It wasn’t long ago that every forward-thinking politician understood that the rules-based-liberal-order was the only game in town.
Devotees of this new order were celebrating the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ultimate dominance of the world by the winners of the Great Game. One of the leading grand strategists of this Great Game was former National Security Advisor and Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski who wrote in his 1997 Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives:
“How the United States both manipulates and accommodates the principal geostrategic players on the Eurasian chessboard and how it manages Eurasia’s key geopolitical pivots will be critical to the longevity and stability of America’s global primacy.”
Anyone resisting this new normal were considered holdouts of an obsolete past age and ignorant of the inevitable Darwinian forces of natural selection propelling humanity towards a long-awaited ‘end of history’ as outlined by neo-con academic Francis Fukuyama. However those who devoted themselves to this cause were promised great rewards.
Few were as quick to jump onto this ‘End of History’ bandwagon as Delaware Senator Joe Biden.
Biden’s Adoration of the New World Order
Biden made his membership to the End of History club known in his 1992 Wallstreet Journal article ‘How I Learned to Love the New World Order’ which saw the recently-failed presidential candidate outline his devotion to a slightly more liberal version of Dick Cheney’s vision of a US globocop managing the world unilaterally.
Biden was extremely ahead of the Unipolar curve when, in 1995, he drafted an Omnibus anti-terrorist bill in response to the first attack on the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombing a year later. Biden’s Counterterrorism Act was brazen in its call to violate constitutional protections by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, sanctioning wire taps of citizens, permitted US military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and eroded constitutional due process and protections.
Despite the fact that Biden’s 1995 bill was defeated in Congress, he was quick to brag in 2002 that John Ashcroft’s Patriot Act was modelled on his own saying “I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill.”
On NATO expansion, Biden was equally foresighted in staking his claim as leading representative of the End of History voting in favor of absorbing Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary into NATO and telling his fellow Congressmen in 1998: “We have an interest not only in the lands west of the Oder River, but in the fate of the 200 million people who live in the nations between the Baltic and Black Seas.” Too few realized what Biden and team End of History obviously understood in those early days of the New World Order: NATO was meant to evolve into a global military force with a jurisdiction stretching far beyond the limits of the “North Atlantic”.
Outlining his clear understanding that no power block would ever again emerge to threaten US-led hegemony, Biden taunted Russian leaders during a 1997 press conference. It was here that Biden described his meeting with concerned Russians who were angry that he championed NATO expansion when just a few years earlier, the Soviet Union disbanded based on the promise that NATO would not expand “one inch westward”. Biden told the reporters at the press conference that the Russians “don’t want this NATO expansion, they know its not in their interests”, summarizing the remarks of Russian Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov who told him “if you do that we may have to look to China. And I couldn’t help… saying [to former Communist Party chair and MP Gennady Zyuganov] ‘lots of luck in your senior year’… and if that doesn’t work try Iran.”
This one didn’t age well considering Iran is now becoming a full member of the BRICS and was made a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on July 4, 2023.
This was the same Joe Biden who sat as ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while championing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and by 1998 played his role tearing down a weapons inspector named Scott Ritter for the offense of stating that Saddam Hussein had honored his promise to eliminate all WMDs in 1991. Biden berated Ritter saying:
“You and I both know, and all of us here really know, and it’s a thing we have to face, that the only way, the only way we’re going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we’re going to end up having to start it alone — start it alone — and it’s going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking this son of a — taking Saddam down”.
This also did not age well considering that within the months following the second Iraq war, evidence of Saddam Hussein’s honesty in having eliminated all weapons of mass destruction came to the surface prompting Biden to claim that he always opposed the war in Iraq… a lie he has held onto to this very day.
The world that Joe Biden pledged his allegiance to in 1992 is a world that could never be.
What Unipolarists Can’t Understand About Reality
The premise that history could come to an end is based entirely on the presumption that human nature is programmable like any computer and defined purely by evolutionary forces that only reward those human animals whose strength can subdue the weak in a world of diminishing returns.
Once sufficient power is consolidated into the hands of a few alphas, it is believed by unipolarists that no resistance to the inevitable world empire were possible. All that awaits humanity is to be assimilated and the willingness to become a creature of this system will determine whether your life will be categorized among the few elite ‘haves’ at the top of the pyramid, or the multitude of slavish ‘have-nots’ at the bottom.
