PeaceFem

Alastair Crooke (@AWCrooke): There is no world order left to restore. The West knocked legal and moral norms aside. What remains is dollar coercion and the bomb. Eurasia can build a defensive order first: escape from the dollar and from sanctions, not a concert of powers. “Yes, the world order, well, there is no world order now. It’s been completely trashed. I think that underlying this is the fact that, particularly in the West, we’ve lost the sense of moral values. We’ve let them go. We have only fragments of them. And so when you have no moral values—none of the values which came historically to us from what it means to be human, from what our civilizations told us, those narratives, those myths, those stories that gave the moral architecture to life and to society—we live by those narratives. They formed us and shaped us, and now they’re mostly gone, and we live in a rather crassly material, mechanically rationalist world, and those values are no longer present. It’s all about power and coercion. And so we have a world order that values nothing: legal norms, the norms of morality, the civilizational structures that used to attach to the West are now replaced by bombing of civilian areas, by threatening financial ruin on societies, by actually threatening even to annihilate civilizations. How do you have a world order in this construct? It’s very difficult, because the underpinning commonality of values is just not there anymore. The Russians believe they have values held in common. It’s also an Orthodox Christian state. But quite clearly it’s no longer the case. Those values and those underpinnings have gone. And so what the other states—China, Russia, Iran, India and others—can do is really not to have a proper multipolar order. The best they can do, probably, is to have a deterrence, a defensive order: an order whose prime purpose is to escape from the hegemony of the dollar, to escape from the hegemony of sanctions, to escape from all of those elements. So we are left, therefore, in a world of geopolitical confusion and immorality, with no morals, no sort of final hurdles to clear. They’ve all been cleared. All of the legal norms have been just knocked aside. Moral norms knocked aside. Children, women being killed en masse didn’t matter. All of these things have really made the possibility of having some sort of concert of powers come into existence almost impossible to imagine beyond the sort of defensive element. And that, of course, is where kinetic defense comes into play: to have enough missiles, to have enough means of projecting power. You need these to compensate for the fact that there’s no common language, no common basis for a multi-global order. So the old order is definitely gone, and the new one is probably going to take shape, but it won’t come smoothly. It won’t flow into a new world order, because I think it’ll be very disruptive. We’ve got to go through a process of catharsis, constructive destruction first. And so the destruction is taking place in the Middle East, with Iran changing the whole global order in the Middle East, and with Russia and China changing the global order in Eurasia. So yes, we’re getting there, but it’s going to take some time before that happens. What are the conditions to make that happen? Well, really, either there has to be some form of economic implosion in the West that deprives it of its dollar hegemony and its ability to sanction people, to coerce people through the financial system, or else there’s going to be a geopolitical collapse in the West. But that is still going to mean we’re going to have to move through a rather difficult, turbulent geopolitical process which will be very dangerous and very concerning for people, because it may produce all sorts of unexpected and dangerous outcomes.” The concert is finished. Settlement outside the dollar is the first architecture that can exist. The physical economy will settle the rest.