Wilful ignorance: The West’s insistence on never knowing its own “enemies”

The US and EU don’t only not know the civilisations it seeks to fight, but actively reject the very option of ever doing so

One crucial mistake the United States, and most of the West in general, continues to make over and over again, is that they have no real concept of the civilisational identity of their opponents, rivals or even their potential partners on the world stage, nor even any real interest in learning about it.

For example, this can be seen very clearly in both the EU’s belligerent position towards Russia, and the completely idiotic and self-destructive position the US government and Trumpists are taking towards China. The Trump movement seems to actually believe that they can slap China in the face in front of the entire world, and expect Beijing to fold and obey US commands from now on; which shows a complete and total lack of understanding of everything China has built its entire national revival project around for over a century now. It’s not even just that Americans tend to not understand China (or Russia and Iran for that matter); they don’t even have any interest in every wanting to know more about the people they are told to hate.

You can’t understand China without grasping the importance of the Opium Wars and the Century of Humiliation that followed, on the Chinese national spirit. Chinese foreign policy was born and moulded in the time of British and French colonisation of the “concessions”, of Japanese occupation starting in 1894, of the Eight-Nation Alliance invasion of 1900, of the millions of martyrs who died in the renewed Japanese invasion of 1931-1945, of the Western intervention against the Communist movement and of the martyrs who gave their life in defence of Korea.

China is built of thousands of years of tradition, coupled with the revolutionary legacy of the Yellow Turbans, Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Boxer Rebellion, the 1911 Revolution and on the achievements of the Communist Party of China. It is based on millennia of tradition in which the common good is central, and in which a strict separation between state officials and the merchant class has been inherent part of state policy for centuries.

China cannot be understood without having at least a basic grasp of concepts such as the Mandate of Heaven or the ideal of the Middle Kingdom, or the Confucian ideal of a harmonious society. Similarly, one can’t understand Russia without comprehending the role Moscow sees for itself as the successor, and protector of the legacy, of both the Orthodox Russian Empire (and thus the Third Rome) and the Soviet Union. And add the Golden Horde to that for good measure. Iran cannot be known if one fails to realise that the Islamic Republic is fundamentally steeped in Islamic eschatology and an ancient tradition of martyrdom, as well as its heritage of Persian and Parthian empires.

Actual intellectual analysts within the United States and Europe who truly understand the basic civilisational impetus behind foreign powers, are few and far between. A handful of intelligent geopolitical heavyweights have existed in the imperialist camp, think for example of Halford Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, but more often than not they had to fend off extremist war hawks within their own country just as much as they could actually focus on serving the Empire.

Nowadays, the US and the EU, in both cases on either side of the political aisle, are led by complete ignoramuses who combine a total lack of basic comprehension with megalomaniacal plans of imperial glory and financial gain. A dangerous combination.