Stephen Sefton, May 25th 2025
Conventional appraisals of the development of international relations generally assume that the ruling classes of a nation act almost exclusively to promote or defend their economic interests and their power and influence in the world. Currently, the North American and European elites have little idea of how to assimilate the collapse of their power and influence relative to the productive economic capacity and the political-military power of the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China. The collective West’s lack of consistency in the face of this challenge is due to fundamental false beliefs that prevent them from adapting to the new reality now being imposed in international relations.
The Western elites still believe
* that the West is technically, morally and culturally superior
* that the collective West should tutor the majority world
* that the West is militarily superior to any potential adversaries
* that the West will continue to dominate the international economic system
In the current global reality, the categorical insanity of these ideas has been made very clear by the pre-eminence of China in the world economy, the strategic military defeat of NATO in its war against Russia in Ukraine, the criminal support of the collective West for the Zionist genocide in Palestine and the failure of the tariff war instigated by President Donald Trump.
The false beliefs of the collective West have accentuated the culture of bad faith and intimidation in their conduct of international relations, as demonstrated by the confessions of Angela Merkel and François Hollande of having deceived Vladimir Putin over the Minsk Agreements. This false misbehavior of Western leaders contrasts sharply with the good faith and sincere respect practiced by the leaders of China and Russia. As part of its constant psychological war against the majority world, the communication machinery of the collective West now perverts and alters history. They construct false memories which deepen the emotional deception against their own populations and sustain Western false beliefs as if they were valid presuppositions forforeign policy.
Two recent examples have been, first, the insistent lie that Iran's nuclear energy program threatens Israel and, second, that the United States can act as a neutral arbiter to mediate the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. In fact, the Iranian nuclear program has always been categorically exclusively for civilian use and, on Ukraine, it was the US ruling class that provoked the coup d'état in 2014, the ensuing civil war and the subsequent existential threat to the security of the Russian Federation. In the same way that they distort such current issues, Western communication and information sources also try to erase from history the sacrifices of the peoples of the Soviet Union and the people of China to achieve the defeat of Nazi Germany and the criminal Japanese empire.
To achieve these victories, China and the Soviet Union lost more than 46 million people, the great majority of them civilians. The historical Western bad faith has been decisive in forming the political-affective aspect of contemporary international relations because it has provoked its rejection by the nations of the majority world. For Russia and China, the memory of the suffering inflicted on their peoples by Germany, Japan and their allies in the Second World War is something sacred that will never be forgotten. For other countries of the majority world such as Democratic Korea, Vietnam and Algeria, their liberation struggles occupy a very similar moral and cultural space, just as the revolutionary struggles do for the peoples of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the sell-out national elites encourage the forgetting and belittling of the sacrifices of their countries’ popular struggles against dictatorships and foreign intervention. Globally, Western countries encourage the forgetting and belittling of the sacrifices of the majority world in the formation of the modern world. The most odious expression of their sadistic cynicism towards the liberation struggles of the majority world has been their support for the zionist Israeli regime in its genocide of the Palestinian people. The emotions of revulsion, condemnation and anguish that the annihilation of tens of thousands of infants, children, women and the elderly, humanitarian personnel and journalists, will endure for a long time in the feelings of the vast majority of humanity.
And this reality explains the sinister importance of the dishonest mass manipulation of the emotions of the populations of Western countries to distort the majority feeling of what is true and what is acceptable in international relations. Every Western aggression has depended on a big lie to justify campaigns of hatred and fear directed towards the domestic population and international opinion so as to demonize the object of the lie. In the past, the targets were Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Muammar al Gaddafi and Bashar al Assad. In Latin America, they have been Comandante Fidel, Comandante Chávez and our Co-President Comandante Daniel Ortega and now too Nicolas Maduro, now in relation to Ukraine it is President Putin and in relation to Palestine the leadership of Yemen, Hamas and Hezbollah.
