It is often difficult to identify a precise starting point for historical processes, which can take shape over decades. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s is an example of this reality, which also applies to the end of the old system of international relations that began in 1945 and the beginning of the new era the world has entered. However, it is possible to identify the key moments that mark the most important steps in these historical processes. It is also possible to characterize the varieties of the processes underway that engender these decisive moments, which can occur suddenly and unexpectedly, despite having been long anticipated.
The recent Tianjin Summit of the member and associate countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, along with the impressive military parade in Beijing, is an example of how a single historic moment can simultaneously clarify and culminate several economic, political-military, and political-emotional processes. The statements by the respective leaders of the more than 20 countries participating in the Summit confirmed the economic capacity and political will of the major countries of the majority world—China, India, and Russia—to advance without necessarily depending on favorable trade and financial exchanges with the collective West.
Two days after the Summit, the unprecedented and massive military parade in Beijing alerted the collective West to the formidable advances in China's defensive capabilities. In the context of the strategic defeat of the collective West in the form of NATO in Ukraine, it was a wake-up call that was impossible to ignore. On the political-emotional level, on the one hand, the Summit and the grand parade in China clarified the sense of pride, determination, firmness, and solidity of the SCO countries. At the same time, they were an expression of their exasperation, rejection, contempt, and defiance of the threats, lies, blackmail, unilateral measures, and aggression of a collective West in crisis and undeniable decline.
The North American and European governments will no longer be able to continue acting in their usual unilateral and arrogant manner without paying an ever-increasing political and economic cost. The Western world's clumsy narcissism and the invariable focus of its greedy ruling elites on their own enrichment have made the decline of their international power and influence inevitable. It is easy to trace the course of this outcome from the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 to the present. The 1990s offered several opportunities for the collective West to correct its erroneous interpretation of that event, so disastrous for the balance of international relations.
Instead of seizing these opportunities, the Western elites replicated and multiplied their errors and criminal calculations year after year. They consistently supported the illegal occupation of Palestine by the genocidal Zionist regime and the sadistic illegal blockade of Cuba. They promoted constant destabilization in Africa. Almost immediately after the end of the Soviet Union, they encouraged the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and used the ensuing war in the region to impose their economic, political-military, and jurisdictional dominance. It would be unnecessary to repeat the endless catalog of interventions and aggressions from Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela to Democratic Korea, Syria, and Iran.
It is enough to note the destructive military aggressions and their aftermath against Serbia in 1999, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Western support for the Nazi regime's war in Ukraine against its own Russian-speaking population after the coup in kyiv in 2014. For more than 30 years, there has been constant interference and attempts at regime change by Western governments around the world. All of these interventions have been deliberate decisions on the part of Western governments to harm governments and political movements that defend national sovereignty and the interests of their people. Since the Western financial collapse in 2008-2009, the ruling elites of the collective West have increasingly applied elements of their disastrous foreign policy to their own populations.
For example, to emerge from the 2008-2009 crisis, Western governments, at the service of their respective ruling elites, implemented an unprecedented transfer of wealth to rescue the financial oligarchy of the collective West from the aftermath of its own delinquency. At the same time, they applied punitive, anti-democratic economic austerity measures to their respective populations to finance the bailout and manage the resulting economic collapse. They did the same during the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 measures between 2020 and 2022. The cycle of crisis and bailout in the economies of Western countries has been progressively worsening for many years.
Now the policy of economic repression has extended to the suppression of legitimate democratic protest and freedom of expression. In Germany and the United Kingdom, peaceful public protest against the Israeli government's genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza is virtually prohibited. In England, a few days ago, more than 400 people were arrested for declaring their support for Palestine at a demonstration in London. Nor is it possible in Europe to publicly criticize the militarism of European governments against Russia without being accused of sympathizing with and collaborating with President Putin. This repression of freedom of expression is another aspect of the process of political and moral decay in Western societies.
Over the past 15 years, this anti-democratic decomposition of the collective West at the national level and its repeated neocolonial aggressions abroad have driven and intensified the corresponding development of autonomous processes in the majority world. Indeed, Russia and China began the process of forming an independent structure of economic protection and political-military defense in 1996 when they formed the so-called Shanghai Group of Five. A major motivation for this initiative was to increase regional security against terrorist and separatist groups operating in Chechnya against Russia and in Xinjiang against China.
