The battle between maritime civilization and land civilization behind the "special military operation"

After more than a year of Russia's "special military operation (SMO)," many people have begun to realize that what is happening can no longer be explained simply by national interests, economic trends or energy policies, territorial disputes or ethnic conflicts. In fact, any attempt to describe what is happening in the usual pre-war terms and concepts is at least no longer convincing, since SMO is an important event in world history with the ability to change the world pattern.

In Russia, this action is still called SMO, but it is understood that this conflict has actually evolved into a full-scale war between Russia and the Western collective, so it is necessary to put aside the narrow theory of local geopolitical conflict and interpret it from a global perspective:

1. Geopolitics. Determine the final evolution of the land war based on the consideration of a deadly duel between a maritime civilization and a land civilization;

2. Clash of civilizations. Modern Western civilization claims "hegemony" over emerging alternative non-Western civilizations;

3. Define the future architecture of the world order. contradictions between unipolar and multipolar worlds;

4. The pinnacle of world history. The final stage of the Western model of global dominance faces a fundamental crisis;

5. Macro analysis of political economy based on a fixed foundation of the collapse of world capitalism;

6. Religious "eschatology" and its inherent conflicts, antagonisms and disasters, as well as the phenomenology of the coming of the Antichrist.

All other factors, politics, country, energy, resources, race, law, diplomacy, etc., although they are important, are secondary and subordinate. In fact, they do not explain or clarify anything in essence.

This requires placing the SMO in the identified six theoretical contexts mentioned above, each representing the entire discipline. These disciplines have received little attention in the past, and people prefer "active" and "precise" fields of study, so to many they seem "foreign" or "irrelevant". But understanding truly global processes requires a global perspective, putting aside the parts and keeping a considerable distance from them.

SMO in a geopolitical context

Admittedly, all geopolitics is based on considerations of the eternal opposition between maritime civilizations (Thalassocracy) and terrestrial civilizations (Telurocracy). For example, in ancient times, the confrontation between land-based Sparta and port-based Athens, land-based Rome and sea-based Carthage (city-state) is a vivid manifestation of these beginnings.

The two civilizations differ not only in strategy and geography, but also in the main direction: the land empire represents a spiritual civilization based on sacred traditions, duties and hierarchical verticals headed by the Holy Emperor.

The maritime powers are oligarchs, a trading system dominated by material and technological development. Pirate countries in essence. Their values and traditions are contingent and constantly changing, like elements of the ocean itself. But their way of life is unchanged, and their civilization is eternal Rome.

With the globalization of politics, these two civilizations finally gained spatial manifestations. Russia-Eurasia became the "core" of the terrestrial civilization, and the poles of the maritime civilization were fixed in the sphere of influence of the Anglo-Saxons: from the British Empire to the United States and the NATO bloc.

This is how geopolitics views the history of recent centuries. Against the geopolitical background, Russia is the eternal Rome, the Third Rome. The modern West is quintessentially Carthage.

The collapse of the former USSR was a major victory for maritime civilizations (NATO, Anglo-Saxons) and terrible disasters for land civilizations (Russia, Third Rome).

Mediterranean and land domination were like two exchange ships, and those territories that broke away from Moscow's control began to be "brought into" the control of Washington and Brussels--- first affecting the secession of the Soviet Union and the Baltic republics, and then the turn of the post-Soviet countries. However, the marine civilization did not stop and continued to fight with the land civilization, fortunately, the land civilization withstood the blow.

But Russia's past mistakes led to the fact that in the 90s of the 20th century, the "Atlanteans" "inserted" their proxies into the state and placed them in the highest positions, which is how the modern Russian elite was formed, and as an extension of the oligarchy, a system of external control by maritime civilizations.

Some former Soviet republics began preparations for full integration into maritime civilization. Others have taken a more cautious approach and are in no hurry to break the historical-geopolitical ties with Moscow.

Two camps were formed: the Eurasian camp (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Armenia) and the Atlantic camp (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and Azerbaijan).

But Azerbaijan got rid of this extreme position and began to move closer to Moscow, which led to the events in Georgia in 2008, and then to the 2014 pro-NATO coup in Ukraine, which triggered the division of Crimea and the uprising in Donbass, and some of the newly formed territories did not want to join the maritime civilization, resisted this policy, and sought Moscow's support ..., which finally triggered the beginning of SMO in 2022.

Today, the new geopolitical phenomenon is that Russia-Eurasia can no longer be the sole representative of this land civilization, and China, India, the Islamic world, Africa and Latin America have also become the poles of land civilization under new conditions, hence the concept of "distributed centerland".

