There’s no question that future unbiased historians will rank Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address on the Return of the Baby Bears – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia – on September 30 as a landmark inflection point of the Raging Twenties.
The underlying honesty and clarity mirror his speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, but this time largely transcending the trappings of the geopolitical New Great Game.
This was an address to the collective Global South. In a key passage, Putin remarked how “the world has entered a period of revolutionary transformations, which are fundamental in nature. New development centers are being formed, they represent the majority.”
As he made the direct connection between multipolarity and strengthening of sovereignty, he took it all the way to the emergence of a new anti-colonial movement, a turbocharged version of the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1960s:
“We have many like-minded people all over the world, including in Europe and the United States, and we feel and see their support. A liberating, anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony is already developing in various countries and societies. Its subjectivity will only grow. It is this force that will determine the future geopolitical reality.”
Yet the speech’s closure was all about transcendence – in a spiritual tone. The last full paragraph starts with “Behind these words stands a glorious spiritual choice”.
Post-post-modernism starts with this speech. It must be read with utmost care so its myriad implications may be grasped. And that’s exactly what tawdry Western spin and a basket of demeaning adjectives will never allow.
The speech is a concise road map to how we got to this incandescent historical crossroads – where, to venture beyond Gramsci, the old order refuses to acknowledge its death while the new one is inexorably being born.
There’s no turning back. The key consequence of a largely documented fact – “a hybrid war is being waged against Russia because it stands in the way of the neocolonial world order” – is that Russia is getting ready for an all-out collision with the Empire of Lies.
Alongside top Eurasian powers China and Iran. Imperial vassals in this case are at best collateral damage.
Moreover, it’s quite telling that Putin’s speech followed India’s External Affairs Minister, Dr. S. Jaishankar, stressing the “pillaging of India by the colonial power” at the UN General Assembly.
Putin’s speech and Russia’s resolve to fight the – hybrid and otherwise – war against the collective West set up the Macro Picture.
The Micro Picture regards the see-saw in the battlefields in Ukraine, and even the blow-up of the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines: a desperate gambit, a few days before the result of the referendums and their official recognition on September 30.
Where’s Osama when we need him?
As working hypotheses swirl on how the deed was done, a few things are quite clear.
Russia had absolutely no motive to destroy billions of dollars of Gazprom’s energy infrastructure: they could always use it as leverage; and they could just turn it off – as they did, because of the sanctions dementia – and re-route the gas to Asian customers.
A White House “led” by a senile teleprompter reader, mired in a black politico-economic void, was most certainly clueless.
The prime suspect is a rogue National Security/State Department faction – part of what is known in the Beltway as The Blob. Call them Straussians or neo-con fanatics, these are the players who are conducting a US foreign “policy” whose central premise is the destruction of Russia – with the European “allies” as collateral damage.
An inevitable – certainly unforeseen – consequence is that in this new twist in the War of Economies.