Every new week we witness yet more blood-spilling.
When we hardly recovered from the Mariupol maternity center bombing, Bucha happened.
Bucha hardly left the front pages, here came the Kramatorsk railway station.
Thousands of Russian soldiers are dying. This issue isn’t even of interest lately.
The Ministry for Defense hasn’t given any numbers for weeks.
All that makes the fundamental question even more crucial – what exactly is the Russian government trying to achieve?
So that the country sacrificed the lives of so many people together with its economy and reputation and army
it must have had some global aim.
It may be anything – from communism popularization to the creation of a global caliphate.
But there has to be some idea about future world establishment.
Today we’ll try to understand what ideas do the people who initiated this war have?
How do they see the past, the present, and the future?
How are they going to change the world’ order stopping the supremacy of the US
(without drawing the attention of psych nurses, I must add).
To submerge into the Russian government’s mind and keep your sanity is quite hard.
As there is a crazy mess of imperial revenge-seeking and Lenin quotes.
That’s why we’ll stick to one topic today – the restore of the “two-polar world”
which has been fidgeting in Vladimir Putin’s mind for a couple of decades.
In short, the idea is that before the USSR and the socialist coalition collapse there were two poles,
two powerful economic and cultural centers – the US and the USSR with two concepts of development – socialism and capitalism.
Powerful, economic, and cultural influence of these two countries spread all over the world.
That was the base for “the balance of power”.
And when the USSR collapsed, the Americans usurped everything and set their own rules,
values, standards of behavior, political model, and its “hegemony” everywhere. So, the world became one-polar.
And now, allegedly, in these sanction wars and real wars a new two-polar world is being born
where a powerful coalition of autocracies represented by Russia, China and anyone who is not squeamish,
confronts the American hegemony.
Yes, it even sounds sick but the ideas of “global resistance"
and “the world’s order change” seriously captivated the minds of those who make decisions.
They really believed in their own propaganda.
This idea of “areas of influence division” must be itching really hard.
It’s not a joke. I’ve really heard a lot and read some people on Facebook who are connected with the power
that the Russian elites are enthusiastic about it.
They are about to shatter the American hegemony, refusing their dollars, and change the world’s order.
That’s their mission.
In this case, probably, 10,000 of soldiers’ lives are not that important.
You might sacrifice anything fighting the hegemony.
Therefore, we’re going to talk about all these crazy fantasies today.
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First of all, we need to say there has never been a “two-polar world”.
After two world wars the humankind first realized that it can’t live the way it lived before.
That it’s necessary to find a way to go on without handmade catastrophes
with millions of victims and the Holocaust horrors.
Especially taking into consideration that the third world war could destroy mankind itself.
The most logical decision was to tie the economies together.
The more connections like this the less you wish to start wars.
And the possibilities are not huge as well – you can’t produce thousands of tanks and attack your neighbors
when those neighbors make the armor, guns and caterpillar bands for your tanks.
In the early 50s the European Coal and Steel Community
was formed with the yesterday-enemies France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands as members.
Later a modern European Union was formed on the basis of this community.
Th US was leading the process of economic integration.
A hegemon! How so? There are two reasons for that.
First, the US suffered less from the World War II.
The enemy didn’t enter their territory, their cities and production objects were not bombed.
Second, the Americans had a very practical approach –
it’s much cheaper to prevent another Hitler than to face the consequences afterwards.
For the after-war recovery of Europe the Marshall Plan was created which was named after the current American Secretary of State.
This plan included financial aid to the countries which suffered from World War II –
both to the winners and the losers – to recover and develop their economies.
To get help it was necessary to meet several conditions set by the hegemon: they had to support sole partnerships, create favorable conditions
for investments, lower customs fares, maintain financial stability, and to report how the received money was spent.
That’s how the pole we might call “Western” was created.
It included democratic countries with developed economies which voluntarily entered political
and military coalitions like EU and NATO and which had no regrets about it ever since.
There was no need in the military force to put them together.
