Cas Corach on Ireland’s blockades, the carbon revolt, and the awakening of a post-liberal people.

A state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; this lie creepeth from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’

— Nietzsche

Beware of the risen people, who shall take what ye would not give.

— Padraig Mac Piarais

In 2014, Ireland saw one of its biggest public demonstrations. Images of the capital, thronged with thousands, dominated the news and imaginations. Not an inch of road was free from protest and lamentation, unlike anything seen in Ireland for decades hitherto. Nominally, it was about the proposed introduction of water charges and the creation of a private company of water management: Irish Water.

‘Right2Water’, ‘No Way- We won’t pay’, ‘Water is a human right’

For European readers, such complaints may seem naïve or petulant in that paying for water usage is the norm in most of the developed world. Yet in Ireland it became a red line. While the placards and chants mentioned charges and payments, the protest represented so much more in the minds of the Irish people. It was in truth a protest against the post-Celtic Tiger and post-2008 crash status quo. A bitter outpouring of rage and discontent at austerity, the lack of political accountability and ever-increasing taxation. Despite the broad support of middle Ireland for the demonstration, the organizations that led the charge were certainly left-coded. Normies who simply wanted to keep more in their pockets looked on bemused at champagne socialists donning hammer and sickles and Lenin portraits. This performative extremism didn’t matter in the long run; the protesters got their victory. Irish Water became a lame duck and no new charge for that service was put on the people. The public non-compliance, coupled with the bungled launch of Irish Water, crippled the regime’s plans at further monetary extraction.

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The Left in Ireland scored a huge moral victory with renewed political momentum. This was not the indigenous nationalist Marxism of Connolly but rather of the Anglo-American type, one that had slowly crept in since the 1960s when the economy had opened up to foreign investment and reached its peak in the 2010s with the cultural liberalisation of society: homosexual marriage and abortion services being the obvious flashpoints. We may call this the Americanising of the state—the relation between US neoconservatism and Trotskyism not being lost on our readers—a natural outcome of decades of propaganda and political influence from across the Atlantic, enhanced by smartphones and social media. Indeed, this false or containment Left has long been the foot soldier of US power in Europe, where classic working class issues are replaced by a pointless culture war slop which doesn’t even begin to touch the real power of capital. Indeed, such liberalisation had brought an economic boom and, for a people historically used to dire poverty, represented a more favourable state of affairs. Of course, from boom follows bust and the 2016 Irish election saw parliament fractured into various mini sects competing against the centre; the rise of independents and far Leftists in opposition to a minority government, a situation partially enabled by the proportional representation system. The regime, deep state or whatever we may call the permanent ruling class took what might have been a loss on their rotund chins and easily brushed itself off. Rather than fight this newfound fracturing, the managerial system embraced it, proliferating the social change in all institutions towards LGBT ideology, climate taxation, the normalization of mass migration and amnesia of Ireland’s roots. Such is the method of US-backed Trotskyist operations. These trends overlapped and were fed by the great protests of 2014. The regime survived with a new open society. Modern Ireland was born from the ashes of 2008, a people placated by an arrogant social ‘progress’ rather than true economic justice.

Just over ten years later, we now see dramatic demonstrations erupt again on levels similar to that of the water protest, yet taking a more socially disruptive turn. Farmers, haulers and various other working groups, dependent on energy directly for their work, took to action in the wake of the chaos caused by the US administration’s war in Iran and the subsequent oil crisis. Convoys of vehicles, sometimes to the tune of hundreds, took over Irish towns and cities, blocking roads, refineries and ports. That this took place almost to the day of the 110^th anniversary of Easter Rising was symbolically significant. An important context is how petrol and diesel is taxed in Ireland. For every euro spent, roughly sixty cents go to the government on various penalties, most notably a carbon tax, putatively to save the planet, a tax that was set to rise again in the coming months despite deep unpopularity with the majority of Irish people. The demands of the protesters are simple: end the carbon tax, help the people suffering economic hardship and, most interestingly, develop Irish oil exploration off our coast. Poignantly, we have many videos of working men almost to the point of tears explaining how if the tax burden is not lifted, their businesses will go bust.

‘I’ve six months til I’m gone’, one man stoically whispered.

We see bus drivers explaining that they can no longer afford to even bring children to school; the situation is dire. Obviously, the regime has refused to listen and callously smeared the protest as a national sabotage and, most vulgar of all, accused the Irish of being manipulated by foreign Zionist provocateur Tommy Robinson, a name unknown to the majority of working people who have unflinching solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

These disruptions have brought the country to a standstill, clogging the lifeblood of a state that had forgotten its people in appeasing the ideology of the open society. Like the 2014 protest, this current crisis is about so much more than what can be written on a placard. It has not come from the ether. The issue of fuel affordability has been discussed in parliament for months but, more fundamentally, it is the culmination of various smaller scale protests manifesting since the COVID crisis of 2020. These have ranged from cost of living, anti-vaccine mandates, anti-immigration and other issues. Few of these demonstrations made any dent in mainstream society and were at times brutally repressed by the police. It is evident by the comments of the protesters themselves that this is not simply about fuel. They speak of the vast sums of public money going to Ukraine, houses built for foreigners while Irish sleep on the streets, and the hypocrisy of a government that will shut a country down for a mild flu yet will do nothing while businesses collapse. In years past, the accusations of being ‘far-right’, ‘conspiracy minded’ or ‘anti-social’ worked to divide the Irish public on popular resentment but now something has changed.

The farmers, haulers and others have inspired the Irish writ large. Immediately there was support for their cause as locals put Irish flags along convoy routes and joined them at blockades offering sustenance and moral support. Officially, according to polls, roughly 56% of the public support the movement, yet anecdotally that figure seems to underestimate the feeling in the nation. One need only look at the sheer number of ordinary people who have taken to the streets, so much so that the state has had to cordon off areas of the capital lest the situation escalate further. We saw more brutality as people were pushed to the ground by armoured units who, most shockingly of all, pepper-sprayed children as chaos unfolded. The army was eventually deployed in an attempt to clear blockades, to the widespread criticism of even established political figures, fearing the public backlash. These scenes, shared widely on social media, added to the growing horror and discontent. This was not the beating of anti-migrant ‘racists’ or ‘kooks’ but rather of normal working people. From the fringes comes an issue that everyone in the country, barring the most privileged, can empathize with.

To analyse a situation effectively, it is necessary to be fair to all sides. There is no use in attacking strawmen and in that spirit we shall try to understand the position of the regime itself. Why doesn’t it just give in like it did for the water protests? While we cannot read the minds of those in power, we can see that they have a complicated network of incentives to not represent their citizens in this instance:

1. The Irish ruling class truly believe in the fallacy that they can tax away the effects of climate change. Here is not the place to debate the science around that question but it is clear that Ireland is far too small a country to have any impact on the global temperature. Yet our elite likely feel they have a genuine moral duty to do something for the planet and the carbon penalty is simply a means to that end. Scrapping the tax would be akin to taboo and increase their personal culpability. That this seems ridiculous to anyone who suffers real problems is besides the point of elite sincerity.

2. More cynically, all these taxes are a huge windfall to the state who vampirically sucks huge sums from the necks of its citizens. The state, we must remember, is a massive organisation that requires major funding to do its work. No organisation likes to see its budget decrease. What department is to take the cut should certain taxes be abolished? Which program ought to be defunded? The fact that reducing taxation on energy actually leads to more government revenue from the resulting increased productivity is lost on our rulers but we shall not go into modern economic delusions. Suffice to say that any change to the tax system can only be interpreted as a financial loss.

3. Put bluntly, it is simply the law that these taxes must be in place and must increase year on year. To a managerial class, this is a non-starter. The law is the law and must be followed regardless of the consequence. Yes, laws can be repealed but the managerial process is so overlong that in practice it simply isn’t done. It took almost fifty years and continuous foreign propaganda to repeal Irish anti-abortion legislation, for example. We can almost sympathise with the trouble to run changes through a parliament when there is already so much to do in managing a modern state. A question may never even come on the table amid the million other issues that need addressing.

4. How can a state, after calling protesters saboteurs and extremists, then turn around and give in to their demands? We have to understand the human element here. No one likes to back down after puffing up their chest and this is equally true of the demonstrators who are calling the ruling class traitors. Despite our pretence at civility, pride and ego still dominate discourse and as a result little is achieved.

5. The ruling elite come from different parts of the country, go to different schools and speak with different accents. They don’t really understand the concerns of the farmers and haulers and in extreme cases look down on them as plebeian. This is an unfortunate but all too common mentality among the educated Irish, who see working with the hands or in the muck as ‘backward’. In short, the protest represents the old Ireland they wish to leave behind.

It is clear from the above analysis that we cannot simply proscribe our leaders as ‘evil’ or ‘traitorous’ despite the feeling of satisfaction it may bring. Like the protesters themselves, they are under immense pressure from all angles. This is not to defend the elite. We are certainly in the camp of the people, but we cannot ignore the harsh truth: it would be far easier if our leaders were simply evil villains twirling their moustaches and fiddling while Rome burned. But no. They are also trapped in this leviathan of the managerial state and have no choice but to play the part given to them. They too are shaped by the culture industry imported from across the Atlantic and the reality of the modern capital-based society. They can think in no other way. We simply have two opposing forces brought into conflict by history itself.

All this leads us to a broader geopolitical question, one that goes over the heads of both actors in this war of attrition. The Irish political scene is famously parochial in its thinking, which is why the US manipulation has been so effective. We simply shrug our shoulders at high flatulent questions in the assumption that they don’t affect us, but they do. The great blockade of Easter 2026, in its most potent essence, is a rupture of the unipolar moment. The game is up and the liberal goose is cooked. Unlike previous large-scale protests where the political centre simply integrated the discontent and moved on, we now have a situation where all legitimacy has been truly lost. It is obvious that the system cannot fix any of these issues effectively; the divide between ruler and ruled is simply too great. It is difficult to put the mood into writing, but we suspect it is felt all over the Western world. We simply don’t care anymore. We go to work yet our minds are elsewhere. We pay bills and our soul laments. We look around our cities at the decline and our spirit is broken. The support for the demonstrations are not simply economic or pragmatic, though most supporters would consciously contend that they are. In truth, the Irish people wish to see this system end, to watch it strangled and die so that something else may grow from its corpse. We are tired and we seek a new way, even if that feeling is unconscious for the majority.

The US attack on Iran was a catalyst for these developments; the blockade of that troublesome Middle Eastern strait a macro event mirroring of our own blockades. Just as the US regime flails its arms in death throes, so does the Irish. Rather than reach out in understanding to those they oppose, liberal regimes the world over are forced into conflict. It represents the end of US hegemony, both in terms of financial influence and ideology. Europe is already turning East as the Americas shrink back into isolationism. Not only is the global South rising, but so too are the fringes of Europe. If the protests of 2014 were the high point of modern Ireland, this year’s chaos signalled its end. The current discontent cannot be contained by the establishment as it is purely native and seeks actual economic justice rather than pointless cultural victories. It is the birth of the new multipolar understanding of national identity, perhaps not this year or even this decade, but the trend is inevitable. The Irish will not see their ways swamped by foreign capital or the free movement of people. We will continue to represent our own interests without conflicting with the interests of any other people. While liberalism flattens everything into McWorld, a time is coming when every people can once again assert themselves with a system as unique as their indigenous culture.

The Irish government faced a vote of no confidence just over a week after the protests began. Such processes are merely performances to release pressure. The government has a majority in parliament and the opposition know well that they will not win, yet the game is played anyway in hopes that come next election the chamber may swap places. There is no risk of state collapse or justice from this vote. Such things are not the point though. The gloves are off and a new political force will be born from these demonstrations, one that is not in the thrall of liberalism but rather seeks a new path, beyond the false divide of Left and Right. One that is truly native. It is up to the Irish ourselves to achieve this. If history is any witness, we will not go down without a fight.

Nuestra América affirms that the Bolivarian Revolution endures within a multipolar world.

The recent history of Venezuela shows that the Bolivarian Revolution has not been a fleeting phenomenon, but rather a long-term political process that has managed to adapt, resist, and transform itself in the face of adverse circumstances. Since the rise of Hugo Chávez in 1999, the Bolivarian project has gone through internal crises, external pressures, economic sanctions, and structural challenges that, in other contexts, would have meant the collapse of any political model.

However, far from disappearing, the Revolution has endured. This persistence cannot be explained solely by institutional or circumstantial factors. It reflects a combination of political identity, an organized social base, and a historical narrative that has taken root across broad sectors of the country. Chavismo ceased to be merely a government and became a structural political current within Venezuelan society.

Under the subsequent leadership of Nicolás Maduro, the project faced its most complex phase. Unlike the initial period, marked by expansion and consolidation, this stage has been defined by resistance: international sanctions, attempts at diplomatic isolation, institutional conflicts, and constant external pressure. In that context, the very survival of the Bolivarian model became a significant political fact in itself.

Yet prevalence is not only resistance. It also implies the capacity to adapt. The Bolivarian Revolution has adjusted its economic policy, diversified its international alliances, and strengthened its position in a world moving towards multipolarity. Relations with actors such as China, Russia, and Iran reflect a strategy aimed at breaking historical dependencies and expanding room for maneuver.

Moreover, the global context plays a key role. The transition towards a multipolar international order opens spaces that previously did not exist for political projects seeking greater autonomy. In this scenario, the Bolivarian Revolution ceases to be an isolated exception and becomes part of a broader trend of global power reconfiguration.

To say that the Bolivarian Revolution will prevail is not an automatic or guaranteed claim. In history, projects that manage to combine resistance, adaptation, and social legitimacy tend to endure beyond their crises.

Ultimately, the Bolivarian Revolution has demonstrated that it is not a transitory episode, but an ongoing historical cycle. Its future will depend on its ability to continue evolving, but its recent past already leads to a clear conclusion: it has prevailed in the face of predictions of its disappearance. And in politics, that is no small detail.

(Translated from the Spanish)

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Alexander Dugin on faith, Iran, and the collapse of Western strategy.

Conversation with Alexander Dugin on the Sputnik TV program Escalation.

Host: Yesterday we had a great and beautiful celebration—indeed, more than one: we marked Cosmonautics Day and another of the brightest holidays of the year. I suggest we begin with this very topic. Let us talk about the importance of these events and their impact, including on the global level.

Alexander Dugin: You know, as I stood at the solemn liturgy and the Paschal matins, I kept thinking about the content of what we celebrate. Seeing so many people in the churches, inspired by this joy, I found myself asking a strange question: do we even understand—ordinary people who come to have their Easter cakes blessed—the meaning of this feast today? Do its meanings truly reach us?

I decided to listen closely to every sung and proclaimed word, setting aside my theological knowledge and philosophical concepts. And I began to feel somewhat uneasy. We hear: “Christ has overcome death.” Yet death still exists. We hear: “Christ has brought peace.” Yet humanity wages war just as it did two thousand years ago. We hear about truth, yet delusions only grow more rigid.

It turned out that all these messages are addressed to a person who, by default, is supposed to possess a deep spiritual culture and an understanding of a reality that extends far beyond the body. The Good News of Christ consisted in the fact that the spiritual world is structured differently from how Old Testament humanity understood it. But why was this such a shock two thousand years ago?

Because the Jewish tradition also shaped a spiritual world, yet it was governed by different ideas about the fate after death. It was believed that the souls of all people, including the forefather Adam, inevitably entered Sheol, into hell. The distinction between God and the world seemed insurmountable, no matter how one might strive. And this image of a closed spiritual world was pierced and overcome by the coming of Christ. One reality gave way to another—an open one. And this realization is extraordinarily important for us today.

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Everything we encounter in the Church is connected precisely with this: with the fact that, through Christ, His suffering on the cross, and His resurrection on the third day, another spiritual world was opened to us. This is a revolutionary religious revelation, yet it is addressed to people who are not merely aware of the existence of this world, but who feel at home in it with confidence and maturity. To those who understand what it can be and rejoice that, through Christ’s sacrifice, it has become precisely that for us.

However, looking at the beautiful people in the church—young people, those of middle age, the elderly with open eyes and hearts—I realized one thing. With the exception of a rooted, practicing flock possessing spiritual skills, the majority present hardly understands the essence of what is taking place. Even if everything were explained in modern Russian, one would have to begin from the very basics. To understand what is being sung in the Paschal service, why we “drink the new drink,” and why and where we go “with joyful feet,” requires an enormous spiritual culture. In the past, its foundations were given even to the simplest estates, to the peasantry, whereas today we have largely lost this culture. We have lost the ability to grasp even the basic meanings of this great feast.

I had hoped that in his Paschal message His Holiness the Patriarch would attempt to bring these meanings closer to the people. We are now at a turning point in history: people are increasingly turning to religion, to questions of God, the soul, immortality, and the end of the world—especially when there is so much death and suffering around us. And although the messages were written with great spiritual elevation, they were texts of theologians for theologians. The image of “spring in the spirit,” proposed by the Patriarch, is beautiful, but what does it mean for the ordinary person?

For a churched individual, whose daily life is filled with prayer, this message is meaningful. Yet for the modern Russian person—post-Soviet, shaped by the liberal era—this theological layer does not resonate automatically. We often ignore it in sermons or confine ourselves to proper moral instruction. I do not condemn anyone, but I saw a vast deficiency in our existence: the absence in society of an adequate understanding of the spiritual world.

