Above is this week’s khutbah; below is my new article for Crescent International, the leading Muslim news and analysis magazine in English.
Will the West’s Suicide Bring World Peace?
In The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski speculated about the American unipolar hegemon’s ultimate geostrategic nightmare: “a new ‘antihegemonic’ coalition, formed around the three powers with the greatest geopolitical stake in reducing America’s primacy in Eurasia.” Those three powers, of course, are Russia, China, and Iran. Such a development, Brzezinski observed, would “bring together the world’s leading Slavic power, the world’s most militant Islamic power, and the world’s most populated and powerful Asian power, thereby creating a potent coalition.”
Such an alliance would require “a renewal of the bilateral Sino-Russian connection, capitalizing on the resentment among the political elites of both states over the emergence of America as the only global superpower.” That seemed unlikely when Brzezinski was writing in 1997 because, as he put it, such a coalition could only develop if the US were stupid enough to antagonize all three nations simultaneously.
Brzezinski should have known never to underestimate the stupidity of American foreign policy elites. As I write this in late July 2022 (Dhu’l-Hijjah 1443 AH) the neocon-led west is committing strategic suicide by doing exactly what Brzezinski warned against: not just antagonizing, but massively antagonizing Russia, China, and Iran all at once. The inevitable result will be the collapse of American pretensions to global leadership, sooner rather than later.
The US under Donald Trump blew up whatever shred of credibility it had with Tehran by tearing up the JCPOA and assassinating Gen. Qassem Soleimani after luring him to Baghdad with a fake peace offer. Moving the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem/al-Quds, deeming Israeli land-theft legitimate, and sponsoring the anti-Iran anti-Palestine Shaitan Accords (misnamed the “Abraham Accords” in a horrific insult to sayyidna Ibrahim alaihi as-salaam) was just the icing on the cake. After those actions, Iran had no choice but to face the reality that the US is, as the Russians say, non-agreement-capable.
Around the same time the US attacked Wuhan with COVID-19, inadvertently (?) unleashing a global pandemic. This came on the heels of suspected American bio-attacks on China in 2017 and 2018 that decimated the Chinese meat supply in the midst of Trump’s red-hot trade war. Immediately after exploding out of Wuhan, COVID suspiciously jumped 3600 miles to Qom, disproportionately infecting Iran’s political and clerical leadership just weeks after the US had murdered Gen. Soleimani. The Rahbar, Imam Sayyid Ali Khamenei all but accused the US of perpetrating a biological attack, and Iran formally complained to the United Nations.
The US COVID bio-attack on Wuhan and Qom was presumably designed to be blamed on China in order to foster anti-Chinese hysteria and trigger the supply-chain decoupling that would be necessary during the lead-up to military escalation. Though elements of China’s leadership dropped many hints that they knew the score, Beijing apparently calculated that playing coy as the pandemic “returned to sender” was wiser than launching formal accusations and sparking domestic outrage that could force a premature hot war.
While angering China and Iran with such reckless mistreatment, the US would have been well-advised to play nice with Russia. Instead, the neocons did the exact opposite: They orchestrated the 2022 war on Russia through Ukraine. After installing a neocon-run puppet government in the 2014 Maidan coup, the US built a huge NATO-armed-and-trained “Ukrainian” army—and, in early 2022, sent it to attack the Donbass and Crimea. Russia’s pleas to respect the Minsk Accords and negotiate limits on NATO expansion were brutally rebuffed as US-Ukrainian biological warfare labs on Russia’s borders ramped up their suspicious activities. All of this was intended to trigger a pre-emptive Russian invasion of Ukraine, and it succeeded.
To win its proxy war on Russia, the US needs to isolate Moscow. To that end it slapped sanctions on Russian energy, banking, and raw materials. Washington’s obsequious European vassals meekly obeyed, depriving themselves of Russian natural gas and thereby committing economic suicide. But most of the world is defying the sanctions, and China and Iran are leading the way. As the US propaganda service Radio Free Europe recently whined, “China’s growing appetite for discounted Russian oil has made it the leading financier of the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine by giving Moscow a reliable revenue source that blunts the impact of tough Western sanctions against its economy.” (Why would China kowtow to US orders even as Biden breaks with US policy and announces his readiness to go to war with China over Taiwan, which the US has officially deemed a province of China for half a century?)
Meanwhile the Rahbar of Iran brought Russian President Putin and Turkish President Erdogan to Tehran on July 19 to plan the eviction of the US from Syria while forging a Eurasian partnership that will eventually see all three nations working with China to build an alternative non-US-authorized trade and security order. According to al-Jazeera “The two leaders (Imam Khamenei and Putin) also reportedly discussed bilateral relations and gradually removing the US dollar from bilateral trade.” By accelerating the erosion of the dollar as global reserve currency, Russia and Iran, along with China and other Eurasian partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, will undercut Washington’s ability to print the unlimited currency it uses to finance its military occupation of much of the world.
Also at the Tehran conference, Russia announced its investment of $40 billion in developing Iranian gas and oil fields, while the two leaders jointly agreed to proceed with plans for enlarging Russia-Iran-China joint military exercises (which are already happening around the world including in Latin America, Washington’s “Monroe Doctrine” backyard). The multipolar alliance’s move into Central and South America has been facilitated by a wave of left-wing election victories empowering Latin leaders who never much cared for US dominance of their half of the hemisphere.
And even as Turkey was joining Russia and Iran in Tehran in a pointed rebuke to Biden’s visits to Tel Aviv and Riyadh, Pakistan’s Imran Khan won a smashing election victory in Punjab, signaling the Pakistani people’s refusal to accept the US-IMF coup that deposed Khan in April. Other Central Asian nations are also leaning toward the new multipolar axis based on the Russia-China-Iran tripartite alliance.
These developments, together with Russia’s victory over the US in Ukraine, suggest that the “new American century” has ended 78 years early. The boundless arrogance of America’s neocons, who seized power in their 9/11/2001 coup d’état and proceeded to squander America’s soft and hard power in a series of ill-advised adventures, has created the very nightmare scenario that all serious strategic thinkers, including Brzezinski, had insisted on avoiding at all costs.
Ironically, the Americans may be inadvertently preparing the groundwork for world peace even as they blunderingly bestride the globe waging bloody, counterproductive wars. By forcing Eurasia to unite both commercially and militarily, the US may have accidentally created the conditions for a more stable world order. Eurasia, after all, is the center of the “grand chessboard” and ground zero in the competition for land and resources that tends to erupt into war. As Eurasian nations band together into an anti-American alliance, they may be forging enduring ties that will eventually facilitate the emergence of more peaceful world bound by economic, intellectual, and spiritual exchange rather than military competition and plunder.