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“Most analysts and historians fail to understand that starting in the early 1980s, China had become a full fledged capitalist country. There are powerful US business interests including Big Pharma, major hi-tech companies, banking institutions which are firmly entrenched inside China.” [1]
China has now become a dynamic global financial superpower. Since 2010, it is second economically only to the United States. [2]
Nowadays, according to the United States Statistics Division, “China makes up 28.4% of total world manufacturing output accounting for over $4 trillion to the world economy! The United States makes up 16.6% of Global output worth $1.8 trillion. The third largest exporter does not even make it into the double digits.”[3]
The graph that follows demonstrates quite starkly the rise in the countries’ GDP from 1960 to 2022. [4]
Indeed, the nation has taken a leadership role in building a new generation of Silk Roads across Eurasia. And BRICS, the group comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa has now added five new members: Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia. The partnership is now larger than the G7![5]
But the Red Dragon is more than a competitor. It is a threat! At least that’s the thinking of the Pentagon. [6]
According to the U.S. Department of Defense 2022 National Defense Strategy, the People’s Republic of China “remains our most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades” and quoting President Biden’s National Security Strategy, the PRC is “the most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades.” [7]
Strangely though, the course taken by China for the last fifty years, got significant help from Henry Kissinger and the Trilateral Commission which was born in 1973 from two American minds: Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller. The Organization is supposedly devoted to bringing together leaders in policy, business and media in an attempt to solve “some of the world’s toughest problems.” [8][9]
Now that an election in the island of Taiwan recently chose a leader, Vice President Lai Ching-te, who is propping up commitments to opposing unification with China, commentators in the U.S. media are speculating on the likelihood of China doing something, like upping its military presence in the country. Something these “Authoritarian Regimes” are expected to do. [10]
This episode of the Global Research News Hour takes a special look at China, its background, and the threats, real and imaginary that are in evidence at this crucial time after the Taiwan election and historically generally.
In our first half hour, we invite back writer and author Patrick Wood to guide us through Technocracy, the true politics of China post 1980. He will share the role of Kissinger and the Trilats in moulding this system to their liking and ultimately taking over countries around the world.
In our second half hour, we are treated once again to the reflections and assessments of Pepe Escobar. He will put forward his views about the Taiwan election, China’s advancement, and the advance of the Russia-China Axis of resistance into the future.
Patrick Wood is a leading and critical expert on Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Agenda 21, 2030 Agenda and historic Technocracy. He is the author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015) and co-author of Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II (1978-1980) with the late Antony C. Sutton. He is also a leading expert on the elitist Trilateral Commission. He is a frequent speaker and guest on radio shows across the U.S.
Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News, The Cradle and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.
(Global Research News Hour Episode 417)
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Transcript of Patrick Wood, January 15, 2024
Global Research: China is a technocracy, that is, with a new governing system that is neither communist nor capitalist nor democratic. This is the point of view argued by my first guest, Patrick Wood. He is a leading and critical expert on sustainable development, green economy of Agenda 21, 2030 Agenda and historic technocracy. Also, a frequent speaker and guest on radio shows across the United States. Global Research News Hour got hold of him and started our conversation by getting him to help define technocracy.
Patrick Wood: Technocracy as it was invented in 1932, was defined as a “Replacement economic system for free market economics and capitalism.” There is no other way to explain it. It was a resource-based economic system, not predicated on supply and demand. Money was going to be exchanged for energy and in particular, energy script, that would serve as a currency sort of – so to speak, to regulate the economic activity.
It’s also interesting that they were very interested in social engineering, as well. There was a problem that they had that they couldn’t make things, factories and so on, you couldn’t get people to do what you wanted them to do. So, they created this elaborate system of social engineering – and they call it a science, science of social engineering – we see this today almost everywhere we look.
GR: So, I guess —
PW: People are messing with our minds. There’s just no end of it, right?
GR: When it first occurred to people, I guess the technology wasn’t quite ready, 50 or 60 or 70 years later the technology caught up and now —
PW: Mm-hmm.
GR: — they’re moving ahead, right?
