Glimpses of the Multipolar World, 10 June 2023
USA vs India, Kanwal Sibal, casualty of war, Indo-Pacific, BRICS vs. G7, Kaschuta and Pang, Pushkin
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. Does the USA want to topple Modi?
Governing the Multipolar World. Kanwal Sibal, the grandmaster’s view from India
Using History Mindfully. The second casualty of war is…
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Indo-Pacific histories and shadows.
What surprised me most. BRICS surpass G7.
Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress. Alex Kaschuta, John Pang, and next book is near
Reading and Closing Verse. Ploikhy, bad. Pushkin, marvellous.
Do check out my latest published article, Australia, Little Country Lost. My illustration this week illustrates the strange geography of the “Indo-Pacific” that I comment on in the article.
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So, on with the newsletter….
1. The Big Story
The so far unsuccessful Ukrainian counter-offensive, including most likely their sabotage of the Nova Kharkovka dam is clearly a big story. I will not comment on it directly because I have made a rule with myself not to comment extensively on the NATO-Russia-Ukraine War until after 30 June. There is so much information, misinformation and misinterpretation on this war that it can be a little overwhelming. And I am working my podcasts and thoughts on war, peace and ruin in Ukraine into a book, which I plan to publish in the second half of the year, depending on how events unfold. Hopefully, noone will be provoked into World War Three or Armageddon, and I will still be able to share these thoughts with you.
So my big story this week is a less visible but major story, and that is tension between India and the United States of America. How can that be? They are partners in the Quad, yes? They are pseudo-allies in an Indo-Pacific strategy, yes? But there is significant tension between India and USA revealed during the week. Indian Opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, made a speech highly critical of PM Modi and India’s political system at Stanford University, and the Indian External Affairs Minister, Dr S. Jaishankar, reprimanded him for that. This event fits a pattern of concern, widely reported in Indian media, of apparent ‘regime change’ efforts by USA in India. Remember the BBC documentary that ‘revealed’ a 20 year-old British foreign office report? The Hindenburg scandal? George Soros saying India was a democracy, but Modi was not a democrat? And Dr S. Jaishankar’s reply that Mr Soros was old, rich, opinionated and dangerous?
The world’s largest democracy will bring the world’s largest voting public to the polls in 2024. The future and power of Narendra Modi’s government will have major consequences for American influence in the world. America grew used to India being a divided and unassertive power, under many coalition governments. With Modi and BJP majority control, India has pursued a strong foreign policy in the national interest and for the global good. But America wanted a weak, dependent and Western-lite India. This is why there are so many misinfomation campaigns about India in the media right now, as Salvatore Babones writes. Many commentators, including former Foreign Secretary, Dr Kanwal Sibal, and influential journalist, Arnwab Goswami, say directly that the USA is attempting to weaken Modi’s majority to strengthen US geoploitical sway. They may not resurrect the Congress Party but they may cripple Modi and the BJP.
Perhaps, Australian politicians and media could be a true friend to India, and call out American interference in Indian democracy. Perhaps, they could do it with more validity, but as much force, as when they pursued the Russian election interference stories since 2016 into Alice’s rabbit hole. If they did so, Australia could, as I wrote in my article, Australia, Little Country Lost, stand with India in the Quad, and stop kneeling before the USA.
2. Governing the unruly multipolar world
The Indian intellectual on YouTube, Abhijit Chavda, has published a long interview with the distinguished Indian diplomat, Dr Kanwal Sibal - “Ex-Foreign Secretary Opens up on Russia-Ukraine War & India's Future 🇮🇳 | Dr. Kanwal Sibal on Abhijit Chavda Podcast”. I highly recommend this video to get a non-Western perspective on governing the multipolar world.
One other interesting piece of news on the relations between great powers is an interview with Arnaud Montebourg, former French Minister of Economy. He detailed the methods by which Americans “wage economic warfare against us." You can read a translation of his interview here. Aren’t France and America allies?
