When
globe-trotting journalist and keen geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar
refers to the United States as the “Empire of Chaos,” it may seem like
hyperbole. But upon looking deeper at both Escobar’s coverage and the
United States’ foreign policy itself, it is perhaps the most accurate
title for this political entity and its means of operation, perhaps more
apt than the name “The United States” itself.
In the wake of World War II, the US and its allies set out upon the
reclamation of the West’s lost colonies, many of which took advantage of
Europe’s infighting to either establish independence from their
long-standing colonial masters, or begin the conflicts that would
inevitably lead toward independence.
Perhaps the most well-known of
these conflicts was the Vietnam War. The United States would involve
itself in the dissolution of French Indochina at the cost of some 4
million lives in a conflict that would embroil not only Vietnam, but
much of Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. Covert
coups and brutal insurgencies were underwritten by Washington across the
planet, from the Middle East to South and Central America. And while
this too seems chaotic, the goal always seemed to be the destruction of
independent states, and the creation of viable client states.
These client states included the
Shah’s Iran, Saudi Arabia, much, if not all of Western Europe and even
to varying degrees, some of the enduring autocracies of the Middle East
until for one reason or another they fell out of favor with Washington.
The idea was to create an international order built upon the concept of
globalization.
Globalization was meant to be a
system of vast interdependencies governed by international institutions
created by and for the United States and more specifically, the special
interests that have long since co-opted America’s destiny.
However, the concept of
globalization seems to have neglected any anticipation for rapid
technological advances in both terms of information technology and
manufacturing. There are very few real interdependencies left to stitch
this vision of globalization together with many of them being
artificially maintained at increasing costs. The idea of using sanctions
to ‘starve’ a nation by isolating it from this global order has been
exposed as more or less impotent by nations like Iran and North Korea
who have sustained themselves for decades despite everything besides air
and gravity being denied to them.
Indeed, nations understand the value of self-sufficiency in both
terms of politics and the basic necessities which constitute any state’s
infrastructure. Russia’s recent encounter with Western sanctions has
caused it to look not only eastward, but inward, to secure its interests
and to transcend sanctions wholly dependent on the concept of
“globalization.”
As this “carrot and stick”
method of working the world into Wall Street and Washington’s
international order becomes less effective, some of the uglier and less
elegant tools of the West’s geopolitical trade have taken a more
prominent role on the global stage. It appears that if the West cannot
rule this international order built upon the concepts of globalization,
it will rule an international order built on chaos.
The Empire of Chaos
The unipolar geopolitical
concepts that underpin globalization have eroded greatly. Nations no
longer have to pick between an existence of lonely isolation and
socioeconomic atrophy or subordination within this international order.
Instead, they can pick to associate with the growing community of what
the West calls “rogue states.” So large has this list grown that the US
may soon find itself and Western Europe the last remaining members of
its failed international order.
The real danger for an aspiring
global empire is to find a planet that has suddenly begun to move in
tandem out from under its shadow and moving on without them in relative
peace and prosperity. To prevent this from happening we have seen a
concerted effort focused on disrupting and destroying this emerging
multi-polar world.
In Europe, the refugee crisis is
being used to polarize European society and allow governments to
increase their power domestically and further justify wars abroad. Along
Western Europe’s borders, facing Russia, a relative stable balancing
act maintained by former Soviet territories attempting to benefit from
associating with both East and West has been turned into outright war.
Throughout North Africa and the
Middle East, any nation that even so much as slightly resembles a
sovereign nation state has been undermined and attempts to violently
overthrow them pursued. The goal is no longer to create viable client
states, but rather to Balkanize and leave them in ruins so as to never
contest Western ambitions in the region again. This can be observed
clearly in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen where none of the groups backed
by the US and its allies could ever realistically run a functioning
nation state.
And in Asia, in state after state, those leading political parties
marked by Washington for future client status are being removed from
power and their leaders, long backed by the US, being either exiled or
jailed.Where these political gambits are crumbling, a steady stream of violence perpetrated by terrorist groups not even indigenous to the region has begun to build in strength.
Divide and Conquer
Divide and conquer is a
geopolitical maxim that has served as empire’s bread and butter since
the beginning of recorded human civilization. When the British could not
subdue a targeted territory just beyond the grasp of its empire, it
would divide and destroy them. A ruined nation that can be plundered and
trampled may not be as desirable as a loyal client state run by a
British viceroy, but it is better than a pocket of national sovereignty
serving as an example for others of the merits of resisting “Great
Britain.”
Today, it is clear that the idea
of creating a client state in the midst of a general public
increasingly aware of the features and fixations of modern empire is
becoming ever more tenuous. Such client states are less likely to be
accepted by a local population who, with minimum effort, can put up
significant resistance against even the best funded of foreign proxies.
Globalism required more and more
illusions to convince people they needed a global system controlled by
far-off special interests to do what can now be done through advances in
technology nationally and even locally. Now all that is left is the
sowing of chaos to prevent people from leveraging this technology
nationally and locally, to keep them divided and distracted for as long
as possible, to perpetuate the West’s global hegemony for as long as
possible.
Moving Beyond the Chaos
An empire built on chaos is not
meant to last. Chaos, like the international order of globalization that
preceded it, requires illusions and manipulation to perpetuate itself.
Unfortunately, stirring chaos among a population is a lot easier than
convincing them of the non-existent interdependencies of globalization.
Nations leading the way out of
this chaos include those who have suffered the most because of it. Their
leaders have realized the necessity of closing off the vectors through
which the West feeds this chaos within their borders, which include
socioeconomic disparity, foreign-funded propaganda, foreign-funded
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and of course extremist groups used
to carry out the actual terrorism and agitation required to create the
worst sort of chaos.
Russia and China in particular
have been busy creating alternatives not only for the remnants of the
West’s globalization racket, but alternatives for the unipolar world the
West was trying to create. They are both looking within and across
their borders to create a patchwork of nations ready to move beyond the
chaos and toward a more widespread balance of power.
By in turn, placing sanctions on the West, Russia is forcing itself
to not only produce raw materials for export, but to become a more
capable producer of finished goods. By doing so, Russia has begun a
process that turns America’s sanctions game back onto itself. While many
believe Washington drives American policy, it is unrealistic to
discount Wall Street’s role. By cutting the corporations trading on Wall
Street down to size, one cuts down their unwarranted power they wield
on the global stage.Nations choosing to trade rather than being forced to because of an ungainly system of globalization ensures that any given people have more control over not only what they buy and sell, but how and where their natural resources are used.
With the Empire of Chaos in terminal decline and with a new multi-polar order emerging, the only question left to ask is; will chaos spread and destroy faster than this new multi-polar order can be built? It is certainly a close race pushing both sides into acts of increasingly unimaginable confrontation.
Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.