Luxembourg’s enthusiastic embrace of war rhetoric is rooted in its outsized role in global finance. Despite its tiny size, the Grand Duchy is among the world’s leading financial centres. The numbers are obscene. By the end of 2025, assets under management in Luxembourg-domiciled funds reached €8.2 trillion. The Grand Duchy manages 58 percent of all global cross-border funds. It is the world’s second-largest fund domicile, trailing only the United States, and Europe’s largest fund hub. Its external financial assets stand at €13 trillion. This is not a country. It is a machine for the extraction of value, a vast financial pump that siphons the world’s wealth into the coffers of the global elite.

And now that machine has found a new product to sell: death.

Defence Minister Yuriko Backes let the mask slip before the summit when she told reporters, “With every item of expenditure, we must also consider the economic return for Luxembourg.” War is a good business. And Luxembourg intends to be the banker.

Luxembourg’s most concrete contribution in Ankara was its support for the new Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB), a multilateral institution that is being planned to channel private capital into defence and security projects. Headquartered in Canada, with Luxembourg playing a key European role, the bank aims to finance not only dual-use technologies but also lethal capabilities. The project so far is backed by representatives from Albania, Belgium, Greece, Latvia, Romania, Turkey and Ukraine. The idea was first proposed in 2024 by bankers (surprise surprise) and a group of former NATO security advisers and military officials. JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, and ING, as well as Canada’s largest banks: RBC, BMO, CIBC, National Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, and TD Bank have since become involved in the project.

Luxembourg’s own defence spending is also quite telling. When Prime Minister Luc Frieden took office, the country’s NATO contribution stood at 0.4 percent of Gross National Income (GNI). Now it is racing toward 2.3 percent by 2029 - roughly €1.66 billion. By meeting NATO targets, Luxembourg buys a seat at the table where the contracts are handed out.

Beyond the bank, Luxembourg signed up to new NATO projects including the GlobalEye reconnaissance system, cooperation on defence-critical raw materials, and investment in a tenth Multirole Tanker Transport aircraft.

What makes this moment particularly obscene is the speed with which the financial sector has abandoned its moral pretenses. Until recently, many fund managers regarded arms manufacturing as ethically questionable. Now they embrace it enthusiastically. European defence ETFs have delivered returns of 60 to 75 percent between 2025 and mid-2026. In the first five months of 2025 alone, investors poured over $2.7 billion into such funds. The six largest French banking groups increased their financing to defence companies by 25 percent by the end of 2025, reaching over €46.6 billion - a 75 percent increase compared to 2021.

BlackRock launched its Europe Defence ETF in May 2025. BNP Paribas increased defence financing by €2 billion and dropped its policy barring financing of “controversial weapons.” BPCE issued a €750 million defence bond that was oversubscribed nearly fourfold. Warburg Pincus is considering raising up to €1.5 billion for a dedicated defence fund.

Last year the Financial Times reported that Deutsche Bank had established a dedicated defence and infrastructure team consisting of approximately 40 bankers across different divisions to capitalise on the European rearmament push. Their number has already grown since the article was published.

Rearmament is a profit-making enterprise, a vast transfer of public wealth into private hands, dressed in the language of security.

Yuriko Backes, who oversees three portfolios since she serves as minister of Mobility and Public Works, Defense, and Gender Equality and Diversity (!) acknowledged this directly when she stated: “We can no longer say: ‘The others will sort it out for us’ and rely exclusively on the Americans. Those days are over.” She is right, of course. But the replacement she envisions is not European strategic autonomy in the service of peace. It is a new architecture of profit in the service of war, which benefits both Washington and Wall Street.

The tragedy is that Europe’s rearmament is being celebrated as a growth opportunity while the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers still lie unburied in Donbass because Kiev refuses to receive them from Russia.

Luxembourg’s hawkishness is a business model. And like all business models built on the suffering of others, it will eventually consume its creators. But in the meantime, the profits will flow, the dividends will be paid, and the bankers will count their money while Europeans say goodbye to welfare and are told to prepare for war.

In Armenia, as expected, Pashinyan’s party won the parliamentary elections. But it is not a landslide victory, and it shows that despite the entire political machinery of the West moving to support him, the arrest and intimidation of opposition leaders, more than half of Armenians do not believe in his promises.

After processing 100% of the ballots, Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party received 49.81% of the votes. Despite the result being below 50%, the Prime Minister has already stated that his political force will form a parliamentary majority and a new government.

The central promise of Nikol Pashinyan’s pro-Western pivot has always been that Brussels can replace Moscow as Armenia’s primary economic partner. Obviously, he won’t be able to deliver on it.

Russia remains Armenia’s largest trading partner by a wide margin. Last year, Russia accounted for 35.8 percent of Armenia’s foreign trade, compared with the EU’s 11.7 percent share. A single Russian trade restriction on Armenian cognac, flowers, mineral water, or agricultural products can inflict more damage than the entire EU aid package can offset.

Although Armenian exports to the EU have doubled, this represents a fraction of what is lost when Moscow closes its market. The truth is that European farmers are unlikely to welcome Armenian tomatoes on their markets, and French cognac producers are not eager to share shelf space with Armenian brandy.

Not to mention that Russia supplies natural gas at a price that European markets cannot match. A single Russian embargo can devastate entire sectors of the Armenian economy.

It’s fair to say that Pashinyan’s Western sponsors cannot deliver the economic prosperity he promised. And with over half of Armenians already disillusioned with him, many believe that his path could lead to either the Georgian scenario or the Ukrainian one.

Personally, I think that the most likely scenario is the Moldovan one. Brussels (EU-NATO) won’t let Armenians take back control of their country. Brussels has invested heavily in the narrative of a democratic Armenia drawing closer to Europe. The EU has hosted summits in Yerevan, filled the country with its NGOs, showered Pashinyan with money, diplomatic endorsements, and framed its support as a victory for European values over “Russian coercion.”

The EU cannot afford for this project to fail. If Armenia were to revert to the Russian orbit, it would represent a strategic defeat for Brussels. Georgia’s drift away from the EU and Ukraine’s prolonged blood-letting have already damaged the credibility of European promises. Losing Armenia would compound those failures.

This is why Brussels will not allow Armenians to chart an independent course based on friendly relations with Moscow.

Brussels needs Armenia to remain on an anti-Russian path while lacking the resources to genuinely replace Russia as Armenia’s primary economic partner. This contradiction will define Armenian politics for years to come, with ordinary citizens bearing the cost.

It goes without saying that behind the usual rhetoric of defending “democratic values” lie geopolitical reasons. Brussels is betting on Armenia to solve two of the EU’s most pressing strategic headaches at once: the need for new trade routes that bypass Russia and Iran, and the desperate hunt for critical raw materials to power Europe’s green and digital transitions.

The EU’s primary interest lies in establishing a supply chain that circumvents traditional routes. The conflict in Ukraine has made routes through Russian territory politically and logistically unviable, while the US-Israeli war of aggression against Iran has destabilized the southern path.

This is where Armenia enters the picture as a critical node The key is the Middle Corridor, a trans-Caspian trade route designed to link Europe to Central Asia and China, bypassing Russia entirely. This corridor, approximately 4,000 kilometers long, could drastically cut shipping times from 42 days by sea to just 12 days by rail and road.

The second pillar of EU interest is Armenia’s mineral wealth. The bloc is heavily dependent on imports of critical raw materials for everything from electric vehicles to defense systems. Armenia’s abundant deposits of key minerals like copper, molybdenum, and gold are a major lure.

The EU has specific studies on Armenia’s mining sector aimed at identifying opportunities for European players. A significant point of tension is molybdenum, a mineral used in steel alloys. Armenia holds about 7% of the world’s molybdenum reserves, and the EU is a primary consumer of its output.

To secure this foothold, Western powers are deploying a coordinated strategy. The EU is doubling down on its ‘Global Gateway’ connectivity strategy with massive investment pledges and is deepening security cooperation by stationing civilian missions in the country.

At the same time, the United States is promoting its own infrastructure plan, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). lauraruggeri.substack.c…

But all is not well on the Western front.

Some reports mail.arminfo.info/full_…even suggest the US is negotiating to divert Armenian molybdenum exports away from EU markets, highlighting the intense competition between Western allies for control of these strategic resources.

The No Kings protests, which began last June to coincide with Donald Trump’s birthday and a U.S. Army 250th anniversary military parade in Washington, have drawn millions of participants, not only in the United States but more recently in several Western countries as well.

Initially sparked by domestic grievances such as immigration policies and their violent enforcement, authoritarian threats, and executive overreach, the movement has since March increasingly rallied around opposition to the war of aggression against Iran.

Although I share the outrage and deep frustration that have driven millions into the streets, I believe that solidarity with the protesters must be accompanied by a critical obligation to scrutinize the movement’s focus and objectives, besides its sources of funding.

Conservative critics, drawing mainly on a Fox News investigation, have primarily highlighted the organizational infrastructure and financial networks that sustain the movement, albeit selectively, and quickly labeled the protests a “color revolution.”

Having written extensively on color revolutions, I believe it is important to maintain analytical clarity when using this term in order to avoid epistemic confusion.

While it is true that the No Kings movement relies heavily on a professionalized protest apparatus funded in part by Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and that the U.S. liberal donor class has been involved in virtually all the color revolutions we have witnessed so far, we must retain a fundamental distinction, at least at the analytical level. All the donors mentioned in investigations carried out by Fox News, the Daily Mail, the Pearl Project, Snopes and others, happen to be U.S. nationals. And although one of them, Neville Roy Singham, retired and moved to China a few years ago, his political activism and support for U.S. left-wing groups long predate his relocation.

Color revolutions are externally driven operations, typically funded and orchestrated by foreign powers or their affiliated organizations with the explicit goal of destabilizing a targeted country and/or overthrowing its government to achieve geopolitical objectives. In the case of the No Kings movement, no credible evidence of foreign involvement has been unearthed or provided by its critics. That is not to say, however, that the movement is necessarily organic or self-organizing.

Rival factions within the same country’s elite have long been leveraging social forces and popular mobilization as weapons in their internal power struggles. Protests of this kind are not aimed at replacing the ruling system but at shifting the balance of power among competing elite groups. One faction organizes, funds, and directs a protest movement to pressure, discredit, or weaken its rival. The mobilized crowds become a kind of popular proxy deployed by one segment of the establishment against another.

While I understand the temptation to lump the No Kings movement together with color revolutions given that much of its organization, funding, and direction comes from the same donor class and “philanthropic” networks, I believe doing so would be intellectually lazy and ultimately misleading, as it obscures a fundamental difference. If color revolutions represent an “outside-in” assault on the political order, domestic elite turf wars are an “inside-in” assault. Both may feel and look like grassroots resistance, but their underlying logic and ultimate beneficiaries are radically different.

Interestingly, this dynamic also works in the opposite direction. Social forces can be demobilized according to the convenience of elite factions. Just as easily as they can be activated to create pressure, they can be quietly discouraged, diverted, or neutralized when their energy no longer serves the desired purpose.

In the past, lobbies primarily focused their efforts on influencing political parties and elected officials within the formal democratic process. However, as large segments of the population have grown disaffected with electoral politics and traditional party structures, mass mobilization provides an additional lever to supplement the conventional democratic process. Professionalized protest movements offer another tool for elite factions seeking to achieve their goals outside the increasingly discredited channels of representative democracy.

Some commentators have borrowed the Gramscian term “passive revolution” to describe the No Kings phenomenon, but this label, like that of color revolution, fails to fully account for what we are seeing in the United States.

According to Gramsci, the ruling classes, in moments of crisis, are capable of absorbing part of the demands of the subaltern classes, emptying them of their subversive charge and transforming them into instruments of conservative modernization. Thus, what appears as a popular conquest is in reality a restructuring of domination that preserves the substantial asymmetry of power relations. Gramsci also explicitly connected passive revolution to trasformismo—a process of molecular absorption and incorporation of the active elements of opposing classes, through which the dominant class renews itself and produces the impression of change where in reality there is only perpetuation of the existing order.

I would argue that this dynamic is not exceptional. This is how capitalist elites manage dissent, crisis, and the need for periodic modernization. One could say that passive revolution and trasformismo are the enablers of capitalist rule and the default reproductive logic of elite power once it has consolidated itself.

However, co-optation alone, understood as the post-factum neutralization and absorption of dissent, is insufficient to explain the full picture.

In situations of intra-elite hegemonic competition, opposition movements are not merely neutralized post factum; they are actively weaponized in advance. The genuine anger and energy of the people are harnessed and directed by one elite faction against another, serving as instruments in the contest for dominance within the existing system.

What we observe in phenomena such as the No Kings movement (and symmetrically in MAGA) is not a passive revolution in the classical sense. There is a key difference between a post-factum dynamic—where elites respond to and neutralize an existing threat to their power (passive revolution)—and an ante-factum dynamic—where elites proactively create and/or support popular mobilization as a strategic instrument in their internal power contest.

Both movements, No Kings and MAGA, despite their apparent antagonism, function as complementary mechanisms through which rival elites vie for hegemony and neutralize popular discontent. MAGA channels the rage of de-industrialized, downwardly mobile working- and middle-class Americans into a nationalist, protectionist agenda. No Kings, by contrast, absorbs legitimate outrage against authoritarian tendencies, executive overreach, and militarism into a liberal-globalist agenda.

It is important to point out that neither movement is a monolith. No Kings, for instance, is a coalition that features progressive groups that support the Democratic Party, but also anti-war organizations and Marxist collectives, each bringing different ideological commitments and tactical preferences to the shared project of opposing the Trump administration.

MAGA too is far from homogeneous: it is divided into distinct, often competing groups with different priorities, as internal tensions between pro-business elites and populist nationalists, libertarians and Christian conservatives, isolationists and military hawks have shown.

Although it would be wrong to claim that all the organizations and groups forming these movements explicitly support the U.S. aspiration to restore its global hegemony, the picture changes when we look at their main donors.

The main driver behind No Kings is the Indivisible Project, an organization that received $7.61 million between 2017 and 2023 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Indivisible has repeatedly taken credit for coordinating actions, providing toolkits, training, coordination, and strategic messaging. An even larger source of funding comes from the opaque Arabella Advisors (rebranded as Sunflower Services) and the Tides Foundation—major progressive funding machines that obscure original funding sources, although the Gates Foundation, Pierre Omidyar, George Soros, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the NoVo Foundation (linked to the Warren Buffett family) have all been named as documented donors.

MAGA’s main financial backers hail from the same billionaire class, primarily from the technology, cryptocurrency, finance, and energy sectors: Elon Musk, Jeffrey Yass, Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone), Greg Brockman (OpenAI), and the new wave of Silicon Valley and AI executives such as Alex Karp (Palantir), Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (venture capitalists profiting from the merger of Silicon Valley startups with the military industry), and Kelcy Warren (Energy Transfer Partners), alongside pro-Israel donors such as Miriam Adelson and Ronald Lauder.

Both billionaire factions seek to defend and preserve elite class power and U.S. hegemony, although liberals insist on painting it in rainbow colors and attaching a glossy label peppered with fuzzy words and virtuous slogans such as “inclusivity,” “democracy,” and “rules-based international order.” The rhetoric changes, their material interests do not. By sponsoring opposing movements, elites ensure that indignation is released in controlled bursts rather than coalescing into a cross-ideological challenge to class hegemony. Meanwhile, the “culture war” keeps the public divided and invested in the spectacle.

While I do not doubt the sincerity of ordinary Americans who join the liberal-progressive or nationalist-populist movements, I doubt they are fully cognizant of the objectives of those who fund the organizational infrastructure that enables, coordinates, and sustains their activities at both national and international levels.

The international dimension should not be ignored. Both elite factions have extended their influence far beyond American borders and are actively seeking to shape political processes and decision-making in targeted countries through well-funded networks, organizations, parties, and media outlets. What appears as spontaneous global solidarity is often the result of carefully cultivated transnational structures working in parallel to advance the strategic interests of their respective elite backers.

Movements like No Kings and MAGA serve as a controlled environment where genuine political energy can be released, channeled, and neutralized when no longer useful. And we are already seeing signs that MAGA has outlived its usefulness and needs to be rebooted after its base became disillusioned with the Trump administration. It may be quietly retired or reformed, while a new outlet is prepared for the next cycle of discontent.

One could argue that these movements are designed with built-in obsolescence, much like the majority of consumer products nowadays. They thrive on hype, branding, temporary catalysts but lack the analytical foundation that could give them real staying power, a coherent theory of how power is actually produced and reproduced, an understanding of the class and production relations that sustain elite hegemony and the continuity of the bipartisan imperial project. Their energy is almost entirely affective and symbolic, a performance of moral purity. The result is a politics of perpetual novelty and exhaustion.

Both MAGA and No Kings are tightly bound to Donald Trump’s personal brand and persona (Trump for one, anti-Trump outrage for the other) and it is precisely this obsessive fixation on a figurehead that will make them fizzle out.

Encouraged by a media ecosystem that infantilizes political discourse and fetishizes personality, the public confuses the man with the root of all that is wrong with America. Many would be all too happy to replace him with a candidate marketed as his perfect antithesis, just as Barack Obama was presented as the enlightened, multilateral, hope-and-change antidote to George W. Bush. Obama ran explicitly against the Bush legacy: the Iraq War, Afghanistan, unilateralism, cowboy diplomacy, Guantanamo, and the erosion of America’s global image. He promised a smarter, more collaborative foreign policy rooted in diplomacy and restraint. While the branding worked, the continuity was hard to miss. Obama preserved the core architecture of the post-9/11 surveillance state and the commitment to American primacy. He escalated the drone program, actually authorized roughly ten times more strikes than G.W. Bush, colour revolutions and regime-change operations were ramped up (Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macedonia...) As a result, four countries remain mired in chaos, war or both.

We should not forget that the strategic foundation for Washington’s confrontational stance toward China was laid by Barack Obama. His Pivot to Asia marked a shift in U.S. strategy: it identified China’s rise as the central long-term challenge to American dominance.

Fast-forward to Trump 2.0. Since China cannot be contained directly, Washington has opted for indirect containment: destabilizing the global economic order on which Chinese growth depends. Any conflict or crisis capable of tipping Asia and Europe into recession effectively pulls the rug from under Chinese manufacturing. China’s growth slows, its factories idle, and its workers suffer, not because China itself is attacked, but because the global economy that sustains it is set on fire. That is the logic of containment through chaos.

By focusing on Trump as the source of all evil, U.S. progressive movements commit a common error known in semiotics as indexical inversion. An index is a sign causally linked to its object—smoke to fire, a fever to an infection. Yet public habit mistakes the fever for the disease, treating it as the cause rather than the symptom of a deeper illness. This error is one of the reasons these movements can be easily switched off as soon as a more presentable Democratic leader is elected.

Trump is not an aberration, a deviation from the system. He is the system finally becoming visible in all its self-undermining contradictions. Trump is late capitalism’s own schizophrenic process made flesh. He embodies the contradictions of financial capitalism and performs them at maximum volume and speed. As the purest expression of the advanced decay of American capitalism, in him all the most short-sighted, parasitic, and rotten features appear magnified and grotesque. But you won’t fix the problem by simply removing and replacing him, which would be the equivalent of taking a Panadol to treat an infection.

Trump accelerates the breaking down of established rules, norms and structures because Washington no longer benefits from them.

In an era of multipolarity the U.S. cannot maintain its old position as the world’s dominant power so it defaults to chaos in the hope of preventing any coherent challenge to its hegemony from emerging.

Meanwhile its parasitic elites are still able to extract dividends from the disorder.

Chaos creates lucrative opportunities for selected American interests. Disruptions in energy markets drive up oil and gas prices, which directly benefits U.S. energy exporters; perpetual conflict sustains the military-industrial complex through massive defense budgets, lucrative arms sales, and highly profitable contracts for private military and security firms. After the chaos subsides, “stabilization” and reconstruction efforts typically open the door to IMF and World Bank loans, privatization deals, and large-scale infrastructure contracts. Although in this case it might not happen as other lenders may step in. In the past global investors tended to rush into U.S. Treasuries as a safe haven in a time of crisis, but the mechanism is no longer as automatic as it once was: they still value Treasuries’ liquidity in the very short term, but long-term demand is being tested by concerns over U.S. debt, inflation pass-through, and geopolitical blowbacks.

Of course, this approach is ultimately self-undermining: it erodes America’s soft power, accelerates de-dollarization efforts and there is no guarantee that other powers won’t benefit more from this unraveling of international rules than the U.S. If its proponents see it as necessary “creative destruction” it is because there are not enough resources to enforce order.

Threats, aggression and chaos are the only modus operandi that still yields dividends in the context of deep and intractable systemic problems caused by the U.S. structural decline.

For decades, the United States enforced an international order that reflected its own interests while presenting itself as the guarantor of democracy, security, and the rule of law. Not anymore. The post-1945 institutional architecture—the Bretton Woods system, the United Nations, NATO, and the network of bilateral alliances across Asia and the Middle East—was designed to lock in American primacy under a veneer of universal norms. The United States wrote the rules, policed their enforcement, and reserved the right to exempt itself whenever convenient. Yet as long as the system delivered stability and relative predictability, most states tolerated its hypocrisy.

That era is over. The erosion of U.S. economic dominance, the rise of rival power centers (notably China), and the accumulated resentment of decades of unilateral interventions have rendered the old order unworkable. Washington can no longer sustain the costly infrastructure of global hegemony—the bases, the alliances, the foreign aid packages, and the endless wars. But it has not yet accepted the transition to a genuinely multipolar or multiplex world. Trapped between decline and denial, Washington has chosen a strategy of disruption. While this strategy is self-undermining in the long run because it erodes trust in the dollar and drives the very multipolarity that Washington seeks to prevent, in the short to medium term, it is devastatingly effective.

Mind you, Trump hasn’t single-handedly destroyed America’s international standing, its erosion was already underway and evident to anyone who cared to pay attention. What may surprise is the speed and scale of the collapse.

Amitav Acharya argues¹ that the world is moving toward a “multiplex” order rather than multipolarity. This is a more complex system involving multiple actors: great powers, regional organizations, corporations, and non-state players. In this world, Washington can still destroy (through military action or sanctions), but it can no longer build or sustain a stable international order. As the current war against Iran is further damaging trust in American leadership even among so-called allies, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many countries, especially those in the Global South, are adapting by reducing their dependence on the United States.

What we are seeing in the chaotic management style of the Trump administration is the signature of a system whose sole remaining business model is selling deckchair tickets on the Titanic.

Financial capitalism, in its late stage, no longer resolves contradictions, it multiplies them, internalizes them, and finally performs them as Grand Guignol theatre. The result is derangement, not as incidental dysfunction, but as the system’s default operating mode.

At the personal level, this derangement takes the form of a leader who cannot afford coherence. The financier’s ethos (maximize returns, disregard friction) becomes a governing philosophy. Contradictions that would paralyze a statesman become opportunities for transactional improvisation.

Take the Triffin Dilemma for example. One day Trump extols the virtues of a strong dollar, the symbol of American dominance. The next day he furiously attacks the same strong dollar for crushing U.S. exports and killing American jobs. Incoherent? Contradictory? Sure. But the charge of incoherence misses the point. The contradiction is not a bug in Trump’s messaging, this is the logic of the hedge, not the logic of the plan. Traditional economic policy assumes a coherent set of goals pursued through consistent instruments. Financialized logic, by contrast, thrives on volatility and profits from both directions of a move. A hedge fund does not need the market to go up or down; it needs the market to move, and to move unpredictably so that its constructed portfolio of long and short positions extracts value from uncertainty. Trump governs the same way. He does not resolve the tensions in the U.S. economy. He amplifies them. Strong dollar one day, weak dollar the next. Tariffs on China, then a deal with China. Oil price chaos. Threats to allies, then embraces. The message is not the medium. The volatility is the message.

What appears as incoherence from the standpoint of traditional statecraft is, from the standpoint of financialized power, a strategy of extracting optionality. By refusing to commit to any single position, Trump preserves the ability to claim credit regardless of which direction the economy moves. If the dollar strengthens, he can take credit for projecting American power. If it weakens, he can claim victory for American workers. The hedge protects him from accountability while maximizing his political flexibility. But there is a deeper logic at work, one that extends beyond Trump’s personal style. The U.S. economy has become so thoroughly financialized, dominated by rent extraction, asset price inflation, and speculative flows rather than productive investment that the old industrial-era certainties no longer apply. The tragedy is that this approach forecloses any possibility of a coherent industrial policy, a stable trade regime, or a predictable international posture. And while the financialized elite extract value, the productive economy that actually makes things and employs people slowly atrophies.

The coalition of political, economic, and financial interests that backs Trump is a portfolio of contradictory bets. His personal incoherence reflects this systemic incoherence. This coalition cannot hold back the tide of change reshaping the global order. What it can do is exploit and monetize the remnants of that old order through a transactional, unilateral, and brazen style of foreign policy. Such an approach reflects a recognition that the post-war institutional framework no longer delivers the same advantages for the United States, as other powers—China above all—now hold stronger cards.

This coalition is a distinctly hybrid formation. While its hybrid character has proven electorally strong, it lacks the internal coherence necessary to generate a stable, long-term hegemonic project. Instead, it is riddled with deep, unsolvable contradictions and colliding interests that render it inherently sterile, as most hybrids tend to be.

Its main feature is opportunism: a tactical alliance formed around shared short-term goals such as tax cuts, deregulation, favorable government contracts, tariffs that protect domestic industry, reduced oversight (especially in AI, crypto, and energy), hostility to “woke” institutions, and opposition to the old liberal order. However, the deeper strategic visions of these factions are fundamentally incompatible. And that is even before we factor in the toxic influence of the “Make Israel Great Again” faction.

Trump co-opted and leveraged deep domestic grievances caused by globalization, inequality, and the failures of liberal institutions. By the 2010s, American capitalism was already in a deep crisis. Decades of neoliberal globalization had produced massive de-industrialization, extreme inequality, the loss of well-paid manufacturing jobs, the opioid epidemic, stagnant real wages for the majority, and a profound loss of trust.

Large segments of the population experienced this as a betrayal by the liberal elite. These grievances were real and potentially explosive. Trump the demagogue claimed to speak for “the forgotten men and women,” attacked the “corrupt elite,” denounced globalization and free trade deals, and promised to restore American greatness. He redirected the subversive energy of popular discontent into his political project, ensuring it would not challenge the interests and power of his main donors.

Social conservatives got culture war wins; white working-class voters got scapegoats (immigrants, China); corporations and Wall Street got tax cuts and deregulation; the AI and high-tech sector received a highly favorable policy package (aggressive deregulation, financial incentives, and a strategic government partnership); the Zionist lobby received carte blanche for Israel to genocide Palestinians with impunity and attack the Axis of Resistance; and the military-industrial complex received the largest post-WWII military budget.

The compensatory narrative that secured Trump’s reelection winning millions of votes from the conservative base revolves around a cluster of powerful signs: the nation, the strongman, the family, and the border. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, I would argue that Trump is both the schizo (the one who lets the flows run wild) and the paranoiac (the one who tries to nail them back down under the despotic signifier of “America”).

Movements that oppose or support him are locked in a mirror dance. Until people break free from this reactive mirroring and start organizing around the material conditions that produced Trump, they will remain trapped in the same paranoid-schizoid machine, forever chasing a red herring while the real work of building an equitable system goes undone.

Unlike the elites who profit from volatility, ordinary people have no hedge portfolio. Whether they live at the periphery or in the rotten centre of the empire, they bear the brunt of Washington’s pursuit of hegemony through chaos.

1. https://en.interaffairs.ru/article/view-from-india-trump-is-not-the-cause-of-the-wests-decline-he-is-its-consequence

In The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a major influence on U.S. foreign policy, referred to Azerbaijan as “the vitally important 'cork' in the bottle containing the riches of the Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia.”¹ His metaphor, laden with imperialist undertones, vividly captures Azerbaijan’s strategic value as a gateway to vast energy and mineral resources. At the time of the book’s publication in 1997, Azerbaijan’s potential as a major gas and oil producer was well-known (the Baku oil boom started in the 1870s, when the country was part of the Tsarist empire). Its importance as an energy corridor and critical node in global trade emerged later, but it was already clear that the West would seek to leverage Azerbaijan’s position in order to gain an edge in energy and trade, extend its reach in the region and undermine Russian security and interests.

During the Cold War, the Caucasus was largely off-limit to Western shenanigans, but following the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991, this region re-emerged as a contested space. The spike in the number of reports published by American and British think tanks after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, along with other indicators, is testimony to a surge in attention to the South Caucasus and Central Asia.

These reports highlight areas of opportunity and recommend engaging the region in a more systematic and coordinated manner in order to exploit its vast resources and reduce the West’s dependency on China for critical mineral and rare earths resources, which they see as a strategic Achilles’ heel. A typical example is Eric Rudenshiold’s January 2025 report, A Trans-Caspian Trajectory: A New U.S. Strategy for Central Asia and the Caucasus², which has already been endorsed in Washington circles as a sort of roadmap. Rudenshiold, a former National Security Council Director for Central Asia and USAID director for the same area, urges the Trump administration to increase funding and deepen engagement in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, particularly through the Middle Corridor, with the intention of countering Russia and China. He also argues in favour of moving Central Asia responsibilities from the Asia Bureau to the Europe and Eurasia (E&E) Bureau and from CENTCOM to EUCOM to better reflect the American vision for Eurasia. A delusion that boils down to ‘EU-NATO in, Russia and China out.’

Praising his friend’s report, Daniel Runde, another USAID old-timer who advocated for the merger of USAID with the Department of State long before it actually happened, said that the Caspian region and Central Asia “is going to get a lot more tensions in the next five years.”³ Coming from him, it sounds more like a plan than an assessment. Runde also sits on the board of the Ukraine-Moldova American Enterprise Fund, a USAID creation, which provides direct investments, loans, coaching and technical assistance to local SME and start-ups. He is eager to replicate this scheme in Central Asian countries where, in the battle for global tech supremacy between China and the U.S., the race for critical minerals now rivals the race for oilfields and for trade routes, adding a new dimension and new actors to the old Great Game.

Runde remarked “There is going to be a lot of interest in minerals, and we need a buyer's club for metals.” He then emphasized Azerbaijan’s role as a key transit point in the Middle Corridor (Trans-Caspian International Trade Route) for their transport as it bypasses Iran and Russia: “My deepest thought from visiting Central Asia this summer is that if we’re going to go big on the Middle Corridor, we’re going to have to learn to love Azerbaijan in a much deeper, more profound way.”⁴

Crucially, Runde suggested the EU should pull its weight to complement U.S. efforts in the region, as it is currently doing in Ukraine.

I assume the reader understands what ‘loving Azerbaijan more deeply’ means in the given geopolitical context. Runde’s suggestion brings to mind ‘love bombing’, a manipulation tactic notoriously used by cults to recruit new adepts. It involves flattery, validation, intense attention, feigned mutual interests, empty promises, offers of help and pressure for very rapid commitment. Then a wedge is driven between the recruit and anyone who might provide a reality check, as isolation from former friends and family is deemed crucial to exercise control on cult members and create a dependency relationship. The effects of the ‘charm offensive’ launched towards the Azerbaijani leadership are hard to ignore. Baku ramped up its anti-Russian rhetoric, closed down Russian cultural centres and news outlets, arrested and mistreated Russian journalists and citizens, and is using any pretext to escalate tensions with Moscow.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Azerbaijan pursued a foreign policy of strategic equidistance aimed at maintaining beneficial relations with both Russia and the collective West, a balancing act that allowed Baku to maximize economic benefits. But as global and regional power competition for geopolitical, economic and cultural dominance increased, all countries in the South Caucasus were targeted by Western influence operations. The goal of these operations was to eradicate Soviet and Russian legacy from the region, and upend these countries’ relations with Moscow.

Influence is exerted through multiple vectors. Investments, trade, energy deals, market access and financial aid, control over energy resources, pipelines and supply routes, defence agreements, arms sales and security partnerships, diaspora communities, cultural soft power, education and religious ties, institutional reforms, integration into regional and international organizations, psyops and media campaigns that increasingly rely on social media. But influence becomes hegemonic when it transitions from episodic to systemic and structural, that is when it captures the political, economic and cultural elites of the country. This capture relies more on coaxing than on coercion. It hinges on education, integration and assimilation, a form of soft incorporation that reproduces a Western worldview almost effortlessly – elites internalize a foreign power’s narrative without recognizing its ideological bias, adopt Western policies as their own because they are presented as solutions to local needs or as universal norms, not as foreign constructs.

