From a geopolitical look, the most general context of the moment is the attempt by the United States to halt its decline as a unipolar power and its refusal to accept the consolidation of a multipolar world, with much more balanced rules of the game than those established after 1945, which imposed a decisive US influence on the scheme of international relations.
Today it is already clear that the rise of China to become a leading economic power, the recomposition of Russia as a major factor in energy, military and geopolitical terms, the greater gravitation of India, Iran, Turkey and other Asian countries, the structuring of blocs such as BRICS, ASEAN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Eurasian Union or the African Union of Nations have unbalanced the single power scheme devised by U.S. strategists, promoting the path to greater independence and sovereignty in relation to their desires.
In contrast, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has been expanding its borders contrary to what was agreed in 1990 with then CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Since then, it has added 14 new countries to the East, now totalling 30 members. Although proclaiming a defensive spirit, this bloc has acted militarily in Kuwait, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, showing its offensive character.
The recent formation of the AUKUS military axis between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, together with the summit meeting held in March of this year in the Negev desert between the governments of Israel, the United States, Egypt, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Morocco with the aim of forming an alliance fundamentally against Iran, speak to us of the configuration of a confrontational scheme against the emerging powers.
The permanent attack in Latin America on left-wing or progressive governments, added to events of a destabilising nature in areas close to Russia such as the disturbances in Belarus and Kazakhstan or the provocation of China with Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, speak to us of a global strategy in which the United States is trying by all means to stop the levelling of world power and to continue trying to be the sole power, supported above all by the waste of billions of dollars in military hardware.
For their part, the fact that the countries of the European Union, faced with their own difficulties, are beginning to turn their gaze towards the enormous demographic and economic weight of the East, especially the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to the fabulous business derived from China’s Belt and Road project, or to the increased supply of cheap energy from Russia through new gas pipelines such as NordStream II, set off alarm bells in the US deep state, which undoubtedly encouraged the UK’s exit from the bloc in order to weaken it and fuelled the 2014 uprising in Ukraine. The attempt to join NATO and eventually equip the country with nuclear weapons was a trigger for the ongoing Russian military operation.
The US objective with this advance is undoubtedly to re-discipline Europe, to create a new Iron Curtain to prevent possible cooperation with Asia and to prevent the European continent, which never ceased to be militarily occupied after the last world conflagration, from achieving greater autonomy.
Another aspect of profound geo-historical significance at this juncture is the West’s illegitimate claim to remain the world’s pre-eminent culture, while maintaining some of the prosperity gained from the plunder and humiliation of millions of human beings in its former colonies, a prosperity that is now in sharp decline for the majority of its inhabitants.
Feudal disengagement and supremacist bidding
As the US loses ground on a globalised financial and technological capitalist chessboard driven by its own strategies, it now seems to be engaging, as at other times, in a double-bladed tactic. On the one hand, it is trying to readjust with a relative feudal disengagement in the fields that are not entirely favourable to it, while on the other hand trying to maintain its supremacy by any means in those that it considers fundamental, such as control of the economy through its currency as the standard of exchange, ruthless technological competition and its status as the top dog in international organisations.
The globalising influence, neoliberal ideology and the illusion of single leadership had a short heyday, barely more than a decade, as the people, after the stupor and pain of their propagation, resumed a new rebellion against these policies. The neoliberal failure was deepened in the West with the speculative bank failures of 2007-2008. This social unrest continues to this day, channelled through different options, whether through popular support for progressive fronts or, unfortunately, also on the right, through the advance of nationalism or retrograde fundamentalism.
China’s strategy is on a different track, despite using similar trade and financial schemes, in an attempt to sustain open trade and global value chains without a dent. The concept of a ‘community of shared destiny for mankind’, the central motto of Xi era diplomacy, is certainly much more promising. But is it an updated translation of China’s perennial quest for harmony or is it just a phrase coined to hide an elephant behind a screen? In other words, to delay an even more radical adverse reaction from the Western hegemon to the now clearly visible growth of the East. Or perhaps neither one nor the other, but both at the same time.
Globalisation and social fragmentation
Beyond these tactics of two competing powers, globalisation, i.e., the total interconnection of different cultures – quite different from the economic globalisation led by corporate transnationals – is an unstoppable and accelerating process. It is not only anachronistic but impossible to pretend to go backwards in the constitution of this first civilisation on a planetary scale, which leads those who take part in this reaction to sink into the mire of resentment and violence in the face of difference, a downward spiral with no possibility of personal or social improvement.
Denying globalisation is like trying to break the laminated glass of a car windscreen. It can be shattered by a blow into numerous particles, but it holds together so that the shards do not injure the occupants of the vehicle.
And precisely what is happening with the second process underway, parallel to globalisation, is an enormous tendency towards fragmentation, separatism, the breaking up of the social fabric, even division in the most intimate ambits and even contradiction in one’s own interiority.
The FORCE driving this social atomisation is the dissolution of ties based on values that are losing their validity due to the speed of social change. Paradoxically, however, an important human contingent, thrown into loneliness, exclusion and the lack of solid references, seeks refuge and containment in the past, in the promise of lost paradises, in conservative conceptions of worlds that no longer exist, with the illusion of stopping time and history.
This dynamic of the inner world in people today causes delays in human evolution. Not realising this world, not understanding the difference in speed between possible changes in the social landscape and in the innermost human landscape, not investing energy in the development of this universe of consciousness in parallel with the transformation of unworthy conditions of misery and exclusion, hinders and slows down the necessary progress in social, political and interpersonal terms. They seem like two different worlds, but they are one and the same.
The opportunity for Latin America and the Caribbean
The Latin American and Caribbean region has a great opportunity and a fundamental role to play in this process, which can be synthesised in three programmatic postulates.
Its unity, denied by the colonial powers, should be accelerated through collaboration and twinning within the framework of integration processes that contemplate not only inter-state cooperation but also the fundamental participation of social organisations and different cultures in this process.
To become an outpost of a model of decentralised power, inclusive social conditions and real democracy.
And finally, to promote the simultaneity of social change and inner Guide change guided by a new scale of humanist values, making non-violence the axis of a powerful collective transformation.
In short, creating a demonstration effect of a humanised continental nation, prologue and antecedent of the “other possible world”, the future Universal Human Nation.
