The United States' Mad Drive for Unipolarity

 After the collapse of the USSR, unipolarity was supposed to last for no more than a decade. By extending it for two more decades, the US got embroiled in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine. This has to stop before it's too late.

Over the last few days I have watched in disgust the sorry spectacle of an American president visiting the Old Continent in order to prove to the world -and probably to himself, too- that Western countries stand united behind the US in its latest proxy war. On Friday he met up with young American soldiers deployed in Poland at the border with Ukraine, he ate a pizza with them and had the cheek to lie to them with a straight face as he tried to explain why the United States are putting them in harm's way, some 8,000 kilometres from their home country. He told them that they are there to  fight for democracies against autocracies, which - it goes without saying - the US is ready and willing to spend blood and treasure to defend.

Well, not quite. The real reason why US soldiers are being posted in Eastern Europe is to defend American unipolarity against multipolarity, which has been the natural state of affairs in international relations for centuries. As we know from the examples of Napoleon and Hitler, power is a heavy drug which makes political leaders act in dangerous, if not always catastrophic ways. Unchecked, unrestrained power - because this is what unipolarity is all about - is far worse, however, and that's what has brought the world to the brink of a fully-fledged nuclear war this time.

I have also watched in disbelief over the past few weeks how the US - which has interfered irresponsibly in Slav and in European affairs since 2014 - is propping up a Kiev regime bent on starting WWIII in order to weaken its larger neighbour, Russia. The US has not made the slightest effort to lean on the Ukrainian leadership to sue for peace, but is instead using Ukrainian people as cannon fodder, and the rest of Europe as a refugee camp only to provoke regime change in Moscow. Russia's cardinal sin, it appears, is that of being one of the main challengers to the unipolarity of the US in world affairs.

Unfortunately for all concerned, unipolarity cannot be saved. Regardless of how many allies the US enlists in this quest and how many inept sanctions they pile on Russia, (which are sure to be extended to China in the future, as well). As no sane political leader can disregard geopolitical imperatives in the conduct of foreign relations, like the US has for the past few decades, nor can unipolarity be enforced for long against multipolarity. Thus, although Zelensky wants Joe to be the "leader of the world", the truth of the matter is that this is not his choice or Joe's to make. 

After Joe Biden was inaugurated as president, an American geopolitician friend of mine, who shall remain anonymous, described him as "not the sharpest knife in the drawer". After watching the American president for about one year go about "solving" international crises from Afghanistan to Ukraine, I can now confidently confirm that my American friend's assessment was an understatement. The US president is not only overwhelmed by the crisis in Ukraine, but his neocon team is a menace to world peace, and his monumental misunderstanding of the US's place in international affairs is there for all to see.

For most of us from Europe, the conflict in Ukraine is an internal problem of the Slav world. The other major ethnic groups that compose the EU - the Latins and the Germans - do not exhibit such fratricidal tendencies and get along fine with each other and with Russia. Similarly, an armed conflict between the countries of the Anglosphere has been inconceivable for more than 200 years. The attitude of the Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks in this conflict is -for the rest of the Europeans - puzzling, to say the least. Furthermore, neighbouring countries like Hungary and Romania see no valid reason why they should become involved in the Ukrainian mess, were it not for American pressure. In hindsight, the inclusion of Slav nations of Europe in NATO might have been another major error, on top of the admission of Baltic states.

I cannot call myself a Trump supporter, but I have to admit that his loss of the 2020 elections proved to be an unmitigated disaster, both for the United States and the world as a whole. As a businessman, Donald Trump at least understood the fact that the US cannot go about invading countries indefinitely or sponsoring pointless resistance movements, like in Syria or now Ukraine, and he was willing to adjust American foreign policy accordingly. With Donald Trump in charge of the White House, the Russian intervention in Ukraine would possibly have never happened.

The sooner American elites and foreign policy circles can acknowledge the huge risks involved in keeping up their claim to unipolarity, the better it would be for the world as a whole. I say this because by keeping up the fight to remain sole hegemon, the US runs the risk of not only losing its current (undeserved) status, but also of destroying large areas of the world in the process.