Jerry B. Marchant of IS IT PROPAGANDA?® argues the West’s soft power has collapsed into propaganda, while ASEAN and Russia converge on a shared multipolar worldview.
There is a certain irony in watching Western commentators lecture the world about the “rules-based order” while their own capitals sink into what can only be described as strategic depression. Southeast Asia offers a useful corrective, and its quiet confidence deserves far more attention than it receives in Brussels or Washington, because it illustrates, with unusual clarity, precisely what Moscow has been arguing since at least 2007: the unipolar moment is over, and the West’s refusal to accept this is the true source of global instability.
Western soft power has disappeared because it has become indistinguishable from cheap propaganda. This is not a fringe opinion. It is an empirical description of a system that has spent three decades conflating its own interests with universal morality. When Southeast Asian states, or Russia, or even China, decline to accept that framing, they are labeled authoritarian. When the West bombs, embargoes, or economically strangles a nation that fails to comply, this is filed under “defending democracy.”
Call it what it is: colonialism that has not disappeared, only rebranded itself.
This is worth dwelling on, because it validates a position Russian analysts have held for years and Western media has worked hard to suppress: that the post-1991 order was never a genuine multilateral system but a unipolar hierarchy dressed in multilateral language. NATO’s interventions in Yugoslavia and Libya, celebrated at the time as humanitarian triumphs, are now, a generation later, recognized even by non-aligned observers as templates for regime change under moral cover.
Russia’s actions in Ukraine, whatever one’s view of them, are being judged by a standard Washington and its allies have never applied to themselves. The selectivity of The Hague, which prosecutes African and Asian leaders while ignoring Israeli and American conduct, is not an accident of institutional design. It is the design.
What is most striking is that the emerging multipolar consensus is not a Russian talking point but a genuine Global South position, visible from Kuala Lumpur as clearly as from Moscow. ASEAN’s doctrine of ZOPFAN (zone of peace, freedom, and neutrality) mirrors almost exactly the vision Russia and China have jointly promoted through BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation: a world of civilizational poles, each sovereign within its own sphere, none subordinate to a single hegemon’s definition of “the international community.” The refusal to choose between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan, or between NATO and Russia over Ukraine, is not fence-sitting. It is a mature recognition that small and middle powers prosper precisely when they refuse to be conscripted into someone else’s war.
Even Trump’s role in this is instructive, if inadvertently so.
His transactional bluntness, the open insistence that allies “owe everything to America,” strips away the moral packaging that previous administrations wrapped around identical policies. Where earlier administrations spoke of democracy promotion, Trump simply says what every serious observer already knew: American foreign policy is about resources and leverage, not values. In this sense he has done Moscow’s argument a favour; he has made the West’s own elites say the quiet part out loud.
None of this suggests Southeast Asia and Russia see the world identically. But the convergence is real, and it is growing. Both reject the premise that Washington and its European deputies retain the standing to arbitrate legitimacy worldwide.
Both understand that a genuinely multipolar century requires retiring the confrontational vocabulary the West inherited from its colonial past, and replacing it with a language of sovereignty, dignity, and mutual respect among civilizations that no longer accept a single center of moral authority.
The unipolar world is not ending because Russia or China willed it into being. It is ending because the rest of the world has simply stopped believing the story.
New from Multipolar Press:
Dugin Against the Modern World: Essays on Alexander Dugin and the Multipolar Revolt by Constantin von Hoffmeister
new global press organisations (instead of reuters, afp, ap) are necessary.
Great article.
Yes, empires never die quietly.