ECO-SOCIALISM AND GEOPOLITICS: LESSONS FROM THE CONFLICTS IN UKRAINE, GAZA AND IRAN: Part I
Arran Gare
Assoc. Prof., Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry, Swinburne University of Technology (Hawthorn, Australia)
Abstract
The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran, with the unipolar world-order challenged by those striving for a multipolar world, have exposed the functioning of the current regime of geopolitics. Comprehending this is necessary for those striving for an eco-socialist world-order. In this two-part essay the author has attempted this, at the same time, showing what is standing in the way of even efforts to comprehend what is going on. He argues that eco-socialists should embrace the end of unipolarity and seek to influence those striving to free themselves from this regime. This, he argues, will involve developing the grand narrative of ecological civilization in such a way that it grants a place to diverse nations and civilizations involved in this struggle, conceiving of it as ‘ecopoiesis’ – home making, not only for individuals but for local communities, nations, civilizations and humanity as whole conceived as participating in creating the future of life.
Keywords: geopolitics, unipolar world-order, multipolar world-order. ecological civilization, ecopoiesis
Introduction
The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran have resulted in major defeats for the unipolar world-order, promoted and maintained by USA and its allies following the collapse of the Soviet Union. This will result in major changes to the global geopolitical system. What these changes will be needs to be understood, and if possible influenced, by ecosocialists. There are multiple dimensions to this quest for understanding. One is to evaluate the theoretical frameworks used to comprehend the current state of the world and reveal possibilities for the future, and show how desired possibilities can be achieved. Before even beginning to do this, however, is the problem of understanding and learning from developments that precipitated this global crisis. To do this it is necessary to understand how consent for these developments have been manufactured. Again, there are multiple dimensions to this associated with how the ruling elites established their cultural hegemony and succeeded in marginalizing challenges to it. This has culminated in the triumph of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, transforming institutions to cripple opposition to this cultural hegemony, including transforming universities and other educational institutions, controlling the media and using this to control political institutions, including political parties. All this has been kept in place by expanding the security apparatuses of the State, including military, police and intelligence organizations, along with mind-control industries. To comprehend all this it is also necessary to comprehend media technologies and their effects, and how these have been utilized, creating what has been characterized as a global surveillance state or a global police state.[1] Comprehending the exercise of power also requires comprehending how these institutions of coercion and mind-control function both within nations and internationally. The first step in this quest is facing the difficulties in finding out what is going on at present. In one sense, it has never been easier to find the truth, if one has the time and conditions to sort through the deluge of information and misinformation available through an increasing diversity of media sources, but this has made finding the truth and proclaiming it, incredibly difficult. This points to a deeper problem: the imposition of a culture that has subverted the quest for truth.
Finding the Truth about Ukraine, Gaza and Iran
The Ukrainian conflict has been successfully portrayed as an unprovoked and illegal attack by Russia on Ukraine, with the suggestion that Russia is attempting to regain its empire, and in doing so, is threatening Western Europe. This is the view promoted by the mass media, the ownership of which has never been more concentrated, along with a huge contraction of independent investigative journalism, associated with much more deliberate efforts to control people’s beliefs through fake news. However, investigative journalists and other sceptics of prevailing views have been able to work outside such media and convey their views through the internet, particularly through YouTube podcast channels such as Judging Freedom hosted by Judge Napolitano, interviewing such figures as the economist, environmentalist and government advisor Jeffrey Sachs, the international relations theorist John Mearsheimer, a former CIA official Ray McGovern, the former weapons inspector Scott Ritter who had been in charge of investigating weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before its invasion, and had found conclusive evidence that there weren’t any, and various military figures, including Karen Kwiatkowski and Douglas McGregor. Another channel, Neutrality Studies hosted by the Swiss Pascal Lottaz, has interviewed such figures as Jacques Baud, a former colonel in the Swiss armed forces and analyst for Swiss strategic intelligence who had served the United Nations monitoring the Minsk agreements, Benoît Paré, formerly an analyst at the French Ministry of Defence, and David Gibbs and Glenn Diesen, leading analysts of global politics. And there are a number of other channels, including those hosted by Lena Petrova, Danny Haiphong and Katie Halper.
These and other podcasts present a picture of the conflict as the outcome of a project articulated in the 1990s by Dick Cheney soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union and further elaborated by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book The Grand Chessboard [2] published in 1997, to destroy or cripple the Russian Federation. This was in line with The Defence Planning Guidance Document of February, 1992, setting out the ambition of USA to maintain permanently global unipolar hegemony (although allied with Israel), preventing the rise of any regional or global rival, and reserving the right to pre-emptive, unilateral military action (subsequently known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine). This involved explicitly marginalizing the United Nations.