So-called “elite knowledge networks” are the transmission chain of Western narratives and worldview – they are embedded in university programs, philanthropic foundations, think tanks, cultural institutions, business and professional associations, etc. Transnational knowledge networks socialize and validate leaders who will eventually be in a position to shape their country’s policies and decision-making in alignment with the foreign power’s interests. Hegemony, as distinct from mere influence, implies a pervasive, structural dominance that often appears natural or inevitable to the host country’s elites. The control of minds is reinforced by coordinated narratives that dominate both global media and social media networks.

UK investment and influence in Azerbaijan

When we look at Azerbaijan it’s impossible not to notice the elephant in the room: the UK is the largest investor in Azerbaijan's economy, followed by Türkiye and Hungary.⁵ More than 450 UK companies operate in Azerbaijan. In the last 33 years BP, together with its co-venturers, has invested more than $87 billion in oil and gas exploration, development and transportation projects in Azerbaijan.⁶ In addition to oil and gas, UK companies are active in areas such as construction management and design, waste management, retail and education.

Almost immediately after Azerbaijan recaptured parts of territories of Nagorno-Karabakh, Baku announced ambitious reconstruction plans for these territories. British planning and architecture firm Chapman Taylor secured a $2.4 million contract from Azerbaijan to develop a new master plan for the city of Shusha (Shushi in Armenian). In tandem with Pasha Holding, owned by the Aliyev family, Chapman Taylor played an active role in deciding the fate of various structures within Shusha: by marking buildings and homes for demolition it contributed to the systematic erasure of Armenian heritage.⁷ Chapman Taylor also won a tender to prepare a draft master plan for Jabrayil, now a ghost town after being destroyed during Azerbaijan’s recent war with Armenia. BP and the Azerbaijani government plan to build a 240-MW Shafag solar plant near Jabrayil, a stone’s throw away from the Iranian border. Areas razed by war are like a “a blank white paper,” said Orkhan Huseynov, a spokesman for SOCAR, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan. “We can write whatever we want.” To put a politically-correct spin on the destruction, Baku announced that the area would be developed as a carbon-neutral, green energy zone. The push for ‘smart cities’ in territories now controlled by Azerbaijan and close to the Iranian border has alarmed Tehran. The intelligence and military applications of a web of sensors and surveillance cameras that enables data sharing and real-time analytics among physical objects are well-known. With the help of AI, multiple data sources can be integrated into a single point of view and used to “accelerate the closing of complex kill chains,” as Anduril, the defence startup backed by Palantir's Peter Thiel, boasts on its website.

BP, Azerbaijan’s largest investor, plays a role that extends far beyond the economy. The energy giant is deeply involved in the country’s politics and society, both through its outreach organizations and initiatives, and collaboration with the local British Council, universities and various Azerbaijani ministries, including the Ministry of Education. BP has always been contiguous with Britain’s MI6 and Ministry of Defence. Not only are they working closely at the highest levels, the revolving door between BP and British military and intelligence apparati never stops turning. Senior officials who became advisers to BP include former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers, who joined the corporation as a non-executive director, its former head of counterterrorism Sir Mark Allen who joined BP after leaving government service. General Nick Houghton, the former chief of the defence staff, and Lord George Robertson, the former Secretary of State for Defence and NATO secretary-general, also became advisors to BP.⁸

Türkiye and the Organization of Turkic States

Türkiye’s position as the second-largest investor in Azerbaijan is driven by a combination of strategic, economic, and cultural factors. The two countries share linguistic, ethnic, and cultural affinities, and are joined at the hip by economic interests, trade, energy projects and close military cooperation. So much so that both Turkey and Azerbaijan frequently use the slogan ‘two states, one nation’ to describe their relations. Azerbaijan is a key energy partner for Türkiye, supplying oil and gas through pipelines like the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) and Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP). While Azerbaijan invests heavily in Türkiye (SOCAR invested $18.5 billion in Türkiye’s energy sector over 17 years), Ankara reciprocates with significant investments in Azerbaijan’s oil and non-oil sector.

Türkiye makes no mystery of its geopolitical ambitions. In the Caucasus and Central Asia it is leveraging cultural, linguistic, and historical ties with Turkic nations to expand its influence. The Organization of Turkic States (OTS) is a cornerstone of Türkiye’s strategy to unite Turkic-speaking nations and project its power. Founded in 2009 as a Turkic Council, the OTS includes Türkiye, which is home to its general secretariat, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, with Turkmenistan, Hungary and Northern Cyprus as observers. Some analysts suspect that, beneath the banner of cultural unity, Türkiye harbours a geopolitical agenda to form a bloc whose undeclared objective is to counter China, Iran, and Russia.

In 2021 the OTS increased its focus on mutual security and strategic alignment and adopted a roadmap called ‘Turkic World Vision 2040.’⁹ One of the recommendations contained in this programmatic document is to “strengthen institutional relations with the UN and its bodies, Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA), and establish new partnership relations with relevant regional institutions including the European Union (EU), Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC), Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), and Visegràd Group.” The document made no reference to BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Union, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), although several members of the OTS are also members of the latter three organizations and Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan recently became BRICS partner countries.

China and Russia’s public stance on the OTS has been generally cautious, reflecting a mix of wariness and pragmatic engagement. Beijing views the OTS’s promotion of Turkic identity like the Common Turkic Alphabet adopted in 2024 and Türkiye’s decision to replace the term ‘Central Asia’ with ‘Turkestan’ in textbooks as potentially encouraging Uyghur nationalism, but believes that OTS members’ involvement in its Belt and Road Initiative would likely deter them from alienating Beijing. Since China is focusing on economic integration, it views the Middle Corridor promoted by both the OTS and Western powers as a complement to the BRI’s China-Central Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor. For this reason China has invested in related infrastructure, such as the Trans-Kazakhstan Railroad and is now working on the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) railway project which is planned to start in Kashgar (Xinjiang autonomous region) and end in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan. At the 2024 BRICS Summit in Kazan, where OTS members participated, China emphasized connectivity and trade, signaling a willingness to align with OTS economic goals when mutually beneficial.

Although the OTS hasn’t adopted a confrontational stance, one shouldn’t underestimate the potential of OTS initiatives to shape current and future perceptions, a potential that extends beyond their currently limited impact. Prompted by Türkiye, the organization even created a so-called "unified map of the Turkic world", which in addition to the OTS member countries, includes the Balkans, Cyprus, regions of Iran, the Xinjiang Uyghur region of China, part of Mongolia and some Russian territories (Crimea, Kuban, Tatarstan, the Caucasus, Siberia, Yakutia and the Altai Territory). Initiatives such as this underscore a key aspect of Türkiye’s soft power: education. Ankara offers scholarships and exchange programs, established foundations, institutes and universities like Manas University in Kyrgyzstan and Ahmet Yesevi University in Kazakhstan, while the Yunus Emre Institute and the Turkish Maarif Foundation play important roles in Türkiye’s current policies toward Central Asia. Clearly these efforts aim to strengthen long-term ties and educate future political elites. According to several surveys, they seem to have positively contributed to Türkiye’s overall perception in the region.¹⁰

Russia, like China, would rather not antagonize Türkiye – the form and extent of their collaboration are determined by their respective motives and current priorities rather than past rivalries – but presumably keeps an eye on the OTS, regarded by some Russian analysts as an expansionist project of the West implemented through Ankara. The role British intelligence plays behind the scene is particularly concerning, since Pan-Turkism, like other forms of ethnic nationalism, has historically been nurtured and supervised by Britain in its confrontation with Russia.

Considering that the West seeks to expand control over Western and Central Asia’s natural resources and trade routes, Russia and China ought to align and coordinate their soft power initiatives if they want to boost the relevance and capabilities of their regional projects. Russia’s position could be bolstered by a reorientation in terms of its identity – the idea of Russia as a multiethnic, multicultural and multiconfessional Eurasian civilisation, whose spiritual, cultural, political and economic development have both eastern and western trajectories.

At present President Recep Erdoğan is still balancing Türkiye’s Western allies and non-Western powers like China and Russia to gain economic and strategic benefits – the collective West lacks sufficient leverage to enforce Türkiye’s full compliance with anti-Russia and anti-China diktats and policies – but the grooming of Turkish elites continues at a steady pace. American and European think tanks have recently suggested the revitalization of Türkiye’s economic integration with the West and recommended making it a major partner in Western infrastructure projects with a focus on Central Asian connectivity.¹¹

Iran is understandably worried about the expansion of Turkish influence and the OTS’ hidden agenda, Azerbaijan’s military and intelligence cooperation with Israel, its decades-old ‘energy-for-arms’ pact with the Zionist state which in 2024 topped the list of destinations for Azerbaijani oil, Türkiye’s military industrial complex and NATO membership, its soft power and neo-Ottoman regionalism. They all present a challenge to Iran’s security.

Add to the mix the fact that Armenia, Iran’s strategic partner, under Pashinyan’s rule has been pivoting to the West and is currently engaged in negotiations with Azerbaijan to strike a peace deal that could further embolden Türkiye and open the door to Western control of the Zangezur corridor.

The U.S. has set its eyes on the Zangezur Corridor

The opening of this transportation route would connect Azerbaijan’s mainland with its Nakhchivan exclave through Armenia’s Syunik Province and significantly weaken Iran, which would lose transit revenue from Azerbaijan-Nakhchivan trade and control of the greater part of its border with Armenia.

By connecting NATO-member Türkiye to Azerbaijan, a direct Turkic link between Europe and Central Asia will be established through the South Caucasus to bypass Iran. If the West, or one of its proxies, were allowed to control this strategic route, NATO would have a highway to the Caspian region at its disposal — a scenario that neither Iran nor Russia, two of the five countries that have coastlines along the Caspian Sea, can accept.

Washington didn’t show much interest in the Zangezur corridor when it was first officially proposed by Baku in 2020 because, as part of the Trilateral Ceasefire Agreement signed then by Ilham Aliyev, Nikol Pashinyan and Vladimir Putin, Armenia and Russian FSB border guards were to monitor transport connections between the bulk of Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan. The U.S. turned its eyes on this corridor after Azerbaijan’s flash military conclusion of the longstanding Nagorno Karabakh conflict in September 2023, when the region came under Baku’s control thus making Russian peacekeepers redundant – Armenian civilians were driven out and there was no ceasefire to monitor. Last but not least, following the colour revolution in 2018, Yerevan was eager to please its Western sponsors and distance itself from Moscow.

In July 2025 several news outlets reported that according to U.S. Ambassador to Türkiye Tom Barrack, Washington intends to lease the Zangezur corridor for 100 years and let a large American logistics company manage it. At the time of writing there is still no official confirmation of such intention, but the news has been received with a mix of interest, scepticism, and outright rejection. Several sources insist that Ankara supports the plan and has been urging Baku to sign a peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia as it would lead to Ankara’s own normalisation process with Armenia.

As to Armenia, its political leadership stresses it is pursuing a multi-vector policy, but actions speak louder than words. Yerevan suspended participation in the work of the CSTO (a military alliance consisting of Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan) and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan recently stated that Armenia is more likely to quit the organization than resume its membership. Armenia has also officially applied for EU membership candidacy, hosted joint military exercises with the U.S. and engaged in talks with NATO. At the same time, Armenia declared it doesn’t intend to withdraw from the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), which prompted the Kremlin to remind Yerevan that it is impossible to be a member of both the EU and EAEU.

Meanwhile Yerevan continues its crackdown on pro-Russian forces: ahead of the next parliamentary elections, Armenian authorities have been busy targeting opposition figures and groups perceived as aligned with Moscow. Hardly surprising when you consider that Pashinyan’s government receives financial backing from the EU and U.S. Since 1992, the U.S. has provided about $3 billion to influence Armenia’s elites and society. In just five years (2019-2024), USAID spent almost twice as much money in Armenia ($ 2.1 billion) as in the previous twenty-seven to promote “the development of democracy,” codename for the demonization of Russia and support of pro-Western forces in the country.¹² To complement U.S. efforts, Brussels funnelled hundreds of millions of euros to Yerevan. In 2024 alone the EU approved a €270 million EU aid package “to underpin the Armenia-EU Partnership Agenda.”¹³

Labour sharing: U.S., EU, and UK divide responsibilities to advance shared objectives

Brussels has recently increased engagement with Central Asia and the South Caucasus through various initiatives and projects which, in its intentions, would facilitate interregional integration and counter Russia’s influence. In May 2025, the European Commission’s Directorate for Enlargement and the Eastern Neighbourhood, notoriously staffed with radical Russophobes, announced a new Black Sea Strategy.¹⁴ As part of this strategy, the EU vows to deepen cooperation with Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Türkiye, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, focus on transport, energy, digital, and trade corridors, particularly the Trans-Caspian International Transport Corridor (Middle Corridor), which bypasses Russia and Iran. The official document stresses that “a coordinated approach with Türkiye, an EU partner of strategic importance and a candidate country, is crucial. Likewise, deepening relations with Armenia and Azerbaijan through cooperation in strategic areas is an important objective for the EU.”

I would like to point out that this is not an isolated policy and has a clear military angle. The strategy has already been woven into the EU Defense plan as part of a broader campaign known as “ReArm Europe” which includes the participation of arms manufacturers from neighbouring and ‘like-minded’ countries as potential partners in joint procurements. The Black Sea and Caspian regions are implied in EU’s plans concerning preparedness and crisis response coordination and civil-military cooperation.

The European Commission has taken formal steps to strengthen ties with countries that serve as a bridge between Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, eyeing the energy resources, minerals and critical rare-earth metals of the region. In this light we should consider the first EU-Central Asia summit held in Samarkand in April 2025 which upgraded relations between the EU and five Central Asian states (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan) to a strategic partnership. The summit aimed to diversify trade relations away from Russia and China and strengthen diplomatic connections. However, this ambition requires not only political will but also reliable infrastructure. Recognizing this need, Brussels has pledged billions of euros in investments as part of its Global Gateway project, a pipedream in which the EU would provide the Global South with a better alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

One of its flagship initiatives is the upgrading of the Middle Corridor, a multimodal trade and transport network connecting China to Europe via Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, the South Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Georgia), and Türkiye, bypassing Russia and Iran. The corridor is operational and expanding, mainly because many shipping companies cannot use the Northern Corridor through Russia due to the threat of Western sanctions. The Middle Corridor, despite being shorter than the Northern one, faces higher costs, slower transit times, and persistent congestion, with the Caspian Sea presenting the primary bottleneck due to limited vessel availability, outdated port infrastructure, and inefficient cargo-handling processes.

It is estimated that building the necessary infrastructure in Central Asia will require around €18.5 billion. More than half of the EU funding, €10 billion, was pledged during an investor forum held in Brussels in early 2024, which was attended by EU member states, private sector representatives, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).¹⁵

It may seem a lot, but not when you compare it to Chinese investments in Central Asian projects, which have already exceeded €60 billion in total value.

Despite the EU's poor track record in infrastructure development even within EU countries — budget overruns and delays are the norm — and its inability to match China’s swift and efficient progress, Brussels’ ambitions shouldn’t be underestimated: its promises often fall flat, but it excels at co-opting elites and grooming future leaders. The EU propaganda machine is well-oiled and relentlessly pushes its narrative to those spared the misfortune of living under the technocratic rule of this dysfunctional, and increasingly totalitarian, supranational organization that has turned national parliaments into mere simulacra.

On 24 April 2025, the day Armenians worldwide commemorated the 1915 genocide, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas...visited Azerbaijan! Why would Kallas court Azerbaijan on such a sensitive date, ostensibly trampling on Armenian feelings? Because Armenia was already in the bag, so to speak, with Prime Minister Pashinyan doing everything the EU had asked of its Eastern partners. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, needed some blandishment. There were other considerations too. Since the tragic accident involving the Baku to Grozny flight that crashed near Aktau in Kazakhstan a few months earlier, relations between Moscow and Baku had been under strain. Kallas swooped down like a vulture to take advantage of the situation. The EU, which had signed a major energy memorandum with Baku in 2022 to double gas imports, treated Azerbaijan as a coveted partner.

The reason lies in and beyond its energy resources. Azerbaijan is positioning itself not only as a Caucasian or Caspian state but also as a springboard to Central Asia, which explains why the EU is doubling down on its efforts to engage with the OTS. In 2025, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan recognized the Greek Cypriot administration, diverging from Türkiye’s support for Northern Cyprus and suggesting EU diplomatic leverage in Central Asia.

In recent years, there has been a flurry of Western diplomatic initiatives in the region to enhance ties and explore cooperation in areas like trade, education, and critical minerals. It appears we are witnessing a "Great Game 2.0," a modern iteration of the historical geopolitical rivalry over Central Asia between the Russian and British Empires, with old and new actors.

Over a year ago, RUSI, the UK’s leading defence and security think tank, stressed the synergy between the OTS and the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (Middle Corridor) and their strategic importance for the EU. Keep in mind that although the UK left the EU it retained its influence.¹⁶

In September 2024, Richard Moore, the former head of Britain’s MI6, stepped onto the stage at Baku’s ADA University, and delivered a lecture that barely masked the significance of his visit. No official statements from Baku or the British Embassy detailed the agenda, but the presence of MI6’s chief signaled more than academic pleasantries. Analysts whispered of discussions with Azerbaijan’s Foreign Intelligence Service (XKX) focusing on countering Russia in the South Caucasus after Vladimir Putin’s August 2024 visit to Azerbaijan intensified Western concerns about a potential deal that would allow Russian border guards to monitor the Zangezur Corridor, considered as a future component of the Middle Corridor.

In April 2025 the House of Lords hosted a roundtable in London to discuss the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, or Middle Corridor.¹⁷ Officially framed as promoting development, the event primarily aimed to bolster British influence in the region and advance the interests of Anglo-American capital. Among the initiatives announced, the UK’s Export Credit Agency was slated to provide up to £5 billion in credit guarantees to Azerbaijan for priority projects in energy, aviation, transport, and infrastructure. It was revealed that $10 billion was raised via the London Stock Exchange the year before. The roundtable was followed by a conference three months later “to harness the momentum.” ¹⁸ In a typical neocolonial arrangement, the region supplies raw materials as collateral, while Britain and the US reap control, profits, and influence.

Conclusion

The transition to a multipolar world, where power is distributed among multiple global and regional actors rather than concentrated in one or two superpowers, is reshaping international relations. However, the West continues to approach global affairs with a Cold War binary mindset, relying on Cold War tools like sanctions and narratives rooted in Cold War ideology. Last but not least, it expanded NATO, a Cold War-era alliance, and increased military spending.

Resistance to a shifting world order is inevitably fraught with geopolitical conflicts and intensified competition, particularly over resources and trade corridors as Western elites scramble to arrest the crumbling of U.S. hegemony. At the Valdai Discussion Club in October 2022, Vladimir Putin described the coming decade as “the most dangerous, unpredictable and, at the same time, important decade since the end of WW2.”¹⁹

In the context of heightened geopolitical and geoeconomic tensions between the West and the rest of the world, several actors have a clear interest in damaging Baku-Moscow and Yerevan-Moscow relations and leveraging an Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal to control this strategic region. They pull out all the stops and weaponize every tool at their disposal to achieve this objective.

But they are swimming against the tide of geopolitical shifts, as the Global South consolidates its economic and strategic position through growth, partnerships like BRICS, and resistance to Western hegemony.

The course taken by the political leadership of both Armenia and Azerbaijan is clearly out of sync not only with this global trend but also with the reality of their trade relations with Russia. Russia is Azerbaijan’s third-largest trading partner after Italy and Turkey, accounting for 10.33% of Azerbaijan’s foreign trade in the first half of 2025 and 10.08% in 2024. Russia is Azerbaijan's leading import partner and ranks sixth as a destination for Azerbaijani exports. In 2025, Russia-Azerbaijan trade has grown significantly, reaching $2.52 billion in the first half (up 16.2%), driven by Russian exports of vehicles, fuels, and agricultural products.

Russia pursued a mutually beneficial arrangement with Azerbaijan to maintain friendly relations, which explains Moscow’s restrained response to the 2020 downing of a Russian helicopter and the deaths of its crew, Azerbaijan’s capture of Nagorno-Karabakh (during which Russian soldiers were killed). However, Western powers seem to have secured considerable sway over Ilham Aliyev, influencing his stance towards Moscow. After the unfortunate accident involving the Baku to Grozny flight, Azerbaijani authorities could have reacted the way friendly nations do, wait for the result of the investigation, pursue a diplomatic route and private negotiations with Russia. Instead Baku chose to exploit this accident and adopt a confrontational approach that fueled anti-Russian hysteria in the country. Azerbaijani information flows indicate that it mobilized significant political, expert, and media resources in its anti-Russian campaign.

By alienating Russia, antagonizing Iran, and seeking Western favour, Aliyev is engaging in a high-stakes gamble that runs roughshod over his proclaimed equidistance and multi-vector foreign policy. Prioritizing alignment with Western powers, amidst the ongoing shift in the global balance of power, represents a most questionable strategic decision. Some would say it borders on folly.

References

1Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives, 1997

2https://api.caspianpolicy.org/media/ckeditor_media/2025/01/15/us-strategy-for-central-asia-and-caucasus_s18hJ2f.pdf

3https://x.com/caspiancenter/status/1879574628399829095

4https://www.caspianpolicy.org/research/press-releases/a-us-strategy-for-central-asia-and-the-caucasus-new-policy-for-trump

5https://www.trend.az/business/4023519.html

6https://report.az/en/energy/bp-reveals-volume-of-investment-in-azerbaijan/

7https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/uk-firm-chapman-taylor-accused-of-harmful-human-rights-impact-in-24-million-shushi-redesign-project/

8https://consortiumnews.com/2021/02/23/dozens-of-uk-former-senior-officials-profit-from-fossil-fuel-corporations/

9https://turkicstates.org/u/d/haberler/turkic-world-vision-2040-2396-97.pdf

10https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0738059310001690?via%3Dihub

11https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/transatlantic-policies-on-china-is-there-a-role-for-turkiye?lang=en

12https://eadaily.com/en/news/2025/05/05/teach-to-hate-russia-how-the-usaid-office-captured-armenia-without-a-single-shot

13https://euneighbourseast.eu/news/latest-news/eu-announces-new-e270-million-resilience-and-growth-package-for-armenia/#:~:text=To%20underpin%20this%20partnership%2C%20the%20EU%20is%20proposing,leverage%20investments%20in%20connectivity%2C%20resilience%20and%20business%20development.

14https://enlargement.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-strategy-secure-prosperous-and-resilient-black-sea-region-2025-05-28_en

15https://international-partnerships.ec.europa.eu/news-and-events/news/global-gateway-eu-and-central-asian-countries-agree-building-blocks-develop-trans-caspian-transport-2024-01-30_en

16https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/azerbaijans-pivot-central-asia.

17https://www.caspianpolicy.org/research/press-releases/trans-caspian-connectivity-at-the-house-of-lords

18https://www.caspianpolicy.org/research/press-releases/the-caspian-policy-center-hosts-its-3rd-trans-caspian-connectivity-conference-in-london

19http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69695

Ukraine’s Defense Minister Rustem Umerov and Vladimir Medinsky, the head of the Russian delegation, confirmed that the two sides had reached a consensus on this humanitarian measure.

On 6 June, Russia sent the first batch of 1,212 frozen bodies to the designated exchange point on the Ukrainian border. But as Vladimir Medinsky explained, “The Ukrainian side unexpectedly postponed for an indefinite period, both the acceptance of the bodies and the exchange of prisoners of war.” (1)

The Russian side offered to fulfil this obligation on Trinity Saturday, the day Orthodox Christians commemorate the departed and pray for all dead, regardless of whether they are family, friends or strangers. The Ukrainian side did not show up and did not offer an explanation.

There are several reasons why Kiev would rather forget about these bodies.

The regime is caught in a bind: both choices, repatriating them or refusing to, are laden with risks and could potentially disrupt the status quo.

The financial burden associated with compensating families is certainly a factor, as each fallen soldier’s compensation is estimated at 15 million hryvnia (approximately US$362,000.) But it may not be a decisive factor, since Ukrainian authorities have long learned how to evade reponsibility and figured out ways to delay or avoid paying compensation.

Former deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, Spiridon Kilinkarov, told Rossiya 24 TV channel that the government would need to allocate more than US$2 billion just to compensate the families of 6,000 fallen soldiers. Ukraine lacks the funds and Western countries haven’t shown any intention of assuming financial responsibility for these deaths, let alone for hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who have already perished.
He explained that applying for the compensation promised by the regime is extremely complicated. It requires official recognition that the soldier was performing his duties at the time of death, which needs to be corroborated by witnesses and then the application undergoes a lengthy verification. (2)

Since the procedure seems to have been deliberately designed to ensure that very few claimants would be successful, receiving an extra few thousand applications won’t make a big difference.

It’s therefore worthwhile considering other possible explanations for Kiev’s reluctance to accept these bodies.

Their repatriation could bring the issue of human losses to the forefront of public discourse and thus expose the regime’s immoral and fraudulent handling and classification of military casualties, such as deliberately mislabeling soldiers’ remains as ‘unidentified’ or ‘civilian’ to avoid compensation.

It may also increase skepticism at the figures provided by Kiev and draw unwanted attention to the massive losses suffered during the disastrous invasion and occupation of part of the Kursk region.

Although Ukrainian media are controlled by the regime and Western agencies, the risk of losing control of the narrative is not negligible.

The current leadership has a clear interest in avoiding scrutiny, and so do its Western backers, but one can’t completely rule out the possibility that politicians or interest groups viying for power might point out the most glaring inconsistencies in the official narrative and grab some low-hanging fruit without even the need to conduct a thorough investigation.

Although at the time of writing it’s still unclear whether Kiev will eventually meet the terms of the agreement reached in Istanbul and repatriate thousands of bodies, there is no denying that the regime is in a conundrum.

Taking back six thousand frozen corpses means storing, identifying and then burying or cremating them. Unlike abstract numbers, bodies and tombstones have a physical existence which would signal to Ukrainian society the true scale of losses and thus highlight systematic concealment. Their impact on the national morale can hardly be overstated. Which explains why the much touted National Military Memorial Cemetery, whose design is based on the Arlington National Cemetery in the United States has yet to be built.

The refusal to accept these bodies, on the other hand, might trigger a strong backlash and widespread outrage over the regime’s inhumanity and lack of respect for the fallen soldiers.

Burials, funerary traditions and mourning customs tell us a lot about a society. Regardless of any purported raison d’etat, I doubt any Ukrainian would consider Russian refrigerators as a suitable resting place for his or her family members.

Humans have been honouring the dead and performing funeral rites for thousands of years. Not only did Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals bury their dead, some paleoanthropologists believe that even an extinct species known as Homo nadeli, a Stone Age small-brained hominid better adapted to climbing and suspensory behaviour in trees than walking, may have done so.

In a country where militarization has been actively promoted since 2014, and the glorification of fighters is embedded into daily life to boost morale, the refusal to lay to rest the remains of fallen soldiers currently held in Russia offers a strident contrast to Kiev’s narratives, state awards, and public commemoration of acts of heroism.

You can’t sweep the dead under the carpet without violating an ethical principle that is universal. The United Nations recognizes the protection and respect for the dead as a fundamental human value across all cultures and religions. Although burial and funeral practices vary across cultures, burying the dead is regarded as a sacred duty by all religions, and any interference with the burial of human remains is condemned across all cultures and legal systems.

Not only does denying burial to soldiers while publicly hailing them as “heroic defenders of the nation” reveal the leadership’s hypocrisy, it is also an egregious transgression of religious and cultural norms. Such transgressions have very serious implications for both societal cohesion and the survival of any regime.

Just remember the Madres de Plaza de Mayo and their role in undermining the legitimacy of Argentina’s military regime. Starting in 1977, the mothers of the “disappeared” — opponents of the regime seized by the authorities and never heard from again — held regular vigils in the public square in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires to demand transparency and accountability regarding their children’s fate. They had little hope of ever seeing them alive again, but by holding these vigils, they laid bare the cruelty and inhumanity of a regime that wouldn’t even let mothers bury their dead.

In ancient societies burial was sanctioned by the gods and its denial was considered a sacrilege, an infringement of divine laws. Retrieving the bodies of slain warriors was such a sacred duty that wars were waged to get them back. Reverence for the dead was not always extended to the enemy.

But even in violent Homeric times, when Achilles drags Hector through the dust to deny him a “beautiful death” Apollo intervenes to protect Hector with his golden shield. A god ensures that Hector may still have the beautiful death worthy of such a warrior and eventually Hector is buried by the Trojans after his father, King Priam, ransoms his body from Achilles.

A few centuries later, around 440 BCE, Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone already emphasized the moral imperative to bury all dead, including the enemy. After a civil war, King Creon decrees that Polynices, who had gathered an army and marched against Thebes, is a traitor and therefore must remain unburied.

When Antigone defies Creon’s edict and buries her brother, she appeals to a higher law, that code of human dignity and familial duty that no state can override. The gods approve and Creon’s violation provokes divine retribution. He loses his son Haemon and wife Eurydice.

Today no one would deny that all dead deserve respect, regardless of their actions, origin and ideology.

Many Ukrainians may disagree with the characterization of their government as an illegitimate, repressive, terrorist, criminal and corrupt regime, but how many of them can justify denying proper burial to Ukrainian soldiers and compensation to their families?

Where is Ukraine’s Antigone? Will widows, mothers and sisters defy this necropolitical regime and demand answers? Only time will tell.

1. https://tass.com/politics/1970241

2. https://www.vesti.ru/article/4540022

Last February, I publicly questioned the existence of Jianwei Xun, an author who published a best-selling, critically acclaimed book titled Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk and the New Architecture of Reality. On his website and on academia.org — the original version of his profile can now be found only on Internet Archive — he claimed to be a Hong Kong-born media philosopher, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Critical Digital Studies in Berlin who had studied political philosophy and media at Dublin University.

Since I live in Hong Kong and used to teach cultural studies, I was surprised I had never heard his name before. Had I become so disconnected from this interdisciplinary field that his name didn’t even sound vaguely familiar? It certainly sounded odd: Chinese names follow a different order, the family name should have come first. That’s when I decided to dig deeper. The Berlin institute he mentioned didn't exist, “Dublin University” was an ambiguous reference and didn’t point to any specific university. Xun claimed he had spent years consulting on strategic narratives for global institutions before dedicating himself to writing. I found no trace of his academic output or professional activity prior to 2024 when his work was first published in several languages. The book excerpts I sampled didn’t strike me as particularly original, they read like a hotchpotch of 1960s and 1970s philosophy. But unlike other derivative texts I often come across, they possessed an uncanny quality, almost as if a medium had invoked the spirits of the dead philosophers during a séance. Since today’s impostors are more likely to use AI than table-turning, I quickly came to the conclusion that whoever was hiding behind the mysterious “Jianwei Xun” had employed generative AI tools to churn out this book.

Months after I denounced this fraud¹ and exchanged messages with several journalists, corporate media finally admitted Xun doesn't exist. The Italian publisher who hid behind this fictitious identity now insists he was just conducting an experiment, "an exercise in ontological engineering,” as he put it. But if that was the case and he didn’t intend to deceive his readers, why did he remove the academic and professional references he had fabricated from the newly updated website of his fake persona?

The choice of a Chinese identity to enhance credibility and marketability reflects a disturbing pattern of cultural appropriation where Western writers capitalize on the perceived exoticism of an Asian name, while real Asian writers face significant barriers to the publication of their work.

If there is a lesson to be learnt from the Jianwei Xun saga, it is that the media buzz around “his” work and persona, amplified by reputable outlets, glowing reviews, and a slick online presence, created a feedback loop where the perception of reality outpaced any need to verify it. When the lines between real and not real get blurred, aggressive marketing made those lines feel irrelevant.

With AI churning out content that to the untrained eye appears indistinguishable from human output, and media outlets racing to publish it, people are increasingly wired to prioritize the hype and often have no time to even scratch the surface.

While the media system has always cashed in on hype and sensationalism, these days social media platforms are the main generator of hype.

