Fearing Potential Future Monsters, Playing Nice for the Monster in the Backyard (Update 2)

My Internet gave out for a while during this interesting panel discussion, but I was fortunately able to return to the fray towards the end and to throw in a few discordant remarks. There were important convergences in our views and some striking divisions.

The conversation centered on Britain’s handover of the Chagos to Mauritius. My colleagues seemed to think this was unwise, mainly out of fear of the fact that Mauritius is quite China-friendly, although one of us voiced a sensible regret that there has been no referendum of the peoples of the Chagos themselves, and my position was that decolonization is an absolute good unto itself and should be celebrated - even if it is limited in this case by the continuation of the UK-US lease, for 99 years and something around $4 billion, of the island of Diego Garcia, whose population the British forcibly displaced (as a “transient population” that the British themselves had brought to the island from India and elsewhere many years previously) half a century ago.

The program gave me the opportunity to decry Trump’s BOP (Board of Peace) as a grotesque insult to the UN Charter, to all those who fought in, suffered from, died or survived World War Two. Countries who sign up for this pay-to-play casino with the global system are dumb, complicit, endorsing Zionist and US expansion, colluding in genocide. If Russia decides to join, I will say the same of Russia. Putin is reported to have said he is willing to pay the $1 billion entry fee if it comes out of frozen Russian assets. Scott Ritter justifies this on the grounds that it gives Russia a seat on the table and that Putin doesn’t want to offend Trump. If so, I think Putin is being pathetic and colluding with Trump’s obscene insult to the world and, by the way, to the UN and to the UN Charter. Who in their right mind would want a seat at this table knowing what they do of its proposed leader (Trump) and of its other key members but not yet having the faintest idea of what this is really about? If Putin goes down this path then we know for sure that the welfare of the world is being signed over to a Zionist project run by a club of odious billionaires and oligarchs. He will do better to weigh how he can send a forcible message to French pirates like Macron following French seizure of the Grinch which, as Anatol Lieven has recently pointed out, is NOT sanctioned by the UN, which has no sanctions on Russian oil, and is tantamount to a declaration of war.

The main point I wanted to convey, in opposition to my colleagues’ persistent concerns about what they consider to be the sinister designs of China, was that we can speculate all we want about future possible monsters even while ignoring that at this point of the narrative China is playing an extremely cautious and principled trajectory in support of multipolarity and doing so within the framework of the UN Charter and the UN itself, and which prioritizes developmental goals far higher than militaristic.

So speculation about China-the-Future-Monster is actually disassociated empirically from today’s reality and is surely a waste of intellectual energy if we choose to blind ourselves to the monster in our own backyard, one who blithely executes the leaders of opponents, invades their countries, abducts their presidents, threatens multiple others, is disdainful of and shames his allies while he also steals from them (imposes unjustified tariffs).

The most influential of these (Europeans) seem to come to life only when their own interests are impacted and when the hegemon threatens to cut them off from the means of winning in the proxy war with Russia over Ukraine, since the “Ukraine project” is the ground base for this generation of European leaders that gives them meaning, and, they think, justifies all their silly and self-defeating policies and obnoxious waste of tax-payer money. Interestingly, two of us in this program would welcome the dismantling of NATO on the grounds of its expansionism and its culpability in bringing us to the precipice of nuclear annihilation while one of us, a European MP, seemed greatly to fear this.

Sadly, none of us had the time to reference Canada’s Mark Carney who last week decried the propaganda trick that is represented by the notion of a Western-invented and entirely vacuous “rules-based global order,” and struck a strategic partnership with China in a very promising initiative that flies in the face of and exposes the Trump regime’s disgraceful bid for global dictatorship for what it is.

In other news, Trump has climbed down on Greenland and now says that the US has “total access” to whatever it wants in Greenland, which is kind of close to what it already had under the 1951 treaty. He also talks of his “armada” headed for Iran, even though Israel’s Netanyahu has counseled against a strike at the moment because Israel is not certain of victory and fears the damage that Iran can inflict on Israel. In Syria, meanwhile, Israel’s interests have been baulked by the seeming victory of government forces over Kurdish SDF forces - fighting is ongoing - following the abandonment of the Kurds by the US, which consolidates Turkish influence over the HTS and Damascus and probably locks Russia into a de facto alliance with the new, illegal, regime.