{"id":217123,"date":"2022-08-01T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=217123"},"modified":"2022-07-26T04:14:01","modified_gmt":"2022-07-26T03:14:01","slug":"for-those-about-to-rock-nam-2-0-salutes-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/08\/for-those-about-to-rock-nam-2-0-salutes-you\/","title":{"rendered":"For Those about to Rock, NAM 2.0 Salutes You"},"content":{"rendered":"

NAM 2.0 drive \u2013 of which China is a key player \u2013 stands in stark opposition to how the Empire of Chaos \u2013 and Lies \u2013 wove its toxic net, via the war on terror, since the start of the millennium.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito (right) with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (left) and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, shown here meeting in 1956, are considered to be among the founding fathers of NAM. Radio Free Europe<\/p><\/div>\n

22 Jul 2022 – <\/em>Those were the days, in 1955, at the legendary Bandung conference in Indonesia, when the newly emancipated Global South started dreaming of building a new world, via what became configured later in 1961 in Belgrade as the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).<\/p>\n

The Empire of Chaos \u2013 and Lies \u2013 would never allow a starring role for NAM. So it played dirty: everything from hardcore subversion and bribing to military coups and proto-color revolutions.<\/p>\n

Yet now, the Spirit of Bandung lives again, via a sort of NAM 2.0 on steroids: a Newly Aligned Movement, with the leaders of Eurasian integration at the vanguard.<\/p>\n

We just had a taste of which way the geopolitical wind is blowing at the gathering of a new power troika in Tehran<\/a>. Unlike Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill in 1943, Putin, Raisi and Erdogan did not meet to carve up the world. They met essentially to discuss how another world is possible \u2013 through bilaterals, trilaterals, multilaterals and an enhanced role for an array of relatively new geopolitical and geoeconomic institutions.<\/p>\n

Russia \u2013 and China \u2013 have been on the forefront of all recent key decisions. Their diplomacy has brought Iran to join the SCO as a full member. Their pull is attracting key Global South players to join BRICS+. Russia has all but convinced Turkey to join BRICS+, the SCO and the EAEU, and facilitated the re-approximation of Tehran and Ankara as well as Tehran and Riyadh. Russia has largely influenced the remake\/remodel process across West Asia.<\/p>\n

This NAM 2.0 drive \u2013 of which China is a key player \u2013 stands in stark opposition to how the Empire of Chaos \u2013 and Lies \u2013 wove its toxic net, via the war on terror, since the start of the millennium. The Empire tried to subdue what it described as MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) on the basis of two invasions\/occupations (Afghanistan-Iraq); a total devastation (Libya); and a protracted proxy war (Syria). All eventually failed.<\/p>\n

And that brings us to the stunning contrast between these two foreign policy approaches, graphically illustrated by the spectacular failure of the teleprompter-reading \u201cleader of the free world\u201d in his visit to Jeddah \u2013 he was not even allowed to go to Riyadh \u2013 compared to Putin\u2019s performance in Tehran.<\/p>\n

Not only we are witnessing the lineaments of a Russia\/Iran\/Turkey informal alliance; we are witnessing the alliance reading a soft riot act to the Empire: leave Syria, before you suffer yet another humiliation. And with a Kurd-directed corollary: keep away from the Americans and recognize the authority of Damascus before it\u2019s too late.<\/p>\n

Ankara could never admit it in public, but the fact is Sultan Erdogan \u2013 as much against US troops in Syria as Putin and Raisi \u2013 even seems to have swiftly calibrated his previous designs on Syrian sovereign territory.<\/p>\n

The much-debated Turkish military operation in northern Syria in the end may be restricted to taming the YPG Kurds. The heart of the action will in fact revolve around how the Russia\/Iran\/Turkey\/Syria alliance will make like impossible for Americans stealing Syrian oil.<\/p>\n

As Russia is now on \u201ctake no prisoners\u201d mode when facing the collective West \u2013 the mantra in every intervention by Putin, Lavrov, Medvedev, Patrushev \u2013 and on top of it firmly aligned with China and Iran, it\u2019s inevitable that every other player across West Asia and beyond is giving undivided attention to the new game in town.<\/p>\n

Go Caspian, Young Man<\/strong><\/p>\n

Interconnecting West Asia and Central Asia, the Caspian Sea has finally reached the geopolitical and geoeconomic limelight \u2013 complete with the groundbreaking consensus reached by the five littoral states at the Caspian Summit in late June to officially ban NATO\u00a0from these waters.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the leadership in Tehran in no time realized how the Caspian is the perfect, cost-conscious corridor from Iran to the heart of Russia along the Volga.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s no wonder that Putin himself, in Tehran, proposed the construction of a key stretch of highway on the St Petersburg-Persian Gulf route, much to the delight of the Iranians. Cue to the nostalgic Great Game crowd in that former \u201crule the waves\u201d island getting serial heart attacks: they could never imagine the Russian \u201cempire\u201d finally having full access to the warm waters of the Persian Gulf.<\/p>\n

