The World Had Already Changed Before November 5th
Although many of you will find this hard to believe, a series of events took place this year and last year that, in their level of global importance and future impact, trumped the recent election of Donald Trump. While the Western legacy media kept our attention fixated almost solely on the re-emerging ratings cash cow question, “To Trump or not to Trump?”, a global shift of state allegiances took place among many of the world’s wealthiest and most influential nations. This shift has reshaped the global order. In short, the world has already changed markedly and most people in the US aren’t aware of what has happened yet.
The Formed and Newly Forming Alliances
A serious challenge to US’ global hegemony has arisen and continues to grow. This challenge has come about due to a number of factors, one of the primary factors being the rise of China as an economic superpower coupled with its newly empowered alliances with Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa. A burgeoning global interest in becoming part of this alliance of countries known as the BRICS Economic Partnership, has been increasing exponentially throughout 2022 – 2024. In fact, there are now over 40 new countries applying to enter BRICS, which just added Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to its charter.(1)
Another huge factor that has contributed to the recent collapse of the unipolar era has been the massive military and economic failure of the US/NATO funded proxy war in Ukraine.(2),(3) The abject failure of “Project Ukraine” has generated a new level of global economic crisis and also a now widespread recognition of the precariousness of US/Western hegemony, which many previously believed to be monolithic at the height of the unipolar era, which began in 1990.
It’s become very clear that two and a half years of US sanctions on Russia (12 rounds of them) have completely boomeranged. Russia recently surpassed both Japan and Germany, becoming the 4th largest economic power in the world.(4) This is the other key factor that has stimulated the current global “bolt toward BRICS”. (5)
A Global Economic-Military Coalition That Can’t Be Bullied By the US
These new conditions and revelations have spurred BRICS members and prospective BRICS members, a grouping that makes up more than half of the world’s GDP and well over half of the planet’s human population, to engage in, amongst other things, the beginnings of the creation of a new collective currency. This new currency, which is in the process of being developed, will, in all likelihood, eventually challenge the dollar as the world’s central global currency.
These newly strengthened economic and military alliances, which include three of the world’s four most powerful economic and military nations (China, Russia and India) have generated a new global playing field on which the United States is no longer the lone great purveyor of power.
In short, a new and undeniably formidable global coalition is now taking shape. The BRICS movement’s like-minded countries have very recently realized that together they are capable of a level of economic and military interdependence that cannot be trammeled or undone by the United States’ economic and/or military threats.
This global shift from unipolarity to multipolarity is not only inevitable, it’s already well underway. (8) Whether this transition will go hard or easy or somewhere in between depends on the forms and levels of resistance and/or acceptance that we meet it with as a global culture. So far, the West has reacted with fear, compulsivity and aimless violence to this changeover.(7)
Donald Trump’s New Administration and the Multipolar Shift
Unfortunately, judging by Donald Trump’s cabinet picks so far, it’s difficult to see whether his level of understanding of the implications of the huge changes mentioned above will be sufficient to undertake the type of diplomacy necessary to ride rather than resist and push against the tidal wave that’s now headed due West.(8) Frankly, at first glance, many of his cabinet picks look problematic, aside from his choice of Tulsi Gabbard for Intel and RFK Jr. for Health.
In the coming years US leadership is going to have to negotiate A LOT with leaders from all over the world, including people like Vladimir Putin and Ji Jinping. Donald Trump has shown that he is able to engage effectively with these supposed US “adversaries”. Whereas the Biden administration has shown, over and over again, that it has no such wish or ability. Their anti-diplomatic chest-beating and hawkishness have come right out of the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Nuland neocon playbook. This is another reason the Democrats lost the 2024 election.(9)
Trump, on the other hand, has proven that he knows how to negotiate and make deals. Let’s hope his better angels, the ones who know that negotiations and diplomacy are going to be the only road to global peace, remain in his ear, in close proximity to him. People like Gabbard, RFK Jr. and a few others in his circle know the score when it comes to the impossibility and the stupidity of relying on intimidation and war as a means to peace in the rest of the 21st century.
The Choice Moving Forward
Moving forward the choice will, ultimately, come down to choosing between mutual negotiation and cooperation or mutual annihilation, as a country and as a global culture for that matter.
The Military Industrial Complex and the donor owned Republican and Democrat political class of the 21st century have been doing all they can to lie, intimidate, gaslight, sanction and kill their way out of having to deal with what is now the inevitability of Multipolarity. On top of this, the inability of the donor-owned political class to listen to and work with the American public’s needs, wishes and mandates over the last 25 years has resulted in an exorcism. The US’ neoliberal, neocon plans for a unipolar “New World Order” are being jettisoned. The unipolar era is over.
In Conclusion
Straightforwardly, it would be remiss of me not to come clean about the fact that I believe we have a very rocky path ahead of us as this decade moves forward. I’m not at all convinced yet that Trump and his administration are up to the tremendous challenge they’re going to face. Not the challenge that will come from unhappy Democrats but rather the challenge of dealing with and adjusting to the recognition that American hegemony is waning (for good) and that a serious adaptation needs to be made here in the US, existentially and ideologically. We’re going to have to learn to work together with our global neighbors and perceived “enemies”, as opposed to bullying them and bossing them around. That approach simply isn’t going to work anymore.
I would love to change my mind about Donald Trump and his administration’s ability to meet the upcoming challenges they’re going to face. I would love to be surprised by him/them! That would be wonderful. Confessions and disclaimers aside, I do feel we’re going to eventually make it through to the other side of this global transition. My hope is that it will go as smoothly and as nonviolently as possible.
In my next article I’ll be focusing on the power of the “media lenses” we’re all unknowingly (and in very rare cases knowingly) looking through and consequentially creating our opinions of “reality” with.
CITATIONS:
• 1) https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/04/brics-southeast-asia-thailand-malaysia-russia-china/
• 2) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr7582l4015o
• 3) https://time.com/6695261/ukraine-forever-war-danger/
• 4) https://eurasiamagazine.com/putin-russias-economy-surpasses-japan-germany
• 5) https://www.cigionline.org/articles/americas-unipolar-moment-is-over-what-comes-next-is-unclear/
• 6) https://www.ft.com/content/5a1a5d17-d37b-4242-8241-d81daa7467fc
• 7) http://www.asjournal.org/65-2018/the-rise-and-demise-of-american-unipolarism-neoconservatism-and-us-foreign-policy-1989-2009/
• 8) https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/11/14/trumps-cabinet-here-are-his-picks-for-key-roles-rfk-jr-doug-burgum-matt-gaetz-and-more/
• 9) https://www.pressenza.com/2023/03/meet-the-faces-of-death/