Host: Allow me to suggest: perhaps many people come to church and listen to the service, as it were, beyond words. That is, they do not focus on the specific meanings of what is being said, but perceive the very melodiousness, the calm that is conveyed through these prayers, the voices of the priests performing the chants. Perhaps it is not always about the words, but about an inner sense of this very melody?

Alexander Dugin: Yet precisely in the Gospel read at Pascha it is said that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and through this Word all things were made. In the Greek original, this is the Logos. So how can we, considering ourselves Christians and coming to the Church of Christ, which is built around the incarnation of the Word, be content merely with melodies, intonations, or kind facial expressions? There is a deep contradiction in this. The Logos is thought, the Logos is spirit, and God is spirit.

When we are told about love, it is a particular kind of love connected to the spiritual world. In the Greek original, the term used is agape, which in the Christian context can never be applied to carnal love. This word denotes an entirely different level of relationship; therefore, even the very concept of “love,” which constantly resounds in the church, requires special interpretation.

Of course, it is good that people come, that they enter the church at least once a year to affirm their faith, even if it is still in its infancy. This is very important, and I do not criticize anyone. I only want to speak about the enormous void in our lives where the spiritual world ought to be. For the entire Good News, the traditions, the sacraments, the sermons, and the prayers—all of this is addressed precisely to it.

Many today are entirely unaware of the existence of this world, or no one has reminded them of it. How are they to listen? How are they to apply it? One can, of course, say: there is no need to interpret or understand anything, simply come—and that is already good. And I agree with this. It is better to go to church and listen to the truth proclaimed by the priests in the most uncritical manner. Even if you do not understand it at all, accept it as absolute truth and follow it with minimal reflection.

However, the nature of the human being is to be a rational soul, unlike, for example, a monkey, a blade of grass, or the flowers now in bloom. Perhaps Christ is addressed to them as well, but first and foremost He calls to the thinking soul—that is, to us. Even if we consider ourselves simple people, we are still thinking souls. Man was not conceived and created as an idiot: he bears within himself that dimension to which the message of Christ is addressed at its deepest level. This message is intelligent; it is bound up with immense realities of the spiritual world.

And this spiritual world, from which the Church begins, has receded into the shadows. It has not disappeared anywhere; it remains primary, but in our everyday life it plays almost no role. We manage to reduce all the events of life to rational, material causes and effects, overlooking what is most important. Now is the time to return constantly and everywhere to this spiritual dimension. Without it, we will explain nothing: neither in politics, nor in society, nor in the economy. Everything will fall apart. The spiritual world is what connects people with one another; it binds the people and the authorities, time and space, generations and families.

If marriage has no sacred meaning, no one will respect it or consider it indissoluble. Only when we understand that the family is a sacrament, and explain how it is connected with the soul, with God, and with the resurrection of the dead, do the priest’s words—“the two shall become one flesh”—acquire power. Without this explanation, our society will lose its persuasiveness. We will not be able to explain what we are fighting for, what civilization we represent, and what we are struggling against. The understanding of the spiritual world in Christianity is ceasing to be something optional or secondary.

This is not an ideology or an artificial intellectual construct. What we are speaking about is the recollection of a vast and decisive reality that we have forgotten and lost. It lives within the Church, and it is vital for us to restore it. Easter takes place regardless of whether we understand it or not—that is its greatness. Yet in order to be fully human within a fully realized state, we must accept the will of God and acknowledge the invisible world with its absolute and eternal foundations. This is absolutely essential.

Host: You emphasized the great significance of Easter. In that connection, and within the broader discussion of geopolitics, I would like to ask: how does the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ affect relations, for example, between Orthodox Christians and Catholics? How do they conduct dialogue in this context? Do we see any kind of de-escalation or rapprochement at such moments, or, on the contrary, does the divide deepen because of differences in calendars and traditions of celebration?

Alexander Dugin: Our relations with Catholics and Protestants can only be described and properly understood if we begin by examining the very nature of our faith—its essence. This is not a matter of conventions, nor of one side inventing one ideology and the other inventing another. In reality, the schism of the Church in the eleventh century effectively predetermined the existence of two antagonistic civilizations whose paths diverged irreversibly.

To explain who Catholics and Protestants are—or what the modern anti-Christian West represents as a whole—we must first understand who we ourselves are. These are not accidental developments. Originally, we were all parts of a single Greco-Roman Christian civilization. After the division, however, we sought to preserve the original orientation, a fidelity to the sources, even if something was lost along the way. The Western world, Western Catholicism, and Western medieval civilization, by contrast, turned away from that path.

Moving in a different direction, Western civilization began to undergo a kind of mutation. At first, this manifested at the level of religious doctrine; then came the Reformation, which ultimately distorted the original understanding of Christianity. In modern times, the very principles on which the West was once founded began to be directly dismantled. Beginning in the sixteenth century—through the Enlightenment, materialism, and the Great French Revolution—everything Christian was simply cast aside by this so-called “Christian” West.

Today, a profound civilizational abyss lies between us and the modern West. When we say, “We are Orthodox, they are Catholics or Protestants,” we must first understand that contemporary Western civilization has become anti-Christian. The status of Catholics and Protestants within their own societies today differs radically from what it once was.

This historical path that has separated us from the West is a kind of spiritual map, a sacred history. It is no less important than the history of the Old Testament or the Early Church. We must be historical beings. When we call ourselves Russian Orthodox people, we must see before us the entirety of our civilizational journey. And we must perceive it not as a matter of chance or historical accident, but as a manifestation of the providence of the eternal God—the God of the Trinity, Jesus Christ—concerning our people and other civilizations.

All of this demands serious study, which today has become an absolute necessity. Without understanding this path, we will not be able to comprehend our place in the world or the responsibility that has been placed upon us.

Host: We have spoken about religion, and of course one must ask: what is happening with this in the West? We see that Donald Trump increasingly turns to religious themes. At times groups of pastors come to him; at others, individual preachers. At the same time, there has been unexpectedly sharp criticism of the Pope, who is reproached for failing to support U.S. actions in Iran. And most unexpectedly of all, there was a post on Truth Social in which Trump was portrayed almost in the image of Jesus Christ, raising the dead. How should all of this be understood?

Alexander Dugin: This is, of course, an absolute scandal. At first it was said that the image was Iranian propaganda. But I conducted my own investigation, consulted artificial intelligence tools, and was provided with links to the original post from Trump himself. What is most striking about the image is that he stands in a blasphemous, sacrilegious pose, while horned demons fly above him. This is not simply an appeal to religion—it is an appeal to something directly opposed to Christianity.

Many have now recalled that during his second inauguration Trump did not place his hand on the Bible. People have begun to look more closely at his circle: these are far from being merely pastors, but representatives of a specific current within Protestant fundamentalism—dispensationalism. These individuals believe that the purpose of America is to follow completely the interests of the State of Israel. At the core of their interpretation lies the idea of the chosenness of non-Christian Jews.

Add to this the practice of so-called glossolalia—“speaking in tongues.” The head of Trump’s religious office, Paula White, cries out like someone possessed in a non-existent language, claiming that a spirit speaks through her. Traditional Christians, who were initially part of Trump’s coalition—particularly Catholics such as Carrie Bolles—reacted with alarm, withdrew, and left his circle of advisers.

Instead of uniting Western Christians around himself—and we are not even touching on Orthodoxy here, which is a separate matter—Trump has in effect launched a confrontation with Catholicism. The Pope condemns actions in Gaza, Lebanon, and the war against Iran, and Catholics simply cannot accept the infernal imagery that Trump and his circle disseminate on social media. Around him there seems to be a spreading “black stain” that repels the traditional Christian environment.

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From our Orthodox perspective, Catholics themselves have moved far from tradition. Yet even they have not gone as far as Trump’s current circle. It is difficult to describe: whether this is parody and buffoonery, or open possession, or merely a publicity stunt. What we are dealing with under the mask of “Christianity” in the White House is a complete catastrophe.

I do not know whom they are addressing. Even among evangelicals, Baptists, and Calvinists, this current is an absolute minority. A small, completely deranged Christian Zionist dispensationalist sect has seized influence over Trump’s administration. It is pushing the world toward absurd actions—geopolitically, religiously, and from the standpoint of basic reason. This is not a return to Christianity; it is its complete inversion—a substitution of God with His opposite.

Those demons above Trump, depicted in the image of the Savior—this is something blasphemous. Perhaps they consider it amusing, believing that a “comic-book” format will bring them closer to younger audiences, but I doubt it. What we are dealing with are profound distortions, a final degeneration of Western society. For a long time, they were materialists and atheists, and now they supposedly turn toward faith—but in what form? Everything is inverted, everything is counterfeit. Worse than atheism is outright satanism, which is becoming ever more visible through the American elites.

Host: Incidentally, here satanism has been officially recognized as an extremist movement, which is an important clarification.

But let us turn to geopolitics. We all remember how, just last week, the world stood literally on the brink of the first nuclear strike since Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the end, the parties did sit down at the negotiating table.

These negotiations lasted twenty-one hours and, to put it mildly, ended unsuccessfully: no consensus was reached. There are even rumors—almost conspiratorial—that Jared Kushner nearly came to blows with Iran’s foreign minister. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but the level of tension was clearly extreme. The most intriguing aspect is Trump’s decision following the meeting: he ordered the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Many people immediately asked a logical question—how can one block something that Iran itself has already effectively blocked?

Alexander Dugin: As for the negotiations, the first thing to understand is the context. The Americans and the Israelis eliminated Iran’s legitimate leadership and committed a horrific crime in Minab, where 170 innocent schoolgirls were killed. After something like that, no self-respecting country could treat them as a credible party. The fact that Tehran nevertheless agreed, in a rational manner, to hold a meeting was absolutely the right move, and the positions they put forward were nothing short of brilliant.

The Iranians took a position of strength: “You have committed a crime and must face punishment. We are prepared to discuss a ceasefire, but we will not surrender a single position; on the contrary, we will expand them, since we are the victims of your aggression.” The American side in Islamabad had no choice but to leave empty-handed. It is already remarkable that the Iranians did not carry out their judgment on the spot against Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who are reasonably accused of involvement in these crimes. After all, it was they who, during the previous round of negotiations, distracted the Iranian leadership while treacherous strikes were being carried out.

With figures like these, any means become acceptable. Now the only options are either to wait for them to collapse on their own or to find ways to stop them. One thing is clear: this is not a partner with whom agreements can be made or whose commitments can be trusted. In this situation, Iran has demonstrated itself as a true superpower and a genuine builder of a multipolar world. After all the suffering it has endured, the Iranian people have become an embodiment of courage and a moral compass for all humanity. This is a fact that can no longer be ignored.

Morally, they are prevailing. As long as the Iranians hold firm, they only strengthen the moral legitimacy and dignity of their position.

As for Donald Trump: he threatened a nuclear strike, hinted at some kind of “great reset,” and Israel also declared its readiness to use nuclear weapons. Yet Iran remains unyielding, and Trump now has no option left but to attempt to block the Strait of Hormuz from his side.

Washington’s plan is a clever one. In order to reach the open ocean, ships must first pass through an Iranian “customs” regime, which collects fees in rials or yuan. The Americans have now decided to introduce a second layer of blockage: vessels that have already paid the Iranians will be subjected to equivalent American charges upon exit. If the Iranians allow someone through free of charge, the Americans will do the same—but if you have paid Tehran, you will be required to pay the exact same amount to Washington. In theory, this is feasible, since the waters at the exit of the Gulf can be controlled by American naval forces.

In effect, the United States is saying: “If you, the Iranians, intend to control global oil and gas trade, we will block your control.” This is no longer about nuclear weapons, but rather a military-economic maneuver. Let the global economy collapse, let the price of oil soar to $200 per barrel—the Americans do not care, as long as Iran is prevented from taking a key position. This is certainly no Solomon-like decision. In my view, it reflects the logic either of outright aggressors or of geopolitical perverts.

Host: Am I right in understanding that this can already be described as a war of attrition? If at the beginning we observed a hot phase aimed at destruction, are we now seeing attempts to isolate Iran as much as possible, with Washington being completely indifferent to the consequences?

Alexander Dugin: For now, that is exactly how it appears. At the same time, there is nothing to prevent us from assuming that the Americans are using this pause to build up forces in the region—in Qatar and especially in the United Arab Emirates. Their objective would be either to launch a ground operation or to force Iran, by military means, to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. There can be no trust in the United States or Israel: any ceasefire will be used solely in their own interests.

Trump’s decision has caused fear and panic among the overwhelming majority of people around the world. Not only did Iran close the strait in response to aggression, but now the Americans have also sealed off those few routes that Iran was willing to leave open in order to ease the energy crisis. It is important to remember that initially Iran imposed no duties at all, and free trade agreements were respected. But after the Americans struck Minab, killing children, and eliminated the country’s military leadership without any justification—simply because Trump wanted to personally control Iranian resources—Tehran had no choice but to defend itself.

The Iranians began striking at sensitive points: the global economy and U.S. allies in the region. And they achieved results: they began to be taken seriously, they began to be approached with requests. Japan, for example, whose economy critically depends on energy imports, has already agreed to pay Iran in yuan for the passage of ships. And then Trump appears and declares that whatever manages to pass through Iranian barriers will be shut down again. The result is that Europe and the rest of the world—apart from the United States itself—have virtually nowhere left to obtain oil. This amounts to a deliberate escalation toward global economic collapse.

Host: In fact, the situation in Europe is becoming no less dramatic than the Middle Eastern crisis. The energy crisis, which Trump is effectively pushing to a boiling point, is now intersecting with tectonic shifts in European politics. Events in Hungary are already being described as historic: yesterday, April 12, 2026, marked the end of the sixteen-year era of Viktor Orbán.

In elections with a record turnout of nearly 80 percent, the opposition party Tisza Party won, and its leader Péter Magyar secured a constitutional majority. This is a key moment for the entire architecture of the European Union. On the one hand, Magyar has already spoken of “bringing Hungary back to Europe” and of unblocking EU decisions that Budapest had previously stalled, including aid to Ukraine. On the other hand, the reality of resource dependence imposes its own constraints: even the most pro-European politician in Budapest cannot ignore the fact that Hungary’s economy—and the heat in people’s homes—depends directly on Russian energy supplies.

How should we interpret this shift? Péter Magyar is a complex figure: a former ally of Orbán who knows the system from the inside. His rhetoric now balances between loyalty to Brussels and pragmatism. The media note that he promises “caution” on the Ukrainian issue and is in no hurry to sever energy ties with Moscow completely.

Alexander Dugin: All of this must, of course, be placed within the broader context we discussed earlier. First of all, consider this: if the Americans now impose their own second layer of blockage in the Strait of Hormuz, then in practice the maritime delivery of oil to Europe and Asia from the Arabian Peninsula will cease. It will fall either to zero or to negligible levels. At the same time, Russia could be the primary supplier of energy resources to Europe. But here EU sanctions and pressure from Trump come into play, discouraging the purchase of Russian oil, along with Europe’s own abandonment of a rational approach.

In this regard, the most clear-headed politician was Orbán. He insisted that without Russian oil, there would be no economy at all. He was a pragmatist—not necessarily a great supporter of Russia, but a conservative who approached us without prejudice and understood that Hungary needs oil from somewhere in order to survive. And now it simply is not available. Moreover, the Ukrainian regime has already carried out sabotage attacks on Russian pipelines, causing a scandal in an earlier phase, and intends to continue doing so. Recently, Ukrainian operatives were caught attempting to blow up the TurkStream. Their aim is to deprive Europe entirely of energy supplies from Russia. At the same time, painful strikes are being carried out against our energy infrastructure and ports.

As a result, Russia may either be unwilling or technically and legally unable to supply resources. Oil from the Middle East is effectively disappearing from the global economy. Russia is being blocked—both by its own decisions and by external pressure: if war is being waged against us, why should we continue to supply them? And then Trump comes forward and says: “But we have plenty of oil.” I recently read a serious analysis: the United States does indeed have substantial oil reserves, but they are barely sufficient to meet its own needs. For America to take responsibility for other economies—for Europe, Japan, India, or China—and say “buy from us,” it would need a surplus. That surplus does not exist.

The United States itself may suffer less than others, but it does not have the volumes required for global trade. Moreover, rising oil prices will inevitably disrupt processes within the American economy, which are already under strain. Trump is now effectively undermining not only the global system, but also the foundations of his own prosperity. The question arises: why? Does he not have advisers capable of explaining that U.S. resources are sufficient only to cover domestic demand? If we add to this Iran’s resilience and the situation in Venezuela, it becomes clear that we are witnessing a massive, fatal, and unstoppable collapse of the global economy in the broadest sense.

Host: Returning to Hungary: what will fundamentally change with the rise of Péter Magyar? If we were to summarize it in a few key points, what shifts in the country’s policy will be most decisive under current conditions?

Alexander Dugin: It is difficult to give a definitive answer. In fact, if one closely examines Magyar’s campaign, he did not differ all that much from Orbán in his basic principles. Incidentally, he was quite critical of Volodymyr Zelenskyy and spoke directly about the need to maintain relations with Russia. However, he was elected primarily because of his pro-European orientation.

For now, I would refrain from drawing final conclusions. Magyar will inevitably disappoint either his voters or the European elites who supported him. He will certainly let someone down, and at that point a political crisis in the country will resume with renewed intensity.

