ruin, exactly? Russia is testing that proposition now, and the United States under Biden is not far behind. Events, dear boy, events.

NATO Puts On Green Camouflage

Look below and you will find an eighty-seven second video about NATO and the security implications of climate change. As far as soft-focus videos featuring a succession of images, alternately arresting and heartening, and music of a mildly urgent kind usually go—and that’s how they usually go—it’s not at all bad. I’ve had to watch it several times in preparing this article, and I now more or less enjoy it.

That must count as a success story for the producers because the video is not aimed at me or people like me. I am a supporter of NATO and have been ever since I first became aware of what it was and what it did. Since I was six years old when the organization was founded in 1949, that epiphany probably took place around 1954-55. But it was reinforced very strongly by the Soviet invasion of Hungary and its brutal repression of Hungarians in the following year. The Hungarians were crushed precisely because they weren’t members of NATO which, being a defensive alliance, didn’t cross the Iron Curtain to protect them.

Many people felt a sense of shame at that—and certainly the West might have done more to protest the savagery of the repression—but the conclusion that almost everyone in Western Europe drew was that   if NATO protected them from the Soviet forces on the other side of the Iron Curtain, then it must indubitably be a Good Thing.

From Russia with love.

And most people on both sides of the Atlantic continued thinking that until the velvet revolutions of 1989 and 1991 produced the collapse of the Soviet threat and the first hesitant emergence of an identity crisis in NATO. “Why are we here?” agonized five-star generals and former Secretaries of State. If NATO’s original purposes had been (in the brilliant summary of its first Secretary-General, Pug Ismay, previously Churchill’s wartime military aide) “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” what were its purposes since the Russians were now “out” of their own accord?

Fortunately a new and plausible reason for NATO’s continued importance was quickLy found in Ismay’s second justification: to keep the Americans in (in Europe, that is.) Membership of NATO—which meant U.S. security protection when translated into local languages— became the carrot to persuade the former communist satellites in “Eastern Europe” to adopt painful reforms that would transform them into “market democracies.”

Though genuinely painful for workers in communism’s wasteland economies, the reform programs succeeded well and in a short time-scale of less than two decades.  And though the EU has tried to re-write history (an EU specialty) on this matter, the transformation of “Eastern Europe” into a zone of stability and democracy was overwhelmingly achieved mainly by NATO and the U.S. (with, of course, the help of local governments.) The EU stepped up later to share in the benefits.

That brings us and NATO to the present. For the embarrassing fact is that at least one central purpose of NATO is now is Ismay’s cold-bloodedly realistic desire “to keep the Germans down.” As long as NATO exists under the informal leadership of the United States, no single European country can dominate its security structures. Since only one country could hope to do so if the U.S. were to pull out of Europe, namely Germany, maintaining NATO as the main provider of European security is a way of keeping Germany down or if not actually down, then at least not at the top of the tree.

That’s not an argument that anyone who is near these decisions can make openly. But it is something that shapes the opinions of all the defense ministers around the NATO table—and around the European Union defense table too. For the debates now happening in Europe about a future European defense structure are really proxy arguments over whether Europe should be defended by forces under American command or forces under German command.

It’s hard sometimes to make sense of what participants in these discussions are saying because they talk in riddles. Those who want the Americans to depart denounce President Trump on the grounds that he’s undermined America’s security guarantees to Europe. Those who want the U.S. to stay criticize Chancellor Merkel for not backing her talk of a Europe compelled to become independent with hard cash for defense. Almost the only people who say exactly what they mean are the Poles and the Balts, who leave no doubt that they want American security guarantees and will accept no paper Euro-substitutes.

That’s the real question facing NATO today. Where, then, does climate change come into it?

NATO’s Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, a former Danish Prime Minister, addressed that question directly in a virtual speech to the students of ten major universities a month ago. Mr. Stoltenberg begins by mentioning various challenges facing NATO which included cyber warfare, disruptive technologies, the shifting global balance of power, and climate change. Okay, the first three problems are obviously relevant to military power. But he told the students that he would  focus on the last one:

“Some may ask if NATO, a military alliance, should be concerned with climate change. My answer is that yes, we should. And for three reasons.
1. Because climate change makes the world more dangerous.
2. Because it makes it harder for our military forces to keep our people safe.
3. And because we all have a responsibility to do more to combat climate change.”

None of these three challenges really adds up to much. The first may not even be true. Many experts on climate policy argue cite statistics to argue that extreme weather situations are not getting worse or more frequent. And if turns out that NATO forces may have to launch more missions to rescue people from floods and other natural disasters, that’s a secondary mission that keeps soldiers busy and has a useful public relations function.  We  maintain large military forces to preserve our security, not to do social work.

The second reason is we have to protect the ability of NATO forces to fight in difficult climatic conditions. Well, yes. Napoleon and Hitler made an enormous error in sending troops to fight in Russian winters without warm clothing. Obviously, our military planners  should always think about such matters—not that they always do as my examples suggest—but climate change alters such calculations hardly at all. And thinking about the conditions of warfare should be second nature.

Don't mess with General Winter.

And the third reason boils down to ensuring that our military and logistical planning should be done in such a way as to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by the usual dates. Insofar as this is a general obligation on everyone, the armed forces will doubtless comply. But thinking about such matters should not be a priority. In comparison with countering the most advanced weaponry being developed by the Russian and Chinese militaries (and the subversive methods of asymmetric warfare), holding down carbon emissions is a third-order consideration.

Truth be told, climate change is not a question of military security at all unless some other power is weaponizing climate change against NATO. That kind of thing happens a lot in James Bond movies—usually through the agency of a mad billionaire—and I imagine that some scientists may be locked away in places like Siberia and Wuhan thinking the unthinkable about the climate. Might there even be some DEFRA-type body looking into how NATO itself might weaponize climate change against our enemies too? I hope so even if only for the purposes of deterrence.

Were that to be so, however, I doubt that Mr. Stoltenberg would be mentioning it to audiences of students. They wouldn’t be the right kind of audience for it. But they are exactly the right kind of audience for talks on NATO as an agency for combatting climate change.

In making the case for its own preservation as the primary vehicle for European defense, NATO has to deal with the massive political fact that much European public opinion—and an even larger percentage of German opinion—is both Green and anti-American. Anti-Americanism is the driving force behind the persistent campaign for a structure of European defense separate from NATO  and independent of the United States. It’s to be found on the French Right, the German Left, and in the Brussels Eurocracy.

It is even to be glimpsed in Britain’s Ministry of Defense which is doing its bureaucratic best to keep the UK inside European defense structures “despite Brexit” and without much parliamentary scrutiny. Or so the generals in Veterans for Britain tell us once they are safely retired.

NATO can hardly deal with this directly. It would be too obviously pleading its own (and Washington’s) cause. So it is doing the next best thing—seeking to win over the rising political forces of Green environmentalism which are replacing the traditional social democratic and socialist parties on the Left of European and German politics. On the success of that campaign may depend whether the defense of Europe is conducted in German or English—only thirty years after the reunification of Germany.

And so I must admit to having been mistaken. The video on NATO and the Environment was a hard-headed political pitch for keeping NATO on as Europe’s main engine of defense. It was therefore meant for people like me.

My apologies. I was misled by its green camouflage.