by RADHIKA DESAI & MICHAEL HUDSON
VIDEO/Geopolitical Economy/Youtube
Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are joined by geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar to discuss the rapidly changing world order at a time of summits of BRICS, G20, and G77 and the UN General Assembly.
RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 17th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our times. I’m Radhika Desai.
MICHAEL HUDSON: And I’m Michael Hudson.
RADHIKA DESAI: And today we are joined once again by the incomparable Pepe Escobar. Welcome back, Pepe.
PEPE ESCOBAR: Hi, everybody. Great pleasure to be with you both.
RADHIKA DESAI: Great. So Pepe and Michael and I are going to discuss the apparently unending series of summits and read their tea leaves to see what they tell us about how the world is changing.
And that summitry has been pretty exhausting. There was the fateful NATO summit in July, where much to his chagrin, President Zelensky failed to get even a timetable to get into NATO after having prostrated his country before NATO and having long ago so faithfully let NATO into Ukraine.
And then there was the BRICS summit in Johannesburg in August, where the organization defied pessimistic predictions and admitted six new members. This was followed by the G20 in Delhi, hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
President Putin attended the BRICS meeting virtually, but both he and President Xi, who had attended the BRICS meeting personally, did not go to the G20. They left their foreign minister and prime minister to do so.
However, then President Putin hosted the vitally important meeting of the Eastern Economic Forum that has been held annually since 2015 to showcase Russia’s own pivot to Asia, which was, of course, a friendly one, unlike Obama’s pivot to Asia, whose purpose was to, of course, escalate tensions with China.
At that summit, which barely rated any coverage in the Western media, President Putin not only underlined the absolute priority of Russia’s own Far East and its development, but also Russia’s relation with other Far Eastern economies, which are increasingly, of course, the dynamic center of the world economy, as we have been talking over so many shows.
And President Putin also announced that Russia was planning to follow its already spectacular development of hypersonic weapons, which had already caused a Sputnik moment in Washington, D.C., with new weapons, apparently, we are told, based on hitherto unused physical principles, using laser technology, ultrasonic technology, radio frequency, and whatnot.
So this will apparently also, according to President Putin, yield new principles of action in war.
After this eventful Eastern Economic Forum came the G77 plus China meeting in Havana, where China has restated its commitment to the development of the majority of humankind as the principle that should govern international relations.
And of course, now, at the moment, the world is watching as the United Nations has its regular annual meeting in New York, where thanks to his waning popularity, both at home as well as abroad, President Biden seems to be wanting to propose democratic reforms for the United Nations, including the expansion of the United Nations Security Council.
Now, the reason these summits have been so hectic and have felt like such a whirlwind of events is simply because each of them has been marking time with the accelerated tempo of change on the international plane, that is to say, the rapid shifts in the world order. And these are the changes that we want to examine in this conversation today.
So Pepe, I thought maybe it would be really great if you started this off because you were at the Eastern Economic Forum and that’s one of the least talked about of these summits. So why don’t you start us off by telling us what your takeaway was from that?
PEPE ESCOBAR: To be frank, Radhika and Michael, I should not be here now. I should be in Kamchatka Peninsula, you know, or the Sakhalin Islands.
When I was at the airport flying back to Moscow, I was desperate because I was looking at my options and I said, oh, my God, everything is there. Blagoveshchensk, which is the border of Russia and China in the Amur, the Altai Mountains, the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Sakhalin Islands, Buryatia.
And I said, oh, my God, I have to fly back seven time zones to go back to Moscow and work. OK, I want to drop everything and stay here, especially because one of the days of the summit, I spent the whole afternoon going to all the stands of the different provinces, and talking to the representatives over there.
They had very, very good businessmen, startups, official representatives. So you can go to the Buryatia stand and in one hour you will know everything about Buryatia and you have an invitation to go to Buryatia to see the development of the province.
When I visited the Tatarstan stand, they gave me an official investor’s guide in Tatarstan, which I’m going to start distributing to everybody, including you guys. You know why? Because the summit of the BRICS next year is going to be in Kazan, which is in Tatarstan.
So when you see all that live in front of you and you talk to the people from the provinces and you see how it’s this public-private partnership in terms of sustainable development, you know, these gigantic islands, you know, three million square kilometers or so, then it starts dawning on you that, well, this is Asia-Pacific on the move, really.
And the even more outstanding factor is that, for instance, for Japanese, for Koreans, for other Asians, when they arrive in Vladivostok, they say, ah, this is the European capital of Asia. In their minds, Vladivostok is Europe.
But the minute I arrived in Vladivostok, I said, no, I am in Asia. Well, I lived in Asia since the 90s, the mid-90s. So for me, Vladivostok was like if I was in a Chinese city or somewhere in Southeast Asia, of course, a slightly different climate.
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