Glimpses of the Multipolar World, 24 June 2023
Biden on Xi, World History vs. Geopolitics, Eurasianism, Russian Foreign Policy, Dragon of Drones, Fernàndez-Armesto, Blok, Scythians.
Each week in my newsletter, I offer seven glimpses for seven days of the multipolar world. This week, I share glimpses of:
The Big Story. Biden boasts that Blinken goes to China.
Governing the Multipolar World. World history as a guide to geopolitics.
Using History Mindfully. Eurasianism and World History.
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Eurasianism in Russian Imperial Foreign Policy.
What surprised me most. A dragon of drones.
Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress. Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto.
Reading and Closing Verse. Blok, Scythians.
Have you checked out my books? My next book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat is coming out next month, and substack subscribers will be the first to learn the details. In the meantime, you can also buy
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 was the failure of American diplomacy with China, which is not a good story for the world.
Secretary of State Blinken visited Beijing, the first high level US official visit to China in five years. Until recently, Chinese diplomats reportedly refused to take his call. Blinken said little during the visit, and mainly listened. There is even an image of him taking notes during his meeting with Xi Jinping. The US diplomat’s remarks that reiterated the long standing official US position on Taiwan, however, provoked a furious reaction in American domestic politics. Blinken “grovelled” and “kowtowed” before the Chinese, the nationalist and imperialist press declared. But at least he left the meeting with the appearance of wanting to rebuild diplomacy, and to establish a working group with the unstated aim to facilitate a meeting of the leaders of China and the USA. There was also agreement to increase people-to-people exchanges that represented some basic progress.
The following day President Biden made remarks to a private donors function in California, and his remarks were then widely promoted in the media, presumably at his advisers’ instigation, and published on the Whitehouse website. The most widely publicised remark was that Xi JinPing was a ‘dictator.’ The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson commented in Western news sources that the remarks infringed China’s political dignity and diplomatic protocols. The Wall Street Journal reported that China summoned and reprimanded the US Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, who has been in the role but months and with much controversy.
It appeared as if Biden had made another gaffe, perhaps through inattention, maybe out of anger and frustration. Another explanation was that Biden was merely playing to the domestic political audience in America who are unhinged about China. All the reports were that Biden had undone mistakenly, forgetfully or emotionally the good work of repairing communication lines and beginning a ‘thaw’ in relations between the USA and China.
It may be inadvertent, but I am inclined to think this event was carefully orchestrated as a demonstration of US dominance and Biden’s mastery of diplomacy, at least in the deranged minds of American strategists.
There were more remarks from Biden than a single insult about Xi Jinping, which is, in any case, consistent with American rhetoric about the great crusade of Democracy against Autocracy. The transcript of “Remarks by President Biden at a Campaign Reception” includes these comments early in his remarks:
You know, I’ve met a lot of world leaders. And I — I come at this reelection thinking about what I was as- — I was asked by Xi Jinping — I’ve spent a lot of hours with him over the last 12 years. I mean, in over — they keep mec- — meticulous records — 82 hours’ worth just he and I, 60-some of it in person.
And we were in the Tibetan Plateau, and he said, “Can you define America for me?” And I said, “Yes, I can. In one word…” — the Gov has heard me say this before — “In one word: possibilities. Possibilities.”
One of the reasons why we’re always referred to, Mr. President, by others as “the ugly Americans”: We think we can do anything. And we can do anything we set our mind to. But we just haven’t focused much — very much in the last four or five years in terms of focusing on what we need to do.
I’m convinced if we work together, there’s not a damn thing we can’t get done.
In other words, Biden is reasserting American exceptionalism, and reanimating Karl Rove’s old illusion that America can make its own reality. Following some talk on the economy, Biden then claimed he has drawn the world more tightly into the American military alliance, and persuaded laggard allies, like Europe and Japan, to pay more to the American military industrial complex. He started with Japan:
And as I said, with regard to Europe, when I told people that we were going to bring — I thought we could bring Japan along. You know, Japan hasn’t increased its military budget for a long, long time. But guess what? I met with the chairman — the president — the vice — excuse me, the leader of Japan for, I guess, on three different occasions, including in Hiroshima. And he convinced — I convinced him and he convinced himself that he had to do something different. Japan has increased its military budget exponentially.
So, he said “Don’t worry about China.” It is here that he dropped the dictator word about Xi Jinping, but it was in a broader context.