For example, under the de Gaulle rule France decided to leave the military organization NATO
and banned the headquarters of the Alliance from its territory.
But nobody had the idea to send tanks to Paris to make the disobedient French more compliant.
France fully returned to NATO just in 2009.
Today we know what exactly ensured the Western democracies’ prosperity –
the liberty of speech and self-expression, competitive elections and independent mass media
which make the politicians depend on people,
rights protection and an independent system of justice providing the supremacy of law.
It’s not without reason that among the richest countries in GDP per head there are just two exceptions
which don’t comply with those criteria – oil barons which have more energy sources than people, and Singapore – a city-state.
There are no other exceptions. Liberal democracies proved its outstanding efficiency in all respects –
from the expectancy of life to the average wages, from level of education to the level of happiness.
Meanwhile, as opposed to the Western democracies the second pole emerged – a socialist pole.
It included countries liberated by the USSR from the Nazis – Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and so on.
No one among them entered the socialist coalition voluntarily.
The attempts to leave the socialist coalition or to make reforms to make the regime milder
led to the danger of the Soviet tanks’ intrusion.
That is what happened in Soviet Berlin in 1953, in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
In 1981 Poland somehow escaped this fate.
When the USSR faced a difficult economic crisis
and couldn’t threaten its satellites with military intervention, this second pole crumbled very fast.
It turned out, communism in the Eastern Europe wasn’t supported by the proletariat, it was supported by the soviet guns.
There were no public discussions or referendums to stay in the Soviet coalition or not in the European countries.
The citizens just demolished their socialist regimes and created new democratic regimes.
And many of them still exist and are successful.
In rare cases the countries joined the socialist coalition voluntarily but usually to get a lot of help.
For example, the President of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser whose views in early years were close to the Arabic variant of fascism,
announced he was moving towards socialism just to get the Soviet help in the war with Israel and to build infrastructure.
Freeloaders like this escaped Moscow’s influence as soon as the support ceased, or a more profitable offer occurred.
So, in the post-war world we can’t see two equally appealing poles.
We can see free countries which voluntarily united in economic, political, and military coalitions based on their values.
And we can see the countries-satellites of the USSR united while Moscow had enough power to get them together.
Is it possible to recreate this construction now in the 21st century?
Can we create the second pole as an alternative to the West and force some significant part of the planet’s population there?
You can if your economy is strong enough to pay for it and an army powerful enough to punish the ones who disobey.
It would be temporary. But history says this second “pole” could exist for almost 50 years.
But there is no way you can do it if your economy has less than 2% in the world’s economy,
and your army proves it’s a failure and falls apart in the very first significant military operation against not the most formidable opponent.
Here the supporters of the “one-pole world” disruption will say that Russia won’t be alone
because for some unknown reason we’ll get support from China, India and some African countries
which allegedly suffer from the American hegemony.
The example of insane confidence of the Russian government in the foreign support can be found
in the words of the “United Russia” (main political party in Russia) member Vyacheslav Nikonov that Russia has a support of 7 billion people in its war with Ukraine,
they are just pushed by the West too hard to admit it.
And the most important thing, it will be more profitable for the Chinese and the Asian Indians to trade with America and Europe than to quarrel with them.
China and India didn’t lose anything from the so-called “hegemony of the West” for the last 35 years.
Their economies have been growing fast because of trade with the West.
The productions in India and China are set for the foreign market where America and EU are the main export partners.
Besides, the Russians didn’t lose anything too during the last 30 years.
Before it collapsed the USSR was going to the dogs – the goods deficit was growing,
as well as alcohol abuse in the country, the production was collapsing, and life expectancy kept reducing.
The existing problems together with a dramatic fall in oil prices were enough for the USSR to collapse.
Russia had to change its half-closed plan economy to an open market economy.
It resulted in a painful transformational crisis, and the life level became even lower.
But soon enough the quality of life significantly increased and kept rising during the “wealthy 2000s”.