PW: That’s exactly right. This whole concept was adopted by the Trilateral Commission as I argue in my books. That was created by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1979 – excuse me, 1973. And the Trilateral Commission stated that it wanted to create a new international economic order. It was all over their literature at the time. And I see, now, that they were talking about technocracy as a new economic system. They didn’t really specify back then, but I see it now very clearly that that’s what they were talking about back then.
GR: You wrote that the Trilateral Commission and Henry Kissinger in particular played roles in taking China as a communist state and turning it into a technocracy. Explain, you know, what went on and how it has gone from being a communist country to no longer a – to being more of a technocracy.
PW: Well, Brzezinski in 1976 brought Deng Xiaoping to the United States. Wined him – that was the Chairman of the Communist Party at that point. They wined him, they dined him, and you know, brought him onto the world stage. At that point, China looked a lot like North Korea does today. They basically had no economic system at all, they were mired in poverty as a nation and as a people. And when Brzezinski got ahold of him, Chairman Deng, he taught him about technocracy. Not about capitalism, not about free market economics. He taught him about technocracy.
Now let me back up here and say, “Why?” The thing that endeared Brzezinski to Rockefeller was Brzezinski’s book circa 1970 called, “Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era.” That was the exact title of his book. In that book, he described a vision of how technology was going to be used to basically conquer the world. He foresaw a future age where this technetronic era – it really should have been “technocratic,” but that’s the term he uses. So, this is what China started out with, with this vision of the technetronic era.
We’ve seen this – I’ve seen this, others haven’t, obviously – but I see this as a continuing trap against the free world where they are marching to a different drummer and it’s not capitalism, it’s not communism.
But scholars have pointed out that technocracy has become the de-facto system that China is operating under right now. And that’s not just me saying that. You know, people study China – political science people and so on – they see it. But nobody else wants to really hear what we have to say about it.
GR: Wow. So, China was really the first test case, as it were, —
PW: Yeah.
GR: — where there were these principles being applied. I mean, what exactly is the whole roster of reasons why they made China the test case?
PW: It was a blank slate. There was nothing blocking them. The huge – China had a huge population, number one. But it was an absolute empty chalkboard. You could put anything on it you want to. That’s what they did. There was no other nation on Earth of the size of China that could be plied by these people, that is, the elitists of the Trilateral Commission. And when their contractors, their companies that belong to the Trilateral Commission, when they moved in on China, it staged all the infrastructure that they needed, that they would need, to conquer the West with all the industries that subsequently moved to China. Took away jobs from us, took away economic activity from us. And this was their mission. They wanted to build this nation quickly into a technocratic model that would export itself all over the world, including back to us again.
GR: So, there are other nations that are also becoming, you know, taking on technocracy. Is this all like – you planted the seed in China and it spread from there? There’s like Singapore, South Korea, and you know, other places. Or did – was there the United States’ involvement in helping to spread it around the – beyond China?
PW: Well, there’s two parts to that story. One is: China is proud that they have taken their influence to nations around the world who would receive it to export their technocracy to those nations. On the other hand, you look at the United States now which is then a willing participant with China to this same end.
This follows a very long history of finance by Wall Street interests, for instance. Again, and also, a global multi-national corporations. These people – let’s look too at the World Economic Forum, too, with all the companies that are invested in them. All of these forces have seemingly joined up with China to export technocracy all over the world. The United Nations has had a place in this as well with sustainable development. It’s the same, you know, warmed-over technocracy from the last century. But the United Nations has pushed this sustainable development agenda all over the world. And China is big with the United Nations, as you know as well. But they’ve been doing this by stealth, mostly, for the last 50 years, and here we are now.
GR: What are some of the specific concerns you have about technocracy that have begun to manifest in countries like the United States or France or Canada, and you know, countries of that high grade?
PW: It’s going to result in a scientific dictatorship at some point. It’s on its way right now. A lot of people can see it, especially like China with their social credit scoring system where they can control people almost to minutiae. But the concept of a scientific dictatorship is that the science, the algorithm, the AI, et cetera, will manage the human population as a dictator. Not as a person, it will – like a human might be, maybe a Hitler or a Nero or whatever from history. But a scientific dictatorship will have absolutely no compassion, no capacity for mercy or human values that we would like to be part of. And the result of it is: all personal freedom will be gone. Absolutely smashed.
