In These New Times

Cailean Bochanan

21st May, 2013

As the Syrian army continues to reclaim its control over sovereign territory the West faces complete failure and humiliation. Failure because utter hubris has led us into overreach and  humiliation because defeat has exposed the nefarious nature of our engagement with Salafist terrorists and NATO death squads and our complicity with, amongst other things, the ethnic cleansing of Christians, our presumed co-religionaries. All that matters now is that realism prevail and we go into reverse gear. We must end our aggression against Syria and we can do so under the cover of a “peace process” being provide for us by the Russians. This allows us to pose as mediators between a legitimate government which we have tried and failed to overthrow and the armed gangs which we have sponsored to that end. We have been given a lifeline, a chance to repackage ourselves as bringers of peace rather than murder and mayhem. Let us take this opportunity with open arms!

And given that this peace process must begin let us ensure that its scope goes beyond just Syria, just the Middle East- let us ensure that it becomes a global peace process. That it has the potential to do this rests on a simple fact: it is based on an emerging strategic partnership between the US and Russia. Working together the world’s two leading powers form an axis on which a new multipolar world order can be built. This means the refoundation of global governance on a new multilateral basis. The construction of new global leadership is timely since the West has completely exhausted its ability to play this role- militarily, economically, politically, morally and culturally. This is made manifest in the disgrace of the Syria campaign.The imperial idea is the big idea of the West, however it may have been dressed up ideologically, and its failure means a new idea of how the world must be run, a new paradigm, comes to the fore.

Of course, I am assuming that we in the West are capable of confronting this new reality, of managing our own decline. This is a big assumption such is our own assumption of superiority, so mired are we in our vested interests and so attached to the narrowness of our outlook and our defunct ideologies. It is only possible at all  since amidst all the paraphernalia, the apparatus of empire, we still have sovereign institutions which can respond to the exigencies of the moment. At the same time that we desist from overthrowing constitutional government abroad we must try to strengthen it at home in the face of inevitable opposition from the lawless forces of oligarchy.

Failure is also opportunity and the end of empire means we can at last begin to rebuild our economies and strengthen our social cohesion and political institutions so long sacrificed for the chimera of global hegemony. Our political leadership can therefore avail themselves of a constructive popular programme to build a base of support. Could Cameron’s first tentative moves against tax havens and price-fixing be the beginning of this? At the very least it would be a cue for a popular reaction if there were still signs of life in civil society. For the moment, those signs are limited to pseudo-conflicts between left and right such as  the bizarre ambush of little englander, Nigel Farrage by “anti-fascist”, leftist riff-raff newly converted to Alex Salmond’s Scottish nationalism lite The coming conflicts between government and oligarchy, between sovereign power and the power of the City of London should provide more of substance in British political life.