A New Great Power Balance: The Real Goal Of Washington Madness

## A shifting map of power and the logic behind apparent chaos What emerges from this exchange is a striking reconceptualization of recent policy volatility: what looks like erratic, self-contradictory behavior from Washington is better read as the rough sketch of a new great-power bargain. The conversation argues that the current flurry of diplomacy, public bluster, tariffs, and covert pressure should not be treated as isolated mistakes or purely domestic theater. Instead, these moves appear to be attempts—clumsy, contested, and incomplete—to redraw the rules that will govern interactions among the United States, Russia, and China in a genuinely multipolar age. If this reading is right, the immediate political aim is less to resolve single wars than to institutionalize how great powers will coexist while competing, including how they limit nuclear dangers, manage proxies, and carve economic spheres of influence. ## Multipolarity unmistakably on the table The discussion frames the present moment as the first clear instance in decades when classical great-power diplomacy is resurfacing in public view. The pattern is not simply a reversion to Cold War binaries; it is a messy negotiation among three powerful states that each bring different interests and institutional constraints to the table. The United States is simultaneously applying economic pressure on China through tariffs and sanctions, signaling readiness for bilateral deals with Russia, and exerting hardline postures in various theaters. Russia, for its part, is engaging bilaterally with the United States and deepening ties with China while defending its strategic interests in Europe. China, meanwhile, is positioning itself as a necessary interlocutor in the Middle East and Eurasia. What this conversation emphasizes is that these are not isolated tracks: they are becoming threads of a single, complex tapestry of great-power management. By highlighting cross-theater linkages—Ukraine and Iran being the most obvious—the discussion argues that the powers involved recognize a shared interest in avoiding outright catastrophe even as they accept persistent rivalry. Nuclear non-proliferation, avoidance of direct inter-state great-power war, and the management of proxy conflicts emerge as common concerns. This is a crucial shift: rather than expecting an era of global homogenization under one hegemon, the participants are engaging in a form of negotiated pluralism in which zones of influence and spheres of competition are acknowledged, if not officially codified. ## Linking Ukraine and Iran: negotiating a wider bargain A central point of the exchange is that diplomacy surrounding Ukraine cannot be fully understood in isolation. Conversations and shuttle diplomacy that touch Russia, Iran, and China suggest the contours of a broader bargain in which multiple conflict theaters are treated as interlinked bargaining chips. The conversation makes the case that envoys shuttling between Moscow, Tehran, and Beijing are less likely to be trying to broker immediate peace in a single battlefield than to carve out understandings that prevent escalation between great powers while allowing lower-intensity competition to continue. This implies a grim but pragmatic logic: wars can persist as long as they remain contained and do not threaten the vital interests of the other great powers. From that angle, negotiating limits—what kinds of proxies are acceptable, where naval operations are off-limits, how nuclear thresholds are respected—becomes the more realistic project than insisting on comprehensive peace in each local conflict. The conversation suggests that this dynamic is already visible in diplomatic gestures and the relative willingness of some capitals to engage with emissaries even when public rhetoric remains hostile. The result could be a stable but uneasy accommodation: simultaneous states of competition and cooperation that prevent rapid escalation while preserving strategic room for maneuver. ## Tools of pressure: tariffs, sanctions, and institutional inertia The exchange is unsparing in its critique of how economic instruments are being repurposed. Tariffs have morphed into quasi-sanctions; trade instruments now double as levers of geopolitical influence. The discussion argues that this repurposing is not arbitrary but tactical: economic coercion is being used to pry allies and partners away from rival economic spheres. Yet the conversation also stresses the self-defeating aspects of such measures. Heavy-handed economic pressure can produce blowback at home—creating costs for domestic producers, eroding supply chains, and fueling political division—and abroad, by hardening the resolve of targeted states to deepen alternative partnerships. Beyond the visible instruments of coercion lie deeper institutional limits. The conversation points out that great powers are not the personal property of their leaders. They are complex systems—bureaucracies, industrial bases, alliances, financial architectures—whose momentum shapes and constrains policy. Presidents and premiers may try to dismantle or repurpose elements of these systems, but the entrenchment of institutions means that policy change is often incremental and path-dependent. Sanctions, intelligence capabilities, alliance commitments, and trade regimes have a kind of stickiness that channels behavior even when rhetoric shifts. Recognizing this helps explain why actions that seem internally inconsistent may in fact reflect the tension between political theater and institutional continuity. ## Ships, not cars: the inertia of great powers A vivid metaphor in the discussion is that great powers are more like ocean liners than automobiles: slow to turn, costly to reorient, and propelled by immense institutional mass. This image underscores two points. First, rapid reversals of foreign policy are rare because they require simultaneous realignments across industrial policy, military planning, intelligence structures, and alliance politics. Second, because of this inertia, leaders often must work through processes—back-channel diplomacy, incremental confidence-building, and partial agreements—rather than dramatic, immediate reforms. The conversation also warns that internal fragility is a real variable. Great powers survive because of resilient state-society linkages and adaptive institutions. Yet internal contradictions—economic inequality, political polarization, elite factionalism—can weaken the coherence of strategy. The interlocutors note how domestic politics in each great power can produce both