Geopolitics Playlist And Discussion Thread

[zazen]

Many times I come across geopolitical videos that are so wide ranging - they don’t quite fit in any single thread. Here’s a thread to share such videos and discuss geopolitics in general.

Don’t jump to conclude that sharing such videos means endorsing all the views in such videos, and ignore the clickbaity titles and thumbnails that are unfortunately common these days despite the content being worth listening to.

Starting off with three all encompassing videos:

- Jeffrey Sachs covering how the world got to where it is today (Uni-polar)

- Scott Horton covering US foreign policy in detail (there’s a recent Lex Fridman podcast 10 hrs long but this is more condensed)

- Matt Williams (Willy OAM) on global geopolitics and how all the players are positioning themselves. Quite a mind blowing listen. Doesn’t embed so here’s the URL:

https://youtu.be/6OaP6Hi0OSk?si=tacdv0wa2gCzC3cc

 

Edited September 3 by zazen

[Hatfort]

I'm rescuing this topic for this interesting discussion between Sachs and Mearshamer about spheres of influence in the multipolar world. What establishes a sphere of influence? I'd say geographic proximity would be the most important factor. They also make a distinction between a non-restricted economic influence and a restricted military influence. 

Of course, the Ukrainian conflict comes into the conversations, but also the Cuban Missile Crisis. Would the USA sit down and respect the freedom between Mexico and China to establish Chinese ballistic bases all through the Mexican border, pointing at the USA. No way, so it's not that hard to understand that Russia won't accept an equivalent of that in Ukraine either. 

[zazen]

@Hatfort Nice share. I remember another thread Raze made with them two discussing geopolitics. I grappled with the differences they had to make sense of it and commented on it here:

On 10/1/2024 at 9:56 AM, zazen said:

Often I write, as I think others do too, from the lens of international politics and justice (idealist - Sachs) because thats the cultural marinade of liberalism we're all swimming in. It's the liberal order we're trying to (and told to) build. It defers to justice before peace, rather than the game of power politics human nature finds it far too easy to default to (realist - Mearshimer).

We created psycho-political frameworks of laws and institutions so that we don't have to use the might makes right way of doing things which is often bloody and brutal. We went from managing our societies through raw physicality to refined psychology - doesn't the notion of us being civilised rest upon this shift? From raw to refined, from physical brawn to the psychological use of our brains to affect change and peacefully transfer positions of power.

On 10/1/2024 at 10:16 AM, zazen said:

The whole paradigm of containment is problematic. The US only seeks to develop the world up to the point they can benefit from it, but not to the point it challenges their hegemony. China, Russia and co go to war out of necessity, the West goes to war looking for the next one... and even its utmost prominent analyst Mearsheimer who claims to be a scholar of realpolitik, can't come to terms with the reality that China's growth poses no existential threat that needs containing, but rather engaging with.

Mearsheimer surrenders to the power dynamics of human nature, while Sachs aspires to the principles of human nurture (nature vs nurture, power vs principle). Mearsheimer's world view is fatalsitic in that it projects onto China the Wests own behaviour because ''this is how all power operates'' and ''this is the nature of things'' leaving out any variation in how that power or nature can be potentially exercised or nurtured towards better ends. Otherwise why bother with any civilization building - why not just default to ''nature'' and ''law of the jungle''.

We shouldn't resign to the law of the jungle where power rules (darwinian minded ''realists''), we can't ever erase power dynamics and survival pressure either (detached utopian progressives) - we can only manage them properly (through maturity, diplomacy, humility). These realists sometimes just come across like nihilists and leave little hope or space for cooperation. They surrender to the human animal in us, rather than working with the humanity (consciousness) in us that separates man from animal.

On 10/1/2024 at 10:45 AM, zazen said:

Westerners celebrate the idea that their relatively peaceful and stable societies are the result of democracy and human rights. Western countries aren't only more peaceful and prosperous due to democracy (or the perception of it) but due to anti-democratic practices abroad.  The prosperity and peace they enjoy within their borders is underpinned by maintaining a inherently anti-democratic, hegemonic order beyond their borders.

The West speaks of principles but acts with power, to them power is the principle though they speak in opposing terms. The attitude is that peace and prosperity is attained through the existence of or imposition of power - even if it delays justice and prolongs current injustice. Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum - If You Want Peace, Prepare For War. The existence of power acts as a deterrence, which brings about peace so long as that power isn't abused or challenged.

Justice before peace is how we hope the world could work, grounded in law and principles (Sachs). The imposition of peace by positions of power is grounded in power dynamics and pragmatism and often how the world does work (Mearsheimer).

The world works on a spectrum between the two - between power and principle. We dance between the aspirational values our society claims to cherish but that our political class and state fails to embody - and who often default to what is already embodied in our base human nature which is raw power and survival. This causes a collective cognitive dissonance and a visible hypocrisy.

It's this hypocrisy of calling oneself civilised whilst the other barbaric and primitive that rubs a lot of the Global South the wrong way. The hypocrite stands on a pedestal of their own making, pontificating about virtues they fail to embody and casting others as evil, for sins they themselves commit and attempt to conceal through propaganda and linguistic gymnastics.

This lack of integrity, and gap between actions and words or between rhetoric and reality is what erodes the trust needed in a multipolar world. This is why the world is bifurcating between the East and West, and parallel systems (BRICS) are being built which the West now bemoans. The next decades will be heavily predicated along these lines.

Wrote that last year, and it's panning out along those lines as we see today.

[Breakingthewall]

35 minutes ago, zazen said:

It's this hypocrisy of calling oneself civilised whilst the other barbaric and primitive that rubs a lot of the Global South the wrong way. The hypocrite stands on a pedestal of their own making, pontificating about virtues they fail to embody and casting others as evil, for sins they themselves commit and attempt to conceal through propaganda and linguistic gymnastics.

 

The history of Europe is the history of total war.
Until not too long ago, it was assumed that the natural state of nations was war.
Periods of peace were merely intervals between wars.
Everyone enjoyed themselves with their colorful uniforms, drums, and trumpets, their bows, victories, and defeats, until the First World War arrived.
Then the game shifted from a “savage sport of gentlemen” to “absolute horror.”

From that cauldron of horror emerged dreadful figures who could only think of the next satanic orgy, while in Asia the Japanese descended into a state of collective madness, their repressed and ceremonial nature erupting into a wave of total aggression.

With those ingredients came the Second World War, when the gates of hell opened.
Let’s not deceive ourselves: the Americans and the British were simply a better business than the Nazis and the Japanese.
And the gray empire that Russia imposed for decades over much of Europe was a sentence to suicidal depression.

Thanks to the gods, who gifted us those works of art of destruction called nukes, the satanic orgy did not repeat itself again and again.
Now humanity is condemned to understand each other, since the only alternative is annihilation.
The law of life, which would have forced us to keep fighting forever for the sake of evolution, has met an absolute limit: the apocalypse.

So, only the era of peace remains, one that will inevitably come sooner or later.
Perhaps then we will all commit suicide together, out of sheer lack of meaning.