Never mind the willy waiving, Liz Truss's speech yesterday was the most shocking/interesting geopolitical thing I've heard recently:
The world order created after the Second World War and the Cold War isn’t working anymore, so the West needs “a global NATO” to pursue geopolitics anew, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss argued, in a major foreign policy speech on Wednesday. Truss also urged the US-led bloc to send more “heavy weapons, tanks” and airplanes to Ukraine, and said China would face the same treatment as Russia if it doesn’t “play by the rules.”
“My vision is a world where free nations are assertive and in the ascendant. Where freedom and democracy are strengthened through a network of economic and security partnerships,” Truss said in a speech at a Mansion House banquet in London.
Dubbing this arrangement “the Network of Liberty,” Truss argued it was necessary because the economic and security structures developed after 1945 – such as the UN Security Council – “have been bent out of shape so far, they have enabled rather than contained aggression.”
“Geopolitics is back,” she announced.
The collective West and its allies need to supply Kiev with “heavy weapons, tanks, aeroplanes – digging deep into our inventories, ramping up production,” Truss said, because the objective is to “push Russia out of the whole of Ukraine” and rebuild the country along the lines of a new Marshall Plan.
“The war in Ukraine is our war – it is everyone’s war because Ukraine’s victory is a strategic imperative for all of us. Beyond that, NATO must ensure that “the Western Balkans and countries like Moldova and Georgia have the resilience and the capabilities to maintain their sovereignty and freedom,” and uphold the “sacrosanct” open-door policy, Truss said.
Her ambitions went beyond Europe, though, as Truss denounced the “false choice between Euro-Atlantic security and Indo-Pacific security. In the modern world we need both. We need a global NATO,” she said. “And we must ensure that democracies like Taiwan are able to defend themselves.” Pointing to London’s unprecedented effort to embargo Russia, Truss insisted that “economic access is no longer a given. It has to be earned,” and that countries who wish to earn it “must play by the rules. And that includes China.”
In other words, the New World Order aka the 'neo-liberal rules-based world' order has failed, so naturally what is needed is more of that which has failed.
This response isn’t even remotely surprising in the abstract, as doubling down is what stubborn idiots always do instead of examining the reasons for their failure and rethinking both their assumptions and their approaches. But it is surprising in the particular, as Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, and the Philippines have made it clear that they will not submit to the West’s demands that they deliver their natural resources to their Western customers on demand, while simultaneously being subject to having their economic access to those same customers controlled by globalist corporations, alphabet soup agencies, NGOs, and powerful Western billionaires who want to interfere in their domestic politics and tell them how to live - or else.
This tends to strongly support something I have recently been pondering a lot about, that the Russian 'Special Military Operation' has very little to do with Ukraine per se; it is merely the opening battle in the Non-West’s war with the powers who rule over the West. This will be confirmed if/when a second theatre of conflict opens, though whether that will be in Taiwan, Western Europe, Russia, or somewhere in the Middle East is yet to be seen.
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Originally Posted by Lencoboy