Today the average Russian lives better than the average Soviet citizen – he lives longer and in a more spacious apartment,
eats well, he doesn’t have to spend half of his life in queues.
But the Russian government keeps pretending that Russia has lost when it stopped commanding other countries.
In the moral code of people who are ruling Russia its greatness (even when it’s a fake) is much more important than someone’s quality of life.
To assess the true scale of disproportion in this imaginary “two-pole world” you need to follow the fate of the payment system “Mir”.
One might think, a 150-million country has lost its access to the international payment systems, global players have lost their access to millions of clients.
The very same day, or at least in a week, everybody should integrate the local payment system Mir.
It might not stand along with Mastercard and Visa, but at least with the second-rate systems
like JCB, Union Pay or American Express. Moreover, no official sanctions prevent it at the moment.
But instead, we can see how easily the Western services go away from the Russian money, they deliberately refuse it and cut the Russian users from them.
The answer is in the goal setting – America does whatever it wants, bombs Belgrade, seizes Iraq, occupies Afghanistan – we want the same.
Even if we omit very significant details which make any American campaign unlike the Russian intrusion into Ukraine,
even if we penetrate this schizophrenic world of Russian official doctrine where there’s a motto
“Why they can, and we can’t?!” – there will be an answer even for that.
You can’t because you are not even close to America.
You could have been something like that, you could make reforms, escape the trap of average income,
and have 30,000 GDP per head with almost 5 trillion altogether.
You could take the third place in the world after the US and China and be ahead of Japan – then everybody would take you into consideration.
But in this case, you would have to settle a competent democracy and lose power,
and the idea of “two-pole world” would die itself.
Russia would have been on the right side of history and in 2012 Putin would have retired, gone to his country house,
picked mushrooms and discussed the one-polar world and the US’s hegemony with his grandchildren.
But yet the situation is as this – the US has almost a quarter of world’s GDP.
If we cut the US from the world’s economy, it would be like a nuclear war in Europe if we compare the losses.
All the financial, technological and logistic chains will die.
No company in its right mind would prefer any other market to the American market.
The Russian economy is 15 times smaller than the American one.
They are as different as the Russian and the Belarusian economies.
The losses and the mistakes the US can endure without any significant effect
for the average American, would simply crush Russia.
Even if we take the side of this stupid, cynical, and unreal idea where America is an operator of evil that always gets away,
we need to remember that Russia is not America, even close.
Though it could have been half-step behind.
There are a lot of countries which escaped absolute poverty and became the leaders of the first world quite fast
without the advantages Russia has.
Like Ireland, for example.
It used to be one of the poorest countries in Europe in the 80s
Now it has the 4th place in GDP per head in the world.
But Russia didn’t do such a thing.
It didn’t become a candidate for economic and cultural leadership in the world or, at least, in the huge region around it.
Russia didn’t do it for the reason why it’s looking for partners in the field opposite to America.
Because you can’t get milk without a cow, you can’t achieve internal prosperity which is the basis for international influence
if you go across all the recipes leading to prosperity.
To become the second pole, we have to take everything from America which makes it America.
independent courts, competent elections, true federalism, the supremacy of law
It’s a necessary base for growth and at the same time it’s what makes the Western model appealing.
The main paradox is that to counterbalance America and to be the second pole you must have everything America has.
And if you do, you have no reason to be America’s enemy.
Unfortunately, we are in the situation when people with very archaic views and weak connection with reality
rule our country and army instead of entertaining their grandchildren or nurses in a psych facility with their reflections.
And because of this nonsense about a multi-polar world and the soon-to-be dollar failure because of purchasing oil in rubles,
our country has lost all the achievements for many years.
Everything’s in vain – from the win in World War II and the reputation of the country which defeated fascism to economic success and liberal reforms.
There has never been Russophobia in the world. And now there is.
We couldn’t even imagine the war with Ukraine. And now we are at war.
Ukraine fights “the liberators” who came to them with guns because they don’t want to live in Putin’s world
And we shouldn’t too.
But we live in it yet.
Till tomorrow.