Geopolitics: Time for weapons?

Biden's green light for Ukraine to carry out deep strikes into Russian soil has perhaps marked the beginning of a different era in international relations. Apparently, after signs that with Trump's arrival there would be a climate conducive to a peace treaty and a withdrawal of Western forces and support towards Kyiv, the failed Democratic administration is taking the worst path: closing all avenues to negotiation and radicalizing relations between the two powers so that there is no progress, even putting the life of our planet in jeopardy. What seemed incredible and unthinkable for any human calculation is happening. Some talk about Biden's senility, which would be leading him to this decision, others mention a hidden, dark and irrational agenda of the elites who need this war.

Meanwhile, Russia has activated its nuclear doctrine, which makes some Western territories, in which there may be a hostile stance, legitimate targets. Moscow's response, it has been reported, will be proportional, which means that in the theater of operations there may be certain progress in concordance with how Kyiv uses these missiles. And the issue is not only whether the missiles are effective or not, but what it means in geopolitical terms. The Ukrainians do not have the technology to do so and would be using military intelligence support from NATO. Something that was already happening, but this particular step forces the Kremlin to assume it publicly and therefore act accordingly.

What can happen before January 20? It is suspicious that the supposed candidate for peace (Trump) has not spoken out about a situation that will complicate one of his most famous campaign promises. There is speculation about a supposed agreement in which both Biden and the incoming president are aware of what they are doing with foreign policy. In any case, apart from statements by Trump's son on social media, there has not been any kind of positioning on the part of the newly elected administration. And in the midst of the campaign, we have forgotten the two-headed nature of American power, in which both parties are one and the same when it comes to questions of external empire. If the Republicans are more anti-Chinese and the Democrats more anti-Russian, in reality both positions respond to the preservation of the post-1991 globalist order and not to geopolitical oppositions. What some have promised through the trade war, others are doing in the confrontation in Ukraine. Being one and the same, the parties act in an essential coordinated manner, since the existence of the liberal globalist model is at stake. Therefore, we can judge that the escalation goes beyond a game of the outgoing president towards the incoming one; in fact, it is not unreasonable to say that the conditions are being created for, once he takes office on January 20, foreign policy issues will be so tough that Trump will justify with it the failure to fulfill his main campaign promise. The decline of power is one and the ways to restore it seem to be different, but only in appearance. In reality, it is a methodology that tends to weaken enemies through tariffs and proxy wars that have their most evident weight in trade and the value of the dollar.

Meanwhile, in Russia, measures have been taken for the game on the international board. It seems that the activation of the nuclear doctrine is a lose/lose move for everyone, but what we see in Putin's determination is the logic of raising the costs to the West for its actions to see if there is a change in the new administration. A weak position or one of early conciliation will not achieve the desired effect in the face of a Western diplomacy that has lost the mastery of yesteryear and that moves through irrational impulses. Russia is risking its existence and has the means to defend it. It has already gone through processes of disintegration and total threat and has learned lessons from them that it is taking to the arena of geopolitics and therefore it is an intelligent enemy that has an immense military-industrial complex, with war strategists who follow a firm leadership. There is no way that the West can corrode that machinery from within as it did in the past. In truth, Russia has carried out a cultural war in which it removed the cancer of Western NGOs and achieved a hegemony internally that allows it to continue being an entity with influence abroad. The political philosophy that governs the country goes beyond liberalism and there is an awareness of the times in which we live and of the need for a thought and a praxis that transcend present limitations.

In fact, Russia's resurrection has to do with the rediscovery of national identity based on the fourth political theory, that is, a vision of the world that transcends liberalism and that seeks in peoples and their culture the strength to find a true sovereignty. This discovery is not only spiritual, that is, allusive to the entity that moves us as inhabitants of a region, but to the tangible forces that survive and that are the basis of production and development. For this reason, Russia has awakened in other countries the possibility of a new world not based on the dollar and Western institutions, but on the logic of each person. Precisely that is the political philosophy of the universe of new alliances that is emerging and that are based on a post-liberal order, that is, on the sequence of ideas that come from the crisis of globalism and the need to structure a creation that is not alien to the past, but that has the ingredients to overcome it. If the West does not understand this logic and continues to proceed with military aggression, not only is there a danger of a world war, but we will not be able to see a new order outside the system of sanctions and the toxicity of the dollar.

Returning to the scenario of Biden's decisions regarding Russia, it must be said that the Western elite is implying that it is not interested in millions of lives being lost in a war, it is only guided by the logic of maintaining power, even if that is not possible in market terms. Perhaps this explains Trump's victory and the permissiveness that the establishment had with the qualities of said politician in terms of the laws and his many trials. In the set-up that is politics, we are faced with the same project of restoring the Pax Americana, which cannot be possible without the elimination of democratic civil liberties and without external aggression. The Republicans know this despite their campaign promises. So, post-liberalism has arrived in the West and has a face that is quite familiar to humanity, since it was experienced in the last century in countries dominated by the powers of the fascist axis. If in Russia there is talk of an awakening of identities and a diversity of international views starting from millenarianism, in the West there is a return to the ethnicity of the 19th century and to the narrative of the superior white man with his supposed motivation to dominate the world.

Both processes of building a post-liberal order go in the direction of dismantling the results of several centuries of international order in which the ideas of bourgeois revolutions dominated. But the reason is not the same and has to do with the correlation of forces. The entity that is expanding (the East) needs the resources and labor of the rest of the world. The one that is retreating rejects this ethnic diversity and blames its voters for it as the cause of the failure of the liberal model. The West and its elites believe that a demographic reduction in the enemy East would be the exact blow to prevent its growth and perhaps that is where the logic of supporting a war lies, although not even they themselves as politicians and millionaire businessmen are safe from bombs. The contradiction is that, in its post-liberal proposal, Russia has drawn from the liberal tradition of the West and has learned from it, to incorporate it into the power project of multipolarity. Thus, the relationships inherent to the family and traditional values ​​are at the base of the civilization that Moscow is carrying out. While the West carries out globalist gender policies that criminalize men and heterosexuality and therefore renounce respect for the dignity of the human being whatever their identity; Russia maintains what in previous decades was proper to the liberal order, that is, respect, the democratic values ​​of the individual and their insertion into a greater identity. The West is slowly committing suicide and believes that it will be saved by doing so, but Russia has understood the logic of reduction that they want to impose on it and its response has been to leave its comfort zone and project a different globality.

Russia is in this way Heidegger's Dasein that recognizes itself in a present from knowing that the death of liberalism exists and therefore seeks the answers in concrete existential reality. The West, on the other hand, lives in the world of the ontic and the spoken, and is therefore renouncing its cultural greatness in favor of the idea of ​​a corrupt elite that has usurped its mechanisms of government. All of this is at the heart of the confrontation, even if it is attempted to be simplified through media narratives and caricatures are used in which the complexity of the clashes between the powers is not evident.

The confrontation has already reached another level and it remains to be seen how far the irrationality of the dying world will take us. Also, the nascent world has ways of preserving itself, although at a cost. No one should consider the alternative of war, but it seems that there are those who are so alienated in their bubble of power that they do not want to perceive the danger.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff