America and its allies are committing geo-political suicide for no discernible gain
Imagine that you sit down to watch a new film. It is one of your favourite genres: post-apocalyptic survivalism. Shortly after the opening scene wherein the world is demolished by nuclear war, our hero emerges from his bomb shelter. He looks at the devastated world around him and realises that his old life is behind him; he will have to live by his wits from now on. He walks over to his gun cabinet and picks up a shotgun. You think that the action is about to start.
But then the hero does something strange. He starts acting hysterically, screaming and cursing about his new lot in life. He turns the shotgun toward his own feet and pulls the trigger. After howling in agony, he slings the shotgun over his back and begins to walk painfully toward the outside world, now apparently ready to face the challenges ahead. You turn off the film. The plot is simply too ridiculous to take seriously.
Yet this is what our leaders in the West are doing today. It has become clear in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine that this is about far more than Ukraine. The Chinese response to the invasion has been to increase its economic ties with Russia. The same has been true of countries like Brazil and India. It looks like the BRICs countries are using the invasion as a pretext for re-polarising the world order. From now on, the old American-led unipolar world is no more. Instead, we will be in a world of competing great powers.
Like the hero in the survival film, we are facing enormous new challenges and will need all the wits and resources we can muster. Yet, again like the hero, we seem intent on taking a shotgun to our feet before we embark on this difficult task. We are doing this in the form of the economic sanctions we have imposed on Russia in response to her invasion of Ukraine. The evidence is now overwhelming that these sanctions are far more deleterious for our economies than they are for the Russian economy. They also seem to be catalysing the repolarisation we are facing. In short, they are enormously counterproductive and, in a word, insane.
Mistaking Moscow for Tehran
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