Stephen Sefton, October 5th 2025
From Iran to Venezuela to Russia, each of the different, very serious threats to international peace demonstrate the absolute bad faith and nihilism of the ruling elites of the collective West. In Ukraine, the political classes of the European powers conspire to sustain NATO's war against Russia because it is politically impossible for them to admit they have lost a war that they themselves provoked. In the process, they have destroyed the lives of millions of Ukrainian families and ruined their own national economies with high debt levels, high energy prices and a totally anti-democratic commitment to the militarization of their countries.
For his part, the US president and his team, far from seeking peace in Ukraine, go through the motions of detaching themselves from the conflict so as to avoid taking the blame for the now inevitable defeat. They continue to supply armaments and guarantee intelligence, communications and reconnaissance resources so to sustain Ukraine’s regime of Nazi sympathizers. The Western ruling elites support the Zionist genocide in Gaza, increase their aggression against Iran and besiege Venezuela. Despite all the well known history of the contemporary world, the leaders of the collective West continue with the demented belief that they can regain their former global dominance, when Iran and Yemen have already demonstrated that another attack on Iran or an attack on Venezuela will certainly have an adverse outcome for them.
Against Democratic Korea, their efforts to change the government have failed for more than 75 years. They have been unable to destroy the Cuban Revolution for 65 years. They have been unable to overthrow the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran for more than 45 years. Now they threaten Venezuela militarily after failed attempts at regime change over 25 years of endless commercial and financial aggression, violent destabilization, subversion and sabotage, psychological warfare and diplomatic siege. Apart from demonstrating the insanity and perfidy of the collective West, this history also highlights the steadfast moral vision of the world’s sovereign nations defending an independent future for their peoples.
The chronic incoherence of the Collective West
The Western ruling classes also demonstrate their nihilism domestically in their own countries. They offer no strategic vision responding to the aspirations and needs of their peoples. On the contrary, they betray their people with increasingly anti-democratic public policies of censorship, criminalization of protest and crude police repression. This betrayal of civil rights is another aspect of the chronic inconsistency between their macro-economic policies, their foreign policy and the now practically abandoned commitment to ensure good socio-economic conditions which is self-evident in issues such as access to housing, employment and technological competitiveness.
For the majority of the US population, housing prices have risen much more than household incomes. Since 2019 the cost of a home for a typical family has doubled, while the cost of rent has increased by 32%, but incomes lag far behind. In the UK, the cost of housing has risen at a rate double the increase in people’s earnings which have been effectively stagnant for a decade. Likewise, in the European Union during the last 15 years, housing prices have risen by 60% and rent by 25%. It is reported that 10% of the European population pays more than 40% of their income in rent or mortgage payments.
This housing crisis in the richest countries of the world slows growth, increases inflation and promotes greater inequality. It is yet another aspect of the stagnation of the economies of Europe and the US which is also reflected in unemployment. Major European countries such as Spain, France and Italy have unemployment levels between 6% and 10%. In the United Kingdom unemployment has risen to the highest since 2021 and in the US economy employment is also stagnant. There, the official unemployment figure of 4.3% underestimates the reality and many observers claim that the official number which includes other categories is more relevant, this figure being 8.6%.
The fundamental issue of energy
It is worth remembering that the European energy crisis includes not only the insane decision to abandon cheap and secure Russian gas and oil supplies, but also the lack of investment in infrastructure. This lack of adequate investment caused the almost total blackout of the electricity supply at the end of April this year in Spain, Portugal and part of the south of France. Similar problems occur with tUS electric power infrastructure where most of the infrastructure is 40 years old. Among other crucial components, millions of new transformers need to be replaced every year, a demand the industry cannot meet.
In 2023, the US economy consumed 4272 Terawatt/hours (12.44Mwh per person) and consumption is projected to increase by 25% by 2030. But it is impossible to see how the investment needed to reach this goal will be met when it has only 40.1GW of renewable energy capacity under construction and President Donald Trump has blocked or delayed new wind and solar infrastructure in favor of hydrocarbon-based plants and nuclear power. But the installation of new nuclear or coal- or gas-based generating plants will take until the beginning of the next decade. There will not be enough electricity generating capacity on time, even without taking into account the need to replace outdated transmission infrastructure.
