Why E. Blinken's theses at Johns Hopkins University should be taken seriously
On September 19, the “high-level week” of the UN General Assembly starts, where the ideas and agreements that were reached at regional and interregional negotiation platforms will be polished on the platforms and on the sidelines. A high level implies representation of top officials of states.
UNGA resolutions are advisory in nature, but voting on them usually reflects the positions of international coalitions and also shows changes in their composition. That is, this event partly allows you to see the geopolitical map based on the results of the past political year. This event should neither be underestimated nor overestimated - it is a kind of marker of the current state of the “game of thrones”.
Over the past year, we have seen quite significant changes not only in the positions of the parties, but also in working methods. Moreover, as strange as it may seem at first glance, the topic of Ukraine is not the main one here. It is a thread that stitches the agenda of different international platforms into one whole, but it is not a goal, but a high-cost tool.
From the point of view of assessing Russia’s main geopolitical adversary, the United States, we have observed three most important steps this year.
The first step was J. Sullivan’s speech on May 4 at the WINEP symposium, where he presented a model of interaction with India and the Arab world. As we could see in a number of spring and summer materials on VO, the United States is implementing its life with enviable persistence and certain results in relation to Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan. The nearest actual points of autumn are Iraq, Iran and Transcaucasia.
The most widely promoted event in our country was the memorandum on the creation of a unified trade and transport system for India and the Arabian countries. But this is the top of a pyramid, at the base of which there are many other processes.
The second step was the signing on June 9 of the Atlantic Declaration and Action Plan for the XNUMXst Century US-UK Economic Partnership (ADAT) between the US and UK. It not only once again specifies China and Russia as a strategic threat. The main thing is that this declaration returns London and Washington to the relations of the Atlantic Charter during the Second World War.
This means that the struggle between Great Britain and the United States in terms of building special schemes in international politics has faded into the background, and they have now agreed to proceed in concert. In fact, this can even be seen in the regional hubs - the EU, Turkey and Transcaucasia are included in London's area of responsibility, and the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, Ukraine and Central Asia are under the responsibility of the USA.
The third important step was the presentation on September 13 by US Secretary of State E. Blinken at a conference at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University of principles and methods for building relationships within the framework of future international projects. From a certain point of view, this third step is even more important in some ways than the first two, since it makes it possible to understand the very complex of ideas that the United States embeds in its model of international relations.
Variable Geometry Diplomacy
This speech and its theses must be analyzed in great detail. If only because E. Blinken’s speech has already begun to be associated with “concessions on Ukraine”, “the fiasco of the G-20 summit”, “recognition of the fact of a multipolar world”, and so on and so forth.
At first glance, this speech is indeed a kind of antithesis to another speech by the American Secretary of State, “The Strategic Failure of Russia and the Safe Future of Ukraine,” which he delivered on June 2 in Helsinki. It largely echoed B. Obama’s sensational statements at the time about the economy being “torn to shreds,” and against its bravura background, the theses at Hopkins University seem almost like a surrender of ground.
But the problem is that these are completely different speeches, for different audiences and for different reasons. If in June E. Blinken stated that some agreements around Ukraine would be a priori built around the preservation of its statehood and the current form of Kiev’s perception of “national identity,” then the September ideas relate to the principles of building a new model of international politics as a whole.
It is clear that “overcoming” is the sweet spot for the information sphere, especially since E. Blinken’s speech in Ukraine caused, to put it mildly, a mixed reaction. But the fact of the matter is that in this case there is a danger of missing important conceptual details, and as a result, after some time it may turn out that the failures of the strategic enemy were not so disastrous, the concessions were tactical turns or worse - traps, etc. .
At first glance, E. Blinken really states theses that are unusual for American discourse. The beginning was made in the traditional US style (“The strength and purpose of American diplomacy in a new era”), but then, it seems, there are continuous “zrads” from Washington.
“But what we are experiencing now is more than a test of the post-Cold War order. This is the end".
“One era ends, a new one begins, and the decisions we make now will shape the future for decades to come.”
“Technology and globalization that have devastated and displaced entire industries, and policies that have failed to do enough to help the workers and communities that have been left behind.”
“Humility because we face challenges that no country can face alone. Because we know that we will have to earn the trust of a number of countries and citizens to whom the old order failed to deliver on many of its promises. Because we recognize that leadership begins with listening and understanding common problems from the perspective of others so that we can find common ground.”
Many also noted the passage about the need to live in “a world where each nation can choose its own path and its own partners.”
“The end”, “humility”, “can’t do it alone”, “own path”, “earn trust”, doesn’t even sound very familiar. It is very easy to fall into the trap of these narratives, especially outside the overall context of the speech.
For example. It would seem that E. Blinken is almost talking about the collapse of the idea of globalization, which has devastated states, but let us ask the question, what specific globalization project is he talking about? About the one that the United States has been promoting since the advent of Barack Obama, or about the one that has been built for a long time within the framework of Davos, albeit not without the participation of Washington? Are these exactly the same ideas and, just as importantly, the same participants and institutions?
The ideas of B. Obama's cabinet are remembered for projects such as the Transatlantic (TAP) and Trans-Pacific (TPP) partnerships. They were not brought to working condition, since D. Trump beat them up pretty badly, he and M. Pompeo had enough authority for this. Now these agreements are in limbo, but this does not mean that the United States has abandoned them.
Their peculiarity was the creation of special trade relations between the United States and the participants, which, if necessary, would be removed from the WTO rules. This seems rather strange for the ideas of globalization, unless you consider that there are two concepts of globalization.
