The Eurasian Question¶
Within the great spans of history, domestic ideological controversy is something close to a luxury good. Whenever it isn’t to same extent ‘on hold’ the global environment is untypically benign. Under more normal — which is to say stressed — conditions, it either folds down into pragmatism, or explodes into cosmic, eschatological drama. In today’s unmistakably stressed world, Alexander Dugin‘s ‘Eurasianism‘ exemplifies the latter eventuality.
As with Jacobinism and Bolshevism before it, Eurasianism matters to you whether you want it to or not. The grandeur of its scope is undeniable. It is concerned with nothing less than the fate of the the earth. In this sense, nothing that anyone cares about falls outside it. (People are beginning to get scared.)
Shelving moral and partisan responses, it is merely realistic to acknowledge that Dugin is an ideological genius of the first order. Synthesizing Russia’s native Eurasianist traditions with geopolitcal theory and deep currents of occult mythology, he has restructured the political imagination of his homeland, whose leader is paying obvious attention. When history is integrated with myth, things can easily begin to get exciting.
The fact that Atlantis is unmistakably sinking makes the rising wolf-howls of Eurasianism all the more penetrating. Decadence is a dilemma or a delight for those involved in it. For those looking on, it is food. Eurasianism has the initiative, while the West reacts.
The Eurasian Question, then, is not whether this ideology will shake the world. That is already baked into the cake. The open question concerns China. In a re-ignited Hyperborean / Atlantean forever war, which way does China tilt?
For China, the ideological and geostrategic landscape opened by the Eurasian challenge to the present global order offers extraordinary leverage. A civilization that has long understood triangular diplomacy as the optimal context for the exercise of strategic intelligence can scarcely fail to find encouragement in this complex pattern of widening fractures. In comparison to the cramped and dangerous position of a world geostrategic challenger, that of a triangular balancer presents advantages that are difficult to over-estimate.
China cannot plausibly be described as an ‘Atlantean’ power (despite the great historical importance of its ‘Singlosphere‘). Yet, neither is it ‘Hyperborean’ in any persuasive sense. These options both belong to a dirempted Occident — understood according to an expansive, rather than Eurasian definition, attentive to common classical and Christian roots. The Eurasian mythos is not inherently Sino-sensitive. China’s moves will be made upon a still greater gaming table.
Both a (geographically) Eurasian and a Pacific-maritime power — already, perhaps, a super-power — China has free options within the conflicted global space that Dugin’s ideology so convincingly, or at least compellingly, portrays. The next stage of Chinese geopolitical evolution will occur within an environment of dynamic, triangular tensions. The course of the world depends upon how this opportunity is played.