A World Without Values: How the New Geopolitics Replaces Ideas with Profit
On values, efficiency, and the new architecture of the world. We have entered an era where it is not about changing values, but about dismantling them.
Politics is increasingly becoming an accounting rather than an ideology. Whereas before they used to negotiate about rights, now they negotiate about shares and distribution. Where they used to argue about human dignity, they now divide infrastructure hubs and sign investment memorandums worth tens or hundreds of billions.
In this context, Trump's visits to the Middle East are not diplomacy, but an audit: who, how many, for what/for how much.
The civilizational discourse to which Trump sometimes (rather pro forma) appeals is not a philosophy, but the language of convenient non-interference. Under the pretext of respecting cultural differences, Western players are abandoning universalism in exchange for access to resource and capital flows.
You can ban women from leaving the house, but if you are willing to sign a contract worth tens of billions, you are a "stable and reliable partner." This is not 21st-century diplomacy, but a revival of the ancient principle: a barbarian can be anyone as long as he brings gold.
In this sense, the United States is more focused than before on the path that China is taking – working with elites, ignoring the masses, investing not in institutions but in those who control resources.
The only difference is that China has never pretended, and the United States has been playing with liberal rhetoric while funding politicians/regimes that publicly despise everything that supposedly constitutes the essence of the "cultural West" – freedom of speech, equality, minority rights.
The new architecture of the world is not based on the UN Charter, but on informal clubs, direct channels, and tacit guarantees. It has no place for universal justice. There is only room for pragmatism.
The only crime is to be inefficient, not to be integrated into the value chain, not to make a profit. The rest is a matter of taste and national flavor. If humanitarian ideology remains anywhere else, it is only as an accompanying material to export and commodity loans.