Details were provided of how these policies were implemented by successive US Presidents, in particular showing how the agreement by USA with Russia not to expand NATO after taking down the Berlin Wall and ending the Warsaw pact was ignored, how US leaders engineered the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which led to a civil war, how the Minsk Agreements designed to end this conflict were abrogated by NATO and Ukraine, which used the time gained to arm and integrate the Ukrainian military into NATO, how President Zelensky, after winning an election on a peace platform, reversed his policies after receiving death threats. After having won 73% of the votes in the 2019 election, his approval rating dropped as low as 25% when he reversed his position. Zelensky then called for membership of NATO and for nuclear missiles to be placed in Ukraine, able to hit Moscow in three to five minutes. This was at a time when US military theorists were arguing that the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) as a means to avoid nuclear war could be abandoned because high-resolution satellite reconnaissance and precise tracking systems would facilitate a successful, disarming, first strike. The final turning point, two weeks before Russia’s special operation, was the refusal of President Biden to negotiate over a decision to deploy Tomahawk missiles in Ukraine, able to hit Moscow in fifty-five minutes. Then after Russia launched its special operation to force Ukraine to negotiate, details were provided of a peace settlement that would have secured Ukraine’s future, providing that it gave autonomy to the Donbass Republics, accepted Crimea’s integration with Russia (strongly supported by Crimeans) and abandoned its quest to join NATO. This was scuttled by the intervention of the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and the real war began.
Such claims could and can be researched by anyone, again using the internet, including Google AI searches, which also identify publications, including books, on all aspects of the conflict. The most thorough analyses of the background to the Ukrainian conflict, going back to efforts by Germany to control Ukrainian territory in the First World War, have been provided by the Norwegian professor of politics, Diesen in The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order.[3] Diesen in The Think Tank Racket: Managing the Information War with Russia and Benoît Paré in Ukraine: The Great Manipulation, 2022-2024: Decryption of War Propaganda have also shown how false views of reality have been promulgated and sustained.[4] Despite all this, the vast majority of people in the EU countries and USA still accept the dominant narrative, and are unwilling to have their beliefs questioned. This itself is something that needed to be explained. Mattias Desmet in The Psychology of Totalitarianism, building on the work of Hannah Arendt, attributed it to hyper-conformity generated by technology induced loneliness.[5]
Comprehending the conflict in Gaza, leading on to the war against Iran, is more straightforward. The owners of the mass media are the most part Jewish or Christian Zionists, and the Gaza conflict was portrayed as an Israeli response to a brutal attack on October 7th by Islamic jihadists who beheaded babies and raped large numbers of woman, continuing the goal of Islamic extremists to destroy Israel. This was used to justify Israel’s attack on and destruction of Gaza. This justification was widely accepted by governments in both USA and Europe, in particular, Britain, Germany and France, which violently suppressed demonstrations against Israel’s actions, including by Jewish demonstrators.
However, this portrayal of events did not convince the general public. Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, with many more likely to have been buried in the rubble. This has been documented by medical staff in Gaza and reported by journalists, although in this process more than 200 journalists have been killed. Hamas political chief and ceasefire negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed by Israelis on July, 2024, precluding a peace settlement. This has turned most of the world public against Israel, even in USA, Britain, France and Germany, despite their governments. Details were easy to find on the internet, revealing Israeli claims about beheaded babies and mass rapes to be false, although it was found that 828 Israeli civilians and 367 defence force personnel had been killed, although at least 14 of civilians killed were killed by Israeli Defence Forces. There is evidence that some unarmed civilians were killed deliberately by members of Hamas, while some 1,500 Hamas soldiers were killed. Reasons for the Palestinians’ actions could also be found – that they were taking hostages to use to release Palestinian detainees who were being brutally treated, sometimes starved, sometimes tortured, along with addressing other major issues. 251 hostages were taken, of which 168 were later released, bringing about the release of an unknown number Palestinian detainees.
