The Armenian quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City is facing its biggest crisis in a long time. A Jewish businessman with connections to the radical settler movement is poised to develop a quarter of the neighbourhood’s territory, with plans to build a luxury hotel. If this goes ahead, it will significantly change part of Jerusalem’s Old City and hasten the demographic shift towards the city’s Jewish population which has been happening for some years.

The Armenian quarter actually makes up one-sixth of the Old City (the other quarters being the Muslim, the Christian, and the Jewish) and the Armenian presence in Jerusalem dates back to the 4th century. Together with the neighbouring Christian quarter, it is a stronghold for the city’s small Christian minority. The threat of a takeover of parts of the quarter by Jewish settlers is widely seen as altering the demographic status quo to favour Israel’s interests.

Jerusalem: Armenian Christians fight controversial land deal | BBC News Video

In 2021, the Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem, Nourhan Manougian, agreed a 98-year lease over part of the Armenian quarter with the developers. The agreement covers a significant area that today includes a parking lot, buildings belonging to the office of the Armenian church leader – known as the patriarchate – and the homes of five Armenian families.

News of the deal prompted strong protests among the neighbourhood’s Armenians last year. Such was the depth of feeling that in October, the patriarch and the other church leaders felt compelled to cancel the agreement. This led to violent confrontations between settlers and local Armenians.

After a few quiet weeks, fighting broke out again at the end of December when more than 30 men armed with stones and clubs reportedly attacked the Armenians who had been guarding the area for several weeks.

The dispute has now gone to court. The question is whether the lease agreement is valid or whether the unilateral termination makes the agreement void. The patriarchate has engaged lawyers – local and from Armenia and the US – who will present its case that the agreement was not entered into properly because of irregularities in the contract.

Changing East Jerusalem’s demography

This is not a single incident. Since the 1967 six-day War, when the whole of Jerusalem came under Israeli control, there has been a concerted effort to change the demography in the traditionally Arab East Jerusalem.

In many places the authorities are evicting the Arab families who have lived there for decades with the explanation that they lack documents that they own the house. Then a Jewish family moves in.

This change of the demography of East Jerusalem happens through evictions, demolitions and buildings restrictions. This is also happening in Jerusalem’s iconic and touristic Old City.

Almost 20 years ago, there was a minor scandal when it emerged that the Greek Orthodox patriarchate, a large property owner, had entered into a long lease agreement with a Jewish settler organisation regarding two historic hotels.

Now we have a similar incident concerning the Armenian patriarchate. Selling or renting out property to Jewish settlers for a long time is viewed extremely negatively by the Palestinians, who have long fought against illegal Jewish settlements in Palestinian areas.

East Jerusalem is of vital importance to the Palestinians. In proposed plans for a two-state solution, it is the intended capital of a future Palestinian state. Decisively changing the demography there is therefore a priority goal for some in Israel – including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who doesn’t want a two-state solution.

Hierarchical institutions

This conflict also underlines an old problem with the Jerusalem’s Christian churches – namely the gap between the leadership and the people. Old churches are by nature hierarchical and the leaders at the top rule supremely. In Jerusalem there is an additional problem in that the church leaders are not always drawn from the local population.

The largest Christian denomination in the Holy Land is the Greek Orthodox Church. Its members are largely Arabs, but the patriarch and the other leading prelates are Greeks.

Nourhan Manougian, the current and 97th Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem, was born in Syria to an Armenian family. The Armenian patriarchate has been accused of corruption and illegitimate sale of property in the past, long before the current crisis.

If the Armenians lose this battle and the settler movement is able to gain control of such a key site, it will harm a vulnerable small minority. And the settler campaign to colonise East Jerusalem under Jewish control will have achieved yet another victory.

Svante Lundgren, Researcher, Lund University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Officials in Washington are doubling down on their efforts to create a new energy corridor that runs through the Caucasus, a major transit route for trade and energy that connects Europe and Asia.

Focusing on Armenia and Azerbaijan, two countries at odds over land and history, officials in Washington hope to link the two countries with energy pipelines, despite Azerbaijan’s recent incursion into Nagorno-Karabakh, which resulted in more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fleeing the territory in September.

“A transit corridor built with the involvement and consent of Armenia can be a tremendous boon to states across the region and to global markets,” State Department official James O’Brien told Congress in November.

U.S. Objectives

For decades, U.S. officials have pursued geopolitical objectives in the Caucasus. Viewing the region as a strategically important area that connects Europe and Asia, they have sought to integrate the region with Europe while pulling it away from Iran and Russia, both of which maintain close ties to the region.

“The Caucasus is tremendously important as a crossroads between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East,” Senator James Risch (R-ID) said in a statement last year. “Trade agreements, energy deals, infrastructure, and investment all have the potential to better integrate the region within the transatlantic community.”

At the heart of U.S. planning is Azerbaijan. Given the country’s extensive energy resources, especially its oil and natural gas, U.S. officials have seen Azerbaijan as the key to creating a U.S.-led Caucasus that will help Europe transition away from its dependence on Russian energy.

“We have been hard at work, along with our European colleagues, over the course of the last decade, trying to help Europe slowly wean itself off of dependence on Russian gas and oil,” Senator Christopher Murphy (D-CT) explained at a hearing in September. “Part of that strategy has been to deliver more Azerbaijani gas and oil to Europe.”

Another reason for the U.S. focus on Azerbaijan is its location. With Russia to the north, the Caspian Sea to the east, and Iran to the south, U.S. officials have seen the country as “the epicenter of Eurasia energy policy,” as U.S. diplomats once described it. The United States has worked to position Azerbaijan as the starting point for an east-west energy corridor that benefits the West and deters a north-south corridor that would work to the advantage of Iran and Russia.

For the United States and its European allies, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline demonstrates the possibilities. Since 2006, the BTC pipeline has carried oil from Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean Sea, where it has been shipped to global energy markets. The pipeline is controlled by a consortium of energy companies headed by BP, the British oil giant.

“We need that to keep functioning,” State Department official Yuri Kim told Congress in September.

From the U.S. perspective, another major geopolitical achievement has been the Southern Gas Corridor. The corridor, which combines three separate pipelines, runs from Azerbaijan all the way to Europe. Since its initial deliveries of natural gas to Europe in 2020, the corridor has been critically important to keeping Europe supplied with energy during the war in Ukraine.

“That Southern Gas Corridor is extremely important for ensuring that there is energy diversity for Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, potentially Albania, and definitely Italy, and possibly into the Western Balkans,” Kim said. “We cannot underestimate how important that is.”

A New Route?

As pipelines carry oil and natural gas from Azerbaijan to the West, U.S. officials have sought to reinforce the east-west corridor by creating additional pipelines that run through Armenia. Not only would a pipeline through Armenia add another route to the corridor, but it would pull Armenia away from Russia, which maintains a military presence in the country and provides Armenia with most of its energy.

For decades, one of the major challenges to U.S. plans has been the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict. As long as Armenia and Azerbaijan have remained at odds over the region, U.S. officials have seen few options for integrating Armenia into a broader east-west energy corridor.

“If not for the frozen Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,” U.S. diplomats reported in 2009, “the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline could have been routed through Armenia, reducing the distance and construction cost, and providing Armenia both an alternative source of gas as well as much-needed transit fees.”