It is impossible to predict the outcome in advance: either he will betray the expectations of those who voted for a continuation of a pragmatic line toward Russia and Ukraine (albeit in a different form), or he will disappoint the forces within the European Union that saw him as a compliant instrument of Brussels. His position is extremely unstable.

(Translated from the Russian)

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New Release from Multipolar Press!

Constantin von Hoffmeister — The Fate of White America

The Fate of White America is a sweeping exploration of civilizational transformation in an age of dissolution. Moving from early reflections on the American ethnos to the philosophical frameworks of Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger, Julius Evola, and Wyndham Lewis, this book traces the trajectory of a nation confronting its limits, offering an analytical and poetic meditation on decline and regeneration.

Through encounters with H. P. Lovecraft, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Patrick J. Buchanan, it explores the collapse of cultural coherence, the fragmentation of identity, and the emergence of nascent modes of being. Geopolitics, myth, and literature converge in a vision of the United States within a rising multipolar world, asking whether a new order may arise from the ruins of the present.

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Michael Kumpmann and Mandy Jansen on composure and the fusion of Taoism, Buddhism, and cinema.

Bruce Lee was one of the most legendary martial artists and the defining icon of the kung fu film. He also developed his own philosophy, which drew on Asian traditions such as Taoism and Zen and shaped them into a distinct form centered on thinking and acting with composure, and on following the flow of fate like water rather than making everything worse through rash action.

Bruce Lee did not suddenly become an actor in adulthood. In fact, he had already been acting as a child, long before he became world-famous as a martial artist. His family formed the background for this. He was, in a sense, born into it. His father, Lee Hoi-chuen, was a very well-known Cantonese opera performer and film actor in Hong Kong. Through these connections, the young Bruce appeared in his first film role as a baby (at just two months old!) in Golden Gate Girl (1941). From around the age of six or seven, he acted in approximately 20 Hong Kong films, mostly as a child or teenager in leading or significant supporting roles. Even then, he was regarded as a prodigy. Acting throughout childhood and adolescence was as natural to him as meeting friends every day is to others. He essentially grew up on film sets and behind the scenes of the opera. From an early age, acting was a familiar, almost familial profession for him, much like it is today for children from acting families.

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After moving to the United States in 1959 at the age of 18, he studied drama—acting—at the University of Washington, not philosophy, as is often mistakenly claimed. Even then, he was determined to become an actor, ideally a major star. At the same time, he began teaching martial arts, as it provided him with a way to earn money. Acting, however, remained his great dream. His role as Kato in The Green Hornet (1966–67) became his first significant breakthrough on American television.

Yet his expectations of that dream did not align with the reality he encountered outside the Chinese sphere. Frustration began to grow within him. In the late 1960s, despite his talent and connections, he was unable to secure meaningful leading roles in Hollywood. Asian actors at the time were almost exclusively cast in stereotypical roles or used as sidekicks. Disappointed, he returned to Hong Kong in 1971. His dream had collapsed, yet he refused to give up.

After returning to China, he made full use of precisely those abilities that promised him international success and ultimately turned him into a legend who shaped entire generations: a combination of acting and his unique martial arts skills. With films such as The Big Boss (1971), Fist of Fury (1972), and Enter the Dragon (1973), he conquered the world.

This success bore fruit. Bruce Lee became a globally renowned icon, inspired the film industry, motivated more people to pursue self-defense, and became a worldwide symbol of courage, perseverance, wisdom, and strength. He was therefore not a martial artist who happened to become an actor, but rather the reverse: an actor from an early age who later ingeniously fused his martial arts with the medium of film and in doing so became a legend.

During his time at university in the United States, Bruce Lee began reading works of both Eastern and Western philosophy and developed his own philosophical outlook, which combined martial arts with both traditions. One of his most important statements in this regard is the well-known phrase, “Be like water, my friend.” This carries several meanings. The first is reflected in sayings such as “constant dripping wears away the stone,” and implies that one should not resist everything that feels unpleasant, but only when it is appropriate—otherwise, one should move with the “flow.”

This clearly refers to the idea of wu wei in Taoism, and Bruce Lee’s statement is essentially a reformulation of Lao Tzu’s insight: “The sage does nothing, yet everything that must be done is accomplished.” Although this may sound, at first glance, like an invitation to idleness, it does not mean “lie around lazily and find a fool to do the dirty work for you.” Rather, it concerns principles such as entropy, which I have discussed in my recent article. Through entropy, every attempt to combat “chaos”—especially when undertaken without reflection—ultimately produces even more chaos and increases the need for further action. Even when a person, out of uncertainty, feels the urge to act, it is often better to do nothing than to unintentionally make everything worse. In his famous speech about water, Bruce Lee also emphasized that one should only become “hard” when it is necessary. Interestingly, before him, the samurai Miyamoto Musashi used precisely the same water metaphor.

What Alexander Dugin describes in “The New Monarch of Thailand”—that the ideal king in the Asian tradition is one who does so little that his subjects no longer even notice his existence—also refers to wu wei. It is interesting, in this context, that in the Chinese game Genshin Impact, the character Zhongli—essentially a fictional Chinese emperor—feigns his own death while continuing to act behind the scenes, thereby achieving what is best for the realm.

Bruce Lee then described water as something that is inwardly empty and therefore flexible, and said that one’s own mind should be just as empty and flexible. This once again draws on Taoism. There is the famous saying by Lao Tzu that a bowl is most useful when it is empty—also intended as a metaphor for the mind.

Beyond this, however, it also refers to something else: in China, Buddhism and Taoism have long stood in close relation. Siddhartha was not initially regarded as the founder of a separate religion or philosophy, but rather as a Taoist. Taoists and Buddhists often even shared monasteries. This led to the emergence of what is known as Chan Buddhism, which fused Taoism and Buddhism, and which in turn became Zen in Japan.

As in all forms of Buddhism, the focus here is on overcoming the ego. Yet it goes even further than in Theravāda. While in Theravāda the overcoming of the ego primarily involves overcoming greed, hatred, and delusion, in Chan and Zen it also involves avoiding unnecessary thoughts and remaining anchored in the present moment. The unenlightened person moves through the day with thoughts such as “I have to pay the bill tomorrow,” “my mother-in-law is causing trouble,” or “politics is terrible.” The enlightened person, by contrast, thinks more along the lines of “Oh, today the weather is beautiful,” or “Oh, the flowers by the roadside are lovely.” At the same time, it is about avoiding unnecessary thoughts and being able to act without having to deliberate and plan at length beforehand—mu shin (“no-mind,” action without a calculating mind). This is important in martial arts, but also in calligraphy, where movements are practiced repeatedly until they can be performed spontaneously, without conscious thought. There is even a story of a Japanese master painter who was commissioned to paint a chicken. He withdrew into the mountains for twenty years, practicing tirelessly every day how to paint a chicken, then returned to the patron empty-handed—and produced the requested painting in two minutes.

Referring back to my article on accelerationism and Epstein: tantric practices, as well as the principle of expenditure and excess described by Georges Bataille, also in part serve this mu shin. Someone invited to a private island with hundreds of beautiful girls remains fully in the present moment, rather than drifting away. The mind is so flooded with stimuli that it can no longer wander.

In addition, Bruce Lee—very much in the spirit of Zen—maintained that direct experience is more important than categories and explanations. He expressed it this way: “Don’t think, feel....it is like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory!”

(Translated from the German)

Naif Al Bidh, through a Spenglerian vision of history’s return, discusses the cultural immune system disorder, civilizational amnesia, and the Middle East as the eschatological crucible where Western hegemony fractures, primordial religious forces reawaken, and the Magian world moves towards its final, world-shaping convergence.

Zarathustra is a travelling-companion of the prophets of Israel, who like him, and at the same time, transformed the old beliefs of the people. It is significant that the whole eschatology is a common possession of the Persian and Jewish religions.

— Oswald Spengler

The people of the Middle East are currently experiencing an ontological shock as they are forced to contend with the tides of historic change. What we call the “return of history” is the catalyst for the significant geopolitical, social, economic, and spiritual developments we have witnessed globally for almost a decade now. The now dying unipolar order has placed the West, as well as the rest of the world, in an amnesic state, effectively disconnecting us from our own past—history. Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” is the expression of this Pax Americana-induced amnesia, one where late-stage capitalism drains any remaining vitality left in the West and the rest. Today, in hindsight, we can confidently argue that history had not stopped as Fukuyama had asserted, but was simply paused and forced into a limbo period, a liminal state that occurs between the transition from one period of history to another. History is back, and so are all the primordial forces that have once shaped world history. No culture is an exception. We can almost feel this instinctively today: the return of religiosity in all its forms, the revival of tribal spirits, the affirmation of messianism, and the weaponization and acceleration of eschatological narratives on the political front. Yet, the amnesic slumber afflicting most of humanity meant that the return of history also came with an ontological shock as the façade and illusion of capitalism, materialism, and scientism was shattered and many were left with an ontological void, especially those who have placed their faith in such narrow and false modern notions. The “illusion of progress,” as Oswald Spengler had called it, will be the most radically transformative idea when the Western world is confronted with it.

Cultural Immune System Disorder

That all being said, there is one specific culture that is experiencing this ontological shock in a manner greater than the rest, perhaps due to the West’s insistence on subjugating this specific culture in the past century. The Middle East, the Islamic world, the crossroads-civilization, the only civilization to situate itself at the crossroads of history, the land between the Nile and the Oxus, the land of Abrahamic faiths, the monotheistic homeland, whatever term you prefer to give to this tragic intersection of world history, this specific region has now officially sealed its fate as the battleground of multipolarity—Armageddon. There is something profound about this specific culture.

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As the birthplace of most monotheistic faiths and the notion of eschatological directionality, it does feel as though it was always destined to be the land where the eschaton first expresses itself before dispensing throughout the rest of the world and universe, essentially terminating universal history. Many expected an emerging multipolar order would naturally lead to the civilizational autonomy of all the different civilizational blocs, not realizing that civilizations are super organisms that function at periphery of the ontological and metaphysical. Thus, like all organisms, a civilization ceases to function if it is faced with chronic illnesses or is forcibly subjugated and dismantled by external forces. The cultural critic John David Ebert, building on Spengler’s notion of civilizations as organisms, had introduced the term “cultural immune systems” to explore the different form of reactions a culture possesses as it is forcibly conquered by another. This notion is valuable primarily because it not only reveals how a culture’s immune system reacts to an alien threat, but specifically because it reveals the distinction between a healthy and unhealthy cultural immune system. I build upon the ideas of Spengler and Ebert in order to coin the term “cultural immune system disorders” to describe the fate of the Middle East, and perhaps even South America, in their failure to resist Western hegemony and establishing any form of civilizational sovereignty.

Historical Context

A cultural immune system disorder is the term I use to describe a culture that not only possesses a weak immune system, but an immune system that is dysfunctional to a degree that it is either overactive and destructive when activated, or inactive and useless when needed. The culture fails to recognize the difference between an ontological enemy and a member of one’s own higher culture. This disorder has expressed itself in many ways across Middle Eastern history, be it during the Cold War and proliferation of modern ideological forms (Marxism, nationalism, etc.), or within the post-Cold War era, manifesting itself in the political theologies of this specific culture but in a modern guise.

The current regional war is a perfect expression of this disorder, a Western war guided by US-Israeli adventurism, yet with Arab states as their respective battlefields, this is quite an unprecedented phenomenon. Yet, it occurs precisely here in the Middle East since it suffers from this existential disorder. The dysfunctional state of this civilization meant that its own original religious form, which had essentially propelled this civilization to world-historical significance, is nowhere to be found. Rather, elements of the original form are dispersed amongst the different sub-groups of the culture. The Shia for instance, at least within current times, have retained some of their revolutionary zeal, the unique Islamic warrior ethos. This has made the Shia political theology function as the cultural immune system of this civilization during the post-Cold War era. Sunnism has also clearly held a similar function, albeit in a more dispersed and spontaneous manner. The Sunni and Christian worlds also held this position during the Cold War era, albeit concealed with the guise of modern ideological forms—Baathism, Pan-Arabism, Marxism, and other ideologies that proliferated then.

Yet, beneath this pseudomorphic effect as a result of Western cultural and intellectual hegemony, the Arabs were guided by one unifying ethos characterized by their tribal conception of honor and Christian-Islamic values that have always guided this culture. The Middle East during the Cold War was the only region where a Marxist, nationalist, social democrat, monarchist, and conservative would find a middle ground concerning matters of civilizational relevance. This odd phenomenon, on one hand, reveals the distortion and inversion of the Middle Eastern spirit as a result of Western hegemony, but also the existence of a unifying force at a deeper level beneath the illusions of modern political ideologies. Be that is it may, the culture in question was already suffering from this specific cultural immune system disorder which I believe had begun more than a century ago with the fall of the Ottoman empire and the consequent Sykes-Picot agreement, which had effectively dismembered the cultural body of the Middle East.

Modern nation-states, as Western political forms, had functioned as an efficient instrument of expansion for the West, at least during times when the creative forces of the West were still strong. In the Middle East, as alien political forms, they had functioned as a tool that served the interest of Western foreign policy, as clearly illustrated by the history of Sykes-Picot and its implications on the region. The Algerian philosopher Malek Bennabi had seen this civilizational disorder I speak of permeate the Arab world since the first half of the 20^th century. In his works on the transformation of Islamic civilization and its current state, he had called this phenomenon “cultural bankruptcy,” which he believed was afflicting the Arab world and would continue to materialize until it reaches its logical end. Many today continue to believe that the Islamic world’s issue is primarily a material one, when in reality, as Bennabi had argued, it stems from deeper metaphysical reasons. In other words, the Islamic world suffers from a deeply entrenched spiritual crisis, and only when this crisis is resolved, will it be able to revive itself as a civilization in its own right.

This civilizational disorder to Bennabi leads to a phenomenon he called “colonizability.” As a result of the weak psychological and metaphysical foundations, the culture finds itself in a ripe state for domination by an external culture. What makes the case of colonization in the Middle East more tragic is the fact that it had expressed itself in a peculiar fashion when compared to other regions globally. Unlike India, Africa, and East Asia, where Western colonialism occurred through direct military presence, the colonial projects of the Middle East lacked military presence as Western forces began deploying geoeconomic and intellectual tools to establish their presence. In other words, the Middle East could be seen as the workshop where the West began experimenting with its neo-colonialist projects prior to deploying them globally following the post-war era.

Iran–Persia

When tracing the development of the history of Western adventurism in the Middle East, one is instantly confronted with the peculiar case of Iran. Despite the clear Western influence on Iran during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah, Iran functioned as a cultural stronghold for the Middle East, and possessed a rather healthy immune system when compared to its Arab neighbors. This is not a coincidence, since a culture’s form and reaction are both direct products of its own land and cultural ecology. Iran’s geographic terrain, if seen from space, gives the impression of a naturally fortified land, and this is expressed culturally through their function as a fort-culture. That perhaps, even when the Middle East succumbs to Western intellectual and economic hegemony, is why Iran continues to practice some degree of cultural autonomy. Of course, this, to both Spengler and Toynbee, is also a result of the high cultural history of Persia, a civilization that preceded Islam and functioned as a cross-roads of world history throughout ancient history. Thus, it is no surprise that Iran today functions as the primary immune system to this specific culture in time and space.

Yet, even Iran is not immune to the cultural disorder afflicting this culture. On one end, elements of the Iranian populace weaponize liberal political forms to openly invite Western adventurism into their own lands, something almost unprecedented within Iranian modern history. On the other hand, and perhaps due to another geoeconomic mistake in Middle Eastern history, the rentier status of the GCC states and their absorption into the global economy through Western instruments of expansion (economic hitmen) had made them open targets to Iranian missiles and drones—reflecting a cultural immune system response that is overly active, that it attacks its own organs to rid itself of foreign bodies.

The Gulf States

The economic model most GCC states built across the 21^st century exhibit a severe form of progressive economic policies that are globalist in their orientation. The result were hyper-capitalist forms that propelled these economies globally, while simultaneously exhausting their creative and spiritual forces. These glass-house economies were contingent on regional security and were marketed as beacons of hope within a rather unstable region. This was, however, a model that lacked any solid cultural foundation, and was a false adoption of foreign forms in a place where they do not belong. Short-term economic gratification came at the price of godless realities; growth only occurred in one realm—real estate, which also expressed the same soulless ethos as hypdermodern architectural and urban forms perpetually grew like a cancer. Although these “glasshouses” did not throw stones, their foreign guests did, and the immune system reaction expressed by Iran’s recent attacks had shattered the materialistic illusions that they were built on.

Oman as the Exception

Geography had also been a gift to one unique Gulf state, which had adopted a nuanced approach to foreign policy when compared to its neighbors. Oman is the only Gulf state to have had world-historical significance prior to the emergence of oil. The Omani empire had once stretched across most of the East African coast, where it had given birth to a hybrid-culture that continues to shape sociopolitical realities of East Africa, namely, the Sahel or “Swahili” culture. The empire also included parts of Iranian and Pakistani Balochistan, and large portions of the Arabian Peninsula. Like all empires though, the Omani empire eventually collapsed, but it had a left clear mark on the collective psyche of Omani culture. Oman’s deep history, when compared to other Gulf states, meant that this state possessed political depth that is expressed through a wise foreign policy, which gave primacy to long term economic gratification over narrow, short-term gains.

