Putin puts in an “Eagle”

The rule of the uni-polar eunuch - a world out of balance and out of control

Addressing a gathering of international defence ministers and political representatives at the Munich Security Conference, Vladimir Putin lashed out at the international role of the United States in an unprecedented manner. Not since the Cold War has the sort of language and tone been heard from the leader of one world power to another. Despite that, his arguments were intellectually sound, though probably beyond the grasp of George W. Bush, who wasn’t present.

Putin lambasted the US for overstepping “its borders in all spheres - economic, political and humanitarian,” and for imposing itself on other states. The results, he said were disastrous, leading to more local and regional wars and more deaths. He stated that the US was proceeding “from one conflict to another without achieving a fully-fledged solution to any of them.” In no uncertain terms he was accusing the US of being the major destabilizing and destructive force on the planet, as a result of its position as an omnipotent uni-polar power.

Undoubtedly, there are many world leaders who like to usher similar, if less belligerent remarks. Putin was obvious reflecting a feeling of anger and impotence at the way the US is destabilizing the world situation and causing problems for everyone. But his remarks were not only correct from a political perspective, but on a theoretical or scientific level also.   

Normally speaking, the concept of a "uni-power world" is really an oxymoron. Nothing in nature, let alone in international relations, can exist with only one pole. It is a stick without an end, a head with no tail, matter without anti-matter, an Artic without an Antarctic, life without death. In a uni-polar situation there can be no interpenetrating, oppositional gravitational forces holding the world together. By definition the world must unravel and unraveling it is.

Yet nature always proves the rule by the exception. Uni-polarity can and does exist in nature, but the phenomenon is a temporary mutation, an aberration, a fluke of nature, and an evolutionary cul de sac, which must eventually self-right itself again. The great problem is that the longer it exists, the more its gravitational effect warps world relations, turns society and politics upside down and creates chaos and disorder. All the old maps are torn up, continents collide, and earthquakes and eruptions will bring the formation of new alliances, wars, civil wars, sectarian bloodbaths and the proliferation of terror and nuclear force. This is particularly true because of the unique character of modern US uni-polarity, which is a polar force in decline. It lacks the capacity to pull the world “into line”, but at the same time, has sufficiently influence to shred and fibrillate, its missing global counterbalance into highly dangerous multifarious live wires of international destabilization.    

But whatever, Bush, or his successors do, there are no military, diplomatic or socio-economic policies they can pursue which will change matters. They are simply attempting to solve problems by writing arithmetic formulas on a global blackboard of advanced calculus, whose equations are incontrovertible, since they are being played out and applied by the quantum physics of global evolution. Whatever America does, the driving processes in the physics of the dynamic relations between balance and disequilibria, chaos and disorder, cannot be stopped. The US is now powerless to halt the unraveling of the whole world political situation, and where it does intervene, it only accelerates the process. Uni-polarity is leading inevitably towards deep chaos and violent disorder worldwide.

In this situation it no longer matters what the great uni-power superpower may wish, it cannot hold back the forces of nature from re-shaping the whole globe by eventually destroying the forms in which everything came before. The United States does not stand above universal laws, and these laws apply as much to politics as they do to physics. The whole Universe has an inherent tendency towards returning to duality, which even the USA cannot overturn. And this new form may be bi-polar, as before, or multipolar, with a number of different counterbalancing weights or countervailing forces. 

When the clarions of the “New World Order” trumpeted in the epoch of uni-polar superpower as a new Golden Age of peace and stability, we witnessed one of the worst displays of myopic, self-delusory, linear thinking since King Canute believed he could hold back the sea. The notion of uni-polar stability was like reducing international relations to a flat earth theory of political science.

With balance broken between the two old Soviet and American superpowers a new topsy-turvy “Wonderland” is emerged, where everything is not as it seems to be and, indeed where many of the characters are quite larger than life. And things have a nasty habit of turning into their opposite and in new unexpected and unique forms. The international peace and stability, which the end of the old balance of nuclear terror promised, has evidently brought forth a new form of terror, which is no longer “implicit” but explicit. The once unassailable superpower, finds itself as a “uni-polar eunuch”, whether in the “war on terror”, the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan or the brazen detonation of a nuclear weapon by North Korea. It must stand by idly and have its face slapped and insulted by one “rogue” leader after another at United Nations gatherings. Indeed, one cannot help also noticing, that there is some bizarre, almost “biblical” irony that the father of the phrase “New World Order” should bequeath to his son the destiny of leading the world’s greatest uni-polar empire into decline.

Chaos theory explains that all dynamic systems in nature exist in a “far-from equilibrium” state and human society and international relations are system which are particularly so. We live and have always lived “on the “edge of chaos”. World politics has always been characterized by periods of precarious and relative semi-stability, followed by great plunges into phases of “deep chaos” and anarchistic disorder. Wars, economic and social crises, are the formless, violent fractal reformations, through which world relations re-organize themselves into new, tenuous and transient stability. Each emergent, new trajectory of history has its own unique features, but it is rare that international stability can last for any substantial period where one side of the scales is not matched by a countervailing force, be they singular or collective in character.

Periods of peace have always been times, where an implicit balance of terror between two superpowers or two opposing alliances of powers, has kept the ropes of international relations sufficiently taut to allow a pattern of uneasy equilibrium to exist. Generally speaking, these are those periods of greater peace, where there is at least some growth and economic and social stability exists. Yet, because all development continues in combined and uneven subterranean forms, periods after war may bring especially dynamic and volatile economic and social progress to some areas of the world and not others.

This parallel, lower level, hypogean “chaos” eventually also works its way to the surface of world affairs and disturbs the balance of international relations. Thus, be it for economic, social or political reason, domestically or internationally, there are no times, whether “stable” or not, which are not inherently riddled with trip switches and bobby traps ready to destabilize the whole world. This phenomenon has reached its pinnacle in the epoch of globalization.

Today we are diving into a period of deep chaos. From this a new trajectory will eventually emerge to draw international relations into a revolutionary new bi-polar or “multi-polar” formation. What such a new formation will be will reveal itself more clearly in the course of events. In the world of physics and the study of chaotic systems, this period of deep chaos leads either to the emergence of a “strange attractor” – a force which pulls the anarchistic disorder into a new trajectory, thus establishing a new formation – or to centripetal forces that lead to disintegration and self-annihilation. These so-called bifurcations may also produce multi-furcations, so a large number of diverse outcomes are possible, before the process concludes in either direction.

When no “attractor” at all emerges and then the interaction of the competing forces of disorder cancel each other out, and pull each other down into total mutual destruction.

In the period of deep chaos that is now enveloping the world, a myriad of contradictory and highly dynamic, interacting factors will come into play, which means that, unlike periods of relative stability, the work of clarifying perspectives is made much more complex. Analysis and forecasting now necessarily takes on the form of observing the interaction of different factors and the new fusions of highly unstable elements in a unique, unobserved experimental process on almost a daily basis. It becomes a time of increasing instability where factors of “chance” can play an undue role. It is a time of sharp turns and sudden changes, where perspectives become a working hypothesis open to constant adjustment. A time when one can, at best, hope to general in the specific and specific in the general in forecasting developments and outcomes.