Although the entire article has full of bangers, the quote below is my favourite.
The program of the “rules based order” is more maximalist than the Cold War. Anglosphere policy elites occupy a narrative-based reality. Their narrative of the necessity of liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism for all places and all times must be maintained whatever the facts. They are the heroes of an eschatological conflict between light and darkness, good and evil, democracy and totalitarianism. Compromise with their satanized adversary is appeasement and coexistence is a dirty word. The West is the last bastion of ideology, the crusader of a deformed, late liberalism with the right to fashion every society on earth in its own image. The rest of us must either be re-made according to the latest iteration of “values,” however inimical or repulsive to tradition, culture and faith, or be marked for expulsion. There is nothing in between.
Good luck forcing this infantile logic on the foreign policies of the most culturally and politically diverse region in the world, with a shared identity constituted by two thousand years of cultural cross-pollination across the trade routes of the Old World. Southeast Asia is constituted by its very in-betweenness with respect to the civilizational poles of Islamic, Indic and Sinic worlds. Today it is what makes ASEAN central to the multilateral architecture of East Asia, the crossroads of an “Asian Century” made possible by the rise of China.
- ☭ 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗘𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿 ☭@lemmygrad.mlM15·2 years ago