As I was handling media enquiries about the fictional “Hong Kong-born media philosopher” and writing about this case on my Substack, I received a tip from a reader who alerted me to another instance of habitual AI-enabled plagiarism, this time involving someone who does live in Hong Kong and contributes to Russian and Chinese media outlets.

Did his opinion pieces slip through? Did editors turn a blind eye to AI-generated content in order to capitalize on his social media reach?

In any case, we should not focus on specific instances: anyone using an AI detector knows that this unethical practice is widespread. Instead, I invite the reader to consider the complex interplay of audience dynamics, economic and cultural factors that incentivizes both the rise of AI plagiarism and the social influencer industry.

By now it should be abundantly clear how social influencers operate. Self-promotion, exaggerated claims, and a well-crafted image can snowball into credibility before anyone checks credentials. They build parasocial relationships with their followers who feel like they know the influencer, even if they have never met. Influencers attempt to create an aura of individuality and authenticity through personal storytelling, share raw footage or sensational material, invite followers to “peek” into their lives encouraging voyeuristic engagement.

However, this aura is even more fragile than the artificial aura mentioned by Walter Benjamin when in the 1930s he described the Hollywood-driven phenomenon of elevating actors to celebrity status, creating cult-like personas that compensated for the loss of aura in in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Not only is the influencers’ derivative content easily replicable, they too are vulnerable to replacement by AI-generated personas.

Benjamin recognized in the spell of the star’s personality “the phony spell of a commodity.” But most importantly, he warned that a medium that has a dual capacity to abolish distance between the audience and the depicted world while simultaneously detaching the audience from the physical world and its material conditions, is ideally suited to the aims of fascism. Benjamin was primarily referring to film and photography, but in an era of algorithmic reproduction controlled by a handful of tech companies his observations have become more relevant than ever.

Influencers leverage the bandwagon effect, that mix of conformity and fear of missing out. Once a persona gains momentum, with the help of thousands of bots whose cost is now less than a cent for basic accounts, humans jump on. Social media’s smoke and mirrors work because we are wired for stories, not audits. But with billions of automated bots flooding social media platforms, there is a roughly 50% chance that any account you engage with, whether by liking a post, commenting, or following, is a bot. Bots have become so sophisticated that it has become increasingly harder to detect them. As to the remaining accounts that are still operated by humans, about half of them publish content that is generated by artificial intelligence.

Even those with limited expertise on a given topic can produce persuasive posts and articles, while readers would need an AI tool such as GPTZero to identify their artificial origin.

A simple prompt ensures that the AI-generated content they publish is aligned, and resonates, with their followers’ ideological leanings, interests and preferences. An article that appeared in a conservative news outlet can be automatically rewritten to please a liberal audience and vice versa. A paper published by an academic can be summarized and interspersed with jokes and colloquialism to appeal to a non-academic audience, three articles can be seamlessly meshed into one creating a cohesive piece that synthesizes their content, etc. You get the drift.

Shaped by a mix of human activity and AI-generated content, the Internet and social media now resemble a phantasmagoria, a make-believe optical show that projects ghostly images, fetishizes human desires and experiences, and intensifies narcissistic self-reference to create an illusion of authenticity. The manufactured presentation of the self (fabricated authenticity) is the ultimate neoliberal imperative: people are actively encouraged to become producers of themselves. The name of the game is “fake it till you make it.” Lack of qualifications or professional expertise is no barrier for aspiring influencers. Ambition, a background in marketing, a good knowledge of psychological manipulation techniques, the ability to leverage algorithms, and an initial investment in an army of bots to boost content are better guarantors of success.

Those who make the cut can rake in juicy contracts to promote products, services or a political agenda. The more engagement their hustle generates, the more data capital social media platforms accumulate.

Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs is undermining real engagement and driving an increasing number of frustrated and disillusioned users away from these platforms, leaving bots to interact with other bots, as advertisers already lament.

As generative AI dissolves barriers to productivity – one can easily churn out dozens of social media posts a day, dozens of articles a week and use them for videos, podcasts and interviews – concerns about machine plagiarism keep mounting. Initially the most combative critics were those directly affected such as authors, artists, journalists and academics, but, as I will explain, the alarm is now being raised by AI researchers too. It turns out that AI-generated texts which omit attribution, remix unconsented content and reduce it to an untraceable, unrecognizable blend, constitute a form of pollution that is degrading the same digital environment that feeds AI systems.

These systems, particularly large language models and generative tools, are trained on data scraped from the internet, including books, articles, websites, and social media. Theft on a global scale is presented as the future of humanity.

Not only are AI companies profiting from work they never paid for and never asked permission to use, those who rely on generative AI are profiting too, which drives the demand for ever more sophisticated and human-like chatbots.

Like most industries, traditional media are being transformed by AI. While AI analytical tools can certainly help journalists process a large volume of data, identify meaningful patterns, and AI transcription technology is saving them time on a rather mundane task, generative AI is a different story. It is jeopardizing journalistic integrity, jobs and readers’ trust. As usual, the big driver behind the use of AI tools such as ChatGPT is the pursuit of profit. The problem is, cuts in the newsroom are weakening the quality of journalism, which alienates the audience, which in turn puts further pressure on revenues, which again leads to further staff cuts, and so on.

The complexity of journalistic work rests upon a repertoire of embodied experiences and knowledge – building a network of trusted sources who are willing to share their secrets is not something AI will be able to achieve any time soon.

Unfortunately, the moment the result of this painstaking work, which may combine interviews and extensive research, is published online, it is drowned out by hundreds of AI-generated variations of the same article that remixed and rewrote its content. The result is standardized, homogeneous texts stripped of the vibrant, dynamic essence of human voices and their diversity. Or mimicry that simulates diversity – the “text-in-drag.” But as the Internet is inundated with AI-generated clickbait articles competing for readers’ attention, investing in quality doesn’t guarantee any returns to media outlets and independent authors.

Moreover, AI’s overproduction of derivative content is overwhelming search engines and social feeds, and exacerbating the problem of information overload. Readers can hardly cope with a deluge of information and the constant digital stimulation that is impairing their memory, attention spans, critical thinking and ability to process information. Many are already tuning out, avoiding news altogether, or just scrolling headlines.

Although regurgitating information has never been easier, its impact is fast becoming inversely proportional to its quantity. Information requires no interpretation to exist and doesn’t necessarily turn into knowledge and understanding. It may, but only through a dynamic cognitive process of which acquisition is only the first step. As Artificial Intelligence is advancing its capabilities, there is no evidence that human beings are advancing theirs. Actually, they are already losing the ability to think clearly and effectively, let alone handle complexity.

Another consequence of the proliferation of AI systems is ontological confusion, a state of existential disorientation arising from ambiguity or indeterminacy in the categories of being, essence, and reality. AI creates a breach in the barrier between humans and objects, though it’s fair to say capitalism started wrecking it long time ago. If the barrier collapses, our conception of what it is to be human would be profoundly undermined. AI is already disrupting established frameworks of meaning, interaction and trust; failing to take stock of this disruption could have catastrophic effects on both individuals and societies.

If AI is to assist humans rather than deceive them, then we need a mandatory AI identification system: any autonomous AI agent must declare itself as such prior to interaction with a human and the media industry, including social media platforms, should clearly label AI-generated content. There is no shortage of AI detection tools, and they are pretty effective at identifying which portions of a text are likely to be human-written, AI-generated, or AI-refined.

Some also hope that sooner or later search engines will start offering users an effective AI filter. Until then, weeding out artificial content will continue to be a time consuming endeavour.

Although the optimist in me shares the belief that transparency over AI-generated content will likely increase due to a strong demand, my inner pessimist believes that chances of it happening soon are slim: the digital economy is underpinned by data capital, which has a symbiotic relationship with AI. And Big Tech won’t change the status quo until the quality of data becomes so seriously degraded that it erodes its colossal profits.

AI transforms data into capital and relies on data capital to train and operate. AI is both a driver and beneficiary of data capital. That’s why software is being embedded in more and more products: they are all generating data.

As a ‘Big Data strategist’ for Oracle, one of the largest software companies in the world, explained “data is a new kind of capital on par with financial capital for creating new products and services. And it’s not just a metaphor; data fulfils the literal textbook definition of capital.”²

I don’t know which textbook he had in mind, but in order to understand the economic and social dynamics that drive the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, I am going to consult the copy of Marx’s Capital that sits on my shelf. Admittedly, it needs some dusting.

Marx defines capital as value in motion, that is value of a peculiar type, namely self-expanding value, a social relation which appropriates surplus value created in a definite process of production, and continually reproduces both capital and capitalist relations.

In order to expand, capital must purchase a commodity, the consumption of which creates new value. This commodity is labour-power, an inconvenient truth that our “Big Data strategist” didn’t bother to mention.

“In order to be able to extract value from the consumption of a commodity, our friend, Moneybags, must be so lucky as to find, within the sphere of circulation, in the market, a commodity, whose use-value possesses the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose actual consumption, therefore, is itself an embodiment of labour, and, consequently, a creation of value. The possessor of money does find on the market such a special commodity in capacity for labour or labour-power.” (Capital, Chapter 6)

The creation of value depends on the general intellect, that is the knowledge, skills, and intellectual capacities of society, but under capitalism it is subject to private appropriation and private control. Tech oligarchs like to frame this private appropriation for their AI models, as "democratizing access to knowledge.” If that is case, maybe we should start to democratize access to their bank accounts.

When data is treated as a form of capital, the imperative is to extract and collect as much data, from as many sources, by any means possible. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Capitalism is inherently extractive and exploitative. In addition, it also generates a constant pressure or tendency towards universal commodification, it keeps colonising new territories, non-commodified and non-monetised parts of life, with the same disregard for collateral damage it exhibits when it exploits labour and natural resources to seek profit.

It is important to keep in mind that data is both commodity and capital. A commodity when traded, capital when used to extract value.

AI distils information into data by transforming any kind of input into abstract, numerical representations to enable computation.

The distinction between the consumer and the producer of information vanishes once their activity becomes data. To be online is to both consume and produce data, that is value. Users generate data through interactions which platforms monetize. This unpaid ‘labour’ is comparable to Marx’s labour power, as users produce value (data). AI algorithms, cloud infrastructure, and digital platforms are the new means of production, and they are concentrated in very few hands.

Data extraction and collection is driven by the dictates of capital accumulation, which in turn drives capital to construct and rely upon a universe where everything is reduced to data. Since the data which is fed into machines has undergone a preliminary abstraction process, there is nothing to stop this data from being outcomes of previous cycles of artificial production of information through data. Data generate data that generate data and so on. Like interest-bearing capital, “a mysterious and self-creating source of its own increase … self-valorising value, money-breeding money”, as Marx describes the process of financialization that autonomizes capital from its own support.

Data accumulation and capital accumulation have led to the same outcome: growing inequality and the consolidation of monopoly corporate power.

But as the autonomization of capital that crowds out non-financial investments has a detrimental effect on productive sectors, so does the proliferation of AI content online. Several researchers have pointed out that generating data out of synthetic data leads to dangerous distortions. Training large language models on their own output doesn’t work and may lead to ‘model collapse’, a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget the true underlying data distribution, start hallucinating and producing nonsense.³

Without a constant input of good quality data produced by humans, these language models cannot improve. The question is, who is going to feed well-written, factually correct, AI-free texts when an increasing number of people are offloading cognitive effort to artificial intelligence, and there is mounting evidence that human intelligence is declining?

When Ray Kurzweil, a promoter of transhumanism and AI pioneer, raves about machine learning systems that would soon begin improving themselves by designing ever more powerful neural networks that do not require human input “Because computers operate much faster than humans, cutting humans out of the loop of AI development will unlock stunning rates of progress,” he is just engaging in spin. When he was asked about the impact of AI on labour, Kurzweil explained that he envisages a society where the majority of people would receive Universal Basic Income by 2030. That is, they would survive by eating something like Soylent or insect protein. Presumably, their life would fit the definition of “bare life” proposed by Giorgio Agamben, an existence reduced to its most basic, biological form, stripped of political or social significance.

But as the quality of their lives decreases, so will the quality and value of the data they produce for free.

AI evangelists claim that artificial intelligence will act as a transformative, almost divine force to solve humanity’s problems ushering in an era of prosperity and transcendence. In fact, if the current trajectory is any indication of future developments, AI is more likely to entrench a hyper-capitalist dystopia, rather than build a post-capitalist utopia.

The idea that machines could replace human labour, the capitalists’ wet dream, is neither new nor original. It has been with us since the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution. Its proponents forget that greater use of robots and AI would result in a decline in the rate of profit at the level of the whole economy if the majority of the population lives hand to mouth. By focusing on individual capitalists who gain a competitive advantage by increasing productivity, they fail to see the whole picture. A typical example of missing the forest for the trees.

AI and digital platforms are controlled by a handful of tech companies, whose owners dominate the ranking of global billionaires. Obviously, we can’t trust those who have a vested interest in pushing AI down our throats to prioritize the public good. They spend millions to downplay the risks and thwart any attempt to introduce effective regulations.

In a world shaped by a powerful tech oligarchy, which gives off a strong dystopic vibe, the lines between corporate power, state influence, and cutting-edge technology blur into indistinction.

Throw in geopolitical competition and a bleak global economic picture, and governments are all too willing to join the AI race, which is now one with the arms race. AI’s military applications include Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance analytics, networked drones, autonomous weapons, cybersecurity, logistics, decision support, training, electronic warfare, and psychological operations.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that AI lies at the core of state power projection in the 21st century. And US multinationals hold imperial control over a great portion of the global digital ecosystem.

If we look at data as a commodity, we have to remember that the cumulative ‘socially necessary labour time’—past and present labour— is embodied in it, that human labour-power has been expended in its production. Even if data-producing online activity may not necessarily and immediately appear as labour, the time you spend online is time subtracted from real life experiences, family and social interaction. Your screen time may even cut into sleep.

It may involve work in the traditional sense, like creating content, coding, or engaging in paid tasks, or be more akin to leisure or consumption.

Ultimately, the value of the commodity and by extension the collective human labour, is relative to what is regarded as necessary by current society, by current human wants and needs.

Invisible, under-valued and abstract labour (such as unpaid digital labour) does not mean labour has disappeared. Labour is still essential in valorisation processes.

The reason why the value-creating ability of labour is conveniently disregarded and concealed has everything to do with capitalist relations of production and the extraction of surplus value.

When you have sex you don’t produce data. You may conceive a child but unless you engage in that activity because someone wants to buy the baby, no one would consider sexual intercourse and gestation as ‘labour’ and the baby as a ‘commodity’. But if you watch porn, have sex while wearing an electronic gadget, or if in the vicinity there are devices with sensors, processing ability, software etc, you do produce data.

But let’s return to the commodity, since it embodies the logic of capitalism and is the basic unit of economic exchange in a capitalist system.

What fundamentally complicates and makes mysterious the concept of a commodity is the very notion that individual labour takes a social form. In its social form, what becomes most difficult is the quantification and assessment of that individual labour, the “expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, etc.”

Here the concept of commodity fetishism, although elaborated by Marx in a spatial, technological and organisational dimension of capitalism different from the contemporary one, remains one of its specific, constituent aspects.

Marx used this category to represent the specific form of sociality in an economy based on commodities and on market mediation. In this system, commodities obscure the relationships between individuals, and through a process of inversion, the commodity takes on an autonomous existence, detached from the human labour and interactions that produced it. A spectral objectivity.

Marx perceived and remarked the spectral objectivity of the commodity in the middle of the 19th century, at a time when the Industrial Revolution was ripping apart the social, economic, and cultural fabric of Victorian England, deepening inequality and intensifying exploitation and alienation. As people grappled with the sweeping changes and upheavals caused by the introduction of technologies that had mechanized and concentrated production, and technologies that seemed to abolish temporal and physical distance, such as photography, the telegraph and later the telephone and the radio, some turned to spiritualism. When all that is solid melted into air, all that is holy was profaned, beliefs in the paranormal, magical powers and the occult thrived. While workers’ lives were cut short in slums and factories, and labour-value was occulted in the commodity, communication with the dead through mediums and séances, became a fashionable pastime among the bourgeoisie. Mediums would use a variety of tricks to levitate tables and convince people that a ghostly presence was among them.

Troubled by guilt and haunted by fear, Victorian England became obsessed with spirits.

Marx taps into the bourgeoisie’s fears when he conjures the “spectre” of communism. By framing communism as a “spectre,” and arguing that capitalism is inherently unstable and haunted by its own contradictions, he amplifies bourgeois anxiety.

When he addresses the apparently magical quality of the commodity, described as commodity fetishism, he exposes it as a form of deception by drawing a comparison with ‘table-turning.’

“It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was.” (Capital, chapter 1)

Today’s most sought-after and fetishized commodity, data, is doing an even better job at obscuring its origins under mathematical operations and statistical reasoning. And it is certainly spawning more grotesque and fanciful ideas than any commodity known to Marx.

In the spectral phantasmagoria of Artificial Intelligence, the “utopian” and the “cynical” have joined hands while we grapple with the consequences of ontological confusion, loss of trust and intensified exploitation. As commodity relations shape objectivity and subjectivity in capitalism, permeating every aspect of social life and moulding it in its own image, those who refuse to be de-skilled and reduced to “bare life” must organize and fight back.

1. Judging by the chronological order of posts on Telegram and X/Twitter, I was the first person to question Jianwei Xun’s existence https://t.me/LauraRuHK/9759

https://x.com/LauraRu852/status/1894404864895234268

I shared the information in my possession with several journalists, only one acknowledged my contribution. https://decrypt.co/314480/philosopher-trump-musk-fabricated-ai

2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2053951718820549#bibr63-2053951718820549

3. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y#Bib1

Four years ago, when the Biden administration took office, I mapped out the likely trajectory of its future policy toward China in a lengthy article titled Hybrid War on China that was subsequently published in a Chinese news outlet. I argued that the U.S., faced with the emergence of a multipolar world order, was growing increasingly desperate to arrest the decline of its hegemony and would pursue an aggressive policy based on the rigid assertion of its liberal ideology. I expected it would continue to frame it as an existential battle between democracy and authoritarianism although that narrative, and the ideology underpinning it, was becoming increasingly ineffective - many societies had developed antibodies against the messianic promotion of Western liberalism. My analysis stood the test of time until the Biden administration was relegated to the dustbin of history. Now, in order to speculate about the evolution of China-US relations we must overhaul that analysis to take into account the ideological thrust, ambitions and sweeping reforms of the new administration.

Trump’s team encompasses a variety of perspectives on how to assert US leverage in the competition with China. The ideological biases and vested interests of Trump's advisors and supporters may explain the dissonance in messaging conveyed by the president and the rest of his administration. Marco Rubio, as Trump's Secretary of State, views China as a totalitarian threat to American influence, Michael Waltz, the National Security Advisor, also sees the challenge from China in ideological and existential terms, highlighting the long-term implications of China's rise. Conversely, Elon Musk admires China's technological and industrial advancements and opposes economic decoupling from China. He advocates for a cooperative rather than confrontational approach, positioning himself as a mediator between the U.S. and China.

While some analysts believe that this dissonance is purely the result of a multiplicity of perspectives, others view it as a deliberate act of duplicity designed to keep Beijing off balance so that the current administration can advance initiatives with a diminished risk of reprisal.

Six months before Trump was elected president, Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that led Project 2025 - a sort of road map for Trump 2.0 - had actually recommended a policy of deliberate ambiguity toward China to determine the tempo, tenor, and contours of Sino-U.S. competition in the coming years.¹

A bipartisan think tank, Brookings, echoed that recommendation as Trump was forming his cabinet.²

Regardless of whether the ambiguity is strategic or not, the very unpredictability of Trump’s approach – a barrage of explosive and often contradictory public statements, a rapid shift from threats and provocations to warm personal diplomacy - makes it exceedingly hard to forecast what he might ultimately do. During his first presidency US-China relations largely followed long-term trends, Washington continued to sponsor and direct anti-government forces in Hong Kong as they set the city on fire in an attempted colour revolution designed to undermine its status as a global trade and financial hub, ramped up anti-China hysteria in the media and imposed sanctions when local authorities restored order.

Trump’s scapegoating of China with regards to the U.S. trade deficit inspired impromptu tariffs against China in May 2019 that triggered a subsequent drop in stock prices across Asia, creating ripple effects across the globe.

Biden never rolled back Trump’s tariffs, if anything the Biden administration raised the stakes against China by imposing export controls on US high-tech products, including advanced semiconductors used to power artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, and piled on more pressure by roping in European and Asian allies.

Some researchers have suggested³ that Trump’s seemingly irrational and volatile behaviour makes him an ideal conveyor of a U.S. policy based on the strategic ambiguity that gained much currency during the Nixon’s administration and was described as the Madman Theory. It dates back to at least 1517 when Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in The Prince that sometimes it is “a very wise thing to simulate madness.” The inklings of an idea that appeared in the work of Machiavelli eventually inspired a coterie of Harvard University scholars that included Henry Kissinger to ponder the limitations of rationality in grand strategy during the late 1950s and early 1960s - a rational U.S. president would seek to avoid a nuclear confrontation at all costs, but a “convincingly mad” one could credibly threaten large risks and therefore make the adversary blink first.

What is certain is that the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity vis-à-vis China predates Trump’s presidency. In the last ten years, Washington’s attitude to China shifted dramatically. From viewing it as a partner in global governance to describing it as a strategic competitor, to labelling it a systemic rival that poses direct challenges to U.S. interests.

Let’s look at the language used by the U.S. State Department in a statement about US-China relations dated 13 February 2025: The United States works to deter China’s aggression, combat China’s unfair trade policies, counter China’s malicious cyber activity, end China’s global trafficking of fentanyl precursors, mitigate China’s manipulation of international organizations, and promote accountability for China’s violations of human rights within China and around the globe. [...] In its bilateral economic relations with China, the United States will place U.S. interests and the American people first and work to end China’s abusive, unfair, and illegal economic practices.⁴

It certainly sounds bellicose, but we should put this rhetoric into context. A hostile posture to intimidate and dominate the adversary is part and parcel of the aggressive negotiation tactics that Trump and his team favour. This declaration of intent, which draws from the mendacious repertoire of anti-China propaganda, seems designed to up the ante in the trade war with China, while avoiding to cross Beijing’s red lines.

Another recent provocation designed to gain leverage in negotiations involves Taiwan. As Taipei was negotiating arm purchases with Washington, including coastal defense cruise missiles and HIMARS rockets, amounting to between $7 billion to $10 billion⁵ the U.S. needed to pump up Taipei’s spirits. To this effect, the US Department of State's official website removed the statement that the U.S. "does not support Taiwan’s independence” from the fact sheet on its relations with Taiwan. In case you wonder, on the same page it reiterated Washington’s adherence to the "one-China policy." Clearly, the principle of non-contradiction doesn’t apply to U.S. official statements.

The new administration continued the traditional U.S. policy of ‘constructive ambiguity’ on the Taiwan question that was a built-in feature of both the 1952 San Francisco Treaty orchestrated by John Dulles and the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué issued during Nixon's visit to China.

In May 2022, the Biden administration had also removed wording such as "not supporting Taiwan’s independence" from its website, only to quietly restore it less than a month later.

Since the Taiwan question is a ‘trump card’ that Washington routinely plays to gain leverage with both Beijing and Taipei, the U.S is unlikely to abandon its current policy toward Taiwan.

Trump appointed Ivan Kanapathy as senior director for China and East Asia policy at the National Security Council (NSC). A former Marine, he was director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolia at the NSC in the previous Trump administration after serving as a military attaché in Taiwan. In several articles he penned for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and for the think tanks he is a member of (CSIS, Council on Foreign Relations and Beacon Global Strategies) he argued that offering Taipei an unconditional security guarantee could strengthen radical pro-independence factions that are less cautious about Beijing’s red lines. He affirmed that needlessly provoking China is not in America’s interest and that a security guarantee would be counterproductive to overall military deterrence because it would reduce pressure on the Taiwanese authorities to further increase defense spending, marginalizing effective capability enhancements such as additional defensive munitions and drones. Kanapathy also shared his view that Trump will likely place a larger emphasis on “reducing free-riders.” In other words, U.S. vassals in the Asia-Pacific, like their European counterparts, will be pressured to spend more on defense and thus purchase more U.S. weapon systems.

It was also suggested that Washington should bring key players in the Global South, such as India and Vietnam, deeper into the U.S. fold. For example, supporting India’s role in Central Asia or arms markets was proposed as a strategy to challenge Russia’s position and create friction with China.

For all the provocations that Washington will continue to orchestrate, mainly through its proxies, the U.S. has a compelling reason for avoiding a full-blown conflict with China. The Pentagon is aware that the military balance in the Asia-Pacific region is not tilted in its favour. According to its most recent annual report on China⁶, the country now has the largest navy in the world and the largest air force in the region—and one should note that China, unlike the United States, can devote these considerable assets almost entirely to Asia-Pacific.

Although Washington will likely avoid any kinetic escalation as it tries to reorganize its military industrial complex, a wild card is the neocon foreign policy elite and its political machine - it has operated unchecked for decades, despite catastrophic failures. Whilst this elite appears to have been sidelined, we should keep in mind that it has the ability to adapt, rebrand and infiltrate any U.S. administration, and has a vested interest in stoking conflicts and advocating for military action.

The Sino-Russian partnership - a bulwark against U.S. efforts to undermine China

The enhanced, mutually beneficial, strategic partnership between China and Russia, that "strategic nightmare" for the U.S. that former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski warned about nearly thirty years ago, is making it remarkably more difficult for Washington to tackle China.
The surge of diplomatic engagement, military cooperation, energy deals, cultural exchange, and technology transfers illustrates deepening ties. Between 2000 and 2021, China’s annual trade with Russia grew eighteen-fold, and this process only accelerated after the further imposition of sanctions against Russia in 2022. The Sino-Russian collaboration has extended to the Arctic, with increased joint efforts across various domains, as noted in a 2024 Pentagon report.⁷

U.S. efforts to prop up its waning global influence are met with obstacles that extend beyond the Sino-Russian no-limit partnership. The synergy that this partnership has generated is far greater than the sum of its parts. The two countries established the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) the world's largest regional organization in terms of geographic scope and population. In November 2022, the SCO emphasized enhancing regional cooperation through partnerships with other organizations such as the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to create a sort of “Greater Eurasian Partnership.” As a new framework, SCO could replace obsolete Euro-Atlantic models that granted unilateral advantages to certain states. China and Russia also co-founded the BRICS to promote a multipolar international order as an alternative to the US-led disorder. This platform has proven very appealing to Global South countries - it gives them a collective voice to share their grievances with regard to lack of representation in global governance and increases their ability to resist U.S. pressures, sanctions and tariffs.

As more countries reduce reliance on the US dollar and try out common strategies to oppose U.S. coercion, Washington is unlikely to abandon the fantasy of driving a wedge between China and Russia because it considers their partnership “the greatest threat to vital U.S. national interests in sixty years”, and the key challenge to an international order dominated by the U.S.

For this reason, ambiguity and deception will likely underpin Washington’s diplomatic engagement with China and Russia. Such engagement is being conceptualized as the most promising one to both avoid military confrontation at a time when the U.S. isn’t yet prepared for it, and to offer both real and imaginary incentives to ensure the Sino-Russian partnership won’t deepen even further.

To offset what the Council on Foreign Relations has dubbed the “Axis of Upheaval” (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) U.S. analysts recommend to focus on economic growth at home while putting more pressure on allies to increase defense spending and pull their weight. And if they drag their feet, the threat of tariffs is supposed to frighten them into submission.

In the meantime, the U.S. will try to cultivate what it calls the “global swing states”: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Türkiye - middle powers with enough collective geopolitical weight for their policy preferences to sway the future direction of the international order.

To pursue the objective of making America fitter to stem the tide that is fast eroding its dominance, Trump’s team is targeting the woke ideology and scrapping policies that have undermined social cohesion and productivity. It is also addressing wasteful Pentagon spending and inefficiency, and streamlining the government apparatus - the decision to overhaul USAID and NED could serve the purpose of redirecting resources to covert operations, especially in places like Africa or Asia where China’s Belt and Road has achieved remarkable progress. Moreover, in the age of social media, artificial intelligence and cognitive warfare there are cheaper and more effective ways to manipulate public opinion. The Trump administration will also continue imposing tariffs in an attempt to circumvent foreign competition, reshore supply chains and reindustrialize the country. Many analysts expect the tariffs will boost inflation and slam GDP growth.

In the shadow of the continuing hegemony of the financial sector it is highly debatable whether it is even possible to boost the real economy.

Confronted with China’s unrelenting technological progress - China's leadership in most areas of AI has come to light - the U.S. has been forced to take a hard look at itself.

But for all his campaign promises, Trump won’t be able to bring about a “reinvigorated” and “renewed” America for a simple reason - more privatization, deregulation and unfettered capitalism, ruthless individualism, unchecked greed and self-interest, and a notion of government devoid of any sense of social responsibility is not a cure, it’s a disease. When individuals are forced into relentless competition for survival, they lose any sense of shared responsibility. In fact, it leads to extreme inequality and the concentration of power in few hands. It is also destroying lives. Over the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year. Of course it’s easier to accuse China of supplying Fentanyl than addressing the root causes of its abuse.

As Richard Wolff pointed out,“empires often react to periods of their own decline by over-extending their coping mechanisms. Military actions, infrastructure problems, and social welfare demands may then combine or clash, accumulating costs and backlash effects that the declining empire cannot manage. Policies aimed to strengthen empire—and that once did—now undermine it. Contemporary social changes inside and outside the empire can reinforce, slow, or reverse the decline. However, when decline leads leaders to deny its existence, it can become self-accelerating.”⁸

The Trump administration is aware that running a grotesque Truman Show as the Biden team did in a ridiculous attempt to deny reality, can only accelerate the downfall. In 2021 a senile Joe Biden used his first address before a global audience to declare that “America is back, the transatlantic alliance is back.” Four years later, on the same stage, at the Munich Security Conference, vice-president JD Vance told members of that alliance that they should “step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.” He didn’t elaborate on the danger, there was no need to. Two days earlier in Brussels, Pentagon’s chief Pete Hegseth had already informed them that “The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity, and making the resourcing trade-offs to ensure deterrence does not fail. As the U.S. prioritizes its attention to these threats, European allies must lead from the front.” ⁹

In 2025, the world is neither bipolar, as it was during the Cold War, nor is it unipolar, as it was in the 1990s; the strategic environment has changed beyond recognition and the U.S. cannot dominate every square of the chessboard. As Washington prioritizes projecting power in what it calls the Indo-Pacific, the Pentagon will reallocate there the forces that it plans to pull out of Europe and accelerate its military build-up in the region.

I expect all DIMEFIL (diplomatic, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence and legal) instruments will continue to play a role in the U.S. strategy and policy towards China.

However, the competition between the American and the Chinese systems has a distinct cultural and civilizational dimension. Trump's "revolution of common sense" is a return to conservative values, but the economy and society are so broken that it will take a long time for the country to gain a competitive edge over China, if ever. MAGA is a clumsy attempt to install a new cultural software without upgrading the system and that’s why it will fail.

What distinguishes a true society from a mere collection of individuals is cooperation - people working together to produce public goods that benefit all members of the society. Although societies differ in their tolerance of inequality, there is always a point beyond which unequal division of rewards ceases to seem legitimate. When people feel that they are not getting their fair share, they begin to lose trust and withdraw their cooperation. Which is a real problem since generalized trust is a critical ingredient for collective action, economic growth, and effective governance. According to all surveys, Americans’ trust in their government remains very low (around 22%) and has been declining for much of the 21^st century.

As John Gray observed in his recent book, New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism, "In the competition with China, Western capitalism is programmed to lose. Only if the Chinese leadership makes a major mistake can the West hope to prevail. [...] Systems in which market forces are directed by the state have an inherent advantage over those in which the government is captured by corporate power."

