China, Russia, Europe & The Ummah's Future. Middle Nation Podcast (E:19)

Welcome to the Middle Nation. This is Shahid Bolson, and this will be episode number 19. Let's talk for a moment about China in the context of the war in Ukraine and their relationship with Russia and Europe. Now before this war broke out, Europe was talking about asserting what they called strategic autonomy, meaning the EU was going to try to increase its independence from The United States in terms of security, economic, and political policy. To this end, the EU and China signed a major trade agreement just before Biden took office called the comprehensive agreement on investment, the CAI.

This agreement would have benefited some major European companies by giving them greater opportunities to invest and work in China on a more level playing field vis a vis Chinese state owned enterprises. Prior to signing the agreement, The US basically warned the EU not to do it. The agreement was not ratified yet by the time war broke out in Ukraine, and it is probably a fair guess that the CAI is dead in the water at this point along with any notions of strategic autonomy. Another thing the EU was trying to do prior to the war was to revitalize Europe's economic and political relationship with Africa with the explicit aim of countering China's and Russia's influence on the continent. Just five days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there was a meeting between EU and African Union leaders in Brussels.

They announced a 150,000,000,000 investment plan called the Global Gateway Project, which was ostensibly intended as a European alternative to China's Belt and Road Initiative. But as will be familiar to most African countries, this was mostly a PR trick. Because of the promised new €150,000,000,000, 100,000,000,000 was already earmarked two years ago, and the remaining 50,000,000,000 is money that the EU hopes will be recruited from the private sector but is as yet unconfirmed. Now coupled with the potential investment by EU companies in China, the Global Gateway Project is probably more accurately understood as a European partnership in the Belt and Road Initiative more than as a competitor. These two developments represented the strengthening of Europe's ties with China, ties that would be more potentially beneficial for the EU than for China, as well as the strengthening of Europe's ability to exercise, quote, unquote, strategic autonomy.

Well, as with the CAI, in the wake of the Ukraine war and the American led response to it, the global gateway project is probably dead. Europe is being cut off from all viable alternative sources of economic survival. Now the EU is China's second biggest trade partner, and China is the EU's biggest trade partner. Disrupting Europe's trade and investment with China is in and of itself destabilizing for Europe, and a destabilized Europe and economically weakened Europe constitutes a blow to China. Now if you add, obviously, the destabilizing impact of isolation of Russia on Europe, it's compounded even more.

Diminished consumer demand across Europe as the continent plummets deeper and deeper into American imposed financial crisis will not only reduce China's export revenues, but also China's demand for energy because reduced European consumption will lead to lower manufacturing output in China, which means that China will be less motivated to purchase Russian oil and gas, thus helping to ensure the destructive impact of the sanctions against Russia. This is truly a master class in geopolitical chess by the Americans or rather by the a national private sector coalitions of power for whom America is the most sophisticated and most powerful instrument. Now you have to understand that disruption is all that is really required to defeat Russia and China because demographics will do the rest. Both countries, as I have mentioned numerous times before, are in the advanced stages of demographic disappearance. The death rate in Russia is double the birth rate, and China's population is expected to be cut in half within the next fifty years.

A rapidly aging population means not only fewer workers, but less productive consumption. It means steadily diminishing relevance to the global economy. We are in a very limited window of opportunity for utilizing the current economic existence of China and Russia as alternatives to American alignment. And all The United States has to do is to disrupt China's and Russia's economic participation in the world to close our access to that window. America's proxy war in Ukraine against Europe helps to achieve this objective in multiple ways.

Russia is isolated, Europe is being subjugated, and China is being undermined. Important players on the global chessboard are either being removed or neutralized leaving the Muslim world and the global South in general with fewer and fewer moves to make. And this is being done because our countries are the future. We have demographic advantages, geopolitical advantages, and the advantage of natural resources. And the Muslims have the advantage of a deep comprehensive and sophisticated shared civilization that transcends borders, languages, and ethnicities.

