Essay by Keith Rankin.
The failing nation-states of Western Europe are not peacemakers. They are warmongers, the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ – the Coalition of Sanctimony and Hypocrisy. They are trying to frame the current geopolitical struggle between a unipolar versus a multipolar world order as a struggle of the ‘Democratic’ Axis of Good against a strengthening ‘Autocratic’ Coalition of Evil located through most of Eurasia.
Germany’s new Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, says “whatever it takes“. Twice this year the coalition of sanctimony has derailed opportunities to end the Russia-Ukraine War through the re-creation of a neutral Ukraine. (The present war is already nearly as long-lasting as World War One.) The re-creation of a neutral Ukraine is the only available off-ramp to end this war.
The anti-peace phalanx that pretends to be pro-peace – headed by Merz, Keir Starmer, Ursula von de Leyen, and Mark Rutter (and formerly including Joe Biden and Boris Johnson) – represents the expression of a clear and open geopolitical strategy of eastwards expansion, both further into the Slavic Heartland (refer to Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality, free on Google Books, published early in 1919 though mostly written late in 1918) and in Southwest Asia (aka the ‘Middle East’). (France’s Emmanuel Macron is more ambivalent than these others, and is expected to fade from the presentCoalition as his political career comes to an end, and as France becomes consumed by domestic problems.)
Considered to be the academic founder of the discipline of geopolitics, Mackinder – born in Lincolnshire, England – was then the Conservative MP for a Scottish constituency. In late 1918 – a critical pivot moment in world history – he held his seat in the House of Commons, with a comfortable majority in Britain’s immediate-post-war election. Mackinder saw the necessity of establishing a group of smallish neutral nation-states between the two potentially resurgent “Going Concerns” of defeated Germany and defeated Russia (Russia, then in a post-war civil war, and in the process of becoming the ‘Bolshevik’ Soviet Union). In line with Mackinder’s analysis, the World War reignited in the late-1930s partly as a result of those smaller states eschewing neutrality in favour of various mostly-failed attempts to form security alliances with former antagonists, and/or with Britain and France.
On the matter of Mackinder’s relevance to the 2020s’ world, note this quote re Heartland: Three Essays on Geopolitics, by Halford John Mackinder: “Heartland is a fascinating introduction to a pioneer of geopolitics. Halford Mackinder’s trailblazing ideas have influenced international politics to this day. His concept that world domination depends on the control of the global ‘pivot area’ or ‘heartland’ – the centre of the large land mass of Europe and Asia – has informed the political tactics and wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe through the decades. His theories have influenced politicians and political scientists for generations, most notably Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to a long line of U.S. presidents. In our times, the importance of Mackinder’s heartland theory for the United States’ fight to enforce global hegemony, Russia’s struggle to stay independent and relevant on a world stage, and China’s plans to establish a trade route between East and West, make Heartland essential reading for understanding our world.”
Ukraine and Israel as Western bridgeheads into the Eastern heartlands
In geopolitical context, both Ukraine and Israel can be seen as Western bridgeheads into the ‘Near East’ and ‘Middle East’ heartlands; bridgeheads against the west-resistant poles of Russia and Iran. Ultimately these geopolitical gambits seek as an end-goal the ‘containment’ of China; China being understood as the single biggest threat to the unipolar Western – essentially Christian, labelled ‘Democratic’ – world-order fantasy which prevailed especially in Washington in the 1990s. (In the Cold War, this geopolitical contest was presented as the battle of the Free against Communism.)
Since the demise of Joe Biden (dubbed ‘Genocide Joe’ by some, and not without reason), there has been a bifurcation of the western project.
The United States is most focussed on its Middle Eastern agenda (which, as in Obama times, very much includes geopolitical designs on Syria), so has doubled-down as Israel’s main sponsor of regional terror. Nevertheless, the self-appointed European coalition of sanctimony has been fully and consistently behind “Daddy’s” geopolitical interest in promoting Israel’s asymmetric war of aggression; and still is, despite some attempts to appear to be distancing itself from the Palestinian theatre of conflict. (On ‘Daddy’, see “Daddy” diplomacy: The politics of obsequiousness, Hugh Piper, Lowy Institute, 24 July 2025.)
Israel’s barbarism could only be tolerated by any group of countries if those countries had a ‘higher’ political purpose; namely opposition to a geopolitical adversary shared with Israel – an adversary which dares to resist western power. Any coalition facilitating Israel’s anti-human agenda (of erasing “human animals”, aka Amalek) has fully given up any claim to be considered The Good. In line with geopolitical realism, there are no Good Guys.