1https://www.heritage.org/china/commentary/should-the-usa-maintain-its-policy-strategic-ambiguity-towards-taiwan

2https://www.brookings.edu/articles/abetting-competition-restraining-beijing-recommendations-for-diplomacy-toward-china/

3https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09557571.2021.1919862#d1e280

4https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-china

5https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202502/1328681.shtml

6https://media.defense.gov/2024/Dec/18/2003615520/-1/-1/0/MILITARY-AND-SECURITY-DEVELOPMENTS-INVOLVING-THE-PEOPLES-REPUBLIC-OF-CHINA-2024.PDF

7https://media.defense.gov/2024/Jul/22/2003507411/-1/-1/0/DOD-ARCTIC-STRATEGY-2024.PDF

8https://www.zmescience.com/science/anthropology/the-decline-of-the-u-s-empire-what-will-happen-next/

9https://www.defense.gov/News/Speeches/Speech/Article/4064113/opening-remarks-by-secretary-of-defense-pete-hegseth-at-ukraine-defense-contact/

The demise of fact-checking organizations is simply an evolutionary pivot. Social media platforms and stakeholders such as Western governments have realized that this traditional approach that relied heavily on centralized, self-professed expert gatekeepers is infeasible or even detrimental when accusations of bias and censorship run rampant.

In place of a single, monolithic approach, a patchwork of solutions is taking shape—ranging from user-driven verification and AI moderation to emerging decentralized or blockchain-based frameworks.

To contain and cancel narratives that debunk Western propaganda they are increasingly resorting to non-informational responses. That is, they are fighting information operations asymmetrically, often outside of information spaces.

The harassment, surveillance, intimidation and arrest of independent journalists, sanctions on Russian media outlets, pressure on TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell the platform, the arrest and blackmail of Telegram's Pavel Durov, cancellation of elections in Romania on the bogus pretext of "foreign interference" in the political campaign, DoS cyberattacks etc. point to a very dangerous escalation in the West's asymmetrical response.

Last but not least, NATO and the EU are not defunding their "disinfo specialists." Actually, they are doubling down on their efforts to build a new Iron Curtain citing the need to “fight FIMI” (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference) with sharper tools. The gravy train hasn't been stopped. I quote from a recent report published by EEAS (the EU diplomatic service)

"Tangible campaigns sit behind much of the most damaging and visible information we encounter. These campaigns have people, assets, financial infrastructures, budgets and brands that can be targeted by activism and the law, by sanctions, take-down, de-listing, and exposure. When we focus on the operations that manipulate information spaces – the behaviour rather than just the content – a whole range of responses become apparent that do not require us to weaponise information spaces ourselves."

And on the topic of AI, the EU's DisinfoLab explains

"The explosive growth and availability of AI tools may even hold more benefits for defenders than attackers."

Back in 2015 the EEAS created the East Stratcom Task Force. In 2017 the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, which supports the activities of NATO in this field, was set up in Helsinki to act as a single focus for the analysis of hybrid threats.

NATO built an EU-wide pipeline of researchers, university centers, journalists, fact-checkers and NGOs. They don’t need USAID funding because they are bankrolled by EU-NATO and the usual philanthropists. They employ experts in data mining and analysis to organize, aggregate and process vast amounts of digital data with the help of AI. Under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU can demand social media platforms to give data access to these researchers.

It was a pleasure to be interviewed by Sonja Van den Ende, a fellow writer for Strategic Culture. Her probing questions set my train of thought in motion.

Link to Part 1 of our conversation

https://lauraruggeri.substack.com/p/is-natos-indo-pacific-strategy-in

2. “The EU takes a positive view of its cooperation with Taiwan as a vibrant democracy that respects human rights and shares the same values as the EU. The growing cooperation and dialogue between the EU and Taiwan on a wide range of issues is in line with the EU’s interests and values. The EU is concerned about peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait region and opposes any unilateral action to change the status quo, in particular through force or coercion. The EU supports Taiwan’s meaningful participation in international organizations, including the World Health Organization, the International Civil Aviation Organization, INTERPOL and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The European Parliament has also adopted resolutions reaffirming its support for Taiwan in the international arena and calling on the EU and its member states to support Taiwan’s participation in relevant international organizations. Taiwan is an important economic and strategic partner for the EU, especially in the semiconductor and high-tech product supply chains. The EU is the largest source of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Taiwan and Taiwan is one of the EU’s key trading partners in Asia. The European Parliament adopted a resolution on EU-Taiwan political relations and cooperation, calling for a strengthening of political relations with Taiwan and seeking a comprehensive and enhanced partnership with Taiwan.”

Could you please tell us what you think about the following issues now you have read all these positive stands from Europe on Taiwan:

First of all, I would like to point out that the position of EU institutions with regards to the Taiwan issue tends to be more ideological and extremist than that of individual European states, the vast majority of which are not keen to rock the diplomatic boat with Beijing. They tread a delicate line and try to keep their cooperation with Taiwan under the radar.

Nevertheless, in recent years Taiwanese authorities and their US handlers have been challenging the One-China principle. They are actively pushing a revisionist interpretation of Resolution 2758, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1971, and seek Taiwan’s accession to international organizations as a separate country.

Following Washington’s cue, both the UK and the EU Parliament passed a motion stating that UN Resolution 2758 does not have any bearing on Taiwan’s participation in the UN or other international organizations.

EU parliament members were egged on by a UK-based anti-China lobby known as IPAC, a cross-party alliance of parliamentarians which is very well funded and organized. Set up in 2020 to agitate against the Chinese government, IPAC includes lawmakers from all EU countries and is funded by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), by NED-collaborator the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD) and by Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

IPAC mission is to demonize China and damage Sino-European relations. Its influence doesn’t spare any EU country — if you take a look at the list of its members you can see that these politicians play an active role both in the European parliament and in national parliaments.

Some EU member states have not only been testing Beijing’s red lines, they have actually crossed them.

The most egregious example of a country that closely coordinated its actions with the US to provoke Beijing is Lithuania. In 2021, the Lithuanian parliament passed a legislative revision that gave the green light to the country to open a representative office in Taiwan, ignoring China’s strong protests, and allowed Taipei to set up a de facto embassy in Vilnius, the “Taiwanese Representative Office”. The naming of this office was notable for its use of “Taiwan” in the title, in breach of the One China principle. If they had called it the “Taipei Representative Office” Beijing wouldn’t have objected and bilateral relations wouldn’t have been affected.

But that was the whole point of this charade orchestrated by the US to provoke a diplomatic incident. The US hoped that it would deal a blow to China-EU relations. As expected, in response to this provocation Beijing recalled the ambassador from Vilnius, expelled the Lithuanian ambassador and imposed trade restrictions against the Baltic country, which prompted Brussels to launch a dispute against China at the World Trade Organization. That dispute has now been suspended but it’s a textbook case of how the US uses its European pawns against European interests.

The US is also eyeing Taiwan for the production of drones and has been instrumental in fostering cooperation over drone technology between Taiwan, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.

Cooperation with Taiwan in the military field is directed against both China and Russia. In November Taiwan’s Lin Chia-lung, in charge of Foreign Affairs, led a delegation of representatives from 20 Taiwanese drone companies to Lithuania where they attended a forum on drone technologies and signed two agreements as part of Taiwan’s efforts to expand its domestic drone manufacturing industry. Another MoU was signed with the Latvian Federation of Defence and Security Industries in Riga and with the Polish-Taiwanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The risk of alienating the People’s Republic of China (1.4 billion people) to please Taiwan (23 mil.) is one that only governments controlled by Washington would consider taking.

3. In what areas do you most value Taiwan’s cooperation with the EU?

With a relatively small domestic consumer base of 23 million people, Taiwan’s export has long powered its economy, its trade-to-GDP ratio was 114% in 2024. The main Taiwanese export items to the EU are integrated circuits and electronic components; most of Europe’s semiconductor chip supply originates from Taiwan.

So far trade between European countries and Taiwan has not been particularly controversial, but within the context of the hybrid war that the US has launched against China, it is increasingly being weaponized to create a rift between Europe and Beijing, which is Washington‘s plan.

As i mentioned earlier, to get an idea of how this plan is being implemented, it is useful to look not only at the import duties imposed by the EU on Chinese electric vehicles, but also at the steps taken by the Baltic states, a testing ground for anti-Russia and anti-China policies.

While European states do not have a formal military commitment to Taiwan akin to the Taiwan Relations Act in the United States, they are nonetheless likely to come under more pressure from Washington at the cost of their mutually beneficial relations with China.

In the high tech sector the US wants the EU to strengthen cooperation with its proxy and decouple from China. We see a trend to secure supply chains in case of a military confrontation around Taiwan. I don’t think the risk is imminent, but it’s still worth noting that Elon Musk’s SpaceX asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing of satellite components outside Taiwan due to “geopolitical risks.”

Starlink suppliers such as China-Moon Industrial have confirmed SpaceX’s request to move production from Taiwan to Thailand. Another partner, Wistron NeWeb, has already started manufacturing Starlink components in Vietnam and plans to expand production.

Warren Buffett decided to sell most of Berkshire Hathaway’s shares in TSMC, citing geopolitical tensions.

Multinational corporations are redoubling efforts to find manufacturing sites outside Taiwan, while investors that are already in Taiwan are taking a “wait-and-see” stance, evaluating new delivery routes, diverting capital for new production or withdrawing funds from Taiwan.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) the world’s biggest chipmaker, is setting up new sites in the United States, Japan, Germany, and is already planning more factories in Europe with a focus on the market for artificial intelligence (AI) chips.

Its first European plant in Dresden, Germany, is a joint venture, with TSMC holding 70 percent and three European partners, Germany’s Infineon and Bosch and Dutch NXP, the remaining 30 percent. The project got €5 billion in German subsidies!

In an effort to contain China’s technological development the US also persuaded European policy makers to apply export restrictions to the high tech sector. For example, ASML, a Dutch maker of semiconductor production equipment was forced to suspend the export to China of EUV lithography machines. The U.S. ordered Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) to halt shipments of advanced chips to Chinese customers. We are talking about sophisticated chips, of 7 nanometer or more advanced designs, that power AI accelerator and graphics processing units used in artificial intelligence applications.

Some EU member countries are trying to revise the list of critical technologies that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants to be subject to foreign direct investment (FDI) screening, namely artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum technologies, energy technologies, space, drones or critical medicines. The screening requirement was one of the measures that the anti-China lobby had pushed through under the “de-risking” strategy.

According to a compromise text prepared by Hungary, which currently chairs the intergovernmental arm of the EU, the revised list no longer includes semiconductors, artificial intelligence or other strategic technologies. It appears that some EU countries are wary of overreach by the Commission into their national competence and demand more control over what investments warrant screening.

4. What are the differences between the UK, the US and the EU on the Taiwan issue?

Their official position is the same. The US, UK and the EU have adopted a revisionist policy vis-à-vis Resolution 2758 and seek Taiwan’s accession to international organizations as a separate country, which is part of the West’s salami-slicing approach to dilute the One China policy. Beijing has repeatedly denounced these underhand tactics but rather than reacting to the provocation in a linear, symmetrical fashion, has focused on strengthening its relations with those European countries that eschew confrontation and pursue a more pragmatic course. EU-China relations are still nuanced despite Brussels attempts to impose its consensus, and individual priorities can be created by bilateral interactions.

5. What is the perception of the growing trade dispute between the EU and the People’s Republic of China?

Obviously it is not in Europe’s interest to provoke China, but the EU approach to the Ukrainian conflict has demostrated that Brussels has no strategic autonomy. It can’t be trusted to protect European interests because its raison d’être is to bolster US hegemony and advance American interests, originally in Europe, then in Eurasia and more recently in the Asia-Pacific.

Any exacerbation of tensions between the US and China over Taiwan or other areas of the Asia-Pacific is bound to have a devastating economic impact on EU countries. As in the case of European relations with Russia, we can’t expect rationality and economic interests to guide the EU policy. Its political elites have been selected and groomed to bat for the Anglo-American team.

In 2021, China overtook the United States to become the European Union’s largest trading partner. China is the biggest source of EU imports but the US is hellbent to rock the boat. Just look at what happened in Germany. After years of China being Germany’s main trading partner, in 2024 the US surpassed China. That’s what the US pressure on EU countries to decouple from China achieved. The EU urged companies to “de-risk” from China through friend-shoring supply chains and slapping higher tariffs on EVs imports from China, but it cannot be done without hurting the European economy.

I think we should look at what the US wants to achieve in Europe besides full control of its vassal states. I don’t think Washington intends to kill the European goose since it needs its golden eggs. Due to US-EU trade and security relations, the US too would be hurt if the European economy collapsed, so i expect a gradualist approach. Rather than a full blown trade war with China that risks turning a sick Europe into a terminal patient, we will witness a continuation of the current low intensity one. The US can’t oust Chinese goods from the markets of its satellites and replace them with its own for the simple reason that the US itself depends on Chinese goods.

Sure, it would like to increase its market share in Europe at the expense of China, but hasn’t got the industrial capacity to do so. It will ramp up the “China-threat” rhetoric to justify the imposition of export controls, tariffs and sanctions, and will put more pressure on European companies not to invest in China, or to divest from China. The US and some of its allies are benefitting from this diversion of investments away from China, but they can’t replace China’s manufacturing capabilities, advanced infrastructure, skilled labour and supply chain efficiency.

Washington is engaging in a full spectrum hybrid war against Beijing and attempts to slow down China’s technological development through export restrictions are part of its strategy. In my opinion their effectiveness is limited to the immediate present, and like sanctions against Russia, they are bound to backfire. Export restrictions are actually a spur for China to ramp up investment in the semiconductor industry. As a matter of fact, Beijing announced plans to set up its largest-ever semiconductor state investment fund worth $47.5 billion with six of the country’s largest state-owned banks, including ICBC and China Construction Bank.

https://devend.online/2024/12/03/how-will-the-relationship-with-china-nato-and-the-new-us-administration-develop-an-interview-with-laura-ruggeri-part-ii/

It was a pleasure to be interviewed by Sonja Van den Ende, a fellow writer for Strategic Culture. Her probing questions set my train of thought in motion. Here is the first question. "Is NATO’s Indo-Pacific strategy in Europe’s own interests?"

NATO’s Indo-Pacific strategy is a component of NATO’s expansionist endeavors to buttress US hegemony. If we were to explain this strategy to a child, we could say its main objective is to “Keep the Americans in, the Chinese out, and the Russians down”, to paraphrase NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Hastings, who famously said that NATO was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

While US influence in the Asia-Pacific is rapidly waning, China’s is growing. But since the US is unable to match China’s investments, trade and economic relations with Asian countries, it’s hyping non-existing security threats to impose Cold War ‘bloc thinking’ on the states in the Asia-Pacific region, force them to take sides and coerce its allies to fork out more money for defense.

Previous attempts to damage economic relations between China and US allies had focused on ‘human rights and democracy’ but they mostly fell on deaf ears and may have actually contributed to China’s gains in political and cultural influence in the region. That’s why I fear that the US will ramp up its efforts to undermine regional security. NATO’s growing involvement is part of this strategy.

As far as the US is concerned this strategy was quite successful in Europe as it led to a breakdown in the relationship between Russia and most European countries. Obviously, if we look at it from a European perspective, it was a disaster with a tragic outcome.

NATO’s growing presence in the Asia-Pacific has multiple, mainly negative, implications for the stability, peace and prosperity of the region, and by extension for the global economy, including Europe’s, since Asia is the world’s growth engine.

The US has a tendency to impose its ‘friends vs foes’ Manichean model as a divide et impera strategy. This approach to foreign policy is in stark contrast to the way countries in the Asia-Pacific region manage differences and conflicting interests – by and large they prioritise economic development and seek common ground for cooperation. Painting someone into a corner is not considered a very successful strategy, as it leads to an exacerbation of conflict.

By dragging NATO into the Asia Pacific the US is trying to destroy the limited strategic autonomy EU countries have in managing their relations with China and regional actors. I fear Sino-European relations are about to become a lot more complicated if NATO gets involved. So far European economic elites have been more reluctant to take clear sides in the China-US rivalry than over the war in Ukraine.

It’s worth noting that the tone of NATO’s references to China in official documents started to change in 2019. In 2020 Stoltenberg declared “China does not share our values”. In its 2022 Strategic Concept NATO formally classified China as “a challenge to the organisation’s interests, security and values” and identified the Indo-Pacific as important for the North Atlantic Alliance, claiming that “developments in that region can directly affect Euro Atlantic security.”

The claim that Euro Atlantic security is being jeopardized by China’s influence in the Asia-Pacific is preposterous. If anything, it’s the US massive military presence in the region that is a major concern. Not only has the US been building more military bases near China, Washington is also demonstratively provoking Beijing by strengthening and rallying the anti-China coalition in that region as part of its policy of confrontation and containment of China. In recent years it has orchestrated and funded colour revolutions on Chinese soil (Taipei and Hong Kong), is arming and funding fifth columns, anti-government and separatist forces throughout Asia to destabilize China- friendly countries. As to the cultivation of political and economic elites to be subordinated to and dependent on the US and other former colonial powers, well, Washington has never stopped doing that.

NATO claims to be “a bulwark of the rules-based international order” but this view is not shared by most of the world . NATO’s bloody legacy speaks for itself and this military organisation is widely distrusted. Originally conceived as a collective security alliance to counter the Soviet Union, NATO has since morphed into a tool to assert Western dominance. It is evident that NATO’s presence in the Indo-Pacific, to use an American definition, can only have a detrimental effect on the peace and stability of a part of the world that since the end of the Cold War has largely avoided hostile dynamics preferring to build economic and diplomatic connections to manage regional conflict.

In its ambition to encircle China and isolate Russia within the region, NATO is stepping up its cooperation with other US-led military alliances to increase military-technological interoperability between the Indo-Pacific and the Euro-Atlantic regions. I am referring to AUKUS (Australia, UK, US), to the Australia and Japan mutual defense treaties with the US, and to the Squad (US, Australia, Japan and the Philippines) which is posited as a more aggressive version of the QUAD.

From a Chinese perspective, NATO is a US-led European military alliance that is establishing a strong working relationship with Japan, a former imperial power that invaded their country, brutalized and killed millions of people. NATO’s presence brings back memories of the “century of humiliation”, the period of subjugation China suffered under imperialism, both Western and Japanese. From a more broadly Asian perspective, NATO’s expansion cannot be separated from the painful history of European colonialism and imperialism that shaped modern Asia and that the West has never fully acknowledged.

Is it in Europe’s interest to be associated with that legacy? Do Europeans really think that military projection in the region is not going to have a negative impact on their diplomatic and economic relations with Asian countries? The problem is that EU countries have become captive of US objectives, they are not allowed to have interests that diverge from American ones.

In its unbounded conceit, the EU is now laying claims to the role of security actor in the Asia-Pacific region in addition to presenting itself as a normative and economic actor. All at the same time. It is so detached from reality that it doesn’t even realize the dissonance of these roles.

If you need further proof that the EU has morphed into an appendage of NATO, just take a look at how its strategy towards China changed in sync with NATO’s in less than five years.

In 2018, when the EU launched the first overarching strategy aimed at Asian countries, the EU–Asia Connectivity Strategy, it was open-minded about cooperation with China though this initiative was primarily a response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It promised investment based on an alternative developmental model that emphasized norms such as “rule of law, human rights, good governance, and sustainability”. It turned out to be nothing more than a Soft Power exercise: the Connectivity Strategy argued that connectivity goes beyond transport, energy, and digital networks to include people-to-people connectivity, somewhat confusing connectivity and mobility. As a matter of fact, it allocated the greater part of resources to promoting and supporting the mobility of students, researchers, activists and artists. Guess what? One of the main beneficiaries of its “civil society”outreach was Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

In 2021, the EU launched the Indo-Pacific Strategy, adopting the US preferred terminology. It expanded the geographical scope of the EU’s engagement and made explicit reference to security and strategic aims. Significantly, this strategy juxtaposes the EU and China arguing that the EU will “continue to protect its essential interests and promote its values while pushing back where fundamental disagreement exists with China, such as on human rights”.

Then came the Global Gateway Initiative in December 2021, which promised to support partner countries’ development by offering much larger funding opportunities. And in March 2022 the Strategic Compass set out the EU’s stance towards China, making no secret that it sees “China’s promotion of standards incompatible with EU preferences as a threat contributing to systemic rivalry.” It stated that “in an increasingly hostile security environment the EU must accomplish a quantum leap forward in making the EU a stronger more capable security provider.” Adding that the EU seeks to “secure sea lines of communication, capacity-building and enhanced naval presence in the Indo-Pacific.”

Its new emphasis on hard power capabilities in the area of security and defence closely reflects NATO’s.

The EU is trying to justify this new focus on security and defense by pointing out that the region hosts major waterways that are of vital importance to EU trade, including the Malacca Straits, the South China Sea, and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. But since the US and the EU are China’s most important trading partners, it goes without saying that it is also in Beijing’s interest to ensure these waterways remain open to commercial traffic.

China is an export powerhouse, its prosperity is largely predicated on its ability to freely trade with the rest of the world, which requires regional peace and stability. It is obvious that the country has a stake in the preservation of these favourable conditions.

As a matter of fact, China’s cooperation with Asia-Pacific countries is testament to China's constructive role in maintaining regional stability and security. China is also developing this cooperation within multilateral formats, such as the forum of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) the Comprehensive Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) the Belt and Road Initiative, The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS+.

Part 2 of the interview

https://devend.online/2024/11/29/how-will-the-relationship-with-china-nato-and-the-new-us-administration-develop-an-interview-with-laura-ruggeri-part-i/

Article published on November 4 in “Strategic Culture”.

Gene Sharp, widely considered the godfather of colour revolutions, published his first book, the three-volume The Politics of Nonviolent Action, in 1973, at a time when the U.S. was mired in a series of crises — economic, political, military — that were eroding confidence in its government domestically and thwarting its geopolitical ambitions. The response to those crises — expansion of its hegemony through conventional and hybrid warfare often outsourced to non-state actors, financialization of the economy and weaponization of the dollar — set the course for the following decades. After fifty years it is abundantly clear that though these responses disrupted the post-war global order and led to the U.S. ‘unipolar moment’, they did nothing to address issues that are systemic and structural. If anything, these ‘solutions’ created more, and more intractable, problems for the hegemon that culminated in the crisis of legitimacy the U.S. is currently facing.

The Politics of Nonviolent Action was based on a research, funded by the U.S. Department of Defence, that Sharp had conducted while studying at Harvard in the late 1960s when the university was the epicentre of the Cold War intellectual establishment — Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezenski were all teaching there. At first glance it might seem contradictory that Gene Sharp’s research topic would draw the interest of both the Pentagon and the CIA. In fact, it is far from surprising: the defeat and losses suffered in Vietnam had left a deep wound in the American psyche, and internationally this brutal imperialist aggression had fuelled a strong anti-American sentiment. Moreover, as the U.S. hegemony started to hit the skids, fears mounted over the economic cost of the arms race with Moscow.

Sharp’s theory and practical guidelines for its implementation seemed to provide the solution Washington was seeking to bolster its power, and undermine its geopolitical, ideological and military rival, the Soviet Union.

Sharp, who would later be described as the “Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare,” offered an alternative to the dominant view that security and defense must be provided by the state. As early as the 1960s the executive branch had encouraged the outsourcing of non-inherently governmental functions to private firms. The practice would gradually increase and eventually extend to military functions — at the end of the Cold War military contracting exploded. It became so prevalent that The New York Times called contractors the fourth branch of the government.1

The strategy and tactics outlined by Sharp would enable the U.S. to weaponize social forces behind the Iron Curtain without triggering a military conflict, an option deemed too dangerous since the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear warheads. But most importantly, the job of capturing intellectual elites, inciting division and conducting ideological infiltration could be outsourced to non-state actors such as NGOs, media organizations, lobbies, religious groups, aid agencies, and transnational diaspora communities. As the number of stakeholders and their agendas increased, so did their involvement in shaping the national and foreign policy of the U.S. But as the saying goes, too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth.

In those years Washington was contending with another formidable challenge to its hegemonic ambitions. A negative balance of payments, growing public debt incurred during the Vietnam War and monetary inflation by the Federal Reserve caused the dollar to become increasingly overvalued. The drain on U.S. gold reserves culminated with the London Gold Pool collapse in March 1968. By 1970, the U.S. had seen its gold coverage deteriorate from 55% to 22%. In 1971 more and more dollars were being printed in Washington than being pumped overseas. Does it sound familiar?

The U.S. leadership decided to scuttle the gold-backed dollar and thus revolutionize the system of monetary management known as Bretton Woods.2

The Bretton Woods system for more than two decades had guaranteed economic growth and a relative paucity of financial crises but throughout most of the 1960s the dollar had struggled to maintain the gold peg and contain the rising economic power of Germany and Japan. At the Rome G-10 meeting in November 1971, U.S. Treasury Secretary, John Connally told his counterparts “The dollar is our currency, but your problem.” This blatant expression of arrogance set the tone and aptly described what would become an exorbitant privilege.

In 1973 when the dollar switched to floating exchange rates its value fell 10%.

A few years later, in his book The Alchemy of Finance, George Soros gloated over this ‘revolution’: “Exchange rates were fixed until 1973; subsequently, they became a fertile field for speculation.” Incidentally, the preface of this book was written by Paul Volcker the under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs from 1969 to 1974 who had played an important role in President Nixon’s decision to suspend the gold convertibility of the dollar.

The unilateral decision to sink the Bretton Woods order firmly established the U.S. dollar as the currency of choice for international reserves at many central banks, and elevated U.S. debt to being de facto international money. This new regime based on global floating exchange rates increased capital movements but restricted the policy choices of major countries — under the enormous pressure of capital flows, they were forced to accept conservative monetary policies and to abolish Keynesian expansionary fiscal policies.

Under the new regime, the U.S., unlike other countries, was allowed to run massive debt and print money to weather economic crises, and when excess liquidity drove up global inflation the Fed would raise interest rates and tighten monetary policy. This move would then widen its interest rate gap with other countries, consequently attracting international capital to Wall Street. From 1973 onwards the U.S. has abused its privilege of printing the world’s main reserve currency and has wielded the dollar as a weapon. It was only a matter of time before the inevitable backlash.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentices

Due to the division of academic fields into distinct disciplines, each with its own research focus, so far no one has noticed the strange concurrence of events that I have briefly outlined. The publication of Gene Sharp’s first work, aptly described as a Hybrid War field manual, coincided with the end of Bretton Woods, a turning point that gave new impetus to the financialization of the American economy. Finance was ‘liberated’ from any functional connection to the real economy, becoming a source of great wealth from speculation but also the grand destabilizer of both the domestic and global economy.

Those who had a vested interest in this ‘liberation of the economy’ invested millions of dollars in the ‘liberation from Communism’ and the grooming of new elites that would put an end to the controlled economies and politics of the Eastern Bloc. The fall of the Berlin Wall led to what George Soros called an “explosive period of growth” for his hedge fund.

Though a single coincidence might be dismissed as chance, when multiple coincidences align, they suggest an underlying pattern. Once you notice it, you may discover a reinforcing loop, sequences of mutual causes and effects.

The demolition of the existing international monetary order enabled by the demise of Bretton Woods marked a turning point: the structure of the economy, the distribution of wealth, and the distribution of power changed dramatically. While large multinational companies and financial capital organized a takeover of political power, labour and middle-class interests were pushed to the sidelines. Dollar dominance in the global financial system led to an era of hyper-globalization characterized by the primacy of shareholder capitalism, with deregulation and privatization acting as its handmaidens.

Left unchecked, capital is naturally footloose and expansionistic, always seeks to maximise profit. Once money became virtually free and investment risks could be easily offset, it went looking for investment opportunities abroad, relocated production and supply chains, leaving behind a long trail of socio-economic devastation.

As Vladimir Lenin pointed out over a century ago, “The non-economic superstructure which grows up on the basis of finance capital, its politics and its ideology, stimulates the striving for colonial conquest.

Since we are speaking of colonial policy in the epoch of capitalist imperialism, it must be observed that finance capital and its foreign policy, which is the struggle of the great powers for the economic and political division of the world, give rise to a number of transitional forms of state dependence (…) The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries.” 3

Giovanni Arrighi dealt critically with the Leninist theory of imperialism, cleared up some of its ambiguities, observing that it is virtually the only theory of Marxism to which non-Marxist economists give serious consideration. Arrighi4 explained that whenever a previous phase of commercial/industrial capitalist expansion reaches a plateau, a predominance of finance capitalism is a recurring, long-term phenomenon. Whereas by mid-century the industrial corporation had displaced the banking system as the prime economic symbol of success, the late twentieth-century growth of derivatives and of a novel banking model ushered in a new period of finance capitalism.

The relative decline of both U.S. hegemony and its core economy in the 1970s had obviously alarmed American elites. The production of profit from the manipulation and global expansion of financial capital promised to solve the crisis of both state and capital by bolstering American hegemony. But as it became the biggest and most profitable sector of the economy it would hold the government hostage to its interests. The success of monetary policy led to it being the chief method with which policymakers tried to address economic problems. This, in turn, facilitated the increasing financialization of the U.S. economy and the movement of American capital abroad along with its relentless de-industrialization in the United States.

But let’s return to Gene Sharp. Ten years after publishing his seminal study on ‘civil disobedience’, Gene Sharp joined hands with Peter Ackerman to found the Albert Einstein Institution — despite its name it had nothing to do with the physicist. Ackerman was a banker who had amassed a fortune with junk bonds when he headed international capital markets at Drexel Burnham Lambert, an American multinational investment bank that in the mid-Eighties had become Wall Street’s most profitable firm, with earnings of $545 million on revenues of more than $4 billion before going bankrupt.5

The Albert Einstein Institution (AEI) would soon be integrated into the apparatus of the US stay-behind network interfering in the affairs of allied states, whitewashing covert actions, orchestrating regime change operations and colour revolutions in any country deemed an obstacle to the global expansion of Anglo-American capital and its neoliberal ideology.

In 2005 Thierry Meyssan researched AEI and outlined its involvement in these operations.6

AEI has since continued to play an active role in all the colour revolutions that failed or succeded in overthrowing governments and destabilizing sovereign countries.

While AEI claims to be an independent non-profit, it has significant connections to the U.S. defense and intelligence community. One prominent AEI consultant was Colonel Robert Helvey, former dean of the National Defense Intelligence College. AEI’s regular donors included U.S. government-funded organizations like the U.S. Institute for Peace, the International Republican Institute, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which was set up in 1983, the same year as AEI.

NED’s purpose was to serve as an umbrella group for a network of democracy-promotion NGOs such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the Centre for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), the Centre for International Media Assistance (CIMA) et al.

All the above groups, and many more that have mushroomed since, have a lot in common. They are so organic to American imperialism that in 2001 Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Colin Powell referred to human rights groups and NGOs as “force multipliers and an important part of our combat team.”

They operate in the gray zone between Hard and Soft Power — no longer juxtaposed but conceptualized as a continuum integrated into a single framework — and receive tax-deductible donations from corporate-financier groups (often indirectly through the think-tanks they control) in addition to state funding. As the lines between NGOs and government are blurred due to the pervasive “revolving door” dynamic, their members have the power to shape domestic and foreign policy.

George Soros jumped on the colour revolution bandwagon not only because of his visceral hatred for Communism and the Soviet Union. In 1973, as the Bretton Woods system, and fixed exchange rates, came to an end, Soros co-founded the Soros Fund Management (later renamed Quantum Fund). From 1973 to 1980, the portfolio gained 4,200% while the S&P advanced about 47%. In a book he published in 1987, The Alchemy of Finance, Soros expounded his ‘theory of reflexivity’ highlighting that market participants not only respond to information but can also influence the market ‘reality’ by their beliefs, biases, desires and actions, thus creating feedback loops that drive markets but also boom/bust cycles. “In financial markets expectations about the future have a bearing on present behavior. But even there, some mechanism must be triggered for the participants’ bias to affect not only market prices but the so-called fundamentals which are supposed to determine market prices (…) The thinking of participants, exactly because it is not governed by reality, is easily influenced by theories. In the field of natural phenomena, scientific method is effective only when its theories are valid; but in social, political, and economic matters, theories can be effective without being valid. Whereas alchemy has failed as natural science, social science can succeed as alchemy. The historical process, as I see it, is open ended. Its main driving force is the participants’ bias.”7

Though it’s well known that the psychology behind market movements is a complex interplay of emotional and cognitive biases, Soros didn’t simply leverage on these biases to manipulate markets, his ambition was to manipulate historical processes through “social alchemy”. In several interviews Soros explained that he was guided by exactly the same philosophy in his ‘philanthropic activities’ in Eastern Europe as in the financial markets.

