The intercenturies, at least the last two, have had a crucial effect on humanity. In the 19th and 20th centuries, free-market capitalism became monopoly capitalism; In the 20th and 21st centuries, the global order born in the mid-20th century, after the Second World War, first became unipolar after the implosion of the USSR and from the early years of the 21st, the established order began to change. We wrote about this a little over a year ago, in the CIPI journal Cuadernos de Nuestra América, in an article entitled USA: from intelligent power to stupid power, which analyzed how the neoliberal excesses of deregulation and Obama's failed attempts to restore capitalism with more neoliberalism and "smart power" had paved the way for Trump's arrival in the White House and how he was capable of substituting Obama's "ability to attract" for "stupid power." However, neither Obama nor Trump, nor either of the two powers, could change the course of history.

It could not be assumed, when that first article was written, that Trump's successor, Biden, would persist in the same course that, although unable to change history, like The Pied Piper of Hamelin, today seems capable, if not stopped, of leading to the river (now to the holocaust) not to the rats or the children (in that second part of the story that is so little mentioned), but to all of humanity. It remains here to clarify, following Marx in the prologue to the first edition of Capital, that all the political representatives are mentioned here as what they are, personification of interests and class relations, and also of countries and groups of countries, their interests, and ruling classes.

And when it comes to Ukraine, the first aspect to deal with, without a doubt, is why and how the war has come about; the first leads us to who or who are interested in the war, and also, and finally, how far the war can take us.

It is essential, as a starting point to answer the above questions, to remember the ideology of Monroeism and Americanism, and its geopolitical vision based on the supposed exceptionality of the United States of America, which is easily found in the writings of its founders and –even more obviously– in Theodore Roosevelt's reading of it after the victory in what was falsely called the Spanish-American War, which insists on reiterating such exceptionality. The same idea endures through time and becomes even more aggressive when one reads that “For the United States, Eurasia is the main geopolitical reward… Currently, The great world board is the renowned American political scientist of Polish origin Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was National Security Advisor of one of the nations that occupy the North of the Americas. It is that, in the original formulation of geopolitics, whoever controls Eurasia controls the world.

If, as Marx reminds us by way of example, pettiness and the furies of private interest could make the Anglican church more forgiving of the denial of 38 of its 39 articles of faith than the deprivation of 1/39 of its pecuniary income, it may not seem strange to us today that the American corporatocracy acts in the same way..., together with its closest partners in this globalized world. We will try, in order not to be too extensive, to eliminate the anecdotal in these lines, since, as we do not live in the “free” world, we know almost everything, despite everything that the media do at the service of that same corporatocracy – of which they are part or are their employees – for misinforming us.

Much has happened since the beginning of this 21st century until today. The events are brutal and the increase in turbulence, aggression, breaches of the norms of international law, the proliferation of punitive actions is significant; the so-called sanctions against any State that resists the leonine establishment imposed by the hegemon of the unipolar world, including the violation of treaties by that same hegemon –and also its allies– to the detriment of those least favored by the order (? disorder?) global tax.

The crime of the invasion of Iraq, based on the lie of the existence of weapons of mass destruction, with a general repeating it in the UN; lies to try to hide the crime of the invasion, occupation, and subsequent shameful escape from Afghanistan; lies to justify indiscriminate bombing in Libya; lies to inform us about the implosion and carnage in what was Yugoslavia; lies about chemical weapons in Syria and the theft of its resources… and many more, including those that, using the old testament, try to sacralize Israel's impunity in the continuity of the theft of territories and the murder of Palestinians.

And, although the above are just some of the most significant moments in the established order in the unipolar world, many more can be pointed out, such as those related to globalization and the failure of neoliberalism and its consequences: industrial relocation, the financialization of the economy, weakening confidence in fiat money, rampant inflation and looming stagflation, the use and abuse of control over international financial mechanisms to punish states that refuse to relinquish their sovereign rights, and even the theft and/or freezing of the resources of these States located outside their borders…

And all of the above, and more, together with the worsening of global problems – including global warming and climate change – accompany the accelerated weakening of the former hegemon of the unipolar world, which for all these years has remained the main actor in the attempt to prevent the changes that would guarantee a new world, without hegemonies, more diverse, equitable and just. To do this, the US, accompanied by its cohort of vassal states, expanded and tried to continue expanding NATO, a supposedly defensive organization that should have ceased to exist after the disappearance of the USSR, and since then has been directed against Russia, identified by the US. The USA is its second main contender.

This is the same USA that, without any shame from its president, tries to present itself before the international community and in the UN as a defender of the weak and attacked, at the same time that it is capable of, cryptically, creating other warmongering organizations such as the so-called QUAD (quadrilateral security dialogue, made up of the US, Japan, Australia, and India), and Aukus (made up of Australia, Great Britain, and the US) directed against China, this one identified by the nation of the North as its main geopolitical contender, which makes it the target of uncompromising threats if it does not comply with its "order and command".

It is not hard to see that the sum of Obama's "smart power" and the "stupid power" of those who succeeded him only hastened the events that have brought the world to the situation we are in, in which the collapse of the chaotic, unfair, unequal and unipolar known world leaves us with no certainty about what the unknown world will be like. The successive doses of stupidity that accumulate day by day endanger the very existence of the world today due to the real possibility that the third world war could break out.

And the first of these doses had to do with the attempts to maintain the unipolar world, with the US occupying the hegemonic position in it and Europe complacent in its position as the caboose of the imperial convoy, bent on not fulfilling the commitments made after the dissolution of the USSR. Thus, NATO continued to incorporate members with the clear objective of bringing closer to the heart of Russia the weapons that would prevent it from responding to a surprise attack, even if this eliminated the fearsome Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the only existing guarantee until then of the non-use of nuclear weapons. None of the repeated calls from Russia and its president Vladimir Putin in this regard were heard, the answer was the known one.

In this new "cold war", which we had already anticipated, in these very pages, would heat up ( Granma, December 28/2021), the US, with the mask of NATO, forced ( sic) Russia, to stop the expansion of the “Western” warmongering organization, to invade Ukraine, albeit under the fancy name of a “special military operation”. And, although not a few noticed and even speculated (incited by the distracting movement of the magician's hands that prevents seeing "his" magic) who benefited and who did not from the rise in prices, particularly gas, the oil, wheat, fertilizers, food and even with the juicy business that the war itself represented for the North American military-industrial complex, none of it could hide what was really happening: the birth of new world order.

By; Jorge Casals Llano, internet@granma.cu, 03/23/22