Hamas’ military action followed the failed use of Ghandi type tactics of non-violent protest in 2018 inspired by Ahmed Abu Artema, a 34-year-old Palestinian poet and journalist. This consisted of an unarmed march toward the separation fence, to draw attention to a UN General Assembly resolution on Israel and to the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. A UN study of the outcome reported 183 Palestinians were killed and over 8000 injured, 6106 by live ammunition, while four Israelis were injured by stones.[6] The report also described appalling conditions in the Gaza, describing it as a camp for refugees from the seizure of their homes by the Israelis, and described deaths of Palestinians in a long sequence of clashes between Israelis and Palestinians, that Israelis elsewhere describe as ‘mowing the grass’. This report was ignored by the mainstream press in the West. This led Jacques Baud, with his background in intelligence, to investigate and write a book on the history of Israel, debunking myths about Israel from its inception.[7] Such work drew attention to Yakov Rabin’s history of Jewish opposition to Zionism and his portrayal of the brutality of Jewish settler colonialism from the beginning (Rabkin, 2025).[8] In this, he drew attention to a letter published in the New York Times by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other leading Jewish intellectuals in December, 1948. This charged Zionists associated with the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), the forerunner of the Israeli Likud Party, mentioning by name Menachem Begin, later Prime Minister of Israel by name, with being akin to Nazis or fascists.[9]
Examination of events in Israel drew attention to other aspects of this history. It brought attention to a study group led by Richard Perle in 1996, a former US assistant secretary of defence (1981–1987) at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, an Israeli think tank. They drafted a policy paper entitled ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’, for the prime minster of Israeli, Benjamin Netanyahu. On the basis of this, Netanyahu called for regime changes, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finally, Iran. This is meant to pave the way for expansion of Israel to include parts of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq to create a Greater Israel. The quest for regimes changes has caused the deaths of up to two million people and culminated in the US attack on Iran in February, 2026, promoted and supported by Israel.
All this was justified by the mainstream press in the West by portraying Islamic people as terrorists. The real terrorists, however, apart from groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS, financed by Saudi Arabians, have been the Israeli and US governments. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are hostile to Shia Muslims and those who cooperate with them, including Hamas, who in turn are hostile to Al-Qaeda. The characterization of Iranians as terrorists has been countered by podcasts featuring Professor Marandi from Tehran University and the former British diplomat and MI6 operative, Alastair Crooke. Crooke had thoroughly refuted the view of Islamic people as fanatics and revealed the complexity, subtlety and power of their ideas, particularly those of Iranians. Podcasts brought widespread attention to his book, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution.[10] Iran’s “crime”, apart from not giving free reign to transnational corporations to take control of their oil and gas reserves, is to have provided aid and support to Muslims in Palestine, Southern Lebanon and Syria facing genocide. This book drew attention to histories of Islam, supporting Crooke’s claims.[11]
The outcome of these conflicts, with the failure to bring about the collapse of Russia or Iran, is that the world is moving from unipolarity to multipolarity. Multipolarity is strongly defended by opponents of US imperialism, such as Jeffrey Sachs, and also by the Russian philosopher, Alexander Dugin.
Not only have ruling elites have been unable to convince the general public to support Israel, the status of Israel has plummeted among the general public throughout the world, including in USA and Europe. However, it is rare for people in USA and Europe concerned with oppression of Palestinians to see this in relation to the alliance of USA and Israel, with the support of British and most European governments, to defend and further advance the unipolar world, eliminating all threats to it, such as a prosperous Russia. Nor do they see the connection between this quest and the drive to control the world’s fossil fuel and other reserves, much of these in Russia and Iran, even when President Trump called for the annexation of Canada and Greenland to USA and invaded Venezuela and boasted how they had taken over their oil reserves. They appear confused, seeing a parallel between the attack of a more powerful actor on a less powerful actor, but ignoring the support by Ukrainians prior to the conflict for peace with Russia, and details of how the conflict between Russia and Ukraine was engineered by NATO and backed by the US State Department which, dominated by neo-conservatives, has been closely allied with Israel. Most people in the EU and USA still condemn Russia as the cause of the Ukrainian conflict.
Consequently, formerly neutral countries, Sweden and Finland, have joined NATO and Switzerland has abandoned its commitment to neutrality. The European Parliament, representing the European Union, has strongly supported Israel and has been even more aggressive towards Russia than USA, with Kaja Kallas, a former Prime Minister of Estonia and now High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, openly calling for the destruction of the Russian Federation. She claimed in a podcast, available through YouTube, that anyone who believes that China or Russia played a significant role in defeating Naziism in WWII is grossly ignorant. The German Greens have supported Ukraine in the conflict and backed the German government’s hostility to Russia, and showing some consistency, have supported Israel’s bombing of Palestinians in Gaza (although this is being re-assessed).
The most prominent critical commentators who have pointed to these connections are Jewish opponents of right-wing Zionism, such as Max Blumenthal, Gabor Maté and his son, Aaron Maté, Norman Finkelstein, Kate Halper and Jeffrey Sachs, and former members of the military, sometimes aligning themselves with right-wing politicians, who appreciate the real threat to Russians of the expansion of NATO and what is really involved - as the Republican Senator Col. Richard Black put it, that USA is fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.