unpredictability and continuity: bold moves that conform to a leader’s narrative may nonetheless run into the steady friction of entrenched structures. Understanding this duality is essential for interpreting why some policies oscillate between confrontation and conciliation. ## Historical patterns and the moral ambivalence of empires Placing the present in longer historical perspective, the conversation reminds us that imperial expansion and global domination have been the engine of modern geopolitics for centuries. The United States is portrayed as the latest, and most powerful, outgrowth of a longer European civilizational project whose reach was extended through colonialism and slavery. That history shapes not only material capabilities but also the mental maps and political habits of elites who see global politics in terms of control and hierarchy. At the same time, the conversation resists purely moralistic readings that would reduce current policy to bad actors versus good ones. Instead, it argues for realism tempered by normative awareness: the world is both shaped by historical injustices and governed by sober interests that aim to prevent systemic collapse. The lesson offered is cautious: acknowledging historical power imbalances does not negate the need for rules or the pragmatic project of designing limits to great-power competition. But

A New Great Power Balance: The Real Goal Of Washington Madness What are the erratic policy decisions of the Trump administration about? And why do the Russians seem so keen on going along with a diplomatic process that seems not conducive toward solving the Ukraine war? Even though Zelensky has already rejected the US framework for a negotiated settlement with Russia, Witkoff still went to Moscow and met with V. Putin. Sergey Lavrov is still talking well about the US president on US TV. What's going on? We might seeing the contours of a process that will not necessarily lead to peace in Eastern Europe, but to a general understanding of Great Power Politics. The linkage between the Ukrainian and Iranian conflict theatres are a clear sign that both, the USA and Russia seem to agree that more is on the table than "just" Ukraine. Also China is at least in part involved in this process, as the Iranian Foreign minister just visited also Beijing. Multipolar Great Power diplomacy is now in full swing and it seems that all three, Washington, Moscow, and Beijing are understanding that this is crucial time to define the rules of engagement between them for the decades to come. #M2 Hello, everybody. So it is Saturday afternoon, April 26th, and you're here with Pascal Lottaz on Neutrality Studies. Today, I'm outside on the way to the university because it's nice and calm there in the afternoon. It's just very enjoyable for writing and thinking. On the way here along the river in Kyoto, I thought we could maybe talk a little bit about what's currently going on. The diplomacy of Donald Trump has left many of us in the general commentariat about world affairs quite baffled and guessing what the goal of it all is. Some of these policies seem highly self-defeating. Donald Trump is blurring the lines between these different types of policies. On the one hand, tariffs are usually economic policies designed to help the local economy or the local sector to remain afloat. But Trump basically uses these as foreign policy tools in order to get his will and his ideas through with China and with the Europeans. On the other hand, you have a crackdown on schools in the United States, on universities, on the freedom of speech by one of the warriors for freedom of speech. This is also one of the disheartening occurrences at the moment. You have these very, very heavy-handed authoritarian tendencies. But then, on the other hand, you have still these ongoing active efforts of Trump to reach a settlement, an agreement with the Russians, while trying to put pressure on China. And when it comes to China, you know, the tariffs really should be called such; there are by now sanctions. At least the proposed 145% tariffs, those are sanctions on China, right? And they're working in that way. So what occurred to me recently is just that we have now thoroughly arrived in the multipolar world. And part of this is that I do believe that Donald Trump actually sees it that way too, and that -- 1 of 8 -- what we are witnessing here is the first time in a long time that we see true great power politics and great power diplomacy playing out in front of our eyes. So today, Steve Witkoff is actually in Oman. I suppose he's already arrived. Steve Witkoff, of course, being Donald Trump's emissary. He was originally only responsible for doing diplomacy with China, but by now, he has become responsible for the Iran talks as well. And I think this linkage between Russia and Iran is what really needs to be understood most precisely. It's something that seems to be leaving Alexander Mercouris quite baffled on the Duran, as to why Steve Witkoff is even bothering going to Russia. He had his third meeting with Vladimir Putin yesterday on Friday, right? But the point is, today he's meeting with the Iranians in Oman, in Muscat, and there seems to be this realization, at least in the non-Neocon wing of the Trump team, and Witkoff is part of that, of course, he's not part of the Neocons, that what you need is a grand bargain. Even if you can't end the war in Ukraine, what you can do is try to hammer out the new contours of how these three great powers engage each other. And that is, on the one hand, if it's true, if this assessment is correct, then it is a hopeful thing to happen because it would be, of course, good if we had certain limits on how these great powers interact militarily with each other and that we, for instance, have some form of grand agreement on how to treat each other's nuclear weapons, the nuclear deterrents, and the conventional weaponry too. On the other hand, what it means is that we have an emerging agreement that these military conflicts are not going to go away. That we are going to live in a world where the United States and Russia are simultaneously engaged in a kinetic proxy war and still maintain diplomatic relations and maybe even interactions in the economic spheres with each other while this is going on, you know. It's this moving away from the all-or-nothing, moving away from the black-and-white thinking of especially the, well, the neocon sections of the people who were running and then ruining the 1990s and 2000s and who dragged the United States into or pushed the United States into wars like Iraq, Afghanistan, the destruction of Libya, out of