Seven Glimpses of the Multipolar World
Peace is a desire. War is a fact. 25 February 2023.
In the Burning Archive weekly newsletter I share seven glimpses for seven days into the history, culture and diplomacy of the emerging multipolar world. Thanks for checking it out. I follow the same format each week to share my work to make sense of our time of troubles.
This week marked the anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine-NATO War. Thoughts of war and peace, conflict and diplomacy, reality and illusions have dominated the week.
Gratitude
I have two gratitudes to share this week.
First, I am grateful to you, dear reader, especially to those of you who have joined over the last week. I look forward to the dialogues we will have here on Substack over time.
Second, I am grateful to John Menadue and the editorial team at Pearls and Irritations: John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal, who published my article, ‘The West’s Grand Illusions in Ukraine’. It has given me strength, courage and confidence to continue sharing my glimpses of the chaotic world with more readers.
What I am reading
I have been reading many of the anniversary articles about the conflict in Ukraine this week. One article by the popular historian Dominic Sandbrook, from the Rest is History, podcast so riled me that I took the twitter to question the moral fable he told about the conflict. Sandbrook said the war was ‘not complicated’. In doing so, he abandoned the duty of history, and assumed the role of propagandist. My response was to show a few complications.
More broadly, I have been trying to put together a bit of a reading plan on the history of India. I have been amazed how few books on the history of India are on the shelves of Australian bookshops, especially histories not written by British or American historians, but in fact by Indians. I checked out various recommendations from book lists and YouTube, and in the end consulted the course guide reading lists of two leading Indian university history departments.
Let me know with a comment if you have recommendations of the best books to read on the history of India, which are not written by Brits.
Governing the unruly multipolar world
I attended a webinar this week on resolving the Ukraine conflict that was organised by Prof Joseph Camilleri. He has initiated a project called SHAPE, Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (no shortage of ambition there).
To be honest, I was a bit disappointed. The workshop speakers offered no real pathways to improve global security, or even European security, that faced the reality of NATO’s Eastward expansion since 1991. The best speakers were Professor Kishore Mahbubani and Dr Chandra Muzaffar. Dr Muzaffar faced the root causes of the conflict in American refusal to face the reality of the multipolar world.
Kishore Mahbubani pointed to American defiance of the reality of the rise of China. He tended, I think, to downplay the importance of the conflict in Ukraine as the culmination of the long American war against Russia. It is a ‘sideshow’, he said, compared to the conflict between China and America. I suspect rather, it is the Western front of that conflict. Leading Chinese Politburo member, Wang Yi, reinforced that view with his words in Munich and Moscow this week. The release of the Chinese papers on American hegemony and rethinking global security in the last day have further reinforced that assessment.
Kishore Mahbubani has been highly critical of the Western leaders who show no capability for strategic thought or diplomacy. Compromise is better than war, he insisted and lamented. Why has Europe set its hearts and minds against compromise? I thought, grand illusions, maybe?
He was also realistically pessimistic about the prognosis for economic conflict between China and the USA. Nothing can stop the USA elites wanting to try to hold China down. Mahbubani’s solution is to seek to persuade American leaders that it is in their long-term interest to let China be China. Mahbubani flagged he will publish a piece in Foreign Affairs next week on the ASEAN or South-East Asian ‘third way’ of diplomacy in a multipolar world. It will be one to check out from a skilful diplomat and geopolitical thinker .
The next ten years will be tough, because this economic war will happen, Mahbubani said. I was left to wonder: can the world persuade American elites to step down from global dominance, without provoking a humiliating retreat, which may cause a catastropic last stand of the American empire? Is persuasion, diplomacy and self-interest enough? Or, in the end, does America need to be defeated militarily and be forced to retrench its global military reach? What lasting result will come from a ceasefire agreement with a state that has been at war for nearly every year of its existence, and has increased the pace of its war-making since the end of the Cold War?
Using history to live mindfully in the present.
Peace is a desire. War is a fact.
So said Oswald Spengler. I was thinking about this note as I listened to some speakers and participants at the Webinar shake their heads about the war and then urge instant peace.
History is a guide to live mindfully through times of war. It helps prevent the derangement of our minds with scrolls of doom and clouds of dreams. It helps us bring compassionate awareness to the facts of war, and to let go of the mind’s ceaseless generation of desires, whether we call them peace, glory, nation, justice, freedom, democracy, or revenge.