We have a competing intellectual and moral tradition and a distinct worldview derived from our religion. The threat of this competing civilization has until now been suppressed because of our relative economic and political disadvantage. If Muslim states are poised to emerge as powerful independent players on the global stage, this suppression cannot be sustained. We are therefore seeing preemptive attempts to trap us into helpless alignment with The United States, plugging our economies into the American matrix so as to prevent them from ever developing into independent powers. Now you may say, our countries are already subordinate, and our leaders are already American quizlings.

But let me repeat, you have to contextualize this current reality by considering the relative vulnerability and weakness we have suffered for the last one hundred years. The next one hundred years are going to be dramatically different, and one hundred years is a long time. You also have to understand that the world order, as it has existed throughout our lifetimes, has been an anomaly. This world order has only existed since roughly 1948, and it is being dismantled before our eyes. Even throughout the Cold War period, during the era of a bipolar world in which two superpowers dominated the global stage, Muslim countries did not uniformly acquiesce to American power.

Whenever defiance and nonalignment were possible, Muslim countries often tried to assert independence even when they were economically weak. Well, we are entering an era in which collectively our countries have the potential of becoming economically strong. So there's no reason to believe that Muslim states will not be prepared to assert their independence and sovereignty over the coming decades, and that is something that The United States and those who control it are certainly anticipating, is why they want to limit our options by eliminating Russia, China, and even Europe as viable partners for significant economic cooperation. Muslim countries only have a matter of years in which to conduct useful economic initiatives with China, a decade or two at most, and even less time to deal with Russia. After that, there will only be America.

Now we have a few latent geopolitical powerhouses in the Muslim world. Among them, The Gulf States because of their oil, Indonesia because of its population, Egypt for many reasons, and Turkey because, well, it was the organizing center of the Muslim world for six hundred years for a reason. Together, these represent every major region occupied by this ummah. Each is strategically irreplaceable, and they could have the combined power to control the global economy. The development of a union of Muslim states is not a short term project.

It is not something that I expect to see in my lifetime, but I can identify the work that needs to be done in my lifetime that can help to advance this project, bringing each generation after me that much closer to its realization. This begins, it seems to me, with exercising from our minds the attitude of passivity and defeatism that has become almost universal among Muslims. This feeling that we are mere spectators of world affairs, helpless pawns in a game played by the great powers, that we are just satellites orbiting the West, and all we can do is wait upon their decisions. This is a self fulfilling forfeiture of our collective future, and we have to banish this attitude from our minds. Politically and culturally, we have to insist on non alignment at this stage, and part of this should be motivated by a realistic understanding of and belief in the inevitable rise of our nations as regional and then as global powers.

And we have to prioritize both unity among Muslims and thinking positively about each other even despite our differences. Unity among Muslims is never going to be achieved through an intolerance of disagreement or an exaggeration of the importance of permissible differences of religious interpretation. You can follow as strict an interpretation as you like, but you cannot enforce this strictness upon others, and you should continue to affirm the Islam of those who you deem to be insufficiently strict, and you should still love and defend them as your brothers and sisters in Islam. This all contributes to the mental, intellectual, and attitudinal rehabilitation needed to make practical, political, and economic unity between Muslim states possible in our children's lifetime or our children's children. And I believe that the attitudinal changes are an urgent area of focus at this stage and during what we can call the short term, which is basically the lifetimes of every Muslim currently living on the planet.

Our lifetime is the short term. Obviously, this does not have to be all we can do or all we can accomplish in our lifetimes, and if circumstances allow, the development of economic and political unity may advance rapidly. But we should think of ourselves as part of a continuum. We are part of what came before and part of what comes after us, like a node in a network. We are a continuous ummah and should work for results and outcomes that will benefit our ummah whether we live to see it or not.

Our grandchildren or great grandchildren are likely to live in a world in which both China and Russia are fractured and irrelevant, Europe is impoverished and consumed by war and strife, and it will be hard for them to imagine that any of these countries ever had dominance in global affairs. But whether or not our grandchildren or great grandchildren live in a world in which the Muslims enjoy dominance will be traced back to our generation, and whether or not we transformed our attitudes about the West and about ourselves to prepare a more positive future for them to inherit.