By contrast, China in 2023 consumed 9443 Terawatt/hours (6.6Mwh per person) and already has almost 340GW of renewable energy capacity under construction. In addition, it has just produced its first 110 megawatt heavy gas turbine, ready for commercial delivery, which further diversifies its independent energy matrix. And there are other factors at play as well. China has almost 40% of the qualified personnel in science, engineering and mathematics in the world, compared to 9% in the United States. Together, the figure for the main rich countries of the G7 is less than 16% while for the main countries of the BRICS+ group the figure is more than 81%.
Another measure of technological competitiveness is the number of approved patents for new processes and devices that are registered each year. In 2023, China registered 46% of the patents approved worldwide while the US approved under 19%. Together, the figure for the four main countries of the G7 group was 39% while for the four main countries of the BRICS+ group it was 50%. Above all, the general situation of crisis, incoherence and relative socio-economic, energy and technological failings of the collective West, is compounded by the increasingly complex instability of its financial system and by excessive indebtedness.
The future vision of the majority world
The desperation, lack of imagination and nihilism of Western leaders contrasts sharply with the goodwill, openness, dynamism, cultural and civilizational affirmation and ability to reach consensus of the countries of the BRICS+ group and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. While the member countries of these organizations continue to insist on the need to reform existing multilateral institutions controlled by the West, they continue to explore, agree and consolidate new institutional arrangements which better respond to the needs and aspirations of their peoples. These new structures demonstrate the initiative, imagination, decisiveness and capacity for cooperation based on respect on the part of the nations of the majority world and the complete anachronism of the behavior of the collective West.
Fundamental to the new international order is the majority world nations’ loyalty to their traditions of civilization, faith and spirituality, their commitment to collective cooperation, their openness to other moral and cultural rationalities and their recognition human life’s dependence on the natural world. Their economic practice demonstrates how mutual trust can allow a successful remodeling of global supply chains and global energy relations in contrast to the effects of the collective West’s destructive bad faith and counterproductive nostalgia for its long-gone global domination.
A new international reality
This reality is especially evident in the failure of Western attempts to impede China's technological development. They have not been able successfully to sabotage the supply chains of China’s high-tech industry, while high-tech business sectors in Japan, South Korea and Europe see that they are losing important business opportunities for nothing. On the contrary, both Japan and South Korea are trying to modify the recent unfair agreements imposed by the US government in exchange for less onerous tariffs on their exports to the US. Japan faces paying a tribute of US$550 billion in purchases and investments in the North American economy and South Korea a total of US$350 billion.
While China, Russia, India and Iran intensify their cooperation throughout the Eurasian region promoting and concretizing their vision of the human development of their peoples and the fraternal peoples of the region, the Western elites continue their destructive, counterproductive pattern of destabilization and regime changes. The growing ties between Arab countries and the Eurasian region have been emphasized with the mutual defense pact between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. India has shown that it would rather deepen its relations with Russia and develop its rapprochement with China than submit its sovereignty to the dictates of President Trump.
As President Vladimir Putin explained at the recent Valdai conference, “...the fundamentally new global atmosphere in which the countries of the Global Majority increasingly set the tone, promises that all actors will somehow have to take into account the interests of others when looking for solutions to regional and global problems... All these new structures are different, but they are united by one crucial quality... They are not against anyone; they are for themselves. Every culture and civilization should make its contribution because, I repeat, no one knows the right answer separately. It can only be generated through a joint constructive search, combining, not separating, national efforts and experiences of several countries…
"This is pragmatism and realism: a rejection of the bloc philosophy, an absence of externally imposed rigid obligations or models with major and minor partners. Finally, it is the ability to reconcile interests that rarely completely align, but also rarely fundamentally contradict each other. The absence of antagonism becomes the guiding principle... A new wave of decolonization is emerging now, as the former colonies are acquiring, in addition to statehood, also political, economic, cultural and worldview sovereignty. Multipolarity and polycentrism are not just concepts; they are a reality that is here to stay... the era when a select group of the strongest powers could decide for the rest of the world is gone, and gone forever.”