Ukraine: What comes next?

Jorge Capelán

Undoubtedly, as a Chinese philosopher would say, we are living in “interesting times”, that is, times of great change for all mankind.

Existentialist philosophers such as Sartre and Camus would be surprised if today they saw how references (at least in name) to the current of thought they formed almost 80 years ago are multiplying in the media.

More and more states and nations claim to face “existential” threats, and no wonder, because Russia has everything at stake, the West has everything at stake, and the world also has everything at stake.

In this text we try to go beyond the immediate and take a look at what would come after this great collision between the United States and Russia-China. We will try to give an answer to the question of what the new post-Western multipolar order would look like. But first, we will make some observations on the current situation regarding the war in Ukraine.

In recent days, at the World Economic Forum, some of the West’s deepest anxieties were aired. While the retired (and almost centenarian but not at all senile) imperial strategist Henry Kissinger warned that there are only weeks left to sit down at the negotiating table with Russia in order to avoid a war that would endanger “the balance of power in Europe”.

The top advisors of the puppet-president Volodymir Zelensky did not take a second to respond to Kissinger with a rude “go fuck yourself” and “dumb fuck”.

If Kissinger has been relegated to the group of dissident (but not decisively influential) voices within the empire, another thing can be said of George Soros.

The nonagenarian tycoon and prodigal political financier of US wars, launched at the Forum the lapidary warning that:

the best and perhaps the only way to preserve our civilization is to defeat Putin as soon as possible”

Soros’ words must be understood in their true sense.

Soros does not say “save humanity”, since that is the least important thing for the globalist elites who today command the “collective West”. He says “save our civilization”, that is, the only one that exists for them, which is the one that arose as a result of the genocide of the European colonization of the world 500 years ago.

The reaction of the West to the Russian special operation in Ukraine is such that World War III threatens to break out for real before it reaches Chinese territory directly. In Ukraine, Russia dared to answer NATO’s 30-year expansion to the East with weapons in hand and the West immediately felt threatened to death. Proof of its fragility, both in its material and ideological base.

Definitely, Western globalism is a senile phenomenon, with visible heads like those of Biden (79 years old), Klaus Schwab (84) and George Soros (90).

The desperation which can be seen in the spokesmen of globalism (Biden, NATO, the British, the European political class…) indicates that the West, under the aegis of globalism, ostentatiously disregarding Kissinger’s warnings, has no Plan B: its only plan is to establish the direct global dictatorship of its multinationals by reducing China and Russia.

As for Russia, they dream of returning it to the times of Yeltsin after the fall of the USSR, and as for China, of returning it to the times of the Opium Wars in the 19th century. Vain illusions of old imperial glories…

By now it is clear that emerging powers from the most varied latitudes are not willing to dance to Washington’s tune: India and China, followed by the rest of the BRICS dragging along large countries like Mexico and Argentina; almost all the major oil exporters; many countries rich in population and raw materials and even old allies of Washington like Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey are opposed on many points to the Western diktat of isolating Russia in order to bring it to its knees. On the contrary, they are positive and even actively participate in Russia’s policy of developing international trade outside the orbit of the dollar.

On the other hand, cracks are beginning to appear in Europe, which has not been able to implement the boycott of Russian oil and does not seem seriously determined to get rid of the Russian gas on which it depends.

The Old Continent is torn between a globalist ruling class (both political and media) and the reality of an anti-Russian war that is having the worst economic and social consequences for its own peoples.

More and more Europeans are beginning to understand that they cannot live in eternal war with Russia. However, following the globalist script of Wall Street and the City of London, Europe is jeopardizing its future as one of the poles of the emerging multipolarity.

Will its elites be able to change the rudder in time?

Three possible scenarios

Having made the above observations, and taking into account the permanent danger of a thermonuclear war, we can envision three major scenarios:

1. Victory of the West with “regime change” in Moscow and Beijing and imposition of a Western corporate dictatorship globally.

This would mean the end game and the imposition of the West’s depopulation agenda. A major nuclear conflagration will probably occur, and if it doesn’t, it would entail worldwide genocide anyway because of increased poverty and the destruction of the peasantry on a global scale. Good night.

2. Defeat of the West after a bloody conflagration, most likely with “tactical” nuclear weapons.

This scenario would lead to the slow and uncertain emergence of a new post-Western order. The prosperity of the human race is not assured, due to the material, environmental and social destruction of war.

3. Defeat of the West under less warlike conditions.

If the use of nuclear weapons can be avoided or limited, and if at the same time there is a broad process of disobedience to the “rules-based order” promoted by the West, the new post-Western order will be able to face the destiny of humanity with greater success.

