Who Is Deploying a 'Strategy of Tension' To Prevent a New Peace Architecture? | EIRNS

by Stewart Battle (EIRNS) — Nepal's parliament building burns as protesters storm the capital of Kathmandu and overthrow the government, on Sep. 9

The week has so far been a whirlwind of developments. From Doha to Utah, and from Poland to Nepal, the world is clearly in an unstable period that is rife with danger, and the kindling exists for major new crises to erupt. However, the most important thing that has happened so far this week, actually occurred last week—in Asia. The 2025 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in Tianjin, China over Aug. 31-Sept. 1, established in an unmistakable way that the world is rapidly entering a new period that will be defined by the voices of the Global Majority, and not simply those of the global hegemons. A major aspect of this was the attendance by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who held a major bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, advancing their two nations’ relations, despite years of both real and imagined tensions.

Not only did that event, along with the historic Sept. 3 military parade in Beijing, serve as a certain signal that a new system is in the making that can overcome the divide-and-conquer strategy of ongoing geopolitics; it has also extended a hand to Western nations so as to remind them of what their better, anti-imperial traditions, are. From this standpoint, of the potential embodied in last week’s events, consider again what has happened in the intervening week, and who might be trying to prevent any semblance of rationality from emerging from the West.

The assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk in Utah has already begun to produce the predictable results, with numerous of his supporters jumping up in outrage to demand a civil war and an all-out crackdown on their political opponents. Regrettably, U.S. President Donald Trump himself threatened such actions in his nationwide address on the evening of Sept. 10, saying in very broad terms: “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

This destabilization came only one day after the shocking Israeli strike in Doha, Qatar, which allegedly even surprised the Trump Administration. While Trump’s obeisance to Israel and toleration of the genocide in Palestine is a major weakness, Israel clearly sought to take advantage of this and rammed through an airstrike aimed at sabotaging the last shreds of hope for peace in the region. As the Wall Street Journal put it: Netanyahu “continually boxes him [Trump] in with aggressive moves taken without U.S. input that clash with Trump’s own Middle East goals,” even as unimpressive as those goals may be.

Then there is the caper of the Russian drone strikes in Poland. Not even one month after the Presidents of the U.S. and Russia met in person, in what was an historic move toward peace in Ukraine and re-establishing stable relations between the world’s two largest nuclear superpowers, war-crazed European nations are demanding that NATO mobilize for an impending invasion from Russia. This event (the drone incident) “is the most serious incursion into NATO territory since the foundation of the alliance in 1949,” shrieked London’s The Economist. Poland is now closer to military conflict “than at any time since the Second World War,” exclaimed Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Poland has invoked NATO’s Article 4 for emergency consultations among its member states.

Not to be ignored is the violent upheaval in Nepal, which has already led to the collapse of the government and the imposition of military rule in the country. Nominally over free speech issues, the protests were eerily violent, and were reminiscent of the kind of “color revolutions” deployed by the Anglosphere to bring down a targeted government. Not insignificantly, Nepal lies on the borders of both India and China, whose roles are so central to the emergence of a new paradigm in the world.

While there are many details of these events that remain to be known, one must ask the obvious question: cui bono? And why now? As the world sits on the cusp of a breakthrough to a new system, with both the neoconservatives and neoliberals—as well as their British forbears—in a state of utter desperation, why is such an intense series of crises and conflicts being stirred up?

These events point to the reality that a “strategy of tension” is being consciously deployed to sabotage the potential of the moment. Citizens around the world, in particular those in the West, must not allow themselves to be whipped up by such events, and instead must act to realize such a new system of cooperation between nations. As Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sept. 10: “China and the U.S. once fought side by side during World War II to defeat militarism and fascism, while in this new era, the two sides should work together for world peace and prosperity.”

This was stated most clearly in the recent Schiller Institute statement, “The Nations of the West Must Cooperate with the New World Economic Order!” Sign and circulate it widely in the coming days.