The European Coalition of Sanctimony quickly formed when peace threatened to break-out in Ukraine following the 28 February 2025 meeting in the White House. Their aim is to locate German soldiers in Ukraine; an insensitive act which to Russians would be as provocative as 1914 and 1941. If a post-war Ukraine is to have genuine peacekeepers, they cannot be belligerents; such peacekeepers would have to be there under the auspices of the United Nations, and only from countries which are verifiably neutral with respect to Eurasian geopolitics (India would probably qualify; so would South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Ethiopia, Egypt, Nigeria – and of course Fiji with its tradition of peacekeeping.)
The Coalition is, it claims, fighting for the ‘rules-based-order’ in one conflict while pushing-back against international law in the other (genocidal) conflict. A coalition of hypocrisy, indeed.
In the end, international rules are meaningless in a battle framed as Good versus Evil. Evil, by definition, does not follow the rules. So, if Good is to wage an unyielding war against Evil, why would Good handicap itself by following rules that Evil cannot be expected to follow? Laws can be applied to a real war – of A versus B – but not to a war when one or both sides claim to be Good combating Evil? For the sanctimonious, defeating the posited Evil is more important than following the rules.
These West European interests are pulling back from their unconditional support for Israel so that they can focus on their belligerence towards Russia. While they don’t admit the contradiction in their embarrassing support for one aggressor (Israel) and their adamant opposition to another (Russia), Israel’s war in Palestine has removed any possibility that the coalition can seriously claim the moral high ground.
In Aotearoa New Zealand – the little-West located in the far southeast – we need to show more empathy towards Asia, which has been invaded and abused many times by The West, and less towards West Europe which was last invaded by Asia in the fifth century (by Atilla the Hun). New Zealand (eg under Jim Bolger) once considered itself to be an Asian country. Now, New Zealand’s political class is at risk of reinterpreting the continent Asia – sixty percent of the world’s humanity – as a monolithic antagonist. Can the lands to the south of Asia – literally, Australasia – be trusted by Asia?
In geopolitical terms, the West are the aggressors – and the peace blockers – in both of the present faultlines.
The Central Issue: Unipolar versus Multipolar ‘World Order’
Realist scholars of geopolitics – including the conservative John Mearsheimer and the progressive development economist Jeffrey Sachs – are clear about the nature of and the openness of the western geopolitical project. They see the eastwards expansion of the west, cloaked in its narrative of sanctimony, as somewhat problematic.
A unipolar world order is not necessarily an overt dictatorship over every human on the planet. Rather, it is a system in which one central polity – potentially one man or woman, but more likely a technocracy of truth-guardians – has an effective global veto over the contest of ideas, should it choose to use that veto. In a multipolar world order, such vetoes may operate regionally, though there could be no ‘one-veto-to-rule-them-all’.
The first thing that people across the world should consider, is whether the one-empire world is a better aspiration than a multi-empire world; noting that empires come in both overt and covert forms, and that empires can vary from the somewhat benign (ie fraternal) to the severely malign. (Mackinder’s principal principle was that of ‘fraternity’.) Is a single benign empire best? The issues here are twofold: how easily can a benign empire become malign; and how can we be sure that a benign hegemon is really as benign as portrays itself? (We may note the more benign optics of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World compared to the chilling repression underpinning George Orwell’s 1984.)
The West’s illusion of being non-violent in achieving its objectives is a result of it using violence only as a last resort; the West favours heavy-handed diplomacy, known in earlier imperial times as gunboat diplomacy. Importantly – as we have seen in Palestine and Iraq, and as we saw especially in World War Two, Korea and Vietnam – the West will always resort to extreme violence if it feels it has no other choice. The West will always bring out its ‘big bazookas’ if it feels sufficiently threatened or sufficiently punitive.
The coalition of sanctimony, through Mark Rutter, let slip the truth that the President of the USA is ‘Daddy’. Another ingratiating word that I’ve noted, for example in Berlin Briefing podcasts, is ‘uncle’; a word that this year cost the Prime Minister of Thailand her job (see Thailand’s PM suspended over probe into leaked ‘uncle’ phone call with Cambodian official, Euronews 1 July 2025).