In recent years, regional dynamics have rapidly shifted, however. As Azerbaijan grew flush with cash from its operations as an energy hub for the West, it began spending more money on weapons. With Israel and Turkey selling Azerbaijan increasingly sophisticated weapons, Azerbaijan built a large arsenal and acquired the upper hand over Armenia.

“Where other Western nations are reluctant to sell ground combat systems to the Azerbaijanis for fear of encouraging Azerbaijan to resort to war to regain [Nagorno-Karabakh] and the occupied territories, Israel is free to make substantial arms sales and benefits greatly from deals with its well-heeled client,” U.S. diplomats reported in 2009.

Photo by Sarin Aventisian on Unsplash

Emboldened by its growing power and influence, Azerbaijan made its move. As fighting broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in late September 2020, Azerbaijan’s military forces took advantage of their advanced weaponry from Israel and Turkey to capture the territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh.

Before Azerbaijan’s military forces could seize control of Nagorno-Karabakh, however, Russia intervened, brokering a ceasefire and deploying about 2,000 peacekeepers to the region. Although various observers portrayed the outcome as a victory for Russia, the deal did not last long.

This past September, Azerbaijan moved to take the rest of Nagorno-Karabakh, armed by additional supplies of Israeli weapons. Following Azerbaijan’s incursion, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled the territory for Armenia, where they remain today.

Now that Azerbaijan has taken control of Nagorno-Karabakh, U.S. officials are renewing their efforts to persuade Armenia and Azerbaijan to forge a peace deal that could be the basis for a new energy corridor.

“There is business to be done in this region,” State Department official James O’Brien told Congress in November.

At the Start Department, officials have been reviewing U.S.-funded plans for building the new energy corridor. As O’Brien noted, “the feasibility studies on this transit corridor [have] actually been done, funded by [the Agency for International Development (AID)], so we’re in the middle of seeing what kind of economic future there may be.”

Obstacles

Several obstacles stand in the way of U.S. plans. One possibility is that an increasingly emboldened Azerbaijan will invade Armenia and take the territory it wants for new pipelines. If Azerbaijan continues to acquire weapons from Turkey and Israel, it could take Armenian land by force, something that U.S. officials believe could happen.

“I think, from what I hear, the Armenians are concerned and feel threatened by that corridor and what it might imply for another grabbing of land by Azerbaijan,” Representative James Costa (D-CA) said at the hearing in November.

A related possibility is that Azerbaijan could work more closely with Russia. As Russia maintains military forces in Azerbaijan, it could facilitate a move by Azerbaijan to take Armenian land for a north-south energy corridor that benefits Russia.

Although Russia maintains a security pact with Armenia, relations have soured over Azerbaijan’s seizure of Nagorno-Karabakh, making it possible that Russia will side with Azerbaijan.

Another challenge is the Azerbaijani government. For years, critics have charged Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev with leading a corrupt and repressive regime that has hoarded the country’s wealth while leaving the population to suffer.

In internal reports, U.S. diplomats have been highly critical of Aliyev. Not only have they compared him to mobsters, but they have suggested that the country “is run in a manner similar to the feudalism found in Europe during the Middle Ages.”

As critics have called on Washington to reconsider the U.S. relationship with Azerbaijan, some members of Congress have begun questioning U.S. strategy, particularly as it concerns the U.S. partnership with Aliyev.

The United States may have made “the wrong bet by moving more Azerbaijani resources into Europe,” Senator Murphy said in September. “This strategy of being dependent on a system and series of dictatorships… may not necessarily bear the strategic game that we think it does.”

Other members of Congress have questioned the State Department’s claims that a new energy corridor can bring peace to the region.

“I don’t see the peace process as going nearly as well as some of the description I’ve just heard,” Representative Costa said at the hearing in November. “It was ethnic cleansing that happened with the removal of these Armenians from their historic homeland in Nagorno-Karabakh.”

Regardless, officials at the State Department remain confident in their plans. Pushing forward with efforts to forge a deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan, they remain hopeful that they can create a new energy corridor that runs through Armenia, even if means that the ethnic Armenians who fled Nagorno-Karabakh will never be able to return to their homes.

“As we go from the medium to the longer term, there’s going to have to be some effort made to help integrate these folks into Armenian life,” AID official Alexander Sokolowski told Congress in November. “Many of them dream of going back to Nagorno-Karabakh, but for right now, they’re oriented towards making a life in Armenia.”

Edward Hunt writes about war and empire. He has a PhD in American Studies from the College of William & Mary.

Foreign Policy in Focus

( Tomdispatch.com) – This month’s catastrophic violence in Israel and Gaza — specifically, the contradictory statements from each side on the other’s war crimes — has taken me back to a revealing personal moment almost exactly 18 years ago, recalling a different war in a different part of the world.

That day in the fall of 2005 I was in Yerevan, Armenia, where I was teaching a post-graduate journalism course at the state university. In class that morning, my six students, all of them young women (as was not unusual in that time and place), began discussing the terrible treatment of young recruits in the Armenian army, where the vicious hazing that had been notorious in the Soviet armed forces was still common practice. I don’t remember how the subject came up, but when it did, one student after another chipped in with chilling tales about male relatives and friends who had been savagely treated by other soldiers and their superiors.

Just a few hours later, in an afternoon class with the same six students, someone mentioned Khojaly, the town where, according to the Azeris, Armenian soldiers massacred some 600 Azeri civilians during the Armenia-Azerbaijan war of 1992. My students insisted the story must be false because, as one of them said, “Our boys couldn’t do something like that.”

Only that morning, I reminded them, they had recalled numerous first-hand accounts of horrible things Armenian soldiers did to their own young recruits. Maybe the Khojaly massacre happened, I said, and maybe it didn’t, as Armenia has long insisted, but given the cruelties you spoke about this morning, how can you say Armenians couldn’t do that? For a long silent moment, they looked at me with stunned expressions. Finally, one of them said, “We can’t think that.”

When I heard her words, I realized they were probably the all-too-literal truth. Those young women simply couldn’t think things that didn’t fit the accepted national story about that war, a feeling far more powerful than facts or logic. In the world they lived in, the threat from the enemy was the potential extinction of the Armenian people — a continuation of the attempted genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Taking the Azeri side on anything, including the “facts” on Khojaly or any Armenian atrocity, would be collaborating with the murder of their own people, and that just wasn’t possible.

Echoes from Gaza

If I were in the Middle East today, I’m quite sure I would see the same dynamic playing out on both sides of the current Israeli-Hamas war. Just as my Armenian students couldn’t think that their country’s soldiers were guilty of a serious atrocity, many Israelis and Palestinians are undoubtedly incapable — not just unwilling, but incapable — of recognizing that their side in that conflict might be violating the laws of war and committing crimes against humanity. (The parallel with Israelis is particularly close, since just like Armenians, they have a collective memory of genocide, of facing an enemy that wanted not just to defeat them on some battlefield but to wipe their whole people off the face of the earth.) It also seems a safe assumption that those feelings will not be changed by additional evidence about specific incidents or the broader conduct of the opposing forces.

The conflicting reactions to the October 17th explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza City are an apt example. Palestinians immediately blamed Israeli bombing or missile fire, which they said killed nearly 500 people on the hospital grounds. Israelis argued that the blast was from an off-course Palestinian rocket, while challenging their adversary’s casualty count. (Two days after the explosion, a Jerusalem newspaper reported that estimates from “foreign independent intelligence sources” were far lower — no more than 50 deaths, maybe as few as 10.)