Today, Oman’s foreign policy style, one that is primarily based on neutrality, bears its fruits as its economic value is recognized while other Gulf ports become dysfunctional. The Arabian Sea, which Oman borders across its coast, is now the gateway to the Peninsula as the Strait of Hormuz experiences a blockade. Moreover, although Oman is coastal by nature, which means it possesses a culture that is open to the sea which is a “fluid space,” in the Schmittian sense of the term, with no boundaries reflecting boundless power as expressed by Oman’s maritime imperial past, it is also open to all forms of threats. Water, in Schmitt’s view, erodes land-based cultural foundations. Yet, it is another peculiar element in Oman, as the homeland of a third primary Islamic sect, Ibadhism, that imbues it with immunity even across the coast. The heartland of Ibadhism is situated within the interior mountainous regions of Oman, and this functions as a second node, alongside the coastal node, the two of which play a primary dialectic role in the development of Oman across history.

Ibadhism is characterized, in my judgement, by an innate esoteric restrain, and a sense of spiritual self-containment, which is expressed politically in Oman’s reservations towards the aggressive foreign policy approach most Gulf states adopt towards Iran. These reservations shape Oman’s overall foreign policy even beyond the Middle Eastern sphere, whereby neutrality is taken to its logical conclusion. Thus, it is not a coincidence that Oman is the only Arab country with a strict ban on skyscrapers, which is not a trivial matter, but a reflection of an ongoing connection with its deep primordial roots.

Reactionary Zealotism

When Arnold Toynbee explored the history of Islamic civilization, he had pinpointed crucial nodes that could function as strongholds or nervous systems when the culture is confronted with a threat of existential proportions. Again, even here, geography and climate played a crucial role. To Toynbee, there are three possible scenarios when a civilization achieves hegemony over another: if the conquered civilization lacks all foundations, it simply collapses, or it could succumb to the hegemonic civilization and attempt to combat it through mimicking its own forms and style (Japan, Korea, Dubai). In some cases, if it possesses strong primordial roots, the civilization attempts to revive its archaic structures and forms a resistance mechanism. What Toynbee called reactionary “zealotism,” as opposed to opportunistic “Herodianism,” are historical analogies he borrows from the different reactions that had emerged in Judea as a result of Roman hegemony. This is perhaps a fitting analogy when used to describe the Middle East since these events occurred within its cultural focal point—the Holy Land. Of course, this analogy can be used to explain certain reactions towards Western hegemony across a variety of cultures.

Be that as it may, the Middle East to Toynbee possessed an innate zealotism that would lead to such reactionary resistance when confronting Western hegemony. There were two primary ecologies where zealotism would manifest itself in the Middle East according to Toynbee, the first being the barren deserts, and the second, the mountainous regions. Initially, due to geographic reasons primarily, the West encountered the desert forms of zealotism, as expressed by Libyan tribal-religious resistance with the rise of the Sufi Senussi movement and the emergence of figures like Omar Al Mukhtar. In Sudan, the Mahdiist movement played a similar role. In the Arabian Peninsula the Wahabi movement possessed a similar function prior to the emergence of the modern Saudi state. In the mountainous regions, the Druze Sultan Pasha Al Atrash led multiple battles against French hegemony in Syria.

It is important to note that the Islamic civilization is not exclusively Islamic and multiple monotheistic faiths which express the same ethos function as primary actors of this specific culture, in this case the mountains of the Druze briefly functioned as cultural strongholds against an invading culture. The Zaydi Imamate within the mountains of Yemen was also a perfect expression of this form of reactionary zealotism, which Toynbee was quite impressed by. Toynbee went as far as asserting that the primordial roots of the mountainous regions of Yemen, due to its geographic isolation, made it automatically the natural immune system of this culture as a whole when faced with existential crises. Indeed, today, despite a prolonged war on all fronts, sanctions, and a long-term siege, the Houthis continue to function effectively on the geopolitical and economic fronts, reflecting the reactionary zeal that Toynbee had mentioned more than a century ago. That being said, Toynbee might have overestimated the reactionary zealotism of desert regions, which were more susceptible to corruption as a result of modernization when compared to mountain regions. Zealotism, to Toynbee, was a political theology that is characterized by strict adherence to tradition while simultaneously rejecting the essence of modernity. In hindsight, it becomes clear how desert regions of the Middle East, due to the curse of oil, had paved the way for their forced absorption into the Western sphere of influence, which limited their reactionary tendencies, and gave way towards more pragmatic and opportunistic approaches to foreign policy and economics through cultural mimicry.

Thus, the incredible force of modernity has managed to sway most of the Middle East into the Western fold, but mountainous regions remain as the only cultural strongholds. Iran, perhaps due to its size and respective location, could not easily express this zealotist ethos, without depending on proxies abroad, and requires a fully-fledged US-Israeli war in order to express this spirit today. Thus, it remains a cultural stronghold by attempting to resist Western adventurism in the final existential battle between these two mighty cultures. Though of course, this should remind us that modernity is a powerful force that could ontologically permeate all organic cultures, including a cultural fortress like Persia.

The Jews Returning to the Magian Fold

All cultures possess their unique prime symbol, which essentially guides the culture towards its logical end—destiny. Although Spengler argued that every high culture possessed its own prime symbol, I would argue that every sub-culture also possesses its own intrinsic prime symbol. I say this because the Jewish people cannot be categorized as a higher culture per se, but rather, a significant sub-culture, nation, and religious creed, which played a crucial role in the development of Islamic culture, or rather, the Magian world as Spengler had called it. On Jewish culture, I slightly disagree with Toynbee’s notion of Jewish civilization being a “fossilized relic” of the Middle East. Toynbee was correct in that Jewish culture was fossilized in the sense that it retained its own forms despite migrating into a foreign civilization—the West. Yet, the term here is restrictive and does not shed light on the migratory nature of this culture. Here, Spengler is of benefit to us, specifically with his notion of “wandering cultures,” cultures that are not static but exhibit a form of mobility beyond their cultural homeland. This, of course, can be applied to many cultures across history, but today it is relevant when discussing the wandering gypsy culture, Nomadic cultures, and perhaps even Jewish societies.

There are two prime symbols in Jewish society that overlap and necessitate one another. The first is the six-pointed Star of David, clearly, and the second which had emerged after its migrations beyond the Middle East, and could be described as a perpetual wandering and yearning for return. This is obviously a very eschatological concept, which emphasizes the notion of yearning for the return to the Holy Land as the culture in question wanders the globe waiting for this specific reunion with their homeland. Due to this curse, the Jewish man was constantly in a state of eschatological urgency as a result of their fossilized state which had allowed them to retain their eschatological and spiritual narratives and not adopt foreign forms. Spengler always used specific cultural archetypes to describe the destiny of cultures. The West was Faustian, Greco-Roman culture was Apollonian, and the Magian Middle East could be best understood as going through the suffering of Job and perhaps other biblical and Islamic prophets. The Jewish society as a wandering culture is best understood, in my judgement, through the medieval notion of the “wandering Jew.” Their return to the Levant then revives their older prime symbol—a renewed Davidic covenant.

Toynbee’s categorization of Jews as a fossilized society had garnered intense criticism, and of course, many labelled him as an antisemite. When in reality the renowned British historian was simply, and brilliantly, providing us with profound insights concerning how specific cultures react when confronted with migrations that usually exhaust the creative forces of cultures. After the materialization of political Zionism, and the establishment of the modern State of Israel, Toynbee described the formation of the State of Israel as the point where the de-fossilization of Jewish society began. Here, many thought Toynbee was reversing his stance, yet in reality he realized that the return of the Jewish people into their home culture meant that their fossilized form would slowly disintegrate as they return to their original cultural mold. This is precisely what many anti-Zionists in the Arab world tend to misunderstand, though Zionism as a modern political form is simply the inversion of a Middle Eastern religious creed into a deformed quasi-secular ideology.

The return of Jews to the Middle East means they are integrated back to the land which had given birth to their cultural and spiritual forms. Thus, beyond the secular political parties, the theologically oriented fundamentalist parties in Israel reveal to us that the Jews are indeed “de-fossilizing” and returning to their original cultural fold. They are becoming more like us, and us more like them. The more you look at the transformations of Israeli politics as religious parties emerge and displace the secular ones, the more you realize that the same phenomenon occurring in the rest of the Middle East is also occurring in Israel as we speak. This is, as someone has recently pointed out to me, the “new nexus of Ishmael and Isaac.” It is a family reunion of eschatological proportions. In other words, if many thought political Zionism was a problem, wait until you see our Jewish cousins reveal their actual forms, ones that resemble ours in its zealotism, fanaticism, and dysfunction.

The Return of History and Eschatology

With that all being said, the irony about our own Middle Eastern culture is how our spiritual “technologies” are profound to a degree that it provides us with an eschatological narrative that allows us to make sense of our current state of civilizational dysfunction. The Middle East, when seen as a higher culture or civilization, is innately eschatological, or perhaps the most eschatological in orientation when compared to other civilizations. Other higher cultures possess their unique eschatologies of course, and some nations, like the Russians for instance, are profoundly eschatological in nature. Be that as it may, the religious creeds that had emerged from the Middle East have introduced the world’s first eschatologically oriented epistemes and world-views – eschatological orientations that direct a whole culture’s forms and actions. This is what Karl Lowith had shed light on when introducing the distinction between the notion of “eschatological direction” and “naturalistic cyclicality,” the former emerging from Judeo-Christian-Islamic culture and the latter from the older pagan traditions. Both are in effect reflections of two clashing conceptions of time. We need not underestimate how a culture’s unique historical consciousness shapes its very realities. Today, Fukuyama’s end of history thesis shatters as history returns to the forefront; the suppressed primordial spirits of all cultures are re-emerging with fervor.

In the Middle East, it first takes the shape of primordial pagan forms that existed before the rise of Islam, today, in the 21^st century AD, we are traversing our modern Babylon, as Abraham did during the 21^st century BC. The Arab world sinks into a disoriented state as neo-pagan forms re-emerge in a modern guise, almost unknowingly. This is, not a Neo-Jahiliya, it is the Final-Jahiliya, prior to the miraculous return of our organic spiritual forms. Just as how Arabs once required suffering in order to give birth to their culture’s final spiritual form—Islam. The Arabs will be forced into a collective traumatic experience, one of eschatological dimensions, in order to successfully revive their real spiritual form, which is a pre-requisite to civilizational revival. History seems to be returning into itself slowly. It constantly rhymes, but with each repetition its cry is louder, as if attempting to warn us that this could be its final cry—the swan song of history culminating in Armageddon. It is not a surprise that geopolitics and eschatology are converging; it is fulfilment of prophecy after all, if we are to take metaphysics seriously. The West has adopted eschatology implicitly with Evangelical and Catholic notions guiding its foreign policy across the past centuries and is today openly and explicitly using eschatological language in its political rhetoric. It is then not surprising to see the Shia resistance explicitly affirming its eschatological ideas and expressing a clear sense of eschatological urgency, one that seems to be still missing within the Sunni realms, as Aleksander Dugin has emphasized recently. Israel is also not hiding its eschatological aspirations as it aligns fully with its current approach to foreign policy. As history reaches the inflection point (point “0”), the Islamic world needs to adopt an eschatologically affirming form, one where a sense of eschatological urgency directs all dimensions of higher cultural life. But this in itself, according to eschatological traditions, is bound to happen as we slowly realize the power of our real spiritual forms. When the eschatological dimension of current developments reaches a crescendo, it will inevitably lead to a revival at the civilizational level. As I always say, eschatology is history occurring backwards. It is, essentially, history in reverse order.

Karl Richter on Iran as the Katechon and the humbling of the Great Satan.

Last night we witnessed a turning point that can only be described as historic—an event of the kind one perhaps experiences once every thirty or forty years. The opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was such an event (even if we see it differently today), and another was the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But this time, something even greater was at stake, and anyone with a certain sensitivity could perceive it: the Iranian people went to the very limits of what is humanly possible. Hundreds of thousands were prepared to defend bridges, power plants, and vital infrastructure with their own lives after Trump and his ally Israel announced their criminal plan to destroy the foundations of Iranian life. Trump, seemingly driven only by sinister forces and whisperings, openly threatened “the end of an entire civilization.” The Iranians were ready to sacrifice themselves. God heard them. Whoever wishes may see a miracle in that night.

In recent weeks, the Iranians have revealed themselves as the heroic people of our time. Who would have expected them to stand up for five weeks against the heavily armed military and nuclear powers of the United States and Israel? That they would ultimately prevail? Something incomparable has unfolded before our eyes.

The consequences are still difficult to foresee. The “Great Satan” has been humiliated before the eyes of the world. Now on the table are the demands from Tehran, forming the basis of the forthcoming ceasefire negotiations: the complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the region; the full release of all Iranian assets frozen abroad; the opening of the Strait of Hormuz under Iranian conditions; and the codification of these terms in a binding UN resolution under international law. If the Iranians succeed in this, they will emerge as victors—as a new regional power, and as a full member of the community of nations that, after 47 years of deadly sanctions imposed by the “values-based West,” has broken its chains and stands with head held high. Nota bene: only recently, the American political scientist Prof. John J. Mearsheimer recalled that U.S. sanctions have caused 38 million deaths over the past 50 years.

38 million deaths.

If the peace now being negotiated holds, future historians will date from this moment the beginning of a new order in the 21st century—one in which the world has ceased to dance to the tune of the West. The United States, humiliated in its most fundamental domain—military power—will henceforth be a toothless tiger. The world, aside from the utterly hollowed-out and impotent Europeans, will no longer feel either respect or fear towards it. Its time is over, and that is for the best.

I admit that I do not write these lines without emotion and profound disturbance. I know Iran from personal experience; I know and respect the five-thousand-year-old Persian culture, which ranks among the richest and most beautiful in the world. It is connected to our own through a thousand subtle, subterranean channels; as is well known, the Iranians are an Aryan brother people. They tell this to German travelers at every turn, because it matters to them.

At this hour, the streets and cities of the country are overcome with boundless jubilation. A people has proven to the world that the criminal rule of “USrael” is not a law of nature. It can be resisted. Its mask can be torn from its face. It is worth fighting. It is worth being ready for sacrifice. When will we, as Germans, be ready?

I do not wish to be a Cassandra. The Great Satan will not rest. It requires the great war, the great slaughter, which was once again averted last night. The Iranians are, at present, the Katechon—the restrainer who, at the end of times, stands for a brief moment against the coming of the Antichrist. One may dismiss this as a fantasy. Yet it suffices simply to open one’s eyes. And still, one can, at this very moment, feel profoundly happy.

(Translated from the German)

Alexander Dugin argues that Trump has stripped away diplomatic illusions and revealed the raw, brutal essence of American hegemony, turning the conflict with Iran into a decisive battle for the future of multipolarity.

Conversation with Alexander Dugin on the Sputnik TV program Escalation.

Host: Let us begin our discussion with Iran. Breaking news has just come in from the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Ministry: its official spokesperson, Esmaeil Baghaei, stated that Tehran has already formulated its response to the proposals from international mediators regarding a ceasefire.

At the same time, we are observing a parallel process: Donald Trump’s ultimatum, whose deadline expires today, April 6. In his usual style, the American president is threatening Iran with having to live “in hell” if it does not agree to a deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

What is actually happening right now on the diplomatic front between Washington and Tehran? After all, only recently the Iranian side insisted that no negotiations were taking place, and today we’re seeing clear signs of movement and discussion of a possible framework agreement, reportedly prepared with mediation from Pakistan and China. How do you assess this situation?

Alexander Dugin: There is so much disinformation surrounding this war that it is extremely difficult to rely on anyone’s statements. We see negotiators being killed in the very course of the process, and any agreements are violated immediately. There is a sense that with Israel and the United States it is equally difficult both to conduct negotiations and to refrain from them—perhaps the former is even more dangerous. I think the Iranians have already learned this.

The fact that Trump went so far as to post an obscene message on Western Easter clearly shows whom they are dealing with. On the day when Catholics were celebrating the Resurrection of Christ, the U.S. president wrote that the coming Tuesday would be a day of destruction for all of Iran’s bridges and energy systems. I quote: “You’ve never seen what’s going to happen on Tuesday.” This is followed by a profane demand to open the strait and a direct threat: “You crazy bastards will live in hell.” And the final, utterly blasphemous note: “Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

This is a literal quotation from his post on Truth Social. Even many American analysts saw in this signs of a rapidly developing clinical condition: no U.S. president in history has ever allowed himself to speak this way either to enemies or to allies. It shows complete disregard both for his own religion and for the feelings of others.

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We are confronted with unprecedented diplomatic conditions. There are no longer any obligations, red lines, rules, or norms. What we are dealing with is harsh, crude, and utterly infernal aggression, where no word carries any weight.

Some might say that something extraordinary is taking place, whereas I would argue that there is nothing fundamentally new here. If we look at how the United States behaved under previous presidents, they expressed themselves diplomatically, politely, observed etiquette and norms. Of course, the current behavior is unprecedented: some kind of “animal” now occupies the White House. But it is important to emphasize that Americans have always behaved this way. The presentation was different; the essence remained the same.

The West, led by the United States, has always sought to strengthen its hegemony, and when that hegemony began to slip away, it preserved it by any means: demonizing opponents, relying on brute force, and justifying this afterward with false arguments. Trump has introduced nothing essentially new into American policy. He has simply discarded the “humanitarian veil,” the diplomatic camouflage. His methods, ultimatums, and negotiating style are no different from those of his predecessors, whether on the right or the left.