To this purpose he funded an army of social and political activists who would take part in colour revolutions, bankrolled parties, media outlets, infiltrated and lobbied educational institutions, governments and supranational organizations through his NGOs. The weaponization of human rights, exploitation of domestic grievances, and support of ultra-liberal, progressive forces deepened rifts in society and achieved the sort of partisan and ideological polarization that would unleash chaos not only in the countries where Washington sought regime change, but in the U.S. too. The results of the ‘social alchemy’ of this sorcerer’s apprentice are there for all to see.

However, for parasitic financiers like Soros crises are just an opportunity to increase their power and line their pockets.

Hedge funds profit from geopolitical instability and stock market volatility. Political chaos, boom and bust cycles are their bread and butter because when investors are worried, they want to be hedged.

He Who Sows the Wind Will Reap the Whirlwind

The destabilization of the monetary order, and the destabilization of the post-1945 world order through colour revolutions laid the ground for American-led globalization and gave impetus to the financialization of the U.S. economy. In the 1970s and 1980s we witness the increasing removal of capital controls by national governments worldwide, and in the U.S. the gradual erosion of the Glass-Steagall Act (1933) that, in response to banking crisis had imposed the separation of commercial and investment banking. The Act would eventually be repealed in 1999.

The turn to neoliberalism produced the State decentralization that Sharp, Soros and others of their ilk favoured. In a capitalist society when you transfer authority and responsibility of major government functions to ‘civil society’ and the private sector, you don’t strengthen democracy, you actually transfer power to multinational corporations, various supranational oligarchic clans and lobbies.

Under the pressure of capitalist relations all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, to paraphrase Marx. The reduction of all human relations to the “cold cash nexus” in an increasingly marketized and commodified society means that customs, practices, and institutions on which people have relied or which they have valued in non-commercial terms cease to exist or remain only as parodies of themselves or empty abstractions. Before long, the system breeds a new species: Marx labels it “a new financial aristocracy, a new variety of parasites in the shape of promoters, speculators and nominal directors, a whole system of swindling and cheating by means of corporation promotion, stock issuance, and stock speculation.” Marx knew in the 1860s that the general law of capitalist accumulation could be modified by many circumstances. But in every case, it “followed that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be their payment high or low, must grow worse.”8

And that’s where we are now.

The new Dollar-Wall Street Regime9, to borrow Peter Gowan’s definition, gave rise to a parasitic rentier class that would benefit from chaos because it was well positioned to take advantage of any crisis to increase its power. This class had a vested interest in destabilizing and overthrowing governments that resisted the long march of neoliberalism and its ideological underpinning. And to this purpose it joined hands with Anglo-American intelligence apparati, created a mind-boggling network of NGOs and think tanks to advance its objectives, build clientele, dole out favours.

Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the Dollar-Wall Street Regime identified in Nation-States the new obstacle to a capitalist world-empire with the U.S. occupying its commanding heights, imposing its rules, flouting or adapting them to suit its perceived interests.

Fuelled by money-printing and unsustainable debt, the U.S. superficially looks wealthy, but is actually teetering on the edge. Under the cover of ‘boom and bust’ rot and decay have set in, and the parasitic rentier class has weakened its host. Sure, the U.S. is still trying to punch above its weight, but the global balance of power has already shifted.

The flouting by the U.S. of multilateral conventions whenever these conventions interfered with its interests is an indicator of the weakness, not the strength. Double standards and blatant hypocrisy have eroded American legitimacy.

American corporations, financial institutes, NGOs and media became integral to US-led globalization as they developed a multi-faceted governance paradigm that extended to all sectors of society. Over a hundred years ago, drawing on the analysis of rent-seeking capitalism provided by both Marxist and liberal economists, Lenin reached the following conclusions, “Monopoly under capitalism can never completely, and for a very long period of time, eliminate competition in the world market. The tendency to stagnation and decay, which is characteristic of monopoly, continues to operate, and in some branches of industry, in some countries, for certain periods of time, it gains the upper hand. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries.”

Ironically, what looked like an expression of power, monopoly and dollar dominance, resulted in the erosion of that same power. Private groups, and their interests, have been allowed to shape national and foreign policy but they can’t develop a grand strategy that would enable the U.S. to prop up its waning hegemony.

The US is now going through another crisis after it overcame the 1970s one through the financialization of its economy, delocalization of industrial production, geopolitical expansion through conventional and hybrid warfare and the weaponization of the dollar. The limits of that strategy have been reached and ascending powers have demonstrated a stronger resiliance and power of attraction than the U.S. imagined. The 2008 global financial crisis not only revealed the weakness of U.S. hegemony, it also showed the relative strength that the Chinese economy had acquired. This strength, combined with social cohesion, an emphasis on win-win cooperation with foreign partners rather than control and domination, imposition of arbitrary rules and ideological diktats, proved particularly attractive. In the year following the 2008 financial crisis Brazil, Russia, India, and China held the first leaders summit in Russia under the name BRIC and South Africa joined them in 2010. The BRICS initial focus was on improving the global economic situation and reforming financial institutions. As these five countries shared a vision of non-interference and a commitment to a true form of multilateralism in which countries are equal partners, they gradually increased their cooperation and attracted to the group emerging countries that also advocated a reform of global governance and a fairer world order.

This new reality of sovereign countries determined to defend their national interests contrasts with the flawed neoliberal thesis of transnational capitalism in which interdependence and integrated global chains would overcome the rivalry between national states. Countries of the Global South are rejecting this thesis because they understand that the dilution of their sovereignty doesn’t lead to peace, but in fact to neocolonialism — their subordination to the interests of Western finance and multinational corporations. As neoliberalism showed its totalitarian nature and the old hegemonic power shot itself in the foot by weaponising the dollar and relying on double standards, coercion, war and chaos to impose its rules and anti-values, it’s hard to see how the U.S. can continue to lay claims to international leadership.

The current crisis of legitimacy is far more serious than those the U.S. weathered before — de-dollarization is shaking one of the main pillars of its power and reshaping the global economy. The impact will be acutely felt in the U.S., where de-dollarization will likely lead to a broad depreciation and underperformance of U.S. financial assets versus the rest of the world.

1. Martha L. Phelps, A History of Military Contracting in the United States, in The Routledge Research Companion to Outsourcing Security, 2016

2. Creation of the Bretton Woods System | Federal Reserve History

3. Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916

4. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time, 2010

5. The Collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert; Key Events for drexel Burnham Lambert — The New York Times (nytimes.com).

6. The Albert Einstein Institution: non-violence according to the CIA, by Thierry Meyssan (voltairenet.org)

7. George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance, 1987

8. Karl Marx. Capital Vol.1

9. Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance, 1999

1 December 2021, Foreign Policy: "For Washington, the strategic imperative of deeper engagement cannot be overstated."

March 2022, Victoria Nuland: "Bangladesh and the US will work together to protect democracy and human rights at a time when international law and human rights are under threat." Nuland was in Bangladesh on a 3-day visit.

July 2023 US Under Secretary for Democracy and Human Rights Uzra Zeya was in Dhaka with US Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu and Deputy Assistant Administrator for Asia, USAID Änjali Kaur. May 2024 Donald Lu in Dhaka again to "strengthen bilateral cooperation and to demonstrate US support for a free, open, and prosperous Indo-Pacific region."

• The US wants to build a military base on Saint Martin, a strategic island off the coast of Bangladesh, near Myanmar. Sheikh Hasina thwarted its plans.

• 10 July 2024, Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina met with President Xi Jinping and “elevated their relations to a comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership.”

• Bangladesh student protests began with legitimate demands, but peaceful demonstrations rapidly turned into riots and not only because of police brutality.

• It transpires that protesters were targeted by a disinformation campaign run by shady social media accounts and bots, mostly controlled by UK and US agencies of chaos. They spread inflammatory narratives and now are trying to instigate sectarian violence.

• USAID, NED and other US organizations like Soros’ Open Society have invested heavily in "democracy promotion", funded NGOs and education institutions, groomed community leaders, trained activists and students. https://www.ned.org/region/asia/bangladesh-2021/

• Why did they target Bangladesh? China is Bangladesh’s main arms supplier, investor, and trade partner. China invested over USD10 billion in Bangladesh under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and deals worth about USD 40 billion were signed. Bangladesh was the first South Asian country to join the BRI.

• Bangladesh also maintains very good relations with India and Russia - Rosatom is building the first of two nuclear power plants in the country. Last but not least, last year Bangladesh applied to join the BRICS.

• After Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned on Monday, and the army took control, an interim government will be set up to run the country.

• Enter Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, US and WEF darling. Any surprise?

• Bangladesh needs massive investments in its infrastructure, and infrastructure projects are being built by Chinese companies within the framework of the Belt & Road Initiative - the Padma Bridge Rail Link will benefit 80 million people and is expected to boost economic growth by 1.5%. It needs power plants to address electricity supply shortfalls, China is building a power plant in Payra ($1.9 bn), Russia's Rosatom is building nuclear power plants ($12.65bn) to meet the country's energy needs.

• Muhammad Yunus' much touted "microcredit" can't lift a country out of poverty. That's why the US loves him: the international division of labour underpinning the US-led globalization requires poverty and low wages.

Over two years ago, the Atlantic Council wargamed a scenario of Western sanctions coupled with Chinese counter measures and concluded that both sides would suffer so many damages that it would be tantamount to economic MAD—or mutually assured destruction. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/wargaming-a-western-freeze-of-chinas-foreign-reserves/

Mind you, they were assessing the impact of sanctions. Seizing Chinese-owned infrastructure is an even crazier proposition.

So, why did CNN publish this article? I am inclined to believe that it’s part of a PsyOp aimed at scaring Chinese investors. Washington is worried about China and Europe maintaining mutually beneficial economic relations instead of “decoupling” and is trying to hype up risks in order to deter Chinese companies from investing in Europe and European companies from investing in China.

On Friday, Il Sole 24 Ore, Italian leading financial newspaper, reported that the Italian government is considering taking over by decree defunct auto brands owned by Stellantis, and offering them to Chinese companies to encourage them to set up factories in Italy. https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/auto-mire-cinesi-brand-iconici-innocenti-e-autobianchi-

The plan would involve the Innocenti and Autobianchi brands, both shut down in the 1990s.

The newspaper said Italy's industry minister has registered versions of the two brands at the national patents and brands office, using different graphics from those registered by the Stellantis group.

The government's appropriation would be made possible under a law passed in December and a draft implementing decree, under examination by the Court of Auditors, concerning brands that have been unused for at least five years.

Once under government control, they could be given to "companies, including foreign ones, that intend to invest in Italy or move to Italy manufacturing activities located abroad," the law says.

Stellantis (FIAT) has been neglecting its historic production bases in Italy for years as it pursued a typical strategy of privatizing profits while socializing risks and losses. It moved its headquarters to The Netherlands (in a tax avoidance move!) and turned its back on Italy. Chinese investments would provide a lifeline to the moribund Italian automotive sector, save and create jobs, and of course would be welcomed by everyone. Except Washington.

What intelligence were they accused of gathering? Information about Hong Kong separatists and activists who played a central role in the 2019-20 attempted colour revolution in Hong Kong and fled to the UK to escape justice. And who were they accused of following? The same fugitives.

So, let it sink in. The UK is accusing two Hong Kong men with dual citizenship (HK/British) of keeping tabs on Hong Kongers abroad.

The Brits are really stretching the definition of spying to absurdity: gathering information on your compatriots... for your own government!

Last Sunday the British co-defendant, Matthew Trickett, a former Royal Marine, was found dead in a park, half a mile from his office in Maidenhead. The cause of death hasn't been established yet.

Trickett ran a small company that provided security services. As a matter of fact he provided security for the Hong Kong Secretary for Education Christine Choi during one of her visits to London. Unfortunately now he will be unable to testify in court and explain the perfectly legal nature of his activity.

One of the other defendants, Bill Yuen, worked for the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London. These absurd accusations of "espionage" come at a time when anti-China forces are lobbying Western governments to close down Hong Kong's official representations abroad.

This year China and Russia mark 75 years of bilateral ties and these neighbours have plenty of reasons to celebrate. As Chinese Ambassador to Russia Zhang Hanhui put it, Sino-Russian relations are experiencing “the best period in the entire history of their development.”(1)

The comprehensive strategic partnership between the two countries is running on high-gear as they share common views on the necessity of supporting the emergence of a multipolar world order based on the principle of sovereign equality. Their trade and economic ties are booming — the turnover soared by 30 per cent in 2023, reaching nearly $230 billion — infrastructure and logistics hubs are being built, cooperation in science and technology is growing, academic exchanges have intensified and tourism is recovering after coming to a halt during the pandemic. Most importantly, there is still much scope for expanding and strengthening cooperation in all fields of human activity.

The leaders of both countries understand that in order to realize the immense potential of this partnership, public support and people-to-people relations are crucial. A welcome step in this direction is the designation of 2024–25 as Russian-Chinese Years of Culture.

The two-year project of cultural exchanges will kick off in May with a concert — Chinese and Russian folk-instrument orchestras will play together weaving threads of their traditions into one musical tapestry, a fitting metaphor for the kind of relations the two countries are developing.

Cultural exchanges aim to foster a deeper and more nuanced understanding of each other’s social identities, values, aspirations and traditions, allowing social perceptions to reflect the present reality rather than be clouded by outdated stereotypes and misconceptions. Cultural cooperation, on the other hand, is a strategic concept: people work together to promote common interests or achieve common goals.

It will be exciting to follow and review the progress of Sino-Russian cultural relations in the next two years and see how they move to the cooperation level, but before the official program starts it might be useful to take stock of the past and present state of affairs, and indulge in a few reflections along the way.

As someone who has been living in a different culture over the past decades, exploring and studying several other cultures for personal and professional reasons, I have come to the conclusion that the most enriching cultural experiences are those that through the encounter with another culture offer an opportunity to reflect on your own. The more varied the contacts, the greater the opportunities to learn. And China and Russia have plenty to learn from each other. First of all, the governments of both countries are determined to safeguard their cultural traditions and consider their history as the most vital, profound and enduring wellspring of strength for progress. They are also aware that cultural diversity is at risk of being lost and not only in the West, where the commodification, standardization and dumbification of culture has led to widespread intellectual decay, but in their countries too. American hegemony and its ideologically charged, homogenizing mass culture is having a devastating effect everywhere.

China and Russia have a common interest and motivation to join forces in this sphere, bolster their cultural sovereignty and support their cultural production since it is either ignored, aggressively cancelled or vilified by Western media. They recognise the need to seize the reins of discursive power and are keen to promote cultural pluralism as an integral aspect of geopolitical multipolarity in order to refute the universalist claims of Western liberal culture. True cultural multipolarity is the opposite of the kind of appropriation and hybridization that led to the banality and sterility of contemporary Western culture — it’s the fruitful exchange between cultures that have not lost their unique identity.

The success of this cooperation will ultimately depend on the whole ecosystem of strategic partnership between China and Russia because cultural exchanges don’t happen in a vacuum. Ideally, the experience gained in the bilateral format will be shared with other partners and provide the necessary impetus to boost cultural cooperation within the framework of SCO, BRICS, BRI, CIS, EAEU.

It’s worth pointing out that culture can be defined broadly as well as narrowly: you can look at it as a system, a structure, a process, or as a text, a product, etc. Each approach would require a different strategy, level of investment, resources, and would involve different stakeholders. Even the organization of something apparently straightforward such as a food fair requires a high level of cultural intelligence. And this kind of intelligence must be cultivated.

Success and failure of cultural cooperation depend on many factors, internal and external, but even when external conditions are optimal and the strategy is clear, an underestimation of the complexity of culture, its interdisciplinary and highly codified nature, can hamper the best efforts.

To be effective, cultural cooperation requires the selection of the right partners and consultants and enhanced coordination between academia, government and civil society, between various government departments, between the public and private sector. And since you can only appreciate something that has been brought to your attention and you have learned to understand, the media (both traditional and social) and the education system play a crucial role.

It is also necessary to learn from past errors. The problem is, when it comes to cultural exchanges and cooperation it’s very difficult to measure success — quantitative analysis only tells part of the story, often not the most interesting one. For this reason, goals and objectives should be set very clearly and additional tools of evaluation employed.

Cultivating new audiences and a new sensibility

The West’s cancellation of Russian culture is not only the West’s loss, it has become an opportunity for Russia and China to intensify their exchanges and strengthen their cooperation. Chinese audiences are enjoying a vast array of world-class acts as Russian artists, musicians, theatre and ballet companies have more time to tour China.

Last year the Mariinsky Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev and Vladimir Fedoseev’s orchestra performed at the foot of the Great Wall in Beijing, needless to say tickets for all concerts were immediately sold out. In a recent interview Gergiev said he hoped one day to lead an orchestra of young Russian and Chinese musicians.

In China interest in classical music is now stronger than in the West. It is said that 50 million people play the piano in the country and state-of-the-art concert halls have been built in every city as part of China’s urban development strategy. Russian pianist Denis Matsuev who recently toured China for a month, spoke enthusiastically about his experience: “It was simply amazing. In Shanghai the audience listened to five (!) concertos of Rachmaninoff in a row (…) The fans? Unbelievable. Every concert was sold out, I was even assigned two body guards, so exuberant was the reaction of the public. Sometimes it felt like we were at a rock concert. I played mostly Russian classics: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin. In each city I performed at least six encores, I played a total of 54 pieces. But even this wasn’t enough, people craved communication after the concert.”(2)

Ballet is another classical art form that is highly valued and has a large fan base in both China and Russia. As expected Russian household names such as the Bolshoi and Mariinsky ballet companies enjoy cult status in China.

As to visual art lovers, they are spoilt for choice: museums are busy loaning masterpieces and organizing exhibitions that explore the rich traditions that inspire Chinese and Russian artists.

Classical music, art and ballet have long been at the centre of cultural exchange as they can transcend language barriers and connect people on an emotional level, though, it must be pointed out, Chinese theatre goers are not deterred by linguistic differences — they have grown accustomed to reading subtitles. In Shanghai and Beijing they snapped up all the tickets and sat through an eight-hour long adaptation of Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don staged by the St. Petersburg Masterskaya Theatre. And after the curtains fell, they lingered in the theatre to discuss the play. Many of them had read Sholokhov, whose influence on Chinese literature cannot be overstated.

Cultural exchange based on classical works of art (high culture) certainly has its merits and is a long established practice but is not necessarily the most effective in shaping mass perceptions and public opinion.

Like it or not, pop music and mainstream films reach a much wider public and here market forces are the determining factor. Russian singer Vitas realized a long time ago how promising the Chinese music market was, and made a bet on it: he included songs in Chinese in his repertoire, starred in local film and television productions. Now he plays to full stadiums and spends most of his time in China.
Another Russian pop star, Polina Gagarina, is also very popular in China. In 2019 she took part in Singer, a music contest aired on Chinese television, and won the hearts of millions of listeners with her performance of Viktor Tsoi’s song Kukushka (Cuckoo).

As to cinema, its impact on society and popular culture goes far beyond entertainment: by blurring the line between fiction and reality, filmmakers and storytellers influence societal norms, shape our perceptions, values and even our consciousness. This power has long been harnessed by Hollywood, a vast, militarised propaganda apparatus. Alford and Secker in their book National Security Cinema revealed that the CIA and Pentagon had worked on more than eight-hundred Hollywood films and over a thousand network television shows. The good news is that Chinese and Russian audiences are now far less exposed to this propaganda.

In March 2022, when Russia was hit by a barrage of sanctions, major Hollywood studios joined the boycott and announced that they would be withdrawing their films. But as we have seen in other industries, sanctions largely backfired and created unprecedented opportunities for both domestic and foreign producers.

In 2023, a record number of new movies and TV series appeared on Russian streaming platforms. In fact, there is now more content on Russian streaming platforms than in previous years, when Hollywood had not yet left the market. Two factors in particular have contributed to this successful trend — the purchase of films and TV series from countries that have not imposed sanctions, and the growing number of domestically produced content.

In Russia, Dmitry Dyachenko’s Cheburashka became the absolute box office champion, exceeding the boldest expectations. The film is a live-action, computer-animated children’s comedy based on a Soviet cartoon character that served as Russia’s national mascot for three different Olympic Games. Its popularity extended well beyond the boundaries of the USSR and held steadfast after its dissolution.

The second place after Cheburashka among the box office record holders was taken by the film At the Pike’s Behest (aka Wish of the Fairy Fish), based on a well-known folk tale about Emelya the Fool and his wish-granting pike. More film adaptations of famous Russian fairy tales and children’s books are set to be released this year, filling the void left by Disney’s departure and tapping the lucrative family films market.

Chinese audiences on the other hand just lost interest in Hollywood movies: no American films ranked among the 10 highest grossing in China last year. The blow to American studios was immediately felt in Tinsel Town. China is the world’s biggest box office and US producers used to rely on this market for profitability.

Against the backdrop of growing tensions with the United States, Chinese film-goers favoured domestic blockbusters. China is producing high-quality movies that resonate with domestic, and increasingly global, audiences. The country’s top two films in 2023 highlight the diversity of offerings: Full River Red, a mystery-comedy-thriller set in the narrow passageways and dark chambers of a Song dynasty military compound in 1146 is inspired by historical events and a lyric poem said to have been penned by heroic general Yue Fei. As the film explores various themes, including patriotism, loyalty, betrayal and political intrigue, its world-renowned director, Zhang Yimou, effortlessly blends different genres without leading the viewer into a postmodernist cul-de-sac.

The second box-office hit, The Wandering Earth 2, is a prequel to the 2019 sci-fi blockbuster by the same name that was based on a story by Liu Cixin, an internationally acclaimed writer, and is packed with spectacular CGI effects. Amid a global crisis — the dying Sun is about to explode and engulf Earth — China rises to save humanity while Western countries descend into chaos. Investing the most resources, technological, financial and human, China builds giant engines to change the Earth’s orbit. The film reflects the increasingly assertive stance of China in global politics and exemplifies president Xi’s vision for a “community of common destiny”, that is a sense of duty to humanity, while showcasing both Chinese values and technological advances — state enterprises in key sectors took part in the project, contributing robots, quantum computers, 3D printing and heavy industrial equipment. This $90million production, the most successful Chinese sci-fi film ever at home and in foreign markets, proves that Chinese studios are striding into the global entertainment and media industry and will help build China’s soft power at a time when Hollywood’s creative potential seems to be exhausted: the list of most highly anticipated Hollywood films of 2024 features once again only sequels and spinoffs, reboots and revivals instead of original concepts.

Though contemporary Russian cinema is popular in China, it is not a mass phenomenon. In recent years the most successful Russian films in China by box office revenue were Going Vertical, a sports drama film about the victory of the Soviet national basketball team over the 1972 US Olympic team; The Snow Queen 3: Fire and Ice, a 3D animated fantasy about the importance of family and helping others; He Is a Dragon, a 3D romantic film set in a fictional fantasy world, vaguely based on Kievan Rus; T-34, a war film about the life of a tank commander who gets captured by Nazi troops and then plans his ultimate escape alongside his newly recruited tank crew. The title references the T-34 a Word War II Soviet tank used on the Eastern Front and the film ends with a dedication to the Red Army tank crews of the Great Patriotic War all of whom earned the status of heroes for fighting against the invasion of their country.

Soviet films on the other hand were incredibly popular in China and left a lasting legacy. The Chinese even play tunes from these films on their folk instruments and still quote some of their dialogue lines. In 2016, a play based on Eldar Ryazanov’s Office Romance (1977) was staged in Beijing. The story became a hit again as the problems that the characters face in the film are timeless. Han Tongsheng, who played the role of Novoseltsev in the theatre adaptation, explains the success of Office Romance in China:

“Those of us who were born in the 1950s and 1960s grew up with Soviet art, music, and cinema, it greatly influenced us. With this performance, we want to tell young people about what we breathed and lived. Because it’s a story about us. And it’s still relevant.”(3)

In 2023 Russian audiences had a chance to appreciate Chinese cinematic productions that project China’s confidence not only in its culture but in its army as well. After watching Born to Fly (aka King of the Sky), a film about test pilots who defy death to ensure the progress of military aviation, Russian viewers praised both its patriotism and spectacular effects.
The Eight Hundred, a classic of Chinese military cinema dedicated to the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, was warmly received by both audiences and critics who noted its monumentality, epic battles, and intensity of action.

It seems that Chinese military-themed cinema is gradually finding an appreciative audience in Russia. The Battle of the Lake — a large-scale dilogy about the Korean War also received a lot of positive feedback from viewers.

Decolonization and psycho-historical security

Despite profound cultural differences, in Soviet times a shared ideology facilitated the growth and deepening of cultural and political relations between China and the USSR, and even the painful Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s didn’t destroy goodwill at the grassroot level — memories of World War II were still alive and shaped mutual perceptions. Then in the 1990s China and Russia opened their doors to Western commodified culture — trivial, tacky and pitched to the lowest common denominator. This culture, globalized by the Internet, influenced popular taste and fostered a social imagination that, by transcending time and place, could seriously undermine national identity. The opening up of contradictory and dissonant pathways for cultural, personal and gender identity formation also led to widespread confusion and an explosion of mental health issues, especially among teenagers. China recognized the risk early and took several measures to promote digital sovereignty: they include, but are not limited to, blocking access to selected websites and search engines that are controlled and weaponized by the US government and its allies. Russia only started this process after the launch of the military operation in Ukraine.

But liberating hearts and minds from internalized forms of colonization is more difficult than erecting digital barriers. Prevention is crucial and that’s why schools and culture are regarded as a first line of defense. Both Beijing and Moscow understand the importance of this task: national sovereignty can only be defended by people who are ideologically and culturally sovereign.
Culture is one of the pillars of China’s Five-Year Plan, meaning the government is making a concerted effort to support Chinese investment in this sector and is leveraging culture to enhance its governance, drive development and strengthen national identity. In Xi Jinping’s words: “Without full confidence in our culture, without a rich and prosperous culture, the Chinese nation will not be able to rejuvenate itself.”

If China’s growing cultural confidence can be observed by anyone visiting the country, its soft power on the other hand is still finding its footing. But as the West’s woke posturing, aggressive promotion of the LGBT+ agenda, hypocritical virtue-signalling, blatant double-standards, lies and hegemonic ambitions alienate the global majority, it’s easy to see why audiences in the Global South are becoming more receptive to the core values of Chinese tradition. After all, social responsibility and cohesion, harmony and cooperation, pursuit of collective goals, mutual respect and loyalty are regarded as positive values not only in China but also in non-individualistic societies where people are enmeshed in a complex web of kin obligations and responsibilities — individual rights, desires and liberties are counterbalanced by family and community-related duties.

In contrast, the foundational myths of American identity and culture are individualism and exceptionalism. According to these myths, America is a land of limitless opportunity founded by those fleeing hierarchy and oppression in the Old World (never mind the genocide of native populations in the New World). But as the American dream of upward social mobility is broken beyond repair and the individual’s only consolation is the freedom to choose his/her gender or marry same-sex partners, US neoliberalism, based on social darwinism and individualism, selfishness and cut-throat competition, can hardly represent a desirable model for developing countries. It is cooperation, trust and social cohesion that underlie the ability of human groups, whole societies and political organizations, such as states, to achieve their shared goals.

If orientation towards the West was previously seen as a sign of modernization and progress in China and Russia, this is no longer the case. The decline in Western leadership is glaring and only those who are living in the Platonic cave created by Western media are unable to see it.

Chinese and Russian cultural practitioners could seize the moment, coordinate their efforts and cultivate narratives that resonate more authentically with domestic and global audiences, countering hegemonic narratives that are skewed against them. But their efforts must be supported and coordinated at state level through the sponsorship of literary, art, film and music festivals, artist-in-residence programmes, tours, awards and prizes because a system that nourishes talent cannot simply rely on market forces and their Anglo-American standards. Such a system has to generate its own forces of selection and self-renewal, and confidently engage cultural practitioners from the Global South who have been marginalized through an unequal balance of power.

Western liberalism generated its own value system but it’s abundantly clear that it is a bad fit not only for other cultures but for the West as well — culture wars are ripping society apart in the US and European countries.
Western elites have long embarked on a mission to erase and rewrite history in order to whitewash their crimes, paint themselves as morally superior and their opponents as barbaric, destroy personal and national identities to replace them with fictional ones that better serve their interests.

Sovereign countries, on the other hand, are fighting back and rightly placing history and culture at the centre of their national rejuvenation programme.

China and Russia are civilization-states, poly-ethnic, multi-confessional civilizations unified by a common language, cultural code and national memory. They are building their future by preserving the past through a dialectical interplay of past and present. Dynamic and living civilizations don’t sever their roots, they instill a respect for the past and the achievements of previous generations.

China is the only country in the world where literature has been written in one language for more than 3,000 years, while the Cyrillic alphabet created a common cultural space first in Slavic Orthodox countries, then in the Russian empire and finally in the USSR. I would even suggest that the use of a distinctive script gave China and Russia the necessary impetus to develop their own, full-fledged, digital ecosystems, and they are among the few countries in the world to have done so. Actually Cyrillic has now a larger footprint online than it has offline.

Though digital media have changed reading habits, there is no denying that the Chinese and Russians see themselves as the proud heirs of a rich literary tradition that reflects all the facets of their spiritual and national character. Xi Jinping quotes ancient Chinese classics so often in his speeches and articles that a book collecting these quotes has been published and translated into several languages. But he is far from alone: most Chinese citizens know at least a few classical poems by heart. As to Russia, it is far from uncommon to hear people reciting poems or passages from their favourite books in the most unlikely settings and regardless of the person’s education or occupation.

Russian diplomats recently revealed that they had to dumb down their speeches so their Western counterparts could understand them. They used to quote foreign and Russian classics in speeches, but had to abandon this rhetorical device. Dmitry Polyansky Russia’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations explained: “Our partners may now be less well-read individuals, so occasionally we want to speak in plainer terms to make sure our message comes across.”(4)

As Russian author Zakhar Prilepin repeatedly pointed out, we all live inside language, inside memory, and that means inside culture. If some events are not recorded in our literature and music, then they will never become part of our national consciousness.

Prilepin’s insightful lessons about Russian literature have been aired weekly on NTV and other platforms since 2017 and are contributing to a recontextualization and popularization of literary works outside the classroom and academic circles. His activity highlights the importance of nurturing cultural and political sensibility together: people who lose their memory, language, and culture lose both themselves and their land.

Psycho-historical security should become an integral part of national security as the decline of a society starts with the degradation of its education system and its culture.

Beijing and Moscow are aware that NATO considers the mind an operational domain and has no qualms about turning it into a battlefield. The Cognitive Warfare Concept lies at the forefront of NATO’s Warfare Development Imperative, which recites “The aim is to change not only what people think, but how they think and act. Waged successfully, it shapes individual and group beliefs and influences their actions. In its extreme form, it has the potential to fracture and fragment an entire society, so that it no longer has the collective will to resist an adversary’s intentions. An opponent could conceivably subdue a society without resorting to outright force or coercion.”

Andrey Ilnitsky, an advisor to the Russian Minister of Defense, who has been studying mental warfare for years, warned that these concerted attacks don’t spare any sector of society. They target the civilizational, ideological and moral-spiritual foundations of society, its philosophical and methodological thought, its scientific development, institutions and directions, its economy and technology sector. They are aimed at undermining trust and social stability, at creating a generational chasm that could effectively separate younger generations from the historical consciousness and culture of their country. Through the degradation of the political class and intellectual life of a country the adversary can influence its strategic priorities and development path, and ultimately destroy its sovereignty.

Not only is the moral and intellectual decay of Western elites instrumental in the destruction of both state and society in their own countries, their ignorance, cognitive deficiencies and irresponsibility pose a global security risk as well. This is what China, Russia and many other nations in the Global South are contending with. They understand that in order to defend themselves from this spreading rot they have to work together.

Though the will is there, collaboration in the cultural field has been hampered by an acute shortage of cultural mediators and interpreters in both countries. And though in other fields machine translation is somewhat helping overcome the linguistic barrier, this solution is woefully inadequate and shows all its limitations when it comes to the translation and sharing of cultural elements. This is not just a linguistic task, it requires a deep understanding of both source and target cultures, and though efforts are currently being made to train more specialists, it takes time to meet a demand that is growing exponentially. Today China knows Russia much better than Russia knows China, there are many more people studying Russian there and not just because of the size of its population. However, the situation is changing and more universities across Russia are teaching Chinese.