In this case, we are dealing with the so-called “variable geometry diplomacy” approach. And it was this issue that E. Blinken decided to focus on in his speech.
This strange term was put into circulation during the discussion of the principles of EU enlargement, which was forced to somehow maneuver in order to include countries that did not actually meet the necessary criteria.
In certain cases, this method made it possible to create separate, special integration forms and statuses for several participants in the integration process at once. In principle, the mere fact of the US presence in the WTO is already a kind of element of diplomacy with variable geometry, and the most significant one at that. Another thing is that this method was developed within the framework of the European Union and its trade partnerships, but for the United States it has not been a priority since the late 90s.
E. Blinken's emphasis on this approach must be superimposed on the geography that appears in his theses. The difference from previous years is that Africa (except for the trans-African railway project), Central and Latin America practically does not appear there. All projects, corridors, infrastructure, military-technical cooperation have moved to the Eurasian continent.
The United States intends to fight for the complete development of Eurasia
This is a very important point, since we have a fairly broad opinion in the expert opinion that the United States will be forced to “withdraw from Europe and the Middle East” in order to fully concentrate limited resources on Southeast Asia. E. Blinken's keynote speech indicates exactly the opposite: the United States intends to fight for the complete development of Eurasia as a whole. To do this, it is proposed to move to a system of individual unions and situational associations of countries that unite for specific tasks, without finding fault with the features of the economic model or value systems.
At the same time, India and the Arabian Middle East are connecting infrastructure into a common production block, and Southeast Asia will be a system of various situational alliances, including in the military-technical sphere. South Korea and Japan are considered not as recipients of investments, but as co-investors - they are invited to literally “coordinate our global investments in infrastructure.”
Co-investors initially envisioned them in the PGII concept, which, on the one hand, undocks the trading and production sites of Southeast Asia from China and docks them with India and the United States. This is a new iteration of the Trans-Pacific Partnership idea, only without China, replacing it with India.
Actually, here we see a preference given to individual diplomacy, individual settings of trade associations for a specific regional economy. It is not for nothing that a fairly large part of E. Blinken’s speech was devoted to the success of negotiations with Saudi Arabia, where this yielded success. He is frankly in a hurry, but the shifts in Riyadh’s position are truly significant. There will be a separate article about this, but now it is important to understand the general model.
We see, as in the case of the so-called. Abraham Accords, a deeper and more practical reworking of the ideas of TAP and TPP with a priority on individual diplomacy and a lot of cross-situational international formats. The model has become more complex in execution and administration, but much more practical. But such a position, in essence, means the decline of such monstrous associations as the IMF or the WTO. And it’s not even a matter of eliminating these macro-regulators – there is no question of that. This means potentially a new build and upgrade of them.
And it is quite logical that it is on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly that Washington plans to hold the US-Central Asia summit (C5+1), which for the first time will be held not in the format of ministerial meetings, but of top officials. Actually, this association, which took shape over the previous year and with which China signed the grandiose Xi’an Declaration, is something that the United States will try to, if not take away from China, then at least undermine its position there.
In fact, the United States, by not nullifying the Washington Consensus, is thereby nullifying Davos, but by and large this was the idea of the second globalization project - the reassembly of institutions with the creation of not a single system, but several - a kind of “matryoshka dolls of different speeds”. Nevertheless, there is a difference, and it is significant. The ideas of the Obama era did not provide for alternative economic centers of equal scale. Moreover, the Middle East was planned to be fragmented and redrawn. In this case, on the contrary, it is glued with India into one raw materials, industrial and trade association.
This model is quite unusual for the United States, which has traditionally operated in a position of unconditional maximum gain. For a long time such ideas were used only as abstract declarations. In some ways, they repeat the ideas of the 1970s and 1980s, when the United States suddenly became friends with Beijing, and it is not for nothing that at the beginning of his speech E. Blinken emphasizes the continuity of the “Zbig” (Brzezinski) line. Another thing is that the States never left the policies of the Arabian monarchies without direct control.
In fact, this is an attempt to intercept the very agenda of a multipolar world, which goes (or rather, went) in opposition to the traditional US line. At the same time, Washington, in the person of E. Blinken, does not abandon the postulates of the exclusivity of the nation, historically predetermined leadership, leaderism, etc. It’s just that now Washington will be the leader not of a unipolar, but of a multipolar world. So far these are just declarations, a concept, but the question is how long it will take for this to take root, in terms of economic development for specific players.
Thus, this year we saw not just a tactical change in the US foreign policy line, but we are dealing with a deep revision and, in fact, a number of program documents. This has not happened since Barack Obama's second term.
To attribute this to a situational fiasco at the GXNUMX would be simply ridiculous (but this is already being written, and quite often). Such concepts are not prepared in a week, especially since the United States previously made breakthroughs in relation to Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Next in line will be the struggle with Iran for Iraq and attempts to integrate the Central Asian five. China, Russia and Iran should approach this challenge extremely seriously, and our media should not try to freely use some of the formulas from E. Blinken’s speech on occasion.
The China + Russia + Iran troika should very thoroughly prepare for the fact that the United States not only will not leave, but is actually planning, figuratively speaking, a comprehensive landing on the Eurasian continent.
No peace initiatives in terms of Ukraine should be misleading. The Big Continental Three still have the strength and means for such a response.
* E. Blinken’s full speech at Johns Hopkins University can be found at link.
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