by Matt Parrott
Over the past decade, Russia and Iran have performed an incredible job of building an effective response to Atlanticist hegemony. Their investments in Russia Today, PressTV, and a variety of alternative media projects have achieved tremendous leverage, throwing the Western media monopoly off balance with well-funded and persuasive research and reporting to challenge the multinational corporations and Organized Jewish organizations which have been spinning and framing the news unchallenged and unanswered for decades.
Alexander Dugin has led an entire movement of public intellectuals who’ve arrived at a compelling challenge to the Western “liberal” metapolitical vision, offering hope and solidarity to traditional cultures and identities the world over. A lighthouse beacon has been shown for national leladers who don’t wish for their countries to be stripped down and turned into strip malls by Western financiers have a safe harbor.
It’s working and it’s attracting support around the globe, but Russia’s insistence on framing its actions in Ukraine at least partially in terms of anachronistic themes (Ukrainians are Nazis!) and parochial realpolitik was an unforced error. Support for the ethnic independence movements in the Ukraine could have as easily been framed in identitarian and traditionalist terms from the beginning, but it wasn’t…at least not consistently. Gradually, the Kremlin is gravitating toward those talking points because they’re more compelling, but the opening was left for the Western oligarchs to persuasively frame Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine as crass bullying of its neighbors, leaving much of global reaction ambivalent about or opposed to the ethnic and religious revolutionaries against the liberal Atlanticist Ukrainian puppet state.
Meanwhile, Syria presents an ideal test case for the Eurasianist geopolitical alliance. Assad’s a popular, charismatic, and democratically elected statesman who stands for traditional Arab values across religious and sectarian lines. His opponents couldn’t possibly be any more blatantly a mash-up of mercantile mercenary puppets of NATO agitators and cartoonishly villainous Al Qaeda and ISIS extremists. Even the majority of Americans who remain largely under the influence of Western media sources haven’t been convinced to oppose Assad, and America’s support for the mercenaries and jihadists set against him is largely clandestine and covert owing to the project’s lack of popularity back home.
Political theories are great and necessary, and a persuasive one is coalescing which has the power to challenge the global hegemony of cannibal capitalist “liberalism.” But just as in the first Cold War, the ideas are impotent when insufficient power is projected to undergird them.
Naturally, there’s some calculation which must be made when considering when, where, and how much support a superpower ought to invest in its satellites. After all, there are regimes which will inevitably topple. There are causes which are pretty much lost. There are would-be “partners” who don’t offer enough strategic value to excuse the investment. Despite rapid improvements in the past decade, Russia and Iran remain somewhat cash-strapped relative to the West, and geopolitics, like the game of RISK, requires uncomfortable zero-sum calculations which invariably involve coming up short somewhere else that investment is needful.
But if Assad’s Syria, located smack dab in the heart of the Middle East, isn’t strategically valuable, then what country is? If Assad’s campaign to push back naked corporate mercenaries and ISIS in favor of traditional local rule isn’t the optimal fight to get behind, then what fight is? If Assad’s stability and strategic acumen in the face of boggling odds doesn’t meet the standard, then how high must the standard be? If Russia and Iran can’t even check the Western-backed Arab Spring process in this optimal test case, then why bother challenging Western influence in the Middle East at all?
The leading nations of the nascent Eurasianist project have already invested a tremendous amount in Assad’s Syria in the past several years, and I don’t discount that. But a surge of support is necessary to finally and definitively break the morale and will of the exhausted and disorganized gaggle of foreign mercenaries bedeviling Syria. Protecting this defiant Arab nation which is being politically, religiously, and economically ravaged by Western multinational and Zionist interests–the fanatical jihadis are largely an opportunistic infection–is not only the morally righteous and metapolitically coherent thing to do; it’s also of paramount geopolitical importance.
The whole world is watching and waiting to see if standing with the Eurasian vision is a viable response to Atlanticist aggression which offers genuine hope of liberation from capitalist excess, liberal degeneracy, and fanatical religious extremism. While the Ukraine is naturally closer to Russia’s heart both geographically and psychologically, the Syrian conflict and its outcome is of far greater long-term consequence for Russia’s overarching geopolitical vision. It’s the first real test of the Eurasian vision, and it must be passed. Invest in a Syrian surge and show the world that standing up against American imperialism isn’t hopeless after all.
Connected articles:
The Failure of Putin
The Uses and Abuses of Arab Nationalism