Daddy! says it all. The coalition wants a military presence in Ukraine. Please Daddy! Don’t stop the war in a way that obliges Ukraine to become a neutral country (eg in the way that Austria was obliged after World War Two).
Mackinder claimed: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island [Eurasia-Africa]; who rules the World-Island commands the world.” (Not unlike the Muldoon political stratagem which contributed to New Zealand choosing to adopt MMP. “Who rules the Cabinet rules the Caucus. Who rules the Caucus rules the Parliament. Who rules the Parliament rules the Country.”)
Mackinder, in his later writing, emphasised the lands between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea as the Heartland. The World Wars of the twentieth century can be seen as grabs by Germany for Ukraine, the heart of the Heartland. Which country is it today which – using ‘whatever resources it takes’ – most wants to gain effective control of all of Eastern Europe, including former Soviet republics. Who rules the European Union rules Europe. Who rules Nato rules the West. The United States’ role in Nato is diminishing. Who, who once played a back seat in Nato, is now muscling into the front row?
Let’s play Dominoes, noting that geopolitical advance is performed using various ways and means, soft power and economic power as well as hard power. From a European viewpoint, the final important dominos would be Georgia (an especially interesting prize, given the ambiguous statuses of Abkhazia as a seaside playground for Russia’s richest and South Ossetia), and maybe Belarus.
Further south, after Syria and Iran are neutralised by Israel and the United States (noting the events of 1953), there are – as dominoes for American imperialism – Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Russia, with Belarus and Kazakhstan, would then be encircled. The geopolitical West then would be literally on China’s border; adjacent to China’s sensitive Xinjiang province (aka East Turkestan). It was Zbigniew Brzezinski’s published dream; to contain China, to effectively veto China as a ‘player’. Something like this was Brzezinski’s open conspiracy.
Conspiracy Theories
Yesterday we heard this (Donald Trump says China, North Korea and Russia ‘conspiring against’ US, BBC News, 3 Sep 2025) from the American president. Yes, he was probably baiting the media. But we have been told that only feeble-minded people believe in conspiracies. Are conspiracy theories only lulu-lala when they are espoused by anti-ruling-class people? Is it OK to laugh-off other people’s conspiracy theories while quite earnestly promoting one’s own?
I heard this just the other day on Berlin Briefing, Why military service is back on the table in Germany(14 August 2025; 28’20”); the 2029 hypothesis which is gaining all the hallmarks of a Euro-conspiracy theory. Young soldier: “For example, 2029, the date that is put there out in the room from all Nato allies…”. Nina Haase: “Hang on there, to explain what that means, the date 2029 is the date when most military experts seem to agree that Russia will be in a position theoretically to test Nato’s Article Five, so to test an attack on one of Nato’s countries to see just how Nato will react, whether the other countries will come to help, because that’s what Article Five means, an attack on one is an attack on all.”
A good reference for the 2029 story is Germany’s Army Is Rebuilding. What Could Go Wrong?, Politico, Jessica Bateman, 29 August 2025, ‘”We are now moving from a war of choice to a war of necessity,” he [Carsten Breuer, the Bundeswehr’s highest serving general] explained. From security analysis he believes Russia will be capable of attacking NATO territory by 2029, with the caveat that this depends on the outcome in Ukraine and whether the war exhausts the Kremlin’. Remember Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass-destruction’!
Nobody ever says why Russia would want to attack a Nato country in 2029 or any other year; allegations-of-evil by western soothsayers notwithstanding. Russia has never aspired to possess Western Europe, and its hegemony over Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989 was entirely in the context of the finality of World War in Europe. The coalition of hypocrisy simply asserts this conspiracy theory as a justification for the militarisation of a near-bankrupt Old Europe, to deploy Donald Rumsfeld’s2003 putdown.
Western Europe is undergoing an Economic Implosion
France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are all now in economic crisis; in fiscal crisis. Their spending cuts led to revenue constriction, meaning that less government spending has led to bigger (not smaller, as the neoliberals presume) budget deficits. With France it’s especially political, given the present fiscal crisis, the looming presidential election there in 2027, and the lack of unifying candidates to replace Macron in that role. (Marine Le Pen, who has become a potential unifier of the non-Centre has been barred from running.) The United Kingdom government is imploding too, and for similar reasons (though Nigel Farage, continuing to espouse fiscal conservatism, remains a less likely unifier). Many people in Britain think that the Labour Government cannot survive even half of its five-year term, despite Labour’s huge majority in the House.