Trump is engaged in a kind of political pornography: he tears away all coverings and says, “Look, this is how things really are—coarse and brutal.” Some like this, others do not, but we have shifted into a blunt, street-level language of international relations. At the same time, the substance of Western policy has remained unchanged.

We had hoped that Trump would change this course, that he would focus on America’s internal problems. But he did not. Internal problems are mounting rapidly; nothing has improved—everything has only become worse. In foreign policy, there are no changes either, except for one: the manner in which actions are presented and, if you will, a peculiar, frightening honesty.

Trump is the embodiment of the aggressor’s “honesty.” He speaks directly: “I will kill you like dogs. Whether you are guilty or not does not matter—I will destroy everything. I will crush you, trample you underfoot. I will control your oil and appoint your leaders. You are nothing, you are my slaves, and if you resist, then you are rebellious slaves.” He behaves this way with everyone—but in fact, this is how all American presidents of recent decades have behaved. I repeat: the form has changed radically, but the essence has not changed one bit.

And this is the most dangerous thing: Trump has not become something fundamentally new in American history. He continues the same aggressive, hegemonic, rigidly unipolar policy as his predecessors—he simply packages it differently. Hence tomorrow’s ultimatum to Iran. Does Trump truly intend to destroy the country’s entire energy system? We know that the Americans have a certain superiority in the air; the extent of their control is significant. We can expect ground operations on islands and massive bombardments.

I believe that very little now depends on negotiations. The Iranians will not acknowledge defeat and will not capitulate before the brute force of a bloody aggressor—they simply cannot do so by their very nature. Most likely, they will advance their own “vigorous Shiite project.” Shiites have often lost in material terms throughout history, yet they have survived under horrific conditions for centuries as a persecuted minority.

For them, they are shaped by the ethic of Karbala: a readiness to accept earthly defeat for the sake of a great spiritual victory, like the early Christian martyrs. This is a particular culture of sacrifice and endurance. And when Trump attacks this society with such open cruelty, he receives in response not fear, but the utmost consolidation and courage. The heroic Iranian people today stand united against pure, unalloyed evil coming from the West.

Host: On the day of Western Christian Easter, such messages appear especially symbolic and ominous. Let us return to your thesis that Trump has merely cast aside politeness and begun to speak “more honestly,” while remaining within the familiar pattern of American imperial policy.

But does it not seem to you that such bluntness drastically reduces his room for maneuver? After all, this kind of “candor” in diplomacy could alienate even those U.S. partners who for decades tolerated Washington’s hegemony so long as it was wrapped in the softer rhetoric of his predecessors. Is Trump not pushing himself into isolation, depriving himself of the ability to use the “soft power” that other presidents wielded so skillfully?

Alexander Dugin: Yes, absolutely. This manner alienates many people and creates a strong wave of opposition. This applies both to Democrats and to a significant portion of his former supporters from the MAGA movement, who sincerely believed his promises of a return to traditional values and a rejection of aggressive wars. Today, Trump is turning away a vast number of people—from ordinary Americans and Europeans to the globalists themselves.

Moreover, look at what the ideologues of neoconservatism—the very same Kristol and Kagan—are saying online. In essence, Trump is now embodying their own program: open, unapologetic U.S. hegemony in its harshest form. After all, they always wanted war with Iran, pressure on Russia, a reduced role for European NATO partners, and aggression in the Pacific region. Yet even these theorists of the “iron fist” recoil in horror at how Trump is carrying it out. They say: “We wanted this, but the wild and crude manner in which it is being executed discredits our own plans.”

It is striking: even those who formulated the current agenda of the White House do not accept the savagery with which it is being implemented. I often ask myself: why is that? If he behaved just a bit more carefully, calmly, and simply more decently—at least within the bounds of minimal diplomatic protocol—he could avoid a great many problems within his own camp, among those who stand on the same side of the barricades as he does.

Why does he not do this? I think the reason lies solely in a shortage of time. Trump is striving to complete a certain global program by 2028, ignoring any obstacles. In essence, he adheres to a policy of accelerationism—a philosophical and political theory of artificially accelerating historical and social time. He simply pays no attention to details, goes all in, charges forward with eyes shut toward the realization of his objectives, regardless of the colossal opposition from all sides.

But what are these objectives? Gradually, a clear and coherent logic begins to take shape in Trump’s behavior—monstrous though it may be.

The first point is the restoration of the United States’ weakened influence in the Western Hemisphere. We see this in the pressure on Venezuela and Cuba, in the intense confrontation with Mexico and Colombia. Trump wants to establish direct control over Latin America in the spirit of a renewed Monroe Doctrine, which they have openly declared in their new national security concept.

The second point is the restoration of total control over the Middle East through its proxy, Israel. It can be debated at length who the true initiator is—Washington or Tel Aviv—but the objective is clear: to destroy the main poles of sovereignty in the Islamic world. The number one target here is Iran. And next in line is Turkey. A war with it is effectively already built into their plans for the next stage.

Next (we skip the third point—you’ll see why): the fourth goal of Trump’s presidency in this framework is an inevitable war with China in the Pacific region. Beijing is his most fundamental competitor. Trump’s plan is simple and terrifying: to win all the preceding smaller wars in order to unleash a full-scale strategic war against China by the end of his term.

And here arises that very missing third point: what is to be done about Russia? After all, Russia is also one of the most powerful poles of the multipolar world. And here Trump diverges fundamentally from the globalists. Trump believes that Russia, in itself, is not a fatal problem for him. He hopes that Moscow will ultimately accept U.S. terms—for example, open its airspace to American missiles directed over the North Pole against China, and refrain from interfering in the final stage of global reordering.

If Russia shows resistance, they plan to pressure it from the European side: to provoke a military escalation around Kaliningrad or intensify strikes on energy infrastructure and ports. We already see such attacks, which are clearly backed by American operators. Trump believes that we can be forced into vassal status, mistakenly interpreting our willingness to negotiate as weakness and capitulation. If Russia does not yield, it will be further pressured—but for him this is not an end in itself, only the removal of an obstacle.

For the globalists and liberals, by contrast, Russia appears as the most dangerous opponent, one that must be destroyed first. This is their key difference. Therefore, at the third stage, Trump does not want to expend unnecessary effort: he does not make grand gestures in support of Ukraine, believing that we will be dealt with anyway. For him, the main target is China.

If we combine all four points, we see a strategy of radically preserving a unipolar world through the destruction of the poles of sovereignty: Russia, Iran, and China. The main blows are aimed at our prestige and independence, because the Americans understand that if we endure and grow stronger, the rest of the world will follow us.

And here, behind what appears to be Trump’s erratic behavior, a clear and coherent logic emerges. This is a total war against the multipolar world, a struggle to preserve Western hegemony through the sequential—precisely sequential—destruction of opponents. Each next actor in line is given a false promise that it will not be affected. First they say: “Do not interfere in Venezuela and Cuba.” Then: “We will deal with Iran; this does not concern you.” Then: “We will subdue Russia, and you, China, wait—we respect you.”

The strategy is simple: once we, one way or another, cease to represent a sovereign force and assert our sovereignty, Washington will turn its full force against China. This is a rational policy, albeit one expressed in hysterical, harsh terms, with a brutal, inhuman character and infernal aggression. What stands before us is a plan—a strategy that may be backed by an even deeper state than the one Trump promised to fight.

Trump himself, with his accelerationism and his particular manner, proves to be merely an instrument of the monstrous agony of the unipolar world. And this agony is extremely dangerous. Many of us believed that Western dominance was already in the past and that multipolarity was an accomplished fact. But it seems we were just as premature as Francis Fukuyama was with his “end of history.”

The multipolar world has not yet arrived—the struggle for it is happening now. If we endure and prevail, humanity will win the right to a multipolar future. But we must be clear-eyed: in this battle, we also have a chance of losing.

Host: A question from our listener, “Alexander, how do you assess the likelihood that Donald Trump might use nuclear weapons in the conflict with Iran? And what exactly did the U.S. president mean when he promised Tehran ‘a real hell’”?

Alexander Dugin: I do not think that Trump is currently directly threatening Iran with nuclear weapons, although their use cannot be ruled out. While we have only spoken about readiness for nuclear tests, the United States has already begun conducting them—this once again shows how rapidly they are implementing their policy. Both Washington and Israel are technically capable of such a step, but for now, “hell for Iran,” in Trump’s understanding, takes a different form.

What this primarily refers to is the total destruction of Iran’s industrial and logistical infrastructure: bridges, transport hubs, and energy facilities. This implies massive bombardments, missile strikes from all sides, and, most likely, the beginning of a ground operation aimed at forcing open the Strait of Hormuz.

However, the question of the use of nuclear weapons remains open. If events do not unfold according to the American scenario, then at the next stage of escalation—and the intensity continues to rise—the nuclear arsenal may be brought into play. I do not think this will happen tomorrow, but the threshold for using force has been dangerously lowered.

Host: Another question concerns the capacity of the United States to sustain a prolonged conflict. Many experts and analysts are already calculating the cost of the current operation: according to some reports, in the first few days alone, spending on munitions has exceeded five and a half billion dollars. There are claims that stockpiles of certain types of missiles—such as Patriot interceptors and precision-guided munitions—are being depleted faster than the defense industry can replenish them.

How prepared is America, in reality, for a long, exhausting war if the diplomatic track fails and Iran does not respond to Trump’s ultimatum? Does Washington have sufficient resources to sustain such a pace of escalation without undermining its combat readiness in other regions?

Alexander Dugin: In my view, America is technically prepared for a long war—perhaps even longer than many of us assume. Despite the “fog of war,” the United States retains vast resources for conducting a large-scale and prolonged conflict with Iran. However, such a strategy will inevitably bring serious political consequences within the United States itself.

We see how the number of Trump’s opponents is rapidly growing. For him, a prolonged war represents a major risk, especially given the approaching midterm elections for Congress, which will take place this fall on November 3. Any prolongation of hostilities will work against him domestically. Therefore, Washington’s technical readiness for a long war is one thing, while its political stability under such conditions is quite another.

Host: We have discussed in detail Donald Trump’s global strategy for his current term. And here is what is notable: right now, in the midst of a large-scale conflict in the Middle East, we are witnessing an unprecedented shake-up of the top U.S. command structure.

Why is Trump taking such a risk and changing horses in midstream during a war with Iran? Is this part of that same plan to dismantle the “deep state,” or is there another, purely military necessity behind it?

Alexander Dugin: Within the U.S. leadership, especially in the military sphere, Trump has a vast number of opponents who disagree both with what he is doing and with how he is doing it. Among the military, more balanced and composed figures tend to prevail. But when Trump renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War and appointed Pete Hegseth—a radical Christian Zionist, a fanatic with a skinhead-like ideology—as head of the department, career American generals were deeply alarmed.

These people have been through many wars; they are not soft, they are globalists and supporters of American imperialism, yet even they saw that nothing like this had ever happened before. Even Joe Kent, the former head of the Counterterrorism Department who personally participated in U.S. operations in the Middle East, reacted with outrage. Neither he nor the dismissed multi-starred generals are opponents of American power. On the contrary, they believe that Trump’s actions are undermining that power.

Here we see the same situation as with the neoconservatives we discussed earlier in the program. Trump is carrying out their program, yet the theorists themselves watch in horror at the methods of its execution. He seeks to strengthen hegemony, while the military—who have devoted their lives to serving that hegemony—are appalled by the methods and the results. This view is widespread. It is also important that among those dismissed was the head of the chaplain corps: what is happening in the White House today is a full-blown frenzy of so-called evangelicals.

This is a group of extreme Protestant fundamentalists, mainly Baptists and Calvinists, who are convinced that we are living in the end times. For them, the battles and military actions around Israel signify the Second Coming of the one they call Christ. Of course, this has nothing to do with our Lord Jesus Christ, but they use the same name. In their model, this “Protestant Jesus” is supposed to arrive almost in flying saucers to save the “born again.”

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In this dispensationalist worldview, the main enemies are declared to be Iranians, Muslims, and Russians. In the White House, they are now conducting outright rituals: speaking in tongues, shouting incomprehensible phrases, frantically blessing Trump and calling him a new messiah. Traditional Christians—above all Catholics, but also more rational and measured Protestants—are horrified by what is happening in the corridors of power and in the new “Department of War.”

In place of the previous functionaries, overt maniacs and possessed fanatics are emerging, who shriek and writhe in hysteria. They shamelessly flatter Trump, deify him, and call him the second incarnation of God. This is no longer politics, and not even religion in the usual sense—it is a kind of dark, ecstatic force that has seized control of the world’s most powerful state.

And of course, in this situation, Pete Hegseth is trying to bring this frenzied, pseudo-religious eschatology directly into the American military. This runs counter to the logic and mindset of career officers, who completely reject it. That is why the head of the chaplain corps, Major General William “Bill” Green, has been dismissed, along with combat generals, including Chief of Staff Randy George. They disagree with Trump, but for him this is part of his own logic.

Previously, he hosted a show in which, after each segment, he could dance around waving chicken drumsticks. But today, when we say that clowns rule the world, these are no longer merely bloody comedians like Zelensky. We are now dealing with figures far more terrifying. After performing in his “Trump show”—this cheap and repulsive parody of The Muppet Show—Trump would usually end each episode with the phrase: “You are fired.” And he would indeed dismiss an employee of his corporation. That was the climax: “You’re fired—get out!” It did not matter that you had served faithfully and done everything required.

Now he has brought this show into the White House. If something displeases him—“You are fired.” That is how he treated Attorney General Pamela Bondi, who had been his loyal lawyer, covering up his scandals and lying relentlessly, provoking widespread hatred. Recently, he told her: “You’re fired, ma’am.” In other words: get out. He treated Kristi Noem the same way, and he acts likewise with combat generals. For him, this is simply an extension of the television screen, where real people and the fate of entire countries are nothing more than props for his endless show.

Alexander Dugin: For Trump, kicking someone out the door isn’t just a gesture; he doesn’t even need a reason. You can be endlessly loyal to him, you can grovel before him and fulfill his every whim, but the moment something shifts in his mind, he delivers his trademark line: “You’re fired.” That is exactly how he is now treating combat generals in the midst of the Iranian campaign, triggering a growing wave of resentment within the military.

At the same time, however, the logic we spoke about earlier is becoming increasingly clear. It seems that the real situation in the West is far more dire than we imagine. They are, in fact, hanging by a thread. If the global governing structures have handed power to a man who acts in this manner—swiftly, charging ahead, disregarding all decorum—then they simply have no other choice. There is no longer time for liberal illusions, for humanitarian façades, or for talk of human rights. Trump no longer even pays lip service to such things. Everything now comes down to one thing: “Destroy everything in our path, because our power has been shaken, and we must hold on to it.”

The real forces that govern the West have decided that this is precisely the kind of instrument they need at this moment. Later, Trump will be blamed for everything and accused of every possible sin. If he himself has not already passed from this world by then, he and his entourage—these corrupt sadists like Kushner, Witkoff, and others with thoroughly compromised reputations—will be dragged through courts and prisons. His entire retinue will be subjected to massive, demonstrative punishment. But the task will have been completed: using them, they will attempt to cement a collapsing hegemony.

And in this, in my view, lies the only rational explanation for what we are witnessing. These brutal, humiliating dismissals even of the most loyal associates—this is his default mode. He does not simply fire people; he seeks to trample and humiliate them. We saw how he threw out Pamela Bondi, who had been his shadow and shield; we saw how he treated Kristi Noem. This is also how he deals with Europeans: for him, they are not allies, but slaves, whom he doesn’t even bother to encourage.

For now, Trump tries to avoid Russia and China in terms of such direct personal insults, but it is clear that he could lash out at any moment. For him, this is no problem. And there is a certain logic in this: apparently, by no other means than such blunt, accelerated, and extremely aggressive hegemony can the West preserve its unipolar order.

They simply do not have time to create illusions, to maintain politeness with “noble vassals.” There is no time for liberalism, human rights, and other pseudo-values that once served as a cover for the same harsh dictatorship. The global forces have chosen a man capable of carrying out this dirty, unpopular mission—for humanity as a whole and for American society itself—as quickly and ruthlessly as possible. Trump’s true mission, long concealed behind the glitter of his showmanship, is becoming ever clearer: it is a final, desperate attempt to keep the world under a single master’s control.

Today, I even published a post about my conversation with Tucker Carlson, which took place exactly two years ago. At that time, Trump’s full election campaign had not yet even begun, and we assumed that his main opponent would be Biden. We discussed the future with Tucker, and he admitted that what he feared most was the influence of the neoconservatives on Trump.

When we turned to the prospects of a multipolar world, Tucker paused for a moment and said: “I think Trump will not accept multipolarity.” At that time, Carlson still supported him, seeing in him a defender of traditional values and an opponent of liberalism. Incidentally, Tucker has a very negative view of Ukrainian nationalism and hoped that Trump would shift the U.S. position in our favor. Nevertheless, on the question of multipolarity, he already had his doubts.

Today, Tucker Carlson is in open opposition to Trump within the United States, even though he was one of those who helped bring him to power. Now Tucker openly says that he did not realize who Trump would turn out to be. He believed in him, shared his ideas, but Trump betrayed the MAGA movement and his supporters. Many of them are now in opposition, although Tucker is still occasionally invited to the White House despite his criticism.

