Hubris Invites Nemesis

Xi meets Putin in Moscow. The world will never be the same again.

According to the Ancient Greeks, Nemesis was “…..the goddess of righteous indignation and the punisher of hubristic boasts.”

Pausanias, the ancient Greek geographer, had this to say about Nemesis:

{1.33.2} About sixty stadium-lengths from Marathon as you go along the road by the sea to Oropos stands Rhamnous. The houses [oikēseis] for human habitation are on the coast, but a little way inland is a sacred space [hieron] of Nemesis, who of all the gods [theoi] is the most inexorable toward humans who-commit-outrage [hubristai]. It is thought that the wrath [mēnīma] of this goddess [theos feminine] countered the foreigners [barbaroi, = Persians] who landed at Marathon. Scornfully thinking that nothing stood in the way of their capturing Athens, they were bringing a piece of Parian marble for the making [poiēsis] of a trophy [tropaion], as if their task were already finished.¹

Harvard Professor of Classics Gregory Nagy defines the concept in the following way: “nemesis indicates the process whereby everyone gets what he or she deserves”.

Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”.

For the past three days now, Chinese President Xi Jinping has been meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Moscow for talks. The subjects range from strengthening already growing economic ties, to cooperating in shaping a new global order, one that is commonly referred to as “multipolarity”. The main point of this visit is to loudly announce that Beijing has Moscow’s back in its conflict with the US-led West, knowing full well that if the Russians fail, they are next on the chopping block.

Make no mistake, the two leaders were very blunt as to the purpose of their meeting:

In a joint statement, the two leaders took aim at the West, accusing the United States of undermining global security.

"The parties call on the United States to stop undermining international and regional security and global strategic stability in order to secure its unilateral military advantage," Russia and China said in the declaration.

They also expressed "great concern" over NATO's growing presence in Asia.

On Monday, Xi and Putin held four and a half hours of talks, calling each other "dear friend."

What this announcement represents is the formation of a de facto alliance that seeks to counterbalance US global dominance. It also serves to undo Richard Nixon’s famous trip to China, where the Americans and the Chinese agreed to work together, splitting the communist world in half, giving greater leverage to the USA over its main rival, the Soviet Union. Most importantly, it announces the arrival of the USA’s new global nemesis, one that is entirely a product of its own hubris.

How Did We End Up Here?

The end of the Cold War left American foreign policy planners with a problem: in light of the collapse of its main rival, what would be America’s purpose on the global stage going forward?

While many Americans were convinced that they would benefit from a “peace dividend” via the downsizing of the US military, a “New World Order” was already being constructed atop the ruins of the old one. Capitalism and the free market were seen not just as victorious over the command economy, but as ‘inevitable’ by triumphalists like Francis Fukuyama. Globalism was ushered in to provide the new economic architecture of the global system, one that would be erected by the Americans and their allies for their own financial and corporate interests, but marketed as ‘beneficial to all’.

A new security architecture would have to be put into place alongside the economic one, with NATO being chosen for that task despite false assurances to the Soviets that it would not move towards its borders. Already in 1993, George Soros made the argument that NATO and only NATO had the ability and perceived credibility to fill in the security vacuum left by the USSR’s collapse:

The United Nations might have become an effective organization if it were under the leadership of two superpowers cooperating with each other. As it is, the United Nations has already failed as an institution which could be put in charge of U.S. troops. This leaves NATO as the only institution of collective security that has not failed, because it has not been tried. NATO has the potential of serving as the basis of a new world order in that part of the world which is most in need of order and stability. But it can do so only if its mission is redefined. There is an urgent need for some profound new thinking with regard to NATO.

………

The original mission was to defend the free world against the Soviet empire. That mission is obsolete; but the collapse of the Soviet empire has left a security vacuum which has the potential of turning into a “black hole.” This presents a different kind of threat than the Soviet empire did.

The 1990s was marked by the expansion of US power, economically, militarily, and culturally, with no check on it as Russia was busy looting and impoverishing itself, while China was still very poor, albeit modernizing rapidly. The conceit was that economic privatization and political liberalization in Russia would result in the birth of a liberal democracy in that country. This conceit extended to China, where the theory went that increasing economic openness would create a class of wealthy Chinese that would go on to challenge the monopoly on power held by its Communist Party, creating an opening for the development of liberal democracy in that country as well.

America was riding high. It had the world’s strongest military, the most powerful economy, and was implementing a new global order based on its own style of governance, one shown to be superior to all the others. No challengers were on the horizon, and its most recent one had all but surrendered to it, moving towards adopting its political and economic values. Little wonder as to why many consider the 1990s to be the high water mark of US power on the global stage.

(sorry, I couldn’t resist)

9/11

Having won the economic debate (up until that point in time) and possessing the greatest arsenal in the history of mankind, the USA needed to round out its case for global hegemon status. The only way to do this was via a threat, whether real or manufactured, to its stated core values so that the ‘beast’ could be slayed and its hegemony extended. Radical Islam was introduced to play this foil to American “freedom” and “democracy”, giving the USA a justification to expand its empire.

This was the moment that the neo-conservatives were waiting for; a new force dubbed “Radical Islam” had attacked US soil out of “hatred” for its “freedoms”. A rejection of American liberal democracy by people and groups from states outside of the US orbit provided the grounds for the USA to invade and occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq, while threatening to do the same to Iran, Syria, Lebanon (and others). According to US foreign policy planners and promoters, people in these countries were “suffering under oppression” and were “yearning for democracy and freedom”…and the only way to free them would be to bomb them. The USA now had a new opponent; one that would necessitate military intervention, higher defense spending, and an expansion of US hegemony.