The term “International Community” is one used frequently in the US, the UK, France, in all western media outlets and to a lesser extent, in the EU. It is supposed to convey a gravitas and a sense of unity of purpose and belief. I first heard this expression from George Bush senior around the time he was amassing an invasion force to drive the Iraqi’s out of Kuwait. He also referred to it as “The coalition of the willing.”

But when I think about it, it’s an empty term. There is no real International Community. There are Nation States, commercial power blocks and individual countries vying for a position in the modern world. What they all strive to do is to act in their own and their people’s interests. But Russia & China has come together this week in an unprecedented way to combine their awesome powers to act in their own interests, contrary to US power play and bullying. This combination of two super powers is the culmination of years of work between them.

My memory of the coalition of the willing is that the US bore 90% of the load at the time with various western countries very reluctantly sending small detachments of troops on the condition they would not be front line deployed or ever be in any kind of danger, (in a war!!). The UK was the exception to this even though a million UK citizens marched in London against any involvement in the war/s.

Far from being willing or in any kind of community, western nations are, and were, cajoled, brow-beaten, threatened and bullied into compliance to support America’s imperial dreams by using its military force to achieve its objectives. George W. Bush is a great example of this when he ominously announced on TV, “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists.” This was in relation to the invasion of Iraq and the true irony of that situation was that America itself was the terrorist by breaking international laws designed to avoid this very thing and breaking America’s own laws regarding such an engagement. But according to Bush, any nation that didn’t do likewise was a supporter of terrorism. So were those acts of terrorism by the coalition of the willing the true definition of an International Community?” Is an International Community just a respectable name for nations combining to terrorise others?

In the last twelve months, acting in unison, Russia and China have been very busy in the background selling American debt which both countries had been suckered into buying over the years. The monies paid to both for these debt documents was used by them to buy gold. They have done this in anticipation of the collapse of the American dollar with the inevitable implosion of that country’s economy as a result. It is now believed also that Putin took the decision five years ago that America wanted war with Russia and the US believed they could be successful as well. So for the last five years in utter secrecy, Russian scientists have worked furiously on families of new weapons and technologies, the most lethal of which is their line of hypersonic nuclear weapons. Fired from the back of hundreds of trucks hidden all across the vast country of Russia, these warheads can hit targets on mainland USA in four minutes. They are practically undetectable and even if detected, there is no time to react to them. The hypersonic line of new weapons really does bring the world back to ‘mutually assured destruction,” and perhaps we will all be much safer for it too.

The Chinese belt and road initiative is being strongly supported by the Kremlin as it is seen as an alternative to any trade with the West. It precludes the need for the West by reaching out to a market of five billion people in Asia and Africa and joining those many threads into a mutually beneficial trading block. They are working together on a new currency for this project and are shoring up hundreds of tons of gold to back the new currency, a return to the gold standard for their new money. China and Russia are using diplomacy and sharing technology to make friends around the globe even as the USA threatens to invade Venezuela and Iran to add to their list of victims.

The view from Beijing and Moscow sees a nation of 350m Americans attempting to impose itself on the six billion other people worldwide in what they term a unipolar world with American as its centre. The Russians and Chinese vision is of a multi-polar world with no centre and no leader. They see a peaceful world where war as a tool is consigned to history in favour of diplomacy, trade and negotiation.

Could this be the real International Community for the new age? After all of the empty rhetoric of the new century so far, is there finally a plan in place to create a true International Community for mankind?

As the Chinese proverb goes, “May you live in interesting times.”