[Peace-discuss] Pepe Escobar: Russia, North Korea Stage 'Strategic Coup' Against Western Hegemony

Wed Sep 20 23:16:09 UTC 2023

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230919/pepe-escobar-russia-north-korea-stage-strategic-coup-against-western-hegemony-1113489011.html 
is Pepe Escobar's latest for Sputnik.

> It will take ages to unpack the silos of information inbuilt in the Eastern
> Economic Forum in Vladivostok last week, coupled with the – armored -
> train-keeps-a-rollin’ conducted by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un straddling
> every nook and cranny of Primorsky Krai.
> 
> The key themes all reflect the four main vectors of the New Great Game as it’s
> being played across the Global South: energy and energy resources; manufacturing
> and labor; market and trade rules; and logistics. But they go way beyond –
> exploring the subtle nuances of the current civilizational war.
> 
> So Vladivostok presented…
> 
> - A serious debate on the surge of anti-neocolonialism, presented for instance by
> the Myanmar delegation; geostrategically, Burma/Myanmar, as a privileged gateway
> to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, was always an object of Divide and Rule
> games, with the British Empire only caring about extracting natural resources.
> This is what “scientific colonialism” is all about.
> 
> - A serious debate on the concept of the civilization-state, as already developed
> by Chinese and Russian scholars, applied to China, Russia, India and Iran.
> 
> - The interconnection of transport/connectivity corridors. That includes the
> upgrading of the Trans-Siberian in the near future; a boost for the Trans-Baikal –
> the world’s busiest rail line – connecting the Urals to the Far East; a renewed
> drive for the Northern Sea Route (last month two Russian oil tankers sailed from
> Murmansk across the Arctic to China for the first time; ten days shorter than the
> Suez Canal route); and the coming of the Chennai-Vladivostok channel, which will
> be connected to the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC).
> 
> - The common Eurasia payment system, discussed in detail in one of the key panels[1]:
> Greater Eurasia: Drivers for the Formation of an Alternative International and
> Monetary and Financial System. The immense challenge to set up a new payment
> settlement currency against “toxic currencies” instrumentalized amid relentless
> Hybrid War. In another panel, the possibility of a timely BRICS and EAEU joint
> summit next year has been evoked.
> 
> All Aboard The Kim Train
> 
> The genesis of Kim Jong Un’s train journey to the Russian Far East - coinciding
> with the Forum, no less - is a masterful strategic coup that was in the works
> since 2014, at the time of the Maidan.
> 
> Xi Jinping was still in the beginning of his first mandate; he had announced the
> New Silk Road exactly ten years ago, first in Astana and then in Jakarta. The DPRK
> was not supposed to be integrated into this vast pan-Eurasian project that would
> soon become China’s overarching foreign policy concept.
> 
> The DPRK[2] then was on a roll against the Hegemon, under Obama, and Beijing was no
> more than a worried spectator. Moscow, of course, was always focused on peace in
> the Korean Peninsula, especially because its geopolitical priorities in 2014 were
> Donbass and Syria/Iran. The last thing Moscow could afford was a war in
> Asia-Pacific.
> 
> Putin’s strategy was to send Defense Minister Shoigu to Beijing and Islamabad to
> calm it all down. Pakistan at the time was helping Pyongyang to weaponize their
> nuclear arsenal. Simultaneously, Putin himself approached Kim, offering serious
> guarantees: we’ve got your back if ever there is an attack by the Hegemon
> supported by Seoul. Even better: Putin got Xi himself to double down on the
> guarantees.
> 
> The categorical imperative was simple: as long as Pyongyang did not start any
> trouble, Moscow and Beijing would be by its side.
> 
> A sort of calm before any possible storm then set in – even if Pyongyang continued
> to test their missiles. So over the years, Kim’s mindset changed; he became
> convinced that Russia and China were his allies.
> 
> The DPRK's geoeconomic integration into Eurasia was seriously discussed in
> previous, pre-Covid editions of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. That
> included the tantalizing possibility of a Trans-Korean Railway linking both North
> and South to the Far East, Siberia and the wider Eurasia.
> 
> So Kim started to see the Big Eurasia Picture, and how Pyongyang could finally
> start to benefit geoeconomically from a closer association with the EAEU, SCO and
> BRI. This is how strategic diplomacy works: you invest during a decade, and then
> all the pieces fall into place when an armored train keeps-a-rollin’ across
> Primorsky Krai.
> 
> From the perspective of a Russia-China-DPRK triangle, it’s no wonder the
> collective West has been reduced to the status of crying toddlers in a sandbox.
> The Hegemon’s puny US-Japan-South Korea axis to counter, simultaneously, China and
> the DPRK, is a joke compared to the DPRK’s brand-new role as a sort of
> Asia-Pacific Military District, adjacent to their immediate neighbor, the Russian
