Asia Ascendeth: Will Multipolarity Benefit Ireland?

‘In any case, if the foreseeable future is not nuclear, it will be Asiatic, some combination of Japan’s advanced technology with China’s resourceful landmass. Europe and the United States will then be, simply, irrelevant to the world that matters’

— Gore Vidal 1986

Liberalism’s New Yellow Peril

The likelihood of some degree of conflagration between America and China the next decade increases with every passing event. 

After vacating Afghanistan, an increasingly emaciated America stumbles to safeguard its Taiwanese holdings and to stoke up trouble on China’s Western flank with the manufactured Uyghur issue. 

The window by which an ailing America can successfully challenge Beijing’s rise diminishes by the hour, and Washington is restless trying to bed down the coattails of its receding Empire.

For all the signs of imperial atrophy, America in 2021 can still match the Chinese upstart on the battlefield, despite the institutional dead weight and racial infighting that is rotting the country at the core. However, as elites implicitly know, America in 2031 after a decade more of internal rancour may be vastly diminished.

The pandemic buried any hope of rapprochement between Beijing and the regime on the Potomac, with the current anti-China hysteria (mostly justified, sometimes not) testament to the downturn in relations between Liberalism and the Asiatic hegemon. 

Indeed, it has come to the stage that fabled liberal oligarch George Soros (incidentally hated in various Asian countries for currency manipulation) has penned anti-CCP polemics comparing the Chinese state to that of the threat posed by the far right in the West.

40 years on from Nixon’s visit to China, which precipitated the Sino-Soviet split, and enabled China to prosper as an essential cog for globalism, we are witnessing a new schism between the West and the budding hyperpower they nurtured.

Half a decade ago, I remember piling into cinemas to see American blockbusters with altered plotlines to placate the Chinese audience. Secondary schools even offered cultural immersion tours to visit Shanghai paid for by the Chinese Embassy in Dublin, with the offer to work over the Summer at a Chinese tech firm dangled in front of me during my undergrad.

Ironically, there now exists low level spy scandals in Irish universities over potential Chinese influence operations.

For these reasons, try as I might to generate antipathy towards the Orient, I can’t help but see this rift as disingenuous considering the love-in between Liberalism and the CCP that lasted until the day before yesterday. 

Sure, there was always a faction of Western leadership that has always been sceptical about extending the olive branch to Beijing, but always in a minority.

As sure as Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, this rush towards hostility with China is partially engineered if not directed by the Western security apparatus and financial capital. Yes, China is, has been and will always be a Han focused totalitarian state, but this is baked into the cake with the Asiatic nation and nothing new.

If the current crusade against China was waged by Christian leaders seeking to evangelise, subdue, or even dampen the rise of a totalitarian state, it would be worth supporting wholeheartedly. In actual fact, the present rush to war with China is being waged by the same elites who have badly miscalculated China’s ambitions after decades of strengthening their prospective enemy with their outsourcing operations.

One can be fretful regarding the extent to which Chinese tech firms have permeated Western societies without prostrating yourself before Washington and its agenda. It should be known that neither the Chinese nor Americans are great friends of small nations like our own.

If we are to disengage from China economically, let it be done without the same asset strippers that created the Chinese ascent in the first place.

A century ago, Irish nationalists properly assessed the insincerity of the British Empire rushing to the defence of Belgium as a smoke screen for their own self seeking ambitions.

Let it be likewise when in a few months or years hence we start seeing more shedding of tears for Taiwanese democracy or the Uighurs as America looks to justify its presence in the Orient.  

Army of the Non-Aligned-Exiting Pax Americana 

“We must accept the position that our neutrality during the great war, while emphasising our independent status, as well as the partition of our country, has made our relations with the British and with the Americans somewhat more difficult. But this is a case where we must take the long view..”

— Éamon de Valera

Long foretold and even welcomed by Eurasianist theorist Alexander Dugin, multipolarity is the point at which American grip over the world abates inviting regional conflict and counter ideologies to enter the political mainstream. 

Propelled by the Belt & Road initiative, as well as a variety of anti-Atlanticist ideologies breaking traditional boundaries of left and right, this worldview sees the retreat of Washington as something to be grasped with both hands. 

From the neo-Ottomanism of Erdogan to the anti-Zionist syncretism of Tehran, or the various Asiatic tigers to the East, a variety of different power centres are emerging away from the glare of Western Liberalism.

The arrival of multipolarity onto the geopolitical stage presents us the Irish with an avenue to escape from the suffocating cultural epoch of American hegemony. 

So long as NATO gunships glide over our skies and American capital and intelligence agencies with their NGO minions are there to rap the knuckles of any anti-globalist European government, our prospects remain pitifully limited.

You don’t have to be FP Yockey or to embrace his Pan-Europeanism to appreciate the noxious depths the late stage American Empire has stopped to in the 75 years since American men at arms bolled over the Third Reich.

At the same time, I find it hard to believe in the ambivalence of the Chinese superpower to Irish interests, even if it’s without some of the cultural baggage of the American Imperium.

A true foreign policy outlook would acknowledge the institutional decline at the heart of Brussels and Washington, and seek to carve out a new place in the world for our island. Putting equal amounts of constraints on Chinese and American capital to reshape our society, this outlook would begin to prepare the nation for a time when we are forced to stand on our own two feet lest we be gobbled up by a revanchist Anglo-America or by the cold calculating autocrats at the CCP.

For the nationalist right at home, the break with China may shape our political futures more than we can presently imagine. The Cold War, while occurring far away from Irish shores, nevertheless influenced the ideological space in which the Northern Troubles occurred, and so too could any future Cold War with China.

Merely casting up your arms and declaring yourself geopolitically neutral is not good enough. A state without a functioning army, independent currency or indigenous economy, beyond presenting itself as roadkill for Anglo-American capitalism, invites what it has coming.

It is a bit rich for a defective nation state such as the 26 counties to suddenly throw shapes at Chinese influence operations, after subcontracting out national duties to foreign hands.

I will not lose too much sleep over the plight of Taiwanese or Hong Kong democracy, let alone rebel rousing Islamists egged on by the CIA in Xinjiang, China.

As Irish towns, villages and cities slip into demographic peril, I find it harder to contemplate going to die for international liberalism in South-East Asia, let alone caring about its destiny. Nations only have interests rather than friends, and it is in the Irish interest to break from the present dispensation.

Not Washington, nor Beijing, but Ireland above all. Let’s not be lured in by war drums in the South China Sea.