המשטר הסיני הגיע לשלב הסופי שלו | ריאיון עם גרגורי קופלי

What's the difference between globalization and globalism? And how does communism rely on one crisis to reset another? How does a nation's prestige act as a deterrent? We sat down with Gregory Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association, to delve into these topics in his new book, The Noble State, Governance Options in an Ignoble Era. Gregory Copley, thank you so much for joining us. Great to have you back on the show. Wonderful to be with you again, Tiffany. I want to tap into the Chinese regime part, because it's kind of interesting. You know, you have communism come in, Marxism, and it's a rejection of traditions. You saw that play out with the Cultural Revolution, right? All these different aspects, a very atheistic society, which in its own way, you could argue as a religion, you have to believe in the party. But then you also hear people like Xi Jinping come up with phrases like, oh, mandate of heaven, which heralds back to a previous time and previous way of governance. So it sounds like, to your point, you still need that symbolism or something that people can look up to, even in a society like that, that says it has total control. But in addition to that, we are also seeing, if you will, this rise in globalism, especially from regimes like the Chinese Communist Party, when it comes to talking of the UN, World Economic Forum, blah, blah, blah. It's kind of pushing its own form of governance on the global scale. So you have a globalism as a form of governance, if you will, but then there's also the trend of globalization, if you, the intermingling of markets and stuff. And it seems almost there's a conflation of the two now, where a lot of other governments around the world are also pushing for globalism under the guise of globalization. Could you talk about that for us? And how that fits in with what we're seeing play out in terms of the Chinese Communist Party? Globalism is an ideology, whereas globalization, as you say, is the interplay of markets around the world. There is a relationship, because what we've seen in the rise, if you like, of globalization, we saw literally harmony come to the world through international trade and the sharing of resources and the like. But the globalism concept is really the concept, if you like, of transnational governance. In other words, it's the abandonment of societies. It's the abandonment of identity and sovereignty, supposedly. But what we see with all of these totalitarian globalist movements, as we've seen them through history, particularly fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, Soviet communism and Chinese communism and so on, they have been all globalist totalitarian movements where they depended for their survival on a rolling momentum, continuing victories over other countries and other peoples so that you keep absorbing them. And one of the things about these totalitarian globalist movements is that as soon as they start to stumble and run out of steam, they collapse. We saw that with the Italians and the fascists and the German Nazis movements. They were both defeated militarily. So that's how they basically ran out of steam. With the Soviet Union, it ran out of steam because the ideology wasn't sustainable. So it literally went from one crisis and reset to another, as we've been seeing in China. And you see the death of Stalin, the only way to revive the society there was for Khrushchev to make his big four-hour speech in which he blamed it all on Stalin and really used that as the excuse to say, well, going forward, we're going to be much better. And of course, because they didn't have any new ideology or any new great insights to offer, the society ultimately collapsed in 1990. We're seeing the same thing now today, in fact, in the People's Republic of China. Now, Xi Jinping came into office, if you like, blaming his predecessors and saying he was going to restore through Marxist, Leninist, Maoist philosophy. And all he did was, as the Soviets did, he kept applying ideas and ideologies which didn't work. And we've now reached the terminal stage, if you like, of Xi's society where things just don't work. So if the Communist Party is going to survive Xi, first they have to discredit him, put him behind them and then come up with a new approach to reviving the economy and the social cohesion and loyalty of the population. That's going to be almost impossible to do, as the Soviet Union found out. They're going to have to literally abandon communism. And the People's Republic of China are going to fragment as people scramble for survival. What are the Western countries going to do? What's the United States going to do? Is it going to attempt to stabilize that part of China which produces, if you like, and processes rare earth minerals in Inner Mongolia and then bring them, create a safe corridor down to the seaports in Northern China so that they can get to the world markets? All of these questions come up, but it's all part of this greater picture of saying, well, OK, things are falling apart. What do we really want to see emerge out of this in 10 years' time, 20 years' time? Because we're going to see 10 or 20 years of chaos. I think we've covered on nobility and a couple of other uniting aspects. But there's another part that was super interesting. You're citing your colleague, Dr. Stefan Bassoni, who remarked that prestige is the credit rating of nations. I think that fits into a lot of different aspects, especially the strength of a society and a community. But how does that fit in with something like deterrence on a more global scale? Well, prestige equates to deterrence very much. If you have prestige, you don't have to use your armed forces. Your armed forces have to look credible and have to be seen to be able to perform. And that's what the United States and Britain and so on did very, very well over the past few centuries. They had an ability to follow through on their threats and promises. They could, in fact, enforce. So the advantage of having prestige coupled with military force is that you don't have to use that military force. You go into negotiations, people listen, and we see that when you lose prestige, the value of your currency declines, the threat of your armed forces declines. Look at the United States in the last 20 years or so or 30 years. We've seen massive decline in prestige of the United States since the government of, say, Ronald Reagan, until we started to see President Trump reasserting real U.S. action. Now, the United States has gained massively in credibility, not yet so in terms of absolute prestige. That's because prestige takes decades and generations to build. But the United States at least is seen to be being aggressive in posturing its national interests and looking after the strength of its borders, the strength of its currency, the ability to project its power around the world. So that will pay off. What we've seen in the People's Republic of China is the exact opposite. The last five to 10 years have seen an absolute collapse in the prestige of the Chinese currency, the yuan or renminbi. We've seen an absolute collapse in the credibility of the government because it says one thing and does another. It threatens its partners. It doesn't rely on inherent prestige. It bullies people into doing what they want. It's been a very fascinating conversation. We have so much more to dig into in your book, Gregory Copley, as always, thank you so much for joining us.