Putin Has Been Humiliated Into A Vassal Of Xi
- 14.09.2025, 11:41
Russia is becoming a cog in the global system.
In Homo Deus, Israeli visionary Harari articulated a transitional process that changed humanity's horizons: having conquered hunger, disease and war, it dared for the first time to set the goal not of survival but of prolonging life and even immortality. This goal ceased to be a metaphor and became a new arena of competition.
"We seem to have lost India and Russia to China, the darkest and most bottomless. May they have a long and prosperous future together!", - President Donald J. Trump.
"Homo sapiens is about to turn into Homo Deus, but who will be gods and who will be mortals?", - Juval Noah Harari.
It is telling that the behind-the-scenes conversation between Si Jinping and Vladimir Putin, "accidentally" overheard by journalists, was not at all about nuclear war or armaments, but about life expectancy: "seventy years old is still a boy", "one should live to one hundred and fifty".
According to Peter Sauer, dictators have long thought of endless rule, which is deeply rooted in Chinese tradition, and in European tradition as well - Silvio Berlusconi was not alone in his quest to prolong life and also dreamed of living exactly 150 years. Symbolically, the parade of the power that brings death and the talk about immortality were side by side, like two points of support for future confrontation: one foot, trembling, presses the nuclear button, the other shuffles, looking for longevity.
So our present has become not an abstract dream of a philosopher, but a political field where two approaches collide: the right - through technology, humanism and knowledge; the left - through control, transplantation and exploitation of other people's bodies.
China is the new center of gravity, while Russia has become for it... the GDR?
The victory parade in Beijing, held on September 3, 2025, vividly highlighted the shift in geopolitics. Xi Jinping, accompanied by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, commanded the parade, while before him and two billion television viewers unfolded: nuclear triad in full force, the latest hypersonic missiles, drones with artificial intelligence, laser and microwave weapons, combat robots ... The parade became a symbol not just of China's military might and readiness for future wars, as emphasized by former U.S. Navy intelligence chief Admiral Mike Studeman, but also a demonstration of the logic of the new world order.
In the Kabbalistic tradition, difference arises where properties diverge: as long as they coincide, there is commonality; when they diverge, there is duality. China demonstrates exactly such properties: discipline, control, harmony through submission and fear.
West, on the contrary, continues to broadcast the opposite qualities - openness, creation, scientific research, humanism. The poles are formed not because of geography or military arithmetic, but because of opposing qualities, and this is what makes the parade in Beijing something much more than a show: a ritual act of enshrining the left line, the line of force and restriction, against the right line of humanism, knowledge and freedom.
Russia, one of the many countries invited by Emperor Xi to join the new global pole, has at the same time completed the journey from sovereignty to vassalage and fulfillment of the role of East Germany, a key proxy for the USSR in the Warsaw Pact alliance. The former global pole called the USSR shared the fate of the former global pole called Prussia: most of the territory (Russia as the GDR) became the executor of the geopolitical plans of the new pole.
The USSR was the center of real attraction not only because of its nuclear arsenal, but also because of the "double belt" - the fifteen republics and the "Warsaw Pact"; Moscow was the capital of the "second world", an alternative to the first, free world, i.e. the West. Today's Russia has no external circuit, no ability to dictate or export rules, and the attempt to create such a circuit out of Ukraine has left Russia in the position of a proxy, dependent on Beijing's support.
At the same time, Russia has become like Iran: both are resource hubs that feed the Chinese center, and both are sources of irritation for the West. Harari's allegory is more than apt here: a fly is not capable of destroying a shop, but once in the ear of a bull, it drives it mad, and the shop is destroyed by the bull. That's how terrorist regimes operate, and that's how Russia and Iran are embedded in China's strategy today - they create noise, provoke the West to spend its energy putting out fires (in Iran's case, its proxies like the Husites and Hamas), distracting it from the future and from the real threat posed by China.
Such is the meaning this parade has taken on.
America's retreat creates a vacuum
There is a fundamental idea in Kabbalah: everything in the world rests on two lines, the right and the left. These are two sides of the same coin, two paths that manifest themselves in every phenomenon. The right line is associated with creation, giving, striving for harmony and knowledge; the left line is associated with power, control, egoistic retention.