In Germany, there is some pressure on the right for the CDU to dump its SPD coalition partner in favour of finding common ground with the populist-right AFD. But ‘Putin’ has become the number one political issue in federal Germany, and the AFD are – at least in Merz’s eyes – ‘pro-Putin’.
In principle, Merz could revive Germany’s economy – and enhance his own political fortune – by practicing Hitlernomics; reindustrialisation through a government-spending initiative to invest in rearmament. Whatever it takes. Hitler’s popularity in the 1930s increased because he got Germans working again. But Merz has agreed to buy Germany’s weapons from the United States, so that the arm-twisting United States can make more money and less war.
Most European countries are facing radical demographic change. To fight wars, they will need to exploit immigrant labour. Of course that happened in World War Two, too. One thing we hardly ever heard about, re WW2, was Germany’s reliance on and exploitation of ‘immigrant’ slave labour. Many of the victims of the Royal Air Force in wartime Germany were in fact slaves from the places the RAF was supposedly trying to save.
It all leaves the polities of the countries which make up the coalition morally, intellectually and financially bankrupt.
The Rise of the Conservative Left
The nuanced political chatter in Europe now is about the rise of the ‘conservative left’. And, indeed, it appears that the ‘populist right’ is moving leftwards on economic policy. In practice, that will mean a return to something like Keynesian economics. To a degree this is what is keeping Giorgia Meloni popular in Italy, while the handwringers and conservatives to her north are tanking in the polls.
In New Zealand, there is one authentic party of the conservative left; New Zealand First.
The three policy-axes which determine elections are: economic (progressive [left; fiscal pragmatism] versus neoliberal [right; fiscal conservatism]); cultural [multiculturalism versus dominant-culturalism]; and geopolitical [conciliation versus belligerence re foreign states].
In Europe and elsewhere, the Left (Die Linke in Germany) is ‘progressive’ on fiscal policy, ‘progressive’ on identity politics (including open to immigration), and pro-peace. The Right (AFD in Germany) is becoming ‘progressive’ on fiscal policy, is conservative on identity politics (including immigration), and pro-peace in Europe. Two-out-of-three (potential points of agreement) ain’t bad; especially as left-identity politics is slowly giving way to ‘bread-and-butter’ issues.
So the left-Left and the right-Left may be able to ally to form future coalitions which will oust the “Saatchi and Saatchi” (to quote the late Jim Anderton, as in ‘the difference between National and Labour is the same as the difference between Saatchi and Saatchi‘) centrist legacy parties of the hitherto mainstream political class. (We note that ‘coalitions of opposites’ are not unknown to history; for example, the alliance between the West and the Soviet Union in World War Two.)
The legacy parties, though divided on cultural/identity issues (as are the new parties), are firmly neoliberal (ie fiscally conservative, claiming the virtue of balanced budgets), supportive of Ukraine, and facilitating Israel’s genocidal erasure of Palestine’s indigenous population. The legacy parties can only survive if their opposition remains divided. With the rise of the conservative left – the right-Left – such division can no longer be guaranteed.
Prediction
My sense is that, on or before 2030, there is a one-in-five chance (20%) that there will be a nuclear exchange between the world’s ‘great powers’. That ‘Third World War’ will have been caused by the last-gasp resistance – on the part of the West – to the new reality of a multipolar world order. If such a ‘last gasp of the West’ exchange does take place, my prediction is that there is a 50% chance of a mass extinction event on a scale at least as great as that of 65 million years ago. That’s a 10% chance of a mass extinction event.
Nevertheless ‘nine-out-of-ten’ (or ‘four-out-of-five’) ain’t’ bad, meaning it’s more likely than not that the world does eventually settle down. I am predicting a 50% chance that the politics of Europe will decisively shift towards the ‘conservative left’ in this half-decade (or in the 2030s, towards the radical centre, parties like TOP in New Zealand); and that there will be enough common ground between the old-left and the growing conservative left to make it possible for the two-lefts to form coalitions against the withering centre; against the diminishing hurrah of today’s elite political class. Something like this did indeed happen in the 1930s; then the creation of a coalition against fascism pushed the old conservative politics to one side.
Summary
The world is facing a dangerous moment. Sanctimony and hypocrisy are not the answers. Fraternity, trustfulness, dialogue, neutrality, sympathy; they are the qualities we need to embrace and project.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
