As the war in Ukraine heads into its third winter, Western leaders appear to be sinking further every day into a delusional belief in the success of their hydra-headed attempts to first defenestrate Russia before moving on to do the same to China.
Reality appears to play no part at all in this collective fantasy. The strategy, if indeed it can be dignified with that description, is not only failing in its main purpose but is actively facilitating the rise of the multi-polar world that it so fears. The leader of the West, the US, describes itself as the “indispensable” civilisation. American public intellectuals such as Francis Fukayama have even floated the view that the US had so perfected their political, cultural and economic development that it constituted the “end of history”, a view of themselves common to defunct empires stretching back millennia.
That delusion appears to have convinced the West that its temporary military dominance of the world is both permanent and beneficial to humanity as a whole, whilst utterly ignoring the catastrophic consequences of that several hundred years of dominance for the rest of humanity.
Bureaucratic and political elites in the West are doubling down on an obviously failing approach of using Ukraine and the lives of its young men and women as pawns in their desire to invade and balkanise Russia to steal its resources, all as a prelude to invading China in a forlorn attempt to prevent its rise as a hegemonic threat to the US. Even a passing observation of reality demonstrates the sheer lunacy of such an approach.
Basic logic provides a clearer perspective. China has a population more than four times the size of the US. Since its opening up began in the late seventies, China has had a stated goal of bringing its population out of poverty. That involved making that vast population available to outside organisations as an inexpensive workforce and a rapidly growing market. The quid pro quo for that was access to Western technology.
The West, and particularly US corporate elites, could not resist. They rapidly de-industrialised their economy by sending vast numbers of US jobs to China. The failure of that can be easily judged by looking at the inability of both the US and Europe to live up to their promise to Ukraine to supply them with all the weaponry they needed to defeat Russia. They have simply lacked the industrial capacity to do so, due directly to the US corporate preference for quick profits over sustaining the industrial strength necessary to maintain US military and industrial hegemony over the rest of the world.
Given that drive by the CCP to manage its people out of poverty, it is an ineluctable fact that as their 1.4 billion people’s standard of living continues to increase, their economy will rapidly grow to dwarf the US and European economies. That is a dynamic that the West is now powerless to prevent, except by invasion and subjugation. But even that is beyond the West as history since World War II has convincingly demonstrated.
US invasions of other significant countries over that period have been failures. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria have all ended in ignominy or stalemate. Their attempt to use Ukraine as a stalking horse to defeat Russia is now being widely admitted, even by usually subservient US mainstream media, to be a devastating failure, with a vast cost in the lives of young Ukrainians and a further loss of Western credibility and respect.
The next usable pawn in the Western game of hegemony maintenance is Taiwan. For the last 50 years, the world has recognised that Taiwan is an integral part of China. That is why the UN has not accorded it membership status and why it has no diplomatic presence in the overwhelming majority of countries around the world. The US cares as little about the people of Taiwan as they have about the nearly one million Ukrainians they have sacrificed to their dream of maintaining their rule of the world. As Henry Kissinger remarked, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
Les MacDonald
Les MacDonald is the CEO of NSW Meals on Wheels. Prior to this, he held executive positions in both the Commonwealth and NSW governments. He was previously Executive Director Uniting Care Ageing. Les has an extensive leadership history including board positions in public hospitals, health insurance, the maritime industry, public transport, cancer medicine and the Council for the Arts amongst others.
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