This past week, the first of September, was an enlightening one, marking the beginning of the working year when you return to the office with a tan and putting on socks to put on loafers is torture. Significant not because there was a lunar eclipse with a super full red moon at the end, a fairly rare event, but because a canyon so deep has been carved between the West and the new world that it will be difficult to cross it.
The planet's future 'powerful' leaders met in China, I'm talking about the BRICS ; they did so with great fanfare, with their satellites circling them—almost all the emerging economies, or those already established, like the Emirates. There were two events: one in Tianjin for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a strategic-commercial meeting, and the other in Beijing in commemoration of Japan's defeat at the end of the Second World War, an important event for conveying to the world the creation of the new geopolitical bloc.
The message is clear: we are here and we are much more united and stronger than you Westerners think. What does this show of solidarity mean: is it just a very successful experiment in soft power? Several of the countries present are subject to economic sanctions by the rich West, see Russia; others have even been militarily attacked by the United States, see Iran; others still have been courted by Trump with very little success, see India. The message is still clear: we no longer need your markets and we do not accept your conditions (be they political or economic) to continue trading with you. We are not interested in trading with you.
But that's not all: the show of military strength staged in Beijing with Xi Jinping flanked by Putin and Kim Jong-un, three nuclear powers, three men who can with a finger transform entire cities into a mushroom cloud of smoke and ash, is even more significant. But not because of their possession of nuclear weapons.
The world in which the United States and its Atlantic allies, thanks to the atomic bomb, were superior, that of the Cold War where nuclear power acted as the deciding factor between the two blocs, that of illegal and covert proliferation where nations like Pakistan built their own bombs"at home" thanks to thieving scientists no longer exists. Today we fight with strategic weapons at all levels, with targeted smart weapons, with drones as small as bumblebees, weapons that the BRICS possess. The real message comes from the parade of men and women lined up like robots, a message for us: in this alternative world to ours, the leadership's control over the population (our electorate) is total, as is the consensus. And this is the most powerful weapon of the new world order, a weapon we do not have.
While all this was happening, yet another act of that political theater that has been proposed to us for four years was taking place in Europe: Putin's peace proposals were rejected, even more money was allocated to a war that Ukraine is losing, there was no discussion at all about how to stop the Gaza genocide, nothing was done when interest rates on thirty-year bonds skyrocketed due to the debt accumulated by various countries, just as people continue to ignore the fact that Chinese electric cars have now invaded all markets and put those produced in Europe out of business, and so on. The parallel reality in which the West now lives, made up of memories of a glorious past and dreams of reproducing it, is becoming increasingly suffocating and prevents us from perceiving the extremely dangerous changes underway in the rest of the world. All this is thanks to the Rogue Economy that has been reshaping the world since the end of the Cold War. A savage force that we thought we could keep at bay.
It always happens at the end of empires. The present now struggles to gain the upper hand, kept at bay by the rigidity of the power of the past, and the"rogue" world moves rapidly toward the future. And this real world, constantly changing, is a world that has suffered the hegemony of the Empire and therefore carries with it a baggage of heavy resentment. It is stubbornly distanced by the Empire as an irrelevant and false phenomenon, and in doing so, it digs the canyon of reality.
At some point, alas, if we do not wake up from the torpor of the delirium of power, we will fall into this canyon with the final push of the Rogue Economy.
