The Duran Podcast
The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order - Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
Well hello, this is unusual in that I am making the introductions today, Alexander McEureus. I have my co-host and friend and colleague on many programs, Professor Glenn Deeson, Oslo University, person with much experience of international relations, person with great scholarship and experience and skill in scholarship and this is going to be a different program in some ways from some of the programs that we've been doing recently in that it is actually a discussion between the two of us and the reason we are having this discussion is because Professor Deeson has written and it's just been published and it can be found on Amazon and in other places a book, a new book and it is about the Ukraine war and the new Eurasian world order and I have been reading the book with tremendous interest over the last couple of days. I should say that I founded a page Turner, I found it difficult to put it down, it is absolutely griffy and it is different from every other book I have read about the conflict in Ukraine. Most books that I know about the conflict in Ukraine focus specifically on Ukraine, they talk about Ukraine itself, about its divisions, about the factions there, about the internal conflicts, about the history, the relationship with Russia, the involvement of the West, the diplomacy, all of those things, you'll find all of that also, by the way, in Professor Deeson's book but what makes it unique, what makes it absolutely fascinating is that Glenn has explained all of that, put that all in the context of the development of international relations today, the change in the shape of international relations and the way that this conflict has risen cannot be understood and that's absolutely clear from this book without an understanding in the development of international relations and the key, the clue to that is in the title when which refers to the emergence of the new Eurasian world order. Now the first part of the book which I found very interesting is about different concepts of world orders, the hegemonic system which we've had in the West, lots explained there, hegemonic system that predates the specific hegemony of the United States and which basically goes back to the 16th century, the conflicts that this has given rise to, the way this system has worked within Europe itself and it's a hegemonic system of Europe and the West over the rest of the world but internally within Europe and this is I think extremely insightful and very new, we had a system that was different, a system of sovereign states balancing each other for most of this time, a system which is defined as the Westphalian system based on concepts of state sovereignty developed at the time of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 but specifically this is a European system as far as the rest of the world is concerned, it's a system of European hegemony and then in the 19th century that system evolves into a system of hegemony first by Britain and then in the 20th century of course Britain as the Hegemon is replaced ultimately by the United States but with all sorts of other complicated things working out as well with a period of the conflict, the Cold War, the balance between the two to superpowers of that area, the Soviet Union and the United States and the key thing to understand is that Western policy towards Russia, Western policy connected to Ukraine is deeply informed by this long history of European then British, well specifically British and specifically American hegemony and the kind of attitudes and concepts that this gave rise to and also the fear that exists now that this period of hegemony, Western hegemony and American hegemony which often was interconnected but they're not exactly the same thing is now ending and Professor Decent also discusses the role of liberalism in this system, the way that liberalism itself has evolved as part of that system and how liberalism has to some extent acted as the justification for this period of hegemony and the fear that is also occasionally in the West that as Western hegemony recedes and American hegemony recedes liberalism which informs much of the conception the West today has of itself might start to recede also and then of course we have the rise of the new powers, the development of the multi-polar system which is a system, a kind of vestphalian balance of power system in which the West is only a part and then we have the crucial role of Russia within it, the fact that it's never been a fully easy part of the European vestphalian system and of course it's never been a part of the collective West for many reasons which we'll be discussing more deeply in this program and the see the key conflict the one that defines the change explains the change is the one in Ukraine and of course as I said the book does actually go into great deal of detail about the conflict in Ukraine itself so it's a book which in my opinion doesn't just explain the conflict it explains why we are where we are and the whole nature of the modern world so first Glenn is this a reasonably accurate summary of your book I don't pretend that it covers all the points that is this does this generally get the overall gist of it? yeah that is the the essence of the book because well I wouldn't say well sometimes it's said that this war in Ukraine isn't necessarily all about Ukraine some say it's not about Ukraine at all which probably wouldn't be correct but obviously it's a symptom of something much larger if we see how much each side is willing to invest into this and the amount of risks both sides are willing to take so this is and also you get it from some of the citations I use in the book where both sides tend to lean in and refer to this as like an inflection point in world order which direction are we going and I think that's what makes this so dangerous we we are in a vacuum at the moment where there is no longer unipolarity but multi-polarity is not yet cemented itself so you see now the different great powers pulling the world in opposite directions and the problem of course is world order is about how states engage with each other and in the absence of world or common rules there's more or less more vicious anarchy and I think that's also something that's you're describing what we're going through now but but I like what you said about justification as well because this is yeah I wanted to boil on what does world order depend upon and it's you tend to see it's an international distribution of power and the legitimacy of the rules and this is these two variables is really what dictates how states should engage with it with each other so obviously in the past under the you know Holy Roman Empire if you had one central power and also the universalism of Christianity or Catholicism then you have also yeah the universal ideals to support hegemony and but of course as you mentioned Westphalia this is really in 1648 this is really considered to be the birth of the modern world order in which we all the all the major powers in Europe began to fight each other they all realized to can't be a hegemon winning at the end of this so and then to a large extent it was started by yeah reformation and the absence of the same universal ideals so you want a bounce of power so all the states you can't have one state attempting to dominate so they all check each other and at the same time you you want to accommodate the religious or cultural or civilizational distinctiveness of each one and this is this has been the foundation which is why hegemoni represents a challenge and we see some of the same patterns in the US hegemon or the collective West in which there's an effort to centralize power again to have one central power but we also see that it also revives universal ideals and so when talk about liberal democracy human rights it's not that these ideals are bad on the contrary I was a big supporter but but the problem is the claim for universalism suggests that that it diminishes the principle of sovereign equality which is so foundational in the modern world order and you can see the UN charger as a reflection of the vestalian order reflects this but now we have a system of sovereign inequality so no one well things twice if the West shouldn't interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries to promote democracy or protect human rights this is the most natural thing and of course power interests unavoidably comes into this and this legitimizes and substantiates hegemoni and I think that's why you see now this has been a breakdown over the past few years