“Two people look out from the same bars: one sees the mud, the other the stars.”
This is a quote from the Tibetan mystic Langri.
I posted the photo of the Italian, German, and Japanese warships lined up in the Pacific, and some preferred to see the mud, while others saw the stars.
“Is this a test, sir?” they asked in Fight Club.
In fact, it is a test: to distinguish those who are enthusiastic from those who no longer want to dream.
It wasn’t simply an act of nostalgia, unless it was nostalgia for the future.
Those who see the mud will always claim that their tank’s tracks will get stuck in the mire and that defeat, or rather useless slaughter, is inevitable.
Those who see the mud highlight that this is an exercise led by the Americans and hold the belief that it is preparation to fight China on their orders.
They’re not even half-right, but the real issue is that they see nothing else. The fact that Italy, Germany, and Japan are aligned militarily after 79 years goes unnoticed. That Japan is once again armed and planning nuclear rearmament, and that Germany is contemplating doing the same, matters little to them, only because it would help the United States against China, and therefore it must be wrong! What a rationale…
In reality, it’s not quite like that. In the Indo-Pacific, the games are complex, multilateral, and never has there been so much dominance of multialignment, as Modi’s India calls it.
More than one American commercial and strategic plan has been forced to revise due to the behavior of Tokyo, New Delhi, but also Canberra, Seoul, and Berlin.
The QUAD doesn’t take off, and relations with China are seen by each individual country as necessary, both economically and for leverage, in order to avoid bowing to American hegemony. They are doing with China what Europe tried to do with Russia, and China—unlike Moscow, which is not led by dull-minded brutes—maintains a balanced relationship, in the spirit of its “two-handed” political philosophy.
In the Indo-Pacific, where the world’s strategic center has shifted, the politics of rearmament are being played out with a view toward reset. Japan and Germany play a significant role there, and Italy has embarked on the path to enter as well. Because alongside the Euro-African line of the Mattei Plan, the special relations with Japan, India, and Singapore go hand in hand with the revival of relations with China, after the disastrous choices signed by the yellow-green circus were thrown in the trash.
If history were truly the teacher of life, as they say, one would remember that Prussian independence was regained by the army placed alongside Napoleon, and that Greek independence from Athens passed through collaboration in the Delian League. Our Risorgimento was born in the Napoleonic ranks. More recently, one would remember that the Germans also used the Trilateral to reunify and the Japanese to become, for a long time, the third-largest economic player in the world.
And one might reflect on Schaüble’s doctrine of Euro-Atlantic transformation, which remained standing despite Putin playing on Washington’s behalf, sidelining NATO’s “brain death” for a long time, to say the least.
Those who have stars in their eyes, regardless of their awareness of the opportunities that arise, believe that our lineage, our nation, our Europe can—and more importantly, must—move forward with warrior values, carving out spaces of maneuver. Spaces that will never be defined by the dogmatism evoked by the defeated, for whom nothing can be done here, and everything that corrodes us is good as long as it proclaims itself anti-American.
And yet, they proclaim it without ever being it, opposing those who, aside from words for the masses, are truly struggling. Namely Japan and Europe instead of Russia, which is increasingly functional to the USA and increasingly tied to Washington, both in armaments and nuclear power, as well as in satellite information.
Russia is actually playing for the White House in containing Europe.
This paradox, which has ended up turning the “anti-Americans without ifs or buts” into staunch and incurable, unaware supporters of NATO and the dollar, is ultimately secondary. It’s not the biggest problem, except that, through its premises and postulates, it imposes the disabling psychology of the passive inhabitant of Sodom.
The essential thing is to clear our minds of the rust of frustrated individuals that has formed over years of failed ghettos and instead act with enthusiasm for our power.
Our power will be neither Western nor from the Global South, as we don’t like either of them, but central.
All the other players must be considered, all of them, based on our interests, not theirs, nor by choosing the “lesser evil” that would condition and dominate us.
A power that cannot be imagined, let alone accepted or rejected, based on a real or presumed agreement with this or that other. If imagined this way, it would never be power, because it can only develop if we have the center within ourselves.
Existentially, culturally, and militarily. With the flags we love flying in the wind, just as happened in the Pacific recently, but going far beyond that.
In a creative revolution.
“Is this a test, sir?” Of course it is!
