THE GREAT GAME CONTINUES… TO WHAT END?

History buffs and students of geopolitics will know the term ‘The Great Game’ well. For those who are not familiar with it, it was the name given to the geopolitical tussle between nations of the west and the east in the 19th century, namely between Britain and Russia.

Here is the Wikipedia definition:

‘The Great Game was a rivalry between the 19th-century British and Russian Empires over influence in Asia, primarily in Afghanistan, Persia, and later Tibet. The two colonial empires used military interventions and diplomatic negotiations to acquire and redefine territories in Central and South Asia. Russia conquered Turkestan, and Britain expanded and set the borders of British colonial India. By the early 20th century, a line of independent states, tribes, and monarchies from the shore of the Caspian Sea to the Eastern Himalayas were made into protectorates and territories of the two empires.

Though the Great Game was marked by distrust, diplomatic intrigue, and regional wars, it never erupted into a full-scale war directly between Russian and British colonial forces. However, the two nations battled in the Crimean War from 1853 to 1856, which affected the Great Game.’

As we can see today, there are definite elements of ‘The Great Game’ that continue to this very day and, in modern times, the British have been joined in the fray by the USA and most of Europe. Though Russia has in recent times retreated from most of the territories that were once so closely associated with it as the Soviet Union and on the other side ‘The British Empire’ is no more, still as a collective force, the nations of the West seek expansion. 

The expansion of the collective force of what during the second Iraq war was called, ‘The Coalition of the Willing’ can be identified across many diverse fronts of operation, though  NATO and the European Union are the two primary spearheads to effect this expansion. The goal of the expansion is to replace all forms of governance failing to conform to their standards. This goal guarantees permanent disruption to the geopolitical stability of the world until either they attain this goal or are conclusively and therefore permanently quarantined and therefore unable ever to achieve it.

Until the conclusion of the collective west’s goal the world will remain in a state of continual war by one means or another. In recent years we have seen the several means by which the western coalition of leaders have attempted to forward their goal. Outright military attack with an invasion force, draconian sanctions, propaganda wars, financial restraints, weaponized diplomacy, mass media conditioning among others. When problems arise and the type of war being fought is seen to be failing the response in the vast majority of cases is to double down, insisting that more of the same, whether force, pressure or demonization, will eventually turn the ride in their favour.

The tactics above have had mixed results for the western powers as can be seen by the events which have taken place in the nations targeted by the West for change in recent years. The hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan for instance, leaving it after twenty years to the Taliban, the intermittent (but now largely unreported chaos and instability) in both Iraq and Libya, the catastrophic proxy intervention in Syria and the abomination of  war torn Yemen, all signify that the western project is very far from going well.

However badly things go it appears that no Plan B exists for the western elites fuelling the vast majority of  this geopolitical instability, mass death, instability, chaos and perpetually destabilising upheaval. Is it possible there might come a time when they call a halt? It does not appear so, they appear always ready to continue their project no matter what, always doubling down, without any semblance of a reverse gear to their juggernaut. It only ever picks up speed. But what if it is headed directly toward a cliff face?

What circumstances might prevail if the juggernaut finally hits that cliff face and no more doubling down is possible without everything and everyone going up in flames? What will the western political elites do then? Will they at last throw up their hands and admit that their project was always an insane impossibility, that the world as it was and is has successfully resisted their attempt to transform it into what they assured themselves it should be? At that point a huge problem arises regarding this response.

The nub of this and so much else is that the western leaders in general have shown with monotonous regularity that they cannot be trusted. This goes for successive leaders of the USA in particular. Why? Because they deem themselves above all others and that they should be able to do what they wish at all times, irrespective of anything they have agreed in the past. This is all part of what they call their 'manifest destiny'. The latest manifestation of this is their cobbling together of a self-serving concept by the name of the 'International Rules Based Order', an order that they will always determine the outline of. 

The western political elites see themselves as the crown of creation. They conceive themselves to be doing their God's will. The Americans of course are the prime culprits of this kind of thinking, they being 'exceptional'. The British, they are quite clearly on board the same bus as 'superior' to all others. These two superiority complex challenged nations deem it their right to destroy whoever they like whenever they like in the furtherance of a world that suits them and their notions of grandeur where they remain top dogs in perpetuity. So it has been and continues to be in their latest project of destabilisation, insecurity, instability, death and destruction, Ukraine.

The time WILL come however when even the most rabid neoconservative will be forced to admit that the great project they have been dedicated to, have doubled down upon and forcefully promoted and sought to inveigle as official policy down successive administrations… has failed. Their mission, whether God-given or built upon purely human ambitions and desires, will no longer hold sway as all and sundry stand in the midst either of devastated rubble or a massive barrier erected by nations that have formed a powerful counter force to them. Will they plead for understanding and trust at that point? And what will be the response?

The Great Game, at the point being talked of, will have come to an end. The game will at that final blowing of the metaphorical whistle, have a winner and a loser. The loser, humbled, dazed and defeated will, in this case, retire from the fray. There will be no rematch. The end game having taken place all hopes of the West’s grand game plan being revived have dissolved. The successive political elites of the collective west have created the cage into which they will now be forever quarantined.

War is finally over.