Spengler’s full text is:
“The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.”
All ordinary citizens of the world desire peace, even if their leaders conspire for war. All ordinary citizens of the world need to see war as it is, even if the media dream machines narrate stories of good and evil.
Fragments from the Burning Archive
I picked up a 1973 collection of poetry by Tu Fu (712-770 CE), now generally rendered as Du Fu. Du Fu was a poet, bureaucrat and mindful observer of war. This greater maker was more accomplished in each art than me, but his spirit still guides me.
His poem ‘The Ballad of the Army Wagons’ ends with these three stanzas.
‘Although you Sir, ask such kind questions,
Dare the conscripts tell their wretchedness?
How, for instance, only last winter
The Highland troops were still in the line
When their Prefect sent urgent demands,
Demands for tax, I ask you, from where?So, now we know, no good having sons,
Always better to have a daughter:
For daughters will be wed to our good neighbours
When sons are lying dead on Steppes unburied!‘But you have not seen
On the Black Lake’s shore
The white bones there of old no one has gathered,
Where new ghosts cry aloud, old ghosts are bitter,
Rain drenching from dark clouds their ghostly chatter.
This poem is among Du Fu’s most celebrated because it criticises the press-ganging of conscripts into China’s civil strife. As more reports emerge of Ukrainians being press-ganged by their government, and sent to die at the front of the war, Du Fu’s great poem is a worthy fragment from the Burning Archive. It reminds us, the past is not dead; the past is not even past. It reminds us to listen to the experience of war and to observe the cruelty of power.
What surprised me most this week.
On Friday I stumbled on this tweet from the official account of NATO, that self-declared defensive military alliance.
It is based on a story of a Ukrainian media journalist who is ‘serving on the frontlines’. His service appears to be to spin the mesmerising stories of history as Star Wars and Harry Potter, as an adolescent epic struggle of good and evil.
I was astonished that NATO would promote such blatant, foolish myth-making. I was even more surprised that I was surprised. Sadly, these are the stories that those four riders of the apocalypse (Jo Biden, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken, Victoria Nuland) tell themselves about history to conceal from their citizens, even from themselves, their war-making against the world.
Works-in-progress and published content
This week my works in progress and published content were:
on the Burning Archive audio podcast I spoke about the work I am editing and will publish mid-year, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. It is an unusual glimpse into the real life of a thinking bureaucrat.
On the YouTube Channel I published videos:
in the 7 insights from 7 historians on how to avoid a China-US war. This video focussed on Odd Arne Westad’s insight that the USA fought China in the Cold War too.
on Dr S. Jaishankar, The India Way and how India is setting a new course in its foreign policy
on Australia’s foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific in which I react to a mildly controversial speech made by Foreign Minister, Senator Penny Wong
on my excitement - in a short - about getting ‘The West’s Grand Illusions in Ukraine’ published
I began filming course materials for my online course on how to stay calm and carry on with good decisions using a small dose of history. I will have more news in the newsletter on this course in a month or so.
I edited some more of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, and drafted some of my book on life after Western democracy. I might share some excerpts in a subscriber-only newsletter soon.
I began compiling transcripts of my podcasts over the last twelve months on the Russia-Ukraine-NATO War into a book for publication.
And I did a bit of tweeting, especially about my article on Grand Illusions.
Let me know in a comment if you would be interested in buying an e-book of my interpretations of the Russia-Ukraine-NATO War over the last twelve months.
Or if there are issues or topics you would like me to talk about on the podcast or the YouTube channel.
Next week the podcast will focus on how the conflict in Ukraine has shaped my next book, and YouTube will have another in the series on ‘7 insights from 7 historians on how to avoid a China-US war’ (Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally).
I will also do a special combined Youtube/podcast episode reviewing the war in Ukraine one year on, probably focussing on the state of the diplomatic chessboard today compared to November 2021.
My focus now is writing, speaking and creating content about stories of the multipolar world - its history, its culture, its geopolitics. And how we can all stay calm and sane amidst the turmoil.
I am now doing this for my living, and am entirely reader-supported. Help me build an audience for these insights.
First of all, please subscribe to this newsletter on SubStack. And share with your network, please.