SMO in the context of a clash of civilizations

At the civilizational level, two main vectors collide in SMO:

1. liberal democratic individualism, atomism, the dominance of material-technical methods over man and society, the abolition of the state, gender politics (essentially the abolition of the family and gender itself), and finally the transition to artificial intelligence domination (all of which are called "progressivism" or "the end of history");

2. Loyalty to traditional values, cultural integrity, spiritual primacy over material, protection of homeland, patriotism, preservation of cultural diversity, and ultimately the salvation of humanity itself.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western civilization gave it a particularly radical strategy, namely the imposition of multiple genders, dehumanization (artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, deep ecology), "color revolutions" that destroyed the country, etc. Moreover, Western civilization openly equates itself with all humanity, calling on all cultures and peoples to follow it immediately – not as a proposal, but as an order, an "absolute necessity" of globalization.

But direct geopolitical provocations by NATO and the collective West exacerbate this civilizational confrontation. Therefore, Putin called for a return to traditional values and the rejection of liberalism, gender politics, etc. While their society and ruling elites are not yet fully aware of it, it is clear that SMO is a direct head-to-head collision between two civilizations:

1. Postmodern Western global liberalism, and

2. Traditional societies, represented by Russia and those at least at some distance from the West.

As a result, warfare has risen to the level of cultural identity and developed a profound ideological character. It has become a cultural battle, a fierce confrontation between tradition and modernity and postmodernity.

SMO in the context of unipolar and multipolar confrontation

In terms of the political architecture of the world, SMO is the key to determining whether the world is unipolar or multipolar. The victory of the West over the former Soviet Union ended the era of bipolar organization in world politics. One of the two opposing camps collapsed and disappeared from the stage, while the other remained and declared itself the main and the only one, what Fukuyama called the "end of history".

Read: Francis Fukuyama: Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?

As we have seen, at the geopolitical level, this amounts to a "decisive victory" for a maritime civilization over a terrestrial civilization. More cautious international relations experts call this a "unipolar moment" and claim that its system has a chance to become stable, but it may also be unsustainable and may give way to another pattern.

And this is exactly what is happening right now: the end of the "unipolar moment" is irreversible, and the multipolarization supported by most countries around the world outside the West has arrived irreversibly.

Thus, Russia embodies a multipolar world order in which the West is given the role of only one of the regions, one pole, and can no longer impose its own standards and values as universal.

SMO in the context of world history

The last five centuries of Western civilization are the history of the struggle between modernity and tradition, man and God, atomism and wholeness. In a sense, it is also a history of the struggle between East and West.

Western-style modernization is inseparable from its colonization, because those who impose the rules of the game ensure that those rules are only beneficial to them. As a result, the whole world is gradually influenced by Western modernity, and to some extent, no one can question the legitimacy of this "progressive", Western-centric picture of the world.

In this unchallenged scenario, modern Western liberal globalism, Atlanticist civilization itself, its geopolitical and geostrategic platform in the form of NATO, and the eventual unipolar world order itself, in its final stages of reaching the pinnacle of historical "progress", SMO blocks the right of the West to represent humanity and its destiny.

SMO in the context of the crisis of global capitalism

Modern Western civilization is based on capitalism on the omnipotence of capital, financial manipulation and bank interest rates. This is also the fate of modern Western society - uncontrolled development, leading to the atomization and dissipation of Western civilization, the commodification of everything, and finally the personification.

Philosophers critical of the modern West agree that this capitalist impulse to civilization is nihilism. The first is the "death of God", and then, quite logically, the "death of man", without God, man loses any fixed content. Hence the emergence of posthumanism, artificial intelligence and human-machine stitching experiments, which are the culmination of the "progress" of liberal capitalism.

I am afraid that today's Russia does not think that SMO (sanctions) is a rebellion against global capital and its omnipotence. And that's just the way it is.

SMO in the context of the end times

In general, we see history as progress. However, this view of the nature of historical time has only recently taken root from the Enlightenment. Arguably, the first complete theory of progress was proposed by the French liberal Ann Robert Jacques Turgot (1727-1781) in the mid-18th century. Since then, it has become dogma, although initially it was only part of the liberal ideology and not everyone agreed.

But if we put aside the progressive ideology of liberalism and turn to a religious worldview, we will see a completely different picture of "other civilizations", namely full digitalization, migration to the metaverse, abolition of gender, victory over humanity by transferring initiative to artificial intelligence...

This confirms another dimension of SMO, which is its essence: the assertion of pure truth, which corresponds to the traditional society's view of the modern Western world.

The role of Ukraine

It turns out that Ukraine itself in this fundamental confrontation, no matter how it is explained, on the surface, is a local conflict based on "territorial claims" key, in fact it is something else entirely. The stakes are high on both sides. Russia is destined to undertake a special mission in world history. And the forces outside the center do everything they can to use the Ukrainians to achieve their goals ...

But the forces pooled in this realm of destiny are so fundamental that they have repeatedly transcended any interracial contradictions. This is not just the division of Ukrainians into Russophobic and Russophobic factions, but also the division of humanity on a more fundamental basis.