The aggressive posture taken by the United States, the Western Bloc and NATO will have negative effects around the world. A world that, as we can see, has now reached the end of the unipolar era and is preparing to enter the multipolar phase. In Europe we have Germany which for the first time after the Second World War decided to abandon its role as a “civil power” to rearm itself massively. Germany, as we said earlier, has traditionally been understood as a “civil power”, that is, one which, unlike other great powers, uses multilateral institutions and economic leverage rather than military force to achieve its foreign policy objectives.
Following the launch of Russia’s special military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, internal and external pressures occur that lead Berlin to make an epochal turning point in its policy and thus increase its military spending in an unprecedented way. The decision to step up and meet NATO’s defense spending target of 2% of GDP has been met with skepticism by some lawmakers.
In fact, in Germany there is someone who has sniffed what might be the plans devised in Washington and in NATO environments to ‘defuse’ Germany and make it more docile, more inclined to come down to milder advice, according to the Atlantic perspective. For a geo-economic power like Germany, the combination of exorbitant rearmament costs and having to forcibly give up the gas supplied (at low cost) by Russia could have lethal effects. The CEO of BASF said in no uncertain terms: “Without Russian gas, the economy will collapse”.
Interviewed by the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he contrasted the harsh reality of the warlike rhetoric of the US, NATO and megaphones of the mainstream: “Putting the question in brutal terms, a possible stop to supplies to Moscow would drag the German economy into the worst crisis since the Second World War and it would destroy our prosperity. Especially for many small and medium-sized companies, this could be the end. We can’t take such a risk!”
This is the point: Germany risks de-industrialization. And it is also in all likelihood the objective of Washington which, by defusing the European locomotive, would try to avoid any hypothesis of a Eurasian approach that would considerably reduce the so-called anglosphere.
The further enlargement of NATO to historically neutral countries such as Finland and Sweden, likewise, will not be in the interests of the security of the peoples and Europeans in general. Indeed, a new expansion towards the Russian borders will raise the tension. Europe is practically trapped in US strategy and must decide whether to continue to be a vassal of the United States, or an autonomous subject in the new multipolar world configuration.
We see the world again almost divided into blocks. On the one hand, the Western bloc that is desperately trying to maintain unipolar hegemony, on the other the Eurasian powers and all those non-aligned countries that are working so that a multipolar world based on sovereign states and cooperation can finally arise.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict breaks the global geopolitical and financial dominance of the United States and the Western bloc. Russia has openly challenged U.S. unipolar hegemony, which has long been crushing under its iron heel even what was once the great European civilization, that is, the current non-sovereign European Union, actually dominated by NATO on behalf of Washington. It is very likely that the sanctions imposed on Russia by the Western bloc, and only by the Western bloc, will cause a general weakening of these countries and even of NATO.
So with a weaker NATO, a broader partnership between Germany, France and Russia could be achieved. The excessive use of sanctions and especially their use against Russia since 2014 has led to a self-sufficient Russian economy that is 80 percent self-sufficient in consumer goods and impressive technological advances in the oil and gas sectors. Moscow also benefited greatly from Chinese cooperation which enabled it to offset the impact of sanctions.
Russia and China have already begun to question the dollar’s role as a reserve currency and are looking for alternatives. Much of the Chinese and Russian trade is now conducted bilaterally. ASEAN has also started to trade more and more in their own national currencies. In this regard, hypotheses of payment in rupees or rubles for the oil that Russia supplies to India are being studied. While Venezuela advances in the implementation of the Mir payment system of the Eurasian country.
We can put a tombstone on the theory of the so-called “End of History” the American political scientist Fukuyama proposed at the fall of the Soviet Union. History has started up again, change is already underway, it happens before our eyes. This is why war propaganda is so strong, and even timid dissent is silenced and criminalized in what, against all evidence, still insists on calling itself a free world.
The unipolar order dominated by the United States has now reached its end credits. At the end of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, humanity could finally enter a new era marked by multipolarity and the rise of the Eurasian powers. An international architecture that, compared to the past, provides for a plural articulation of relationships and balanced powers.