There appears to be an inability by socialists to put current events into a coherent perspective, understanding this in relation to the past and what sort of world we should be striving to create. Even if efforts are made to ascertain the truth, there is so much material to assess that even when efforts are made, it is difficult to know when truth is ascertained. Gabriel Rockhill has argued that the CIA now penetrates and largely controls the views of those who purport to be left-wing.[12] Even if one searches for views that really challenge one’s own to test one’s beliefs, this can be very difficult, and those who question mainstream views are seldom able find people willing to argue the case; they are more often met with hostility, as Desmet observed. How can this situation be responded to? What this failure shows is that to have any chance of ascertaining the truth, or even defending the quest for truth, it is necessary to have some defensible theoretical and philosophical perspective that can put all these fragmentary reports into context.
Theoretical perspectives: World-systems theory
There are a number of theories that could be taken as starting points. However, to understand all facets of geopolitics it is necessary to situate geopolitics in relation to the broader context of the globalization of civilization associated with the extension of markets and, more broadly, the evolution of humanity within nature. One perspective has been provided by ruling elites promoting ‘freedom and democracy’ equated to liberating the potential of free markets to concentrate wealth and power, which in turn is justified by Social Darwinism explaining progress as the result struggle for survival and survival of the fittest, tacitly upheld as the supposedly scientific view of human history. What is required is an alternative to this that can challenge this perspective.
While orthodox Marxism is not up to the challenge, much of this has been provided through the reformulation of Immanuel Wallerstein’s post-Marxist world-systems theory utilizing thermodynamics, primarily by Steven Bunker and his colleagues. Bunker died in 2005 and there have been further advances in efforts to comprehend the world-order through thermodynamics, including the work of Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi. These have advanced in some ways beyond Bunker’s work. Although they do not relate their work to Bunker’s, their insights can be assimilated to and further justify his perspective.[13]
The world-order generated by the globalization of the market was characterized by Wallerstein as a system consisting of core zones, semi-peripheries and peripheries, with the core zones utilizing the semi-peripheries and their associated comprador elites to exploit cheap labour and resources from the peripheries. The core zones compete with each other for hegemony, and the history of the world-system has been characterized by a sequence of successful challenges to hegemonic powers, with the Dutch Republic replacing Venice as the global hegemon, which in turn, after a struggle between Britain and France associated with the Napoleonic Wars, was replaced by Britain, which after a struggle between Germany and USA associated with the First and the Second World Wars, was replaced by USA. Influenced by Marx but distancing himself from Marxism, Wallerstein believed that capitalism must be overcome, but regarded the Soviet Union not as the realization of communism but a country temporarily delinking from the world-system in order to come back into it at a higher level, as they appear to have attempted.[14] Now the hegemony of USA is being challenged by China, and we are seeing the expected turmoil.
Bunker’s reformulated this theory utilizing and developing Richard Newbold Adams’ energetics theory of social power, drawing upon advances in thermodynamics, including work on dissipative structures and info-dynamics. The exercise of power, Adams pointed out, always involves transforming energy from one form to another, and requires access to useable energy (or negative entropy), then creating and controlling the triggers for energy transformations.[15] It should be noted that ‘usable energy’ includes any order, as distinct from what is random. ‘Triggers’ include not only technologies, including weapons, but various forms of social organization, institutions, social regulations, authority and legitimacy, facilitating social control and exploitation. Markets and the institutions imposing and supporting them can be analysed and understood from this perspective. Educating people, for instance, should be seen as utilizing a great deal of usable energy to produce complex agents able to better exploit useable energy. Cultivating loyalty of people to their society also involves energy transformations, producing another kind of order. Adams’ study of social energetics included the development of civilizations and the industrial expansion associated with modern civilization.
On this basis, Bunker argued that the power of the core zones is based on controlling energy flows to augment their available energy, increasing their organization and thereby their power to control the semi-peripheries and peripheries. To understand the reproduction of modes of production and of the relationship between global and regional economies it is necessary to take account of the ecological interdependencies between productive and extractive, resource consuming economies, and to take account of the impacts of these relationships on natural ecosystems. In doing so, Bunker distinguished between extraction of usable energy, such as concentrated minerals, and destruction of processes that generate usable energy, most importantly, ecosystems. He illustrated all aspects of this through his study of the destructive exploitation of Amazonia, with core zones allying themselves with the elites of Brazil and promoting ‘modernization’ as a culture. He pointed out the consequences of this:
When natural resources are extracted from one regional ecosystem to be transformed and consumed in another, the resource exporting region loses values that occur in its physical environment. These losses eventually decelerate the extractive region's economy, while the resource-consuming communities gain value and their economies accelerate.[16]
Bunker revealed how the increased energy and material flows to productive societies have facilitated the substitution of non-human for human energies to increase their complexity and power, while the consequent reduced energy flows in peripheral societies have simplified them and reduced their power. Increased energy flows in the productive centres has made possible increases in scale, complexity and coordination of human activities, greater division of labour, and the expansion of specialized fields of information. This has facilitated the development of increasingly complex systems of transport and communication and engendered the means for technological and administrative innovation, enabling these centres to change their technologies and thereby find substitutes for essential resources as these have been depleted.