There is no way to know at this writing what additional facts may come to light or if there will ever be a conclusive finding on which side caused the explosion. But even if there is, it’s a safe bet that Palestinians will keep blaming Israel and Israelis will go on accusing Palestinians. Moreover, people on both sides will believe what they’re saying because, like my students in Armenia, they simply can’t think anything else.

Buy the Book

The parallels aren’t exact, of course. The Israeli-Hamas conflict is very different from Armenia’s with Azerbaijan — not just geographically but in terms of its history, its circumstances, and most notably its potential to ignite a much wider war with devastating consequences globally.

Another crucial difference is that the world in 2023 is not the world that existed in 2005 when I taught that class in Armenia. Facts carry significantly less weight in public discourse now than they did then. Truth-tellers in the news media, academic institutions, and the scientific world are less trusted and less believed, which gives untruths and those who spread them far more influence.

In the age of social media, people whose emotions (and identity) immunize them against unwelcome facts can easily find support and apparent confirmation for their false beliefs in ways that were only beginning to take shape in the early 2000s. Meanwhile, falsehoods spread much farther and faster to what would have been unimaginable numbers of people 15 or 20 years ago.

One stunning example of that change: when I was teaching in Armenia in 2005, Facebook had been in operation for only a year or so and had close to 5 million users. Today, something like two and a half billion people use that platform. In other words, 18 years ago Facebook was reaching approximately one out of every 1,300 people in the world. Now, it reaches almost one out of every three. Other social media networks have seen similar growth. In the United States alone, the percentage of adults who use social media is estimated to have increased from 5% to 79% between 2005 and 2019.

A New Weapon in the War on Facts

If the explosive growth of social media has meant a larger threat to truth, a more recent trend may pose a new and even bigger danger. Artificial intelligence clearly has the capability to create and distribute fake information that will make it ever harder — perhaps nearly impossible — to distinguish facts from falsehoods. So far, ideas about how to control it don’t exactly seem promising, while rapidly advancing technology is producing ever more effective tools of deception. In a recent column on the Axios news website, two of its cofounders delivered a chilling warning about one of those tools, which, they note, is being wielded by “anti-American actors” in crisis spots globally:

“A new weapon is being deployed in all these conflicts: a massive spread of doctored or wholly fake videos to manipulate what people see and think in real time. The architects of these new technologies, in background conversations with us, after demonstrating new capabilities soon to be released, say even the sharpest eyes looking for fake videos will have an impossible time detecting what’s real.”

Such misinformation is not only harmful when people believe things that are untrue, but possibly even more damaging in making it harder to believe things that are true. When lies fill the air around us, everything becomes suspect. Information becomes guilty-until-proven-innocent and, when people like those Armenian students are already motivated to deny reality, the effect will only be hugely magnified.

There’s a strong case to be made that, as misinformation and artificial intelligence gain ground, the greatest risk of all is that truth will simply lose credibility and facts will matter ever less. Ultimately, that trend won’t just subvert knowledge and understanding on specific subjects but undermine the belief that facts exist at all, that there is an objective reality outside our own consciousness.

That was the thesis of a chilling 2017 online essay by Mary Poovey, an emeritus humanities professor at New York University and author of A History of the Modern Fact. In her essay, she described a “post-fact world” where conventional knowledge sources are no longer trusted, formerly unquestioned assumptions are no longer shared, and traditional checks-and-balances processes no longer go unchallenged as validators of information. In that world, she concluded, “Ordinary citizens and parties with their own vested interests have begun to question the very possibility of facts.”

Reflecting on such thoughts in an interview earlier this year, Poovey noted that, without facts, we have no standard for what to believe, no trusted authority to teach us what’s real and what isn’t, and no way to correct false beliefs. And from that comes a bleak but inescapable conclusion: if facts don’t exist, knowledge doesn’t either.

How Misinformation and Disinformation Are Exploding Globally

The slide into low-fact or fact-free discourse is ominous for numerous reasons and across many areas of public life. In this country, false statements and willful denials of reality in the ongoing debate about fraud in the 2020 presidential election — a completely imaginary issue — have done grave and lasting damage to a fundamental foundation of democracy. (On the very day I drafted this essay, the House of Representatives chose as a new speaker a prominent election denier.) Thousands of Americans, perhaps tens of thousands, died as a direct result of misinformation about Covid-19. Intentional and unintentional falsehoods have seriously obstructed urgently needed policies and practices that could better prepare us for coming catastrophes associated with climate change. And, as always, misinformation and disinformation have exploded, along with rockets and bombs, in wars around the world.

To be sure, throughout human history, wars have generated lies and false beliefs. In the present era, however, those falsehoods seem to spread so much faster and more widely, arguably causing more pain than in the past. That has been visible in the current crisis in the Middle East, as well as in Ukraine, as documented in a list of nearly 100 separate false claims compiled in the early stages of that conflict by the newspaper USA Today.

Almost 80 of those items were fake or falsely captioned videos and photographic images, mostly seen on platforms that had barely existed a decade or two ago. In an ironic twist, one photo, purporting to show an explosion in Ukraine, had, in fact, been taken in Gaza in 2021. Another, that newspaper’s fact-checkers reported, wasn’t an image from any real war but from a video game. Strikingly, though on reflection perhaps not surprisingly, a video clip from the very same game was posted on Facebook recently with a caption claiming it showed Israeli anti-aircraft fire shooting a Hamas fighter plane out of the sky.

That clip was far from the only such deception appearing during the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In one of many examples, after the Al-Ahli Arab hospital explosion, a false posting, presumably by a pro-Israeli source, showed a screen-shot of a tweet supposedly from an Al Jazeera journalist reporting that he had seen “with my own eyes” a Hamas missile causing the blast and that Al Jazeera‘s coverage of the event was untrue. Fact-checkers for the French news agency AFP determined that the tweet was fake, and no Al Jazeera reporter had ever sent such a message.

Rewriting Ancient Times — And Yesterday

One effect of the misinformation epidemic is that rewriting the past has become an easier and more common practice than it used to be. An example — looking at a piece of ancient history but completely relevant to today’s headlines — is recounted in a recent blog post by David Shipler, former New York Times correspondent and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Arab and Jew. When he was based in Jerusalem from 1979 to 1984, Shipler wrote on his blog, “I never heard a Palestinian utter a doubt that Jewish temples had stood on what Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary, and Jews call the Temple Mount” (the site of the Temple of Solomon, according to Jewish scriptures). But on a visit in the early 1990s, a Palestinian high school student in Ramallah told him categorically that no Jewish temple had ever existed there and that the claim was “a fabrication by Israelis to lay title to Jerusalem.”

“I don’t know how many Christian and Muslim Palestinians have embraced that temple denial,” Shipler went on, “but on subsequent reporting trips I heard it more and more widely until it seemed virtually ubiquitous.” On that and many other realities from ancient times to the present, the two sides have come to teach and believe completely different stories. Shipler calls it “an arms race of memory.” And while he was referring to Arabs and Jews, his term could just as aptly have been applied to countless other contests between facts and falsehoods in our time.