the hegemon is gone in terms of military power economic institutional and information across the board and at the same time you then see the rules of international law beginning to change as well so the countries who are for the vestalian system they call for international lawings according to the UN system the hegemon advocates for hegemoni are talking about the rules based international order which is based on sovereign inequality so this is really the framework which I put this whole conflict with him yes and what is so interesting is again it's it's it's very historically grounded which is I think absolutely essential if you don't understand the history then you don't understand anything this is always my take to international relations so this this constant temptation that exists in the West towards universalism and now I should I should just disclose here that you know way back long long ago when I was a student of history one of my big topics but a big essays about this was the on the origins of the 30 years war and in fact is exactly what you said it was the the Habsburgs who were the dominant power in Europe at that time and would of course also the representatives of the Catholic Church had very very much a drive towards universalism and in fact they had this this this it was a sort of mysterious sort of slogan but it was a series of letters A E I O U which is Austria Eret in Orbebe ultimate this was their sort of you know their motto if you like Austria will be supreme in the world it was a very much a universal idea so that there would be one emperor one face one line of control Habsburgs control Spain they controlled much of Germany and in the 1620s they made this massive push to consolidate it all and to bring it all together and they did it at precisely that moment when they sensed that they were starting to decline because Spanish powers fading and that had been the core region so this was their last big throw and of course the result was a disaster and the 30 years war was a catastrophe and it went on for 30 years and there was a huge amount of death and destruction and out of it ultimately a multipolar system in Europe emerged and that was the birth of diplomacy much of the concept of diplomacy that we have today developed then and this is where I found the most interesting part of your the first part of your book is that you were talking about how multipolar systems which in a kind of a sense of estophilia in terms of Europe actually was our systems where there are rules there is actual law there's concepts of law there's diplomacy there's a desire on the part of the powers the various states that they want to maintain a balance so that nobody will be overwhelmed and absorbed by the others that they will each have their security and that security by the way also extends to protection of that internal sovereignty their ability to run their own affairs without the interference of the other which is of course exactly what the universal empire hadn't wanted and there you have it right at the beginning of our modern world the early modern period we see the same tensions that we see today and of course the world changed a lot since 1648 so as you mentioned there has been disruptions in which the world order had to adjust so liberalism for example especially the political liberalism with the french and the american revolution at the end of the 18th century this did this introduce to the universalist concepts which was a disruption as well which had to be accommodated so so again there was some needs to to make alterations also the industrial revolution emerging in which power politics was more and became less about only military force but then also looking at the economic aspects so initially we have a very focus on liberal economics we assume that if two countries trade together then there's an absolute gain now there will be peace but in reality you see it's about relative gain you know if you can skew the symmetry of dependence make the other one more dependent on you than that other way around then this becomes a way of the sourcing power both economic and political so you see this becomes also an instrument in restoring an equilibrium into the system and I think this is why you also see the fierce competition of between the united states and china for example is not really military at the core it's a competition over who dominates the key industries who who has the most competitive technologies who has the main transportation corridors under their control who has the main banks which currencies are using these are the main issues which they're competing over now I think one when the united states is at a disadvantage as a military power it has interest in benefiting from this position so you see the militarization of the rivalry taking place as the americans are chipping away at the sovereignty of china by pushing forward this session of taiwan for example but no overall i it's um it's an interesting framework to look at to look at world order because as you said I think one of the things really missing in international relations is history in the past the old political scientists have at least a degree in history this is more or less gone now we're living kind of in a vacuum where everything is about the present and that creates a big problem because if sasa also wrote about a lot of the challenges we have today about hegemon and the decline of hegemoni it's we already did all of this in the 19th century with with britain you know they had their liberal empire they linked the ideals of liberalism to empire and we to a large extent have the same today so in the west we really consider hegemon to be a necessity because this allows liberalism to be elevated but for the rest of the world obviously they don't do not see it in this way and one of the most interesting things about 19th century period where as you correctly said the british exercised a hegemonism which had some a lot of similarities to that of the united states in the you know the 20th century and 21st century is that it provoked responses it provoked resistance from those countries which were in a position to resist and it that resistance was economic it took the form of particular ideas about how to organize economies so the british wanted to integrate everybody into their own system which worked to consolidate their hegemonic position that is what free trade ultimately was all about and yet countries that didn't want to be controlled by the british in that kind of way like the united states and germany developed their economies in ways that rejected free trade and you have the american system that is developed in the 19th century by Alexander Hamilton you have the lists the ideas of Friedrich list which gained traction in germany especially in bismarck's time and of course lists ideas also take hold to take root in russia which one suspects the british saw as the biggest anniversary of the more and the response from the british is very similar to the one that we see from the united states today which is to try to create conflicts to try to block the russians for example with conflicts in the far east with japan to try to block the russians in the black sea with the Ottomans with the Crimean war and essentially again divide and rule well it's uh yeah it's a lot it's a lot of similarities because also at that point you also had this uh Eurasian the Eurasian dimension of world order because this was a new thing being introduced because prior to this whoever dominated the seas they would have the benefit of allowing themselves to become reliant on more free trade that would you know control the transportation corridors they that are great benefits and then suddenly as makinder and others worried greatly about the russians were suddenly connecting Eurasia by by land and this was especially the case after it's humiliating the feat at the Crimean war which ended then in 56 when they began to push through and first of course pushing down towards Afghanistan and then you have this conflict between the british and the russians and they also pushed towards Asia and you know where they reach all the way down to part to Arthur and again also being pushed back having this push back from the british so to a large extent this was the rivalry what is also interesting is in on the periphery of this of course you have the rise of new power so while the british and russians were locking horns on the side you had the emergence of the americans the germans and other key powers so no there is um there's a lot of similarities and as you mentioned also how how one would attempt to block the russians then by access to the sea this is