Some believed that the evils done in the name of capitalism after WW2 were simply necessary means towards just ends.
The CIA’s involvement in assassinations both foreign and domestic, regime change operations, coups, and unilateral wars from Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and beyond were terrible, but some had argued that these evils needed to happen in order to prevent an even greater evil (communism) from winning the Cold War. Now that Communism was defeated, a just world of cooperation, democracy and capitalism were now possible.
However, did this happen?
Not at all.
Since 1991, US regime change operations expanded to include both hard strikes onto Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and also soft regime change operations in the form of color revolutions across the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. In total, the USA has launched a total of 251 military interventions since the Cold War ended (and 469 since 1776) according to official congressional statistics.
The weaponization of finance in the form of sanctions, economic speculation, and usurious loans tied to punitive conditionalities didn’t end after the USA won the Cold War, but only increased with the World Bank, IMF and newly formed World Trade Organization continuing to serve as enforcement mechanisms for neo-colonialism rather than actual instruments for national development as they were designed to be during the last days of WWII.
No large-scale infrastructure was built in poor recipient nations and only obsessive demands for “fiscal austerity” via budget cuts, privatization, structural-adjustment and cash-cropping were enforced across the developing sector.
Beyond military interventions, and economic warfare, another facet of liberal imperialism took the form of ‘soft imperialism’ under the form of color revolutions. Organizations that interfaced with US intelligence agencies such as George Soros’ “Open Society Foundations”, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) bankrolled the overthrow of governments that didn’t abide by End of History formula for vassal states managed by technocratic elites beholden to financial powers far removed from the citizens of those nations.
Things were moving along with a destructive force that few could question or resist between 1992 and 2012.
Buildings collapsed when they were meant to collapse, and NATO expanded eastward without much resistance.
Cracks were forming around the edges of the New World Order Vision. Putin’s Munich Security speech of 2007 featured a different spirit than the Putin of 2004 who was still professing a willingness to join NATO. The noticeable clash between many of those western-directed Russian oligarchs of the 1990s against Russian nationalists fighting to re-nationalize strategic companies while throwing many oligarchs in jail was another crack.
The Chinese-Indian tag team that de-railed the promised ‘legally binding carbon reduction quotas’ of COP14 in 2009 demonstrated yet another crack.
Obama’s Asia Pivot: One Military Step too Far
In 2012, a new US military doctrine was launched in the form of Obama’s ‘Asia Pivot’.
This new strategic doctrine brought China into the crosshairs of US militarists.
China watched with tension as the US military industrial complex vastly expanded across her backyard with over 100 million US troops amplifying their positions in the Pacific with a THAAD missile shield built up in South Korea, belligerent US-led military exercises with China’s neighbors and a clear intention to expand NATO into the Pacific.
Russia’s concerns about America’s aspirations for global nuclear hegemony under ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ outlined by Russian President Vladimir Putin in his 2007 Munich Security Conference speech now became a concern shared by China as well.
And as if to taunt the 1998 edition of Joe Biden, China, Russia and Iran became more united than ever in their need to both protect themselves from the Neoliberal Orderists.
With this trio of nations representing broadly diverse people, religions and civilizations, Samuel P Huntington’s thesis laid out in his ‘Clash of Civilizations’ came under serious threat. Despite the influence of Huntington’s thesis, perhaps the old grand chess master Zbigniew Brzezinski was right when he warned his disciples that “the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.”
The coalition of these nations into a united Eurasian bloc caused some to contemplate the possibility that diverse civilizations could actually work together for common aims. Perhaps this process of cooperation were actually more natural and more in harmony with Natural Law than the Hobbesian theory that diverse civilizations were destined to fight in a world of each-against-all until a supranational leviathan could impose ‘order’ from above.
Either way, this strategic outlook defined all subsequent grand strategy around the 2013 revival of the ancient Silk Road trade routes with a focus on the concept of “common aims of mankind” and “win-win cooperation”.
The Multipolar Alliance Matures
By 2013, China’s new president unveiled a The Belt and Road Initiative (aka: New Silk Road) which promised to make China’s large-scale development model a global institution open to all nations.