GR: I know that you started to write about artificial intelligence, you just mentioned it, the AI. And I mean, I’ve heard recently that someone said that now that employers are – they’re not evaluating people who apply for jobs. You let AI do it and then they’ll screen out people on all kinds of weird principles, you know? Like even the adjustment of their name or other things that maybe something we didn’t intend, but the AIs are doing it. Not exactly the direction I saw it going, but you know – do you think that the existence of this AI – and it’s still kind of we’re not quite sure where it’s going, but will it act as an accelerator of sorts to technocracy and these distinctions that you’ve expressed?
PW: Absolutely. And I want to say that AI and most of the progressive technologies that we see today, these are all – they’ve all been sponsored by technocrats along the way who do not care about ethical values or moral values in what they do. They invent because they can, not because anybody asked them to. As a group, they are morally bankrupt, in my opinion.
But when somebody like a Sam Altman, for instance, talks about OpenAI, you’ll see him talking about, ‘Well, it’s going to be a big threat to humanity. It can destroy us all in the end.’ Other AI people are saying that too, by the way. But then, they go back to their own turf, to their own drawing board, get out the whip and slam their programmers into high gear, ‘Get with it guys, we got to be’ – you know, ‘we’re going to beat the competition out there.’ There’s no checks and balances in this.
We see this with other things as well: big pharma is a big one right now. These people are totally unplugged from reality, in my opinion. And they also exhibit a technocratic mindset that’s so dangerous. They’re coming up with stuff that they should not even be doing experiments with.
GR: Mm-hmm.
PW: But, you know —
GR: Yeah, it seems like we’re not – that it’s starting off as AI being servants to human kind, but now pretty soon it’s going to be the other way around, right?
PW: Well, it is. This is what is intended in the first place.
GR: Mm-hmm.
PW: It may have started off, you know, more innocuous. But now that these technocrat minds have got ahold of it, they see this as the end game of social engineering. This was in the their plan, this was in their credo way back in the 1930s. They wanted to use the science of social engineering to control everything in society. They can do that now. At least they’re on the verge of it right now.
We see this AI is just sweeping the world and it’s showing up in all the places that is displacing workers. I saw this article yesterday it was, I think, that Wal-Mart now is firing all of the people who checks the receipts when you leave the store. You know, the checkers? I don’t know —
GR: Yeah.
PW: — what they call them, but you know, they sit there and they look at your basket and then give you a check mark and there you go. You leave the store with whatever you bought. They’re using AI now to check these baskets completely. No humans now are going to do this. And they said they’re going to fire every checker in the country and they’re going to replace it with an AI scanner who can see exactly what you’ve got in your cart. They don’t say that they’re going to record your conversation or they take a picture of you for, you know, facial recognition scans. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it does. But you know, we see this everywhere now. You keep – once your eyes are open to it, you’ll see it being applied in all unexpected places.
GR: Mm-hmm. Yeah, well we’re just about out of time now. But would you like to add any remaining thoughts you have about the technocratic course China has been on and how other countries are either —
PW: Yeah.
GR: — embracing and how they can resist China’s —
PW: Yes.
GR: — technocratic example.
PW: Yes. Let me just – let me say that the Rockefeller crowd has always been fond of China going back to the 1920s at least. They’ve had a love affair with China and that probably added to their desire to, you know, bring China back on the world stage. We see people like Brzezinski achieving this. We see this with people like the late Henry Kissinger who was the forerunner of Brzezinski to bring China out of the Dark Ages.
Kissinger was a Rockefeller man since his college days. He served as an agent of Rockefeller personally and as a stooge of – with the Trilateral Commission, as well. But you might remember that Kissinger recently bragged that he had been to China on over 100 trips in his lifetime. You have to think what that means. There were some years that he went once. Other years, he went four times perhaps, but he was in love with China all those years. And when he died, Chairman Xi said about Henry Kissinger, that he was, “Our most valuable and trusted friend over the decades.” This just tells you something about what’s going on here.
GR: And just in the minute we’ve got left, I mean, just maybe remind us about how we could go about resisting this technocratic example that’s —
PW: You bet. People can go to technocracy.news, that’s the first place that I would go to get in the swim of the news here. I would also encourage people to go to citizensforfreespeech.org to see where – or at least the role that free speech is going to play this year especially in 2024.
