Where Are We Now?

The focus of this site is principally on the geopolitics of hegemonic maintenance or, to be more precise, on the bid by the USA to sustain its dominance over the global political and economic order in a context of mounting opposition to this US status from Russia, China and the BRICS countries.

For much of the past three years this site has chronicled this process with particular reference to the three major fronts opened by the US in this battle: against Russia over the false pretext that Russia had launched an “unprovoked” attack on Ukraine; against Iran over the false pretext of an imagined Iranian nuclear regional “threat,” and against China over the false pretext of the need to support Taiwanese “independence” (Taiwan is actually a part of China).

The relevance of Russia has to do with Russia’s nuclear equivalence or, in fact, superiority, with respect to the USA as well as its overall military strength and the sheer geographical extent of Russia and the location of global allies of Russia in resource-rich and/or strategic areas of the world such as West Asia. The relevance of China has to do with the size of China’s economy, which in purchasing power parity has long been the most powerful of the world’s economies, as well as its industrial production and trading prowess, military and nuclear strength.

The US has since well before 2014 made preparations to instigate division within Ukraine over the country’s relations with Russia, and to support NATO and Ukrainian provocations. It wanted to crush Russia as an outlier to the US-dominated rules-based order (a term which serves to distinguish that order from an older, legitimate, democratic order established in the wake of World War 2 which assigns overall responsibility for global order to the United Nations).

For the past twenty or more years the US has supported false Israeli claims as to the regional threat Israel, a nuclear weapons power, claims is posed by Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy program, totally permissible under the rules of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Both Ukraine and Israel may be considered proxies of the US and of the US-led global order and in both cases the proxies (led by Zelenskiy and Netanyahu respectively) have also proven troublesome for their captors. Issues of tail and dog are mostly the dog wagging the tail but with the tail sometimes pushing back when US interests no longer align with those of its proxies.

Under Biden the basic foreign policy intention of the US was to weaken and divide Russia and share some of the spoils across the victorious Western world, helping reinforce US influence over the important energy centers of West Asia, before confronting China. This policy was not successful because Russia pushed back against US and Western aspirations for a NATO advance to Russian borders in a far tougher response than was generally expected. Trump is distancing himself from Ukraine with a view to pacifying Russia, pushing responsibility for the containment of Russia back on to Europe. and preserving US resources for its ultimate defeat of China mainly, and maintaining US influence in West Asia by helping take out pro-Russian regimes in Syria and Iran.

It is not yet clear that the US has prevailed in the case of Iran. It seems unlikely that Iran’s nuclear energy facilities have been completely destroyed or the Iranian regime brought to the edge of collapse, which were the basic objectives of the US-Israeli aggression.

There are several reasons to consider this episode a potential defeat for the US and Israel: the DIA assessment that the Iranian uranium enrichment process had not been completely damaged by US strikes; the likelihood that stocks of enriched uranium and certain avanced centrifuges had already been removed and placed elsewhere; the dispersal of Iranium nuclear energy facilities over many locations across Iran in addition to the three facilities that were hit by the US; the speed with which the Iranian regime was able to replace murdered leaders and reassuring evidence of the country’s ability to sustain command and control; the attacks have unified the country behind the country’s existing clerical leadership.

Furthermore, the threat by Iran that it might close down the strait of Hormuz and consequent spikes in the prices of oil and gas (of great benefit to Russia) amid widespread fear of damage to world trade may have been key factors in persuading Trump to call it a day after the US attacks on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. Trump tried to enlist the help of China to persaude Iran not to close down the Strait. More important, the crisis has strengthened talk in Beijing about the need to clear up remaining barriers to progress on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline which, when completed, will like;y increase China’s dependence on Russian energy exports.

Evidence of significant damage to Israeli targets may undermine the already frail prognosis of yet another Israeli attack on Iran (given how close Israel came to running out of interceptor missiles) but the ceasefire for which Trump has taken credit may provide time for the rearmament of Israel in readiness to reignite the conflict within months if not sooner.

For a period of time during Trump’s first few months in office there were some indications that he was moving away from the classic neocon foreign policies of full spectrum dominance, reverting to a balance-of-power model that would allow for the US, China and Russia to maintain their own spheres of interest relatively untroubled by intervention from their peers. But actual events are more readily explicable in terms of the same-old same-old neocon logic.

More recent events do suggest that Trump is pulling away Ukraine so that the US can focus more attention on China. US subsidies to Ukraine will fall by 50% from the end of this year. European countries as represented at the NATO summit this week in The Hague appear compliant with Trump’s pressure on them to beef up military expenditure to 5% of GDP by 2035 which should in theory be sufficient to help them sustain the proxy war with Russia.

But few of this generation of leaders will be around in 2035. While they sell their new commitment to military expenditure to skeptical publics, the reality is that Russian production will continue to outpace and therefore outmatch European and the gap will be much greater in 2035 than it is in 2025. At the moment, NATO members can afford to talk big because they are dipping into both the interest and the capital of seized Russian assets. Soon they will have difficulty in reconciling the additional cost of rising military expenditure - as their economies largely continue to stagnate (with the important exception of some of the former Central European countries) - with the high costs of their social security expenditures, and rising civilian opposition to official war narratives. It will hardly go unnoticed that much of the new military expenditure will be spent on arms and weapons systems purchased from the USA.

One European response to this predicament, as seen at The Hague, is for European countries that border Russia (notably the Baltics, Finland, Poland and Romania) to seed their border zones with mines. This would be a relatively inexpensive way of maintaining a posture of opposition to Russia, allowing them to sustain a false narrative of Russian “threat,” the notion, unsupported by evidence, that once Russia has taken much of the territory of Ukraine it will continue further to invade Europe.

That the old Europe has impoverished itself by stubbornly clinging to a fiction about Russia’s “unprovoked” attack on Kiev and then arming and subsidizing Ukraine at great economic cost, is testimony to the extent that Europe, both as NATO and as the EU, now answers directly to Washington in a process of the concentration of Western power in Washington. The language of the most recent NATO summit’s communique is notably softer on Russia than in previous years, and pressure for more sanctions against Russia is tailing off, signalling European acceptance of Trump’s desire to de-escalate in West Asia so that the US can turn its attention to China and Asia, leaving Europe to take care of its own backyard, a task which it seems Europe will want to do as cheaply as possible (hence the ‘buffer zone” strategy).

The leadership in Kiev continues to make big demands (150 billion euros) for continuing European suggort. Zelenskiy is also hoping to persuade Trump to allow Ukraine to buy weapons from the USA. It is not clear where the money will come from. (Perhaps from the mineral rights deal). Ukraine has launched counter-offensives in recent days, presumably with a view to trying to persuade the international community that it is still a country that merits foreign investment and military aid. But the counteroffensive in Sumy is failing, with Russia recovering the villages of Avdiivka and Yunakivka. Zelenskiy even insists he needs to stay in power, despite having stayed on in office long after he should have stood down, a factor that will complicate discussions between Kiev and Moscow should there ever by a settlement to sign.

In brief, full spectrum dominance survives, with divided responsibilities. Europe takes on the task of containing Russia; US hegemony in West Asia is asserted through the demise of Assad, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian genocide, and the US reminder to Iran that it can and will inflict considerable damage at any moment of its choosing, while longer-term the tensions between the US and China, already acute in the context of tariffs, will be stoked over Taiwan. Perhaps for the better, Russia and China under current leaderships both hesitate to confront the hegemon directly, but it is a patience taken for granted only by the foolhardy.