Who’s the Empire Here?

Speaking at the United Nations, Barack Obama said, “In a world that left the age of empire behind, we see Russia attempting to recover lost glory through force.” This, he says, “reduces the level of security in the world.”*

Isn’t it strange to hear such words from the leader of a country that has repeatedly and shamelessly used force to topple regimes it didn’t like?

America is the real empire. It uses the latest networking technologies only to carry out a colonial policy. This policy is aimed at both developing nations and their closest allies, the countries of Europe. The U.S. is interested in other countries above all as markets for selling its goods and as sources of human capital for its exploitation. It is the quintessence of the West’s centuries-old imperial history: Before dying, the once mighty British Empire gave birth to an heiress who went even further. Indeed, in contrast to the British, the Americans no longer see just India or African countries as colonies, but practically the entire world. In Obama’s eyes, Russia is at fault merely for not wanting to become such a colony, though it already went down that path in the ‘90s.

Yet another feature of the American empire is that it has destroyed the system of international law established after World War II and once again made the world unsafe. Depriving one country after another of its sovereignty, the U.S. posited the thesis that force is the law. That’s exactly how the U.S. acted in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and how it plunged Ukraine into the chaos of civil war. All the countries that have become the objectives of “democratization” have been destroyed. Only Syria is holding on for the time being. Against the background of this series of treacherous interventions, accusing Russia of acting anywhere through force is ludicrous. It’s looking for the speck of dust in another’s eye while completely ignoring the log in its own.

But in one sense, Obama is right, of course. Russia truly is recovering its greatness and power. Only in so doing, it isn’t threatening the world but, on the contrary, making it more stable. To the current dangerous American world, Russia wants to counterpose a multipolar world in which there are multiple civilizational centers. Remember, when the world was bipolar in the Soviet era, it remained relatively safe. And it will be so again when it is multipolar. Levelheaded people in America, by the way, understand this. Donald Trump stands for rejecting the policy of “world policeman,” believing Americans should focus on solving their own problems, of which they have plenty.

The author, Valeriy Korovin, is director of the Center for Geopolitical Expertise and a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation.

*Translator’s note: This latter quote does not in fact appear in President Obama’s recent U.N. address.