As Trump ‘Goes Nuclear’ Against Iran and China, What’s Next? by Alastair Crooke

Is Trump against globalism but not against using globalist methods and strategies? From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

At least it is clear; it’s explicit. The “We’re America, Bitch” formulation by an American official strips away the humbug of soft power. It’s not about ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’: the global universal order never was. And, President Trump, to his credit, makes no bones about it: Why apologise over American power? It’s use it, or lose it – and America is still strong enough to get its way: to remain the Dominant One, he asserts.

China begs to differ. It has already surpassed the US in 2013 in purchasing power parity GDP terms, and now feels history on the move: China is about to resume its former ‘self’, and standing as the primordial Culture (as it believes it always was), occupying the very middle of the world. The material articulation now, of this rediscovered ‘self’, being the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), encompassing a ‘community of shared destiny’. But the latter’s external political expression is reflected more by the (originally) Russian formulation of ‘Eurasianism’ and multipolarity, which dates back to the 1920s.

Plainly, multipolarity stands in direct opposition to western universalism, and to ‘end of history’. It is not anti-western per se, but it is directly opposed to the western utopian projects that have attempted to slice all that is human down to a ‘single size fits all’, model society. The Russian Eurasian notion is of different cultures, autonomous, and sovereign, that precisely denies universality and hegemony, in principle. The idea rather, is of a grouping of ‘nations’, each reaching back to its primordial cultures and identities – i.e. Russia being ‘Russian’ in its own ‘Russian cultural way’ – and not being coerced into mimicking the westernisation impulse. What makes such a wider grouping feasible is that cultural identities are complex and storied; it escapes the prevailing obsession to reduce every nation to singularity in value, and to a single ‘meaning’. The ground for collaboration and conversation thus widens beyond ‘the either-or’.

President Trump ostensibly should be perceived to be in the basket supporting Italy and Europe’s cultural re-sovereigntisation – at least this is what Steve Bannon suggested after a recent visit to Italy, where he soughtto present the new Lega/M5S Italian government as the embryo of a nascent pan-European uprising, against the liberal-progressive (globalist) Establishment. Bannon characterised this ‘embryo’ as a “pivot to Trump”. A Russian thinker and author, however, also visiting Italy at the same moment, saw Italy’s new orientation quite differently – as the seeds of this multipolar, Eurasian ‘idea’ emerging in Europe.

To continue reading: As Trump ‘Goes Nuclear’ Against Iran and China, What’s Next?