Why literature still matters

The relationship between language, culture and thought is symbiotic and meaning-making ultimately needs to include all three points of this golden triangle. One of the highest expressions of this tripartite relationship is literature.

Fortunately China and Russia possess two of the world’s major literary traditions and reverence for the past has influenced the preservation of cultural sources and the transmission of this literary legacy. In China and Russia both early twentieth-century reformers and communist revolutionaries believed in the power of literature as a tool of emancipation: literary texts provided a gateway to literacy and played a crucial role in the linguistic, political, emotional and intellectual development of citizens.

Although people are reading fewer and fewer books, literature still occupies an important position in both countries and its role in cultural exchange certainly demands renewed attention. Traditionally books have been the greatest pollinators of our minds, spreading ideas through space and time and that’s even truer in cultures that place high-value on the written word. Literature, as a unique bearer of socio-historical and cultural information, both reflects and is a means of reflecting on the culture in which it is produced.

China’s formal acceptance of Russian literature began with the translation of The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin at the turn of the 19th century. Russian literature spread throughout China very quickly and on a large scale during the New Culture Movement during the 1910s and 1920s. It took root in China during this period because it echoed China’s social and political needs at the time, as Liu Wenfei, the president of the Chinese and Russian Literature Research Association, told the Global Times.(5) Later, after the establishment of the Soviet Union, the country became a model for the Chinese people and their liberation struggle, and Russian texts a well of creativity to draw upon. The Chinese became avid readers of Soviet classics and many Chinese can still recite the famous saying of Pavel Korchagin, the protagonist of socialist realist novel How the Steel Was Tempered, about the liberation of humankind.

Soviet war literature, such as They Fought for Their Country by Russian author Mikhail Sholokhov, and the short novel Days and Nights by Konstantin Simonov greatly inspired the Chinese people during the war. Between the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and 1958, China translated 3,526 Russian literary works and printed 82 million copies, roughly two-thirds of the total number of translated foreign literary works and three-quarters of prints during this period. Even now, Chinese textbooks include many Russian works of literature such as Pushkin’s poem If Life Deceives You and the famous tale The Flower with Seven Colours.

However, the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the rise of Anglo-globalism led to changes in the circulation of world literary texts. English is still hegemonic in the global cultural market and undoing the damage caused by linguistic and cultural imperialism requires a concerted effort. The centre/periphery hierarchical model shaped cultural flows: peripheries no longer communicated directly, but via a centre, and this practice reinforced the privileged position of the centre. The centre would set standards, provide recognition and visibility only to selected authors from the periphery whose work was useful to reinforce Orientalist tropes or push various socio-political agendas, with “dissident” literature the clear winner. Often these authors found success at home only after their work had been published in English, that is after the centre granted them its imprimatur. But in the context of cultural globalization, this centre/periphery model is only part of the story: it doesn’t account for the increasing entropy of the system, the anarchic fragmentation of the literary market and the cultural field in the age of digital communities.

If we look at the 2023 Best Sellers list in Russia we notice in the first and second place books by a Chinese author, known under her pen name Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, with five volumes of the Heaven Official’s Blessing fantasy series loosely inspired by Chinese mythology.(6) The Russian-language edition appeared thanks to the efforts of fans of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu who collected over 15 million rubles.

But before you celebrate this success, you should know that Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s novels belong to the danmei genre (耽美), romanticized love between boys or young men with idealized, androgynous features. This genre originated in Japan and was first introduced to China in the early 1990s when a large quantity of pirated Japanese manga flooded the Chinese market. It encompasses fiction, manga, anime, games, songs, cosplay and has gained tremendous popularity in East Asia and worldwide creating its own subculture. Mo Xiang Tong Xiu became wildly successful in China by publishing her stories online, namely on JJWXC, a Chinese-language website that adopts a direct payment business model: authors put portions of their work behind paywalls. The availability of Internet technologies that ensure anonymity to authors, as well as the simplicity of content creation and distribution, have played a key role in the development of the danmei subculture.

For years Chinese authorities have raised the alarm over the meteoric rise of fandom culture and called for measures to discipline it. Fanquan, literally meaning “fan circles,” are highly organized groups of passionate, loyal fans who voluntarily use their time, money and expertise to make their idols, usually budding pop singers, actors or writers, as popular and influential as possible. In 2020, about 8 percent of China’s 183 million underage netizens engaged in reputation-boosting activities for their idols. Fan loyalty can turn blind and toxic, giving rise to online trolling, impulsive buying of associated merchandize, rumour-mongering, cyberspace manhunts and other social problems.(7)

In China efforts have been made to contain the spread of danmei. China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) introduced regulations to prevent TV shows and series from promoting “effeminate male celebrities and abnormal aesthetics.”

Luckily besides books by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, the work of another, worthier Chinese writer featured in the Russian best sellers list in 2023, science fiction visionary and leading figure Liu Cixin. He scaled the charts with his trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past (aka The Three-Body Problem) and The Wandering Earth. Their cinematic adaptations have boosted Liu’s fame well beyond literary circles.

If we take a look at what kind of Russian literature is currently being read in China, we notice that no Russian novels feature among the foreign best-sellers, although How the Steel Was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky, originally published in the USSR in 1932 and widely read in China in the 1950s, was re-released in 2019 and became a huge success again after the novel was adapted into a TV series.

According to Liu Wenfei (8), the unprecedented diversification in Russian literature and social changes that occurred after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that is the anarchy of the market, makes it harder for contemporary Russian authors to break into the Chinese mainstream. Many people in China are still familiar with, and fond of Soviet literature and Russian classics, but not very conversant with the contemporary literary scene.

State support could help Russian writers get their works translated, published and promoted in China whose book market is one of the most capacious in the world. Since 2001, there has been continuous growth, until it peaked in 2019 (102 billion yuan or 14.8 billion US dollars at the exchange rate in force at that time).

The history of Russian-Chinese literary relations over the past three hundred years clearly shows that artistic merit is an important but is not the only factor ensuring the publication of a work (beautiful writing and cultural references can easily be lost in translation). Of no less importance is the consonance of the ideological and spiritual content of a literary work with the predominant views, aspirations and values in the recipient country.

1. Xi, Putin usher in ‘best in history’ China-Russia relations, China’s envoy to Moscow says — World — TASS

2. Denis Matsuev: What Russia needs now to remain a great musical power — Rossiyskaya Gazeta (rg.ru)

3. Russian Films Loved in China (teleprogramma.pro)

4. Western diplomacy ‘primitive’ — Moscow — RT Russia & Former Soviet Union

5. China-Russia literature exchanges on the rise — Global Times

6. Китайское фэнтези “Благословение небожителей” возглавило топ бестселлеров в РФ в 2023 году (tass.ru)

7. Xinhua Headlines: Fandom culture booming in China, calling for discipline, regulation — Xinhua | English.news.cn (xinhuanet.com)

8. China-Russia literature exchanges on the rise — Global Times

At the end of October, the president of the EU parliament Roberta Metsola was asked by a journalist whether the EU would formally open Ukraine and Moldova’s accession talks after granting candidate status to these countries in 2022.

“If a country looks to Europe, then Europe should fling its doors wide open. Enlargement has always been the European Union’s strongest geopolitical tool.”

Though Metsola simply rephrased statements made by the head of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen and by the president of the European Council Charles Michel, her word choice offers an excellent insight into the ideological underpinnings of EU expansionism.

Metsola conflates Europe and the European Union, but this is not simply a slip of the tongue, Brussels has a long tradition of assuming that the EU equals Europe and countries lying outside its borders are not truly European, otherwise they wouldn’t be ‘looking to Europe’. To become European is to become ‘civilized’ since outside the ‘garden of Europe’ people live in a ‘jungle’, at least according to EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell. The EU, posited as the embodiment of superior values, has a moral duty to open its doors and admit those unfortunate countries that are currently locked out of this garden of delights, and by doing so, rescue them from some unspecified danger. Basically a variation on the colonial theme of the white saviour. Then Metsola offers the decisive argument in support of enlargement: well, duh, it’s a geopolitical tool to make the EU stronger.

Whether enlargement would make the bloc stronger as its proponents claim or, on the contrary, accelerate its implosion, has divided opinions for two decades. Metsola conveniently forgets to mention that without unanimous agreement accession talks can’t even be started, but of course Eurocrats can’t let facts get in the way of a good narrative.

The metaphors used by Metsola (the door) and Borrell (garden/jungle) reinforce the spatial dichotomy inside/outside that culturally reflects the opposition between positive and negative values, civilization and barbarism. Without a ‘chaotic’ external sphere, actual or imagined, the internal structure wouldn’t appear orderly, actually it wouldn’t appear at all: figure and background would blend in a continuum. Positing the existence of a dangerous jungle inhabited by barbarians is essential to maintain the illusion of order and civility inside. Problem is, at each round of enlargement the entropy of the system increases. History has shown that when imperial expansion is attempted without the necessary preconditions — a sufficiently strong military and an economy capable of sustaining it, an effective leadership, an ideology that spurs the desire for empire, and healthy institutional ties between the core and the periphery — the result is inevitably overreach, failure and defeat. But don’t ask our eunuchs about empires, especially the overstretched one they serve. They believe their own propaganda and are committed to “protecting, promoting and projecting European values, defending democracy and human rights in the interest of the common, public good. Fostering stability and prosperity in the world, protecting a rules-based world order, is a basic precondition for protection of the Union’s values.” When it comes to EU statements parody is unncessary, the original achieves the same comedic effect.

Whether further expansion is good or bad for the EU has become the modern equivalent of the old Byzantine discussion over the sex of angels, and while no agreement can be reached, the process has largely stalled after the biggest wave of new members joined in 2004 and Croatia in 2013. So why has it topped the agenda of so many Eurocrats in the last two years? Mainly because supporters of expansion hoped that they could leverage on the unity that the EU mustered vis-à-vis the conflict in Ukraine to push through a proxy imperialist project fuelled by Washington’s magical thinking. The cornerstone of this project was the full capture of Ukraine whose NATO-trained army should have dealt a decisive blow to Russia. As we know, things aren’t exactly going to plan and that unity of purpose now seems as precarious as Ukraine’s future.

Ukraine had been promised EU candidate status for years and finally received it in return for a blood sacrifice. Obviously it doesn’t qualify for membership, and the prospect of sitting in a crowded waiting room with other candidates for the foreseeable future isn’t exactly worth dying for. Brussels has to first find and then dangle a more appealing carrot at a time when opinion polls show that support for Ukraine is waning.

After coming to the defence of the US ‘rules-based-order’ the EU has a bag full of IOUs, a weakened economy, and Borrell’s garden of earthly delights increasingly resembles the dark panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous triptych.

One may think that discussing EU enlargement while the bloc faces major crises that are stress-testing it to break-point is the epitome of insanity. Actually some commentators have already drawn parallels between the EU’s leadership and Nero fiddling as Rome burned. But allegedly Nero did something else besides fiddling, he blamed Christians for the fire. Offering an enemy within or an enemy without, is a tried and tested tactic to crush dissent and consolidate power. And that is exactly what Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock tried at a recent conference in Berlin dedicated to EU enlargement. She told 17 foreign ministers from EU and candidate countries, including Ukraine’s Dmytro Kuleba, that the EU must expand to avoid making everyone vulnerable.

“Putin’s Moscow will continue to try to divide not only Ukraine from us, but also Moldova, Georgia and the Western Balkans. If these countries can be permanently destabilised by Russia, then that also makes us vulnerable. We can no longer afford grey areas in Europe”. Whatever happened to promises of economic growth, investments and access to a wealthy market? As they all sound pretty hollow in 2023, Baerbock invokes the bogeyman. Gone is all pretence that the EU and NATO pursue different strategies.

With the door to NATO closed to Ukraine and Washington shifting its focus to the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific, the burden of supporting Ukraine “to defend Europe” has been dumped on the EU.

If painting Russia as a threat has long been used by the US to keep NATO alive, in more recent years it has been exploited to unify the foreign and defense policy of EU member states. Washington promoted and facilitated a vertical consolidation of power in the EU in order to outsource to Brussels some of the policing and punitive functions that enable its global capital accumulation and underpin its hegemony. According to its calculus, dealing with one collective vassal, the EU, would be easier than managing several squabbling and competing European vassals. This strategy reflects Washington’s poor grasp of Europe’s history and complexity and that’s why it is unlikely to produce the desired results, especially since European interests were sacrificed at the altar of American ones. After siphoning off wealth from EU countries and restricting their room for manoeuvre, the pie has shrunk and it’s only natural that the scramble to get a slice will intensify. Looting and cannibalizing your allies isn’t exactly a smart move, it reeks of desperation and is a clear sign that the US is financially and militarily overextended.

The economic and industrial decline in EU countries now seems unarrestable. It couldn’t be otherwise when you are trapped in an abusive and exploitative relationship that denies you the freedom to choose your friends and business partners. The economic and geopolitical centre of gravity has moved eastward, the unipolar world order that emerged in the 1990s is unravelling and a new multipolar order is taking shape before our eyes. Instead of following the pragmatic path of Eurasian integration and bolstering mutually beneficial economic ties with China and Russia, the EU has embarked on a suicide mission for its curators in Washington in the doomed attempt to weaken Russia and contain China.

For years the EU had been allowed to benefit from the US-led globalization drive; it developed trade relations and multilateral cooperation with neighbouring countries and the rest of the world. The US rather than accept the emergence of a new multipolar reality, chose to reverse globalization and split the world into two blocs, creatively framing the competition as an ideological confrontation between democracy and autocracy. Trade protectionism increased, international investments were subjected to heightened scrutiny on national security grounds, data-flow restrictions proliferated, sanctions became the norm.

After being condemned to geopolitical irrelevance, European countries are called upon to foot the bill of US imperial ambitions and provide military assistance. A report published by the RAND corporation in November acknowledged that the US defence strategy and posture have become insolvent and recommended a different approach: “The tasks that the U.S. government and its citizens expect their military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally greatly exceed the means available to accomplish those tasks.

The United States cannot and should not on its own attempt to develop the requisite operational concepts, postures, and capabilities required to realize this new approach to defeating aggression. The imperative for allied and partner participation is about more than just generating the resources needed for a credible combined defense. Because deterrence is about more than raw military power, solidarity among the leading democratically governed nations is required in diplomatic and economic dimensions as well. And closer cooperation and interdependence in the defense arena will have beneficial spillover effects in other areas, helping facilitate coordinated action to meet common challenges.”

To better assist the moribund hegemon, the EU is being told to enlarge and reform. Actually reform is deemed even more urgent than enlargement because the US fears that the EU’s ability to carry out the prescribed task might be undermined by a handful of countries exercising their veto power. At the centre of the conversation is the EU’s unanimity rule, which means every country must agree before the bloc can make a decision on issues such as foreign policy, assistance to Ukraine or tax rules.

It is no coincidence that the loudest arguments in favour of EU expansion and majority vote in lieu of unanimity are being heard in Atlanticist circles. Washington needs to strengthen control over Europe’s foreign and security policies and that’s why it has intensified pressure on France and Germany, as well as other European states that are resisting the prospect of Ukraine, Moldova and West Balkan states joining the club in the future.

The capture of Europe

In the kind of EU that Paris and Berlin dreamed of 30 years ago, Baltic and Eastern European countries would provide cheap land and labour, and new untapped markets for their companies — the ideal Lebensraum for ambitious, enterprising Western Europeans. This neocolonial scenario would be assisted by cultural imperialism and facilitated by geographical proximity.

But in the post-Cold war euphoria the Franco-German tandem didn’t pay attention to the Stone Guest: the expansion of NATO was proceeding at a much faster pace than the enlargement of the EU. Despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, NATO hadn’t been disbanded, if anything its mission “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” had been given new impetus after NATO welcomed states whose new political elites had been groomed exactly for that mission.

Not only would the Americans call the shots louder than before, they could count on more allies to do exactly that. As new member states joined the EU, their anti-Russian sentiment also started playing a disproportionate role in shaping EU relations with Russia. As a matter of fact, Russophobia was actively cultivated in post-Soviet states to prop up fragile, and in some cases totally artificial, national identities, and lend legitimacy to new rulers.

In order to glue together new and old members and attract more candidates, the EU turned political problems into technocratic ones, relied on legal procedures and allocated or withdrew financial resources to impose its ‘vision’, became an ideational actor and a ‘global teacher’ of neoliberal principles, Western ‘values’ and EU standards. To conceal its anti-democratic nature and legitimize an invasive bureaucratic apparatus completely disembedded from the wider society, the EU turned into a giant PR machine that drained resources to project moral authority and keep up appearances.

Lacking democratic legitimacy, the EU had to invest considerable resources in creating a simulacrum of democracy. Lacking a demos, it had to invent one through a ‘civilizing mission’ that was undertaken with missionary zeal. In order to create the new ‘European demos’, national, cultural and religious identities had to be diluted first (or artificially inflated where they served an anti-Russian function), one step at a time, starting from kindergarten, and then replaced by some woke ersatz provided by the likes of the WEF and Open Society Foundations — the social engineering path to civilization!

One should bear in mind that the EU is neither an independent geopolitical actor, nor a ‘geopolitical power’, regardless of what Borrell or Von der Leyen rave about. The EU was created to drain power away from member states, erode their sovereignty, so that they will never become a challenge to US interests and power. As a result, the EU isn’t greater than the sum of its parts, it’s the geopolitical equivalent of a black hole. Its institutional architecture, an intricate network of talking shops, is so mind-boggling and mind-numbing that Henry Kissinger, when he was US Secretary of State, famously quipped “Who do I call if I want to call Europe?”

Neither an international organisation nor a nation state, the EU can be described as an artificial supranational polity. This takes the form of numerous mutually penetrating networks of social, economic, political, ideological interconnections which include, at different levels and stages, supranational mechanisms, national governments, regional administrations, multinational corporations, and interest groups whose reach is international.

So when we talk about the EU we should remember that it is run like a private club for a cluster of transatlantic corporations and financial elites. Their lobbies and think tanks control the knowledge and information that shape public opinion and that figureheads act upon — EU leaders are invariably failed politicians and mediocrities whose political careers were facilitated by the same lobbies that own them and dictate their agenda.

As these transatlantic elites engage in a global struggle to maintain and increase their power, seize and control resources, from digital data to natural resources, they form cartels when their interests coincide, or compete for political influence when their interests diverge. The ‘culture wars’ that have made rational debate virtually impossible in the West are often fuelled by these elites as they have the means to mobilize political resources — people, votes and parties — around certain positions on cultural issues.

The European integration process is an imperialist project both in the sense of the relation of the EU to the rest of the imperialist chain, but also inside the EU in the uneven relations between the different countries.

The signs of a deep crisis of European integration have multiplied, Brexit being the most obvious but not the only example. The growing crisis of legitimacy is also exemplified in the reaction of voters in EU countries. Contrary to the accusations of ‘populism’ and ‘nationalism’ addressed to anyone who is critical of European integration, what emerges is rather the anxiety caused by people’s sense of a lack of control over their own lives, disbelief against the undemocratic institutional and political framework of the EU.

Since living standards continue to drop and promises of prosperity and social welfare in the European garden are largely unmet, dissatisfaction and dissent are rising, and not only among ordinary people. Some national elites have become more restive too because they are penalized by the EU hostility against Russia, and increasingly China. EU’s potential for economic growth has been exhausted and the majority of the bloc’s members suffer from chronic budget deficiency and excessive state debt.

But since the US needs all hands on deck to prop up its rapidly waning hegemony, the EU doubled down on its role of enforcer of the US rules by interweaving NATO and the EU into an architecture of control and propaganda — hybrid warfare has been unleashed against the European population under the guise of defending it from Russian disinformation. In such a context more resources are being diverted to the defence and security budget, and to US proxies such as Ukraine. No matter how you spin it, it is obvious that only a handful of well-connected companies benefit from an increase in member states’ military expenditure and R&D.

The Covid-19 emergency offered the US the perfect opportunity to check if all its European ducks were in a row. For the first time in its history the EU adopted a joint procurement strategy: the joint procurement of vaccines not only tested cohesion, coordination, the ability to ‘act quickly’ and mobilize financial resources, it constituted a precedent that later facilitated the joint procurement of weapons for Ukraine and the imposition of sanctions on Russia. The exclusion of Russian and Chinese vaccines showed that the EU could be trusted to obey orders even if they conflicted with its economic interests — US mRNA vaccines were more expensive than the alternative and relied on a technology whose safety hadn’t been proven. The EU media and political debates deployed the language of warfare by referring to a ‘war’ against Covid-19, the virus was ‘fought back’, medics and paramedics were described as ‘front-line soldiers’. A cognitive metaphor of war helped structure the perception of reality. The state of exception was normalized, leading to the suspension of constitutional rights. The pandemic offered the pretext to carry out the most far-reaching psychological operation ever attempted in peace time: any public display of dissent or non-compliance with nonsensical rules was harshly repressed, media and social media were weaponized to brainwash and censor the public, the capacity of the EU new army of ‘fact-checkers’ was boosted and the scope of digital surveillance was extended. Lockdowns led to huge economic losses (and gains for a handful of mostly American tech and pharma companies) but also to a paradigm shift in the EU fiscal, monetary and investment policies, notably through the adaptation of State aid to allow member states to support their economies by means of more direct intervention. It signalled a break from the austerity policy adopted after the financial crisis of 2008. As states became more indebted they had to cede even more sovereignty to the EU: the development strategies and goals of member states had to align with priorities set by the EU and mainly benefitting the US. The debt trap was presented as a recovery plan with high-sounding names such as Next Generation EU (NGEU) — €360 billion in loans and €390 billion in grants.

As they say, never let a crisis go to waste. An emergency creates a sense of urgency and the need to act quickly, which seriously reduces the ability to think carefully. This approach paved the way for the acceptance of even greater losses later, when the EU imposed sanctions on Russia that turned into a boomerang. Any hesitation to give up Russian gas was promptly preempted by its American ‘partner’ through the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines.

Eurocrats who love being loved, especially the pay-to-play manifestation of love, are now kept on a shorter leash. It is estimated that there are around 30,000 registered lobbyists in Brussels and they have been spreading love for decades. But in more recent times only US-vetted lobbyists have been granted free rein. It appears that the arrests that followed the Qatargate were a warning to eurocrats: accepting bribes from certain foreign actors like Qatar will no longer be tolerated. Transatlantic interests must always come first.

EU enlargement — cui prodest?

Though expansion has been enshrined in EU official documents as a geo-strategic imperative, the EU is now facing far bigger challenges than it did in the post-Cold War years. In the early Noughties, European leaders discussed whether to enlarge the union, absorbing Eastern bloc countries, or to deepen its integration. They tried both and the result is an unsustainable mess according to all socio-economic indicators, even before you factor in the mind-blowing cost of supporting Ukraine, the loss of affordable energy resources from Russia and boomerang sanctions.

Think tanks, eurocrats and the media have recently increased their efforts to spin past examples of EU enlargement as a success and future enlargement as an opportunity, but outside their echo chambers scepticism is growing and enlargement fatigue has set in.

If enlargement is being discussed is because talk is cheap. Ask North Macedonia, a country that was granted candidate status in 2005 and is still on the waiting list. The application of Ukraine and Moldova was hastily accepted in 2022 to dangle a carrot in front of them, knowing perfectly well that neither country meets criteria to join the union. Besides, it’s still better for the EU to keep them on the hook, never sealing the deal. Nine countries were formally made the same promise, and you can’t fast track Ukraine and Moldova’s accession without causing resentment.

But as Washington fears that ‘politically and economically vulnerable countries’ would lose patience with the EU, and find more attractive partners to support their development, namely China and Russia, the EU has to keep making promises and most crucially, bankroll political elites in neighbouring countries to bolster their power and clientele. The US is also counting on the EU to fund Ukraine’s war efforts and the reconstruction of whatever will be left of this failed country when the military conflict ends. Let European taxpayers pick up the bill: the EU’s support to the Kiev regime has now reached €85 billion and Von der Leyen promised more will come. An additional €50 billion for the ‘Ukraine Facility’ was proposed by the European Commission for the years 2024 to 2027. In 2022 the European Parliament had approved €150 million to prop up Moldova’s puppet government.

As the EU cannot expand without imploding, France and Germany invited 12 experts to form a working group on EU institutional reforms. They have come up with a set of proposals for a multi-speed construct that would allow some member states to integrate more deeply in certain areas and prevent others from stopping them. The report proposes to get rid of the requirements for unanimous voting, even if scrapping vetoes entails accepting different levels of commitment. It envisages four tiers of membership, the last two falling outside the EU altogether. These ‘concentric circles’ would include an inner circle whose members could have even closer ties than those that bind the existing EU; the EU itself; associate membership (internal market only); and the looser, less demanding tier of the new European Political Community.

The main ‘advantage’ for the Collective West is that all the countries of this ‘Europe’ will be cut off from Russia and Belarus, but it’s not clear what are the advantages for countries in the outer tier given that they will have limited or no access to the Single Market but are expected to give up part of their own national sovereignty in favour of Brussels, losing autonomy and room for manoeuvre in a multipolar world.

Last October, the European Political Community — a talking shop that includes leaders of EU countries, EU candidates, Switzerland, Norway, the UK, and even Armenia and Azerbaijan — convened in Granada to discuss a potential enlargement of the bloc. The meeting was supposed to strengthen resolve but instead it deepened the reservations of those who never warmed up to the idea of enlarging the EU at the expense of current members. Some members have already done the math and realized that if the proposed EU enlargement goes ahead they will have to pay more to and receive less from the EU budget: net receivers will become net contributors. Understandably they are not too excited at the prospect.

While increased EU-NATO integration and eastward expansion created new powerful lobbies and a new class of ultra-Atlanticist eurocrats, EU member states lost any semblance of strategic autonomy and therefore any chance to protect or advance their economic and geopolitical interests. Initially it was the working class of Southern and Western European countries that bore the brunt of the EU expansion, then the middle class too started to feel the pinch. These days Italy’s GDP per capita has fallen to Mississippi’s level, the poorest state in the US; France’s is a little better, it falls somewhere between Idaho’s and Arkansas’, while Germany’s, the engine of the European economy, matches Oklahoma’s. Not exactly a success story.

Though EU sceptics have become more numerous and vocal in these countries, their political influence is limited. Their adversaries represent the interests of a new political and economic elite that emerged through both the material and symbolic co-constitution of the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus of the EU. This elite, through the apportionment and disbursement of funds, can induce compliance or reward the loyalty of politicians. By controlling the purse strings, it can act as kingmaker in any EU country.

It goes without saying that this elite shares the habitus and neoliberal ideology of transnational elites more at home in London and New York than in Brussels. It would be naive to expect it to defend European interests. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t. The eurozone countries, which 15 years ago had a GDP of a little over thirteen trillion euros, today have increased it by two miserable trillion, while the US has almost doubled its GDP (from 13.8 to 26.9 trillion euros) despite its smaller population. According to the Financial Times, in dollar terms, the European Union economy is now 65% of the United States economy. That’s down from 91% in 2013. American GDP per capita is more than twice that of Europe, and the gap continues to widen. Brilliant work!

If EU leaders are routinely bypassed in favour of national leaders in international negotiations it’s because the EU fits the definition of a paper tiger. The unity shown vis-à-vis the proxy war in Ukraine can’t be sustained for long and its main American and European architects will no longer be in office in a year time. Europe’s political setup militates against a proactive foreign and defence policy. So, when Borrell raves about the need for Europe to turn from a soft power to a hard power he conveniently forgets that the EU is not a state actor. It has some of the attributes of statehood — legal personality, some exclusive competences, a diplomatic service and some EU countries have a common currency — but ultimately it is a hybrid and as such is not equipped to play a 19th century ‘great game’ of power politics. And, to be honest, it will not be equipped to do so for many years to come. A ‘geopolitical EU’ remains little more than a consolatory fantasy predicated on its power of attraction — the queue to join.

i https://www.politico.eu/article/roberta-metsola-ukraine-european-parliament-meps-moldova-enlargement-interview/

ii Protecting, promoting and projecting Europe’s values and interests in the world (europa.eu)

iii https://strategic-culture.su/news/2022/10/15/eastern-partnership-eu-geopolitical-gamble-leading-europe-into-abyss/

iv Inflection Point: How to Reverse the Erosion of U.S. and Allied Military Power and Influence | RAND

v State aid in the wake of pandemic, war and foreign subsidies (europa.eu)

vi EU Growth Plan for the Western Balkans to include €6 billion of grants and loans, conditioned on reforms — European Western Balkans

vii Paper-EU-reform.pdf (politico.eu)

viii https://ria.ru/20230910/voyna-1895226264.html

ix Europe has fallen behind America and the gap is growing (ft.com)

x Europe in the Interregnum: our geopolitical awakening after Ukraine | EEAS (europa.eu)

1. You’ve researched and published extensively on “hybrid warfare” and its deployment for colour revolutions. Can you briefly explain the term hybrid warfare?

Colour revolutions are an example of hybrid warfare that weaponises mass protests. The success of a colour revolution does not depend on whether the majority of the population supports the protests, it is enough for the organizers to gather a critical mass of people whose activities pose a security risk or a direct challenge to the government. When this critical mass provokes a repressive reaction from the authorities, protest organizers try to occupy the moral high-ground: they point out the “authoritarian, violent nature” of the ruling government and present their own violent tactics as “self-defense”.
As a rule, organizers receive help from foreign or foreign-linked entities, set up communication networks and news outlets before the start of a colour revolution because they need to reach as many people as possible and influence them ideologically. They also set up smaller, medium security, online groups to radicalize those they have already influenced. High-security online groups that rely on more sophisticated digital tools are used to coordinate subversive activities. They use all available techniques of propaganda and public relations, all social media platforms, and are invariably cheered on by Western media and governments. A color revolution is a well-designed and planned operation with clear and very focused messages, it’s not spontaneous. Of course, the vast majority of activists are not aware they are being used as a pawn by a foreign entity.

So, to go back to hybrid warfare, it is not something new: unconvential, non-military methods to gain an advantage over an adversary have been used for a long time, even in ancient times. What is new is the capability to synchronize operations on a global scale. In a hybrid conflict any instrument of national power can be used as a weapon. It’s a multi-domain warfare, battles can be fought at a diplomatic and legal level, in the information sphere, we talk about economic and financial wars, sanctions, psychological operations, terrorism, sabotage and cyber attacks, even human rights and foreign aid have been weaponised.
Hybrid warfare is designed to remain below the threshold of a conventional military conflict but it can escalate to include the military, usually a proxy army. Its aim is to achieve war-like objectives without formally declaring war, keeping up the pretense of peace.

In a hybrid conflict countries with the ability to weaponise and synchronize instruments of soft power have a clear advantage and that’s why hybrid warfare is enshrined in US and NATO’s doctrine. NATO has even included cognitive warfare in that doctrine, turning the human mind into a battlefield. The aim is to change not only WHAT people think, but HOW they think and act, the ultimate goal is to paralyze their ability to think logically and rationally: once you are driven by emotions only, you are more likely to act against your self-interest or even self-preservation.

Hybrid warfare blurs the lines between war and peace, military and civilian, domestic and foreign, public and private, physical and digital. The information-industrial complex is supporting the military-industrial complex in both a defensive and an offensive role. That’s why the control of this highly integrated complex is vital for the US.

2. The Hong Kong government and many non-western mainstream voices have highlighted the seeds of color revolution that was attempted in Hong Kong during the protest — was the national security law something that largely focused on helping to weed out agents who disrupt sovereignty?

The US-NED started funding anti-China parties and organizations long before HK was returned to China. When in 2003 the Hong Kong administration wanted to introduce article 23 of the Basic Law they manufactured an opposition movement against this bill. People were led to believe that implementing this article of law would have eroded Hong Kong freedoms and installed a totalitarian regime. Nevermind that all the countries they held as a paragon of freedom and democracy had very similar laws to protect their sovereignty. Failing to pass a national security law 20 years ago exposed HK to the security risks we all know. If article 23 had been introduced foreign forces couldn’t have orchestrated the 2014 Occupy Central protest that paralyzed the city for over 2 months and there would have been no riots, casualties and destruction in 2019–20. Finally the National Security Law was implemented in 2020 and Hong Kong has since closed the door to foreign interference.