Conversely extractive economies have lost energy and so become economically and socially simpler, less diversified, and subject to the changes in market demand associated with new technologies produced by the centres. Under these circumstances, strategies tend to be adopted which maximize the short-term return to labour and capital, with little concern for long-term social reproduction. The development of modern State organizations in peripheral regions, being subject to manipulation by the productive centres of the world-economy, merely increases the rapidity of destructive exploitation of these regions. By exploiting such extractive economies, the industrial modes of production inevitably undermine the resource bases on which they depend. In his study of the Amazon, Bunker showed how the development of the Brazilian State, itself subject to unequal exchange and resource exploitation from the economic core zones, intensified destructive exploitation of its own peripheries, how:
By irrationally extending energy-expensive structures and operating procedures into the energy-poor social formations of Amazonia, the state undermined existing but fragile human communities, devastated the ecosystem in which they subsisted, and severely distorted its own developmental projects. ... The state's self-legitimating claims that it can transform the underdeveloped society are revealed as an illusion which can be maintained only when there is fundamental consonance of state policy with the evolutionary directions of the central social formation.[17]
All this is associated with the tendency of social systems to “hypercoherence” where by concentrating control over both human and nonhuman energies and using more and more available energy, a stage is reached where these systems have so much power they can survive while contributing little or nothing to the systems on which they are dependent - until they destroy these systems, the conditions of their own existence. [18] This is what occurred in Mayan society, and it is now happening globally.
After having studied a major peripheral region of the world-system, Bunker along with Paul S. Ciccantell, offered a history of globalization, characterizing the role of capitalism in this, examining the evolution of technologies, particularly transport, and the associated power struggles, often associated with the quest to control trade.[19] The notion of space was incorporated into and made central to these analyses, revealing the absolutely central place occupied by the quest to organize and control spaces, showing the dynamic relation between matter, space and technology. They characterized and analysed the growing complexity of societies associated with technological innovations and the centrality of the struggle for resources in this context, pointing out major changes in what resources have been pursued in the struggles for domination. These have been associated with vastly increased power over the natural environment and of the people who gain subsistence from it. In their conclusion, Bunker and Ciccantell predicted greater intensity of violent conflicts as resource use accelerates while the world-system reaches the global limits of sites for extraction of materials.
This provides a framework for characterizing what has taken place over the last half century. As Wallerstein predicted, the Soviet Union and then Russia attempted to re-enter the world-system as core zones. USA as the current hegemon has done everything it could to entrench its position, so USA along with Western Europe rejected this, treating Russia and Ukraine as semi-peripheral regions, utilizing their oligarchs as comprador elites to facilitate the plunder of their public assets and natural resources. Belarus avoided this by not privatising its public assets. The future of Russia was to be like Brazil, not like Western Europe. The response of USA and Western Europe could be expected given growing shortages of raw materials, with the approach of ‘peak oil’, when the rate of global oil extraction reaches its highest point and then starts to drop forever. Also, USA is now having to contend with China as a threat to its hegemonic position, intensifying its concern to dominate access to resources, and Western Europe has to deal with its lack of resources while at the same time having to compete with the increasingly technologically advanced Chinese. This has intensified efforts to develop new forms of technology, most importantly, digital technology and AI to dominate people. This includes the populations of advanced countries where job security has been eliminated, there has been a massive concentration of wealth, and wealth and real income for most people has declined.[20]
As predicted, there has been a growing intensity of violent conflicts, involving increased expenditure on armaments and the military generally, destabilizing the world politically. From this perspective, it was predictable that conflicts costing the lives of millions have been associated with countries that have large gas and oil reserves – Iraq, Libya, the Ukraine, Russia, Syria, Iran and Venezuela, as the core zones have sought to dominate access to and reduce the cost of these. Bunker and Ciccantell did not go into this, but the drive to reduce costs of inputs has always been central to capitalism and a condition for its continued functioning, as Raw Patel and Jason Moore have argued.[21] The control over oil while upholding the US dollar (the petro-dollar) as the international currency for trade in oil, enabling USA to impose sanctions on countries, blocking access to raw materials, has been central to US global hegemony and the maintenance of the monopolar world.