The collective West promoted its aggression against Russia with the lie that Russia was the aggressor country, now, faced with their defeat, Western leaders pretend they are peace loving and act only in self-defense. Against China, these same Western leaders lie that China imposes unfair trade practices when in fact it is the West that can no longer compete economically, commercially or technologically with China. They lie that Iran threatens to build a nuclear bomb because Iran is the only independent power in the West Asian region resisting Western intervention. They lie that Venezuela destabilizes Latin America and the Caribbean because Venezuela is an independent revolutionary power that facilitates regional emancipation from Yankee dominance.
They lie that Cuba and Nicaragua are dictatorships when their revolutionary democracies, the same as Venezuela, demonstrate the hypocritical falsity of the pseudo-democracies of other countries in the region. All these deliberate lies foster spurious emotions and an atmosphere of negative affect in their countries that allows Western governments to implement their demented foreign policy towards China and Russia, towards Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, towards Yemen, Democratic Korea and the Islamic Republic of Iran, among many other countries. As Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov commented on May 22nd upon receiving the highest decoration of the Russian Federation, in international relations “without exaggeration, a real struggle is waged between good and evil.”
In contrast to the bad faith and sadistic cynicism of the collective West, the culture of international relations promoted by China and Russia and their BRICS+ partners emphasizes mutual benefit and respect among equals in order to achieve a shared future of well-being and prosperity for all humanity. In line with this cooperative impulse, but independently, our revolutionary countries in Latin America have always promoted a culture of sincerity, solidarity and cooperation. Since its inception, the Cuban revolution has shared the incomparable human and scientific quality of its medical culture and its generous educational capacity with the whole world. It was the solidarity inspired love embodied by the Cuban revolution that gave decisive impetus to the defeat of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa and Namibia.
It has been the generous solidarity of the Bolivarian Revolution of Eternal Comandante Hugo Chávez Frías, maintained now by President Nicolás Maduro, that has made it possible to share the wealth generated by Venezuela’s hydrocarbon resources with the peoples of the region through Petrocaribe and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, ALBA. It was the openness and sincerity of the regional leaders of the time that made it possible fifteen years ago to form powerful regional integration initiatives such as CELAC and UNASUR.
And it is still the generous openness, genuine moral commitment to peace and the sincere good faith of the leaders of our revolutionary countries, of Bolivia, Mexico, Colombia, of the Caribbean nations that allow us to maintain a regional balance towards the integration of our peoples. This is so despite the continuous commercial and financial harassment, the constant political interventions and the deliberate economic sabotage of the North American and European elites supported by their regional quisling allies. The recent China-CELAC Forum showed how even the reactionary elites of the region recognize that China offers a respectful, mutually beneficial economic relationship with many more advantages and greater potential than the volatile trade and investment policies of the greedy, snatch-and-grab Yankee culture of the North American élites.
Now the US authorities want to steal even the family remittances of Latin American and Caribbean families so as to finance even greater reductions in the taxes paid by the ruling elite classes. While the regional right wing in Latin America and the Caribbean is debating how to reconcile the need to have good relations with China in the face of the threat of US reprisals, our revolutionary countries are moving forward hand in hand with China and Russia. In international relations, together with China and Russia, our countries have demonstrated that the affective-political aspect, based on sincerity, mutual respect, human solidarity and honesty, is fundamental to building a new world order of peace and prosperity. As our Co-President Compañera Rosario has explained to us:
"From all these alliances that we are forging and above all with the brilliant, continuous cooperation of the People's Republic of China, our People's encounter with a power that prioritizes Solidarity and respectful, unconditional Cooperation, with that extraordinary motto China’s President, ‘A Future, and what that Future should be, one of Shared Community’. A Community building our Shared Future.
“The World must build Community, the World must build Dialogue and Peace, the World needs Security, our Peoples need to feel productive, because we are productive, capable, because we are capable, responsible for our Present and our Future, but, building them via Governments and the Union and Alliance, of Peoples and Governments, along those Routes of Rights, Routes of Prosperity.”