Transcript of Pepe Escobar, January 16, 2024
(Escobar here is commenting on the result of the January 13 election in Taiwan.)
Global Research: This election result was actually a weaker result in the sense that it only commands a minority of the seats in the legislative body. Does that mean the US concern about increasing chances of China possibly marching militarily into Taiwan to fend off any threats to the One China principle, does that have any merit?
Pepe Escobar: Oh, God. Look, I’ve been listening to this movement for —
GR: Yeah.
PE: — so long, I really lost track, you know? When I used to live in Asia, in Southeast Asia in Hong Kong, I used to go to China a lot during the War on Terror years, et cetera. There’s not going to be a Chinese invasion of China. This is a figment of Straussian neocon psycho’s imagination. These people obviously never read Deng Xiaoping. And it’s very easy. Why don’t you get Deng Xiaoping’s complete works? It’s all there.
There is no rush. The reunification of Taiwan will happen when the conditions are right and the, let’s say, informal deadline which Deng was always reiterating, is 2049.
GR: Hmm.
PE: What is happening, what has been happening has happened and will continue to happen is endless American provocations because they want to force Beijing’s hand. And obviously, they use their fifth-columnists all over Taipei they use to manipulate the American embassy in Hong Kong for that manner. They have their colour revolution specialists working in reverse in Taipei, you name it.
GR: Mm-hmm, yes.
PE: The result of these elections is very straightforward, I will cut to the chase totally: Lai got basically 40 percent of the vote. So, he is, for all practical purposes, a lame duck president. The opposition unfortunately, because they are split, they got roughly 60 percent of the vote. So, Lai got 40.5 percent compared to Tsai, the last time when she got 57 percent. So, it’s a minority government. They lost their parliamentary majority. They have most of the country in effect against them. Let’s say almost – easily almost two thirds of the country against them.
And what the Taiwanese – and this is something that from Hong Kong and from Shanghai, from other parts of the Chinese diaspora, we get inside information from Taipei. And what the Taiwanese basically say directly or between the lines is, ‘We prefer the status quo.’ So, this means nothing is going to change for a long, long time.
GR: Mm-hmm.
PE: They know that Beijing is not going to do anything rash. They know that it would be absolutely foolish and suicidal for a minority president, for instance, to declare – or push independence or declare independence. So, the status quo is the default position of the overwhelming majority of Taiwanese. Obviously, none of that will preclude more American operations, destabilizing American operations, all sorts of hybrid war you can imagine or even later on, depending on how things evolve in the next two or three years. A false flag or a series of false flags.
GR: Mm-hmm.
PE: But if we take into consideration what Beijing wants, what Xi Jinping wants, and what the Taiwanese population want, there will be nothing violent on the horizon for the next years and we can even say decades. When we start approaching 2049 it’s another matter, because then – it’s already happening now. The interconnection of geo-economic especially between Taiwan and the mainland is huge. Not to mention, of course, this is all facilitated by the fact that most of them study in the same schools and they speak the same language.
So, it’s basically already integrated. What the Chinese may come up with in I would say the mid-term is a sort of one country, three systems. One country, three systems applies to Hong Kong. One country, three systems would apply to Taiwan, like Taiwan with an enormous margin of autonomy, but part of the mainland as well. This is something that could evolve, I’m sure. The people around Xi could come up with a very seductive framework that would be accepted by the majority of the Taiwanese population, as well. Everything apart from that is American wishful thinking, wet dreams, speculation, and frankly impotence. Because they know that to provoke a war, a proxy-war against China via Taiwan could probably be their Ukraine. Or Ukraine 2.0. And we all know what is happening to Ukraine right now, so I end my case here.
GR: Yeah. Well, in your recent article, “Year of the Dragon: Silk Roads, BRICS Roads, Sino-Roads,” you know, I mean we see about how China and its allies have been building bridges, building the high-speed rail all across Eurasia basically. And you know, this is a counterpart to the United States going and you know, starting wars here and there on, you know, engaged in two wars right now. They had a whole bunch of wars. They must be getting a little bit leery about entering into any new conflicts. Certainly, you know, a military conflict in China is simply off the table, although, you know, I don’t know about the colour revolution and so on. Anyway, I’m wondering about these plans there. It seems to be, you know, kind of critical for its – for China’s rise and success and… When exactly did it have its origin? I mean, it’s part of a long-term strategy. Did it start way back in the 1970s when it started its economic rise? Or did it follow its rise in might?