What Bunker and Ciccantell did not examine is how the development of the world-system has not only generated increasing power to subjugate nature; it has generated increasing power to control people. This is associated with developments in technology, which are almost always driven by power elites and are designed to increase their power, although this can be in opposition to other power elites. For this reason, while the development of weapons has been central to the development of technology, along with control over resources required for this, just as importantly has been the development of media technology. Advances in technology change the relationships between people and how power struggles are undertaken. As Diesen has argued, the Fourth Industrial Revolution associated with Artificial Intelligence building on the Third Industrial Revolution based on digital technology but going beyond it, is transforming great power politics as countries struggle for technological sovereignty and ruling elites change their relations to each other and to their subjects.[22] People are controlled not only through force but through keeping people under surveillance while controlling their beliefs and their capacity to ascertain the truth on any issue – ultimately, controlling what most people take to be reality. This has been deployed within each country and in the relations between countries and how these are understood. As noted, it has been associated with the development of a global police state, although this is being transformed as nations try to gain technological sovereignty. To understand this, and to work out how to combat this domination, it is first and foremost necessary to comprehend the nature of international relations.
International relations theory
Where international relations are concerned, the main traditions of international relations theory are Hobbesian realism, exemplified by Zbigniew Brzezinski and those who have dominated US politics, neo-realism, exemplified by the work of John Mearsheimer and George Friedman, idealism, exemplified by the work of Jeffrey Sachs, and classical realists, emphasising cultural factors, sometimes influenced by Samuel Huntington’s work on the clash of civilizations. How does this relate to the relationship between zones of the world-system? Both neo-realists and idealists are critical of the Hobbesian realists. Hobbesian realism, strongly influenced by Machiavelli, assumes that politics and international politics in particular is all about maximizing power, working out how to organize the world for the advantage of those who have power. In practice, this usually involves disguising what is being done. President Trump is unusual in acting transparently on this philosophy. World systems theorists generally accept that in practice this is the dominant tradition, but have done little to develop alternatives to it.
Through his study of decision-making of governments, Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, argued that the international order is anarchic, nation-states are now the dominant form of government, and all governments act purely out of self-interest. This self-interest could be enlightened through appreciating common interests with other nations. However, the United Nations and international law are ineffectual, Mearsheimer argues, and if China succeeds USA as the dominant economic power, it will seek to dominate the world as did USA, and before that, Britain. Friedman, the founder of Stratfor and Geopolitical Futures, emphasizes that the behaviour of nation-states is driven by permanent geographic realities rather than the ideologies, personalities, or choices of individual leaders. Focussing on the conflict between USA and Russia, he argues on this basis that the policy of USA as a maritime power is to prevent the rising of any local hegemonic power that could challenge its global dominance, and this inevitably puts it in conflict with Russia that cannot avoid seeing the expansion of NATO into Ukraine as an existential threat. Both Mearsheimer and Friedman are known for making successful predictions, but they are not always successful.
Sachs accepts much of what Mearsheimer claims, but argues that there are grounds for hope that governments will behave more ethically, abide by international law and achieve global consensus on what is right and wrong. Both Sachs and Mearsheimer have been highly critical of US and NATO involvement in Ukraine, but for different reasons. Mearsheimer sees the real threat to USA coming from China, and a healthy relationship between Western Europe and Russia would have been in America’s interest. Sachs upholds a vision of a multipolar world, with centres insulated from each other by neutral states, governed by international law, with social democracy being the most promising form of government for dealing with the environment. He argues against Mearsheimer that China has no history of imperialism and is very unlikely to use its economic power to support domination of the world through its military, as did Britain and USA, but does not offer reasons why China will not follow Europeans as they have done with most other things.
There is another tradition often overlooked, which takes into account the ethics and thereby the cultures of societies. This tradition is being revived through the work of Richard Ned Lebow, characterized as The Tragic Vision of Politics. It is a revival of the form of realism developed in Ancient Greece.[23] Recognizing the primacy of the socio-cultural over individuals at all levels requires recognition of and brings into focus the role of civilization and civilizations in history. It allows us to investigate the rise and fall of civilizations, not just in isolation, but in competition or alliance with each other. Although Lebov does not consider Huntington’s work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, his analysis of this clash is essential to understanding the present state of the world from this perspective.[24]
Orthodox (vulgar) Marxists tend to be Hobbesian realists, seeing all power struggles as driven by self-interest, while claiming to be allying themselves with the self-interest of the working classes. In the past they placed their faith in the development of technology to produce such an abundance of goods that social conflicts would be eliminated. Eco-socialists, including eco-Marxists and post-Marxists, are more likely to be sympathetic to Sachs, although they might call for more radical forms of socialism. Bunker, for instance, called for a revaluation of labour and nature as essential to dealing with ecological destruction. Sachs would concur. There is a problem with Sachs’ work in this regard, however. Despite his prominence and forceful statement of his views, he has had little real impact. It appears that it really is a matter of who has the power. Marxists of all kinds see the underlying problem as the domination of the world by the inexorable logic of the market imposed and kept in place by force, commodifying more and more of reality, extensively, to all corners of the world, and intensively, to more and more facets of life, and the need for a revolution against this, but nobody nowadays, including Bunker, takes seriously the claim that the working class will carry out this task. Bunker’s work does clarify the basic nature of power operating in the world system, and thereby does indicate something of what is needed – the choking off of energy in its various forms to the core zones of the world-system, but does not show how to achieve this.