So we\u2019re back to the absolutely crucial re-engineering of the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC) \u2013 which will play for Russia and Iran a parallel role the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) plays for China. In both cases, it\u2019s all about multimodal Eurasia-wide trade and development corridors immune from interference by the imperial Navy.<\/p>\n

And here we see the renewed importance of the hyper-strategic liberation of Mariupol and Kherson by the Russian and DPR forces. The Sea of Azov is now configured as a de facto Russian lake \u2013 and the same will eventually happen to what is bound to remain of the (currently Ukrainian) Black Sea coast, Odessa included.<\/p>\n

So we have the ultra-strategic Caspian-Black Sea maritime corridor \u2013 via the Volga-Don canal \u2013 seamlessly connected to the Black Sea-Mediterranean, and up north, all the way to the Baltic and the fast developing Atlantic-Pacific connector, the Northern Sea Route. Call it the Russian Heartland Water Roads.<\/p>\n

The NATO\/Five Eyes\/Intermarium combo has absolutely nothing to counteract these (overland) facts on the (Heartland) ground except to throw a pile of HIMARS into the Ukrainian black hole. And of course, keep de-industrializing Europe. In contrast, those across the Global South with a keen sense of history \u2013 as in the grand debate of ideas in a Hegelian sense \u2013 and also versed in geography and trade relations are busy getting ready to hit (and profit from) the new groove.<\/p>\n

Have strategic ambiguity, will travel <\/strong><\/p>\n

As much as it\u2019s a blast to survey all the instances of Russia playing strategic ambiguity to levels capable of baffling the entire, bloated \u201cWestern intel\u201d apparatus, what is coming to the forefront is how Putin \u2013 and Patrushev \u2013 are now willfully turning up the pain dial to tactically exhaust not only the Ukrainian black hole but the whole of NATOstan.<\/p>\n

Western governments are collapsing. Sanctions are being ditched \u2013 practically in secret. A Deep Freeze winter is a given. And then there\u2019s the incoming economic\/financial crisis, the Definitive Monster from Hell, as Martin Armstrong has made it quite clear: \u201cThere is no way they can get out of this other than default. If they default, they are worried about millions of people storming the parliaments of Europe\u2026This is really a tremendous financial crisis that we are facing.\u00a0They have been borrowing year after year since WWII with zero intention of paying anything back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Moscow may be revving up the turbines to launch \u2013 this coming Fall? In the middle of Winter? Next Spring? \u2013 a multi-spectrum Mother of All Offensives, capitalizing on a rolling series of interconnected strategies that have already rendered dazed and confused every NATOstan \u201canalyst\u201d in sight.<\/p>\n

That would explain Putin looking like he\u2019s cheerfully whistling JJ Cale\u2019s Call Me the Breeze<\/em> in most of his public appearances. In his crucial intervention at the Strong Ideas for a New Time forum<\/a>, he enthusiastically promoted the advent of \u201ctruly revolutionary\u201d and \u201cenormous\u201d changes that would lead to the creation of a new, \u201charmonious, fairer and more community-focused and safe\u201d world order.<\/p>\n

Yet that\u2019s not for everyone: \u201conly truly sovereign states can ensure high growth dynamics.\u201d\u00a0What that implies is that the unipolar world order, followed by states in the collective West which are hardly sovereign, is\u00a0condemned to fail, as it\u2019s \u201cbecoming a brake on the development of our civilization.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Only a self-confident sovereign who does not expect anything constructive from the collective West can get away with describing it as \u201cracist and neo-colonial<\/em>\u201d, bearing an ideology that\u00a0\u201cis becoming increasingly more like totalitarianism<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0In the old NAM days these words would be met with an assassination.<\/p>\n

So will the \u201crules-based international order\u201d be preserved? Not a chance, argues Putin: the changes are \u201cirreversible<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0For those about to rock, NAM 2.0 salutes you.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at <\/em>Asia Times and<\/em> columnist for<\/em> Consortium News and<\/em> Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he\u2019s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, and Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. He is the author of <\/em>Globalistan<\/a> (2007),<\/em> Red Zone Blues<\/a> (2007), <\/em>Obama Does Globalistan<\/a> (2009), <\/em>Empire of Chaos<\/a> (2014) and <\/em>2030<\/a> (2015), all by Nimble Books. Pepe was contributing editor to <\/em>The Empire and The Crescent and<\/em> Tutto in Vendita in Italy and is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 strategic-culture.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

22 Jul 2022 – Those were the days, in 1955, at the legendary Indonesia conference when the Global South started dreaming of building a new world via the Non-Aligned Movement. NAM 2.0 drive \u2013 of which China is a key player \u2013 stands in stark opposition to how the Empire of Chaos wove its toxic net since the start of the millennium.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":217128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[244,742,2899,278,395,2200,1160],"class_list":["post-217123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-focus","tag-china","tag-iran","tag-non-aligned-movement-nam","tag-russia","tag-turkiye","tag-us-empire","tag-world-order"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}