Recent visit by US President Joe Biden to Kiev and his Hollywoodesque photo-op with Zelensky notwithstanding, it’s plain to any keen observer of the year-long conflict that Ukraine isn’t winning this war, despite occasional battle gains such as in Kherson. The US-led NATO proxy war has bled Russia, but neither has it overwhelmed it, nor isolated it in the international world stage. In fact, the unilateral US sanctions on Russia in the first month of the war and the freezing of over 300 billion USD of Russian foreign reserves have alerted the world to the absolute perfidy of the petrodollar-driven international financial institutions, thus pushing the non-Western world towards non-dollar alternatives. Russia’s oil and gas trade with erstwhile partners like India and China have expanded several fold, trading in respective national currencies, bypassing the dollar altogether.

Moreover, Global South forums like the BRICS have been reinvigorated, especially after the election of Brazil’s charismatic left-wing President Lula da Silva. Lula, along with Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro, has not only refused to condemn Russia, but also politely said no to Joe Biden’s personal request to send ammunitions to Ukraine, emphasising that they would not be party to prolonging the war. In West Asia, Saudi Arabia has led OPEC countries in bringing down oil production, going against American wishes, thus sending fuel price skyrocketing in Europe and America.

In addition, the February 6 revelations by the American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, that the United States, with the help of Norway, blew up the Nordstream pipelines on September 26, 2022, have only confirmed what many suspected for long. The blowing up of the Nordstream pipelines constitutes an act of international terrorism against civilian infrastructure of not just another country, but in fact, an US ally, Germany. Expectedly, there’s pin-drop silence from the Germans, as well as most NATO countries, over the Hersh revelations.

While the White House has vehemently denied the allegations, the captive mainstream media in the US has either completely suppressed the story, or indulged in besmirching the reputation of Hersh, literally the last living American doyen of fearless investigative reporting. Nevertheless, Hersh’s story prompted a UN Security Council meeting, where prominent American academic Professor Jeffery Sachs as well as former CIA officer Raymond McGovern presented their observations that coincided with that of Hersh. It was mentioned in the European Parliament as well as found a significant place in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address to the nation that matter-of-factly spelt out Russia’s security concerns, shorn of the floral rhetoric that characterised the corresponding State of the Union speech by President Joe Biden.

In addition, China’s foreign ministry has also come up with a detailed piece entitled “US Hegemony and its Perils”, where it has outlined the nefarious practices of the United States to maintain its political, military, economic, technological and cultural ‘supremacy’. This is the most direct rebuttal that a Chinese government arm has engaged in, spelling out clearly its differences, and indeed, great frustrations, with the United States, underlining America’s “Cold War mentality” and launching of wars “under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights”.

The Chinese government position comes in the wake of the ludicrous balloon crisis in the US, in which the United States officials spent million-dollar missiles and fighter jets to take out drifting weather balloons and $ 12 hobby balloons flown by American aficionados. It’s crystal clear that Beijing’s no-nonsense position is the exact opposite of the insane anti-China hysteria that the war-mongering American elite indulge in to deflect attention from the chronic failures on the economic, political and cultural front in their own country.

Coming back to the Russia-Ukraine war, it’s obvious that the reality of its unenviable position for both Kiev and Washington is gradually dawning on the American elite. The New York Times, which has otherwise completely blanked out Hersh’sNordstream story, has recently lamented that the West cannot defeat Russia in this war, indicating the shift in the tides of opinion. While the American public by and large had been against any war, the manufacturing of consensus for the war, any war, has been the specialty of the US mainstream media, that’s beholden to the NATO military-intelligence complex. Moreover, the Americans are also becoming wary of emptying their military arsenal in the Ukrainian battleground, giving in to Zelensky’s endless demands for more and more weapons. Some say that Biden’s visit to Kiev, the PR-heavy photo-ops notwithstanding, was a way of telling off Zelensky to stop expecting limitless supplies from the US, and shore up US president’s own dwindling popularity even among the Democrat-leaning American voters.

Unfortunately, Biden’s Kiev visit seems to have backfired, since Donald Trump, who’s seeking to contest once again, grabbed the chance to visit East Palestine, Ohio, where a Norfolk Southern freight train derailment caused a staggering toxic chemical spill, which the company detonated instead of spending on safe clean-up. That Trump, often presented as the most unhinged president in the history of the United States, is situating himself as a “peace candidate”, saying he can end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, is a testament to the depths that American politics has fallen.

It’s also important to carefully read Vladimir Putin’s speech in full, where he has spelt out in great detail Moscow’s frustrations with Washington and its NATO allies, and how the Minsk-I and Minsk-II agreements in the wake of the 2014 Euromaidan coup in Ukraine were signed only to hoodwink a trusting Russia. The annexation of Crimea, with a population of over 90 percent of ethnic Russians, followed by a successful referendum, occurred due to Moscow’s legitimate fears of NATO placing nukes and ballistic missiles right next to Russian borders. In December 2021, Russia’s sincere draft proposal for peace and joint security concerns was ignored by the collective West. The genocidal atrocities by Kiev-sponsored neo-Nazi militias against the Russian-speaking peoples in the Donbas region has been one of the chief contributing factors spurring Russia towards its original Special Military Operation, which it had expected to be quick and bloodless. Despite the initial political miscalculation, Russia has battled a proxy war with NATO, liberating areas in Donetsk and Luhansk, holding on to parts of eastern Ukraine, while denying the Western-backed Kiev regime a resounding taste of success.

While America battles internal political crisis, and Europe reels from inflation driven by the energy price hike after the Nordstream bombing, Moscow and Beijing have been pushed to a strategic embrace closer than any in history. Not only are they an integral part of the BRICS, that also includes Brazil, India and South Africa, but also, they are the kernel around which the Global South is consolidating, attempting to forge a truly multipolar world order, away from the hegemonic US-led “rules-based order”. India’s own multi-alignment, being courted by both the US and Russia, has so far seen it fare well, skirting the choppy waters of international relations, without particularly sabotaging ties with any country. Despite border tensions with China, and the Narendra Modi-led Indian regime’s pusillanimous acquiescence to the new de facto LAC, New Delhi’s trade with Beijing didn’t suffer and possibility of a détente too isn’t ruled out with the resuming of dialogue on the thorny matter.

In the words of Julian Assange, the unjustly incarcerated feral prophet of truth who exposed US war crimes at their ugliest in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now facing imminent extradition to the US from the United Kingdom: America doesn’t want a successful war, it wants an endless war, to launder the money of taxpayers and enrich the transnational security elite. Beijing’s latest document and Putin’s speech both underline the same malaise in the international world order directed by the United States, which sees the global system as a zero sum game with only one true hegemon to call the shots. However, it’s evident to everyone outside the collective West that America’s days of unchallenged hegemony are truly and finally numbered. (IPA Service)