3. The use of NGOs have always been at play, anywhere in the world, and its something all countries are aware of from their own perspective — India, US they all have a list of bans on foreign NGO’s they deem a threat — so why then did HK receive specific media scrutiny for its blacklisting on certain NGO’s like the NED?

NGOs have long been weaponised as tools of hybrid warfare in many countries. In the past the Hong Kong administration didn’t effectively regulate their activities because it had no legal framework to do so. Without a national security law it was difficult to prevent these biased NGOs from operating in the territory. Up until 2020 collusion with foreign forces was still legal and Western-funded NGOs could act as a conduit for political and ideological influence. NGOs have been used by foreign powers for smear campaigns that target and undermine the reputation of governments, politicians, and other public figures, last but not least, some of their members are sent to sensitive areas to gather intelligence. The list of countries that have banned weaponised NGOs is growing and more and more governments are realizing the detrimental effect these organizations have on their societies.

4. The Ukraine conflict obviously stems back many years, a longstanding battle between NATO and Russia — but now with China playing a key role in world affairs and trying to mediate — can you talk about the delicate balancing act China has to strike in approaching this?

The conflict in Ukraine is a US proxy war, the evolution of a long-running hybrid war that featured two colour revolutions that led to regime change and civil war. The main goal was to separate Ukraine from Russia, its largest economic partner and tear it away from the Russian world. Ukraine’s history is very much entertwined with Russian history, a shared history that pre-dates the USSR. The US and its vassals in the EU tried to erase memory and traces of that common history in order to pull Ukraine into the West’s sphere of influence. The aim was to turn it into a springboard for hostile operations against Russia. Ukraine’s history was rewritten, neoliberal prescriptions destroyed its economic and social fabric and led to a neocolonial form of governance. As far as the US is concerned, Russia should have followed the same fate.

NATO expansion undermined the security architecture that had been established after WW2 and had guaranteed a semblance of peace in Europe up until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Ukraine isn’t really a sovereign state, its leaders were handpicked by the US, all important decisions are made in Washington. Remember when a Chinese company bought a majority stake in the engine maker Motor Sich, but these shares were frozen in 2017? Washington wanted the deal scrapped and to do so froze a multi-million dollar military aid programme for Ukraine and threatened to impose sanctions against Motor Sich. Ukraine obeyed and scrapped the deal. It is clear that Ukraine had lost its sovereignty long before Russian troops crossed its borders. It has long been held hostage to US interests. But Western media wouldn’t acknowledge the US capture of Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries because the US achieved this geopolitical objective using instruments of hybrid warfare. There are many ways to invade and occupy a country while maintaining plausible deniability.

China with its 12-point peace plan for Ukraine is playing a constructive role, all genuine efforts to bring about a peaceful resolution of the conflict must be encouraged.
I am sure China knows very well who instigated this conflict because it is also being targeted by US provocations and hybrid warfare. For months before the break out of military hostilities in February 2022 Russia had demanded security guarantees, such as Ukraine’s neutrality, the promise not to expand NATO, the cessation of attacks against the population of Donbass, the protection of the rights of the Russophone population in a country that had banned Russian-language media and the teaching of Russian in its schools, autonomy for the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. It is obvious that the US and NATO had long been prepping Ukraine to fight this proxy war.
Wars in somebody else’s backyard are good for the US military-industrial complex and its “divide and rule” strategy, but they are extremely damaging for China, a country whose economic strength was built on global trade and global investments. So, understandably China works to build peace and its initiative is supported by all countries that have retained a modicum of sovereignty and strategic autonomy from the US.

5. China is also fresh off making a major headway in brokering initial peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia — something many would’ve thought unimaginable — can you talk about the importance of China’s growing economic and diplomatic bond with the Gulf and how that adds to China’s diplomatic weight?

West Asia, also known as the Middle East, sits as the cross-roads of Europe, Asia and Africa. For thousands of years it has been vital to trade routes and transport. Today, it sits at the heart of the global economy. Millions of people and billions of tons of freight move through this region. It’s a key node of global trade and also one of the main oil and gas producing regions. The US tried to grab its natural resources through the age old “divide and rule” strategy, the result was decades of wars, regime change and chaos in the region. Peaceful relations among the two main regional powers will be a driver of future development and have a direct, positive impact on the livelihoods of millions of people. The resumption of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia is also a prerequisite for the cessation of hostilities in Yemen. Syria too is going to benefit as Saudi Arabia plans to invite Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to the Arab League summit in Riyadh on May 19.

Both Iran and Saudi Arabia will soon become members of the expanded BRICS bloc and join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) the political and security union of Eurasian states. What is happening in West Asia is really a game changer because it sets a very positive example for other nations. China rejects zero sum games and encourages peaceful relations between countries because it’s confident that mutual respect, dialogue and cooperation lead to economic, social and cultural progress. And ultimately everybody benefits from it. Everybody, minus weapon manufacturers.

6. By driving a wedge between Russia and EU, the US has seen an acceleration of other regional blocs consolidating, particularly among the global south — BRICS and SCO to name a few — and a multipolar world is something President Xi has emphasized a lot — can you talk about how you see the world moving more toward a multipolar world?

The US isn’t happy about Beijing’s diplomatic success. China won friends in the region by building bridges rather than destroying them. The bridge is a fitting metaphor for connectivity and mutual understanding. The US has sown chaos and division, inspired and funded Islamic terrorists in order to have an excuse to invade countries under the guise of waging a War on Terror, it imposed sanctions to bring countries to their knees and plunged millions of people into poverty, it keeps ramming its liberal ideology down everyone’s throat and has shown little respect for local cultures.
The growing influence of the BRICS+ bloc has shaken the White House, US diplomats have been touring the world on a campaign to bully countries from Africa, Asia and Latin America to support Western-led sanctions on Russia. But the reaction has been mixed, as many countries have been subjected to US bullying before and are understandably tired of it. Many countries also fear that the same sanctions regimes may be used against them in the future and want to hedge their bets.

The BRICS+ countries are working on a common currency to replace the US dollar in their trade, and the dollar is already being gradually phased out in favour of trade in national currencies such as the yuan, ruble, rupee and real.
The BRICS+ bloc and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization offer a counterweight to Western hegemony and that’s why the list of countries that want to join is growing so rapidly. What we are witnessing is the birth of a multipolar order and the decline of the unipolar disorder. Whether the inevitable transition will be peaceful or not…well, that depends on the US.

7. With the EU chief von Leyer recently in China along with Macron, can you talk about how the relationship between China and the EU will play the balancing act of its relationship with the US/NATO, but also build its relationship with China?

Well, earlier German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez had managed to visit Beijing without Ursula Von der Leyen in tow. Macron wasn’t as lucky. She tagged along, some say to spoil the party, lest Macron became too friendly to China. Whatever the truth is, her ideological stance was at odds with Macron’s approach, which was more business-oriented and pragmatic. If Von der Leyen intended to present the EU as a united front, she achieved the opposite result. Europe’s schizophrenia vis-a-vis China was in full display. Western European countries, especially export-oriented manufacturing countries such as Germany, Italy and France need to maintain and strengthen mutually beneficial relations with China, but on the other hand, the EU leadership is taking its cue from Washington and adopts a very ideological and confrontational approach to business matters. One often gets the impression that the EU Commission is nothing more than the political arm of NATO.
Macron is calling for Europe to pursue “strategic autonomy” from the US lest it gets dragged into crises that are of no benefit to Europe. But it’s a bit too late: European countries have already been dragged into a major crisis in their continent, a crisis that was manufactured by the US.
Many European leaders fuelled the Ukrainian crisis rather than seek a diplomatic solution before the start of Russia’s military operations in February 2022. Europe imposed sanctions on Russia that have largely boomeranged and damaged its economy, supply chains have been disrupted. Higher energy costs and inflation have weakened Europe’s manufacturing sector, now Europe is reduced to buying Russian gas through third parties and at higher prices, as well as the absurdly expensive American LNG. Europe’s industrial powerhouses, Germany, France and Italy, depend on affordable and stable energy supplies. Though France is in a better position because it can rely on its nuclear power plants, it has finally dawned on Macron that following the US confrontational stance and calls for decoupling from China could lead to an even worse disaster for the European economy. Let’s not forget that in 2020 China surpassed the US as the EU’s biggest trading partner. By driving a wedge between Europe and Russia, the US hoped it would also be easier to drive a wedge between Europe and China and thus undermine Eurasian integration. If you take a look at the map, you soon realize that without Russia there can be no Eurasian integration, so the US provoked Russia first. Russia is at the heart of Eurasia, so no wonder it was in the US crosshairs. One could say that the US aimed at Russia in order to kill the Eurasian project.
So far very few European countries have been able to resist US pressure to sever their economic ties with Russia and support Ukraine indefinitely. But the prospect of damaging relations with China after damaging relations with Russia is even less appealing, the consequences would be catastrophic for the European economy.
Unfortunately the US and its most loyal supporters in Europe are escalating their aggressive rhetoric not only against Russia but also against China. We see a concerted effort to paint China as a threat. I fear that this is just the beginning. The US controls mainstream media and most social media platforms in Europe, so it could ramp up an anti-China propaganda campaign and stir up anti-China sentiments at will. Exactly as it did with regards to Russia.

8. Does France hold a unique regard for China, especially since it’s not part of the five alliance, or AUKUS, or QUAD — and France are wary of US — involved world conflict more so than some other major western powers?

I remember that in 2021 high-ranking French officials said France had been stabbed in the back when Australia pulled out of an existing multi-billion dollar defense deal and signed a new deal with the US and UK to obtain nuclear-powered submarines.
The US-UK effort to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines is a very hostile move as far as China is concerned, as it is AUKUS, the partnership among Australia, the UK and the US.
US-France relations have always ebbed and flowed, in 2003 there was a dispute between Paris and Washington over the recourse to war in Iraq. Many of the root causes of the disagreement between the US and France have not been fully addressed. The dispute over the US war in Iraq was only a symptom of deeper problems and divergences over the role they want to play in the international system. Last week China made a historic LNG sale to France in yuan, which in my opinion is very significative.

I believe that the business community in France is even more interested in strategic autonomy from the US than Macron himself. Business leaders are rather pragmatic, they understand that the world order is rapidly changing, the centre of economic gravity has shifted to Asia, and as US hegemony declines and the dollar loses its dominance in the global economy, business leaders are eager to jump on the Chinese high-speed train.
Macron said Europe should not become a “vassal” and must avoid being drawn into any conflict between the US and China over Taiwan. He also emphasised the risks to Europe posed by the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a green subsidy plan that provides an unfair advantage to US companies, and mentioned the risk of an overdependence on the US dollar. What he said reflects the dominant opinion in Europe.

As much as i would like to see European countries distance themselves from the US and its confrontational stance, I am also aware that the EU is hostage to the US. Not only because Europe is dotted with so many US and NATO military bases, but also because many European leaders serve US interests rather than the interests of their citizens.
As expected, Anglo-American media criticized Macron’s intention to defend the strategic autonomy of France and not follow the US in the Taiwan standoff.
Behind Macron stands the French business community which has realized that if the US ramps up tensions with China, Europe will again become collateral damage. Decoupling from China would deal a mortal blow to the French economy. The question is, can Macron deliver on his promise to stay out of the US confrontation with China, that is the current trade war? In Macron’s case we are talking about a president whose popularity at home is in freefall. Protests and strikes are shaking France. Will the US allow Macron to hold on to power if he seeks autonomy?

Marketing Ukraine’s Reconstruction to Fuel the War — Strategic Culture (strategic-culture.su)

Immediately after the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, key players in the coalition supporting Ukraine, as well as transatlantic financial institutions and think tanks, were already discussing Ukraine’s reconstruction. They invariably framed it as a historic opportunity for the country: like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Ukraine would become a beacon of freedom, democracy and rule-of-law, a testimonial for Build Back Better, a green and digital economy success story; the country would leapfrog several stages of economic and governmental development and its economic growth would replicate Germany’s post-war boom. Unsurprisingly, the more recent and far less inspiring examples of Western-led ‘reconstruction’ in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan didn’t deserve mention.

The speed with which fantastical narratives of recovery and reconstruction were churned out shouldn’t surprise anyone: they had been concocted years earlier as part of several ‘reform plans’ for Ukraine. One could say they are hardwired into the overall strategy of this proxy war against Russia and the storytellers are directly or indirectly linked to governments and lobbies that are involved both in the destruction of Ukraine and the Ukrainization of Europe, a process designed to fully control, militarize and plunder the Old World.

There is little doubt that Ukraine will need rebuilding once the war eventually ends, but ‘destruction’ and ‘reconstruction’ mean different things to different people in different contexts.

For instance, there is strong disagreement as to what constitutes ‘destruction’, when the ‘destruction’ of Ukraine started and who should be blamed for it. The semantic field, like history, is a contested territory.

Those who have been following Ukrainian affairs without ideological prejudice, and with a modicum of intellectual honesty, know that at the time of the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine was an economic powerhouse, the third industrial power of the Soviet Union after Russia and Belarus, and its breadbasket. The Soviet republic had aerospace, automobile and machine tool industries, well-developed mining, metallurgical and agricultural sectors, nuclear, oil refining and petrochemical plants, tourism and commercial infrastructures and the largest shipbuilding centre in the USSR.

Steps along a continuum of destruction

Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine’s GDP has lagged behind the level it reached in Soviet times, industry declined, and the population decreased by about 14.5 million people in 30 years due to emigration and the lowest birth rate in Europe. Ukraine has also become the third largest IMF debtor and Europe’s poorest country. These negative records cannot be blamed solely on Ukraine’s systemic and staggering corruption: the corrupt networks bleeding Ukraine are truly transnational.

Ukraine was targeted by two colour revolutions that led to regime change and civil war, and was wrestled away from its largest economic partner, Russia. Its history was erased and rewritten, neoliberal prescriptions destroyed its economic and social fabric and led to a neocolonial form of governance.

Ukraine joined Europe’s nefarious Eastern Partnership(1) in 2009 and has been teeming with Western NGOs, economic and political advisers since its independence. The country’s indentured servitude and captivity to Western interests was cemented after the last Ukrainian government to object to the IMF’s harsh conditions was overthrown by a U.S.-sponsored coup in 2014.

On 10 December, 2013, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich stated that the conditions set by the IMF for loan approval were unacceptable: “I had a conversation with U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who told me that the issue of the IMF loan has almost been solved, but I told him that if the conditions remained we did not need such loans”. He then broke off negotiations with the IMF and turned to Russia for financial assistance. It was the sensible thing to do, but cost him dearly. You can’t break the shackles of IMF debt with impunity: not only does this lender of last resort impose its usual shock therapy of austerity, deregulation, and privatization so that the vultures can swoop in, it also furthers and protects U.S. interests.

If those who destroyed a country are allowed to be involved in its reconstruction, then reconstruction will inevitably be just a point on the continuum of conquest, occupation and looting, but with better optics. Destruction produces that blank slate on which the occupier can write his own rules: “To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname empire: they make a desolation and they call it peace”. Tacitus knew both the reality and the spin of Roman imperialism. One can only wonder if those who talk about ‘reconstruction’, ‘recovery’, ‘reform’, ‘rules-based order’, ‘reset’ or whatever buzzword is fashionable at the moment are aware of the brutal reality or truly believe their own propaganda. In any case, they promise a future utopia worth killing and dying for.

Western capitalism has created its own secular eschatology, replacing the promise of eternal life after death with the hope of a better world in the future, arousing expectations that are constantly disappointed. Unable to solve its growing contradictions in the present, capitalism defers the solution to the future. The promised utopia, embedded in both the environmental and technological discourses, is an attempt to deflect attention from the destructive tendencies inherent to capitalism which yet again has resorted to war, and expanded military budgets, to pull itself out of its systemic crises. Wars, with their cycles of destruction and reconstruction, provide critical economic stimulus vis-à-vis stagnation in the West, and an outlet for overaccumulated capital. The centre of economic gravity has shifted to Asia, a market where the U.S. faces tough competition from China, and as U.S. hegemony wanes, Western elites are faced with the choice of propping up the old hegemon, or seeking an arrangement with emerging powers, an option that would not only reduce their sway and outrageous profits, but also accelerate U.S. decline.

Since U.S. military power and influence over the global economy have long been intertwined and losing one would precipitate the loss of the other, the U.S. has tightened the grip on its vassals, doubled down on its hegemonic ambitions and would rather indulge in grandiose, and dangerous, fantasies than accept the emergence of a multipolar reality. Fantasies cannot deliver real growth but they help manipulate market sentiment, and that’s why the Empire is investing a considerable part of its resources in colonizing minds and policing its narratives.

The job of those who are simultaneously planning ‘destruction’ and ‘reconstruction’ is to reduce the cognitive dissonance between the present misery and picture-perfect manifestos of a bright future.

“War is Peace. Slavery is Freedom. Ignorance is Strength”

Selling a war requires all hands on deck, and that’s why think tanks and marketing specialists have been involved from the early stages. They generate narratives that help shape the discursive space, engineer a perception of universal support for Ukraine, provide talking points, and versions of the truth, to both politicians and the media. They have to motivate Ukrainians to keep fighting and European vassals to keep funding the war and arming Ukraine, regardless of the devastating human and economic losses they are incurring.

If those who organized and attended the recovery conferences that have been held so far never talked about peace it is also because the possibility of peace negotiations with Russia has been performatively and normatively excluded from the Western discourse. The last time Western leaders claimed they wanted peace in Ukraine, they were lying. As we now know, the Minsk Agreements were signed by Angela Merkel and François Holland only to win time for Kiev to prepare for war.

The EU was so committed to peace that in a truly Orwellian fashion, in 2021 established the European Peace Facility (2) to bankroll military operations, provide military equipment and training to unnamed EU partners — Ukraine couldn’t be openly mentioned yet. The fund, worth €5 billion, was financed outside the budget, for a period of seven years.

When in October 2022 Volodymyr Zelensky signed a bizarre decree prohibiting talks with the current Russian leadership he simply formalized something that had already become a dogma among his handlers. Six months earlier, in April, Boris Johnson went to Kiev to pressure Zelensky to cut off peace negotiations with Russia, because the two sides appeared to have made some tenuous progress during talks in Istanbul. In March, Denis Kireev, a member of the Ukraine delegation who had taken part in the February peace talks in Belarus, was shot dead by his country’s security service. Israeli PM Naftali Bennet, who had also attempted to mediate a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, revealed how the Anglo-Americans, with Boris Johnson in the role of chief bully again, blocked his efforts. Peace advocates, including Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s former frontman, were added to the infamous Mirotvorets online database. Those who profit from war and want to see Russia weakened would stop at nothing to prevent peace talks.

While Europeans are grappling with the ever growing cost of an American proxy war in their continent, they need a compensatory fantasy to support the absurd notion that a peace settlement in Ukraine would threaten their security and not be in their best interests. Narratives of reconstruction, seamlessly woven into delusions of Ukraine’s victory, allow the transatlantic party of war to present itself as a force for good and a driver of future growth. The reconstruction marketeers have aggressively tried to occupy the moral high ground by evicting the peacemakers and to do so they had to bolster the argument that war couldn’t be prevented nor stopped.

In March 2022, less than a month since Russian troops had crossed the Ukrainian border, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), one of the U.S. military-industrial-intelligence complex’s favourite think tanks, published a bizarre article titled “Rebuilding Ukraine after the War”(3). Its author compared the destruction of Ukraine’s infrastructure to a ‘natural’ disaster such as the hurricane that destroyed Puerto Rico in 2017 and argued that reconstruction would provide an opportunity “to improve on the past”, paving the way for a radiant future, a techno-utopia as orderly, clean and green as an architectural rendition.

Framing war as a natural disaster, as opposed to a man-made one, would allow those who militarized Ukraine and sabotaged all peace agreements, to pre-empt any serious discussion about the causes of, and possible solutions to this conflict. If the war in Ukraine was as sudden and inevitable as a hurricane then it would be pointless to seek an explanation for it other than “Putin is mad/bloodthirsty/evil…” or “Russia is an imperialist country”.

The ensuing devastation was immediately framed by Western media as the result of Russian forces’ congenital appetite for wanton destruction — in the West, Nazi tropes are back in fashion and Russian soldiers can be described as “barbaric Asiatic hordes” with total impunity. Tightly controlled news outlets ensured that the Western public would never hear about the role played in the destruction of residential districts by Ukrainian nationalists who set up firing positions, deploy armoured vehicles, conceal artillery pieces and MLRS in densely populated areas, and use civilians as human shields. Hardly natural. Even less natural was the outbreak of this war, unless you consider NATO’s expansion and US geopolitical goals as part of a divine plan. Mind you, some do and call it “manifest destiny”.

CSIS put forward arguments and plans that would later be expanded at conferences about Ukraine’s reconstruction. “Thinking about recovery means envisioning a post-conflict future, and that links to the twin messages of hope and the necessity to keep fighting.” The twin messages, constantly amplified by Western opinion makers, are mainly addressed to those who need to be reassured that they stand to benefit from the escalation of this conflict, regardless of present losses. And that includes a multitude of stakeholders, both in NATO countries and in Ukraine.

Priming Ukraine for war and expanding the network of its supporters

There have been several antecedents to recent conferences in which representatives of Western governments, financial institutions and corporations discussed ways to keep Ukraine fighting “to the last man” while baiting it with promises of reforms and reconstruction, but one stands out as a direct progenitor. And it had all the hallmarks of a British influence operation.

On July 6, 2017 the UK Foreign Office headed by Boris Johnson organized and hosted the first Ukraine Reform Conference in London. Members of the Ukrainian government and para-government, notorious “friends of UK/raine” such as Chrystia Freeland and other rabid Anglophile Russophobes, many hailing from the Baltics and Eastern Europe, outnumbered less invested participants, exposed them to their fanatical views in order to facilitate their radicalisation and recruitment to the cause. The power of conformity, suggestibility and normative social influence would ensure that participants who had previously held moderate views would gravitate towards the extremist opinion of the majority.

The alleged purpose of this conference was to seek political and financial support for Ukraine’s 2020 Reform Plan (4), a neoliberal roadmap designed to create a more profitable and less unpredictable environment for Western corporate interests while priming the Ukrainian population and army for war. This medium-term Reform Plan defined the main objectives and areas of the Ukrainian Government activity for 2017–2020 and formed the basis for the strategic plans of ministries and other executive bodies. It was predicated on privatization of state-owned enterprises, deregulation, judicial reform, amendments to the labour law, land market reforms, decentralization, forced derussification, patriotic education, transformation of the armed forces into a “modern and effective army in line with NATO standards” by increasing its military spending to 6% of GDP, and integration into the European political, economic and legal space. In short, this was a roadmap for the complete hijacking of Ukraine’s economic, political, and social institutions, the demolition of whatever stood in the way, and further militarization of the country.

The conference also served other purposes. The main proponents of Anglo-American eastward expansion, who are deeply invested in Ukraine, after the election of Donald Trump couldn’t fully rely on the US government to further their agenda: Trump’s “America First” foreign policy had strained relations with NATO allies and frozen military aid to Ukraine — arms sales were ok, freebies not so much. London was more than eager to pick up the mantle to ensure Ukraine stayed the course and remained on top of the transatlantic agenda. By taking the lead in coordinating and strategizing support for Ukraine, the UK government also saw an opportunity to strengthen British influence especially at a time when Brexit negotiations had just started and London feared losing its leverage in Europe. British elites were determined to put their country “at the beginning of the line” in the looting of Ukraine’s assets and resources.

The gambit seemed to pay off: the following years attendance at the annual conference grew, including a larger number of representatives from the United States, NATO, OECD, G7 and European countries, OSCE, Council of Europe, IMF, European Investment Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the World Bank.

After Russia’s military intervention in 2022, the “Ukraine Reform Conference” (URC) was quickly renamed “Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC). But the continuity is strikingly obvious: acronym, logo and corporate image remained exactly the same when in July 2022, the conference was held in Lugano, Switzerland.

Unsurprisingly, the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano turned out to be little more than a PR stunt, featured a few squabbles among participants competing for their share in any future spoils of war, and provided an opportunity for Ukraine’s prime minister Denys Shmygal, supported by Liz Truss, to advocate the seizure of frozen Russian assets to fund his country’s reconstruction project. Shmygal’s call sent shivers down the spine of Swiss authorities, because not only would the confiscation of these assets violate and thus undermine international legal rules, it would also deal a mortal blow to Switzerland’s banking industry.

Increasing pressure on Europe

Brookings, the US think tank that was deeply involved in the design and implementation of the original Marshall Plan for the post-war redevelopment of Western Europe, had to admit that the Lugano conference held in July “was a missed opportunity because the donor countries did not come prepared with any agreement on coordination mechanisms, a division of labour, or necessary funding levels. In addition, the United States was not represented by officials with seniority commensurate to the European representation.”(5)

A similar criticism was expressed by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, another U.S. think tank. GMF asserted that the European Commission had “neither the necessary political nor the financial heft” to lead reconstruction. And it advised against creating a new agency or centralized trust fund. Instead, it suggested that the G7 and Ukraine together appoint “an American of global stature” as recovery coordinator “because only the United States will be able to bring together the needed global coalition and forge consensus among Ukraine’s partners.”(6)

The Anglo-Americans who need the EU to fund the war and masochistically support their geopolitical plans were disappointed that the richest EU countries would not cough up the amount of money they expected: in this scam Germany, France and Italy are the designated suckers.

If Ukraine is the bait, Europe is the big fish and the U.S. would stop at nothing to achieve its goals: persuasion tactics eventually escalated into terrorism, as evidenced by the Nord Stream sabotage.

For all their pledges to help Ukraine recover, those who took part in ‘Recovery/Reconstruction’ conferences seemed bound by an oath to never advocate for peace negotiations with Russia. But wouldn’t peace be a necessary condition for recovery? Well, it depends on what we mean by recovery.

For instance, the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) clearly spelled out its idea of ‘recovery’ in a document titled “Macroeconomics Policies for Wartime Ukraine”(7), which outlined policies to “put the Ukrainian economy on a sustainable trajectory for the duration of the war.” The same policy recommendations became a dogma in Davos, where the World Economic Forum cult members emphasized the need to start reconstruction while the destruction is still going on. For the war to continue the Ukrainian regime has to be bankrolled by foreign donors and Ukrainian refugees have to go home, that is to a place described as the “hell of war” in the same sentence: “We have a moral obligation to nurture hope for these people and to help them stay strong as they go through the hell of war. Doing so will also encourage Ukrainian refugees to return to their homeland.” The cherry on the cake is the cynical reference to ‘inclusivity’, because no disability should exempt Ukrainians from contributing to war efforts, they too are called upon to fill positions vacated by the dead and those at the front. “Inclusivity is particularly important. Thousands of Ukrainians have already received long-lasting injuries (…) many of them will need to continue their life and work with disabilities.”(8)

People, military and financial aid are all needed to ensure Ukraine retains enough strength not to collapse while it performs its designated role of proxy. That said, broadcasting donors’ pledges and the promise of foreign investments also serve a strategic purpose: it sends a message that Western countries form a compact bloc that will stick together no matter the cost, and to other nations that there are benefits to alignment with this bloc. All wishful thinking, of course.

With Ukrainian GDP expected to fall by more than 45%, budget expenditures doubling due to increased military spending as well as business and humanitarian support, and budget deficit projected to reach more than USD 45 billion by the end of 2022 why would international investors be interested in a failed state at war? Ask BlackRock and JP Morgan.

Wall Street vultures swoop in

A heavily indebted country on its knees can’t prevent the outright sale of its assets and resources. And if that country also happens to be at war “to defend Western values and democracy”, it collects billions of dollars, euros, yens in financial and military aid.

The promise of Ukraine’s reconstruction by a parallel government made up of a familiar cast of for-profit consulting firms, engineering companies, mega-NGOs, foreign governments, international aid agencies and financial institutions would certainly make the prospect of a Private-Public Partnership (PPP) attractive. But all this is predicated on Ukraine winning the war and remaining under Western control, something that only those who drink the Kool-Aid are still convinced of.

Betting on Ukraine’s victory is a high-odds bet, a very risky bet even for the regular gamblers of the vast casino known as the Western financial system. Yes, debt can be repackaged by lenders into creative securities backed by some pie-in-the sky and sold to global investors, a scam that would make the subprime mortgage crisis pale in comparison. The problem is, there isn’t much liquidity around in Josep Borrell’s European garden, nor in Joe Biden’s Land of the Free for that matter. Prices and the cost of money have risen sharply, market sentiment has slumped, there is no easy fix for rampant inflation, recession is looming in Western countries, debt-GDP ratio is shocking and the financial system is broken.

While Western political leaders, financiers and business moguls may delude themselves that “everything is fine” in their parallel universe, as witnessed in Davos, this is nothing more than one of those “confidence-boosting” exercises their minions practice in front of the mirror.

Attracting foreign investments is far from easy, as the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance has candidly admitted (9), though he believes that a PPP with BlackRock “can help raise capital even against the background of a bad investment reputation in the past (…) Obviously, private investors in the West will show much more trust in projects or a fund in which a world-renowned company plays some role. Even if it is consulting support.(…) Since investors often have a herd instinct, the option of creating a BlackRock investment fund to accumulate funds from private investors and finance Ukrainian projects is considered optimal”.

In November 2022 BlackRock’s cooperation with the Ukrainian government was formalized in a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU): it will advise the Ministry of Economy.

BlackRock has become the world’s largest asset manager thanks to crises: after the 2001 and 2008 financial crashes it played a major role in advising governments and corporations despite being directly involved in both crises, and was appointed by the Federal Reserve to manage its massive corporate debt purchase program in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Each Wall Street bailout is essentially a bailout of the previous bailout with the Fed pumping more billions into the financial sector under cover of some emergency or crisis. The bubble gest bigger at each bailout, the elites at the top of the food chain ammass ever more power and wealth at the expense of everyone else.

In February, JP Morgan, the largest bank in the U.S., followed BlackRock’s lead and signed a MoU with Volodymyr Zelensky with the eye on attracting private capital for a new investment fund seeded with $20 billion to $30 billion in private capital.

If you want to drive investors, corporate and institutional ones, to yet another fraudulent scheme you have to dress it up nicely: ‘Investing in Ukraine’s Reconstruction’ looks and sounds much better than ‘Funding a proxy war’ to whoever manages your pension fund.

The bolder the scheme, the more it has to rely on public funding, which is hardly a problem when the revolving door with government allows Wall Street behemoths to call the shots.

Why would the Ukraine’s reconstruction scheme be any different?

Talking up ‘reconstruction’ has the additional benefit of distracting attention from BlackRock’s and JP Morgan’s vested interest in the continuation of war, as they own shares in the top military contractors and arms manufacturers in the U.S. But they need not worry about media scrutiny: they hold large shares in mainstream media companies.

In Davos, Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan’s CEO, warned that the conflict in Ukraine is an inflection point that could impact the Western world for decades and restructure the global order. That is so obviously true that it is almost not worth saying, but judging by the trajectory of the war in Ukraine, the world order that will eventually emerge from it might not be to Dimon’s liking.The world is moving toward political multipolarity, established twentieth century powers such as the U.S. and Europe are ceding importance and influence to faster-growing Asia, with China in the leading position. The end of U.S. unipolar moment cannot be prevented and Western elites are aware that the fraudulent, inequal system they owe their power to is doomed. Naturally, they will keep milking it for as long as they can.

1. Eastern Partnership, the EU’s Geopolitical Gamble Leading Europe Into the Abyss — Strategic Culture (strategic-culture.org)

2. European Peace Facility — Consilium (europa.eu)

3. Rebuilding Ukraine after the War (csis.org)

4. ukraine-government-priority-action-plan-to-2020.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)

5. Takeaway from Berlin Ukraine recovery conference: Donor coordination for Ukraine is coming but not here yet (brookings.edu)

6. Financing and governing the recovery, reconstruction, and modernization of Ukraine (brookings.edu)

7. Macroeconomic Policies for Wartime Ukraine | CEPR

8. Ukraine’s future must be green, inclusive and technology-driven | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)

9. BlackRock в Украине: что на самом деле будет делать здесь инвестиционный гигант (minfin.com.ua)

Eastern Partnership, the EU’s Geopolitical Gamble Leading Europe Into the Abyss — Strategic Culture (strategic-culture.su)

The European Union’s co-optation of six ex-Soviet countries around an anti-Russian agenda turned them into a hybrid warfare battleground and fundamentally undermined Europe’s security architecture.

