Neutrality Studies. Weekly Recap #2

July 13-20

Hola! It was another busy week at the Neutrality Studies YouTube Channel, with some exciting talks and one controversial one. But let’s look at them individually, shall we?

The Darkest NATO Summit (Yet)

First off was a fantastic talk by the always-brilliant Ambassador Chas Freeman who, by the way, has a great homepage of his own, on which he publishes all of his speeches and writings! I highly recommend checking it out, since Ambassador Freeman is not only a great speaker but also a gifted writer. His latest essay on “Diplomatic Professionalism”, which I also published on my homepage, is something I would really want each and every diplomat from around the world to read. Ambassador Freeman stands in a long and proud tradition of realist and humanist thinkers like Harold Nicolson (the author of “Diplomacy”) who understand not only international affairs but the art of using diplomacy instead of war to get what you want; evidently, a skill that the entire Collective West has lost.

Hence, we talked in this video about Victor Orban, who with his diplomatic Blitz, upset the entire European Union and infuriated the NATO crowd, but now stands as Europe’s last real statesman, holding the torch of actual real European values (like, you know,… peace). No wonder that, later in the week, Ursula von der Leyen disrespectfully and shamefully called Orban’s attempts at saving the continent from another general war an “appeasement mission.” These people really love boiling every single thing that happened down to a WWII metaphor. Quite rich for a German to imply (once again) that a Russian was the new Hitler. The historical guilt sits deep, deep in their bones. Real deep. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The most important thing that Ambassador Freeman pointed out in the talk was that not only did the recent NATO summit in Washington fail in projecting strength, but it also showed that the alliance is caught in a retreat mentality. NATO is now so clearly antagonising the rest of the world outside the Euro-Atlantic bubble (which, however, does include their close allies, such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand) that the whole club is becoming a citadel for its members to lock themselves in—at least the committed ones. There are still some cracks, with Hungary, Slovakia, and Turkey not playing along as the others would want them to. But the committed members are on a dark path, best exemplified by the way in which Finland has not only given up its independence but is willingly sacrificing much of its security sovereignty to its new Western overlords.

🎶Killing me Trans-Atlanticly 🎶

Actually, this is the video in which we really discussed Germany’s deeply engrained WWII guilt, and its suppressed hatred for the Russian enemy to which they lost. To explore this, I talked to the German journalist and author Patrik Baab, who is a really an ingenious observer of world affairs. Not only did he travel to Ukraine, the Donbas, and Russia to report and get an impression of all sides involved in this conflict, but he also keenly understands the socio-political landscape in Germany and didn’t mince his words to talk about the sorry state that his country is going through; a slow but painful transatlantic death. The same one that already killed Ukraine on the altar of “defeating Russia.”

Thanks to the brilliant work of my colleague, Andreas , we are able to present you this German-language talk in English translation (Andreas wrote the software himself to do this!)

Second Meeting of the Multipolar Peace Alliance

Next up were two videos covering a (long) meeting of our newly-formed “Multipolar Peace Alliance”. We discussed a lot, from the geopolitics of Southeast Asia, the NATO Summit and Washington’s plans to extend the alliance all the way to China’s doorsteps, and the economy. Interestingly, there was quite a bit of back and forth about the changes in the economic infrastructure, especially regarding the financial infrastructure in the second video. This is a topic to explore in future videos. How complicated is it to build US-independent financial networks that can clear trades? A point that Kathleen Tyson was making in video 2 is that the sums of money moving to keep the real economy going is many, many times smaller than the capital that makes up the “gambling” part of global finance, such as the investment bank stuff that doesn’t clear any trades in the real world but just represents the cash inside the different investment markets. I guess, I need to talk to her about that, maybe together with the great Lena Petrova, who's also in this group with us (though she could not attend the meeting).

Then, in the middle of the week, I made a video about the speech that Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, held at the UN on July 16. Oh Lavrov… he really knows how to do both; diplomacy and great power politics in one single sitting, exposing all of the ridiculous narratives of the collective West and appealing to the Global Majority. Lavrov was traveling to New York himself for this speech because the topic of the meeting “Multilateral cooperation for a more just, democratic and sustainable world order” was set by Russia itself, which is holding the presidency of the Security Council (SC) this month. So in a sense, Lavrov did something similar at the SC as what Orban has been doing in the EU. Both men are using a rotating council presidency to force their visions for diplomacy on the table. Naturally, as with Orban, the collective West pretended to be outraged at the audacity of these leaders to frame world affairs differently from their views—blasphemy!!

What is Japan Thinking?

On Friday I finally uploaded a video that had been idling on my laptop for 15 days, mainly for two reasons. On the one hand, a lot had happened in the days between the recording and the upload, including Orban’s Blitz-Diplomacy and the NATO Summit as well as our new Multipolar Peace Alliance. On the other hand, I was unsure how to handle this talk. The scholar I interviewed was a former professor of mine, Professor Narushige Michishita, who I very much respect and admire. However, his answers in the interview left me a bit puzzled. I knew that Professor Michishita is rather a “hawk” in Japan’s security circles, and that he tends to lean toward the US side of things, but I was still surprised by how far the “Trans-Atlantic” mindset is going. There were moments when I wanted to give counterpoints to some of his analysis, but I don’t want to make these videos into ideological wrestling contests. I am not (and don’t want to be) Piers Morgan. I want to understand how my partners view the world and what kind of lessons they are drawing from their thinking. Hence, this video will stand out for a while on my channel. However, I still think it’s valuable to hear people out and I must say, Professor Michishita is not wrong in many of his observations, especially his analysis of South and North Korean respective capabilities is very good to know.

Since we are already talking about this: I would also like to draw your attention to a video that I uploaded over a year ago, which was a panel discussion at GRIPS (the institute at which Professor Michishita teaches and serves as a Vice President) about the change in Japan’s defence strategy. In this talk, he debated with Professor Yoko Iwama and two GRIPS PhD students from South Korea and Taiwan why Japan decided to acquire “offensive capabilities” and what this means for the security environment in North East Asia. Professor Iwama represents another line of thinking in Japan. She interprets Japan’s more “assertive” defence posture as the admission that the country, if push comes to shove, has to be able to defend itself without the help of the Americans who are being seen as less and less reliable—especially after the last Trump interregnum. I’m attaching the talk below, in case you are interested.

What the Rules-Based Order Really Is

And we end the week the way we started it, with Ambassador Chas Freeman (Yeah)! The Ambassador was so nice as to tape a talk that he gave on July 10 to Chinese Attendees at the Cambridge Executive Leadership Program. The talk is also available as an essay on his above-mentioned homepage. The analytical capabilities of Ambassador Freeman are just outstanding. He is the first person, to my knowledge, to actually articulate the core problem of the “Rules-Based International Order” (RBIO) discourse. Many of us have been able to identify that this stupid concept is not the same as International Law (IL) and is even used by the US to evade some IL provisions, but there was always something lacking. I was always frustrated that I couldn’t exactly grasp or articulate what the RBIO was. And here, Ambassador Freeman cracks it open. It’s a version of the ancient (Chinese) idea of “rule by law” as opposed to the concept of the “rule of law.” The ambassador beautifully explains the two intellectual traditions and then shows how the US and its satellites are deploying this concept not to create a world with rules for everyone, but simply to dominate by making rules that apply only to others and only when the hegemony wants it to. Brilliant.

Ambassador Freemen of course goes much deeper into a discussion about the new multipolar—or, as he would call it, the multi-nodal world order—so please have a listen.

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Pascal