And thirdly, General Mark Milley, who recently retired as Chief of the US military, has said there are not two superowers in the world. There are three. USA, China, and yes, that gas station pretending to be a country, that refused to be looted by Wall Street, Russia. Milley said it is kind of hard for America to have one, let alone two, peer opponents. Poor dear. Perhaps he should have been more vocal to dissuade the American political elites from creating a toxic international relations environment through designs to break-up, “decolonise” (recolonise?) and weaken the third super-power of the world. It is time for America to come to terms with the rest of the world in a new Concert of the Globe.
I am going to be addressing these issues more in my paid subscribers only post on Monday, Polycrisis - Empires and Great States. Upgrade your subscription if you would like to read and comment on this work in progress.
3. Using history to live mindfully in the present.
The first casualty of war is truth. But what is the second casualty?
Well, during the week, as I watched some hasty comments by acclaimed historians on the Ukraine conflict, I realised that the second casualty of war is history. Or at least, mindful, honest history.
These comments followed the collapse of the wall of the Nova Kharkhova Dam in Ukraine. Within hours of the news, and on the flimsiest of evidence, two acclaimed historians barged in like information ministry spokespersons for NATO and Ukraine.
Peter Frankopan tweeted “if these are even broadly accurate, Russia has just cut off long-term Crimea's future. Looks like a key turning point to me.”
https://twitter.com/peterfrankopan/status/1665968578690990081
Serhii Plokhy tweeted “An appalling act of ecocide by the Russian regime. The Kakhovka dam and the Kakhovka "Sea" are gone. Zaporizhia nuclear power plant loses access to water.”
https://twitter.com/SPlokhy/status/1665929330072092673
Events soon revealed these statements as aligned with Ukraine war propaganda. They had even a little sniff of prepared lines. I replied to Peter Frankopan with some clear facts, and he did not reply. I did not bother with Plokhy. Frankopan writes some good history, but there are glimpses from time to time that he may be, in the tradition of British historians, too close to the British intelligence establishment to speak truth to power. Still, I was disappointed. I would like him to do better. Plokhy’s histories are in a long tradition of fervid emigre nationalism. No better can be expected of him.
One of the lessons for me about this war is that the Anglo-American historical establishment cannot be trusted to present reliable histories of Russia or their current and former empires. Historians too can be deranged and poisoned by access to power, information and exclusiveness. Even an outcast historian-bureaucrat like myself can twist the stories of the past, unless we approach history mindfully, with detachment, compassion and integrity. Our histories of the ‘modern world’, after all, are mental models that are breaking in this polycrisis today.
I also began reading this week Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (2020). She shows the long complicity of historians with empire. It is a brilliant book, that I will come back to on the podcast later in the year.
War has long provoked reflection on history. Tolstoy included a long essay on history in War and Peace. Over the next few months, I will write some essays that reflect on war and historians’ tales of war. They will be included in my collection War, Peace and Ruin in Ukraine, together with transcripts of my podcasts on the NATO-Russia-Ukraine War.
4. Fragments from the Burning Archive
On the podcast this week I spoke about the Indo-Pacific, and noted how Dr S Jaishankar, Indian External Affairs Miniser, had acknowledged an obscure (to me) German geostrategist Kark Haushofer as the originator of the strategic concept of the Indo-Pacific.
There is a copy of a 1938 translation of his Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean (1924) in the rare books collection of the State Library of Victoria. But there are no translated copies online that I can find today. The best I have been able to do is to find this German text on Japan and the Japanese from 1938.
However, I did read an excellent article from Modern Intellectual History on Haushofer’s concept of the Indo-Pacific. Hansong Li, The “Indo-Pacific”: Intellectual Origins and International Visions in Global Contexts can be read here. Hansong Li wrote:
Of late, the term has gained currency amongst observers and practitioners of foreign policy. Shinzo Abe referred to the integration of the Indian and Pacific Seas in his 2007 “Confluence of the Two Seas” address to the Parliament of India, and his 2016 “Toward a Free and Open Indo-Pacific” speech in Kenya. Two years later, the United States responded by renaming its “Pacific Command” the “Indo-Pacific Command.” These rhetorical moves, however, have not yet provoked any serious academic discussion of the genesis, structure, and evolution of the “Indo-Pacific” concept. In academic circles, political scientists rely on secondary scholarship to trace the origin of the “Indo-Pacific” to the Weimar Republic, but they fall short of explaining what the “Indo-Pacific” really was in its early formulations.As a result, the past of the “Indo-Pacific” remains a dull fact without substance. Historians, on the other hand, draw on richer sources to explore Haushofer's intellectual legacy in German and Japanese geopolitical thought.