PE: Well, this is the story of my professional life this past 30 years. I’ve been writing about this practically on a weekly basis since the mid-90s. I moved to Asia 30 years ago, in fact. I moved to Asia from the West in 1994, because I wanted to know Asia from the inside and especially what I had seen in China when I travelled in China in the early ‘90s which was – it happened to coincide with Deng Xiaoping’s visit, the famous visit to the South. When Deng Xiaoping went to Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou and he gave the major impetus for the modernization drive of China based on these special economic zones in the South and then also in Shanghai. So, when you see that in front of you happening, I was so floored and I said, ‘Well, I have to come here and try to understand this from the inside.’
Then, when you start living in Asia and when you start going to China on a frequent basis. And in my case, when you live in Hong Kong where you have access to everything, all sorts of information coming from China, the transit through Hong Kong, then you understand the big picture and you understand the long-term big picture. Which came not only from Deng when Deng came to power in ‘78. It came during the Mao industrialization era.
And that’s why in this column that you mentioned, I reference one of the very, very good books about it explaining how everything that Deng, in fact, could use later on in this industrialization drive in the ‘80s and in the ‘90s. The basis were put by – the very complicated process of industrialization of China initiated during Mao.
So, when you understand – so, this did not come out of the blue. And China is a big power, it’s not something that started when they entered the WTO in 2001, you know, 20 years ago. It started 50 years ago, at least, not more. And that’s what extraordinary they are – there is a consistency to it. There are degrees, very complex degrees of planning in terms of succeeding a five-year plans that they multiply into three, five-year plans in one, for instance.
You know, two or three years ago, they were already planning all the way to 2035. This is something that is absolutely impossible in the West, where the US cannot plan for next week. Can you image doing three, five-year plans and discussing it? And discussing out of a grassroots basis, which is something that many people in the West don’t understand.
Lots of decisions that arrive at the Politburo and then at Xi’s desk for instance, they start at the grassroots level, they are presented in grassroots meetings, they go to regional governments, and then they start climbing the pyramid. And then, one day they reach the pyramid and there is a decision based on something that started in a little prefecture in the middle of a province in Sichuan, for instance.
It’s fascinating. It’s a form of a direct democracy that is not – it’s not fully appreciating the West – it’s not even understood how it works. So, and that’s what makes it so special in terms of – the Chinese system for everything that we can criticize about it, there’s no question about that. It’s essentially a meritocratic system. And this is what Xi has been very, very careful to emphasize since he came to power and since he started the overarching international Chinese framework of development, connectivity, which is the Belt and Road Initiative started a little over 10 years ago.
They’ve learned from their mistakes. They are always applying Deng Xiaoping, you know, crossing the river while filling the stones. So you know, you may slip in one of the stones and fall into the river and then you’ll go back and you’ll learn from your mistake. And this is what they’re doing all the time.
In terms of the Belt and Road, for instance, they made a lot of mistakes in the beginning in terms of loans that went to projects that would go nowhere. Or you know, instead of relying on a local workforce, bringing loads of Chinese workers. And they’re learning, they are reorganizing all that. They are learning from the Russians, as well, in terms of Russia – Russia is a multinational society, minorities living in Russia. The Chinese are learning to be more supple vis-a-vis their minorities the way the Russians are.
And this all has to do with high levels of education and a meritocracy. Which seems to be the exact opposite of what’s happening with the West right now. Low levels of education, lower and lower, and no meritocracy at all.
GR: Yeah, interesting. Could you talk about the artificial intelligence just for a minute, the AI. Because, you know, the US chips for AI, they are manufactured largely in Taiwan, you know, the Nvidia.
PE: Yeah.
GR: The Chinese chips that are faster now are being developed in China and —
PE: Of course.
