Self-obsessed establishments can live in their illusory worlds all they want – it won’t change the fact that a new world is upon us
Oswald Spengler, eccentric German arch-conservative, brilliant author of “The Decline of the West,” and proud pessimist extraordinaire (“optimism is cowardice”), could also be rather woke: You will find no more disdainful scorn or biting derision for the West’s navel-gazing than his.
Skewering the Occident’s “provincial presuppositions,” naïve vanity, and self-crippling narrow-mindedness, Spengler dismissed its compulsive solipsism as producing a “prodigious optical illusion” of self-importance.
Today, a little over a hundred years after these observations, Spengler would feel grimly vindicated. The string of international events – on a scale from “remarkable” to “game-changing” – that has just unfolded first at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin, then around Beijing’s massive 80th-anniversary World War II victory parade, should bring home to even the most somnambulant inhabitant of the Western mainstream media bubble two key facts about our world as it really is.
First, a new global order centered on Eurasia (minus a small, odd, and dismal peninsula, compulsively fixated on the Atlantic and masochistically obedient to the US) and the Global South is emerging unstoppably. China’s President Xi Jinping made clear in Tianjin that its custodians will relegate the West’s farcical “rules-based international order,” this ugly aberration that has facilitated the Gaza genocide and other mass crimes, to the rubbish heap of history.
And second, the West is missing its chance to play a role in shaping what is coming after its half-delusional and entirely brutal “unipolar moment.” Stuck in self-defeating complacency, as illustrated by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s bigoted dismissal of the SCO meeting as a “performative” get-together of “bad actors,” current Western establishments are determined to keep self-marginalizing.
In Slovak leader’s Robert Fico’s apt terms, most of the Western leadership will go on playing “frog at the bottom of the well,” all too happy to live without a clue. Maybe that’s all for the better: It is hard to see them make a sincere contribution to a world built on “sovereign equality,” “international rule of law,” and “multilateralism” (Xi Jinping), “valid and unshakable” UN principles (Russia’s Vladimir Putin), and a type of “connectivity” that respects “sovereignty and territorial integrity” (Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi).
In this regard, one of the two most spectacular developments in Beijing has been that China and Russia are now getting close to constructing one of the most ambitious pipeline projects in history: The Power of Siberia 2, connecting Russian gas fields to China via Mongolia, “could,” Bloomberg admits, “redefine the global gas trade,” including, the Financial Times points out, that of the LNG-trading US, Australia, and Qatar.
That is an understatement. At a projected capacity of 50 billion cubic meters per year for at least 30 years, Power of Siberia 2 will affect all of the above. In essence, it will amplify and cement a massive shift in the flow of affordable Russian energy, away from lustily self-deindustrializing NATO-EU Europe to dynamic China and Asia.
Of course, Power of Siberia 2 will not merely change the world’s energy system but global geopolitics as well. In the long term, the fresh Russian-Chinese agreement confirms that remaining “reverse-Kissingerians” in the US (or any other Western fantasists, in NATO-EU Europe, for instance) can forget about dreams of driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing.
Call it a “strategic partnership,” (the official term), call it an alliance, it’s a fact: Neither Russia nor China will allow the West to split them apart. In military terms alone (only one, if important, part of the calculus of power) that means that Russia’s forces, which are defeating the West’s proxy war via Ukraine, and China’s, which are the biggest in the world as well as heavily armed with top-notch domestically produced weapons systems, appear on the same side of the global ledger, and so do both countries’ powerful military-industrial complexes.
In the short term, the timing of this Russian-Chinese advance after years of preparations and negotiations proves and signals once more that Beijing cannot be pressured by Washington’s silly threats of secondary sanctions. Context is key here: The US has just done its worst to make an example of India by – unjustly, inconsistently, and very unwisely – harassing New Delhi with punitive tariffs because India dares to be a sovereign nation (watch and learn, Germany!) when it comes to energy and thus to buy Russian oil. If that American sledgehammer policy was meant to frighten anyone into submission, it has backfired spectacularly.
Not only has China made clear it will buy as much Russian gas as it pleases, while Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller is confirming that the Russian company will sell at a price lower than what remaining customers in Europe are charged. In addition – and this is the other most spectacular event of the SCO-Beijing meetings, India was not impressed by Washington’s bullying either. On the contrary, its leader Narendra Modi was a central figure at the SCO meeting, demonstratively welcome as well as engaged. While letting it be known he was not taking calls from the White House.
Western “experts” and ivory-tower think-tankers who have counted on China and India being unable to reconcile their border conflict, have been living under a rock, projecting typical Western obstinacy and irrationality on much more mature leaderships.
Add to all of the above the presence many other important international leaders, including, for instance, those of Iran and North Korea, as well as the excellent organization of what has really been a mega event, and there is no doubt that we have witnessed a historic milestone. History will remember the US and the EU at the recent Turnberry “diktat” as delivering a sad display of the shortsightedness, bullying, and cowardice that have made the West hopeless. It will remember the SCO meeting in Tianjin and the follow-up in Beijing as a demonstration of why and how the new order prevailed.
How is the West, its politicians and mainstream media, responding to all of this? With the same old self-centeredness that Spengler pinpointed over a century ago. Not only is the West declining as if there’s no tomorrow. It is still reading the whole, large, ever more powerful, wealthy, and important world around it – that is, the vast majority of humanity – as nothing but a projection of its fantasies and fears: China and India are advancing together? That simply must all be due to the US or Trump personally having offended India. Perish the thought that both New Delhi and Beijing have their own well-considered reasons to seek rapprochement!
Russia’s Vladimir Putin the central guest of honor in Tianjin and Beijing? Well, that must mean he’s broken out of that splendid isolation that the all-powerful West deigned to impose. Perish the thought that that isolation has never existed! Except in so far, obviously, as the West has isolated itself through its unreasonable demands to isolate Moscow.
The West is an almost pitiable prisoner of its own self-obsession. Indeed, the weaker it is, the worse its reality denial. Such narcissism has a price. Too solipsistic to even try to understand the world on any other terms than their own increasingly delusional ones, Western establishments hardly need enemies anymore. Left to their own poor devices, they will make the West decline in darkness.