also something that is uh yeah gone through the centuries the Swedes did it uh back in the uh was it the 17th century and the british always done it and then followed by the americans and if you look at the strategy uh again why we had the Crimean war in the mid 19th century so keep the russians out of the black sea pushed them back also preventing them from accessing them in the terrain and look look where where we are today the former NATO secretary of general of azimuth is very openly saying well now we can make the Baltic Sea or NATO lake the americans are pushing their military bases up in uh Scandinavia so they will have greater influence over the arctic and of course the ukraine war which is to a large extent also about the black sea so these are the main three seas which russia access the at the europe so the arctic the Baltic and the black sea and all of these are now um had been increasingly put under the collective west or american control since end of the cold war so but uh one thing is very different because everyone who focused on the Eurasianism of the 19th century or the 20th for that sake uh it's the russians were aspiring for hegemony but no one in russia today you know there has either capability or intention to do so now they see Eurasia not as a hegemonic project but as a multipolar project very much of this following project in which they need the cooperation of china, india, iran all of these former giants and this is uh yeah a very cost creates a very different form of network across Eurasia because in the past when the russians had deep interest only in integrating with the west and after the cold war all the relationships with the chinese duralians all this could be mayor elevator market value to the europeans something that could negotiate their entry into europe to create a greater europe those days are gone so there's there's something very different coming this again which is why i call the duration world order as well absolutely and can i just say very interestingly Putin in his state of the nation address the one that he's just delivered to the doomer to the russia run the federal assembly in marsko he actually talked about a Eurasian security architecture so he's no longer talking about you know european security architecture which has to be if there's going to be a negotiation that has to be a negotiated matter it's got to be a Eurasian security architecture so the russians are talking about security architectures that encompass india china european turkey places which are completely outside the framework of international relations that the western powers are used to which essentially was themselves and that is one of the most interesting things actually because the russians are having you know sort of tip put their toe into this dip their toe into this idea of your russianism in the 19th century have suddenly embraced it now that they managed to make the conceptual leap and say look it's not the west so it's just it's not just a small group of european states and the united states that really matter the world is completely different all sorts of other countries have emerged civilizations have emerged resurfaced and it's a multinational system that he's much greater than the west i think the west finds that a shocking idea and again one of the most interesting things parts of the book for me was the way in which you discuss the hierarchies the sense that the west has that that you know liberalism the fact liberalism makes them superior that there's something superior about them that they have the knowledge of how things should be that you know they own democracy they own liberalism they know what the correct way forward is and their job is to sort of civilize every body and teach every body what that thing is and suddenly they find that in fact the people who they thought are their pupils have grown up and they want to listen to these lessons anymore the russians have understood that the west can't get his mind around it also seems to me uh yeah no i think very much so and i in this put in speech was also i noticed the same argument as well where you really highlight that the bricks has become the expanded bricks have become much larger now than the g7 i think was in terms of gdp well according to purchasing power party i think it's 38 percent arnan bricks versus the 27th of percent of the g7 so this is this is well you know it's not just showing off but it's pointing out that the world is not different the main countries who claim the right for collective hegemon in the world is saying you know you're a minority now this is uh when we're not going to be ruled ruled by you anymore and i think this is uh this is a symbol also world order because these are the key institutions which will govern the world and these are the one who will set the actual rules and uh in within these institutions of course it's uh when he refers to the economic power this is uh reference to the international distribution of power so you have that one variable and then next to it you will also have the legitimacy of how to rule and i think on this legitimacy there's something very different because um when you have hegemon you will have demand sovereign inequality when they talk about so uh multipularity what they're saying is that this is expressed in the language of sovereign equality so this is why the chinese have this global civilizational initiative where they say listen we we have uh all these different paths to development one civilization shouldn't dictate to another how to develop so this is uh this is essentially a call for sovereign equality this is rejecting universalism uh so of course a challenge for this uh if you know if the west we want to engage with this accept the multiple artists here we we would have to find this balance between accepting that you know we we want to preserve some of the ideals of a liberal democracy but we also have to recognize how this influenced world order that the rest of the world is not going to put up with any sovereign inequality anymore so it's on this basis that they're pushing back against this universalism and but in terms of this you know sorry it's just be you also mentioned how we want to uh how the diplomacy is shaped by this that we want to you know we want to teach the world and now our little students are all grown up and they don't want to be ruled by us anymore this is also very much um a continuation if you will uh the 19th century because we did the exact same thing then as well we said well we are very civilized people now we talk about liberal democracies versus authoritarianism but then it was uh you know the civilized versus the barbarians this is when you have people like a keepling coming with this analogy of the jungle versus the garden so once you when you're in the garden which is the west where we have civilization you can have rules you have uh you can have uh yeah the rule of law you respect sovereign equality or all of these uh wonderful things however when we're outside the garden among the barbarians then the rules have to be tossed away now it's uh yeah the law of the jungle and uh you know we have to act how what is necessary to do in order to prevent the the jungle from invading our beautiful garden and this was uh the foundation of the civilizing mission or white man's burden and we we see the same rhetoric coming for it again indeed the advisor I cited as well of Tony Blair who was he was totally very openly rejected this filet and idea he called for a new world order and this was uh this was uh you know his advisor even wrote a book about this where he called for liberal empire so very much taking the same ideas from the 19th century but again this is not the peripheral uh I think everyone was familiar with Joseph Barrell the foreign policy chief of the EU he used the same exact same language they said you know we are we built a beautiful garden here outside the garden is a jungle if we don't go out in the jungle and tame it the jungle will invade our garden so it's not just our response right to go outside and civilize the world it's our responsibility and this is this mentality and this idea of sovereign inequality which really dominates a lot of the foreign policy thinking and it's not just in Africa and Asia and South America this is to a large extent how how they think of civilizing Ukraine for that sake because whenever they talk about Ukraine as democratizing it they never actually talk about the popular will of Ukrainians and that was you know some of the statistics we show from 91 to 2014 only like 20% of them actually want to join NATO most of them preferred relations with Russia so how can