this motivation to dominate and to have your own set of rules apply to these places that if you cannot control them, you destroy them. And it seems that this is now changing. So the acceptance that different parts of the world will be under different hegemons and, you know, Marco Rubio, who's actually in the neocon faction, the real foreign secretary of the US, but not in charge of Russia, not in charge of Iran. It's quite questionable what he's still in charge of, actually. But he said at the beginning of his tenure that the United States accepts that China and Russia are great powers in their own right and that we do live in a multipolar world balance. So I think what is happening now is that Blinken is trying to, or not just trying, but actively linking the issue of Iran and Ukraine. Not in the way that one influences directly the other, but that the real goal of these negotiations at the moment is to come to a sort of process which then leads to a renewal of certain basic principles of the game. One thing that's important to keep in mind is that in 2019 it was Donald Trump who nixed the INF Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Agreement, which stated that the United States and -- 2 of 8 -- the Soviet Union, and then later Russia, could not possess weapons with a range between 500 kilometers to 5,500 kilometers. This was basically an agreement to de-escalate the entire Cold War, and it was part of other treaties and agreements on weapons reduction to de-escalate the Cold War, and it worked very, very successfully to the point where, in 1989, both powers decided that this warfare, the Cold War, was done and over with. These treaties were a long process, a long drawn-out process, and they started with informal talks and discussions between these great power rivals. One of the reasons why Trump nixed the agreement, and to me it's the main reason, was that Russia was in breach of the treaty. But whether that's true or not, I'm the wrong person to actually judge that. But there's a second reason given, and that is that China was not part of it. And yes, China wasn't part of it by design. The INF Treaty was by design a bilateral treaty because also the Europeans were not part of it by design. So it left some of these intermediate-range capabilities on the European continent, but it eliminated the threat between the great powers and also reduced the threat of accidents on the European continent. Now, the theater has shifted, and the European continent is still in danger at the moment, of course, and we see that one part of the renewed warfare that we've got is actually in the European heartland. But the issue of Iran and the issue of China are paramount in the thinking of the Europeans. So what I believe is going on is that NATO is discussing or was discussing in Russia with Putin, not just Ukraine, but also how to deal with and approach the issue of the Middle East. And he's taking this now and discussing it with the Iranians in Oman. Their foreign minister, Araqchi, was in Russia and China last week. These powers are now renegotiating or discussing how to approach the Middle Eastern conflict. In a sense, this is something that all three of them have in common at the moment. The Chinese, the Russians, and the Americans have an inherent interest in making sure that nuclear proliferation doesn't occur. So the three of them have an interest in assuring Iran that it doesn't need nuclear weapons. The United States is, of course, trying to do so with threats and intimidation. But Russia and China also have no interest in further proliferation. And this is a classic thing to happen, right? One of the reasons why the Non-Proliferation Treaty that caps the states that can have nuclear weapons was successful is because all five powers, victors of the Second World War, were ultimately allowed to have them, and they jointly worked on convincing everybody else that they shouldn't have them. No nuclear weapon state has an interest in having more states with nuclear weapons. So this actually works in favor right now of these negotiations. The things that Donald Trump does, the things that America does right now, are just, to me, the outgrowth of this new American thinking, which I think Alexander Mercouris and Alex Christoforou, who are under Duran, correctly call spheres of influence, spheres of interest. They think, the Trump administration thinks in those terms, and I think the Russians and the Chinese are actually in agreement that this is the right way of restructuring the multipolar world. Now, what Donald Trump is trying to do with the tariffs is he's now using them more as sanctions in -- 3 of 8 -- order to break away states from the Chinese economic sphere of influence. And this, to me, seems like a policy that's poorly designed and self-defeating in the end. But I think that's the logic behind it. Let's use a sledgehammer in order to break away states from the Chinese economic sphere. So, the Russian negotiations at the same time are supposed to re-establish some form of agreements between Washington and Moscow. And the thing that Donald Trump probably learned in his first administration and should know by now is that not everything, not the best-case scenario that you can imagine, is probably what is going to transpire or happen in the end. Because one thing needs to be well understood, which is that these large powers, the great powers, are countries that work very differently from smaller ones that you and I might be living in, even relatively big countries like Japan or Germany. Great powers, by virtue of having built a system that gives them this much influence—dominating the digital sphere, dominating the economy, dominating and ruling entire monetary systems—have built so many institutions and must have built so many structures that they are inherently very difficult to govern. So even though we have strong men at the helm of all three of the great powers at the moment, they cannot run everything themselves, and they do not run everything themselves. They are shepherds of a system that they need to keep alive. And by the sheer fact that we have a system, it means that things have been running okay in the past and have enabled the United States, Russia, and China to actually produce the level of prosperity needed to also have the implements of war and the propaganda systems in place to control enough of their own populations. And it happens that systems break apart, that great powers just leave the scene of the international world. An example thereof is, of course, the Soviet Union. But the point is, the Soviet Union wasn't broken by U.S. hard o