GR: Yeah. But they could lead to China – like, the US is in the lead right now, but China could overtake them by 2030 or so. Could you talk about the development of that technology? Also, its role in the Taiwan situation and where this could lead in the Cold War, the Cold War 2.0 as it were, possibly thawing even between the United States and China.
PE: Yeah, but that’s – it proves once again that sanctions are some of the most stupid methods of coercion in modern history. It didn’t work with Iran, it didn’t work with Cuba. It didn’t work with Venezuela, it didn’t work with Russia. And it’s not working with China. It’s very simple.
The Chinese – so, we cannot buy what we need from CSMC, Taiwan, or Nvidia, no problem. We’re going to make it ourselves. And the capital was already there, and the main power, and the extremely well-educated tech workforce was already there. It was a matter of time.
During the Trump era, some of us were thinking, ‘Oh, shit, it’s going to take them at least until 2037, 2038 to have breakthroughs.’ No, they had a breakthrough in 2023. And even when they launched the new Huawei Mate 60 Pro with their own operating systems with AI, top of the line AI and all that, everybody in the West goes, ‘How did they do that?’ It’s very simple: if you visit Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen and their research centre, something that I did a few years ago, they are already thinking what’s going to happen – what they were going to be using in 2030, 2035. So, it’s very, very simple.
It’s education, tech education, and planning. And of course, unlimited capital. Because this is directly linked to the official tech strategy which was elaborated even before Trump came to power. And when Trump came to power and looked at it and he freaked out, that’s why he started all those sanctions. Which is something that the Chinese were calling at the time, ‘Made in China 2025.’
Basically by 2025 next year, they wanted to be top or near the top in 10 tech departments, including artificial intelligence, quantum physics, you name it. They’re getting there. After the sanctions, they abandoned the model ‘Made in China 2025’ which was freaking out the Americans big, big time. They stopped talking about it, but they continued to do the same thing. And they even allocated more capital to high end research. And also, research that they do, I wouldn’t say under the table, but in close collaboration, covert and overt with Samsung, for instance, and with CSMC in Taiwan, as well.
So, this is all interconnected. And in the high tech world, everything is interconnected and information flows. Information could flow, for instance, from a WeChat message from one engineer in Rotterdam to one engineer in Shanghai, for instance. And then you have a breakthrough. This is how it works. There is no censorship among – this politicization of science, this is something completely stupid, it doesn’t exist. Scientists talk to each other. So obviously, this was bound to happen. Of course, it happened much faster than anyone could ever imagine.
And now, China, they can have all the chips that they need: 7 nm, 5 nm, 3 nm, whatever, by 2035, which happens to be what they wanted to do in the first place when they came up with this concept of Made in China 2025.
GR: Mm-hmm. I only have like maybe a couple of minutes left, but I just wanted to know what your thoughts are about when China has essentially really pushed ahead of the United States. I mean, there was – I’m thinking maybe the China-Russia alliance has been – there’s been so much interaction there financially. I think it was probably around the time of the Russian’s – well, the Russia-Ukraine engagement and then there was all sorts of – that may have been a key moment, because that’s when we saw a shift, you know, financially and so on. But I don’t know, maybe it’s even more recent or it’s just accelerating, you know, since then. But what would you say is the moment or moments —
PE: Well, Michael – Michael, this is what I rant about every week. Literally, this is what I write about every week, this is what I think and discuss every week wherever I am, here in Europe, or in Russia, or when I go to Southeast Asia or to Central Asia. And it has to do with the Russia-China strategic partnership which is something that very, very few people in the West even understand what it is and understand what it means and understand how it works. Very few people know that. And this is reflected in the personal encounters between Xi and Putin year after year. In the discussion at the highest level with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Defence, and their tech environment as well. The Union of BRICS which was basically a Russia-China driven process. The two major powers on BRICS are Russia-China and they coordinate how BRICS are organizing, going to spend, especially this year where the Russian presidency of the BRICS will coordinate the next level of expansion. It’s going to be BRICS 12, 15, 17, 18 probably in Kazan at the summit later this year, in October this year. Their interactions, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the fact that the Belt and Road Initiative, 10 years old, is – and the Eurasian Economic Union from 2015, they are getting closer and closer together. And you’re going to have projects that include countries that are members of the Eurasian Economic Union and the Belt and Road, and expanding two countries with which the Eurasian Economic Union has free trade agreements. For instance, they have it with Vietnam, they just clinched one with Iran. So, everything is interlocked. And the Russia-China strategic partnership is a sort of master coordinator of this whole process. And it includes military cooperation, which obviously none of us know the intimate details. But it is virtually sure that, for instance, the Chinese now have access to Russian hypersonic technology.