we so how can we justify them joining NATO through a coup which they didn't even support and this is the main idea this is uh they don't necessarily know what they want but we will democratize them and we will you know make them civilize them it's not what democracy is it's it's it's it's important that we are the teacher and this is this also been the very difficult relationship we always had with Russia because we say listen we are you're the Asians we are the Europeans you know we are the civilization you are barbarians now we're liberal democracies you're authoritarian the only relation we can have is a teacher and a student so you can you can either accept this subordinated role in which we divide between the subject and object and accept implied sovereign inequality or if you don't want this subordinated rule where you don't have a seat at the table but you do as you're told well then you hate democracy you're an enemy of civilization and then we have to balance you then we have to check you and this has been NATO's the rhetoric towards Russia's in the 90s we're going to roll up on your borders but don't worry we're peaceful bunch of democracies we just want the rule of law however if you resist us you know this this expansion will be used to continue so we're talking about both sides of our mouth so your chapter on Ukraine is astonishing and what it shows to me is how in you know adopting the cause of building up democracy and liberalism in Ukraine the West has in effect destroyed democracy and what used to be considered liberalism in the West I mean what what liberalism the wars in Ukraine is being destroyed they're also I mean we now have an incredible dominance within Ukraine of extreme right fascist groups and you know whatever they are they are absolutely not liberals but we support them we support them because somehow or other that it helps us to achieve our greater purpose which is to establish democracy and liberalism in Ukraine it is it is astonishing actually to see how you know this this kind of rhetoric and I think this this I mean obviously there's a great little cynicism here as well but beneath the cynicism there is an actual bedrock of belief I think one of the things points you again make is that at some level these people really do believe that they're doing good they really believe that they are defending and promoting liberalism even as they act to destroy it so if an election throws up the wrong candidate well that's not really a good election you try and you know defeat it you're fully in favor of free expression provided of course that free expression isn't abused as you would say by the wrong people it is very strange and very twisted but it is absolutely part of this idea of subordination that they have to be the pupil we have to be the teacher and there's never any point I suspect where that relationship will change because from a Western point of view what they're doing in Ukraine will mean that it will never become the kind of democracy and that liberal place that they say they won no I think I very much agree that we did this mantle the democracy in in Ukraine and and I think it's it's because it didn't fit the right model I mean when you have countries like Poland you know they were always quite resentful towards the Russians when the caller was over they instead of removing the dividing lines they prefer just moving them towards the east so they were on the right side of a new dividing line this was very much preferential which is why they lobbied hard for for for NATO expansion to be part of the Western block instead of dismantling the block system but with with Ukraine it's been very different there because with the polls you can set conditions you know you won't join the EU and NATO here's the conditions you have to fulfill and it becomes you know political conditionality with Ukrainians also very different it's I work with I worked a bit with a Ukrainian PhD student and you know she looked into this how how NATO was socializing Ukraine essentially re-educating them about why why NATO is not a threat it's actually you need us because if you don't have the Russian threat then you don't want to join NATO and if you don't want to join NATO then we don't have the incentive to socialize you so they they have to de-rustify and essentially had all these programs to cause divisions and I think this is a this was the main problem because Ukraine is like everyone agreed which we're not allowed to say anymore this was a fact that the Ukraine was very much divided so in the you know we would own oversimplified but in the western part they see so Ukraine as being you know you had one ethnicity one language one culture but over hundreds of years the Russians had their imperialism had deeply rooted themselves in in Ukraine so nation building really meant you had to shed and de-rustify get rid of this this Russian imperial relic but in the eastern parts of Ukraine they look at this close history with Russia quite differently they see yeah well we're over hundreds of years we lived in the same states on the same government we have the same history so so they say you know we would country with two ethnicities two cultures two languages and so for them nation building would mean you know finding some form of sovereignty but avoiding this ethno-nationalism from the west and and this has been the key problem they have to east and western Ukraine they have to find some kind of a balance you know the commonality would be both sides would support sovereign borders so this is our country we we we we try to organize our differences within it but the problem was this was always very fragile and not almost Ukraine divided but they're also in a divided europe because now the Europeans are literally telling them you have to choose us or them and again this is not empty talk this was actually in 2013 at the end when the western countries were inciting riots in Ukraine because they wanted them to choose between us or them and then they made the wrong choice and the Ukrainians the russia's i could post can we have a trilateral agreement so they don't they can be Ukraine can be a bridge they don't have to choose between us or them europeans said clearly no Ukraine has to choose and of course when they didn't choose correctly they instigated a coup so it's it's quite dramatic and as you as you pointed out i don't think that them the democratic argument doesn't come out clearly here because it wasn't supported by the Ukrainians what what we did to Ukraine dismantling it it's democracy meanwhile the russians could claim some moral superiority because what they wanted they essentially supported the eastern Ukrainians what what they said listen we can join all the western institutions as long as the russians join as well and this was great for us because they were favorable to having a greater europe so they didn't mind they didn't demand exclusive influence of Ukraine they just mentioned you we can't divide we can't put new dividing lines between Ukraine and russia that will create civil war and conflict with russia so this can't be done again this is what the ci director of the in the united states said as well so it shouldn't be controversial and this brings us to the the other key thing because um i mean the obvious question is why the why the west just couldn't leave Ukraine alone i mean if it had been left alone it probably would at some point have found its internal balance but they couldn't leave it alone and it seems to be that this is where again um your conceptual your intellectual framework helps us to understand why in the end they couldn't leave it alone because on the one hand leaving it alone violates the sort of hegemonic philosophical mindset you have to have people who are going to be like us you have to go in and teach these people and model them and shape them to be like yourself but at the same time as well as that there is the great there is the power great power hegemonic aspect you can't have the russians in because they're too strong and they might disrupt the system the hegemonic system at its core so you can't have them in nato you can't have them in the EU you've got to exclude them and you've got to weaken them and how do you weaken them you do that by detaching Ukraine from them and by establishing this anti-Russian Ukraine on their western border and you extend nato eastwards and and do you say so it's in effect looking at this well obviously there were choices which could have been made and the wrong choices were consistently made in terms of Ukraine and preserving peace but you can understand a lot better why those wrong choices were made because on the