Glimpses of the Multipolar World, 15 July 2023
NATO Vilnius Summit. Intellectuals. Carnival. Wilno. Kissinger Pranked. Indie Publishing. The Beginning and the End.
Each week in my newsletter, I offer seven glimpses of world history in the multipolar world. This week, I share glimpses of:
The Big Story. NATO vs Ukraine at Vilnius Summit.
Governing the Multipolar World. Courtiers vs Intellectuals.
Using History Mindfully. Routines vs Carnival.
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Vilnius vs Wilno.
What surprised me most. Vovan and Lexus vs Kissinger.
Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress. Indie vs Trad Publishing.
Reading and Closing Verse. Szymborska, The Beginning and the End.
I am going to be briefer than normal this week, because today my new book Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing is published. So much to do! I will be offering glimpses into the new book on Substack and my other channels over the next 13 working days. Please consider buying this memoir and collection of my writings. There are no official secrets betrayed, but my authentic experience is essayed.
You can buy Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat here
Why not also pick up one of my other books
my book of essays From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments 2015-2021.
my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind.
I have given Amazon links for convenience but these books are also available on Booktopia, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and other online retailers.
So, on with the newsletter….
1. The Big Story
The big story of the week is the standoff between the NATO allies and Ukraine at the Vilnius Summit. Famously, President Zelensky was photographed all alone and angry, after being refused a pathway to membership to the “greatest alliance in history”.
I cover the Summit in my podcast this week, so in this newsletter I will provide some of the best readings that I used to make sense of this event.
You can read the communique itself here. Paragraph 11 is the key source of Zelensky’s disappointment.
Allies will continue to support and review Ukraine’s progress on interoperability as well as additional democratic and security sector reforms that are required. NATO Foreign Ministers will regularly assess progress through the adapted Annual National Programme. The Alliance will support Ukraine in making these reforms on its path towards future membership. We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met. (my emphasis)
The Moon of Alabama interpreted events as a big climb down by NATO.
Mary Sarotte, who has written a history of the US perspective of the promise that NATO not move one inch eastward after 1989, claimed NATO was putting Ukraine in the worst of both worlds.
Thomas Fazi wrote an acute piece, and Adam Tooze explained the US-European impasse on Ukraine and the money problem on his substack:
“Expect the NATO summit to be awash with promises of weapons for Ukraine. The German government is already today trailing possible new packages. But when you read the numbers that emerge from the summit, place them against the structural impasse sketched above. They are part of a double calculation - by the key players in NATO and the EU - which is not designed to give Ukraine what it wants any time soon .
The Quincy Institute grumbled about America paying for its occupation of Europe… sorry that slipped out, I meant Americans want Europe to pay more for its own security through NATO, before expanding its members to include that money-sink of Ukraine.
Richard Haas confused the riverbank city of Vilnius with a mountain. It was another demonstration of the decline of an influential American Imperial Mind. Yet his aims echoed Biden’s results: increased European defence spending and its integration with American operations, focus on China, and avoiding responsibility for foreign policy fiascos by comparing this fiasco to an alternative reality of “irresponsible America under Trump”.
The EU Parliament paper focused on practical cooperation rather than membership promises.
Foreign Policy assembled nine so-called “thinkers” on the future of the alliance. In truth, they were retired politicians, generals and journalists. They all assumed that Ukraine was the iron spine that America would thrust into its European alliance.
MK Bhadrakumar accurately assessed, “the delusional hopes of NATO countries defeating Russia have withered away and the Vilnius summit’s decisions will reckon with this ground reality.”
Kim Dotcom plausibly concluded that Russia has won the war, NATO is in retreat, and the USA is going into a dark time.
Viktor Orban, Prime Minister of Hungary, made a rare European plea for peace, based on the original aims of NATO as a defensive alliance.
John Helmer, the veteran Australian journalist who is the longest-serving foreign correspondent in Moscow, speculated, on the basis of solid sources, that NATO had given an ultimatum to Ukraine. “Win” by the end of the year, or there will be a scramble for Galichia.
Garret Martin at War on Rocks reflected the growing obsession of the American Imperial War Faction with war against China. He called on the Summit to cut Ukraine loose, and expand Nortern Atlantic Defence into a Global Alliance Offence to secure the US Empire in the Western Pacific.
It’s not just support for Ukraine that is at stake for NATO in November 2024, but the alliance itself, and a big piece of that is whether there will be trans-Atlantic unity on how to deal with the challenges emanating from the Indo-Pacific. Having conversations at NATO now about how the alliance would react in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan would help to ensure a more unified response if Beijing takes such action in the future.
The Global Times, reflecting Chinese elite consensus, responded by issuing an editorial demand: “NATO must promptly withdraw the black hand it has extended toward the Asia-Pacific region.” Dmitri Medvedev assessed the Summit darkly, “World War III is getting closer.”
