A Sukhoi Su-35S military fighter jet performs during the International Military-Technical Forum "Army 2022" at Kubinka military training ground in Moscow, Russia, August 18, 2022. /CFP
Editor's note: Andrew Korybko is a Moscow-based American political analyst. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.
Russia plans to host multilateral military drills in its Far East region from September 1 to 7 that will include the participation of China, India, and several other countries. The Collective West, which in this context also includes Asian countries like nearby Japan, shouldn't overreact to these upcoming exercises. They aren't aimed against any third parties, don't imply any sort of mutual defense commitments between their participants, and are Russia's international legal right to hold.
Nevertheless, mainstream media is making a major fuss about this. They're falsely presenting these drills as regionally destabilizing, especially after Tokyo protested Moscow's plan to conduct some exercises in territories that it claims as its own. Russian officials responded by condemning Japan's scheme to obtain a leading role in the global Russophobic movement, urging it to stop dismantling bilateral ties, and warning about U.S. attempts to encourage that island nation's remilitarization.
The truth is that Japan has no legitimate basis upon which to make its claims since they amount to nothing more than the American-encouraged revisionism of the outcome of World War II. The U.S. wants Japan to stir trouble not only with Russia, but also with China and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) so that the mainstream media can then reframe their justified reactions (be they through words and/or actions) as so-called "unprovoked aggression against a democracy."
The purpose behind this perception management operation is to artificially manufacture the false pretext for further encouraging Japan's regional troublemaking and remilitarization in a way that's acceptable to their targeted audiences. If the U.S. openly supported these destabilizing and illegal trends without Japan having first provoked responses from those regional countries, then the entire world would unite in condemning this unilateral disruption of the status quo.
Instead, the mainstream media's overreaction to Russia's upcoming drills – which are but the latest example of them reframing a regional country's international legal right after having earlier twisted the DPRK's right to self-defense and most recently China's military exercises in the Taiwan Strait – serve to scare folks into supporting Japan's unprovoked acts of U.S.-backed aggression due to the false perception that they're supposedly Tokyo's "right to self-defense as a democracy."
A soldier looks through binoculars during combat exercises and training of the navy of the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People's Liberation Army in the waters around Taiwan Island, China, August 5, 2022. /Xinhua
This information warfare narrative also carries with it some additional innuendo for advancing America's strategic aims. Russia, China, and the other countries that participate in these upcoming drills are smeared as the ones that are unilaterally disrupting the regional status quo even though this role falls flatly on the U.S. and its regional allies' laps like Japan. This twisted interpretation of events reinforces earlier propaganda campaigns that paint those states as enemies of the "rules-based order."
About that, this concept is nothing more than high-sounding rhetoric for unconvincingly disguising the arbitrary implementation of double standards intended to advance America's strategic interests at others' expense. The genuine rules-based order enshrined in the UN Charter is precisely what the U.S. and its regional allies like Japan are trying to dismantle because sincerely abiding by these consensually agreed-upon standards would accelerate the decline of America's unipolar hegemony.
They can't openly proclaim this goal though since it would confirm that they're all rogue states. That's why they resort to provoking others like Russia, China and the DPRK into reacting to their unilateral acts of aggression in order for the mainstream media to subsequently spin their responses in ways that mislead their targeted audiences into supporting their self-interested destabilizing agenda. As an added touch, they never fail to smear those countries as so-called autocracies and/or dictatorships.
The only objectively existing "autocracy"/"dictatorship" in the world is the U.S. since it's going against the will of the international community as enshrined in the UN Charter that America itself at one time agreed to in order to impose its zero-sum policies onto all others. Be that as it is, by falsely reframing the dynamics through the earlier-mentioned means and adding misleading labels to its victims, the U.S. is trying to transform its geopolitical agenda into a moral crusade for public consumption.
After all, average folks across the world don't usually keep up all that much with foreign affairs, let alone have expertise in covering some of its most sensitive dimensions. They all, however, feel strongly about whatever they conceive in their own minds to be fair and just causes. These well-intended motivations are maliciously manipulated by the U.S. to mislead its targeted audience into supporting its geopolitical agenda on an artificially manufactured moral basis.
No decent person could ever in good conscience support any member of the international community aggressively seeking to unilaterally revise the same standards that everyone agreed to through the UN Charter in order to advance its zero-sum interests at everyone else's expense. That's why internationally legal and peaceful developments by Russia, China, the DPRK, and others are twisted as "unprovoked and destabilizing acts of aggression against democracy" as part of the U.S.' efforts to gin up global support.
With this in mind, it makes perfect sense why the mainstream media is manipulating perceptions about Russia's upcoming multilateral military drills in the Far East, especially after the U.S.' Japanese ally protested them on an illegitimate basis. It's all about misleading the global public into supporting the declining unipolar hegemon's rogue and increasingly dangerous grand strategy of dividing and ruling Eurasia, but the U.S. is doomed to fail no matter how desperately its media proxies lie to everyone.
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