one hand you need to preserve your dominant position and that means weakening Russia at the same time you have to reaffirm the liberal ascendancy and that means that you have to reshape Ukraine yeah and that's I guess there's another parallel from the 19th century because if you look at the diplomatic cables from the French and the British during the Crimean War in the mid-19th century the the the main logic behind it was you know we're going to feed the russians in Crimea and that will push them not just out of the Black Sea but that will push them out of Europe they will push them into Asia you know kind of where they belong out of European affairs and this is if you read some of the main strategists who write about the post Cold War order the hegemony for example is big Nivresinski yeah the famous American advisor he he you know he very clearly outlined the role of Ukraine in this if if you can detach Ukraine from Russia Russia will no longer be a European power it will be a nation power so this is a way of detaching Russia from the continent so not that much has changed we were still it's the same discussion it's the same logic the only difference this this time of course is once you push Russia into Asia in the past it was an economically backward area they would would ensure that Russia could never be a challenge it would be economically backward it would end up in no man's land now of course we do the same we push Russia into the largest economy in the world in terms of purchasing power parity so it's a very it's a very different different yeah outcome this time absolutely now i was thinking about this because in some ways it shows how obsolete and backward looking western thinking has become because they always say that the Russians are using 19th century methods and concepts in you know in Ukraine in fact it is the west that is that they're looking at things um assuming that Russia can only prosper if it is somehow connected to Europe so if you can push the Russians away from Europe well they'll stagnate and decline which is really what you want because as they're too big and they're too strong otherwise to absorb into the system they might always challenge it but it's of course what you actually doing now is you're pushing them or trying to push them away from Europe the risk is that they will become stronger but of course your real rivals around the world who are outside the European and western system will become stronger as well because they will have Russia joining them and nobody seems to have worked this or thought this through properly in the west especially in the United States they cling to these you know it is Jeffrey Sachs talks about this you know they're refighting the Crimean War of the 1850s and it is all about the Black Sea by the way what you said because i read a piece recently by the institute for the study of war talking about the importance of controlling the Black Sea and depriving the Russians today of control of the Black Sea so they're saying that now they were saying that then and obviously the Black Sea is very important existentially important for Russia but it still doesn't really grasp the nature of the modern world the extent to which it has changed and already slipped away and that is where this point about the new Eurasian world order comes in and which you discuss so well in your book yeah this is it the world doesn't end anymore at the Black Sea this is a poor civilization ends and it's funny because the Russians also the rhetoric about power shifting you also see the discourse changing that you know the this whole idea that the civilised there on the west and it's not in the east this is a whole mentality that is quite backwards and they they said you know we have to shed this well they they argued that they have shed it but but no I think this is why Ukraine is so important in this point in time because it's not only was the war sparked to a large extent about the the competition for world order because as countless American leaders very explicitly keep saying but it doesn't end up in their media is you know if you can break Russia then we would severely weaken the Chinese as well they would lose their most important partner and also that would be a clear signal and this would really revive unipolarity and as the Polish president said in contrast if the Russians would win this it would be the end of the golden era of of American hegemony and you know a whole new world would be born so they all recognized that this was one of the key motivations for going after Ukraine to to knock the Russians down but but also the outcome of this look look what is what has happened I think we lived in our own world you know that Russia's just this gas station masquerading as a country or they have the GDP of Spain you know all the all these nonsense but but look what happened we sent all our weapons can't defeat you on the battlefield all these sanctions economy is growing you're Russia's not the largest economy in Europe and we want to isolate them in the world also didn't work the rest of the world say they didn't want to have anything to do with this and you know in the book I cite the Singaporean diplomatic was the former president of the United Nations Security Council Kishore I'm slaughtering his name now mobile bunny yeah so much right yeah anyways and his main point was you know the rest of the world they refused to join in on the sanctions and also NATO's anti American sorry the West anti-Russian crusade and not because they supported their invasion of Ukraine because you know more or less none have but they but he he used very interesting word he said he can anyone imagine how obnoxious the Americans in the West will become if they could defeat the Russians imagine that we try attempting to restore unipolarity reliving the 90s nobody wants this you know even the allies of America doesn't want this the Indians the Turks the Saudis they want to be able to diversify their economic connectivity because as long as it's one center of power they will dominate too heavily over them so this is a they're all these countries now look at them they can you know trade with the Russians Chinese Americans and they don't want to choose one camp or the other they just want to be able to trade with everyone now no one can tell them what to do anymore if anyone pressures them too much then they just shift their economy to someone else so you know they don't want to live in this uniform world and I think because in the West we only see the Ukraine war as being a Russian Ukrainian war which is absurd especially now that we learn how deeply involved the West has been from day one we we we can't understand why why the rest of the world wants nothing to do with this you know why is that they don't support the invasion but under no circumstance will the support in his sanctions against Russia we can't explain it unless we address the wider issue absolutely because what we're basically saying is that we want to send all of these people who have grown up and become strong we want to send them back to school and the school where we are the teacher and of course you know you can't expect people to want that they're tired of our lessons in fact they have also come to realize that the teacher is extremely self-serving and doesn't apply to himself the same rules and lessons that he's teaching to the students so of course they don't want to go back and it is completely unsurprising anybody who understands human psychology and you know the pride countries have in themselves and people having themselves would not find it difficult to understand can i just mention that one of the most interesting things for people who read the book are the very very many citations he provided his full of the quotes especially western officials and they are eye-opening i mean the the hubris and arrogance and cynicism and i have to use that word cynicism because it's about all the you know the idealism that is spoken there there is always this cynicism as well it is is just astonishing and very very disturbing and i have to say you know it it would be it will it will be food for the historians and if ever anybody wherever said you know held to account for this i mean they their words condemn them and it's astonishing how often and how repeatedly the mask drops in some of the things they say and you know their own words condemn them and you can find all those words in your book yeah that's why i i know it was very heavy on the the citations and references but i think because this was the topic it's it's necessary before you mentioned that you know for example the Black Sea being largely that the worst largely