China is real — has real economic difficulties. And the reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two boxcars full of spy equipment in it is he didn’t know it was there. No, I’m serious. That’s what’s a great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened. That wasn’t supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course up through Alaska and then down through the United States. And he didn’t know about it. When it got shot down, he was very embarrassed. He denied it was even there.
But the fo- — did — the very important point is he’s in a situation now where he wants to have a relationship again. Tony Blinken just went over there — our Secretary of State; did a good job. And it’s going to take time.
But what he was really upset about was that I insisted that we — we reunite the Qu- — so-called Quad. He called me and told me not to do that because it was putting him in a bind. I said, “All we’re doing — we’re not trying to surround you, we’re just trying to make sure the international rules with air and sea lanes remain open. And we’re not going to yield to that — on that.”
So now we have India, Australia, Japan, and the United States working hand in glove in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.
We have a situation where I’ve met with all 50 of the major maritime states in East Asia. And — and they’re — they’re — I mean, I never thought, as a kid coming out of the Vietnam War era, that we would have Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos wanting closer relationships with the United States of America.
He misrepresented the spy ballon affair, since the balloon was only shot down after traversing the entire continent of the USA and much criticism of the impotence of Biden in allowing it to happen. He stated his awareness of Blinken’s mission within his grand strategy, but claimed it was China that wanted desperately to “have a relationship again.” Then he drew critically India into the fold of these alliances, including the Quad, that are pointed like daggers at China’s coast.
These remarks were not blurted out. They were not fits of pique or absent-mindedness. They were boasts of a veteran political leader who believes himself to be the greatest strategist of the exceptional nation. He has drawn Europe, Japan, India and South-East Asia into the fight to knock off the challenger to the United States. And he has even fooled China, with his old friend Tony Blinken, by offering them baubles of relationships, when America wants dominance of the world.
Indeed, Biden repeated the same tired trope of the indispensable nation in his remarks.
My generic point is: There’s enormous opportunity. Enormous opportunity. And the world is looking to the United States. I mean, they really are. They’re looking to the United States. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was right when she said America is the essential nation. Because who else will organize it? Who else can lead it, any other nation in the world be able to do it by themselves?
Biden’s remarks and Blinken’s meeting with Xi are a combined performance intended to project diplomatic dominance over China. Consider what is happening at the same time. The US Coast Guard sends a ship to sail provocatively through the Taiwan Strait, leading to protests from China. The Chinese Premier is visiting Europe, as a follow on to Macron’s earlier visit when the French President wistfully spoke of strategic autonomy. Not on Biden’s watch! Critically, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is visiting the US. Biden’s focus on the Quad working hand in glove in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean was central to his remarks, and was frankly an implied threat to China. The USA and India have now issued an extensive statement on the occasion of the leaders meeting. It contains much more subtlety and detail than the US President’s remarks, and rather less concentration on military cooperation towards American objectives of dominance.
However, I do wonder if President Biden believes he has performed his “Nixon goes to China” moment. He recently remarked “I think I know as much about American foreign policy as anybody living, including Dr. Kissinger.” Biden probably believes he has put spine into Europe, and made them dependent on US energy. He has rallied the world to democracy by sending the soldiers of Ukraine to their deaths. He still dreams of weakening and looting Russia. And now he has brought Russia’s strategic partner and China’s rival, India, tightly into the American Indo-Pacific strategy to contain China. Modi had to go to Washington to do it, because Joe might have trouble with the flights; but America can do anything, don’t you see? It is still the exceptional nation.
So Biden’s remarks were not a gaffe, not a slip. They are not words of petty anger, even if they are the simmering resentment of Captain Ahab’s obsessive revenge. Biden's remarks are more boastful than angry, though they have that edge too. Biden is angrily defending his inflated image of his own prowess as political leader and foreign policy leader, and indeed the infinite 'possiblilities' of America. His boastfulness makes him blind to how his and US power is slipping away, and angry at the people who claim they are. Biden’s remarks express perfectly the flight from reality of American foreign policy. The truly scary thing is so many American elites share these convictions.
2. Governing the unruly multipolar world
In my post for paid subscribers on the World Crisis - Empires and Nations, I wrote about how events today are challenging our mental models of governing the unruly mulipolar world, or geopolitics, if you prefer that term.
If Adam Tooze is right that part of the polycrisis is the failure of a mental model of the world, then we cannot understand today’s ‘geopolitical’ crisis without reflecting on our mental model of the international system or of ‘geopolitics’ itself.
