The New York Times headlined a piece on Monday about how “China’s Echoes of Russia’s Alternate Reality Intensify Around the World”. The gist is that the People’s Republic is supposedly conspiring with the Eurasian Great Power to propagate disinformation about the Ukrainian Conflict and US-EU relations. It’s implied that everything shared by their publicly financed international media outlets and officials is fake news, or at the very least, an “alternate reality”. The article itself, however, is a perfect example of portraying an alternate reality and is typical of US-led Western Mainstream Media (MSM) pieces.

Russian and China media actually portray reality while the West’s portrays an alternate reality. The ongoing global systemic transition to multipolarity has fundamentally revolutionized International Relations. The Global South, which in this context includes Russia since it’s mistreated by the Golden Billion as being just another one of these developing countries, is keenly aware that preexisting multipolar trends have accelerated since the commencement of Russia’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine. The US-led West’s unprecedented reaction has actually been counterproductive.

While America has successfully reasserted its declining unipolar hegemony over Europe and some of its Asian satellites like Japan, it’s exposed itself as a ruthless power-hungry Great Power that’ll flagrantly violate its own self-professed “democracy”, “human rights”, and “rule of law” values to aggressively advance its interests at everyone else’s expense, including its supposed allies’. The EU is now at risk of a serious economic crisis caused by its coerced “decoupling” from Russia under US pressure and President Putin’s geo-economic judo move to demand payment for gas in rubles in response.

All of this is happening, it should be remembered, because the US and its EU allies engineered a Neo-Nazi coup in Kiev in 2014 following the spree of urban terrorism popularly known as “EuroMaidan”. That in turn enabled America to turn this historically Russian-friendly society into the “anti-Russia” in the sense of transforming it into a nationwide launching pad for waging Hybrid War against Russia. This was being done via the clandestine establishment of NATO military infrastructure and an intense information warfare campaign aimed at indoctrinating Ukrainians into thinking that they’re superior to Russians.

Drawing attention to this sequence of events like Russian and Chinese media have done isn’t equivalent to creating an alternate reality but is simply the portrayal of the one and only objectively existing reality. The same can be said for their skeptical take towards Kiev’s claims of alleged Russian war crimes and its US-led Western partner’s instant conclusion that Moscow was to blame for these suspicious incidents despite no investigations having been completed or even initiated. This common-sense approach is what journalism used to look like in the West prior to be turned into nothing more than information warfare.

There’s no so-called “conspiracy” between Russian and Chinese media because they openly cooperate with one another as the article itself later acknowledges, but Beijing isn’t promoting Moscow’s interpretation of events as a favor to its neighbor, but due to the fact that it simply shares its multipolar worldview. It’s not the only member of the international community that does either since the ideological dimension of the New Cold War is that everyone – people, countries, organizations, etc. – can be roughly classified as whether they’re multipolar or pro-American/anti-multipolar.

The first-mentioned category is extremely broad but can basically be summarized as those who believe that the world order is moving away from unipolarity and that all efforts must be sincerely undertaken to ensure that the outcome is more just and equitable for everyone than the prior American-led world order. The second-mentioned, meanwhile, believe that all efforts must be undertaken to ensure that the US remains the leader of the international system so that it can then have more capabilities to “benevolently” help its allies who share the same values (or so its proponents expect).

Russia and China function as the dual engines of the emerging Multipolar World Order due to the immense influence that they wield in shaping the ongoing global systemic transition in their own complementary ways while the US is of course in support of retaining its prior position over the world system. The first two’s partners share their multipolar worldview while America’s vassals share its own. Those countries like India, Iran, and Pakistan that practice policies of principled neutrality towards the Ukrainian Conflict can also by default be described as multipolar since they’re resisting US pressure.

The US-led Western MSM spin a genuinely alternate version of reality though by describing those multipolar countries’ motivations in very inaccurate ways such as supposedly being driven by “authoritarian tendencies”, “controlled by dictators”, or the product of so-called “systemic corruption”. The objectively existing reality is simply that their leaderships concluded that their national interests are best served by supporting the ongoing global systemic transition to multipolarity, not in clinging to the US’ declining unipolar hegemony since that prior system didn’t comprehensively serve their interests.

Observers should keep this in mind at all times whenever they consume Western information products since everything can ultimately be traced back to this ideological divide between the US’ and its Golden Billion vassals’ anti-multipolar outlook (which cannot be described as unipolar since it’s impossible to return to that system) and the vast majority of the Global South’s multipolar one. Upon becoming aware of this, observers will begin to notice that everything actually revolves around it. What’s happening across the world and the way in which it’s presented is shaped by this ideological struggle.