Please also subscribe to my YouTube Channel. It passed 600 subscribers this week, and I am improving my technical skills and interacting with commenters on the videos all the time
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And you can buy my books.
my book of essays From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments 2015-2021.
my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind.
I trust you have enjoyed this edition of my weekly newsletter providing seven glimpses into my mind and the multipolar world.
Please share with a friend.
I will be back in your and your friend’s inbox next week.
And do remember, “What thou lovest well will not be reft from thee” (Ezra Pound, Cantos)
You asked for referrals to boos about India written by Indians. 1. EARLY INDIANS by Tony Joseph. The Story of our Ancestors and Where we Came From. 2. THE EMERGENCY by Coomi Kapoor. A Searing Inditement of the Darkest period of Indian Democracy. 3. AZADI BY ARUNDATHI ROY. Divisions in contemporary India and the repression of Indian Muslims.
Good luck for thoughtful writing.
Tom Cowan
I'm not so sure your reference to the USSR's collapse is that authoritative. Looking at the long arc of history the union of Russian manpower & natural resources, on the one hand, and German capital & technology, on the other, has terrified the banking elites of Europe (& more recently the US) for centuries. Indeed, it was Elizabeth I of England who sent her trade emissaries to Russia seeking an *exclusive trade agreement to cut Russia off from trading with its European partners. You can read the history of Russophobia in Prof. Glenn Diesen's <i>Russophobia<i/> (he's also on Twitter).
So, as the UK-US did in the Mideast with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and with Yugoslavia in the 1990's, the goal of the 'collective West' has been to balkanize Russia. In WWII, the UK-US used Nazi Germany as a battering ram against the former USSR. (27million ethnic Russians/Russian-speaking people were killed in WWII, by the way). Most recently we've witnessed the UK-US use Ukraine as a battering ram against Russia.
If you want to understand the 3 power centers in the world they are:
1. the City of London - a 1 sq. mile of bankers' Head Offices & an entirely separate jurisdiction to the rest of the UK. (Its Siamese twin, the US Federal Reserve - which is neither "federal" nor a "reserve" - is a consortium of private investment banks);
2. The Vatican, an entirely separate jurisdiction to the rest of the Italy, which sees itself as, and I quote, "God's Church", the inference being that any other denomination/organized religion is *not of the Divine. This explains why The Vatican tacitly supports political-military forces which attack Eastern European, i.e. Orthodox Catholic, nations (e.g. Serbia 1999 & more recently Russia) & also remains quiet about UK-US attacks on the Mideast/Islamic nations (e.g. Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, etc);
3. The Pentagon which remains outside US Congressional budgetary supervision, although the Congress provides its budget.
With all that being said, the breakup of the Warsaw Pact and collapse of the USSR was orchestrated by the US/NATO in these ways (not in any order of importance):
- a Polish Pope, Pope John Paul I, was *selected (its been well-known for decades that The Vatican has been infiltrated) to be used as lightning rod for Roman Catholics in the Warsaw bloc, esp. majority-Roman Catholic Poland;
- knowing that the USSR had stockpiled gold, the US-UK flooded the gold market, leaving the USSR holding a vastly diminished asset;
- since the 1950's, the CIA had persuaded the US Congress to change the designation of Ukrainian nazis (who had relocated to the US & Canada after WWII) from terrorists, to return them to Ukraine (which was then a Soviet Socialist Republic) to help destabilize Ukraine with the USSR;
- the propaganda of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), aka Starwars to encourage the USSR to waste billions of rubles on useless research;
- after the USSR had invested heavily in infrastructure & education in Afghanistan (aka the Empire's graveyard) for decades, under President Carter & National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the CIA funded, armed & trained the Mujahedin (which later morphed into the Taliban) 6 months *before the 1979 USSR invasion, to draw the USSR into A'stan and ultimately weaken the USSR economically & militarily, in what became known as "the Soviet's Vietnam";
- lastly, Yeltsin was always a US/CIA plant, aka asset. Via the use of bribery/blackmail, comprador elites can be pressed into service for the UK-US/NATO in many nations around the world.
These days the term we would use to describe all of the above is Hybrid War. And since the 1991 collapse of the USSR what the US/NATO has been striving for is termed Full Spectrum Dominance.