For obvious reasons, the memory arms race is particularly prevalent in remembering wars, which leave passionate and painful emotions that last for generations. Throughout history, those emotions have shaped false visions of reality that tend to endure long after the fighting ends. A maxim said to have been coined more than a century ago (and usually attributed to California Senator Hiram Johnson during World War I) put it this way: “Truth is the first casualty of war.”

That was certainly a valid observation in the past, but I’m not sure it’s accurate in the same way today. Truth wasn’t the first casualty in the present Middle East conflict. It had already been a casualty before that war even began. Today, truth is simply a casualty of our world.

Copyright 2023 Arnold R. Isaacs

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – Thirty-five years ago, more than 100,000 Armenian protesters took to the streets to convince Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that Nagorno-Karabakh – an ethnically Armenian enclave stuck geographically in the neighboring republic of Soviet Azerbaijan – ought to be joined to Armenia.

In recent days, more than 100,000 people have taken to the streets again. But this time it is Karabakh Armenians fleeing their homes to find refuge in Armenia. They have been decisively defeated by the Azerbaijanis in a short and brutal military operation in the enclave. Their dream of independence appears over; what is left is the fallout.

As a longtime analyst of the history and politics of the South Caucasus, I see the chain of recent events in Nagorno-Karabakh as depressingly predictable. But that is not to say they weren’t avoidable. Rather, greater flexibility from both sides – and less demonization of the other – could have prevented the catastrophic collapse of Artsakh, as Armenians called their autonomous republic, and with it the effective ethnic cleansing of people from lands they had lived in for millennia.

A legacy of Lenin

What began as a struggle to fulfill the promise of Soviet Union founder Vladimir Lenin, that all nations would enjoy the right to self-determination within the USSR, turned into a war between two independent, sovereign states that saw more than 30,000 people killed in six years of fighting.

The 1988 demonstrations were met by violent pogroms by Azerbaijanis against Armenian minorities in Sumgait and Baku. Gorbachev, wary that a shift in territory would foster similar demands throughout the Soviet Union and potentially enrage the USSR’s millions of Muslim citizens, promised economic aid to and protection of the Armenians, but he refused to change the borders.

The dispute became a matter of international law, which guaranteed the territorial integrity of recognized states, in 1991 – with Azerbaijan declaring independence from the Soviet Union and rejecting Nagorno-Karabakh’s autonomy vote. The legal principle of territorial integrity took precedence over the ethical principle of national self-determination.

This meant that under international law, state boundaries could not be changed without the mutual agreement of both sides – a position that favored Azerbaijan. All countries in the world recognized Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan, even, eventually, Armenia.

An unsolved diplomatic problem

But that didn’t mean the status of Nagorno-Karabakh was ever settled. And for all their efforts, outside powers – Russia, France and the United States most importantly – failed to find a lasting diplomatic solution.

The First Karabakh War, which grew out of the pogroms of 1988 and 1990, ended in 1994 with an armistice brokered by Russia and the Armenians victorious.

Moscow was Armenia’s principal protector in a hostile neighborhood with two unfriendly states, Azerbaijan and Turkey, on its borders. In turn, Armenia was usually Russia’s most loyal and dependable – and dependent – ally. Yet, post-Soviet Russia had its own national interests that did not always favor Armenia. At times, to the dismay of the Armenians, Moscow leaned toward Azerbaijian, occasionally selling them weapons.

Only Iran, treated as a pariah by much of the international community, provided some additional support, sporadically, to Armenia.

The United States, though sympathetic to Armenia’s plight and often pressured by its American-Armenian lobby, was far away and concerned with more pressing problems in the Middle East, Europe and the Far East.

What might have been

The disaster that has befallen Nagorno-Karabakh was not inevitable. Alternatives and contingencies always exist in history and, if heeded by statespeople, can result in different outcomes. Analysts including myself, advisers and even the first president of independent Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, proposed compromise solutions that might have led to an imperfect but violence-free solution to the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.

Yet the triumphant Armenian victors of the 1990s had few immediate incentives to compromise. Instead, after the First Karabakh War, they expanded their holdings beyond the borders of Nagorno-Karabakh, driving an estimated one million Azerbaijanis out of their homes and making them hostile to Armenians.

The greatest error of the Armenian leaders, I believe, was to give in to a fatal hubris of thinking they could create a “Greater Armenia” on territory emptied of the people who had lived there. After all, wasn’t this how other settler colonial states, such as the United States, Australia, Turkey, Israel and so many others had been founded? Ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with forced assimilation, have historically been effective tools in the arsenal of nation-makers.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijani nationalism smoldered and intensified around the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh. Many decision-makers in Azerbaijan viewed Armenians as arrogant, expansionist, existential enemies of their country. Each side considered the contested enclave a piece of their ancient homeland, an indivisible good, and compromise proved impossible.

Armenian leaders also failed to fully comprehend the advantages that Azerbaijan held. Azerbaijan is a state three times the size of Armenia with a population larger by more than 7 million people. It also has vast sources of oil and gas that it has used to increase its wealth, build up a 21st-century military and finesse into greater ties with regional allies and European countries thirsty for oil and gas.

Armenia had a diaspora that intermittently aided the republic; but it did not have the material resources or the allies close at hand that its larger neighbor enjoyed. Turks and Azerbaijanis referred to their relationship as “one nation, two states.” Sophisticated weapons flowed to Azerbaijan from Turkey – as they did from an Israel encouraged by a shared hostility with Iran, Armenia’s ally – tipping the scales of the conflict.

Democracy versus autocracy

Armenians carried out a popular democratic revolution in 2018 and brought a former journalist, Nikol Pashinyan, to power. A novice in governance, Pashinyan made serious errors. For example, he boldly, publicly declared that “Artsakh” was part of Armenia, which infuriated Azerbaijan. While Pashinyan tried to assure Russia that his movement was not a “color revolution” – like those in Georgia and Ukraine – Vladimir Putin, no fan of popular democratic manifestations, grew hostile to Pashinyan’s attempts to turn to the West.

While Azerbaijan had grown economically – with the capital city of Baku glittering with new construction – politically, it stagnated under the rule of Ilham Aliyev, son of former Communist Party boss Heydar Aliyev.

The autocratic Ilham Aliyev needed a victory over Armenia and Ngorno-Karabakh to quiet rumbling discontent with the corruption of the family-run state. Without warning, he launched a brutal war against Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2020 – and won it in just 44 days thanks to drones and weapons supplied by his allies.

The goal of the victors then was equally hubristic as that of the Armenians a generation earlier. Azerbaijan’s troops surrounded Nagorno-Karabakh and in December 2022 cut off all access to what was left of the self-declared Republic of Artsakh, starving its people for 10 months. On Sept. 19, 2023, Baku unleashed a brutal blitzkrieg on the rump republic, killing hundreds and forcing a mass exodus.

This ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh – first through hunger, then by force of arms – completed the Azerbaijani victory. The defeated government of Artsakh declared it would officially dissolve the republic by the end of 2023.

Learning from defeat and victory

War sobers a people. They are forced to face hard facts.

At the same time, victory can lead to prideful triumphalism that in its own way can distort what lies ahead.

Aliyev appears to have tightened his grip on power, and Azerbaijanis today speak of other goals: a land corridor through southern Armenia to link Azerbaijan proper with its exclave Nakhichevan, separated from the rest of the country by southern Armenia. Voices have also been raised in Baku calling for a “Greater Azerbaijan” that would incorporate what they call “Western Azerbaijan” – that is, the current Republic of Armenia.

