Posted on 03/18/2022 2:04:19 PM PDT by FarCenter
It’s always fun to watch big thinkers slug it out over the most pressing issues of the day. Today in one corner is renowned Indian literary critic and essayist Pankaj Mishra, arguing why so many countries prefer to sit on the fence over the war in Ukraine and why it won’t end well for the West.
Opposing him is Francis Fukuyama, the influential American political scientist, predicting a triumph of the West, the total defeat of Vladimir Putin and a renewal of the “spirit of 1989”.
Fukuyama says he is sticking his neck out to make several prognostications. Writing in online magazine American Purpose, here are his predictions. Russia is heading for an outright defeat. The collapse of the Russian position will be sudden and catastrophic. There will be no diplomatic solution before the war’s end. Putin will not survive his war. His defeat will discredit or at least weaken all the populists and dictatorial strongmen on the rise in recent years.
...
I met Mishra once in Hong Kong. He is a dark and brooding heavy intellectual. I am not surprised by his far more realistic take. He refers to Fukuyama, when he writes for Bloomberg, “Such rhetoric, usually intoned by men who lived through the heady last days of the Cold War, is dangerous. It could yet again make Western countries misread the world and their own power to shape it.” Many nations, he observes, are sitting “out the new cold war between a hastily reunited West and Russia”. The cold warriors of the West don’t understand “the transactional and shifting relationships at the heart of non-alignment”. No matter what happens in Ukraine, he predicts the following trends will intensify, “opportunistic non-alignment, de-democratisation, de-dollarisation of the international financial system and general de-Americanisation of the globe”.
(Excerpt) Read more at scmp.com ...
It may not be the End of History, but it now appears that we are now experiencing the end of armor as a viable military tool. Soon to come will be the end of ships of all natures, including aircraft carriers.
Francis Fukuyama is an idiot neocon fool who has been wrong about everything he ever babbled about. I’ll go with the other guy on this.
Why So Many Countries Want to Sit Out the New Cold War
The cold warriors who insist on being “with us or against us” have never really appreciated the transactional and shifting relationships at the heart of non-alignment. Nor do they seek to understand how carefully and warily the world’s most populous nations weigh their cooperation with a West-dominated international order.
Indonesians still remember the 1998 financial collapse in Southeast Asia, popularly blamed on Western investors. Chinese nationalists continue to invoke the 1999 bombing by NATO of China’s embassy in Belgrade. Memories in Asia and Africa of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the calamitous Western intervention in Libya remain raw.
For many Asians, Latin Americans and Africans, Putin does not seem an unprecedented violator of international law. His anti-Western rhetoric even falls on receptive ears — witness, for instance, his personal popularity in countries such as India and Indonesia.
Is this a mainland China based publication?
Neither of these experts are worth listening to.
The one who is negative about Russia is probably closer to being correct.
This is China making a move on a collapsing Russia.
I think it’s Hong Kong based, for whatever that is worth nowadays.
Fuk Fukuyama! NWO stooges on FR agree with this idiot’s ‘casting of the bones’ approach to the future. The real future of the west is perversion, greed, hubris and fall.
Tanks, surface ships, and manned aircraft face a problematic future. Much of the US DoD is obsolete.
Missiles, UAVs, autonomous subs, and other intelligent weapons systems are proving effective.
There should also be new classes of weapons. I think a low-observable, lightweight, high flotation, autonomous killer robot would be just the thing for spring warfare in muddy Ukraine.
Once those robots become perfected they will become the police force. Goodbye freedom.
I think the globalist’s have miscalculated and confused their financial power as sufficient to keep all the players in line, but the biggest players China and India are saying not so fast. And they are hardly the only ones, Brazil and others aren’t willing to jump through their globalist hoops either.
They’ve already blown their wad exacting the most severe financial sanctions on Russia possible, and Russia just carries on and will continue to do so. The de-dollarization of global trade will wind up hurting us immensely. The cost of energy will drive the US into stagflation and Europe into a depression. In our misguided attempt to unseat Putin and bring Russia under globalist control, we have only hurt ourselves in the long run.
The Western financial system is a vast multiplayer online game. Its all about online transactions that result in additions to some accounts and deductions from others.
It has largely become separated from the business world of extraction of resources, production of goods, and the provision of services. It is a abstract financial layer floating free above the business layer of the economy.
It only continues to govern the business layer because everyone believes it does.
Hi FarCenter.
What would your preferred pronouns be?
Let me tell you about history and democrats, liberals, progressives and socialists. For them history begins when they wake up in the morning.
The last 200 hundred years is no different than what they had for dinner yesterday. CRS.
That’s how they justify their hypocrisy.
5.56mm
...as we know it.
I guess decades of Sci-Fi/Horror books and cinema didn’t get their point across.
“Once those robots become perfected they will become the police force. Goodbye freedom.”
Once those robots become infected they will become a pile of scrap metal. Hello, freedom.
Well I expect the financial ponzi scheme we currently have going is soon to come apart. Just freezing the Russian Central Banks assets is enough to send fear into international markets, and similar to what many people in Canada saw when protester’s private assets were seized without due process and many Canadians quickly moving their money elsewhere in a mini bank run. The globalist message is that no rules are sacrosanct anymore, least of all those concerning property rights. This will have profound implications going forward, none of it good for the West.
No one helped Venezuela when they were eating zoo animals.
I agree that Putin will not survive this war in office.
Fukiyama - the guy had a rep in the hi-end audio business of ordering and returning for refund a lots of expensive stuff. The kind of customer you avoid.
That was decades ago, so he may have come along since then.
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