In February 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Vladimir Putin delivered a powerful speech that signalled Russia’s newly restored confidence and heralded Russia’s desire and readiness to play a more significant role in international affairs. The Russian president criticized the US attempts to create a unipolar world order as both dangerous and futile at a time when many new poles were appearing. He unequivocally pointed out that NATO expansion and the deployment of missile systems in Eastern Europe constituted a threat to Russia’s security. The US deemed the speech an act of defiance: US-Russia relations grew colder, more tense and Washington started drawing up new plans to contain Russia’s legitimate aspirations. The implementation of these plans required a closer collaboration between NATO and the European Union: spurred by the US, the EU stepped up its involvement in the post-Soviet space.

Obviously, the EU has always had an interest in matters beyond its own borders. For instance, the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS) had already recommended “preventive engagement” through the promotion of “a ring of well-governed countries to the East of the European Union”(1) but lacked an institutional framework to coordinate efforts. A step change was urged by the US after the Munich speech.

In May 2008, at the EU’s General Affairs and External Relations Council in Brussels, Poland and Sweden put forward the proposal of a special partnership with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. During the Prague Summit of May 2009, the concept was officially translated into the Eastern Partnership (EaP).

Ostensibly the EaP was launched to strengthen economic and political cooperation between the EU and the ex-Soviet countries in parallel with cooperation with Russia, but it soon became clear that its real objectives were rather different: tear these countries away from Russia, pull them into the West’s sphere of ​​influence, where they were expected to contribute to the common security and defense policy of the EU and, last but not least, turn them into a springboard for the hybrid war that was to be waged against Russia.

Unsurprisingly the ‘architects’ of the Eastern Partnership were two certified Russophobes, both well placed in the Anglo-American network of influence.

Radosław Sikorski, a former member of the Neocon think tank American Enterprise Institute, two years earlier had renounced his British citizenship, but not his allegiances, to become first Minister of Defence and then Minister of Foreign Affairs in his native country, Poland. His close associate, Carl Bildt, besides serving as a very unpopular Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs in Sweden, had held prominent positions with influential Atlanticist think tanks. As an enthusiastic war lobbyist he too maintained a very cosy relationship with American Neocons who used him to further their agenda in Europe: in the US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks, Carl Bildt was described as “a medium-sized dog with a big-dog attitude”, an unflattering but fitting description for someone who is tasked with guarding his master’s interests. The betrayal of his country’s formal neutrality and collaboration with a foreign power dates back to the 1980s, when he passed confidential government papers to his handler in the US embassy.(2)

The EaP was inaugurated by the European Union in Prague on 7 May 2009, while Europe was still suffering from its worst economic recession. A day later in the same city the summit “Southern Corridor — New Silk Road” extolled the benefits of a natural gas supply route from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz gas field (operated by BP, its biggest shareholder) to European markets. The $33-billion Southern Gas Corridor, one of the largest and most expensive energy infrastructure projects in the world would leave behind a trail of ecological devastation, scandals and corruption. Nevertheless it won the praise of the US which saw it as a cornerstone of the EU’s policy to diversify away from Russian gas.

Not only are the EaP and the Southern Gas Corridor inextricably linked, Anglo-American fingerprints are all over both projects. The inclusion of Azerbaijan — geographically, culturally and conventionally considered part of Asia — in the EaP served other strategic purposes as well: cementing the pro-Western course of a country that is allied with Israel, Turkey and the US, instrumentalizing Baku to interfere in Northern Iran, derailing Eurasian connectivity projects.

Between rhetoric and reality

The EaP was presented to EU members as an institutionalised forum for discussing visa agreements, free trade deals, and strategic partnership agreements, while avoiding the controversial topic of accession to the European Union. At the time Europe was in the midst of its deepest recession since the 1930s, several EU member states were scrambling to bail out banks and repay their government debt, austerity measures and spending cuts further contracted their GDP, thus increasing poverty and resentment against Eurocrats. It would have been inappropriate to openly discuss the allocation of resources to countries that were not even members of the EU. And yet Brussels quietly started financing programmes in all six EaP countries in coordination with US agencies. The majority of these programmes served to create or consolidate client-patron relations and networks of influence in fields such as legislation, information, security, education, culture and business, under the guise of promoting democracy, human rights and the rule of law, closer political and economic integration, etc.

At the inaugural summit of the EaP, Radosław Sikorski characterized the initiative as evidence of the EU’s soft power, the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion and payment. In other words, projecting an image, a ‘brand’, and shaping the perceptions of others in order to reduce the costs in carrots and sticks of securing desired policy outcomes.

The previous stage of the EU enlargement process had shown that countries gradually adapting to both the EU’s legislative basis and political norms would eventually become parts of the union. But the EU, post-2008, had not only lost its mojo, it could hardly accommodate new members without imploding.

It soon became clear that soft power alone wouldn’t do: millions of euros flew into EaP countries to fund various projects on the basis of conditionality: the funding would be withheld if progress was not made towards “democratization” (i.e. the election of candidates vetted and approved by the US-EU) and fighting corruption (i.e. investigating, and often framing, pro-Russian politicians while bribing their opponents).

Democratization metrics steadily declined year after year but as long as the governments of these countries showed loyalty to the Western bloc and implemented reforms devised by Eurocrats, they would continue to receive financial and political support.

Soon the European Union became the largest donor to EaP states, marketing Europe in terms of grand idealistic goals rather than tangible economic results no one could deliver.

While EaP countries are extremely diverse, they also have much in common: the widespread use of Russian as a lingua franca, a shared past and historical memory, long-standing links with Russia, both commercial, cultural and social. The EU’s task was to assist the US in painting this shared heritage as evidence of “Russian imperialism” and “Soviet totalitarianism” in order to destroy it, cancel the use of Russian, demonize any form of cooperation with the Russian Federation.

Contrary to the expectations of security, stability and socio-economic development that many associated with increased integration under the EU umbrella, Western interference on Russia’s doorsteps brought war, poverty, depopulation, brain drain and instability.

Hardly surprising when you think about the real purpose of the EaP: supporting US geopolitical goals in the region by dangling a few carrots in front of the EU’s Eastern neighbours and hitting them with a stick if they swerved from the prescribed anti-Russian path.

Prior to the creation of the EaP, the US had already orchestrated and funded two colour revolutions that led to regime change in two strategically significant countries on the Eurasian chessboard, the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, but the cost of maintaining control over the post-Soviet space was growing exponentially and draining a lot of resources. The US had no choice but outsource some of the tasks and functions to its vassal, the EU. The EaP provided the normative framework to slowly erode the sovereignty and autonomy of member states, thus increasing their dependence on the EU.

Instead of acknowledging Russia’s legitimate security concerns and seeking a peaceful resolution of disputes, the EU has stoked tensions and conflicts in EaP countries. So much for its promises of peace and stability in the region. Five out of six original members of the EaP have now territorial disputes; Ukraine experienced a second US-led coup in 2014 and has been at war ever since thanks to US-NATO-EU all-round support; Belarus, the only country wihout territorial disputes, was the target of a colour revolution in 2020, managed to prevent a a coup and wisely left the partnership. In case one still harbours any doubts as to who supported and partially funded the coup, the EU still lists Belarus as an EaP member recognizing Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and “Belarus’ civil society” as representatives.

While the EaP is virtually unknown among European citizens, for over a decade EU emissaries and their local clients have been promising EaP members various perks and further integration into the EU, in return for severing all ties with Russia and ramping up Russophobia.

Anything could be used as leverage, even visa liberalization, or the threat of its suspension. So far only three countries out of six, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine have been rewarded with visa-waiver deals in return for “progress toward democracy”. And who could assess their progress better than a US regime change outfit?

Among its many ‘services’, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) advises the EU on visa matters.(3)

Another lever is the trumped-up EU candidate status, nothing more than a step on the road to nowhere: the waiting list for EU membership is so long the chance of EaP members joining is lower than the chance of the EU dissolving.

At the time of writing only two countries, Moldova and Ukraine, have received candidate status. Ukraine earned it by paying a blood tribute: its soldiers are being used as cannon fodder in the proxy war against Russia. Moldova’s puppet government was rewarded for its anti-Russian stance, though it’s unlikely that the promise of accession to the EU in a distant future will assuage the pain and anger of Moldovan citizens who are dealing with the consequences of economic collapse, the criminalization of political opposition and the loss of energy resources.

If in the past the EU touted accession to its rich men’s club as a path to prosperity and economic growth, after the 2008 financial crash, and the perduring, systemic crisis, that narrative started to sound hollow both inside and outside the club. And that’s why controlling the narrative has become a priority. No expense is spared to manipulate the infosphere, that metaphysical realm of information, data, knowledge, and communication that shapes perception and overshadows empirical observation.

In EaP countries ordinary citizens bore the brunt of Brussels’ neoliberal reforms and suicidal policies: millions of them were forced to emigrate in order to feed themselves and their families. These countries were linked to the Russian market and the reorientation of exports to EU markets not only required costly structural reforms, it also never delivered on its promises.

Very few winners and many losers

As all 5 current EaP countries remain either fragile, undemocratic, economically underperforming, torn by frozen conflicts, or all four at once, the notion that whole societies would enjoy being penetrated by the EU is clearly preposterous.

But, as is always the case, there are a few winners among the millions of losers. They benefitted from the client-patron relationship system that helped build most of the social, political, economic and cultural infrastructure of EU penetration into the post-Soviet space.

EU affiliates and recipients of European aid gained access to powerful networks and sources of funding that enabled them to accrue their political capital, power and status by creating their own clientele. A Georgian acquaintance who runs a marketing and advertising agency told me that 80% of her turnover comes from social marketing campaigns for non-profit organizations sponsored by the EU. It’s hardly surprising that she and her staff actively support all the progressive causes her agency helps promoting: activism and business reinforce each other in a lucrative feedback loop.

The greater part of EU assistance goes to those who promote the simulacrum of Western democracy and “rule-of-law”, selective human rights, the LGBT agenda, the “green new deal” and digital transition, and to those who “combat disinformation”, which is just a code word for producing and spreading Western narratives and anti-Russian propaganda, censoring dissent, cancelling Russian and pro-Russian media.

Focusing on some mythical Western values is easier than delivering prosperity.

Even by its own yardstick, the European Union has failed as an economic entity. The EU’s performance has been dismal compared with other major economies. Stagnation, high unemployment, over-regulation of economic activity and a democratic deficit have led to widespread resentment. Critics point the finger at supranational policy-making and regulation as it takes place in rather technocratic,opaque and closed bodies like committees or agencies that are unelected and shielded from public scrutiny.

The outsourcing of major sectors of policy development to management consultancy firms has led to the loss of accountability, and drained democracy of its meaning.

It’s precisely because of a democratic deficit and legitimation crisis that the democracy rhetoric has been pumped up and large resources are invested in marketing the EU as a bastion of democracy, freedom and human rights.

The EU resembles one giant pyramid scheme: the well-being of the participants in this pyramid is very dependent on whether it will be possible to attract new ones. The most active and evangelical members are invariably those who have joined it relatively recently, like the Baltic states. Their accession to the European Union turned out to be discouraging, rather different from the flowery promises that were made in 2003–04. Foreign direct investment into the Baltic states collapsed during the 2008–09 debt crisis, today it remains subdued and the Baltic states have fallen into a ‘middle income trap’ at around 70% of the EU-15 average income. The EU, like a vampire, sucked them dry economically and demographically, but their “investment” in the scheme means they have to reel in other victims to raise their profile in Brussels. Citizens of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Eastern European countries with British degrees, are conspicuous in regime change outfits, think tanks, NGOs, online and offline influence networks, intelligence and psychological operations. As EU emissaries they provide “technical assistance” to EaP countries, share their experience, especially in the public sector, to facilitate the implementation of political, economic and social reforms and continue to aggressively defend Anglo-American interests in both the EU and post-Soviet states.

Western, liberal values and norms are marketed the way consumer goods are: by preying upon hidden fears of social inadequacy and rejection, by promising status and a sense of moral superiority, by inducing desires that overshadow basic material needs.

It’s often hard to differentiate between Pyramid schemes, Transnational Clientelism, Evangelism marketing and Affiliate marketing, as they tend to overlap. If initially one can observe a distinction, the evangelists believe in what they promote while affiliates benefit from promoting it, eventually the most ambitious and skilled evangelists become affiliates. If we transpose this marketing model to the political sphere, activists perform the function of evangelists. As soon as they build a considerable influence they are offered the opportunity to become affiliates and thus receive incentives such as funding for their campaigns, increased media visibility, a boost to their social media activity, invitations to international conferences, education and career opportunities, a record or a book deal, an international tour, etc. Whatever floats their boat. Once the transition from “activist/evangelist” to “affiliate” is completed, EU promoters become part of a system that can be described as Transnational Clientelism: the discharging of order-making to brokers and intermediaries that works through an asymmetric distribution of benefits. In client politics an organized minority or interest group (lobby) benefits at the expense of the public with negative consequences on democracy.

EU policies generally reflect the interests of transatlantic lobbies and as their power grows so does the repression of dissent.

The ability of the EU to attract simply based on its soft power quickly proved to be a delusion. Co-opting the eastern neighbours and keeping them on board required both payment and coercion.

EaP members soon discovered that there is nothing “free” about Free Trade agreements with the EU: conformity assessments of agricultural or industrial products could be granted or denied based on external, unrelated factors, such as supporting anti-Russian measures for instance. And once products are deemed fit for EU markets, the exporting country realised that it must apply the same EU standards to its imports as well, including public procurement. This requirement is a constraining factor for cheaper imports of industrial goods from certain markets such as China or the CIS(4), leads to higher prices for consumers, a smaller range of products, and the emergence of monopolist importers. The dream of accessing a rich market can easily turn into a nightmare, as the domestic market is put under EU surveillance and held hostage to Western exporters and those ever-changing EU standards.

The myth of superior EU standards has also led to a widespread sense of inadequacy among those who can’t obtain the coveted certificate of compliance, a psychological phenomenon that typically governs the relations between the colonized and the colonizer. After all, there would be no colonialism without a projection of superiority.

The EaP countries will always be found somewhat wanting, they will never satisfy all requirements, because they are only useful insofar as they perceive themselves as inadequate and accept to be lectured, advised, pulled by the sleeve by those “who know better”. To compensate for their inferiority complex the élites of EaP countries project status by embracing the latest Western fads with a zeal that often borders on the ridiculous…and invariably choose an Anglo-American education for their offspring. Now even those with fewer means, but with the right connections, can send their children to a foreign school. In 2018, with the active support of the EU, the first European School for students from EaP countries was launched in Tbilisi, Georgia. But the encroachment of Western education models is not confined to a few schools for the well-connected. In EaP countries extensive reforms were initiated to turn their education system into a vector of Western influence. In the field of exchanges, the EU’s major contribution is through the Erasmus+ programme, which had a total budget for the EU plus third countries of €4.7 billion for 2014–20.

Education is one of the key elements in this colonization project as European education programmes are used as a Trojan horse to demolish existing frames of reference, abolish the study of Russian, replace cultural norms, beliefs and perceptions. They erase the past and rewrite national history as a fight against “Soviet invasion and totalitarism” — even the celebration of a Nazi collaborator, as in the case of Bandera, isn’t beyond the pale. These programmes extol the virtues of a (fictional) common European identity and invariably produce a new generation of West-worshippers primed for migration or war (both hybrid and conventional) against their demonized neighbour, Russia.

NGOs are another crucial conduit of Western influence and pressure in EaP states.

In 2009, alongside the EaP, an Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum (CSF) was established by the European Commission, apparently because “civil society actors serve as a corrective to state politics in less democratic and authoritarian states in which the parliamentary opposition is unable to fulfill this role”.(5) The weaponization of civil society by the EU was a characteristic of the EaP project from the start.

It is also remarkable that the same text describes an organization set up by the EU Commission as a “civil society initiative”. Yet another example of obfuscation of reality, something the EU has mastered really well.

The Forum doesn’t make a mystery of its activities: “The CSF has organized national platforms in order to have more influence at the governmental level in the EaP states. To some extent, the European Commission also functions as a sort of patron in countries with democratic and constitutional deficits that enables civil society groups to formulate public criticism and gives them more freedom of action. For example, the Belarusian platform has used this freedom of action to develop into a pro-European umbrella organization.”(6) We all know what happened in Belarus in 2020.

As is often the case with this kind of “civil society” initiatives, NED provides expertise and support.

In 2012 the CSF established a Secretariat, thus making it even clearer that civil society action is a profession. Local NGOs can apply to participate in the annual Forum but… they are selected by the European External Action Service! Unsurprisingly the CSF is filled with activists, staffers and grantees of Soros’ Open Society and similar outfits. In this fraudulent scheme the EU pays for Soros’ influence operations and guarantees a return on his investments.

But of course CFS and Open Society Foundations are not the only show in town. EaP countries are teeming with NGOs. When it comes to the weaponization of civil society, one of the busiest actors in the EaP is the European Endowment for Democracy (EED), established in 2013 by the EU on the model of its better-known US homologue NED.

EED and NED have spared no efforts in shaping the information, cultural and political landscape of post-Soviet coutries. I could mention dozens of examples, but that’s beyond the scope of this article, so i invite the reader to take a look at NED and EED annual reports.

In Moldova, just to narrow the scope, they supported news outlets, radio and TV programs in Russian and Romanian language that played a critical role in the election of Maya Sandu by attacking and discrediting her political opponents. The irony is that these news outlets are described as “independent” in EED documents. From one of these reports we learn that influencers and popular musicians such as Pasha Parfeny, who had represented Moldova in the 2012 Eurovision Song contest with his song Lautar, were coopted and funded by EED to advance its agenda.(7)

A tragic outcome

Over the years the EaP has changed considerably as reality usually finds a way of asserting itself. It now consists of five member countries, Belarus having de facto left.

Since Armenia and Azerbaijan never sought EU membership, and Armenia joined the Eurasian Economic Union in 2015, the EU has less leverage there than in countries that are eager to join the EU, such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. Only the first two received EU candidate status as a form of compensation for services rendered. Unsurprisingly, they show far worse socio-economic indicators than countries that have retained some degree of autonomy from the West: Ukraine and Moldova were Europe’s poorest countries when the EaP was launched, and still are. Ukrainians, after being targeted by very aggressive information and psychological operations for nearly a decade, ended up fighting a proxy war for NATO. Which is exactly what they had been primed for.(8)

Long before the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the US had gained “premium” leverage there, pumping billions of dollars in weapons into Ukraine. For years the country played host to American and European military and intelligence personnel, information war specialists and their technical support teams.

As a matter of fact other EaP countries have been designated by the US as potential sacrificial lambs. Besides Ukraine, US-NATO set up centres to coordinate hybrid war strategies in Georgia and Moldova.

On cue, in February 2019 the EU Parliament announced the establishment of a regional parliament assembly that includes Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia to forge closer cooperation on “strategic issues such as hybrid war and disinformation”. An Informal Working Group on Disinformation was created with the support of the EU Parliament and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), one of the main components of NED.

Following Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia also expressed their desire to join the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (Hybrid CoE) based in Helsinki, a EU-NATO joint venture engaged in hybrid warfare. Though they are not listed as participants, they already cooperate with Hybrid CoE.

As if it weren’t enough, a transatlantic lobby dressed up as a think tank in 2020 was calling for an EaP Security Compact: an initiative that would create an Intelligence Support and Coordination Cell within EEAS, the foreign and defence ministry of the EU, to facilitate exchange of intelligence between the EU and EaP countries. Tbilisi and Chisinau have been suggested as locations for intelligence-liaison offices.(9)

The idea that ex-Soviet countries would gradually turn away from Russia under the influence of Western soft power and promises of further integration into the EU, made sense when the EU represented a successful model to emulate and was an engine of growth. But that idea was dangerously delusional in 2009 when the financial crash had already brought down the house of cards. The EU, rather than fixing its systemic problems, concocted new harebrained schemes and hysterically doubled up its virtue signaling in an effort to remain relevant.

Meanwhile the economic and geopolitical centre of gravity was moving eastward to Asia and the unipolar world order that had emerged in the 1990s was showing signs of decline. That trend strengthened in the last decade and a multipolar order is now emerging. As the West clings on to its delusions of grandeur and moral superiority the only soft power it can project is based on lies, double standards and empty promises. Liars can create an illusion of truth…till they collapse under the weight of their lies.

But since extracting wealth from a periphery of subject nations and concentrating it in the imperial core require far more than marketing skills, empires are backed and usually imposed by military force. The US empire is no exception and NATO’s militarization of Europe and its eastward expansion accompanied the hypocritical rhetoric of “freedom, democracy and human rights”.

Considering that the EaP initiative was sold to EU members as a way “to secure the eastern flanks of Europe”, which incidentally are also the western flanks of Russia, the conflict in Ukraine and its devastating impact on the political and economic stability of the EU clearly show that the outcome of that expansionistic drive has been tragic not only for EaP countries but for the EU as well.

Notes

(1) European Council, ‘A Secure Europe in a Better World: European Security Strategy’, Brussels, 12th December 2003, p. 8.

(2) https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/carl-bildt-gav-usa-forhandsinformation-fran-ubatsskyddskommissionen-pa-1980-talet

(3) https://eap-csf.eu/wp-content/uploads/Compendium.pdf

(4) Commonwealth of Independent States. It includes Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

(5) https://dgap.org/en/research/publications/eastern-partnership-civil-society-forum

(6) https://eap-csf.eu/

(7) https://www.democracyendowment.eu/en/our-work/firstpersonstories/1581-pasha-parfeny-and-lautar.html

(8) https://strategic-culture.org/news/2022/03/31/is-russia-losing-the-information-war/

(9) https://ecfr.eu/publication/the-best-defence-why-the-eu-should-forge-security-compacts-with-its-eastern-neighbours/#the-eus-marginalisation-in-its-neighbourhood

On June 5 Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s oldest and most influential newspapers, splashed the pictures and names of 9 people, including mine, above the headline “Putin’s network in Italy: the influencers and opinion leaders who produce propaganda for Moscow”.

According to the clumsy article that accompanied this sensationalist title a “secret Russian disinformation network” was uncovered by an investigation carried out by “intelligence agencies”. The only source cited by the article is a report by Copasir (Comitato Parlamentare per la Sicurezza della Repubblica), a parliamentary security committee that is tasked with overseeing the activities of intelligence agencies rather than conducting its own intelligence operations. But this is not the only oddity. Though the article is signed by the newspaper’s assistant editor-in-chief and another senior journalist, it contains so many factual errors, wrong attributions and outright fabrications that the informed reader is left with the impression that the authors of this hack job knew very little about the material they were handling and never before had heard the names of the people they accused of being Putin’s disinformation agents in Italy. Ignorance of the matter didn’t stop them from blithely making us the target of a defamation campaign that, given the current Russophobic hysteria, could put our livelihoods and even personal safety at risk.

Although Italian public figures deemed “too friendly to Russia” had already been profiled by obscure foundations and think tanks in the past, this is the first time names, pictures and personal details are splashed on the pages of an Italian newspaper and widely circulated on the Net. By choosing Corriere della Sera as an outlet for the nefarious and reprehensible practice of doxxing, those who commissioned this hit piece may have intended to legitimise intimidation tactics they have long adopted in Ukraine and tried in Hong Kong and Belarus during colour revolution attempts. This is a clear sign that the information war is getting hotter and anyone who dares to question the official narrative spun in NATO circles can end up in the crosshairs of those who police it. Freedom of expression is one of those fabled “European values” that is currently destined for export only.

The authors of the fact-free article published by Corriere della Sera reached a paroxysm of ludicrousness by claiming that Putin (no less!) had quoted Manlio Dinucci’s book during his Victory Day speech in Red Square. Apparently one day we influence the Kremlin, the next we put on our Kremlin agent’s hats and go on a mission to influence Italians. Suspend your disbelief. Such is the power of the mysterious network i am suspected of being part of that we can coordinate our activities without knowing one another, without any interaction and without receiving instructions from any Russian control centre, let alone payment for our tireless “propaganda” efforts. Is Russia relying on telepathy to communicate with her agents abroad? Has a microchip been implanted in our brains to turn us into unwitting propaganda machines? No explanation would be too far-fetched when the aim is to discredit the work of the analysts, journalists, reporters, academics, and even a member of parliament who make up the magical world of Putin’s disinformation agents in Italy.

As expected the publication of that defamatory article by Corriere della Sera immediately conjured up memories of McCarthyism and the newspaper was accused of engaging in a witch hunt. Understandably, it also caused public uproar and indignation.

Adolfo Urso, the senator who heads Copasir, in an official note tried to distance himself and his committee from the scandal by claiming that “Copasir has never conducted its own investigations on alleged influencers and that it has received a specific report only after the publication of the article”.

A few days later, in an attempt to put the matter to rest, the specific report he mentioned was declassified and made available to the public. But the report, oddly titled “Hybrid Bulletin”, contained only two of the names mentioned in the article.

To explain such discrepancy Adolfo Urso added that the missing names might be listed in three “Hybrid Bulletins” that are still classified. Weeks later, on June 17, at a press conference held during his trip to Washington, he denied that any of these reports contained our names.
According to Copasir, the “bulletins” were compiled by DIS, the Department of Information for Security, which coordinates the activities of AISI (focusing on internal security) and AISE (focusing on foreign intelligence), in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and AGCOM, the authority that was originally set up to safeguard pluralism of information and fair competition in the telecommunication market.

Though Copasir tried to reassure the public by insisting that it had launched an internal investigation to find out who leaked classified information to Corriere della Sera, anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the track record of Italian intelligence agencies holds out little hope that such investigation will yield any results. The general consensus is that a cover up is far more likely.

While Copasir denied any responsibility in the matter and its president claimed he had heard about these reports from the press, on May 20, more than two weeks before the infamous article appeared in Corriere della Sera, Politico, a US news outlet that enjoys excellent relations with the US establishment, published a piece titled “Infowars: Putin’s propaganda permeates Italian media” in which it denounced the attitude, described as too soft, of Italian media towards Russia.

From Politico we learn that Copasir had opened “an investigation into a Russian disinformation network in Italy” the previous week, therefore around mid-May.

Why was an American news outlet aware of this investigation before it became newsworthy in Italy?
From Politico we also learn that Andrea Romano, an MP from the ultra-Atlanticist Partito Democratico (PD) had pushed for the Copasir investigation despite it falling outside the remit of this committee. Politico attributes to Romano the following statement: “Disinformation is part of Russia’s military strategy, as investigations by numerous European parliaments have found. Putin’s regime is very effective in its capacity to penetrate democratic debate, to confuse, and create doubts.”

Politico also mentions Adolfo Urso, the president of the parliamentary security committee who publicly denied any knowledge of the report. According to Urso, Russia has deliberately targeted Italy in a hybrid war fought with fake news and disinformation that pollutes public opinion. Since 2016, at least 13,000 instances of fake news have been documented by the EU’s task force, he said. “The aim is not just to confuse but to condition choices”.

The impression, after reading Politico’s article, is that both the “Hybrid Bulletins” and the hit piece published by Corriere della Sera are the product of a joint effort between Copasir, EU-NATO think tanks, media/academia/intelligence outfits and the “fact-checking” organizations they control.

The fact-checkers aka “disinformation experts” embedded in both mainstream media and social media companies often have a military and/or intelligence background, which reflects the importance NATO assigns not only to policing and weaponizing the narrative, but also gathering information on those who question it. The current witch hunt indicates that after banning all Russian media from the Western infosphere they have now moved on to the next target, Western independent thinkers and reporters whose influence on public opinion they fear even more.

At a time when doublespeak has become the rule, it is hardly surprising that one of the latest reports containing a black list was compiled by the Italian Federation for Human Rights (FIDU) together with Open Dialogue Foundation, the Polish-Ukrainian NGO linked to Soros’ Open Society and International Renaissance Foundation. Silencing dissidents in the West while championing and funding them in countries the US has labelled “authoritarian” is clearly their idea of human rights and open dialogue. The report was proudly presented by Andrea Romano at the Italian Parliament’s press room on June 28. Romano is the same Democratic Party MP who had solicited the Copasir investigation.

Since smear campaigns targeting independent media and journalists were launched at around the same time in several NATO countries, and nearly identical accusations were made against us, the hypothesis that these attacks were coordinated is not so far-fetched.

In Anglophone countries hit pieces such as the one published by NBC news on June 8 “Russian propaganda efforts aided by pro-Kremlin content creators” cited the Institute for Strategic Dialogue as a source. Another hack job published by The Guardian on June 19, “Russia-backed network of Syria conspiracy theorists identified”, also mentioned the same Institute funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, UK, US, several EU countries and NGOs.

If during the Cold War, at a time when European countries still enjoyed a modicum of sovereignty, NATO resorted to clandestine stay-behind networks such as Gladio in Italy, today these networks operate in full view, though they are less structured: in keeping with RAND doctrine they resemble swarming pods and clusters that influence every aspect of civil, political, economic, cultural life in NATOstan.

Back in 2015 the European Council had already asked the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (Federica Mogherini) to address “Russia’s disinformation campaigns”. It led to the creation of the East Stratcom Task Force. In addition, the Joint Communication on Countering Hybrid Threats set up the Hybrid Fusion Cell within the European External Action Service to act as a single focus for the analysis of hybrid threats. In 2017 the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, which supports the activities of NATO in this field, was launched in Helsinki.

NATO built an EU-wide pipeline of researchers, university centers, journalists, fact-checkers and NGOs with the necessary technical, linguistic and subject-matter knowledge to give a veneer of credibility to propaganda stories by creating an array of seemingly scientific tools and methods. It also provided them with additional specialised staff, such as experts in data mining and analysis to organise, aggregate and process vast amounts of digital data. On 1 June 2020 the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) project started its activities. The EDMO consortium includes the Athens Technology Center (Greece), Aarhus University (Denmark), and the fact-checking organisation Pagella Politica/Facta (Italy).

A second phase of the project saw the establishment of national/regional digital media observatories across Europe, IDMO being the Italian one. IDMO was set up in 2021 with the participation of Luiss University, RAI, TIM, Gruppo GEDI La Repubblica, Tor Vergata University, T6 Ecosystems, NewsGuard (linked to NeoCons and US government officials, including former CIA director Michael Hayden), Pagella Politica/Facta, Alliance of Democracies Foundation (the brainchild of NATO ex-Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen), Corriere della Sera, Fondazione Enel, Reporters Sans Frontieres, The European House Ambrosetti.

The swarm of fact-checking/disinformation outfits that have jumped on the EU gravy train of transmedia surveillance and narrative management is constantly expanding and is intertwined with US military and intelligence structures, operations, and goals. So much so that NATO StratCom CoE and the European CoE for Countering Hybrid Threats are virtually interchangeable.

The information gathering capability of this swarm far exceeds that of STASI, as the GDR security agency had to rely on informers and listening devices planted in apartments. In today’s Europe anyone using an electronic device is automatically under surveillance and those who express dissenting opinions are a prime target for harassment, intimidation and smear tactics aimed at discrediting them and their work.

© Laura Ruggeri

1.https://www.corriere.it/politica/22_giugno_05/rete-putin-italia-chi-sono-influencer-opinionisti-che-fanno-propaganda-mosca-fce2f91c-e437-11ec-8fa9-ec9f23b310cf.shtml

2. A study published by Columbia University Press, “Russian Active Measures: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow”, contains the Italian dossier “Russian influence on culture, the academic world and Italian Think Tanks” authored by Fondazione Gino Germani.

3. https://www.scribd.com/document/577826737/Hybrid-Bulletin

4. https://www.politico.eu/article/infowars-russia-vladimir-putin-propaganda-permeates-italy-media/?mc_cid=e25b4b53cf

5. https://fidu.it/wp-content/uploads/Disinformazione-sul-conflitto-russo-ucraino-.pdf