Last week Russia cemented stronger military ties with old allies in Asia – Vietnam, North Korea – while over the week-end Israel continued its rampage in Palestine and insisted on continuing the war even the West further militarily pampered its West Asian client state. Meanwhile, in analysts in Asia are discussing China’s sweeping new military reorganisation seen as part of its superpower ambitions.
Israel’s military’s latest cruelty is the strapping of Palestinian captives onto the front of their combat vehicles in the thick 
of combat – a bizarre ‘human shield’ enactment apparently to discourage fire from the Palestinian resistance fighters. Video clips of this savage behaviour by supposedly “most moral” troops are now viral on the internet. What’s new in warfare? How different is embattled Gaza from the similarly invaded Warsaw Ghetto (the refuge of displaced Jews) during World War 2?
States rise and conquer, empires flourish, despoil whole populations and territorial natural resources. Other states counter and defeat or weaken empires. Colonial powers let go of territories while others stubbornly fight wars to maintain distant outposts with no direct relation to national needs.
Why, for example, is France fighting an indigenous population of islanders in the European- named “New Caledonia” archipelago in the southern Pacific Ocean on the far side of the Earth from Europe? Why is the United Kingdom clinging to the Diego Garcia islands (with those hapless islanders “relocated”) in the southern Indian Ocean, again, whole continents away from the UK? Why is the United States keeping the large, Spanish-speaking, Hispanic-populated, Caribbean island of Puerto Rico as a “colony” without either granting it independence or full American statehood on par with other US states?
The power wielded by political forces in society and in the world is always in flux as the historically dominant assert their power to defend dominance while other political forces either resist or dis-engage or succumb into an inferior status. History has shown that those forces that arbitrarily enforce dominance over others, then exploit and otherwise ravage the lives and situations of the dominated. This happens within nations and states and at regional and world level in various forms of geopolitics.
As an unjust, brutal ‘order’ continues to be enforced by former colonial powers and allied modern great powers with some manipulation of former, yet-dependent, impoverished, colonies, new powers are emerging from among those de-colonised nations. At the same time, larger states less affected by Western colonialism, like China, are now emerging as new great powers.
Both the old, yet dominant, neo-imperial Western states, as well as the younger emerging powerful states have serious domestic imperfections.
While North America and the European Community may boast individual freedoms, their social infrastructure do not fully care for their own citizens despite the enormous wealth these nations have amassed through colonial plunder and continuing plunder of resources of the former colonies. In some of newly emergent states that have opted for a socialist or semi-socialist, model of ‘planned’ development, nations have rapidly progressed despite the lack of wealth as amassed by the colonial powers.
Foreign plunder
India as well as China have built up strong economies without that advantage of centuries of foreign plunder (including foreign enslavement). They are beginning to regain some of that historic politico-economic stature which had been the envy of medieval Europe and was the prime motive for the Western colonial enterprise. What were gigantic economic powers less than a thousand years ago, are now becoming great powers again, but without plundering others.
Yet other medieval non-European powers like the Ghanian and Mali empires of Sahelian Africa, are still fighting off the European neocolonial yoke. They possess mineral resources but need to take full control of these resources in a manner that brings the greater benefits to their own citizens than to the former colonial powers. Likewise with South Africa and Brazil.
All these nations have their own internal problematics that need more domestic political struggle and reform all of which takes time and involves politics both oppressive and liberative.
While China – like the Soviet Union of Russia and allied Socialist Republics – has made history in lifting up its whole population from abject poverty and political disempowerment within a half-century, something that the Western powers need centuries and much foreign plunder and destruction to achieve. Today, China is certainly a social wonder and fast becoming – relatively speaking – an economic wonder, too.
However, much is yet to be achieved in terms of individual political freedom. Certainly is also demonstrating some advantages of the single-party republican system in terms of sustained and rapid economic design and implementation.
India also has demonstrated the value of state-guided economic planning with its own ‘5-year Plan’ system. Even South Korea and Japan have emulated some elements of centralised planning so well practised by the socialist and semi-socialist economies.
India, despite a remarkable multi-party republican system and extensive individual freedoms, yet suffers from the worst effects of the capitalist mode of production that is the core of its economy with some severe aspects of poverty. South Asia as a whole, while showing some rapid growth in production, still suffers from an income gap that should be shameful for a region that boasts of a rich tradition of Dharma and spirituality.
Nevertheless, despite their domestic inadequacies, the newly emerging non-European and non-colonial powers are an important counter to the continued predatory geopolitics of the old western imperial power bloc.
New heritage
Today, whatever their faults, the new powers that are beginning to lead what is called the Global South are not seen as a threat to global humanity in any way to the degree the West has been experienced in the past and in the present as well. The Global South has entered the world system with little negative baggage, and also a new heritage of search for alternative to the rapacious and unjust colonial model.
And the new models are no longer brilliant theories, but are being practised successfully by many governments and social movements in the South.
Most significantly, the world now has strong new economic and political alliances independent of the Western imposed economic and political order – namely the yet-Western dominated United Nations system and the West-controlled World Bank and IMF, along with the World Trade Organisation.
Today we have the BRICS alliance in which – to the shock of the West – trading is beginning to take place free of the US dollar or even the Petro-Dollar. There is also the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation that brings together China, Russia, and host of new powers of the Global South, especially of the vast, mineral-rich Asian continent.
Even as two weeks ago, the EU convened a Swiss-hosted Peace Conference for Ukraine – with Russia not attending and the bulk of attendees being NATO members and friendly states – Beijing also proposed its own blue print for peace in Eastern Europe. While the EU sponsored event focused on regaining an advantage for Ukraine against Russia, the Chinese initiative approached the issue as a problem of Eastern European geopolitics that needed to be addressed taking into account the security interests of Eastern European states.
Beijing proposals
The Chinese approach saw Eastern Europe as free of the influence of the Western European-based NATO military alliance which has now long served as the West’s military tool for world dominance in all regions from the Atlantic to West Asia to North Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. The EU and NATO has summarily rejected the Beijing proposal as being pro-Russian.
Some analysts actually see the Swiss convened Ukraine Peace Conference as a sign of NATO-EU’s desperate need to try to gain moral-political advantage in the Ukraine war when the politico-military advantage now favours Russia. Some Western analysts argue that Russia would lose the war if not for China’s support. Cannot the same be said about Ukraine? Cannot a similar argument be made about Western support for Israel’s genocidal war in Palestine?
Thus, the geopolitics of the increasing number of great powers in the world cannot be seen as being exerted on a level playing field. Rather it is a bumpy field of dynamics between forces that on one side threaten global peace and development with their persistence with old forms of oppressive dominance, and, on the other, new forces that resist those threats to world humanity.
That is why the possession of nuclear arms, today, is no longer an issue of non-proliferation but one of deterrence based on mutually assured destruction (MAD). If looked at historically, then the sole user of nuclear arms in war in the world, the USA, is the biggest threat to world survival.
China’s internal human rights violations needs sound criticism, and Beijing’s attempts to military enforce the return of Taiwan to its fold also needs cautioning. At the same time, China’s military build-up must be seen as a necessary countervailing force to the dominance of the neocolonial and warlike Western power bloc.
Likewise, the right and freedom of other regional powers – like Turkye, Brazil, Iran, South Africa, India, Indonesia – to strengthen themselves economically and militarily, must be respected. This is the harsh, frightening reality of a world without order, what Realist analysts call the ‘anarchy’ of the current global system. The only way out is the establishment for more international governance systems at regional and global level, independent of the old dominant power bloc. Such an expansion of multilevel world governance may help in the reform of the UN itself.