Outlining his proposal for a Global Development Initiative in opposition to the Hobbesian worldview, President Xi Jinping stated in 2021: “We must strengthen solidarity and promote mutual respect and win-win cooperation in conducting international relations. A world of peace and development should embrace civilizations of various forms, and must accommodate diverse paths to modernization… We need to pursue dialogue and inclusiveness over confrontation and exclusion. We need to build a new type of international relations based on mutual respect, equality, justice and win-win cooperation.”
With the New Silk Road, a new agency was established with new funding mechanisms such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Banks (AIIB), BRICS development Bank, and the many Chinese state-owned banks which began to offer productive loans for nations wishing to develop. Between 2013 and 2023 over 140 nations signed onto the Belt and Road Initiative, and new trade corridors were created.
New Free Trade zones were established tying the Eurasian Economic Union led by Russia with China’s BRI in 2015, and China made history by finalizing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership across all ASEAN members in 2020 finalizing the largest trading block in world history. The African Union’s continental free trade zone was made possible by this process and within a short time, rail corridors, energy deals, and industrial development zones began to grow under the new multipolar alliance in rates never before seen.
Through this development dynamic, new models of banking, investment, and even the concept of ‘economic value’ itself matured from the realm of speculation, war profiteering, resource extraction/ rents towards authentic productivity. Suddenly a growth surge in the real economy of those nations cooperating with the Belt and Road Initiative saw benefits both to industrialists, entrepreneurs, investors, the state and the common people.
Over a billion people were lifted out of poverty in short order through this process, and life expectancy increased along with energy access, and per-capita GDP to the point that BRICS+ nations out-performed the G7 for the first time in 2022 accounting for 31.5% of world GDP (vs 30% for the G7).
Lucrative New Silk Road projects emerged throughout Southwest Asia and the Gulf states which provided a basis for reconstruction from decades of western directed forever wars. Peace deals between heated enemies brough a resolution to conflicts between Yemen vs Saudi Arabia, Iran vs Turkey, Saudi Arabia vs Iran and beyond.
The success of this Multipolar alliance began eroding the Cold War claims that one had to be EITHER socialist caring only about the state OR capitalist caring only for individual liberty.
The New Silk Road additionally gave megaprojects like the International North South Transportation Corridor new life. This 7200 km multimodal project connected Russia’s Arctic (increasingly a branch of China’s Arctic Silk Road) through Central Asia, the Middle East and even down into India via Iran.
Despite the fact that Russia lacked China’s capability to wield national banking due to the destruction of Perestroika during the 1990s, Moscow was able to develop an extremely viable military-intelligence capability which was put to work in blocking the regime change operation which was meant to do to Syria’s Bashar al Assad what NATO had earlier done to Gaddafi.
With Russia, China and Iran acting as bedrocks to this new alternative security architecture, the hegemons of Washington and London were confronted with the fact that they were not gods.
Nations that would have formerly been easily destroyed were somehow able to withstand the armadas of regime change operatives that had worked so well in earlier cases of Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon or the Arab Spring. Venezuela’s Maduro remained in power despite full support for Obama-clone Juan Guaido, Kazakhstan remained intact in the face of western funded democracy riots, and Ethiopia survive a foreign led civil war. Hong Kong didn’t succeed in its bid for independence despite CIA operatives and NED front groups promoting riots under the veil of “democracy”. Thailand also remained intact despite the vast CIA funding of insurrectionary groups loyal to the western led neo liberal world order.
The BRICS nations expanded in influence to include Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina and UAE who will become full members on January 1, 2024 and over 40 other nations have made their intentions to join this multipolar block known. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (itself the fruit of the strategic thinking of former Russian Premier Yevgeny Primakov and his Chinese counterparts in 1996) has grown from a negligible coalition of 5 weakened states to a robust security coalition numbering 10 states and 10 more having submitted applications to join in short order.
If humanity was not composed of organic hackable machines, but actual citizens with unalienable rights and powers of genius capable of making disruptive discoveries in science and the arts, then perhaps the End of History was always an illusion.
If this is the case, it appears that Biden was never a part of the end of history… but just a pathetic throwback of an obsolete past refusing to acknowledge reality.