It is rare that international relations are turned upside down as they were in 2022. And it is not over. The process that has begun will not stop, even if events come to disturb it and possibly interrupt it for a few years. The domination of the West, that is to say both of the United States and of the former European (mainly the United Kingdom, France and Spain) and Asian (Japan) colonial powers, touches on its end.
No one obeys a leader anymore, including the states that remain vassals of Washington. Everyone is now starting to think for themselves. We are not yet in the multipolar world that Russia and China are trying to bring about, but we see it being built.
It all started with the Russian military operation to enforce Security Council Resolution 2202 and protect the Ukrainian people as a whole from their government. “integral nationalist”. Certainly, this event is not at all what is perceived in the United States, the European Union, Australia and Japan.
Westerners are convinced that Russia invaded Ukraine to change its borders by force. Yet this is neither what President Vladimir Putin announced, nor what the Russian army did, nor how events unfolded.
Let’s leave aside the question of who is right and who is wrong. It all depends on whether we are aware of the civil war that has been tearing Ukraine apart since the deposition of its democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. Westerners forgetting the 20,000 dead in this war cannot imagine that the Russians wanted to stop this massacre.
As they are unaware of the Minsk agreements, of which Germany and France had nevertheless guaranteed alongside Russia, they cannot consider that Russia has put into practice the “responsibility to protect” that the United Nations has proclaimed in 2005.
Yet former German Chancellor Angela Merkel1 and former French President François Hollande2 both publicly asserted that they had signed the Minsk Accords, not to end the civil war, but on the contrary to buy time and arm Ukraine. These two personalities congratulate themselves on having trapped Russia while accusing it of bearing sole responsibility for the current war.
It is not surprising that these two former rulers pride themselves on their duplicity in front of their public opinion, however their words heard in other parts of the world sound different. For the majority of Humanity, Westerners show their true colors: they always try to divide the rest of the world and trap those who want to be independent; they speak of peace, but foment wars.
It is wrong to imagine that the strongest always want to impose their will on others. This Western attitude is only rarely shared by other humans. Cooperation has proved its worth much more than exploitation and the revolutions it engenders. This is the message that the Chinese have tried to spread by evoking relations “win-win”.
It was not for them to speak of fair trade relations, but to refer to the way in which the emperors of China governed: when an emperor issued a decree, he had to ensure that it was followed by the governors of each province, including by those who were not affected by this decision. He showed them that he had not forgotten them by offering them each a present.
In ten months, the rest of the world, that is to say its overwhelming majority, has opened its eyes. If, on October 13, there were 143 States to follow the Western narrative and condemn Russian “aggression”3, they would no longer be in the majority in the United Nations General Assembly to vote in this way today. The vote, on December 30, of a resolution asking the internal tribunal of the UN, the International Court of Justice, to declare the occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel an “occupation” is proof of this. The General Assembly is no longer resigned to the Western disorder of the world.
11 African states, hitherto in France’s orbit, have called on the Russian army or a private Russian military company to ensure their security. They no longer believe in the sincerity of France and the United States. Still others are aware that Western protection against jihadists goes hand in hand with covert Western support for jihadists.
They are publicly concerned about the massive transfer of weapons intended for Ukraine to the jihadists of the Sahel or to Boko Haram4 to the point that the US Department of Defense has appointed a follow-up mission to verify what happens to the weapons destined for Ukraine; just another way to bury the problem and prevent congressional interference in these dark schemes.
In the Middle East, Turkey, a member of NATO, plays a subtle game halfway between its US ally and its Russian partner. Ankara has understood for a long time that it would never integrate the European Union and, more recently, that it was no longer expected to restore its empire over the Arabs. He therefore turns to European states (such as Bulgarians, Hungarians and Kosovars) and Asian states (such as Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) of Turkish culture (and not of Turkish language like the Chinese Uighurs). As a result, Ankara reconciles with Damascus and prepares to leave the West for the East.
The arrival of China in the Gulf, on the occasion of the Riyadh summit, has overturned the table in this region of the world. The Arab states saw that Beijing was reasonable, that it was helping them to make peace with their Persian neighbors. Yet Iran is a thousand-year-old ally of China, but the latter defends it without allowing its excesses to pass. They have measured the difference with Westerners who, on the contrary, have never ceased since 1979 to divide and oppose them.