These terrorist separatist groups were widely and covertly supported by the US government and its allies, just as they had done in the 1980s against Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. In 2001, the Shanghai Group of Five expanded into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, always prioritizing regional security but with greater cooperation in economic and cultural aspects. Then, between 2008 and 2010, a more ambitious initiative with a global reach was developed in the form of the BRICS group, composed of the governments of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
In the last decade, the SCO has tended to act more decisively than the BRICS group because the SCO countries interact more coherently and also cooperate more both bilaterally and in other forums such as the Eurasian Economic Union. The entry of India and Pakistan into the SCO in 2015 expanded its scope and deepened the coherent comprehensive development of the Eurasian region. Subsequently, the integration of Iran and new partner countries from the Arab world and Southeast Asia into the SCO undoubtedly inspired and facilitated the expansion of the BRICS+ group as well. The example of equal integration by the Eurasian countries in the SCO has served as a successful model for various regional security and cooperation initiatives in Africa, especially the Alliance of Sahel States confederation in West Africa.
Thus, for the majority world, this is a matter of several intertwined processes that advance in a predictable but not necessarily inevitable manner, nor without disagreements. In parallel, it is clear that the decline of the collective West relative to the majority world also results from a series of interconnected processes. For the West, this is a matter of insufficient economic investment, along with the consequent progressive deterioration of its productive capacity; of diplomatic bad faith and counterproductive political-military aggression at the international level; of domestic repression of legitimate protest and anti-democratic policies of control and surveillance; of the historical narcissism of the ruling elites; and of its current cultural stagnation and moral decay.
Correspondingly, the categorical affirmation of a new era of international relations by the major powers of the majority world is based on highly positive processes. Domestically, the countries of the majority world are progressively seeking and promoting greater investment in the human development of their peoples to improve their productive economic capacity and ensure a dynamic of innovation. At the same time, in foreign relations, they insist on genuine multilateralism, respect for the cultures and interests of other countries, and a sincere commitment to dialogue among equals to resolve contradictions.
At this moment, we see the horrific episodes of genocide in Palestine and the aggression against Lebanon, as well as the desperate US aggressions and threats against Iran and now Venezuela, unfolding. In the face of these deeply disturbing events, the majority world continues to develop successful processes of regional integration and exchange with firm determination. It is undeniable that the SCO Summit in Tianjin and the military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Chinese People's Victory over the Japanese Empire marked another key moment in the development of a new era of international relations. A source of hope is the growing international willingness to demand radical reform of the United Nations.
Russia recognized the inherent bad faith of the West with NATO's unilateral military aggression against Serbia in 1999. China began to be more reserved in its policy toward the collective West when NATO abused the UN mandate in 2011 to attack Libya. This year, Indian authorities have realized that it is impossible to trust the American government and its European allies. The Indian case is a particularly important example at this time for two main reasons. First, its authorities have agreed with the Russian company Rosatom to develop an ambitious program with new, less risky and more efficient nuclear energy technologies, such as small modular reactors and nuclear reactors based on thorium instead of uranium.
India has the world's largest thorium reserves and plans to rapidly double its electricity generation with this new nuclear technology to 900 gigawatts by 2030. Second, India has also made the strategic decision to fully integrate as a key partner with Russia in the development of the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic and also the International North-South Transport Corridor. Both routes will dramatically reduce transportation costs and accelerate the development of trade both within the vast Eurasian region and with Africa and Europe.
The same logic that has driven India's closer relationship with the Eurasian region is at work in Latin America. Counterproductive US aggression and its constant neocolonial intervention delay and obstruct progress in regional connectivity and the development of trade and financial integration. While Argentina, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, and Peru compete to see who can be the most subservient to their US masters, most countries in the region have condemned threats of renewed US aggression against Venezuela. It seems that Brazil, like India, has finally discovered that showing deference to the insatiable US ruling elites is pointless.
It remains to be seen to what extent the majority of Latin American and Caribbean countries will be able to defend their sovereignty and national dignity in solidarity with Venezuela, as Cuba and Nicaragua have done in the face of intensifying Yankee aggression in the region. This is another key moment that may well confirm the demise of the old world order of "spheres of influence" and the Monroe Doctrine, and the full emergence of a new, more just and democratic world order for the entire world. As our Co-President, Compañera Rosario, said after the military parade in Managua last week, "We know that we are moving forward... Another world is not only possible.