Armenians might hope that Azerbaijan – and the international community – take seriously the principle of territorial integrity and protect Armenia from incursions by the Azerbaijani army or any more forceful move across its borders.

They might also hope that the U.S. and NATO, which proclaim that they are protecting democracy against autocracy in Ukraine, will adopt a similar approach to the conflict between democratic Armenia and autocratic Azerbaijan.

But with Russia occupied with its devastating war in Ukraine and stepping back from its support of Armenia, a power vacuum has been formed in the Southern Caucasus that Turkey may be eager to fill, to Azerbaijan’s advantage.

A chance for democratic renewal?

The immediate tasks facing Armenia are enormous, beginning with the housing and feeding of 100,000 refugees.

But this might also be a moment of opportunity. Freed of the burden of defending Nagorno-Karabakh, which they did valiantly for more than three decades, Armenians are no longer as captive to the moves and whims of Russia and Azerbaijan.

They can use this time to consolidate and further develop their democracy, and by their example become what they had been in the years just after the collapse of the Soviet Union: a harbinger of democratic renewal, an example of not just what might have been but of what conceivably will be in the near future.

Ronald Suny, Professor of History and Political Science, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

However, it appears that Saudi Arabia is using its growing ties with China and Russia as a bargaining chip in relations with the US and Israel, and that it is not that Saudi is seeking an end to the petro-dollar relationship but its continuation, and that it is the USA that wants less of a commitment. As a result, a feigned move to the East might snowball into a real one if Gulf security and economic interests are not met in the West.

As the BRICS meeting was being celebrated, in the background Saudi Arabia and the US have been in intense discussions over a host of issues; recognition and normalization of relations with Israel on the US side and security assurances for the Kingdom and some assurances for the Palestinians that stop short of a Palestinian state.

The Saudis are mainly interested in a NATO style defense pact, obligating the US to defend the country in case it is attacked. In the interests of assuring security, the Kingdom has also been pushing for the ability to enrich uranium which would allow for the development of nuclear weapons.

The main sticking point has been the US’s unwillingness to provide these security guarantees. Promising to fight and die for the survival of Saudi Arabia is not a popular position in the US, from not wanting to get involved with another war, to the Kingdoms human rights violations, both domestically and abroad in Yemen, has made Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) unpopular in the US.

However, on the Saudi’s side there has been a long history of failure in the US fulfilling its side of the long and close relationship the two countries have shared, a relationship based on oil and security. Since the US pullout from Iraq leaving instability and an empowered Shia government with close ties to Iran, the support for the removal of long time Gulf allies in the Arab Spring, the US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the attacks on Abqaiq and Khurais oil fields in 2019 which knocked out 50% of oil production, and the pullout from Afghanistan Saudi Arabia has been deeply questioning US commitment in the region.

Since then Saudi Arabia has embarked on a diplomatic reset with its neighbors, particularly detente and a reopening of diplomatic relations with Iran. However, Saudi still seeks to ensure its security in the long term which Riyadh sees hinges on US NATO style commitments and/or nuclear weapons for normalization with Israel. So far the US has been reluctant to give either, but with Saudi Arabia reducing its ties to China as part of the normalization deal with Israel, the more Saudi Arabia warms to China, the more pressure the US is under to give into at least one of these demands.

On the nuclear issue, despite being a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Saudi Arabia has publicly stated its desire to have the rights to build the full cycle of nuclear production, which would break Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy pact mandating an obligation on recipient countries to renounce their ability to enrich uranium along with a number of treaties. Beyond that, the US would have to consider what making an exception to the Saudis would indicate to the wider region. These are in line with comments the Crown Prince made, confirming that if Iran obtains nuclear weapons the kingdom would seek them in kind.

With the fact that the Senate showed bipartisan support for an explicit ban on Saudi Arabia’s ability to enrich uranium in any deal made with the kingdom, the US is unlikely to make any bold move like making an exception for the Saudis, especially not before the election, if ever.

In an op-ed for the WSJ, Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen encouraged the US to provide NATO style security guarantees so that Saudi Arabia does not feel the need to pursue nuclear weapons, this aligns with Israel’s interest as they have been pursuing a security alliance with the US as well, and seek to limit the spread of nuclear weapons in the region.

Still, beyond security, Saudi Arabia is increasingly being dominated by the interest to diversify its economy away from oil by using the revenue to fund megaprojects across the country. Currently more than a trillion dollars of real estate and infrastructure projects are ongoing, which requires high oil prices to maintain.

Hence, on the other side of the historic Saudi-US relationship, it is the US that sees its ally backsliding on its role in using its oil supply in the interests of the global economy.

Since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war the US has pleaded with Saudi Arabia for an increased production of oil, not just to offset Russia’s income source but also as a way to reduce inflation globally. Saudi Arabia has in fact went the other direction, making a deal with Russia to reduce production to increase the price of oil. Saudi Arabia needs this oil revenue now more than ever as the massive investments required for its new economy dictate. Furthermore, as China and India are increasingly the kingdom’s biggest oil purchaser, it is very likely Saudi Arabia will increasingly move towards the BRICS bloc, deepening its economic relations with these countries.

For the US and its interest in moving to potentially confront China over the Taiwan straits issue, disengage from the Middle East “forever wars,” as a result of the perceived lack of strategic importance, it seems that to not get a deal with Saudi Arabia will cost more economically, politically, and strategically now more than ever.

China’s diplomatic moves with Middle Eastern powers are being closely watched after it pulled off the coup of negotiating the return of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran this spring.

Xi pointed out that Abbas was the first Arab leader to visit Beijing this year, in the wake of his reelection as president by the Chinese Communist Party, which underlined the importance of Sino-Palestinian relations. He and Abbas went on to announce a strategic partnership between China and Palestine, saying, “The Chinese side is keen to seize this opportunity to enhance in a comprehensive manner friendly cooperation with the Palestinian side in various fields.” For his part, Abbas pledged to make Palestine part of China’s One Belt and Road infrastructure project for Asia.

The previous week, Beijing had hosted the Chinese-Arab Business Forum, where the Saudi foreign minister announced that China had become the Arab world’s biggest trading partner, with trade worth $430 billion per year. Much of that trade is Chinese purchase of petroleum and LNG fossil gas from the region.

The US does not import very much petroleum from the Middle East any more, producing two-thirds of oil consumed by Americans itself through hydraulic fracturing, and importing most of the shortfall from Canada and Mexico. Hydraulic fracturing is banned in states such as New York, since it is environmentally catastrophic and leaves behind highly polluted pools of water.

Conor Mycroft at the South China Morning Post points out that while China only does $158 million annually in trade with Palestine, its trade with Israel every year amounts to $21 billion. Still, China gives aid to Palestinians and is going to build some roads on the West Bank, and many of its Middle Eastern trading partners, including Iran, no doubt pressure Beijing to offer more practical support to the Palestinians.

China’s increasing trade with the Arab world and Israel may be one of the impetuses for it to become more involved in Middle East diplomacy.

The Egyptian “Evening News” reported on Beijing’s commitments to Palestine as announced in a joint statement after the meeting between Abbas and Xi.

