By HUGO DIONÍSIO*
“Calibrated” attacks against neocolonialism
Shortly after the Iranian response to the Zionist attack, which destroyed its consulate in Syria, fatally killing senior commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi, behold, it is the White House itself, and Joe Biden, pulling the reins of Benjamin Netanyahu and broadcasting to the world that the action was properly “calibrated”. This, after the Zionist authorities breathed fire, threatening apocalyptic consequences, against the reborn Persian potentate.
This “calibration” in Washington’s speech is the obvious consequence of what had happened before the Iranian retaliation; In the 48 hours that preceded it, several European couriers asked Iran for “containment”, warning of the serious consequences that this lack of “containment” could trigger. The signs of concern were as evident as the whitewashing and legitimization of Israel's provocative action towards its neighbors in the region had been, until then.
One person who did not, however, take half measures was Ursula von der Leyen. In yet another show of hypocrisy of biblical proportions, this lady came to threaten the only answer she knows: packages of sanctions against Iran, for having carried out an “unprovoked attack”. Emmanuel Macron also could not be left behind and came out to say that it is necessary to continue to “isolate Iran” with the usual sanctions.
If there is anything to take away from this behavior, it is this fact: Úrsula Von Der Leyen and the Macrons of this world live in a reality that no longer exists, in which the “racially, morally and intellectually superior” West had the legitimacy to punish, persecute, invade , threaten and destroy all who opposed him. But if, in their hateful blindness, they have not yet realized this, the same cannot be said about those who are in charge of them. The world has changed and is in the process of accelerated transformation.
Impunity ended when the Russian Federation said it did not accept the crossing of the red line it had imposed and which determined Ukraine's neutrality; the world changed when Iran, Hezbollah, Huthis and Hamas declared that they no longer accepted Zionist abuses against their populations and their allies; the world changed when China did not give up on Russia and Iran, demonstrating that the multipolar world was here to stay. To destroy one, you will have to destroy all three. All interconnected by broad strategic partnerships.
Consequently, Iran's response tried to signal that the country is prepared to give a decisive response, in what it considers to constitute an escalation of growing abuses, by Zionism and its supporters, and that it will not continue to tolerate genocidal disrespect, by of the Zionist entity that controls and is confused with Israel.
This behavior on the part of Iran, previously unthinkable and intolerable by the “international community”, now finds a space of legitimacy that absolutely reveals how the world has changed in these years of growing multipolarity. Even sanctions no longer have the same weight, with Iran – like Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua – having learned to be self-sufficient, transforming aggression into an opposition force; Nor does the West dominate the global south with the force it used to do; Not even the USA, and its vital space, still constitutes that military power that everyone was afraid of.
Today, powers like Iran can afford to up the ante and corner the arrogant West. The most interesting thing is that, from a strategic point of view, the USA had invested in a profusion of multiple provocations, increasingly broad and aimed at localized military escalations, whose function was to contain the expansion of the countries that constitute the central pillars of this liberation. of the global south: Russia, China and Iran.
Resulting in the continued expansion of the multipolar world, the development of the “global south”, which is nothing more than the “global majority”; accompanied by the loss, by the West, of strategic positions that dictate access to strategic labor reserves in Asia and Africa; to commodity reserves in Russia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa; or, to the installed industrial capacity of Asia; The multipolar “triple entente” that directs the anti-imperialist process, through its “calibrated” attacks, is causing a progressive corrosion of the imperialist entity, announcing, at some point in time, its collapse.
And this constitutes the great merit of these three countries and their allies, South Africa, more convinced, India and Brazil, more vulnerable, which have now been joined by five other countries, and which will soon be joined by many others. , including Vietnam itself, which has already made official its intention to join the BRICS. These countries have had the patience, wisdom and competence to act in as concerted a manner as possible, but also in as deconcentrated a manner as necessary, without allowing themselves to become entangled in irremediable internal contradictions that would expose them to the nation-destroying machine that is the USA. . In this way, deconcentrated expansion poses problems that are extremely difficult to overcome for those who wish to destroy this expansion process, which is also a process of liberation from neocolonialism.
It cannot be said, however, that we are in a completely original historical moment. Indeed, it is good to remember the words of Zbigniew Brzezinsky, when New Observateur, in 1998, when, in an interview, he acknowledged that not only had the USA consciously contributed to the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR, but he was also rejoiced – as arrogant supremacists like to do – over the fact that, even with one million dead, it was worth supporting the Mujahideen (Taliban), which they knew in advance would be seen by Moscow as something intolerable within its borders and would not fail to provoke a war.
In a process with similarities to what happened in Ukraine – the formation of a deeply anti-Russian (or anti-USSR) ruling elite practicing a hateful and extremist ideology – the most important thing that Zbigniew Brzezinsky said, however, was that the USA, being ideologically on the defensive, with the human rights agenda it was possible to turn the tide and put the USSR on the defensive. Today, the idea of a multipolar world has returned the Global South, as a whole, to an offensive ideological position and, at the same time, the US has once again found itself on the defensive. And this time, they may well come with the human rights agenda again, as no one believes in them anymore.
From this position we can draw a valuable lesson for our days: no matter how aggressive, arrogant and belligerent they may seem, the USA – including Israel – was once again placed in a defensive position. Everything they do happens in response to a reality in which the multipolar world continues to expand and the “enlarged” West contracts. No matter how many “enlargements” NATO may propagate, the vital space of Western monopolies, which constitute the roots of imperialism, has been progressively shrinking. This is an undeniable fact and only brutal debt from the White House means that the US economy continues, artificially, to grow and with it, to feed the process of “containment” of the growth of the multipolar world.
