If you follow Western mainstream media, you’d possibly believe that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was an international pariah reviled by other world leaders following the invasion of Ukraine. But this may not be totally true. After all, last week Putin made a visit to the Middle East, meeting rulers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Note that both these countries are major oil and gas producers and were formally considered as allies of America and the West.
This may be yet another indication that the era of ‘Pax Americana’ – where America was the world’s only superpower and the world’s policeman – is over. That has created a vacuum in global geopolitics and nature abhors a vacuum. So America and the West are being challenged for global domination by a new grouping of autocracies led by China and Russia.
It’s obvious that the West is collapsing due to its own greed, complacency, lassitude and narcissistic self-absorption:
- Our rulers want all the trappings and benefits of power but none of the responsibilities. So they increasingly hand countries’ sovereignty over to international bodies such as the EU, the IMF, the WHO, the UN, the UNHCR etc.
- A whole generation has been indoctrinated to hate everything the West has achieved – personal liberty, freedom of speech, limited state interference in our lives, virtual eradication of poverty, education for all etc.
- Ludicrous culture wars debilitate us as we are constantly being hectored that women can have penises, all our institutions are racist and we are consciously or even subconsciously racist.
- Most of our mainstream media pour out a neverending torrent of anti-Western propaganda and self-flagellation.
- We are told that we should be paying reparations to all our former colonies to which we gave roads, railways, ports, schools, universities, the rule of law and so much more.
- Our ruling elites loathe us and import huge numbers of migrants, far too many to effectively assimilate or integrate, undermining our communities, our customs and our sense of belonging to a recognisable country.
- All our institutions – civil service, education, health, police – are failing as woke nonsense makes them more interested in internal navel-gazing than in doing the jobs they were set up to do. As our NHS claims a lack of money, it spends ever-increasing amounts on diversity managers and now our armed forces prioritise diversity targets, rather than ability, when hiring new recruits.
- An economically-suicidal cult – supposed man-made global warming or climate change or climate emergency or climate crisis or whatever it now calls itself – is causing massive economic devastation, wrecking whole industries in the West and destroying millions of jobs as manufacturing moves to those countries which realise what the world’s greatest climatologist, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calls ‘global boiling’ is nonsense on stilts.
- Most Western countries are essentially bankrupt, living on increasingly worthless printed and borrowed money to support their ever-increasing welfare bills.
As the West withers away, a new grouping of autocracies is rising in the East. Led by China, the core group is China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Their leaders don’t have to worry about four- or five-year electoral cycles, so they can make longer-term plans for achieving their aims – economic and military conquest of the West and cementing their position as the new global superpowers.
Watching this power struggle between a collapsing West and a rising East, many countries are deciding to back the likely winner. And they are choosing the China- and Russia-led autocracies. Many readers will be aware of the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘Belt ad Road’ programme. This is aimed at making China the world’s economic superpower mainly through debt colonisation – lending huge amounts of money to resource-rich, but often massively corrupt countries. Then, when the interest payments can’t be made, Chinese companies take over assets such as mines, ports, agricultural land and so on. But not so many people know about The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). The SCO, formed in 2001 with objectives such as combating terrorism, promoting border security, strengthening political ties and expanding economic cooperation, initially included China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan:.
India and Pakistan officially became members of the SCO in 2017, and Iran is in the process of obtaining full-time membership. Egypt and Qatar are dialogue partners, and Saudi Arabia, a traditional U.S. ally, has taken steps to join. Belarus is set to become a member in 2024 after signing a memorandum of obligations. And many more countries are lining up to join:
Countries around the world are working out who is going to emerge victorious in the struggle between confident, resurgent autocracies led by China and Russia and the self-hating, collapsing West. An increasing number have decided to join the winning side.
Please note how many of the world’s oil- and gas-producing countries are getting into bed with China and Russia. This doesn’t bode well for European economies which are dependent on these countries for their energy.
As Lady Bracknell might have said: “‘To lose one friendly Middle-East oil-producer, Mr. Biden, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two (or even more) looks like carelessness.”
The SCO also plays a crucial role in Chinese military ambitions. In 2007, the SCO signed an agreement outlining the legal rights and responsibilities for military exercises in another member country. The agreement allows Chinese armed forces to engage in air-ground combat operations abroad, covering activities like long-distance mobilisation, counterterrorism missions, stability maintenance operations and conventional warfare.
Today, the SCO encompasses 42% of the global population and 32% of the global GDP.
In 1992 American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a book titled The End of History and the Last Man. This argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy – which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991) – humanity has reached “not just … the passing of a particular period of post-War history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.
Watching the ascendancy of the SCO autocracies and the West’s pointless self-immolation, it seems like Mr. Fukuyama got it wrong. As the Western so-called ‘liberal democracies’ commit economic, military and societal suicide with their ludicrous internecine culture wars, open-borders immigration and disastrously-destructive Net Zero policies, the rise and rise and rise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation suggests that the end point of human government is not going to be the ‘liberal democracy’ predicted by Mr. Fukuyama. It’s actually going to be venal, corrupt, incompetent, kleptocratic, oppressive totalitarianism.
Time to get in a few beers and pizzas and watch the fun.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.
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