1. China expressed its unfaltering backing for the establishment of an independent and fully sovereign state of Palestine on the basis of 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

2. Beijing also supported the historical understandings that constitute the “status quo” agreements about the holy places of Jerusalem.

3. China supports the full membership of Palestine in the United Nations. (At the moment it is a non-member observer state, in the same category as the Vatican.)

4. China wants to see the achievement of Palestinian internal unity (i.e. ending the faction-fighting between Hamas and the PLO).

5. China supports a two-state solution through peace negotiations with Israel on the basis of “land for peace” and UN Security Council resolutions.

The Asian Exchange Union was established in 1972 and was intended to decolonize the banking system and allow member states to trade with one another without going through the old imperial powers. It never has, however, amounted to much, though it may suddenly be a bigger deal if Iran’s plans are implemented.

In the end the representatives voted to explore the formation of a non-dollar basket of currencies, to bring into being a digital currency controlled by the central banks of member states, and setting up an international banking exchange to rival the US-dominated SWIFT. The US has kicked both Iran and Russia off of SWIFT and interdicted their use of dollars, which has hurt their trade and foreign exchange reserves.

The non-dollar basket of currencies to be used as an alternative to the US dollar as a reserve currency would initially consist of the Chinese yuan, the UAE dirham and the Russian ruble, according to the plan voted on.

The United Arab Emirates’ central bank took part last year in a trial of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) using mBridge technology directed by the Bank for International Settlements and looking at the potential use of CBDC’s for “international transactions.” The study’s participants also comprised “the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the Bank of Thailand, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority with participants hailing the results of the study,” according to Coingeek.

The third resolution was to set up an alternative to the SWIFT bank exchange. According to Investopedia, “The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system powers most international money and security transfers. SWIFT is a vast messaging network used by financial institutions to quickly, accurately, and securely send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. ”

Mohsen Karimi, the International Vice President of Iran’s Central Bank, said at the Tehran summit, “The interbank messenger replacing SWIFT will be implemented within the next month among the members of the Asian Exchange Union.” He said that Iran has designed a new exchange that will message members of the Asian Exchange Union’s banks and allow currency transfers among them. He said this method will be cheaper than SWIFT.

For many reasons, the dollar is likely to remain the world’s reserve currency for some time, and the SWIFT banking exchange will remain central. Still, it may be possible for this rival basket of currencies to replace the dollar in Asia for some purposes, and a new banking exchange that allowed South Asian countries to deal with Iran and Russia in ways that the US cannot easily sanction would have its attractions. It is certainly the case that Washington’s over-use of financial sanctions is likely sooner or later to cause other countries to move away from the US-dominated banking exchange and from the dollar, which is a Trojan Horse for the Office of Foreign Asset Control of the US Department of the Treasury.

Since Kennedy wrote those words, we have seen the end of the Cold War, the peaceful emergence of China as a leading world power, and the rise of a formidable Global South. But the United States has indeed failed to “adjust sensibly to the newer world order,” using military force and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter in a failed quest for longer lasting global hegemony. 

Kennedy observed that military power follows economic power. Rising economic powers develop military power to consolidate and protect their expanding economic interests. But once a great power’s economic prowess is waning, the use of military force to try to prolong its day in the sun leads only to unwinnable conflicts, as European colonial powers quickly learned after the Second World War, and as Americans are learning today.

While U.S. leaders have been losing wars and trying to cling to international power, a new multipolar world has been emerging. Despite the recent tragedy of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the agony of yet another endless war, the tectonic plates of history are shifting into new alignments that offer hope for the future of humanity. Here are several developments worth watching:

De-dollarizing global trade 

For decades, the U.S. dollar was the undisputed king of global currencies. But China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and other nations are taking steps to conduct more trade in their own currencies, or in Chinese yuan. 

Illegal, unilateral U.S. sanctions against dozens of countries around the world have raised fears that holding large dollar reserves leaves countries vulnerable to U.S. financial coercion. Many countries have already been gradually diversifying their foreign currency reserves, from 70% globally held in dollars in 1999 to 65% in 2016 to only 58% by 2022. 

Drawing by Jerzy Wasiukiewicz

Since no other country has the benefit of the “ecosystem” that has developed around the dollar over the past century, diversification is a slow process, but the war in Ukraine has helped speed the transition. On April 17, 2023, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that U.S. sanctions against Russia risk undermining the role of the dollar as the world’s global reserve currency. 

And in a Fox News interview, right-wing Republican Senator Marco Rubio lamented that, within five years, the United States may no longer be able to use the dollar to bully other countries because “there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.”

BRICS’s GDP leapfrogs G7’s  

When calculated based on Purchasing Power Parity, the GDP of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is now higher than that of the G7 (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan). The BRICS countries, which account for over 40% of total world population, generate 31.5% of the world’s economic output, compared with 30.7% for the G7, and BRICS’s growing share of global output is expected to further outpace the G7’s in coming years.

Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has invested some of its huge foreign exchange surplus in a new transport infrastructure across Eurasia to more quickly import raw materials and export manufactured goods, and to build growing trade relations with many countries.

Now the growth of the Global South will be boosted by the New Development Bank (NDB), also known as the BRICS Bank, under its new president Dilma Rousseff, the former president of Brazil. 

Rousseff helped to set up the BRICS Bank in 2015 as an alternative source of development funding, after the Western-led World Bank and IMF had trapped poor countries in recurring debt, austerity and privatization programs for decades. By contrast, the NDB is focused on eliminating poverty and building infrastructure to support “a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable future for the planet.” The NDB is well-capitalized, with $100 billion to fund its projects, more than the World Bank’s current $82 billion portfolio.

Movement towards “strategic autonomy” for Europe

On the surface, the Ukraine war has brought the United States and Europe geostrategically closer together than ever, but this may not be the case for long. After French President Macron’s recent visit to China, he told reporters on his plane that Europe should not let the United States drag it into war with China, that Europe is not a “vassal” of the United States, and that it must assert its “strategic autonomy” on the world stage. Cries of horror greeted Macron from both sides of the Atlantic when the interview was published. 

But European Council President Charles Michel, the former prime minister of Belgium, quickly came to Macron’s side, insisting that the European Union cannot “blindly, systematically follow the position of the United States.” Michel confirmed in an interview that Macron’s views reflect a growing point of view among EU leaders, and that “quite a few really think like Emmanuel Macron.” 

The rise of progressive governments in Latin America

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, which has served as a cover for U.S. domination of Latin America and the Caribbean. But nowadays, countries of the region are refusing to march in lockstep with U.S. demands. The entire region rejects the U.S. embargo on Cuba, and Biden’s exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua from his 2022 Summit of the Americas persuaded many other leaders to stay away or only send junior officials, and largely doomed the gathering. 

With the spectacular victories and popularity of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and Ignacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, progressive governments now have tremendous clout. They are strengthening the regional body CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) as an alternative to the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States. 

To reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar, South America’s two largest economies, Argentina and Brazil, have announced plans to create a common currency that could later be adopted by other members of Mercosur — South America’s major trade bloc. While U.S. influence is waning, China’s is mushrooming, with trade increasing from $18 billion in 2002 to nearly $449 billion in 2021. China is now the top trading partner of Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay, and Brazil has raised the possibility of a free-trade deal between China and Mercosur.

Peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia 

One of the false premises of U.S. foreign policy is that regional rivalries in areas like the Middle East are set in stone, and the United States must therefore form alliances with so-called “moderate” (pro-Western) forces against more “radical” (independent) ones. This has served as a pretext for America to jump into bed with dictators like the Shah of Iran, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and a succession of military governments in Egypt.

Now China, with help from Iraq, has achieved what the United States never even tried. Instead of driving Iran and Saudi Arabia to poison the whole region with wars fueled by bigotry and ethnic hatred, as the United States did, China and Iraq brought them together to restore diplomatic relations in the interest of peace and prosperity. 

Healing this divide has raised hopes for lasting peace in several countries where the two rivals have been involved, including Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and as far away as West Africa. It also puts China on the map as a mediator on the world stage, with Chinese officials now offering to mediate between Ukraine and Russia, as well as between Israel and Palestine.

Saudi Arabia and Syria have restored diplomatic relations, and the Saudi and Syrian foreign ministers have visited each others’ capitals for the first time since Saudi Arabia and its Western allies backed al-Qaeda-linked groups to try to overthrow President Assad in 2011. 

At a meeting in Jordan on May 1st, the foreign ministers of Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia agreed to help Syria restore its territorial integrity, and that Turkish and U.S. occupying forces must leave. Syria may also be invited to an Arab League summit on May 19th, for the first time since 2011.

Chinese diplomacy to restore relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia is credited with opening the door to these other diplomatic moves in the Middle East and the Arab world. Saudi Arabia helped evacuate Iranians from Sudan and, despite their past support for the military rulers who are destroying Sudan, the Saudis are helping to mediate peace talks, along with the UN, the Arab League, the African Union and other countries. 

Multipolar diplomatic alternatives to U.S. war-making

The proposal by President Lula of Brazil for a “peace club” of nations to help negotiate peace in Ukraine is an example of the new diplomacy emerging in the multipolar world. There is clearly a geostrategic element to these moves, to show the world that other nations can actually bring peace and prosperity to countries and regions where the United States has brought only war, chaos and instability.

While the United States rattles its saber around Taiwan and portrays China as a threat to the world, China and its friends are trying to show that they can provide a different kind of leadership. As a Global South country that has lifted its own people out of poverty, China offers its experience and partnership to help others do the same, a very different approach from the paternalistic and coercive neocolonial model of U.S. and Western power that has kept so many countries trapped in poverty and debt for decades.    

This is the fruition of the multipolar world that China and others have been calling for. China is responding astutely to what the world needs most, which is peace, and demonstrating practically how it can help. This will surely win China many friends, and make it more difficult for U.S. politicians to sell their view of China as a threat.

Now that the “newer world order” that Paul Kennedy referred to is taking shape, economist Jeffrey Sachs has grave misgivings about the U.S. ability to adjust. As he recently warned, “Unless U.S. foreign policy is changed to recognize the need for a multipolar world, it will lead to more wars, and possibly to World War III.” With countries across the globe building new networks of trade, development and diplomacy, independent of Washington and Wall Street, the United States may well have no choice but to finally “adjust sensibly” to the new order.

That past, though seemingly distant, is still shaping the world we live in. Those legendary generals and admirals are, of course, long gone, but the geopolitics they practiced at such a cost still has profound implications. For just as Washington encircled Eurasia to win a great war and global hegemony, so Beijing is now involved in a far less militarized reprise of that reach for global power.

And to be blunt, these days, China’s gain is America’s loss. Every step Beijing takes to consolidate its control over Eurasia simultaneously weakens Washington’s presence on that strategic continent and so erodes its once formidable global power.

A Cold War Strategy

After four embattled years imbibing lessons about geopolitics with their morning coffee and bourbon nightcaps, America’s wartime generation of generals and admirals understood, intuitively, how to respond to the future alliance of the two great communist powers in Moscow and Beijing.

In 1948, following his move from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State George Marshall launched the $13 billion Marshall Plan to rebuild a war-torn Western Europe, laying the economic foundations for the formation of the NATO alliance just a year later. After a similar move from the wartime Allied headquarters in London to the White House in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower helped complete a chain of military bastions along Eurasia’s Pacific littoral by signing a series of mutual-security pacts — with South Korea in 1953, Taiwan in 1954, and Japan in 1960. For the next 70 years, that island chain would serve as the strategic hinge on Washington’s global power, critical for both the defense of North America and dominance over Eurasia.

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After fighting to conquer much of that vast continent during World War II, America’s postwar leaders certainly knew how to defend their gains. For more than 40 years, their unrelenting efforts to dominate Eurasia assured Washington of an upper hand and, in the end, victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. To constrain the communist powers inside that continent, the U.S. ringed its 6,000 miles with 800 military bases, thousands of jet fighters, and three massive naval armadas — the 6th Fleet in the Atlantic, the 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and, somewhat later, the 5th Fleet in the Persian Gulf.

Thanks to diplomat George Kennan, that strategy gained the name “containment” and, with it, Washington could, in effect, sit back and wait while the Sino-Soviet bloc imploded through diplomatic blunder and military misadventure. After the Beijing-Moscow split of 1962 and China’s subsequent collapse into the chaos of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union tried repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, to break out of its geopolitical isolation — in the Congo, Cuba, Laos, Egypt, Ethiopia, Angola, and Afghanistan. In the last and most disastrous of those interventions, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to term “the bleeding wound,” the Red Army deployed 110,000 soldiers for nine years of brutal Afghan combat, hemorrhaging money and manpower in ways that would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In that heady moment of seeming victory as the sole superpower left on planet Earth, a younger generation of Washington foreign-policy leaders, trained not on battlefields but in think tanks, took little more than a decade to let that unprecedented global power start to slip away. Toward the close of the Cold War era in 1989, Francis Fukuyama, an academic working in the State Department’s policy planning unit, won instant fame among Washington insiders with his seductive phrase “the end of history.” He argued that America’s liberal world order would soon sweep up all of humanity on an endless tide of capitalist democracy. As he put it in a much-cited essay: “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism… seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture.”

The Invisible Power of Geopolitics

Amid such triumphalist rhetoric, Zbigniew Brzezinski, another academic sobered by more worldly experience, reflected on what he had learned about geopolitics during the Cold War as an adviser to two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski offered the first serious American study of geopolitics in more than half a century. In the process, he warned that the depth of U.S. global hegemony, even at this peak of unipolar power, was inherently “shallow.”

For the United States and, he added, every major power of the past 500 years, Eurasia, home to 75% of the world’s population and productivity, was always “the chief geopolitical prize.” To perpetuate its “preponderance on the Eurasian continent” and so preserve its global power, Washington would, he warned, have to counter three threats: “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along the Pacific littoral; ejection from its “perch on the western periphery” of the continent provided by NATO; and finally, the formation of “an assertive single entity” in the sprawling center of Eurasia.

Arguing for Eurasia’s continued post-Cold War centrality, Brzezinski drew heavily on the work of a long-forgotten British academic, Sir Halford Mackinder. In a 1904 essay that sparked the modern study of geopolitics, Mackinder observed that, for the past 500 years, European imperial powers had dominated Eurasia from the sea, but the construction of trans-continental railroads was shifting the locus of control to its vast interior “heartland.” In 1919, in the wake of World War I, he also argued that Eurasia, along with Africa, formed a massive “world island” and offered this bold geopolitical formula: “Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.” Clearly, Mackinder was about 100 years premature in his predictions.