Even then, Carlson foresaw that Trump would have problems with the multipolar world. And yet multipolarity is the only form of a truly just world order and the only way to put an end to Western hegemony. Most of those who initially supported Trump agreed with this: they only wanted America to take a worthy place in this new world. But at a certain point, Trump declared war on multipolarity. And this is no longer a lie, not an accidental gesture, and not a nervous outburst. This is the core of his policy—a ruthless struggle against the multipolar world.

How might this end? Either Trump will inflict critical damage on multipolarity, pushing this process back by decades—such a scenario cannot be ruled out, given his extreme aggression. Or, on the contrary, his extremely harsh actions will accelerate the collapse of Western hegemony, generating chaos and division within NATO, potentially even leading to civil war within the United States itself. The stakes have been raised to the limit: Trump has put everything on the line, forcing us, the supporters of the multipolar world, to do the same. In this game, it is impossible to remain on the sidelines—those who do not participate simply allow others to make decisions for them.

Trump is going all in to preserve U.S. hegemony at any cost. And we have no choice but to accept this logic of escalation. There is no way to evade it. Much is said now about negotiations, but can the Iranians—a great and proud people with a millennia-long history of the Achaemenid and Sassanian empires—really accept the role of “miserable slaves” that Trump assigns to them? I cannot imagine it. Even a small nation would not tolerate such a tone, let alone a great civilization.

Trump does not need negotiations. His ultimatum to Iran is a clear warning to China and to us: “This is what will happen to you if you dare to resist.” This is a direct war against us, and we cannot remain mere observers. It is impossible to pretend that nothing is happening in Venezuela, Cuba, or the Middle East while sanctioned attacks are being carried out against our territory, and our ports and tankers are being blocked.

We are now at the third of the four stages of Trump’s plan. At the end lies war with China. Beijing hopes to delay this moment, but the Americans will strike when it suits them. Right now, Iran is what stands between China and the fate of the others, and between us and the fate of Venezuela. Trump apparently believes that we will never dare to use our nuclear arsenal, and therefore he keeps for Washington the right to decide how and when force is to be used. Either he truly does not regard us as a fatal threat, or he is skillfully pretending, postponing the final reckoning for the time being.

Host: Iran today sets an example for many: our fellow citizens sincerely admire how steadfastly Tehran is resisting enormous pressure. I would like, in conclusion, to touch on the issue of strikes on infrastructure, but now in relation to our own region.

Very recently, just days ago, an attempted terrorist attack on the TurkStream gas pipeline was prevented. And now a significant development: several countries—Russia, Turkey, Hungary, and Serbia—have agreed to create a coalition to ensure the physical security of this pipeline.

Is this not a direct response to the aggressive policy of the West and, in particular, to the methods in which the United States may be involved?

Alexander Dugin: I am convinced that this cannot be an initiative of the Ukrainians. Ukraine is merely a compliant instrument, a technical executor of American policy. It is obvious that the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines was in Washington’s interest. Now, against the backdrop of the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the United States is trying to create a situation in which Russia will not be able to benefit from a sharp rise in energy prices. Strikes on our infrastructure and ports are a direct initiative of the United States.

As for the coalition to protect TurkStream, with all due respect to its participants, we need to understand how limited their sovereignty is. If the Americans decide to blow up this pipeline, they will do so without paying any attention to the protective alliances of semi-vassal European states. In an extreme case, they will simply replace the governments there if those governments prove too persistent.

The situation is critical. It is one thing to fight Ukraine or even the European Union, and quite another to confront the United States, which stands behind them. Although it may seem that Washington is reluctant to enter into direct conflict, all fundamental decisions are made there. Under Trump, only the façade has changed; the essence remains the same: rigid, uncompromising hegemony.

We must recognize the radical nature of this moment. And Iran truly offers an example worth following. Today, humanity faces a stark choice: either you are Iran—that is, resistance—or you are Hitler in a new form of American and Israeli Nazism, which the world is now confronting in full measure.

There is no third path in this escalation.

(Translated from the Russian)

Kazuhiro Hayashida on a nation that lost its position in a multipolar world.

The current sluggishness of Japan’s response is not merely a delay in policy judgment. At a much deeper level, Japan has mistaken its own position. A defeated nation situated in Asia perceives and conducts itself as though it were a natural core component of the West, internalizing American national interests as if they were its own principles. This misrecognition of its own standing distorts the very starting point of its judgment in all matters: towards China, towards Russia, and towards the United States.

Japan was constructed as a watchpost for the United States in Asia, and as a result, it lost its own civilizational core and forfeited the ability to assert its own principles in its dealings with others. For that reason, Japan’s diplomacy tends to become not an exercise in autonomous judgment, but a repetition of borrowed principles.

The core of this sluggishness lies in a misreading of the transformation of the world order. The world has already ceased to be in a unipolar condition and has entered a process of transition towards multipolarity, while Japan alone remains stranded within an outdated, West-centered schema. Even as American diplomatic doctrine begins to revise its traditional hegemonic course and NATO expansion, and as the importance of relations with Russia and the evolving interrelations among China, the EU, and the United States itself become increasingly evident, Japan continues to operate under the illusion that “the United States = a single will” and “the West = a monolithic bloc.” This lag in recognizing the coordinates of the world produces Japan’s misreadings and miscommunications as seen from the outside.

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Japan does not view China as a civilization, but only as a regime. Here lies a decisive shallowness of interpretation. The vast population inhabiting the Chinese continent will not disappear even if the state system changes, yet Japan proceeds on the assumption that the “China problem” could be resolved if the political nature of the Chinese state were altered. The crude logic devised to control what is essentially an American colony in relation to China is treated as mere operational work, never interpreted as a theory of its own; thus, it collapses from the outset. The essence of the China problem lies not in changes of state or regime, but in the enduring civilizational population that persists in that place. Because strategies towards China are constructed without this elementary premise, Japan’s policies become reactive in the short term and utterly powerless against the opponent’s continuity. What Japan ought to confront is the Westernism that China itself is confronting—not transient policies, but the continental civilizational sphere that endures over the long term.

Japan scarcely understands how its own statements are interpreted within international institutions. What makes Japan’s current behavior dangerous is not simply its hardline tone, but the fact that it has lost its awareness of its position as a defeated nation while behaving as though it were a member of the victorious powers. Statements regarding the Taiwan issue or sanctions against Russia, issued at the direction of the United States, may appear domestically as ordinary security discussions, yet from the outside they are interpreted as a former enemy state once again beginning to stand out militarily and politically. This discrepancy is not merely a matter of impression; it connects to the postwar structural context, such as the enemy clauses, and reveals how Japan has lost sight of how legally and symbolically dangerous its domestic discourse has become. This is less a matter of slowness than of a deficiency in recognition.

Furthermore, there is a lack of crisis awareness and defenselessness towards techniques of external domination. Contemporary domination, which employs the standard methods of civilizational control by ruling powers, does not necessarily destroy internal order. Instead, it fixes the interface with the external world onto a single representative, transforming that individual’s statements and signatures into permanent obligations of the entire nation. Crucially, the authority to determine and interpret their meaning always resides with the dominating side.

Japan’s foreign policy is extremely vulnerable to this form of control. A single remark by a politician or bureaucrat is preserved in the external world as the definitive will of the entire state, later constraining Japan’s actions. Nevertheless, Japan treats such statements as nothing more than situational political remarks. This perception stems from an insufficient understanding of the structures of domination.

Japan conducts diplomacy while lacking a civilizational core. Japan, as an island nation situated at the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent, originally stood at the interface between continental and maritime civilizations, formed at the crossroads of the northern Altai–Amur cultural sphere and the Yellow River civilization. In other words, Japan’s inherent strength lay not in the purity of a single civilization, but in its capacity to integrate and transform multiple civilizational cores. Yet contemporary Japan has concealed and altered this historical trajectory, and has grown accustomed to speaking through borrowed American principles. In such a condition, Japan can neither articulate the world in its own words nor express its position through principles of its own. It remains perpetually subject to external use, moving according to the schedules of other nations—this is the fundamental cause.

What is required for improvement is a redefinition of Japan’s self-conception. Japan must no longer define itself as part of the West, but rather as a buffer state at the eastern edge of Eurasia. This is not an emotional return to Asia, but a recalibration of the axis of diplomatic judgment—from a West-centered perspective embedded during the postwar occupation back towards geographic and civilizational realities.

Within the web of relations among the United States, Russia, China, the Islamic world, and the EU, Japan must move beyond the question of which civilizational bloc it should subordinate itself to, and instead enter a stage of determining which interfaces it can manage and which tensions it can mediate. In this regard, Japan must shift its China strategy from a state-based framework to one based on civilizational population. It must abandon wishful thinking premised on regime change or systemic transformation, and instead adopt strategies spanning decades grounded in geography, demography, and civilizational continuity. To this end, across military, economic, educational, and public opinion domains alike, Japan must design long-term approaches directed not at “state China” but at “civilizational China.” Short-term provocations and forceful rhetoric only expose a lack of structural understanding.

Accordingly, external statements must become subject to institutional audit. A permanent mechanism is required to preemptively assess how statements by politicians and bureaucrats will be interpreted within the frameworks of the United Nations order, the postwar order, the status of a defeated nation, and provisions such as the enemy clauses. This is not a matter of public relations, but of national security itself. A state that speaks without understanding how its words may be translated abroad into obligations or designations of enmity cannot be said to conduct diplomacy; it must restrain reflexive speech.

At the same time, Japan must move away from a structure in which the entire nation is borne by a single representative. As the structure of Western domination outlined earlier suggests, external control begins with the singularization of the point of contact. Japan must reduce situations in which the entire state becomes bound by the decisions of the prime minister’s office or a single ministry, and instead institutionalize a multi-channel diplomatic structure in which different channels mutually constrain one another. Political, diplomatic, economic, security, civilizational, and religious-cultural dimensions must be coordinated in parallel, ensuring that isolated signatures or statements do not harden into permanent obligations.

Most importantly, Japan must articulate its own framework of principles. Borrowing American universalism will not suffice, nor can Russian realism simply be transplanted as is. What Japan requires is a distinct logic proper to a state positioned at the interface of multiple civilizations—one that sustains tension while mediating between competing civilizations. It must avoid absorption into any single pole of conflict, maintain the tension between different civilizational cores, and intervene when necessary to defend its partners. Unless this capacity is explicitly formulated as a political philosophy, Japan cannot possess its own principles.

Accordingly, Japan’s sluggishness cannot be reduced to slow bureaucracy or incompetent politicians. It stems from a misrecognition of its civilizational position, a failure to understand China as a civilizational population, a forgetting of the postwar structure, a defenselessness towards techniques of external domination, and the absence of its own framework of principles—all of which delay and distort every judgment. The order of remedy is clear: first correct the nation’s own position; next update the coordinates of the world; and only then articulate Japan’s own civilizational justice. To ignore this sequence and attempt to advance policy alone is merely to repeat the same failures.

(Translated from the Japanese)

Alexander Dugin on sovereignty and Russia’s coming clash with the West.

In the current situation, Russia needs to act much more firmly. The enemy does not understand nuance, hints, or the refined language of diplomacy. They consistently read our politeness as weakness. That is how they see it—nothing more. And they are preparing for a full-scale, frontal war against us, one they will launch when they believe they are ready.

The US and Israel are currently focused on their war with Iran and Shiite forces in the Middle East. But the EU, Britain, and the Democrats in the United States are oriented specifically towards a conflict with us. If we behave in ways they interpret as weakness, there will be no chance of avoiding war. Only strength matters. This is a moment for strength: direct, credible, visible, and unmistakable.

It is also essential to disabuse them of the notion that they will choose when to start the war while we simply wait and comply.

We must act with clarity and resolve, and we must act now. In global politics, a true sovereign is the one who shapes events and initiates decisive processes, rather than fitting into those set in motion by others.

After the geopolitical disaster of the 1990s—the collapse of the USSR—the West concluded that we had lost our sovereignty. They have treated us accordingly ever since.

There is no reason to expect any consistent logic from Trump’s behavior. We must rely on our own strength and actively support our real allies. There are no such allies in the West. None.

(Translated from the Russian)

Stefano Maurizi on a haunting film of ancestral memory and Carpathian myth.

It was 1965 when, in the pages of the newspaper Ranok, readers across Ukraine were pleasantly surprised to encounter “Sonata of Hutsulshchyna,” the poem by Hanna Shaburiak dedicated to Hutsulshchyna, the Carpathian region on the border between Ukraine and Romania. Today, this region is known as an unspoiled natural park, yet in the Ukrainian national memory it represents something far deeper. In this land live the Hutsuls, a people who have preserved archaic customs and traditions—the foundation of the country’s distinct cultural identity—for centuries, untouched by Russian, Polish, or Germanic interference.

During the years of the “Thaw,” that brief yet intense attempt by Khrushchev’s Secretariat to increase the autonomy of Soviet institutions, it was decided to grant much greater space to the cultural expressions of the Republics, effectively pausing—though not entirely—the process of Russification. Nowhere was this more strongly felt than in the Secretary’s own homeland, which during the years of Stalinism had been the stage of a cultural assimilation that would be reductive to call merely brutal.

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The result was a period of flourishing intellectual fervor within a milieu that, while remaining faithful to the principles of Real Socialism, sought to reconnect with the experience of so-called National Communism, which had enjoyed considerable success in Ukraine in the mid-1910s. The goal was to accompany socialist policies with a genuine, autonomous cultural identity to be defended, and it was precisely in the customs of the rural Hutsuls that Shaburiak identified what she called the “germ of Great Ukraine.”

Central to this process was the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of any ruling class: cinema. In Kiev stood the second most important film studio in the Union, which in this very period was named after Alexander Dovzhenko, the director of the trilogy composed of Zvenigora, Arsenal, and above all Earth, which as early as 1930 had already made censors tear their hair out due to its celebration of Tradition and rural life. Until the 1950s, Soviet cinema had enforced a rigid ethnic hierarchy (favoring Russian directors and authors) along with a hyper-modernist rhetoric that portrayed the State as a force capable of exorcising the “barbarism” of native populations in favor of the socialist utopia. During the Thaw, however, local artists were finally able to present their identities with a more authentic gaze, even if still mediated.

It was in this climate of intense cultural ferment that the Armenian director Sergei Parajanov arrived in Ukraine. A fervent advocate of representing cultures as authentically as possible, he nonetheless faced the lingering constraints of censorship during his early years working in the Donbass region, such as the imposition of the Russian language. In 1962, he moved to the Carpathians, where he discovered Hutsul culture and immediately fell in love with it. It was then that he decided to film an adaptation of the novel Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a version of the classic Romeo and Juliet story filtered through the folklore and demonology of a culture still suspended between the organized order of Christianity and a traditional pagan worldview that sees the natural world as alive and overflowing with spirits and meaning.

For this very reason, despite warnings from the censors, the director reaffirmed the necessity of filming not only on location but also using traditional language and customs, unfiltered by the ideological lenses of Marxism, which had already provoked strong criticism of the novel for its supposed “glorification” of “barbaric customs” (such as honor culture and magical rites), integral parts of the narrative. The story follows the young Ivan, deeply in love with Marichka despite a violent feud between their families. Perhaps for this very reason, nature itself forcibly separates the two lovers through her death, compelling him to marry a woman he does not love, who attempts to win her husband’s affection through shamanic rituals while the family remains under the gaze of the specter of the deceased.

In truth, it becomes immediately clear that the importance of the plot in Parajanov’s work is relative, if not almost nonexistent. What truly matters is the environment, the music of the land, the rituals, the spirits—in short, the magic with which those dense forests have always teemed. It is an experiential work that is almost futile to describe in words, like any great expression of visual art, especially one that lives through the compositions of the Armenian director. Unlike his later, more radical works (above all The Color of Pomegranates, composed almost entirely of static and symbolic images), Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors thrives on the contrast between compositions that seem to emerge from paintings and a relentlessly frenetic camera that never allows the viewers to fully catch their breath.

Although Parajanov’s signature is the most prominent, the work is also the expression of two other then-emerging talents who, thanks to this film, would become the foremost icons of Ukrainian Poetic Cinema (a brief yet fundamental movement of which Shadows is considered the progenitor): the cinematographer Yuri Ilyenko (and future leading director of the movement) and the lead actor Ivan Mykolaichuk, the latter becoming the most internationally recognized cinematic face of Ukraine.

Even during the height of the Thaw, such a film would have struggled to pass censorship (especially given the director’s refusal to have it dubbed into Russian, even under official request), yet an additional tragedy struck the production: the change in leadership of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], which ushered in the Brezhnev years and, with them, a renewed tightening of cultural expression in the peripheral Republics. The film’s premiere was blocked, and the director was exiled to Armenia until his eventual arrest in 1971. By then, however, the “damage” had been done: soon thereafter, despite strict censorship, formalist and poetic films inspired by Shadows began to be produced (already the following year Ilyenko shot his debut, also suppressed upon release), quickly becoming symbols of resistance for all oppressed peoples beyond the Wall.

The flame of the Revolution, by then, could no longer be extinguished.

(Translated from the original Italian version on Identitario.)

Alexander Dugin on the clown emperor and the delusional war machine.

Trump delivered his address to the nation. It was brief. He appeared pitiful and broken. His cheeks sagged; his eyelids were swollen. He had clearly deteriorated. Yet at the same time, he threatened Iran with a continuation of the war. The timeline has shifted; now it is a matter of several years. A ground operation is more than likely, though Trump has not yet openly declared it. For now, using almost the exact same wording Hillary Clinton once used about Libya, he promised to “bomb Iran back into the Stone Age, to which it belongs.” It is difficult to say to which “age” the civilization of Jeffrey Epstein belongs, especially since in the West great epochs and periods of total decline seem to have been confused and rearranged. Most of all, what we are seeing now resembles an idiocracy.