about control over the Black Sea i mentioned that on the Norwegian news channel and i was condemned for conspiracy theories and then two weeks later the deputy secretary general nato he goes out and he says the same thing and then it's okay so it's just that i think the problem is that this word becomes so heavily propagandized from day one so so it's it's very important to be able to document everything very clearly you know because we say oh well this word didn't have anything to do with nato expansion but then you can go all the way look you know Russia's not worried about nato expansion but you can go all the way from ill clinton to foreign ministers the defense ministers ci there's all these american leaders top ones if pro or you know cautious about nato expansion those who are very favorable of it like madland all bright very favorable but you still recognize well of course the russian sees this as an encirclement and betrayal you know this was common sense but but still we were not allowed to discuss this now because it's interpreted as legitimizing russia which is apparently the worst crime you can do but but it's also yeah across the board and also the the idea i also mentioned once that americans have come to establish complete establish a lot of control over russia sorry after over ukraine after the coup but you know there's an abundance of evidence they even put in all their own people i don't think people noticed but after 2014 the you know the finance minister was an american working for the u.s state department even in the embassy american embassy in keb she just took over that post as becoming finance minister so it's colonial and you had all these other positions of americans state prosecutors going freaking new york going and doing the same for ukraine and that's why i think everyone's familiar with this victor shokin the general prosecutor of ukraine him as well he's given the interviews later on saying that you know they came in they ran us like a colony they would determine every new employee employment of a key government official had to be approved by the americans if the americans didn't put forward their own people and uh and you know they said this uh they saw us as a colony and again nothing to do with democracy and then he was fired himself by joe biden bragging about it after he opened a criminal investigation after his son over at aburisma so it's just you know if you just make a claim i think people it's very important in this case to substantiate it so i guess that's why there's so much so many citations and always i try to focus on the western ones because so far you know everyone can be dismissed as a put in his days if you say the wrong thing so i like to lean into you know washington post new york times you know the rosophobic ones if you will i and again if you come back to nato expansion and this is where the citations are so interesting the quotations from these who's so interesting is that as you correctly said they understood i mean this mythology that the russians were never promised that nato would not expand eastwards well it turns out that everybody knew every body youth of that promise had been made and there was a deliberate intention essentially as far as i can see not to keep it and there were all these warnings it will result in a conflict with the russians and as you correctly said people like maddling all right all of these people they accept that it will lead to a conflict with the russians and then at the same time they say we need to expand nato in order to provide insurance in case there is a conflict with the russians and whilst recognizing that it was the expansion of nato that was creating the conflict with the russians in the first place it is most strange behavior very strange behavior but of course again one which makes complete sense if you understand the hegemonic framework in which everything takes place that the need to preserve and prolong the hegemonic position first of the united states and then of the west yeah that's why well again that's why i find it so so so difficult to have any discussions this is because you say well well once you start expanding it or you you revived the cold war logic of uh of uh you know moving dividing lines us or them this zero-sum game of the cold war but these days ah that's just a russian mentality but bill clinton he made his argument in january of 1994 when he when he said listen if we expand nato we're gonna risk redividing the logic of the cold war uh we're gonna go back to block politics uh us versus them european and great integration effect will become this zero-sum game everyone said this uh george kennen and also i think the best quote is probably from william perry was the u.s. uh defense secretary under blanton from the clinton from 94 to 97 and it's not just was he strongly against it and considered quitting but he also explained the the position of all these colleagues who were four expanding nato you know he didn't even reject they they didn't reject the idea that this would be threat russia but the their main position was well you know who cares they're russia's weak no one cares about russia uh they're they're you know they're they're gonna go into dustbin of history they're gonna follow the path of the soviet union who cares we're gonna manage their decline let's expand nato that would ensure the decline as well everything is fine and anyways if they one day becomes uh uh resentful uh at least we'll have a huge nato surrounded uh them so it's it's just the fact that we forgot decide to forget this it's uh for me it's uh it's quite obscene and i also quote uh joe biden in there just to show what was coming because in 97 he gave this speech at atlantic council where he makes fun of russia oh they told me that this is gonna be a huge threat for them and if we do this they're gonna have to they're not gonna be able to integrate with the the west anymore they're gonna have to look to east to china and he mocks them saying yeah sure go to china ha ha that the you know that country doesn't have an economy this is no point and how about it if you're gonna go east why don't you go to iran you know all this mocking and now of course we see it uh uh 25 years or well more than that later and we see uh yeah these are the main strategic partners now russia there they're main most important partners china and you see them linking themselves closer to iran which is very much overlooked by most countries how important this relationship actually is absolutely and in fact let's come to that because um it is very interesting that you talk about cold war politics and block politics because in fact it's again it's very clear reading your book that it is the west is obsessed with block politics it's the west that's always creating divisions and uh instigating conflicts and saying you know this is this is your friend this is your enemy you've got to make alliances with you know someone else because you know we've got to make alliances with us to protect you from so-and-so so fakistan you must be hostile to india india you must be hostile to china that kind of thing and you click great so conflicts everywhere and and try to extend alliances everywhere and then you have the opposite model which is the new model that the erasions are creating which is radically different it says no we don't have blocks we don't have alliances we don't have alliances even with each other because we understand that an alliance is defined ultimately by its opponents by its enemies and we're not looking for enemies we're all looking to work together and I find that again an absolutely fascinating part of your book because you see how the chinese are very careful that you know they're setting up all these systems but they're actually willing to accept constraints upon themselves to reassure people that they're not going to dominate whatever structures are created and abuse them in their own interests so russia india are able to forge connections with each other the indians won't want to be subservient to the americans they have problems with the chinese so they look to the russians instead it's a fascinating thing and all of it tying together yeah well this is why i also had that introductory chapter on the on the theories nowadays behind the world order because this was a foundational idea of the vast following system was not just a balance of power but also the agreement to maintaining the status quo so for example when the polion had been defeated we didn't create them alliance to perpetuate the weakness to dominate them no they were invited in at the concert of europe in which they had a seat at the table because