In the latter scenario, there are two possibilities: The first is that the West, in the form of North America/Europe remains “one player among others”. The second (and more likely) possibility is that both North America and Europe will be relegated to second place given the serious danger of a civil war in the United States and the consequences of anti-Russian sanctions for Western, especially European, economies.

The new post-western order (some observations)

The new post-Western order has to emerge from facts, it cannot be a product of a desk or a pact on board a warship like the famous Atlantic Charter signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in August 1941 and parodied 80 years later by Biden and Boris Johnson.

If in 1941 the British and American leaders agreed on many issues that came to define the post-war world, in 2021 they agreed to plunge together into the abyss of “après moi, le deluge”.

In the economic sphere, the new order must prioritize the real economy, subordinating finance to political power. Implement the logic of “win-win” and consensus. The new post-Western order whose foundations are now being laid needs, first and foremost, a new financial order.

This is imperative, and will certainly be characterized by the end of fiat currencies (i.e. currencies whose value is only backed by “market confidence”); an anchoring of currencies to gold and commodities and a plurality of currencies (“currency baskets”).

The new post-Western order will inherit a large number of conflicts unresolved by the old Western colonial order (from the Mapuche conflict in Chile to Palestine, Turkey, numerous conflicts in Africa, etc.). It will also inherit structural problems in access to resources, especially water.

It will also have to face a very serious socio-economic debt (for example, the lack of food, water and sanitation for large sectors of humanity) and the deficient Western production model inherited (for example, from a medical “industry” based on keeping populations sick in order to sell their products to them, to a food “industry” based on destroying the environment, destroying biodiversity and producing poor quality food).

Politically, the new order will have to be plural, since it will be composed of liberal democracies, theocracies, autocracies, etc., as well as countries of socialist, capitalist and other orientations.

The new post-Western order cannot emerge from the heirs of the League of Nations or the UN, since both were designed by the Western imperial powers. Neither the League of Nations nor the UN ever cared for the rights of the weak. The UN is totally penetrated by Western interests (“civil society” of NGOs financed by Western countries, the model of “public-private partnerships” which in practice is a model of plundering the public sector, etc.).

These bodies are inefficient, as they prioritize voting over consensus and “rules” (tailor-made according to Western interests) over the solution of common problems.

We should not expect a “reform” of these organizations; they themselves will gradually lose relevance in the face of their inability to respond to the real problems of the world.

The new post-Western order should emerge from the current emerging multilateral mechanisms and others, such as CELAC, ASEAN, OPEC+, BRICS, etcetera. This order should be based on consensus, on the win-win logic, on the logic of respect for diversity and on problem-solving agendas rather than on normative conceptions of political systems, etc.

The great challenge: Changing the hegemony to decolonize the world.

Dismantling the unipolar empire is only the first step in liberating humanity from Western barbarism. Not only Latin America must be decolonized, but the whole world that was affected by European expansion from the 15th century onwards.

The concept of hegemony applies not only to political domination, but also to control over dominant ideas (cultural hegemony). Western hegemony does not disappear with the disappearance of the unipolar world in the same way that the influence of Rome did not cease with the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Let us remember that the Catholic Church was the heir of Rome and has survived to the present day as one of the pillars of Western domination, both ideologically and materially-financially.

The heirs of Western hegemony are in turn three of the West’s great contributions to humanity: science and technology as formalized by the West; the Western conception of knowledge and related institutions such as the modern school, etc.; and the Western concept of development expressed in the ideology of modernity.

It is essential to decolonize these three structures to ensure that the Western empire does not survive after its political and economic collapse. It is essential to reformulate science, knowledge and the concept of development from the perspective of all humanity and not that of the West.

This does not mean rejecting those institutions and categories, but creatively reappropriating them by “resignifying” them, to use an expression in vogue.

For 150 years, a narrow imperial elite (Europe-United States), by both public and private means, has financed and organized the entire institutional network that at the planetary level decides what is worth studying, what questions to ask, what problems to solve and how to do it.

This has very palpable implications today, for example, in the question of pandemics and their impact; in the question of responses to crises of all kinds; in the challenges posed by Artificial Intelligence and Information and Communication Technologies.

The Western empire leaves us a world in which production is subordinated to speculative profit for the benefit of private monopolistic interests.

Thus, we inherit a medicine based on keeping us sick, an agro-industrial complex based on the destruction of the environment and the production of poor quality food, and information technologies that instead of liberating our potentialities isolate, spy and control us.

These are just a few examples of the barbarism inherited from the West.

The new post-Western order has the challenge of saving humanity for a long era of historical development or perish before the barbaric globalist holocaust.

Jorge Capelán is a journalist and author from Nicaragua, you can read more his work (in the original Spanish) here.