What is impossible to hide is that the US problem, this time, is more complicated. It will not be as easy to go “on the offensive” as it was with the USSR. Although the USSR constituted a formidable challenge and which the ruling elite in Washington quickly identified as something of life and death, the fact that the Soviet power was, at the time, the only pillar on which the challenge was based, made things easier. . It was very easy to split the world in two and demonize the other part. Unlike today, the USSR could not support itself in China.
The challenge posed by China, Russia and Iran, supported by India, South Africa, Brazil and many others, is much more complex and delocalized. Firstly, it is not a monolithic bloc with the same ideology. These are countries with very different governance systems, from the most liberal, such as Brazil and South Africa, to socialist ones like China or developmentalist national ones like Russia, or even Iran, also associating it with its theocratic dimension. and democratic.
From a propaganda point of view, this poses many difficulties, which is why, in recent months, we have seen an increasing development of a line of propaganda, according to which China is interested in the victory of Donald Trump – he who wants to destroy it – and that it is the European extreme right that supports China and is supported by it. It’s a kind of “Russiagate”, this time in a Chinese version. Putting everyone in the same hood and demonizing them has not been easy.
Furthermore, these countries, each in their own way – Iran to a lesser extent – are connected to Western value chains, which prevents decisive and brutal action, regardless of consequences. Look at what happened with the sanctions on Russia, now think about what would happen if this aggression took place against the Chinese economy.
This is the essence of “multipolarity”, which others call “multiplexity”, which consists of its enormous capillarity, like mushrooms that multiply throughout the world, each with its own morphology, but all with the same nature, becoming become virtually impossible to contain its growth. As the USA learned from Russia, it is not enough to attack one, it is necessary to do it to all, but it is impossible to attack all, as you are now realizing. This diversity is absolutely challenging for the totalitarian and unicist logic of the United States, which saw itself as dominating a uniform world.
If there is one thing that the monopolistic West does not understand, it is how to unite things that are different, how to accept other people's differences, how to create a common force between different people, united only by one feeling, freedom. To unite, US imperialism feels an imperative need to standardize, disrespecting and destroying cultures, traditions, beliefs and ideologies, with the aim of imposing its own.
These multipolar countries, based on an intervening State (something common to all and which rejects the Western proposal of the neoliberal minimum state, replaced by monopolies), which controls the strategic sectors of the economy and committed to economic sovereignty, make the control of their economies very difficult. complicated. No wonder one of the US lines of attack on China is the need to abolish “capital controls”. The story of “liberalization” is advantageous to those who have more purchasing power. We know who has the most accumulated money, the result of 500 years of plunder and slavery.
The truth is that the USA, looking at this reality, realized that Brezinsky's strategy would have to be adapted to the current reality, namely, it should be deconcentrated or capillary, opting for delocalized provocations, taking advantage of the dispersion of military bases throughout the world. To Russia, it would be Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, closely supported by NATO; to China it would be Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan and the slippery India; to Iran, Israel.
The delocalized provocations, through proxys very well armed, they pose a problem, a problem now demonstrated by Iranian retaliation. The blanket is short, for a West that does not have the industrial capacity of the past, relocated through its own fault, through an unpopular policy of destroying jobs, at the service of monopolies. And this happens in a context of financial, economic and social contraction. Even from the point of view of financing these operations, the West ends up trapped by its contradictions: unlike States, monopolies do not invest in the common good, only in the concentration of wealth. Taking from the State to give to monopolies has ended with what we are seeing.
Based on military-industrial complexes in which the main companies are public and, even when private, forced to compete with public ones, Iran, China and Russia produce very cheaply what is extremely expensive in the West (the air defense of Iron Dome, on the night of the Iranian retaliation, spent around a billion dollars). This reality allows for a “calibrated” response of relatively low value. In comparison, those who spend the most on these operations are those whose savings are falling; Those who spend the least are those who have their savings growing. Once again, a consequence of the neoliberal minimum state, emerging from the Washington consensus.
Therefore, the great challenge facing the multipolar world will be to continue to invest in responses that are sufficiently “calibrated”, to put the aggressor at attention, without entering into an escalation of life or death, but keeping the aggressor occupied, corroding himself more and more, and whose activity leads him to believe that he is advancing, when, in fact, he is retreating. Russia did it masterfully with the Special Military Operation and China is also doing it from a non-military point of view.
Hence, listening to Ursula von der Leyen with her proverbial arrogance, threatening Iran with ineffective sanctions, listening to Donald Trump and his MAGA, Rishi Sunak wanting to talk tough and Emmanuel Macron acting like Napoleon, at the same time that they say “the world is with Ukraine”, “Russia is isolated”, “we are going to contain China” or “Iran attacked Israel”, demonstrate this: monopoly servers are busy playing toy soldiers without realizing that they are doing it on a board increasingly smaller.
Can the multipolar world continue to launch its “calibrated” attacks, in whatever form these attacks take (some more militarized, others more commercial and technological) and we will be guaranteed that they will be able to complete the task, previously begun by others: ending with neocolonialism that still muzzles the global south.
*Hugo Dionísio is a lawyer, geopolitical analyst, researcher at the Studies Office of the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP-IN).
Originally published on author's blog.
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