G7 Summit 2023. Photo: G7hiroshima.go.jp.
By Pepe Escobar – May 22, 2023
Let’s start with a graphic depiction of where the Global North and the Global South really stand.
1. Xian, former imperial capital, and key hub of the Ancient Silk Roads: Xi Jinping hosts the China-Central Asia summit, attended by all Heartland “stans” (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgzystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan).
The final summit statement stresses economic cooperation and “a resolute stand” against Hegemon-concocted color revolutions. That expands what the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are already implementing. In practice, the summit seals the Russia-China strategic partnership protecting the Heartland.
2. Kazan: the Russia-Islamic World forum unites not only religious leaders but top businessmen of no less than 85 nations.
Multipolar Russia occurred in parallel to the Arab League Summit in Jeddah, which welcomed Syria back to the “Arab family.” Arab nations unanimously pledged to end “foreign interference” for good.
3. Hiroshima: the ever-shrinking G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, and US), actually the G9 (including two unelected EU bureaucrats) is an intergovernmental political forum for Western power.
The G7 seeks to impose a single agenda of more sanctions on Russia; more weapons to black void Ukraine; and more lecturing of China.
4. Lisbon: the annual Bilderberg meeting – a NATO/Atlanticist fest – takes place in a not so secret hotel completely locked down. Top item on the agenda; war – hybrid and otherwise – against the “RICs” in BRICS (Russia, India, China).
I could have been in Xian, or most likely Kazan. Instead, honoring a previous commitment, I was in Ibiza, and then scrapped the idea of flying to Lisbon as a waste of time. Allow me to share with you the reason why: call it a little tale from the Baleares, breaking the trademark pledge that what happens in swinging, sweaty deep house Ibiza stays in Ibiza.
I was a guest at a top business gathering – mostly Spaniards but also featuring Portuguese, Germans, Brits and Scandinavians: ultra high-level executives in real estate, asset management, and investment banking. Our panel was titled “Global Geopolitical Shifts and Their Consequences.” Before the panel, participants were invited to vote on what worried them most when it comes to the future of their business. Number one was inflation and interest rates. Number two was geopolitics. That prefigured a very lively debate ahead.
When an EU hagiographer goes berserk
Little did I or the audience know that would turn into a wild ride. The first presentation came from the director of a “Center for European Politics” in Copenhagen. She bills herself as a political science professor, and is an adviser to EU Chief Gardener Borrell.
Well, I adopted a Cheshire cat stance after the tsunami of clichés spewed out about “European values” and evil Russkies, as well as her being “frightened” by the future of Europe. At least immediate relief was provided by the impeccably diplomatic Lanxin Xiang, an adorable character, always with a cheerful smile on his face, and one of the very few leading experts on China who actually knows what he’s talking about, in fluent English.
Moscow Accuses US of Trying to Sabotage 2nd Russia–Africa Summit
Lanxin Xiang, among other accomplishments, is Emeritus Professor of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva; director of the Institute of Security Policy at the China National Institute for SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) International Exchange; and executive director of the Washington Foundation for European Studies. This is a column I wrote about him and his work, published in October 2020.
Professor Xiang offered a masterful exposition on the American obsession to fabricate a “Taiwan problem” and how Europe, already squeezed by the U.S. proxy war against Russia, must be very careful when it comes to lecturing China.
When it was my turn, I went for the kill, dismissing all those EU press release platitudes as absolute nonsense and stressing how Europe is already being eaten alive by the proverbial “American interests.” Briefly, I explained the whole geopolitical background of the war in Ukraine.
Well, this was all delivered to top business people who consume The Economist, Financial Times and Bloomberg as their prime sources of information. Their reaction would speak volumes.
Predictably, the EU-paid bureaucrat completely freaked out, and shrieking with outrage, went full pre-ordained script, from threatening to abandon the stage to accusing me of being “paid by the Kremlin”. I asked her, point blank, to “contradict me, with facts.” No facts were provided. Just fear and bewilderment, mixed with intimations of cancel culture.
To his great merit the vastly experienced moderator, Struan Robertson from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, kept things civil, giving more time for Lanxin Xiang to explain the Chinese mindset and opening the floor for a sequence of very good questions.
In the end, the audience loved it. Many came to personally thank me for information they will never have access to in El Pais, Le Monde or The Economist. A minority in the room was simply stunned – but our debate at least must have left them musing over a lot of preconceived notions.
It’s the total merit of the key organizers, Jose Maria Pons and head of the program Cristina Garcia-Peri, to host such a debate in fabulous Ibiza, in Spain, prime NATOstan territory. In the current situation, this would be absolutely impossible in France or Germany, not to mention Scandinavia or those demented Baltics.
There’s no way to counter-act the fabricated narratives parroted by EU-paid hacks and bureaucrats except by ridiculing them – in their faces. They become livid and barely manage to stutter when their lies are exposed. For instance, one of the questions from the floor, by a top of the line German businessman, enumerated a litany of dark facts about Ukrainian “democracy” that are absolutely verbotten by EUrocracy.
The G-Less Than Zero freaks out
What happened in Ibiza dovetails with what happened in U.S.-nuclear bombed Hiroshima – Hegemons don’t do apologies – and in that locked down Lisbon hotel.
With the G7 “leadership” mired in a sticky swamp of intellectual shallowness, predictably the only agenda in colonized Japan was more sanctions on Russia – imposed over third countries and on companies in the energy and military-industrial sectors; more weapons to the Ukrainian black void; and a ridiculous counter-productive new obsession of piling on China “containment” for its alleged “economic coercion.”
In the photo ops, by the way, it’s not a shrinking G7 that shows up: but a warmongering G9, artificially augmented by that pathetic couple of unelected EUrocrats, Charles Michel and Pustula von der Lugen.
As far as the real Global Majority – or Global South – is concerned, this looks more like a G-Less Than Zero. The more the senseless, illegal Sanctions Wars are “expanded,” the more the absolute majority of the Global South moves away from the collective West, diplomatically, geopolitically, and geoeconomically.
And that’s why the top Bilderberg agenda at the hijacked Lisbon hotel sought to revamp NATO/Atlanticist coordination in a war – hybrid and otherwise – against the driving forces in BRICS: Russia, India, China.
There were other items on the menu – from AI to the acute banking crisis, from “energy transition” to “fiscal challenges”, not to mention proverbial “U.S. leadership”.
But when you get in the same room people like NATO’s Stoltenberg; director of U.S. intel Avril Haines; senior director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council Thomas Wright; Goldman Sachs president John Waldron; Chief Gardener Borrell (whose minion was in Ibiza); vice chair of Brookfield Asset Management, Mark Carney (one of their executives also in Ibiza); Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Christopher Cavoli; and Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, among other Atlanticist shills, the plot is self-evident:It’s war on the multipolar world.
At least we can dance it away in Ibiza.
bla 5.24.23 10:20 EST
Pepe Escobar
Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian journalist. He writes a column – The Roving Eye – for Asia Times Online, and works as an analyst for RT, Sputnik News, and Press TV. In addition, he previously worked for Al Jazeera.