But today, by combining Mackinder’s geopolitical theory with Brzezinski’s gloss on global politics, it’s possible to discern, in the confusion of this moment, some potential long-term trends. Imagine Mackinder-style geopolitics as a deep substrate that shapes more ephemeral political events, much the way the slow grinding of the planet’s tectonic plates becomes visible when volcanic eruptions break through the earth’s surface. Now, let’s try to imagine what all this means in terms of international geopolitics today.

China’s Geopolitical Gambit

In the decades since the Cold War’s close, China’s increasing control over Eurasia clearly represents a fundamental change in that continent’s geopolitics. Convinced that Beijing would play the global game by U.S. rules, Washington’s foreign policy establishment made a major strategic miscalculation in 2001 by admitting it to the World Trade Organization (WTO). “Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community,” confessed two former members of the Obama administration, “shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy debate erred.” In little more than a decade after it joined the WTO, Beijing’s annual exports to the U.S. grew nearly five-fold and its foreign currency reserves soared from just $200 billion to an unprecedented $4 trillion by 2013.

In 2013, drawing on those vast cash reserves, China’s new president, Xi Jinping, launched a trillion-dollar infrastructure initiative to transform Eurasia into a unified market. As a steel grid of rails and petroleum pipelines began crisscrossing the continent, China ringed the tri-continental world island with a chain of 40 commercial ports — from Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, around Africa’s coast, to Europe from Piraeus, Greece, to Hamburg, Germany. In launching what soon became history’s largest development project, 10 times the size of the Marshall Plan, Xi is consolidating Beijing’s geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, while fulfilling Brzezinski’s fear of the rise of “an assertive single entity” in Central Asia.

Unlike the U.S., China hasn’t spent significant effort establishing military bases. While Washington still maintains some 750 of them in 80 nations, Beijing has just one military base in Djibouti on the east African coast, a signals intercept post on Myanmar’s Coco Islands in the Bay of Bengal, a compact installation in eastern Tajikistan, and half a dozen small outposts in the South China Sea.

Moreover, while Beijing was focused on building Eurasian infrastructure, Washington was fighting two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a strategically inept bid to dominate the Middle East and its oil reserves (just as the world was beginning to transition away from petroleum to renewable energy). In contrast, Beijing has concentrated on the slow, stealthy accretion of investments and influence across Eurasia from the South China Sea to the North Sea. By changing the continent’s underlying geopolitics through this commercial integration, it’s winning a level of control not seen in the last thousand years, while unleashing powerful forces for political change.

Tectonic Shifts Shake U.S. Power

After a decade of Beijing’s relentless economic expansion across Eurasia, the tectonic shifts in that continent’s geopolitical substrate have begun to manifest themselves in a series of diplomatic eruptions, each erasing another aspect of U.S. influence. Four of the more recent ones might seem, at first glance, unrelated but are all driven by the relentless force of geopolitical change.

First came the sudden, unexpected collapse of the U.S. position in Afghanistan, forcing Washington to end its 20-year occupation in August 2021 with a humiliating withdrawal. In a slow, stealthy geopolitical squeeze play, Beijing had signed massive development deals with all the surrounding Central Asian nations, leaving American troops isolated there. To provide critical air support for its infantry, U.S. jet fighters were often forced to fly 2,000 miles from their nearest base in the Persian Gulf — an unsustainable long-term situation and unsafe for troops on the ground. As the U.S.-trained Afghan Army collapsed and Taliban guerrillas drove into Kabul atop captured Humvees, the chaotic U.S. retreat in defeat became unavoidable.

Just six months later in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin massed an armada of armored vehicles loaded with 200,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. If Putin is to be believed, his “special military operation” was to be a bid to undermine NATO’s influence and weaken the Western alliance — one of Brzezinski’s conditions for the U.S. eviction from Eurasia.

But first Putin visited Beijing to court President Xi’s support, a seemingly tall order given China’s decades of lucrative trade with the United States, worth a mind-boggling $500 billion in 2021. Yet Putin scored a joint declaration that the two nations’ relations were “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era” and a denunciation of “the further expansion of NATO.”

As it happened, Putin did so at a perilous price. Instead of attacking Ukraine in frozen February when his tanks could have maneuvered off-road on their way to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, he had to wait out Beijing’s Winter Olympics. So, Russian troops invaded instead in muddy March, leaving his armored vehicles stuck in a 40-mile traffic jam on a single highway where the Ukrainians readily destroyed more than 1,000 tanks. Facing diplomatic isolation and European trade embargos as his defeated invasion degenerated into a set of vengeful massacres, Moscow shifted much of its exports to China. That quickly raised bilateral trade by 30% to an all-time high, while reducing Russia to but another piece on Beijing’s geopolitical chessboard.

Then, just last month, Washington found itself diplomatically marginalized by an utterly unexpected resolution of the sectarian divide that had long defined the politics of the Middle East. After signing a $400-billion infrastructure deal with Iran and making Saudi Arabia its top oil supplier, Beijing was well positioned to broker a major diplomatic rapprochement between those bitter regional rivals, Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. Within weeks, the foreign ministers of the two nations sealed the deal with a deeply symbolic voyage to Beijing — a bittersweet reminder of the days not long ago when Arab diplomats paid court in Washington.

Finally, the Biden administration was stunned this month when Europe’s preeminent leader, Emmanuel Macron of France, visited Beijing for a series of intimate tête-à-tête chats with China’s President Xi. At the close of that extraordinary journey, which won French companies billions in lucrative contracts, Macron announced “a global strategic partnership with China” and promised he would not “take our cue from the U.S. agenda” over Taiwan. A spokesman for the Élysée Palace quickly released a pro forma clarification that “the United States is our ally, with shared values.” Even so, Macron’s Beijing declaration reflected both his own long-term vision of the European Union as an independent strategic player and that bloc’s ever-closer economic ties to China

The Future of Geopolitical Power

Projecting such political trends a decade into the future, Taiwan’s fate would seem, at best, uncertain. Instead of the “shock and awe” of aerial bombardments, Washington’s default mode of diplomatic discourse in this century, Beijing prefers stealthy, sedulous geopolitical pressure. In building its island bases in the South China Sea, for example, it inched forward incrementally — first dredging, then building structures, next runways, and finally emplacing anti-aircraft missiles — in the process avoiding any confrontation over its functional capture of an entire sea.

Lest we forget, Beijing has built its formidable economic-political-military power in little more than a decade. If its strength continues to increase inside Eurasia’s geopolitical substrate at even a fraction of that head-spinning pace for another decade, it may be able to execute a deft geopolitical squeeze-play on Taiwan like the one that drove the U.S. out of Afghanistan. Whether from a customs embargo, incessant naval patrols, or some other form of pressure, Taiwan might just fall quietly into Beijing’s grasp.

Should such a geopolitical gambit prevail, the U.S. strategic frontier along the Pacific littoral would be broken, possibly pushing its Navy back to a “second island chain” from Japan to Guam — the last of Brzezinski’s criteria for the true waning of U.S. global power. In that event, Washington’s leaders could once again find themselves sitting on the proverbial diplomatic and economic sidelines, wondering how it all happened.

Copyright 2023 Alfred W. McCoy

Via Tomdispatch.com