the point was to keep them weak it was to to restore and maintain the system and we used to it's not that long ago we'd rejected idea keep in mind a lot of the lessons that you supposedly had after world war two was you know we have to have security with each other not you know you're security with other members not against non-members which is why you know the german's french were all supposed to be in the same club but after the cold war that changed now it's not security with each other with other members it's security against non-members all the rhetoric shifted and this is the alliance systems you see this is why you know in europe we split america split us into you know the european versus the russian so or in the in the middle east we have the arabs versus the ronians in asia they always try to put the chinese neighbors against them of course the big trophy would be if they're able to win over the indians which is why they get so excited every time there's tensions between the indians and the chinese because now you can also divide them into a dependent ally versus a weak and adversary but but no you're right and i think uh you know i want you to glorify everything that china does but but but but one or or you know one shouldn't be blinded either that something might be deceptive but but look at the brix expansion for example they took uh you know ethiopia in egypt you know they're having a rivalry over the water canals and they took in the soudis united arab emberts and iran and these are also adversary so it becomes an institutional format for resolving differences between members not an alliance against others no one thinks saudi arabian iran gonna ally up and attack you know britain it's just that it is not in the cards it wouldn't work and i think they had a shanghai corporation organization is the same and you know they took on more and more economic competencies that this is concerning for the russians because used to military focus and then of course russia would be the kingpin once it became an economic institution they thought okay now the chinese might lead and the russians made them peace with it that they can be the leader but they don't want chinese dominance they don't the new hegemon so they expanded the shanghai corporation organization but if they took in india and parkistan if you have that little trio of china india and parkston this is a very difficult partnership but again uh if the purpose is to resolve differences between each other then you can have mutual gain everyone improves their economic connectivity reduce everything of military conflict and uh i think this is why it creates incentives for peace as well uh which is why i wrote about the the peace agreement they made between the soudis in rannies it's in their interest uh the americans would never do this they they paying the price now you know they can't get the soudis to join in on bombing the yemen the arab emirates are putting restrictions on them to attack a iranian proxies or proxies or allies uh so it's um it's a very different system the chinese are advancing it is it is beyond america's conceptual understanding the idea of bringing together in a group countries that are rivals in the in that kind of way to the american mind it weakens the group because of course they think of it as an alliance and the creation of a block so you're creating divisions within your block so that's why you have to exclude you have to pick one side and exclude the other but of course the iragians don't think in that way because they're not creating a block and that i think is the fundamental difference there's something which is which the americans don't understand what the what the erasians this is i'm taking it from your book are creating is a global vestalian community in which people balance each other and maintain peace with each other and at the same time prosper and feel secure alongside each other it's a very different conception of statecraft and one which hegemonic thinking just cannot possibly get his mind around oh i think uh well that's why i always think back at this uh quote of george kennen because he was the you know we're seeing this architect of the containment policy against the soviet union and you know after the cold war is so disillusioned because you know so how did he come down to this the cold war is over the russians walked away from an empire the main part is to have peace with us and to work with us and they called it political midgets i think because the only political imagination we had was to let's revive the blocks you know who should be innate or who should be left outside that this was the scope this was the intellectual imagination that we had that this was the only way to organize security was uh you know who should be with us who's against and uh how should we organize these power structures and uh and again for the russian irrationalists of the 1920s they saw this as being symptomatic of uh of maritime powers because if you're going to rule from the periphery then usually you have to keep the big players split you know you don't want the Turks and the russians getting too close or the Iranians and the Turks or the russians and the Germans the Chinese and the russians so forth you want to keep them divided but what you see on the Eurasian landmass it doesn't work because if you're going to have economic connectivity there you know not only maritime corridors then you have to be able to work together and and i think this is what you see as well the it's not necessarily that Chinese are more moral than anyone else but they see that you know if they're going to try to do a hegemonic approach to or perhaps they're more moral with maybe its confusion and ideals i don't know but uh anyways it's if they will try to become a hegemon in Eurasia the russians would then start to lean more towards India they would lean more towards Iran maybe Europe they would start to to to shift so they realized that if they want to have this Eurasian project of integrating with common technologies institutions uh yeah industries transportation corridors currencies banks all of this then they have to compromise and harmonize how else can we explain why our analysis always go wrong like we assume that the russians and Chinese were going to have a huge conflict in central Asia it didn't happen because they found the way of accommodating each other and i think this is why there's a lot of potential and but again whenever i say this Eurasian integration has potential uh i i in the west people say well wait are you supporting this block against our block about you know in their Eurasian conception Europe is a part of this you know they same even the Americans they Eurasia doesn't have to be against America it's a it's a multipolar construct it's anti hegemonic not anti-american so it's not choosing one side over the other and i think it's um yeah it's a healthier approach to how to reduce the world both Xi Jinping and Putin have both gone out of their way to say repeatedly that the Eurasian project is not an anti-western project it it perhaps to some extent to protect people from the west but it is not hostile to the west and i i there was this there was this phrase that you you gave that you know it's it's not against it's not an against someone it's a positive between the countries that are forging it together and it's a vesphalian system coming back again to what he said he gives this there's rules and there's which people observe it's not a situation where the rules are just made at in a completely arbitrary way by somebody a center which is not itself subject to them which is what the rules based international order is now there's a lot of other things in your book and i think that you know it's perhaps best in people reading but i mean there were some very interesting points you made about how universal empires have declined basically coded in their DNA that universalism are for a brief period relatively brief period of prosperity leads ultimately to atrophy in stagnation and how that's also happened to liberalism in the kind of way that the liberal is liberal ideology in the west the focus on individualism which was a vital and you know humanizing thing at one point has now taken all sorts of very strange courses and i again i have to say i found that all very interesting living in Britain of course where one still sees if that one sees very strongly the symptoms the consequences of stagnation and atrophy that developed and which we've not broken from broken away from during our sort of late imperial phase and it explains to americans that part of your book i think explains a very great deal to americans