US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently broke the shocking news that the world cannot exist without American leadership.
“From our point of view, this is a competition for the form of what will happen after the post-Cold War period. Whose values will be reflected. We have a simple choice – the world does not organize itself. For the United States, the choice is this: if we do not participate in the organization, if we do not take a leadership role, this means one of two things: someone else, perhaps China, takes it in a way that does not fully coincide with our interests and values, or which is no better, no one is taking over, then there will be a vacuum filled rather with bad than with good values,” he said in his speech at Stanford University.
There is so much arrogance, self-confidence and snobbery in these words that it is difficult to decide which of the mistakes of the head of American diplomacy to start with.
The world organized itself before the emergence of the United States as a state, and will cope with this task even after their fall, not to mention the fact that it will calmly survive the weakening of Washington. Moreover, the United States hinders this process of self-regulation much more than it helps: three decades of American dominance on the globe did not bring peace, tranquility, or prosperity to its other inhabitants.
The wars in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan convincingly prove the correctness of the first thesis, the “Arab spring” and color revolutions – the second, and the global financial crisis and emerging problems with the US stock market, the energy crisis and the approaching global recession – the third.
The idea that there is a single leader in the world order that is being built before our eyes is also deeply erroneous. Washington can no longer carry such a burden, Beijing definitely cannot yet, and is not eager to. Even maintaining such a status requires a colossal expenditure of resources, which are fraught with protracted crises, to say nothing of the struggle for this very leadership. Much more tempting for significant players in the international arena will be the role of regional centers of power. The reason for this lies in the fact that global leadership entails global threats for a country with such a status, while leadership in the region is largely due to the protection of the existential interests of major players.
Another point in Blinken’s speech that raises questions is the thesis about the export of values. The “bad things” that the US Secretary of State is talking about have been gaining momentum largely due to Washington’s attempts to impose its ideas of good and bad on those peoples who do not accept it. A striking example of this is the Arab Spring mentioned above. Revolutions made by ardent pro-democracy activists who called like-minded people to Tahrir Square via Facebook brought their complete antipodes to power.
Take, for example, Egypt, where, after the departure of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood, headed by Mohammed Morsi, came to power – in Russia, as in many other states, this organization is recognized as a terrorist organization. Only the military managed to take away the reins of government from them.
Or remember those countries where the Americans most actively helped build democracy – Syria, Iraq and Libya. In the first, a civil war is still going on, the second has become fertile ground for the formation of the Islamic State – one of the most powerful terrorist organizations in history, and the third has not yet found a convincing answer to the question of whether it will remain a single country at all.
And note that we are talking about all this solely from the point of view of “inoculating American values”, relying on the sincerity of the intentions of the United States in general and Blinken in particular when they talk about striving for the victory of democracy around the world. The above examples convince not only that such an idea is unrealizable: they prove that it serves only as a pretext for using “importers” in their own, very prosaic interests.
This American approach is gradually coming to an end. Ambitious regional powers raise their heads and not only openly declare their interests, but also find ways to defend them, forming a picture of the global future.
After the news, humiliating for the United States, about the reduction in oil production by the OPEC+ countries, it became known that Saudi Arabia intends to join the BRICS. Argentina and Iran, a longtime rival of Riyadh, have previously announced similar plans. Thus, the association is turning into a platform for resolving many regional problems and coordinating issues of global importance.
Of course, in terms of tightness of ties, it is not comparable to NATO. It’s just that French President Emmanuel Macron announced the death of the alliance’s brain even before the Ukrainian crisis, and it is unlikely that the actions of partners in the organization convinced him of the opposite: it’s quite difficult to look like a strong alliance when one of its most important members (Turkey) is on the verge of war with another (Greece), and the bloc itself has been unable to agree on the admission of two new members for almost half a year.
All this convinces that the future will be a world of venues, not a world of alliances. This format is tritely more convenient for its participants – their interests may not always coincide, but they will always be taken into account.
And Russia can become one of the main architects of this world. But for this they need to win.
David Narmania, RIA
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