Another world is already real. Another world is taking shape. And another world is dawning. It is the Golden Dawn of the Peoples!"
rainpizza in geopolitics
New international relations – processes and leaps
https://nuevaya.com.ni/opinion-ya/las-nuevas-relaciones-internacionales-procesos-y-saltos/It is often difficult to identify a precise starting point for historical processes, which can take shape over decades. The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s is an example of this reality, which also applies to the end of the old system of international relations that began in 1945 and the beginning of the new era the world has entered. However, it is possible to identify the key moments that mark the most important steps in these historical processes. It is also possible to characterize the varieties of the processes underway that engender these decisive moments, which can occur suddenly and unexpectedly, despite having been long anticipated.
The recent Tianjin Summit of the member and associate countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, along with the impressive military parade in Beijing, is an example of how a single historic moment can simultaneously clarify and culminate several economic, political-military, and political-emotional processes. The statements by the respective leaders of the more than 20 countries participating in the Summit confirmed the economic capacity and political will of the major countries of the majority world—China, India, and Russia—to advance without necessarily depending on favorable trade and financial exchanges with the collective West.
Two days after the Summit, the unprecedented and massive military parade in Beijing alerted the collective West to the formidable advances in China's defensive capabilities. In the context of the strategic defeat of the collective West in the form of NATO in Ukraine, it was a wake-up call that was impossible to ignore. On the political-emotional level, on the one hand, the Summit and the grand parade in China clarified the sense of pride, determination, firmness, and solidity of the SCO countries. At the same time, they were an expression of their exasperation, rejection, contempt, and defiance of the threats, lies, blackmail, unilateral measures, and aggression of a collective West in crisis and undeniable decline.
The North American and European governments will no longer be able to continue acting in their usual unilateral and arrogant manner without paying an ever-increasing political and economic cost. The Western world's clumsy narcissism and the invariable focus of its greedy ruling elites on their own enrichment have made the decline of their international power and influence inevitable. It is easy to trace the course of this outcome from the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 to the present. The 1990s offered several opportunities for the collective West to correct its erroneous interpretation of that event, so disastrous for the balance of international relations.
Instead of seizing these opportunities, the Western elites replicated and multiplied their errors and criminal calculations year after year. They consistently supported the illegal occupation of Palestine by the genocidal Zionist regime and the sadistic illegal blockade of Cuba. They promoted constant destabilization in Africa. Almost immediately after the end of the Soviet Union, they encouraged the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and used the ensuing war in the region to impose their economic, political-military, and jurisdictional dominance. It would be unnecessary to repeat the endless catalog of interventions and aggressions from Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela to Democratic Korea, Syria, and Iran.
It is enough to note the destructive military aggressions and their aftermath against Serbia in 1999, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Western support for the Nazi regime's war in Ukraine against its own Russian-speaking population after the coup in kyiv in 2014. For more than 30 years, there has been constant interference and attempts at regime change by Western governments around the world. All of these interventions have been deliberate decisions on the part of Western governments to harm governments and political movements that defend national sovereignty and the interests of their people. Since the Western financial collapse in 2008-2009, the ruling elites of the collective West have increasingly applied elements of their disastrous foreign policy to their own populations.
For example, to emerge from the 2008-2009 crisis, Western governments, at the service of their respective ruling elites, implemented an unprecedented transfer of wealth to rescue the financial oligarchy of the collective West from the aftermath of its own delinquency. At the same time, they applied punitive, anti-democratic economic austerity measures to their respective populations to finance the bailout and manage the resulting economic collapse. They did the same during the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 measures between 2020 and 2022. The cycle of crisis and bailout in the economies of Western countries has been progressively worsening for many years.
Now the policy of economic repression has extended to the suppression of legitimate democratic protest and freedom of expression. In Germany and the United Kingdom, peaceful public protest against the Israeli government's genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza is virtually prohibited. In England, a few days ago, more than 400 people were arrested for declaring their support for Palestine at a demonstration in London. Nor is it possible in Europe to publicly criticize the militarism of European governments against Russia without being accused of sympathizing with and collaborating with President Putin. This repression of freedom of expression is another aspect of the process of political and moral decay in Western societies.
Over the past 15 years, this anti-democratic decomposition of the collective West at the national level and its repeated neocolonial aggressions abroad have driven and intensified the corresponding development of autonomous processes in the majority world. Indeed, Russia and China began the process of forming an independent structure of economic protection and political-military defense in 1996 when they formed the so-called Shanghai Group of Five. A major motivation for this initiative was to increase regional security against terrorist and separatist groups operating in Chechnya against Russia and in Xinjiang against China.