Will this be another American century? Will America continue to govern the world the American way through its preferred liberal rules-based international order? Will the world bifurcate into the NATO world and the DragonBear? Or will we enter a more complex multipolar world, or even enjoy a new era of peace and development?These questions are often addressed through models of geopolitics, international relations theory and histories of empire.
Geopolitics has a tainted tradition, with influences of Mahan, Mackinder and Haufhosen. Mahan expressed the strategy to command the seas, and for the American Empire to take over British rule of the blue oceans, Mackinder defined the world competition as the struggle of the peripheral empires of Anglo-America to control the World Island of Eurasia. Haufhosen conceived the idea of the Indo-Pacific, and sought to use it to flip the table on the Anglo-Americans in an alliance between Germany, Japan and the other colonised nations of the two great oceans of the world. From the 1950s Zbigniew Brzenzinski reinterpreted these traditions as the Grand Chessboard on which the Democratic Grandmasters of Geopolitics would outplay the Authoritarian Dictators of Eurasia. His undertones of contempt for the Asiatic Mongol Horde were never far from the surface, and have broken out in the more fervid passions of American geostrategists and their clients in Ukraine. Some Russian Eurasianist theories challenge these ideas from using a black mirror of the same concepts. Geopolitics has a tragic flaw to conceive grandiose strategies to dominate the world, rather than to live with the world as it is.
I go on to explain in the article why I prefer world history as a mental model to make sense of the world today, and how by constructing a different narrative of the ‘world order’ we might find our way to a resolution of the world crisis. You can read the full article by upgrading to a paid subscription.
3. Using history to live mindfully in the present.
My last two podcasts have discussed Eurasia in world history. On Eurasianism, I have found the Anglo-American historical establishment to be rather unreliable interpreters of this complex family of ideas, which reflect on realities of Russian history and geography.
I did not refer to many historical texts during my podcasts on Eurasia, but there some helpful reflections on the mindful use of history in two important recent books on Russia and Eurasia.
First, there is an excellent discussion of “Eurasianism” and the long, complex history of this idea in Mark B. Smith, The Russia Anxiety: and how history can resolve it (2019). He concludes his section “Eurasia’s Russia” so,
Russia is itself - but this does not make it anti-Western. It is of the West - and it borrows from the West. It is European - and it is Eurasian. But far from opening up Russia in the imagination of outsiders, this combination of identities has come to be seen as the driver of Muscovy’s unstoppable empire. For the Anxiety prone [such as the Anglo-American historical and foreign policy establishments] … the myths and realities of expansionism would be encoded into the DNA of the future Russia.”1
Western geopolitical thinkers have projected their own shadow, in the Jungian sense, their unacknowledged destructive instincts, onto Russia and Eurasia.
One great antidote to these quite distorted projections is Marie Favereau, The Horde: How Mongols Changed World History. I did a podcast, For the Horde? Russian History and the Mongol Empire and a YouTube video, How Marie Favereau, The Horde: How the Mongols changed the World changed my mind, on this book, but I highly recommend readers check it out.
4. Fragments from the Burning Archive
On the podcast this week I spoke about ideas of Eurasia, including Dugin’s apocalyptic vision of the confrontation between the West and Russia, and Halford Mackinder, The Geographical Pivot of History.
I read in Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia (2015) a fascinating account of the Eurasian ideas of influential thinkers and foreign policy officials in Russia in the years immediately prior to World War One. Baron Roman Rosen (1847-1921) was a leading diplomat who set out, in his memoir, Forty Years of Diplomacy, one strand of Eurasian ideas. In particular he set out the view that it was not in Imperial Russia’s interests to expand into Europe. Rather, “the true interests of Russia lay in the development of her Siberian Empire and her possessions in Central Asia.”
Roman Rosen’s brother was Russia leading academic orientalist, Viktor Rosen. He in turn challenged the dominant Euro-Atlantic tradition that there is a dichotomy between the Western and Eastern, or European and Asian mind. He studied the reality of the intemingling and exchange of peoples, cultures, social practices and languages, and concluded that Eurasia always was and always will be a pluralistic world. As Dominic Lieven notes this thinking “challenged the assumption common at the time that culture was rooted in ethnicity and blood.. and the dominant assumptions of the era about race, nation, and culture.”