To work out how to be effective, Mearsheimer’s work is important because it focusses on nations and national governments as actors and how they make their decisions. However, it does not examine the conditions for nations to act in their own interests, let alone to consider how to extend their goals to serve the common interests between nations and promote these, as called for by Sachs. He does not examine the role of comprador elites working against the interests of their own national communities, for instance. With neoliberalism entrenched through changes in communication technologies and international institutions, the autonomy and coherence of nations has been undermined, except where it is associated with the rise of fascism, where people define themselves as a community in opposition to others portrayed as sub-human. It is necessary to utilize the insights of the form of classical realism promoted by Lebov, updating this in light of radically changed circumstances, to comprehend the current situation and its possibilities.
This requires us to engage with and comprehend the dynamics of communities, societies and civilizations, their rise and fall, and their succession. The world-system as characterized by Wallerstein has to be seen as the civilization of modernity, that is, European civilization, which through the expansion of the market under capitalism, came to dominate the world, creating the world system consisting of core zones, semi-peripheries and peripheries. It has culminated in the unipolar world dominated by USA which vigorously extended its dominance. USA is a country originating with British imperialism, the genocide of its indigenous population and a slave based economy while in competition with French and Spanish imperialism. After experimenting with democracy and then social democracy under the New Deal, it abandoned both with neoliberalism and neoconservatism, entrenching a brutal oligarchy that has undermined the economic security of its own citizens, the condition for democracy, manufacturing consent for this. They have launched a series of wars for total world-dominance, reducing Western and central Europe to vassals, but now appear to be in decline. The question then is, Can eco-socialists respond to the state of the world we are now in, utilizing the wisdom of classical realism to move towards ecosocialism, an ecologically sustainable world-order no longer dominated by USA and market imperatives?
The imminent fall of the US empire and the monopolar world
Once the propaganda has been seen through and the emergence of a multipolar world is recognized, it is evident civilization is in a major crisis. The notion of crisis originated in medicine where it was seen as a turning point in medicine, in which the self-healing powers of an organism are sufficient for recovery. Applying this notion to society, Thomas Paine wrote of it as ‘a grievous disturbance of equilibrium, producing a terrifying acceleration of the historical process, and little coordination among societal elements…’ and Jacob Buckhardt defined it as ‘a massive and uncontrolled transformation of society insofar as this transformation is “genuine”’.[25] Developing the concept to characterize the state of the world in 1987, James O’Connor highlighted the inter-relationship between economics, social, political and personal crises while being centrally pre-occupied with a global ecological crisis. These are in a far worse condition now, and from what I have described it should be clear that we are facing not only a crisis of the monopolar world and its associated rule-based order, based in USA and supported by Western Europe and Anglophone colonies, but a crisis of Western civilization and humanity. That is, it is a crisis of the civilization of modernity, which is now being challenged by Islamic, Confucian, Hindu and Buddhist civilizations along with Orthodox Christianity.
This crisis could result in the re-establishment of US hegemony, although this is very unlikely. More likely is that USA and China will divide up the world into two spheres of domination, which is more likely, but also likely to be unstable. Or it could result in the replacement of USA by China as the dominant hegemon in the current world-system. Given the turmoil associated with previous successions of hegemony in the world-system, such as the Napoleonic Wars after the defeat of the Dutch Republic and the First and Second World Wars after the decline of Great Britain, this rivalry is more likely to result in more wars, given the mindset of those trying to maintain the current monopolar world. What we see is an effort by USA to control the choke points through which raw materials, most importantly, oil and other hydrocarbons, are transported, thereby crippling the Chinese economy. It is this that led to attacks on powerful nations, Russia and Iran, which appear to have failed, with US theorists now anticipating a military conflict between USA and China. This dramatically increases the possibly of a nuclear war. A nuclear is also becoming more likely with Europeans becoming more belligerent towards Russia as Ukraine is facing defeat. What a nuclear would be like has been well described by Annie Jacobsen in Nuclear War: A Scenario.[26] It is likely to destroy most of humanity along with its productive infrastructure, resulting in a new dark age. Or it could be associated with the deployment of digital technology, including killer robots, to eliminate most of humanity. Or, perhaps it could result in some combination of nuclear war and digital technology, with the global elite surviving in underground bunkers, emerging to create a new order with most work done by robots.