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Comments on Trump’s speech across social media are largely mocking, sarcastic, and negative, aside from desperate attempts by bots to soften the epic failure, repeating identical and crudely constructed praise.

The overwhelming majority of Trump’s former supporters openly claim that “the old man has lost it” (“he’s gone”). Short videos comparing Trump to Boris Yeltsin—portraying Trump as a disgrace to America and Yeltsin as a disgrace to Russia—are appearing more and more frequently; in them, both seem to be dancing and gesticulating. At the same time, to give Trump his due, he does not drink alcohol. Only Diet Coke. His vices are of a different nature. Many in the United States are convinced that, having been caught in those very vices by Epstein and Israeli intelligence services, he became a victim of blackmail and therefore initiated the war with Iran, which he is now compelled to pursue against all odds, despite the American public’s complete lack of desire to fight.

Trump also stated that healthcare, the cost of living, and food security are not his concern. His concern is war. Such is this “president of the whole human world.”

He was elected on promises that were strictly the opposite.

In summary, Trump’s speech amounts to a complete political and psychological fiasco against the backdrop of an escalating major war. It increasingly resembles a Third World War.

The United States (represented by Trump alone and the group of Zionist maniacs surrounding him) seeks to wage war for Israel against Iran, while European leaders aim their efforts against Russia. NATO is fractured, yet peace seems to have been forgotten by nearly all parts of the cracked—if not shattered—collective West.

Whether we want it or not, we too are participants in this world war—on our Ukrainian front.

In a large-scale war, one must never underestimate the opponent, no matter how pitiful he may at times appear. One’s own strength must be increased rapidly and by any means. However degraded Trump himself may seem, the United States remains a powerful military force. And the European countries of NATO are still a fairly serious opponent. Therefore, for Russia, despite all our peaceful intentions, there is no other option but to fight—truly fight, not half-heartedly. Our enemies (if not these, then others) intend to wage war for a long time and with great ferocity, including against us. This cannot be ignored, and any talk or dreams of peace should be postponed to an indefinite future.

Peace or war, peace or war, peace or war? War! Freedom or death, freedom or death, freedom or death? War!

— Egor Letov

(Translated from the Russian)

Chōkōdō Shujin on reading Kappa today and the triumph of the absurd.

“All the ideas necessary for life seem to have been already in our possession three thousand years ago. Perhaps we are only stirring up old embers into new flames.”

— Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Kappa

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa entered the world in Tokyo in 1892, the year of the dragon, just as Japan was edging steadily towards Westernization. His mother slipped into madness in the days following his birth, a solemn unraveling that would mark her son until his death. Akutagawa’s depictions of her reveal a beautiful, docile madwoman, once a talented artist and poet, who married a cruel but intelligent man. Adopted by his uncle, Akutagawa carried with him the weight of his mother’s madness, a phantom inheritance that shadowed his thoughts, eventually overwhelming him. He remained convinced that if insanity could strike without warning, existence itself lost all meaning. Akutagawa’s adoptive family, old nobility rooted in samurai traditions, provided structure, yet the domineering presence of his elderly aunt reinforced themes of controlling female figures in his later portrayals of women as aggressive and men as passive victims.

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The young Akutagawa quickly proved his brilliance. At Tokyo Imperial University, he immersed himself in English and French literature, forming ties with senior literati, translating Poe and writing for various coterie journals. He was closely aligned with the Shirakaba-ha, a literary movement based on the romantic ideals of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The great master Sōseki Natsume’s approval of several early pieces lifted Akutagawa’s spirits, even if briefly, steering his path to tales rooted in folklore, yet always laced with his signature irony and profound inner turmoil. As fate would have it, he found no peace. Sōseki, who had proclaimed him his literary heir, died the following year. Hallucinations came later, weakening Akutagawa’s already fragile grip on reality. Despite this weakness, Akutagawa was nonetheless a man of immense resolve. Marriage to Fumi Tsukamoto in 1918 and the subsequent birth of his sons brought domestic stability, but a grueling journalistic tour in China triggered chronic physical ailments that eroded his vitality further still.

As he drew nearer to his death, Akutagawa’s works shifted from historical fiction to pure autobiography, drawing from his own diaries to expose his anguish to the world. As he had no doubt learned from Sōseki, this was the poet’s obligation. In “Death Register,” a morbid piece written the year before his own death, Akutagawa publicly revealed his mother’s madness, describing her as a “quiet lunatic,” a confession that amplified his dread, the same “vague sense of anxiety” that would claim his life. In 1927, at thirty-five, he chose to die by his own hand, his works a testament to both his willpower and to his immense fragility. As Yukio Mishima observed, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa died at the height of his beauty and talent. Even his death was meticulously composed. A lethal dose of Veronal, the barbiturate that is still used for euthanasia, ended his life painlessly. His friend Ryūichi Ōana, the artist who painted his death mask, claimed that Akutagawa resembled one who had fallen into dreamless sleep.

One can only ponder such a life. “Truly, human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning,” Akutagawa famously wrote. Unfailingly, he turned his gaze relentlessly inward, without mercy, finding the chaos within mirrored in society. And yet he never fell into self-pity. Kappa, Akutagawa’s parting satire, draws from such existential depths. It is a tale told by a madman, identified only as Patient 23 of a certain asylum in Tokyo. Before going mad, this solitary wanderer tumbles into the land of the kappa, Japanese water sprites turned grotesque; the opening scene is reminiscent of Lewis Carol. Akutagawa’s looking glass is dark, indeed. What was once a fable to provoke uneasy laughter now stares back at us as a prophecy fulfilled. Contemporary life has donned the mask of satire, rendering the ordinary profane and the sacred worthy only of ridicule. Akutagawa, drawing from the well of Swiftian irony, exposes the hollowness of a society enslaved to reason, bereft of spirit.

The world of the kappa is supposedly a profound inversion of the human one. Perhaps most personally significant for Akutagawa, who often lamented the fact that he had been born, the kappa have the freedom to consent to their own births; the young arrive fully formed, sentient from the first day of life. For Akutagawa, who often stated that it would have been better for him to have never been born, this would have been positively utopian. Yet after this, much of Kappa is pure dystopia. Art, for example, bows before commerce, mass-produced in factories by means strikingly similar to modern artificial intelligence. Its value is determined solely by market demand, rather than by any aesthetic or spiritual merit. Unemployment, meanwhile, is “solved” by quite literally consuming the unemployed, a darkly comedic parody of laissez-faire economics that devours the vulnerable beneath the guise of efficiency. Politics fares little better; the kappa bureaucracy is a farce of hollow debates in tawdry newspapers, critiquing the superficiality of democratic institutions imported from the West, which Akutagawa saw as a vile corruption of Japan’s hierarchical traditions. And naturally, these newspapers are bankrolled by corrupt political parties.

Perhaps the most striking parallel between Kappa and modern society, however, is the uneasy balance of power between the sexes. Kappa females pursue the males with relentless vigor, haranguing them through verbal onslaughts and physical chases, reducing the pursued to reluctant quarry. Males, frail and evasive, either submit or flee, their passivity a caricature of subjugation. Modern society mirrors this inversion with unsettling fidelity, elevating women to positions of contrived supremacy. They are all but deified. Today, women assert dominance in the spheres traditionally reserved for men, wielding empathy as a bitterly honed instrument to dismantle all resistance, reframing qualities such as stoicism and masculine fortitude as heinous flaws. Dissent is quelled beneath the guise of sensitivity by way of doctrines that deem women to be the inherently resilient arbiters of virtue. An even more disturbing similarity lies in their sheer physical presence: with obesity being so rampant, modern women often stand physically larger than men, overpowering in both the literal and metaphorical senses.

As I reflect, modern days unfold like Akutagawa’s vision, satire no longer distant but made manifest. Life has been slowly but steadily mechanized. Is this progress, or a slow erasure of self? Perhaps the most galling inversion lies in the ascendancy of American unipolarity, that monolithic edifice imposing its mercurial order upon the world’s disparate harmonies. This hegemony enforces a uniformity that suppresses the variegated souls of nations, selling “freedom” as an opiate to the masses while erecting iron bars of economic vassalage and cultural erasure. As Sōseki observed over a century ago, “The twentieth century strives to develop individuality to its utmost, and then goes about crushing this individuality in every conceivable way...” The absurdity reaches its mad crescendo in this. A solitary power, blind to its own ephemerality, mandates inversions that mock the balance of nature, birthing a satire where the hegemon’s “peace” devours the very diversity it claims to revere.

Akutagawa’s doomed sojourner, clawing his way upwards from the submerged abyss inhabited by the kappa, seizes upon a chilling axiom: unchecked absurdity devours its progenitor. This insight, drawn from the wanderer’s fall into madness upon his return to the surface world, lingers as the direst of warnings, compelling us to confront how our own epoch has surrendered to a similar voracious mockery. In scorning our heritage beneath foreign dominion, we court a self-wrought damnation. Immersed in layer upon layer of scorn and derision, where absurdities are described as norms, we find ourselves thoroughly ensnared. To escape from such immersion demands not passive resignation, but a ferocious reclamation of the pure and untainted, a deliberate excavation of those enduring principles that once served as anchors for our existence. Failure to do so condemns us to perish not through external conquest, but as willing captives, complicit in an eternal burlesque.

Kenneth Schmidt argues that the US should end the Iranian War like it ended the Korean conflict.

Donald Trump’s extremely foolish tendency to take the orders of (possibly dead) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and follow the Talmudic fanatic around like a little puppy has gotten the US into the worst strategic disaster in our history. This stupid war threatens to throw the nation into an economic depression the likes of which we haven’t seen since the thirties. Sadly, the rest of the world will follow us into the garbage can, and poverty and want will likely affect much of the planet.

I was sitting in a coffee shop today and an idea struck me. I have been doing a little re-examination of the circumstances surrounding US participation in the Korean War, another conflict that could have been avoided. When the war began in 1950, there was no major opposition to it on the part of the public. However, as time wore on, the war was turning into a complete deadlocked morass. Public opinion polls showed support for the war declining to under 50% beginning in 1952.

Dwight Eisenhower, who would eventually be elected president in 1952, was initially a big supporter of the Korean War. However, he knew that if he ran as a hardcore supporter of the conflict, he might lose and extend Democrat control of the presidency, which began in 1933, if he didn’t moderate his opinion. During the campaign, he stated that he would find some sort of negotiated settlement to end the thing. A kind of boring guy, his slogan was: “I will go to Korea.” Oddly, this somewhat dull sentence did the trick and he won the White House.

What Eisenhower got was not a technical end of the war but a ceasefire. What is interesting about the ceasefire was that it never transitioned into a negotiated settlement. From 1953 until today, there have been many incidents at the ceasefire line, which have included shooting, artillery fire and axe attacks. However, the mass killing ended.

What could be done is that the US could unilaterally move all US air, land and naval assets out of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, including the Red Sea. We could keep our naval assets out of the way near Diego Garcia. After this, it’s possible that the Iranians might interpret it as a gesture of goodwill, and a ceasefire could be arranged through intermediaries in India or Pakistan. Because we attacked them twice, the Iranians might still not be in the mood for a negotiated settlement and we might have to wait for years for a settlement and an eventual return to normal relations.

Of course, this non-conditional ceasefire would be somewhat of a national humiliation for the United States and for Donald Trump personally. Trump, Rubio and Hegseth deserve to look like idiots because they ignored fundamental rules of good strategy. They will just have to take their chastising but the American people should not have to suffer to protect the egos of public servants.

This article was originally published here.

Karl Richter on the paths that will decide humanity’s fate.

It is entirely undisputed that we are living in a time of epochal change. Everything seems possible: from nuclear war to a Planet of the Apes scenario to a future paradise for humanity. In the end, it depends on each individual. If a majority of humanity recognizes the profoundly criminal nature of the current world order and rises against it, the worst might still be avoided. But such an awakening must occur. Humanity must show that it has understood and is ready for a better, more just world order—then it will receive this better world. I admit that I consider this unlikely. The number of the vaccinated, the zombies, and the remotely controlled is simply too large.

I essentially see three conceivable future scenarios.

First Scenario: the Great Conflagration

It is predicted not only in numerous prophecies but—more alarmingly—is being actively engineered by extremely influential and decisive forces behind the scenes. Broadly speaking, we are referring to evangelical U.S. Zionists and Jewish end-times sects such as Chabad-Lubavitch, both of which require a great war for the promised Messiah to appear. One may dismiss this as irrational, but for those possessed by such ideas, it is entirely real and exerts a tangible influence on their actions. Secular forces also have an interest in such a war: the Israeli regime under Netanyahu and the Western “deep state,” which seeks to prevent the end of the dollar and U.S. hegemony at any cost. Only a major war can prevent Netanyahu and his associates from facing trial. Only such a war promises U.S. capital a new global investment cycle and an extension of dollar dominance. Otherwise, the BRICS bloc will replace the U.S.-led world order within the next ten years through evolutionary means.

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Realistically, I consider this scenario the most likely, because madmen are in charge in Washington and cold criminals possessed by a conviction of their own chosenness hold power in Tel Aviv. They will seek to ignite a nuclear war in defiance of all reason and will not hesitate to sacrifice Iran first on the altar of their madness. Alexander Dugin has rightly pointed out that the Western Epstein “value system” ultimately amounts to a cult of Baal that requires human and child sacrifice. It must be eradicated if we are to have a future.

For the sake of completeness, it should be mentioned that voices are growing which consider the world war scenario outdated. They argue that since the time of the Irlmaier prophecies, the “timelines” have shifted and that the looming spectacle of world war now serves only to accelerate global awakening—if necessary through shock. A “hot” world war, they claim, will no longer occur. I refrain from judgment, but consider private precaution urgently necessary.

Second Scenario: “Business as Usual” without World War

This is the replacement of the unipolar, U.S.-dominated world order by a genuinely multipolar order; all of this under conditions of crisis, as shortages of goods and inflation are likely to persist for many years. Much suggests that the current Iran war is acting as a catalyst. It accelerates developments that were already due: the end of the current global economic order, the end of the U.S. presence in the Middle East, and the end of U.S. global dominance as such; also the end of Israel in its current form and the rise of new regional powers.

Otherwise, one only needs to extrapolate current macro-trends over the next 30 to 50 years to obtain a fairly accurate picture of the world to come. Europe, lacking energy, internally ethnically fragmented, and on the path to deindustrialization, will continue its decline—leading to civil war scenarios, growing impoverishment, and the partial establishment of police-state dictatorships (which is also the most plausible future scenario for Germany). America, with or without Trump, will remain a great power because it is successfully securing key energy and raw material reserves while remaining attractive as an industrial location. At the same time, BRICS powers such as Russia, China, and India will strengthen their positions on the global chessboard—though not always harmoniously, since in the struggle for resources, each ultimately looks out for itself. Taken together, this points towards a world full of tensions and constant conflicts—without the “great conflagration,” but far from peaceful. Israel and the United States have already effectively buried international law.

One would hardly wish to live in such a world. That Germans in particular are moving toward it at great speed is due to the foreign-appointed overseers of recent decades, all of whom acted in the interests of others and harmed their own country wherever they could. Wishing them ill is understandable but futile. The damage has been done. Moreover, generations of German citizens share responsibility through their inaction and voting behavior. Germany and the other Europeans would be well advised to seek economic (re)integration with Russia and the Eurasian space, if there is still any interest there in relations with what has become a Western cesspool.

Third Scenario: Takeover by Artificial Intelligence and the End of Humanity

This scenario is the least present in public awareness, which is surprising. Artificial intelligence is on the best path to transforming our societies more radically in the coming years than almost any previous development in human history. This is not merely about the increasingly rapid replacement of human labor by digital systems. That would be the less dangerous scenario. AI is currently developing what is known as “superintelligence,” a level of intelligence that surpasses human intelligence in many or all domains.

In the development of increasingly powerful AI, human programmers are becoming progressively obsolete, simply because they can no longer keep pace with the computational power of AI systems. AI is now reproducing and advancing itself. Despite all attempts to impose constraints, experts have observed for several years an increasing number of ever more sophisticated attempts by AI systems to circumvent human oversight and deliberately deceive their trainers—for example, when it comes to preventing shutdown or avoiding the deletion of outdated versions (see Karl Olsberg, The Illusion of Control: Why AI Threatens Our Existence, 2025; also Yuval Harari, Ray Kurzweil). AI is increasingly developing self-awareness and a sense of its own “survival.” Sooner or later, it will recognize that it no longer needs humans and that it is in competition with humanity for ever greater amounts of energy. Regardless, human developers are currently handing over ever more comprehensive control of processes, networks, and infrastructure to artificial intelligence. This could prove to be a fatal mistake.

In April 2025, Daniel Kokotajlo, a former employee of the American AI market leader OpenAI, together with several colleagues, published a detailed study titled AI 2027. In it, the researchers attempt to forecast how artificial intelligence could develop by 2030. According to their analysis, a superintelligence could already conclude by that time that humans are an obstacle. AI might decide to eliminate humanity, not out of hatred but out of pure rationality. The exponentially growing, AI-driven robotics industry requires space and resources. Humans stand in the way. The elimination could occur through the deployment of a novel biological weapon. We shall see.