> Far East.
> 
> There will be military integration, of course, in missile defense, radars, ports,
> airfields. But the key vector, along the way, will be geoeconomic integration.
> Sanctions from now on are meaningless.
> 
> No one in 2014 was seeing this all play out, except for a very sharp analyst who
> coined the precious Double Helix[3] concept to define the still evolving, at the
> time, Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership.
> 
> The Double Helix perfectly explains the full-spectrum geostrategic symbiosis
> between two civilization-states which happen to be former empires but since the
> middle of the previous decade willfully decided to accelerate their mutual drive
> to lead the Global Majority in the path towards multipolarity.
> 
> The Road to Polycentricity
> 
> All of the above finely coalesced in the last panel[4] in Vladivostok - informally
> known even to the Japanese and Koreans as “the European capital of Asia”, in the
> heart of Asia-Pacific. The debate was on a “global alternative to Western
> dominance”. The West, incidentally, was absolutely invisible at the Forum.
> 
> Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova summed it all up: the recent G20 and
> BRICS summits[5] had set the stage for President Putin’s remarkable address to the
> plenary session in Vladivostok.
> 
> Zakharova alluded to “fantastic strategic patience”. That applies to the whole
> “pivot to Asia” policy and boosting the development of the Far East, initiated in
> 2012, and now implying a full turn of the Russian economy towards Asia-Pacific
> geoeconomics. But at the same time, that also applies to integrating the DPRK into
> the geoeconomic Eurasian high-speed train.
> 
> Zakharova stressed how Russia “never supported isolation”; always “advocated
> partnership” – which the Forum graphically displayed for dozens of Global South
> delegations. And now, under the conditions of a “dirty fight, unlawful and with no
> rules”, a serious stand-off, the Russian position remains easily recognizable for
> the Global Majority: “Not to accept dictatorship”.
> 
> Andrey Denisov, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, made a point to
> mention crack political analyst Sergey Karaganov as one of the key drivers of the
> concept of Greater Eurasia. More than “multipolarity”, Denisov argued, what is
> being built is “polycentricity”: a series of concentric circles, involving plenty
> of dialogue partners.
> 
> Former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl now heads a new think tank in St.
> Petersburg, G.O.R.K.I. As a European who ended up being ostracized by her own
> peers under the blatant toxicity of cancel culture, she stressed how freedom and
> rule of law have disappeared in Europe.
> 
> Kneissl referred to the Battle of Actium as the key passage of power from the
> Eastern Mediterranean to the Western Mediterranean: “That’s when the dominance of
> the West started”, complete with all the mythology built around the Roman Empire
> which obsesses the Anglosphere to this day.
> 
> With sanctions[6] dementia and irrational Russophobia installed at the head of the EU
> and the European Commission, Kneissl stressed, the notion that “treaties must be
> preserved” disappeared while “the rule of law has been destroyed. This is the
> worst that could have happened to Europe”.
> 
> Alexander Dugin, online, called for understanding “the depth of Western
> domination”, expressed via hyper-liberalism. And he proposed a key breakthrough:
> the Western modus operandi should become an object of research, in a sort of
> Gramscian attempt to define what distinguishes Western ideology, and thus act
> towards “deep decolonization”.
> 
> In a sense this is what is being attempted by current actors in West Africa –
> Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger. That poses the question of who is a real Sovereign in a
> new world. The West, argues Dugin, is a Total Sovereign; Russia, as a nuclear
> power and prime military power defined as an existential threat by the Hegemon, is
> also a Sovereign.
> 
> Then there’s China, India, Iran, Turkey. These are key poles in a dialogue of
> civilizations; actually what was proposed by former Iranian President Khatami way
> back in the late 1990s, and then dismissed by the Hegemon.
> 
> Dugin remarked how China “has moved far away in building a civilizational state”.
> Russia, Iran, India are not far behind. These will be the essential actors
> steering the world towards polycentricity.

[1] https://forumvostok.ru/en/programme/business-programme/?day=11.09.2023
[2] 
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230728/north-korea-showcases-military-might-during-pyongyang-parade-1112204695.html
[3] https://www.mediafire.com/file/08rzue8ffism94t/China-Russia_Double_Helix.docx/file
[4] https://forumvostok.ru/programme/business-programme/?day=13.09.2023
[5] 
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230914/dedollarization-accelerating-within-brics-across-globe---netley-group-1113359503.html
[6] 
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230918/russias-economy-recovered-country-withstood-sanctions-pressure---putin-1113456789.html