My podcast recommended some books from the archive to read to gain a deeper appreciation of all the cultures, histories and civilisations of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. These texts were:
Jaishankar, The Indian Way (2020)
David Abalufia, The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (2019)
K.N. Chauduri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (1985), and
Sujit Sivasundaram, Waves across the south : a new history of revolution and empire (2021).
Coincidentally, I found out while I was recording the podcast on Thursday that June 8 was World Oceans Day. So my podcast this week is a tribute to the role of oceans in world history and culture.
5. What surprised me most this week.
A little fact came to my attention. BRICS have surpassed the G7 in global economic output. The rich countries club is fast becoming a superannuated seniors club. The BRICS are now shooting away from the G7. The tides of history are surging. A visualisation of the change is here.
https://twitter.com/Glenn_Diesen/status/1664582474708418560
6. Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress
A big thank you to Alex Kaschuta for commenting on my comment on her wonderful essay on Everyone is Checking Out. You can read it here. Alex’s podcast and essays are among the most interesting and thoughtful on how we are to live now, especially from the perspective of culture, family and social relationships.
I am grateful to Aran Martin and John Menadue for publishing my article on Indo-Pacific, and to John Pang for making this kind remark about the article, and reminding me of Tony Milner from the ANU History Department, when I was doing my PhD.
This week my works-in-progress and published content were:
on the podcast I published Episode 104 Lost in the Indo-Pacific - Strategy, Oceans, History or Illusion?
On the YouTube Channel I did the livestream on Polycrisis.
I have made nine-tenths of the final editing changes to 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. Next week is the finicky design work, and last insertions.
On Twitter, I did a.
Let me know if there is something you would like me to focus on on the podcast and the YouTube Channel - whether topics or types of videos. I am experimenting with the livestreams until the end of June, when I finish getting 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat done. I will do a mini channel review myself, and make some pivots on the channel after I complete that intensive work and do some reflection. I would like to hear your feedback on on what you, good subscribers, would live me to present.
Next week, On Tuesday on Youtube, I will do my next Livestream (13 June, 2.00 pm AEST) on the Indo-Pacific, building on my latest podcast. On Friday on the podcast I will talk about ideas of Eurasia in world history and geopolitics, and whether this mental model also is breaking in the polycrisis.
I am making good progress with getting my online courses ready for launch, but I think this will be in July now. My big aim for June is to publish 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat.
7. What I am reading and Closing Verse
I finished reading Serhii Plokhi The Russo-Ukrainian War (2023). My summary verdict is that Plokhy is a nationalist propagandist, and his book is of limited value. He is a distingushed emigre Ukrainian-American historian. Sorry to disappoint you, if you thought it might be better. I thought he might be better myself. But his book provides highly loaded interpretations and an illusory nationalist narrative of liberation. I will, however, say no more until July, when I will write an article or a podcast on the topic.
I celebrated Russian Language Day and the birthday of Pushkin by reading Pushkin. I am learning the Russian language at the moment, and aI am so delighted we have reached the point where we can learn at least one of his poems.
I have decided to retire Ezra Pound from the newsletter and podcast for now, and change up the end of the newsletter.
I will include 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 world. Please enjoy the opening stanza of Pushkin’s Winter Morning in both Russian and one (of many) translations.
Frost and the sun; a splendid morning!
My dear friend, you still lie dormant, —
It's time, my beauty, rise in cheer:
Ope your eyelids lulled by night
To the splendor of the northern lights
And like the northern star appear!
Мороз и солнце; день чудесный!
Еще ты дремлешь, друг прелестный —
Пора, красавица, проснись:
Открой сомкнуты негой взоры
Навстречу северной Авроры,
Звездою севера явись!
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.