These terrorist separatist groups were widely and covertly supported by the US government and its allies, just as they had done in the 1980s against Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. In 2001, the Shanghai Group of Five expanded into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, always prioritizing regional security but with greater cooperation in economic and cultural aspects. Then, between 2008 and 2010, a more ambitious initiative with a global reach was developed in the form of the BRICS group, composed of the governments of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
In the last decade, the SCO has tended to act more decisively than the BRICS group because the SCO countries interact more coherently and also cooperate more both bilaterally and in other forums such as the Eurasian Economic Union. The entry of India and Pakistan into the SCO in 2015 expanded its scope and deepened the coherent comprehensive development of the Eurasian region. Subsequently, the integration of Iran and new partner countries from the Arab world and Southeast Asia into the SCO undoubtedly inspired and facilitated the expansion of the BRICS+ group as well. The example of equal integration by the Eurasian countries in the SCO has served as a successful model for various regional security and cooperation initiatives in Africa, especially the Alliance of Sahel States confederation in West Africa.
Thus, for the majority world, this is a matter of several intertwined processes that advance in a predictable but not necessarily inevitable manner, nor without disagreements. In parallel, it is clear that the decline of the collective West relative to the majority world also results from a series of interconnected processes. For the West, this is a matter of insufficient economic investment, along with the consequent progressive deterioration of its productive capacity; of diplomatic bad faith and counterproductive political-military aggression at the international level; of domestic repression of legitimate protest and anti-democratic policies of control and surveillance; of the historical narcissism of the ruling elites; and of its current cultural stagnation and moral decay.
Correspondingly, the categorical affirmation of a new era of international relations by the major powers of the majority world is based on highly positive processes. Domestically, the countries of the majority world are progressively seeking and promoting greater investment in the human development of their peoples to improve their productive economic capacity and ensure a dynamic of innovation. At the same time, in foreign relations, they insist on genuine multilateralism, respect for the cultures and interests of other countries, and a sincere commitment to dialogue among equals to resolve contradictions.
At this moment, we see the horrific episodes of genocide in Palestine and the aggression against Lebanon, as well as the desperate US aggressions and threats against Iran and now Venezuela, unfolding. In the face of these deeply disturbing events, the majority world continues to develop successful processes of regional integration and exchange with firm determination. It is undeniable that the SCO Summit in Tianjin and the military parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Chinese People's Victory over the Japanese Empire marked another key moment in the development of a new era of international relations. A source of hope is the growing international willingness to demand radical reform of the United Nations.
Russia recognized the inherent bad faith of the West with NATO's unilateral military aggression against Serbia in 1999. China began to be more reserved in its policy toward the collective West when NATO abused the UN mandate in 2011 to attack Libya. This year, Indian authorities have realized that it is impossible to trust the American government and its European allies. The Indian case is a particularly important example at this time for two main reasons. First, its authorities have agreed with the Russian company Rosatom to develop an ambitious program with new, less risky and more efficient nuclear energy technologies, such as small modular reactors and nuclear reactors based on thorium instead of uranium.
India has the world's largest thorium reserves and plans to rapidly double its electricity generation with this new nuclear technology to 900 gigawatts by 2030. Second, India has also made the strategic decision to fully integrate as a key partner with Russia in the development of the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic and also the International North-South Transport Corridor. Both routes will dramatically reduce transportation costs and accelerate the development of trade both within the vast Eurasian region and with Africa and Europe.
The same logic that has driven India's closer relationship with the Eurasian region is at work in Latin America. Counterproductive US aggression and its constant neocolonial intervention delay and obstruct progress in regional connectivity and the development of trade and financial integration. While Argentina, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, and Peru compete to see who can be the most subservient to their US masters, most countries in the region have condemned threats of renewed US aggression against Venezuela. It seems that Brazil, like India, has finally discovered that showing deference to the insatiable US ruling elites is pointless.
It remains to be seen to what extent the majority of Latin American and Caribbean countries will be able to defend their sovereignty and national dignity in solidarity with Venezuela, as Cuba and Nicaragua have done in the face of intensifying Yankee aggression in the region. This is another key moment that may well confirm the demise of the old world order of "spheres of influence" and the Monroe Doctrine, and the full emergence of a new, more just and democratic world order for the entire world. As our Co-President, Compañera Rosario, said after the military parade in Managua last week, "We know that we are moving forward... Another world is not only possible.
Another world is already real. Another world is taking shape. And another world is dawning. It is the Golden Dawn of the Peoples!"