India and Iran are working hard with Russia to build a transport corridor that will allow them to trade despite the Western economic war (presented in the West as “sanctions”, although these are illegal in law international). Already Mumbai is connected to the South of Russia and soon to Moscow and Saint-Petersburg. This makes Russia and China complementary. Beijing builds roads in Eurasia from East to West, Moscow according to longitudes.
China, for whom this war is a catastrophe that disrupts its plans to build the Silk Roads, has never adhered to the Western narrative. She is a former victim of Russia, which in the 19th century took part in the occupation of Tianjin and Wuhan (Hankou), but she knows that the West will do anything to exploit them both. She remembers her past occupation to be aware that her destiny is linked to that of Russia. She does not understand much about Ukrainian affairs, but knows that her vision of the organization of international relations can only see the light of day if Russia triumphs. It therefore has no desire to fight alongside Russia, but will intervene if the latter is threatened.
This reorientation of the world is very visible in government institutions. The West humiliated Russia in the Council of Europe until Moscow left it. To their surprise, Russia does not stop there. It leaves one by one all the agreements concluded within the Council of Europe, in all sorts of fields, from sport to culture. Westerners suddenly realize that they have deprived themselves of a generous and cultured partner.
It should continue in all the other intergovernmental organizations, starting with the United Nations. It is an old story of Western-Russian relations that goes back to Moscow’s exclusion from the League of Nations in 1939. At the time, the Soviets, worried about a possible Nazi attack on Leningrad (Saint-Petersburg) asked Finland to be able to lease the port of Hanko, however, the negotiations dragging on, they invaded Finland, not to annex it, but to place their navy in Hanko. This precedent is taught today as an example of Russian imperialism as Finnish President Urho Kekkonen himself acknowledged that the attitude of the Soviets was “understandable”.
Back to the United Nations. Excluding Russia could only be possible after having adopted a reform of the Charter by the General Assembly. It was possible in October, but not today. This project is accompanied by a reinterpretation of the history and nature of the UN.
It is assured that membership of the Organization prohibits war. This is nonsense. Joining the UN obliges to “maintain international peace and security”, but men being what they are, authorizes the use of force under certain conditions. Sometimes this authorization even becomes an obligation under the “responsibility to protect”. This is exactly what Russia is doing for the populations of Donbass and Novorussia. Note that Moscow is not blind and has backtracked on the right bank (north part) of the city of Kershon. The Russian general staff withdrew behind a natural border, the Dnieper river, considering it impossible to defend the other part of the city against the Western armies and this while the population of the whole city had requested by referendum on joining the Russian Federation. There has never been a Russian defeat at Kershon, but that does not prevent Westerners from speaking of its “reconquest” by the Zelensky regime.
Above all, the functioning of the UN is obscured by questioning the executive board of the Security Council. When the Organization was founded, it was a question of recognizing the equality between each State within the General Assembly and of giving the great powers of the time the capacity to prevent conflicts within the Security Council. This is not the place of democracy, but of consensus: no decision can be taken there without the agreement of each of its five permanent members. We pretend to be surprised not to be able to condemn Russia, but were we surprised not to have condemned the United States, the United Kingdom and sometimes France for their illegal wars in Kosovo, in Afghanistan , Iraq and Libya? Without the right of veto, the UN will become an absolutely ineffective assembly. Yet this idea is gaining ground in the West.
Moreover, it would be absurd to think that China, the world‘s leading commercial power, would remain in a UN from which Russia, the world‘s leading military power, would have been excluded. Beijing will not play the guarantee for an operation against its ally, as it is convinced that his death will be the prelude to his own. This is why the Russians and the Chinese are preparing other institutions which they will only manifest if the UN is distorted, if it turns into a monochromatic assembly and thus loses its ability to prevent conflicts.
We perceive that the only possible way out is for Westerners to agree to be what they are. But, for the moment, they are not capable of it. They distort reality hoping to maintain their centuries of hegemony. This game is over both because they are tired and especially because the rest of the world has changed.
Thierry Meyssan
source: Voltaire Network
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