However, crises also provide the conditions for creative responses in which people, forced to face up to the situation they are in, mobilize to avoid such catastrophes. If such futures are to be avoided, it is necessary to embrace the defeat of the monopolar world-order and consider what could replace it. It is unlikely that any of the ancient civilizations could simply replace Western civilization and dominate the world, although some Islamists and some Confucians might aspire to this. The question that needs to be addressed is, Can a new civilization be created that unites the opposition to the monopolar world and commits itself to the common good of the whole of humanity? This is unlikely to be achieved by simply replacing the cultures of previous civilizations, as orthodox Marxists aspired to do. Such efforts are likely to paralyse opposition to the current monopolar world with all its destructive imperatives. It will involve creating a global civilization that recognizes a place for diversity and the unique contributions of each civilization, but in such a way that these civilizations are not undermined or attacked but are constrained to uphold this broader civilization. What is required is ‘transculturalism’ as characterized by Mikhail Epstein, whereby people from different cultures appreciate each other, criticise each other and learn from each other.[27] My contention is that the global ecological crisis and the importance of avoiding the destruction of the current regime of the global ecosystem, combined with increasingly outrageous behaviour of those trying to maintain and extend the monopolar world, can bring into focus this goal. It will involve creating a global ecological civilization committed to augmenting life, including the lives of individuals, of families, of local communities, of nations and civilizations, and thereby of humanity and the global ecosystem. It will consist of communities of communities, functioning in such a way that in advancing themselves each community augments the conditions for the other communities that are similarly augmenting life.
Notes:
[1] See Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. N.Y.: Public Affairs, 2019 and William I. Robinson, The Global Police State. London: Pluto, 2020.
[2] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. N.Y.: Basic Books, 1997.
[3] Glenn Diesen, The Ukrainian War & the Eurasian World Order. Atlanta GA: Clarity Press, 2024.
[4] Glenn Diesen, The Think Tank Racket: Managing the Information War with Russia. Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023; Benoît Paré, Ukraine: The Great Manipulation, 2022-2024: Decryption of War Propaganda. Sydney: Amazon.com.au, 2025.
[5] Mattias Desmet, The Psychology of Totalitarianism. London: Chelsea Green, 2022.
[6] UN Human Rights Council, Report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 2019.
[7] Jacques Baud, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood: The Defeat of the Vanquisher. Max Milo, 2024.
[8] Yakob Rabkin. 2025. Israel in Palestine: Jewish Rejection of Zionism. Atlanta: Aspect Editions.
[9] Isidore Abramowitz, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein et.al. “New Palestine Party: Visit of Menachem Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed”, New York Times, Dec. 4th, 1948.
[10] Alastair Crooke, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution. London: Pluto Press, 2009.
[11] See Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, Updated Ed. New York: Public Affairs, 2025
[12] G. Rockhill and Z. Dingqi. “Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism.” Monthly Review, December 1, 2023. https://monthlyreviewarchives.org/mr/article/view/6255.
[13] See for instance Mario Giampietro, Kozo Mayumi and Alevgül H. Şorman, Energy Analysis for a Sustainable Future: Multiscale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism. London and New Yor: Routledge, 2013.
[14] Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy: the States, the Movements and the Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
[15] Richard Newbold Adams, Energy and Structure: A Theory of Social Power. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975; Richard Newbold Adams, The Eighth Day: Social Evolution as the Self-Organization of Energy, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988; Stephen G. Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
[16] Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon, p.22
[17] Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon, p's.56 & 242.
[18] Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon, p.253.
[19] Stephen G. Bunker and Paul S. Ciccantell, Globalization and the Race for Resources. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005.
[20] See David N. Gibbs The Revolt of the Rich: How the Politics of the 1970s Widened America’s Class Divide. N.Y.: Columbia Uni. Press, 2024.
[21] Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. Oakland CA: University of California Press, 2018.
[22] Glenn Diesen, Great Power Politics in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Geoeconomics of Technological Sovereignty. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
[23] Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders. Cambridge: CUP, 2003.
[24] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order. N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 2003.
[25] James O’Connor, The Meaning of Cris: A Theoretical Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1987, p.108f.
[26] Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario. London: Penguin, 2024.
[27] Mikhail Epstein, The Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto, Trans. Igor Klyukanov. N.Y.: Bloomsbury, 2012, p.60ff.
Suggested citation note
Gare, A. (2026). Eco-socialism and geopolitics: lessons from the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran. Part I. Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice, 7 (1). [open access internet journal]. – URL: http://ecopoiesis.ru (d/m/y)