Underestimating and Misunderstanding the Competition

Admiral Stavridis finds himself adrift when trying to understand the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

If you rely on major Western media, you would hardly be able to tell, but a very important meeting has recently taken place in the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana. That is where, on 3 and 4 July, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) held a summit. This was most likely an occasion that will feature in future history books.

Regarding our mainstream media, at the time of the SCO summit they were busy with the Biden dementia saga and what are really minor wrinkles in the dull intrigues inside the declining organizations of NATO and the EU. The bizarre failure to fulfill the simple requirement of reporting the actually relevant news about the SCO in Astana must be attributed to the current Western fashion of indulging in the illusion that the lazy limits of our self-centered interest somehow constrain reality itself: if we don’t care, then what they say and do won’t matter – that seems to be the basic (in every sense of that word) idea.

By now, however, there is an exception. On 18 July, two weeks after the Astana SCO summit ended, Bloomberg ran an opinion piece on it by James Stavridis. Stavridis, of course, is not only a Bloomberg columnist, but also a VIP card-carrying member of the US-Western security and strategy establishment, a purebred blobster, that is, inhabitant of the Washington foreign policy blob: a retired US admiral, former NATO supreme allied commander Europe, he has been involved with the Rockefeller Foundation, and, of course, global investment firming, too – and that’s just a short sample. It doesn’t get more connected and more deep-state in the West.