Listen to the Burning Archive podcast this week for my own assessment, in music, prose and poetry.
2. Governing the unruly multipolar world
The Royal Commission into Robodebt reported recently, and it has prompted reflections on the state of the public service. My quick assessment of the Royal Commission is that it may have succeeded as an inquisition into wrongdoing, but it has failed to institute improvements. Its proposals to rectify the degradation of the public service are poor. I will write more on this next month, but in the meantime I do have extensive discussion of my experience of problems of public service in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat.
Public servants have lost their institution and culture to the parasite state, the new nomenklatura, the new courtier class who fill our intellectual performances with low-grade trash. I commented on a tweet about one such think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute; surely our intellectual class can produce better analysis, Cameron Leckie asked. I responded:
They have become a courtier class; so no they cannot. Think tanks are not authentic intellectual institutions. They are not capable of insightful thought. They merely perform the rituals the court demands.
More on this topic soon, but I do encourage you to buy and read Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat here if you are interested in my writing on governing and the restoration of authentic public service.
3. Using history to live mindfully in the present.
The French riots for now do not appear to be leading to the collapse of French social order or the Macron Government. The Prigozhin Affair did not precipitate a Time of Troubles in Russia. Both events remind us that unstable situations can emerge without the world being in crisis. They remind us to think mindfully about history, and to remember all the times when an unscheduled carnival appeared, but routine social life resumed the morning after. These events remind us that after a war or a riot, there is always someone who has to tidy up (see my poetry selection this week).
I will write more on this theme in my upcoming posts on the World Crisis and Social Fragmentation. I will actually be splitting a long essay into three parts over the next three Mondays. The first comes out on 17 July. These posts are for paid subscribers. Please consider upgrading your subscription and supporting my writing.
4. Fragments of the Burning Archive.
On the podcast this week I talk about NATO and the Vilnius Summit. The place at which this meeting occurred led me to explore the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, some major figures in its cultural history, and some major shadows over the history of Vilnius.
Czelaw Milosz was born in Lithuania, and described himself as the last citizen of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He wrote many poems in Wilno, the Polish name of the city, and an important poem about the city during the war, The City with No Name. The Polish dream of its Great Commonwealth seems to be still alive in parts of Eastern Europe today. It has a dark past, as brilliantly evoked in Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob. I discuss the massacres of Jews during the 1930s and 1940s in Vilnius on the podcast, and also learnt that many Nazi Lithuanians fled to America after the war, and then returned to Lithuania scot-free after the fall of the Soviet Union. Sean Penn and Bob Dylan claim to have some Lithuanian blood, and I stumbled on one interesting discussion of the complex myths of Lithuanian history. I understand there may be some good recent histories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but I have not investigated it thoroughly. It is hard to surpass The Books of Jacob, and it is dangerous to revive this ghost of East European ethno-nationalism.
5. What surprised me most this week.
I was surprised that Vovan and Lexus pranked Henry Kissinger. Yes, the 100-year old grand statesman over-estimated his guile so much that he actually believed Vladimir Zelensky would call him now. It is astonishing that these pranksters have tricked so many Euro-Atlantic figures during this war, including the British Defence Minister, Ben Wallace. What enables this? Vanity? A kind of patronising contempt for ethnic Slavs?
6. Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress
I am grateful to Ingram Spark who publish, print and distribute my book. More broadly, I am grateful for the remarkable economic, technological and cultural conditions that enable independent publishing. They make my life as an independent author possible. The free me from the gatekeepers of traditional publishing. They allow me to meet you directly, dear reader.
This week my works-in-progress and published content were:
on the podcast I published Episode 109 NATO in Vilnius - what does it mean?
On the YouTube Channel I published Prigozhin Affair - Coup, Mutiny, or Psyop? My TNT Radio Interview with Hrvoje Moric 29 June 2023, and Why America is NOT the greatest superpower in the world. 7 reasons the USA is not number one.
On Twitter, I shared a lot of stories on the NATO Summit, and links to my earlier articles Grand Illusions of the West, The Derangement of the American Mind, and Australia, Little Country Lost.
Next week, I will release, on each work day, some short promotional content on 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat across all my platforms, including YouTube.
On Monday I will be writing the next instalment of my Sub-Stack series on the World Crisis, Social Fragmentation.
On Friday on the podcast I will release a remastered and edited selection from one of my early episodes on social fragmentation.
7. What I am Reading and Closing Verse
I read some Milosz, Szymborska and Tokarczuk. Three Eastern European Nobel Prize winners!
I close the newsletter with a stanza from a poem I have enjoyed during the week. This week it is Wislawa Szymborska, The End and the Beginning.
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
I read the whole poem in my podcast this week. It connects to events in Ukraine, Vilnius and Washington.
You can read the whole poem in the collection, Map, or here.
Until next week, take care, and stay sane.