about problems within their own country the economic problems that we're hearing so much about but also the intense partisan divisions that are there and it's fascinating that there's you know there's one book is able to bring all of these things together and show that all of these things are connected to each other well on the topic of yeah the the universal state or the the challenges of liberalism facing this was uh about some of these ideas from john hertz he was uh was the scholar who termed the coin well coined the term uh security dilemma he wrote in the 1940s that when you have these uh ideals of uh he called it idealist universalism so he put the french revolutionaries the Bolsheviks but i added uh well this was in the 40s so i added the liberal democracies of a present time into this concept of idealist internationalism because he and he made a point that once once these ideals win in victory they die he wrote and i thought those they're also a good description of how what happens to to them to to liberalism because liberalism is often it often thrives in opposition because it's uh ideology of freedom of the individual but once it becomes dominant ideology and there's no alternative to balance it everything has to be liberated so you have to liberate the individual from the from the common culture from the faith from from the nation itself so you have now liberalism divorcing itself from the nation state it's uh it's quite a dramatic uh way so this is why i become i think many people now see liberalism becoming entering a revolutionary stage where we even attempt to live free ourselves of our own past you know it's burdened with all our the sins of our past now we're all gonna start living in the area zero again and it's uh it's very destructive at its core and uh but again we we don't have these discussions because if you if you comment on uh the challenges of liberalism then well either you're for or against everything is black or white in the discourse so it's very difficult to approach it and here again you discuss very very well brilliantly i think that the need to control discourse you have to control discourse to protect all of these things the foreign policy the many contradictions that you have the various statements that you catalog so well in your book you can't talk about them you can't talk about what happened so you have to control you have to control what is said and and the information that is circulated so in order to protect all of these things you have to sort of suppress and control consensus in a way that is the opposite of what western societies and democracies and liberal democracies used to be all about but i think that's why you also see now unipolarity coming to an end everyone recognized not just the distribution of power in terms of military and economics but look at how we exercise our ideals so we spread democracy by toppling democracies i mean this uh um in in terms of economic liberalism you see the liberalism today is becoming more and more illiberal i would argue and even economic liberalism now that economic concentration is no longer in the west if you have complete free competition and you know the chinese are leading in key technology speed 5g or anything else then of course this is not favorable to us anymore so now we're reverting to the idea of fair trade instead of free trade uh from the american system so you have all this uh yeah you see idealist uh the liberal hegemony not just the hegemon is disappearing but the liberal core of it's going away as well and as you said the controlling the narrative only 10 years ago it would be unthinkable to have this amount of censorship and cancellations as they're called or content moderation you know we're lending new new language to to justify why why we can't have you know liberal economics or free speech or it's uh it's quite um uh yeah difficult uh a strange time we're living even in this country yeah we have uh we have a liberal uh yeah we have the human rights organizations financed by the states who are now looking to censor people who criticize us you know the glory of the natal it's just uh it's very absurd time to be alive to be honest and i think this is why you see the decline of uh liberal uh listen man hegemony absolutely and of course and you know and as we now come to the end of this program can i just say we are at the end i mean what we are talking about is unsustainable and that is absolutely clear to me from reading your book and you you say and this is the most interesting this is always the most important but perhaps the most disturbing chapter as well so um whatever happens now in the war in Ukraine it's already gone horribly wrong but the unipolar system cannot be recreated and you talk about how we have a choice either we escalate in a disastrous attempt to try and hold these together and pursue it or we just recognize this fact and europe in particular makes you some important decisions which has been avoiding making recently either we do that or we risk a great tragedy no i couldn't agree more and i think uh this is why it's so dangerous uh if we had more political imagination to to imagine what other alternatives we could have because so far it appears our only goal is to revive the 1990s which are already which is already lost i mean best case we severely were able to weaken russia but much like in the 19th century between the british and the russians it's at the periphery we'll see new powers coming between the archina who are you know the new germany in america who are not gonna live by this live under this unipolar system anymore anyways so the the world is coming changing very fast and there should be some discussions which is why you and i we talked to jeffrey sachs before and we discussed this ideas of was this of adam smith where he also points this out that in his days you know discovery of america in the east in this that this was uh the greatest in he called it the greatest discovery in human history because he connected the whole world but he also recognized there was a huge tragedy for all the people's europeans that encountered simply because the disparity of power was too great too much power was contrary in west all the relationships be the economic military or political all of it would be very exploitative so you know he saw it as beneficial if in the future there would be more symmetry in relation so that's why i'm i keep making a point uh this uh biracial multi-polarity emerging it doesn't have to be uh utopia it's gonna have its own set of problems uh but it doesn't have to be seen as being the end of the world it's just the end of unipolarity but unipolarity was always unsustainable so yeah i wish there was a broader discourse instead of just who's supporting us those enemies and yeah that's part of the objective of the book of course well exactly i was going to say professor professor decent you've made a major step in opening up that discourse i would strongly recommend everybody to read that book if you want to understand the world we're in today i think it is an essential book actually you you get also by the way i mean now there's an awful lot there but we haven't discussed in this program you get a very sense strong sense of some of the personalities also by the way who've been involved and have made these kind of decisions and you it says it it weaves it all in the great pattern of history and of course if you know anything about history you know that it doesn't end it it continues so there's end of history ideas which you also discussed but you know we'll leave that for people to read in your book end of history ideas are flawed and wrong from the outset i think we can both agree on that so go to read the book please do read the book you'll understand the modern world and why we are in this conflict now and you'll understand the place of this tragedy of this terrible war in Ukraine better once you've read it and as i said you can find it on amazon hard copies are now on sale and i think it's an essential and extremely good read by the way as i said i found what i started it i couldn't stop so thank you professor decent if there's anything last that you want to say uh no not really uh yeah thank you and yeah hopefully yeah people will take an interesting book and uh as you mentioned um i think it was Mark Twain you know he said the history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes and i think this is kind of why i wanted the historical perspective world order because you see the same issues we're playing themselves but slightly different as uh you know new ideas economic systems come into place so thank you very much thank you you