In this episode, I talk about the rise of multipolarism in the post-World War II world, and why I don t think it works. I also talk about why Israel might be playing a different game in an emerging multipolar world.
00:00:00.000So there is multipolarity as a kind of ideology, and then there is multipolarity as a description.
00:00:07.740So multipolarity as an ideology is deriving from Alexander Dugan and people around him.
00:00:16.180And it is a kind of liberalism for the world where all of these great, like, gross realms can have their, like, indigenous cultures and do whatever they want, but how dare a one gross realm invade another?
00:00:35.380There's the American realm, and that's fine. You do you, babe. But how dare you even contemplate interfering in the Russian realm?
00:00:47.720And the Russian realm is basically structured around the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, more or less, and they can just do whatever they want.
00:00:57.640So it's a kind of convenient ideology for someone like Dugan to put forward and to put forward through his many acolytes in the sense that Russia has its own really serious problems.
00:01:11.820Russia can't win wars, at least against countries that are getting backed by NATO.
00:01:19.580NATO troops are never on the ground, but they're getting, they're certainly getting backing.
00:01:23.120They can't win these wars. And worse still, the Russian realm is less attractive, in fact, than the Soviet Union.
00:01:33.920And the Soviet Union dealt with this sort of delegitimacy crisis.
00:01:38.560But Russia really deals with it. No one wants to be a part of the Russian realm.
00:01:43.120And I've said this before, but I know this is like a Twitter meme, but it's also one of the few Twitter memes that's 100% accurate,
00:01:51.480which is that NATO expands through handshakes and consensus and through basically popularity among the people.
00:02:02.660Ditto the European Union, different related thing.
00:02:06.000Russia only expands through tanks and claiming that there are Russian speakers in another country that Russia must protect for some reason.
00:02:17.440And that's it. No one wants to be a part of that world.
00:02:21.400And that's just a brutal reality that Russia has no answer for.
00:02:25.620But so basically, multipolarity as an ideology is highly convenient for the Russians, let's just to put it mildly.
00:02:35.500But there's also multipolarity as a kind of description that is, regardless of the theorizing of Alexander Dugan, are we entering a multipolar world?
00:02:50.600Now, my view is that I don't think we're ever going to enter a truly multipolar world due to advances in technology, communications,
00:03:04.240the spread of a lingua franca around the planet, the creation of a almost homogeneous man, basically.
00:03:14.240Nietzsche was talking about this in terms of Europe, where he wanted to, even then in the mid to late 19th century,
00:03:22.820just move past nationalism, etc., because we already have a European man that exists.
00:03:31.000And this, of course, is in the age of train travel and the telegraph and maybe some precedents for things like the automobile and highways and telephones and computers, etc.
00:03:45.820Certainly, universal Christianity is a major part of this as well, and the kind of universalism and egalitarianism that entails.
00:03:54.020So I basically agree with Nietzsche that multipolarity is not going to happen.
00:04:00.460Like, we live in a society, but we live on a planet, and we can talk to each other immediately on a planet.
00:04:07.520What happens somewhere happens everywhere due to the technology of the internet and web.
00:04:15.780And we are creating, for better and for worse, a sort of homogeneous mankind that thinks of himself as bearing rights and as dignified and as a good-consuming citizen.
00:04:33.600So I don't think that multipolarity works.
00:04:38.460I think it's a kind of trad LARP, in fact, coming from Duganism as an ideology, but I don't think it works even as a kind of analysis of what's happening.
00:04:48.500But I think that Israel might very well be playing different games in an emerging multipolar world, in its perception, and at least in its perception that the United States' days are behind them.
00:05:10.500Whatever Herzl wanted, whatever the early Zionists wanted, they were in many ways, not necessarily Soviet, but certainly socialist and communist, nationalist, Jews.
00:05:29.140Stop being these bankers, being in Vienna and Paris.
00:05:33.240Go get on the land and start farming and, yeah, you should work out and start taking supplements.
00:05:39.860You should deadlift 500 at the very least, fellow Jews.
00:06:14.020But we're the only American-style democracy in the Middle East.
00:06:17.000There was just this embrace of the West, and that existed uncomfortably with Israeli identity and even Israeli hopes and dreams of expansion and hegemony and et cetera.
00:06:35.260But I don't know, maybe Israel is trying to sell itself as the center of the world in an increasingly multipolar world.
00:06:48.320And what I mean by this is that, like, the classic theory of the center of the universe is Mackinder and its heartland theory, and it is about natural resource production, et cetera.
00:07:05.760But there's also a kind of, like, spiritual center of the world as well.
00:07:11.660And Israel benefits from the fact that is Jerusalem.
00:07:16.220And so evangelical Christians believe that this is where Jesus is going to return to us.
00:07:24.820And Jesus walked on the sand in what is Israeli and, I guess, in many cases, Palestinian territory, Bethlehem's in Palestine, et cetera.
00:07:37.880And it makes sense to them in some weird way that the Jews should be in charge of it.
00:07:43.860Jerusalem remains the center of the world in Muslim apocalyptic scenarios, as Jerusalem also plays a major factor there.
00:07:56.660And, of course, Professor Chang might be wrong about some things, but I did see that he had a clip where he was right, that the Jews wrote the Koran, by the way.
00:08:05.920And much like they created Christianity, they also created Islam.
00:08:11.200And lo and behold, it functions in a kind of parallel structural way as Christian end times philosophy.
00:08:20.140And Jerusalem is right at the center of it.
00:08:22.860That's where Muhammad took his ride all the way to Jerusalem and back.
00:08:28.060So Israel might very well want to become or remain a kind of spiritual center of the universe.
00:08:36.920There's like a heartland theory where Israel, but it's about religion.
00:08:42.540And Christians in America will love it.