GR: Wow.
PE: Because this has been discussed at the highest level by their Ministries of Defence. And the fact that their strategy in terms of trying to – I would say muzzle the hegemon, it’s not fight the hegemon. It’s to try to muzzle a hegemon that is absolutely out of control now. It implies that they have to discuss – all major decisions have to be taken at the highest level and they have to be coordinated. And this includes the way they are supporting, by not supporting, or even feigning their supporting Gaza which is an extremely complex dossier where they act Alas Su Su or they act in a very Chinese way: in total silence. And we know that when they are not resolutely against something it’s because they are supporting it —
GR: Hmm.
PE: — in the background. Same thing about the whole Axis of Resistance. And this applies to Hezbollah, the militias in Iraq, Iran obviously as a whole. The fact that Iran, Russia military relationship now is 100% on both sides. This is something that I had in Moscow a few months ago where the Iranians said, ‘Basically, we told the Russians, “Anything you need, you can get it.”’ So, it’s at this this level nowadays. And the same thing between Russia, China, and Iran, between the three of them. These are the three poles of Eurasian integration.
GR: Okay.
PE: So obviously, the Americans don’t even understand how it works. So, how they can counter at a concerted drive in very well-regarded – nice strategy by these three major poles of Eurasia integration that applies to everything: high tech, artificial intelligence, geopolitically, geoeconomically. And of course, doing everything they can to prevent a frontal clash with the Americans. There is no interest by Beijing or by the Kremlin to have a direct, frontal clash with the Americans because they know how irresponsible and how unprepared the people running American foreign policy at the moment are.
So, they are basically trying to contain and muzzle this out of control, very dangerous animal. So, if you don’t understand these processes which these people in the Beltway, for instance, don’t. Or the people at NATO don’t, or the people at the European Commission don’t, you don’t understand what is happening all across Eurasia. And how, what is happening in Eurasia, is basically looked at by the whole Global South as, ‘Okay, this is the next game in town.’ And it’s now the only game in town, because we simply cannot trust anything that the Americans say or do. They are, as the Russians define them, ‘Non-agreement capable empire.’ And what the Eurasian integration process is offering to the whole Global South, to the Latin Americans, Southeast Asians, to Africans, et cetera, is mutual respect, connectivity corridors, trade – make trade, not war. Rejecting of forever wars. Multi-polarity and basically a fair, equitable system of international relations which is something that they would like to implement at the UN, but not at the UN as we know it today, the way the UN works today which is completely dysfunctional.
So, this is the macro-picture of why, for instance, what happens if Russia had some difficulty in one field, or Iran in another or China in another. They can talk among themselves and try to find solutions among themselves and talk to their partners as well in this big, let’s say greater Eurasia partnership which is a wonderful way that the Russians found to describe this process of integration.
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Notes:
- Michel Chossudovsky, Global Reseaerch, 2022
- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD
- https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/manufacturing-by-country
- World Bank, OECD; https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD
- Javaid Mirza (January 2, 2024), ‘BRICS+ welcomes five new members in 2023’, Custom News; https://customnews.pk/2024/01/02/brics-welcomes-five-new-members-in-2023/
- Tara Copp and Lolita C. Baldor (October 22, 2022)‘Pentagon: Despite Russia’s war, China still top threat to US’, Associated Press; https://apnews.com/article/europe-middle-east-china-united-states-beijing-4521a349b4171b4e9792a5ed96f6f44f
- https://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF
- https://www.technocracy.news/day-7-china-is-a-technocracy/
- https://www.trilateral.org/about/
- Michael Martina and David Brunnstrom (January 5, 2024) ‘Analysis-Taiwan Election Poses Early 2024 Test of U.S. Aim to Steady China Ties’, Reuters; https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-01-05/analysis-taiwan-election-poses-early-2024-test-of-u-s-aim-to-steady-china-ties