Lieven credits these ideas as a lost map to a different path for Russian foreign policy. He briefly traces the history of Eurasianist ideas after the revolution, and how the emigre community took up Eurasianism with, in Lieven’s view, an “anti-Western and bitter tinge”. However, this fragment of the burning archive may still be influential in Russia today.
5. What surprised me most this week.
I was surprised and delighted this week but this staging of a dragon composed of thousands of illuminated drones for the Dragon Boat Festival in Shenzen. If only all drones were used for images of such extraordinary beauty.
https://twitter.com/PDChina/status/1670799847853547520
6. Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress
I am grateful to Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto, the great historian of the world. His books have deeply shaped my view of history. They celebrate imagination, culture and plurality. His writing is witty, compassionate and comic. If you enjoy history, please read his books including Civilizations, Our America, Millenium, One Foot in the River, Pathfinders and Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan.
This week my works-in-progress and published content were:
on the podcast I published Episode 106 How are ideas of Eurasia similar in Russian and Western Geopolitical Strategy?
On the YouTube Channel I published a short and refreshed my channel art. I am experimenting with the tag line, Imagine the World with History. What do you think?
I designed the cover of 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, and have put an image of a Ming Dynasty 16th century final stages of design and publication.
I continued with my Mindful History online course for release on the Learn Worlds platform in July.
I printed out a proof of my next collection of poetry that I will edit slowly over the enxt couple of months.
I wrote an article on the problem of consultants in bureaucracies and how it reflects a broader problem with political order.
On Twitter, I was amazed at the reception to my retweet of some lines from earlier articles on America (over 25,000 views) and the Ukraine war (over 1,800 views). Otherwise I had a quiet week.
Let me know if there is something you would like me to discuss on any of my content. Don’t forget my 100th podcast reader/listener “competition” or participation exercise. Until 30 June 2023 you can respond to two optional questions:
What is your favourite episode of the Burning Archive podcast, and why?
What is a ‘fragment of the Burning Archive’ (a cultural or historical artefact meaningful to you and the times) that you would like featured on the podcast?
I have also put up a poll on favourite episodes with some favoured options on Spotify. It is easy to vote over the next month.
You can submit your ideas in response to the Substack chat thread or can leave a comment right here
Next week, I will be doing the final steps for the publication of 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. On Monday I will be releasing the next instalment of my Sub-Stack series on the World Crisis, Political Disorder (full article is available to paid subscribers). On Tuesday I plan to release a video on Youtube explaining who are the five major powers of the today’s multipolar world. I will appear on the Hrvoje Moric show. On Friday on the podcast I will release the first of a two part episode on the Atlantic.
7. What I am Reading and Closing Verse
I read some more of Priya Satia’s Time’s Monsters that exposes the close links between British history and its imperial project.
I am closing my newsletter with a stanza from a poem I have enjoyed during the week. Daily reading of poetry is a simple way we can all bring a little more beauty, calm and depth to our troubled world.
Since there has been a Eurasian theme to this newsletter, let me close with some stanzas from Aleksander Blok (1880-1921), Scythians (1918). Just in English this time.
Come join us, then! Leave war and war's alarms,
And grasp the hand of peace and amity.
While still there's time, Comrades, lay down your arms!
Let us unite in true fraternity!
But if you spurn us, then we shall not mourn.
We too can reckon perfidy no crime,
And countless generations yet unborn
Shall curse your memory till the end of time.
We shall abandon Europe and her charm.
We shall resort to Scythian craft and guile.
Swift to the woods and forests we shall swarm,
And then look back, and smile our slit-eyed smile.
Away to the Urals, all! Quick, leave the land,
And clear the field for trial by blood and sword,
Where steel machines that have no soul must stand
And face the fury of the Mongol horde.
An alternative translation is here:
Come to us! Leave the horrors of war,
And come to our peaceful embrace!
Before it's too late - sheathe your old sword,
Comrades! We shall be brothers!
But if not - we have nothing to lose,
And we are not above treachery!
For ages and ages you will be cursed
By your sickly, belated offspring!
Throughout the woods and thickets
In front of pretty Europe
We will spread out! We'll turn to you
With our Asian muzzles.
Come everyone, come to the Urals!
We're clearing a battlefield there
Between steel machines breathing integrals
And the wild Tatar Horde!
You can hear the resonance with the world today, can you not?
I hope you enjoy this different ending to the newsletter. Please share my work with your network, and see you next Saturday for more glimpses of the multipolar, many-cultured world.
Mark B. Smith, The Russia Anxiety: and how history can resolve it (2019), p. 228.