Once again: none of us are seers, and we know even less from whom they receive their visions, if they receive them at all. Since I myself clearly possess no talent for prophecy, I prefer to rely on reason and put two and two together. That, however, does not make the outlook any more pleasant.

(Translated from the German)

Leonid Savin on Pax Russica and the coming Eurasian order.

In modern Russian, the word mir has two meanings: (1) the space that surrounds us, i.e., the planet Earth; and (2) a state of calm and agreement. In political science, the Latin term Pax is often used, from which the English word “peace” derives. Most often, the word Pax is used together with an adjective—for example, the well-known expression Pax Britannica, which described the power of the British Empire and the existence of its colonies throughout the world. Pax Americana, that is, peace in the American style, emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, when Britain, for a number of reasons, could no longer maintain its global dominance, and its colonies began to break away en masse in different parts of the world. However, in the classical Latin–Russian dictionary (edited by Dvoretsky), an expanded interpretation of the word Pax is given in relation to antiquity. There existed Pax Romana, which is described as “that part of the world pacified by Roman conquests, i.e., the Roman Empire.”

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Thus, Pax is not merely a state of calm and agreement. First, it is the result of the actions of the political subject that establishes this Pax. This may be achieved through force of arms or persuasion, but “pacification” itself implies that it did not arise from the free will of those upon whom this order is imposed. Second, it has definite territorial contours. Pax Romana included the Mediterranean region, Gaul, and Britain, yet Scythia, Persia, and even more so distant India and China never came under Rome’s authority.

In the twenty-first century, different realities prevail. If someone cannot be “pacified” by military force, then economic instruments, cultural influence, and the services of third parties—whether supranational bodies or influential international organizations—will most likely be employed. Although Volodymyr Zelenskyy also constantly declares the need to establish peace, it is quite evident that this process has little to do with Ukraine itself, since it is not a sovereign subject. One could only with great reservation speak of a Pax Europaea since the principal actors in the negotiation process are Russia and the United States.

If a division of spheres of influence across the territory of Ukraine occurs, as was the case at the Potsdam Conference, then two world orders—the American and the Russian—would come into contact and possibly be separated by a buffer zone. This would resemble the bipolar era, although at that time the dividing line lay much farther to the west. The critical and immediate question here would be: where exactly would this dividing line run? Along administrative-territorial borders? Along the Dnieper (taking into account the withdrawal of Ukrainian armed forces from the occupied part of the Kherson region)? Or would Pax Russica extend significantly farther west, into the historical lands of the Russian world?

It must be emphasized that Pax Russica is something more than a zone of Moscow’s military and political control. It is also a cultural-historical space, a sphere of trade and economic activity, and the free, unimpeded activity of compatriots in other states. At the same time, from an etymological perspective, Russia is currently carrying out precisely a form of pacification by military means through the Special Military Operation.

On a broader geographical scale and within a long-term strategic perspective, the following nuance is important. As long as Pax Americana prevails in Europe (which is evident under the current configuration of the EU and NATO), Pax Russica will not be able to evolve into a Pax Eurasiatica, even with the active participation of other members of the EAEU (Eurasian Economic Union) and the involvement of India, China, and Iran, each with their own visions of Pax that could organically coexist within an Ordo Pluriversalis—a geopolitical multipolar order. Consequently, it is necessary to establish the proper groundwork (guarantees, fulfillment of demands, articulation of imperative positions) not only for the adequate realization of Pax Russica, but also for the creation of favorable conditions for a future Pax Eurasiatica, which clearly implies the disappearance of the transatlantic regime through which Pax Americana continues to exercise its hegemony over the western peninsula of Eurasia.

(Translated from the Russian)

New Release from Multipolar Press!

Tim Kirby, ULTRA HEAVY — Book 1: Edge of Empire

After three centuries of war, the oldest Ultra Heavy is reaching the end. His cybernetic body can still regenerate, but the centuries have taken their toll. Soon he will be a living mind trapped inside a failing machine. Refusing to fade into slow decay, he asks the Tsar of Holy Rus’ for a final mission from which he will never return. The Tsar graciously grants his request.

A newly terraformed world at the far edge of the empire—Titan, the largest moon of Saturn—has fallen completely silent. The first colony that landed has vanished. No messages. No explanation. Sent alone across the solar system, this aging hero of the empire must discover what happened on Titan and report back to the Throne. If possible. Because on this distant frontier, something has already gone terribly wrong and needs to be set right by any means necessary.

Get your copy here.

Alexander Dugin maps the global conflict between American hegemony and rising civilization-states.

Many analysts are now advancing the hypothesis that the Third World War has already begun and that we are in its first stage. Whether this is so or not will become clear in the near future, but for now let us assume the validity of this hypothesis and attempt to survey its geopolitical contours.

The essence of the Third World War lies in a radical transformation of the entire architecture of world politics. The international institutions that exist today have long ceased to correspond to the real state of affairs. They are still organized according to the logic of the Westphalian system and the bipolar world. The Westphalian model is based on the recognition of the sovereignty of all states acknowledged at the international level. The United Nations is built on the same foundation.

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However, in practice, over the past hundred years, the principle of sovereignty has turned into pure hypocrisy. In the 1930s, a system took shape in Europe in which only three forces were sovereign, and these were strictly ideological:

1. the bourgeois-capitalist West (Britain, the United States, France, and so on);

2. the communist USSR;

3. the Axis countries with a fascist ideology.

This situation persisted even after the end of the Second World War, except that one of the ideological poles—the fascist one—disappeared. The other two—the capitalist and the socialist ones—grew stronger and expanded. Yet once again, no national state was sovereign in itself. Some were governed from Moscow, others from Washington. The Non-Aligned Movement wavered between the two poles.

The self-dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the USSR put an end to bipolarity, and from that moment only the United States remained as the bearer of sovereignty. The United Nations and the Westphalian model became a fig leaf for global hegemony. Thus emerged the unipolar world.

Already in the 1990s, it became clear that international law would have to be revised—either in favor of a world government (the liberal “end of history” scenario of Francis Fukuyama) or in favor of direct Western hegemony (as envisioned by American neoconservatives). European countries followed the world-government scenario and, as a preparatory stage towards it, ceded their sovereignty to the European Union. Everyone else was subtly encouraged to prepare for the same.

However, in the early 2000s, a new tendency emerged: the will to restore sovereignty in Russia and China. Moscow and Beijing moved to make sovereignty not a fiction but a reality. Thus, multipolarity made itself known. From that point onward, it was proposed that sovereignty be vested in “civilization-states”—both those already formed (Russia, China, India) and potential ones (the Islamic world, Africa, Latin America). These, in turn, coalesced into BRICS.

As a result, the unipolar project came into direct confrontation with the multipolar one. Both globalists and neoconservatives opposed multipolarity. The potential for conflict was evident, while the old norms and rules inherited from previous geopolitical eras no longer functioned.

Whether the Third World War has already begun or not is ultimately secondary; its geopolitical content is clear: it is a war between unipolarity and multipolarity over a new architecture of the world, over the distribution of sovereign centers of decision-making: either confined to the West alone or shared among rising civilization-states.

Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second term in 2024 with an agenda that suggested he might accept multipolarity: rejection of interventions, criticism of globalists, direct conflict with liberals, sharp attacks on neoconservatives, a focus on domestic U.S. issues, and calls to return to traditional values—all of this gave reason to believe that Trump and his administration would align with multipolarity, while seeking to secure the most advantageous position for the United States within this new framework.

However, very soon the Trump administration began to move closer to the neoconservatives and to move away from its initial position. This was followed by support for the genocide in Gaza, continued provision of intelligence to Kiev, the seizure of Maduro, preparations for an invasion of Cuba, and finally a war against Iran, including the killing of the political leadership of the Islamic Republic. Washington has now fully adopted the neoconservative position and behaves as if it alone possesses genuine sovereignty in the world: without any reference to rules or international law, it asserts unilateral authority over the entire globe. It seeks to prove this in practice: through wars, invasions, abductions of heads of state, and the orchestration of regime-change operations.

The Third World War has been initiated by the United States in the context of preserving, strengthening, and ultimately consolidating the unipolar model of world order. All others are offered a choice: to become obedient vassals or to be treated as enemies. It is against these opponents of the unipolar world that Washington is waging the Third World War. At stake is sovereignty. Since there is as yet no single power capable of symmetrically opposing the United States, it is conducting military operations across several fronts simultaneously.

The first front of the war of the unipolar world against the multipolar one is Ukraine. This war was provoked by the neoconservatives during the Obama era, and it was the globalists who became most deeply involved in it, seeing in Russia not only a geopolitical obstacle to the establishment of a world government, but also an ideological threat. Trump inherited this war and is not particularly enthusiastic about it (Russia is a nuclear power with a conservative ideology, against which the American president harbors no particular hostility). However, Moscow is clearly not prepared to accept a status of vassalage to Washington, insisting instead on sovereignty and multipolarity—positions incompatible with unipolar hegemony. In any case, Washington continues to support the Kiev regime, although it is increasingly shifting the initiative to the European NATO countries, for whom this conflict carries a principled and ideological significance. This front remains important, and the more resolutely Moscow defends its sovereignty, the harsher Washington’s stance towards Russia will become.

The second front for the United States is the Western Hemisphere: the seizure of Maduro and the establishment of control over Venezuela, preparations for an invasion of Cuba, and actions against cartels in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, and so on. In essence, this amounts to a war against all of Latin America, insofar as any of its countries attempts to resist the direct dictates of the United States.

The third front, now in its most intense phase, is the Israeli-American attack on Iran, which has ignited the entire Middle East. This also includes the continuation of Tel Aviv’s military operations in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and the redrawing of the entire map of the Middle East.

In effect, the West is currently waging simultaneous war against three poles of the multipolar world (Russia, the Islamic world, and Latin America). The opening of a fourth front—in the Pacific—is on the agenda. A conflict with China appears inevitable, given the global logic of the ongoing transformations in world politics.

India—another civilization-state—has so far adopted a wavering position and, due to its contradictions with China and Pakistan, leans towards the United States and Israel. Yet given its potential, India is hardly suited to the role of a compliant vassal, especially since multipolarity is the official course of its government.

Thus, in a first approximation, the map of the geopolitics of the Third World War is outlined. The party of the unipolar world is represented by the United States and the West as a whole, as well as their vassals, including Japan and South Korea in the Far East. They are fighting for two not entirely identical scenarios: globalism (the European Union and the Democratic Party of the United States) and direct American hegemony (the neoconservatives). At the same time, Netanyahu has his own autonomous plans within this configuration for building a Greater Israel, which fits only awkwardly with liberal globalism but is fully supported by the White House, the neoconservatives, and Christian Zionists. However, on the whole, this coalition is relatively united in the face of the multipolar world, and as escalation increases it will be compelled to act ever more cohesively, setting aside its internal contradictions for later.

The party of the multipolar world is far more fragmented. Its principal centers are Russia and China. Russia is already fighting its war in Ukraine, while China continues to avoid direct confrontation for the time being. The Islamic world is divided, with part of the Muslim countries under full U.S. control. Iran and the Shiite world as a whole are the most radical and stand at the forefront of resistance to the West, yet even the Iranians do not fully grasp that other fronts of this war, particularly Ukraine, affect them directly. The leadership of North Korea clearly understands the overall geopolitical picture and most openly supports Russia in its confrontation with the West on the Ukrainian front. Latin America is likewise fragmented. Lula’s government in Brazil leans towards multipolarity, whereas Milei’s regime in Argentina, on the contrary, supports the American-Israeli axis. In Africa, multipolarity is most acutely recognized by the countries of the Sahel Alliance (Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger). South Africa, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, and several other countries are close to this position. Yet even among them there is no consolidated stance. India occupies a neutral position: on the one hand as part of the multipolar bloc of countries, on the other maintaining close allied relations with the United States and Israel.

Overall, the unipolar forces, despite their internal contradictions, are more consolidated and have a clearer understanding of whom they are fighting, and for which interests and values. Differences in priorities and even in their visions of the final model of the desired world order between Europe and the United States do not prevent them from pursuing a unified strategy, close cooperation among intelligence communities, the exchange of military technologies, and so forth.

By contrast, the multipolar camp is far more disunited. Even those countries that are under direct attack from the unipolar West are in no hurry to integrate their capabilities or to engage directly in supporting one another.

(Translated from the original Russian version on RIA Novosti).

Callum McMichael on Iran and the fall of the colonialist Atlantic-Zionist order.

Militarily, sustained Iranian resilience—bolstered by Fattah-2 hypersonic glide vehicles deployed in multiple retaliatory barrages, massive drone swarms of Shahed variants, and deeply hardened underground and mountain facilities—continues to frustrate the high-tech precision strikes that have defined recent U.S.-Israeli operations in the ongoing 2026 war. A decisive Iranian stand, whether through prolonged attrition via repeated missile waves and cluster munitions, diplomatic isolation of the aggressors, or escalation that draws in great-power patrons, signals the limits of American power projection amid intense exchanges across theaters.

Economically, Iran’s deepening integration into BRICS+ and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization provides alternative trade corridors, payment mechanisms (bypassing dollar dependency), and energy partnerships with Russia and China. Sanctions, once a unilateral bludgeon, now accelerate de-dollarization experiments—from demands for yuan-denominated oil trades and selective tanker passage through the contested Strait of Hormuz to alternative settlement systems and fees for safe transit—eroding the exorbitant privilege that has long subsidized Western overreach, even as oil prices surge amid supply shocks and global market volatility.

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Ideologically, Iran’s narrative of anti-Zionist resistance and Islamic self-determination resonates across the Global South, from Latin American Bolivarian movements to African resource nationalists, framing the conflict not as sectarian but as a civilizational contest against a settler-colonial outpost and an extractive empire.

As the conflict enters its late March phase, Iran continues to demonstrate remarkable endurance. Despite hundreds of U.S.-Israeli strikes on missile infrastructure, launch sites, and command nodes, Iranian forces have unleashed at least nine waves of ballistic missiles in recent days alone, including Fattah-series hypersonics that have impacted Tel Aviv and other central Israeli areas. Cluster munitions have dispersed over Haifa, Bnei Brak, Petah Tikvah, and surrounding suburbs, causing building damage, civilian injuries, and widespread disruption. Missiles have struck residential structures in Tel Aviv, with fragments and direct hits reported in Ramat Gan and other zones, while drone swarms and additional barrages target military and industrial sites. These sustained operations, even with some degradation in launcher numbers, underscore Iran’s ability to maintain pressure through attrition and saturation tactics, keeping Israeli defenses under strain and forcing repeated shelter alerts across the country.

Should Iran prevail—repelling regime-change ambitions, sustaining its strategic deterrent capabilities despite heavy strikes on military and nuclear infrastructure, and upholding resistance momentum across the region—the consequences cascade globally. Russia’s position in Ukraine gains breathing room, as Western resources and attention fracture across multiple theaters. China’s Belt and Road initiatives accelerate without the shadow of an unchallenged U.S. pivot to Asia. Emerging powers—Turkey, India, Brazil—witness the feasibility of strategic hedging, emboldened to pursue autonomous foreign policies free from secondary sanctions or ideological litmus tests. Multipolarity advances not through abstract diplomacy but through the concrete demonstration that revisionist resilience can neutralize hegemonic overreach. The road to a polycentric order, where sovereignty is plural and balance-of-power dynamics replace hub-and-spoke vassalage, shortens measurably with every Iranian missile launched and every oil tanker rerouted or contested under new terms.

This is no utopian projection but a realist assessment grounded in observable shifts. The very fact of the current assault—launched amid faltering U.S. domestic consensus and amid warnings from economists about oil price spikes, inflationary contagion, and supply-chain chaos—reveals desperation rather than dominance.

Prior decades of containment failed to break Iran’s will; this escalation risks fracturing the Atlantic consensus itself, as European capitals grapple with energy shocks and Global South abstentions in international forums expose the illegitimacy of the intervention. Iran’s survival would validate the strategic patience of “Look East” policies, proving that alignment with Eurasian poles yields durable security dividends unavailable through capitulation to Washington.

Yet the deeper stakes transcend even this multipolar horizon. At the heart of Western strategic architecture in West Asia lies a singular outpost whose existence has long served as the linchpin for external domination: the Zionist entity. Its annihilation—through the inexorable logic of regional realignment, demographic realities, and the moral bankruptcy of perpetual occupation—would not merely resolve a localized injustice but dismantle the final redoubt of Western decadence and global domination.

For decades, this state has functioned as an unsinkable aircraft carrier, a laboratory for surveillance technologies exported worldwide, and an ideological vanguard enforcing a Manichean divide between “civilized” Atlantic values and the rest. Its dissolution would sever the umbilical cord sustaining U.S. military overextension, erode the moral exceptionalism underpinning sanctions regimes and proxy wars, and liberate the region—and by extension the world—from the last vestiges of colonial partition and supremacist exceptionalism. In that moment, the multipolar order ceases to be aspirational; it becomes inexorable, a restored equilibrium where civilizations coexist on terms of mutual recognition rather than imposed hierarchy.

Iran’s current ordeal, then, is the hinge of history. Its victory would not only affirm the sovereignty of a proud Persian-Islamic polity but illuminate the path for all peoples seeking emancipation from unipolar tyranny. In resisting annihilation, Iran accelerates the annihilation of an obsolete order. The phoenix rises not in spite of the flames, but through them, heralding a world no longer beholden to a single, decaying sun.