When we talk about today's bipolarity in the world, we see the same structure at the political level: the Western world embodies the properties of the right line, building technology for the sake of health and happiness, while authoritarian regimes reach for the left line, where fear, power and the use of man as a resource prevail. And they have different logics: the Western right line is the path of knowledge, technology and humanism, here Ray Kurzweil and his "singularity", Google and Calico researching aging, CRISPR and regenerative medicine labs, the Epicurean tradition for which the highest good is to reduce suffering; the "Eastern" left line is the path of extraction: Life extension through other people's bodies, transplantology without ethics, violent organ removal, control as an end in itself and the introduction of self-control.
In the Western tradition, man remains a subject, even when his body becomes an object of research; in the Chinese-authoritarian tradition, he becomes a resource, a spare part, a means.
It is here that the Homo Deus watershed passes: who will become gods, and who will remain expendable for someone else's immortality. And it is not a fact that the right line is winning today, because there is no unity among those who lead it.
An unfortunate example: On September 4, 2025, talks were held between Donald Trump and the leaders of Europe - Zelensky, Macron and von der Leyen - and they revealed serious disagreements because Europe does not have the strength to contain Russia on its own. Not only that, but the U.S. will begin phasing out security assistance programs for Eastern European countries. This means that as early as next year Washington will stop funding projects to train and equip armies, primarily in the Baltic states, which will be on the front lines in the event of an armed conflict with Russia. Europe now wants clarification from Washington as to what this will all look like - especially as the threat is growing, take the quadrupling of the number of Russian attacks on European infrastructure (2024 data)! The confusion is also supported by the underlying nudging from Beijing: China is taking advantage of the moment to woo Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia with the "One Belt, One Road" program, promising "stability" and investment to these countries - instead of freedom.
The projection of power through data management technologies
The divided future exposes a major philosophical question: what are technologies created for?
In the West, they are created for health, happiness, freedom from pain and anxiety, for the reduction of suffering, as Epicurus and Jeremiah Bentham said.
In China and its entourage, they are for stability, loyalty and endless controllability, for the substitute of happiness in the form of silence and submission.
Symbolism has also diverged: the parade with its ironclads, marches and announcers' baritones is the language of the past, the theater of fear and discipline, while the laboratory, the conference, the aging database is the language of the future; yes, the hopeless boredom of protocols, but it is this boredom that creates the possibility of living longer without taking life from others. And already Harari's concept of "dataism," where control over information equals superiority, is finding its way into China's strategy and practice.
The robotic precision of the parade and Xi's call for a "shared future" underscore Beijing's export of surveillance systems, social credit mechanisms, and "sovereign" social networks to Russia and Iran (at a minimum) and ensure loyalty, creating a bloc incompatible with the West's democratic ethos. Russia, fighting in Ukraine with the help of North Korean troops and Chinese drone components, and Iran with its Islamic proxies are increasing China's influence through economic leverage and the extraction of resources China needs, replicating the ideological power of the past USSR, but with the unprecedented power of 21st century technology. The main production facility for this power is China, as Admiral Stavridis emphasizes, drawing attention to the SCO summit's decision to create a focal point for AI development.
Divided Future
The right line, the West, is unfortunately in disarray today, on pause, and the longer it lasts, the more the left pole will grab for itself in the new world. As America retreats, China's technopole is rising, projecting the Homo Deus of algorithmic dominance, and America's withdrawal from global proactivity only worsens the situation. One pole lives on constant investment in knowledge, institutions, rules and values - and on trust; as soon as this energy wanes, a vacuum is created, which is immediately filled from the other pole with parades, censorship, proxy wars - and fear. The left axis consolidates its future role more and more quickly, although it does not offer a positive image of the future, but only blocks other people's possibilities.
The existence of two poles today is not fixed by leading analysts, for example Vladislav Inozemtsev believes that it is premature to discuss the bipolarity of the new world. But it seems to us that Harari's question - "who will be gods and who will be mortals?" - takes on a threatening urgency precisely today. China has long exported the idea (and technical means) of centralized control, surveillance, and resource extraction to its satellites and proxies. A metaphysical structure prioritizing the systemic characteristics of brute force is also evident in Chinese governance through systems of social credit, artificial intelligence-assisted monitoring, and economic dominance, ensuring that proxies adopt authoritarian norms incompatible with Western openness.
Trump's bitter lament that India and Russia are in fact already in China's "darkest" orbit is an unquestioned fixation on the biggest failure of a U.S. administration led by incompetent and unstable Will this vision of China seduce the global South, or will the West's fractured humanism be able to endure? The world is at a crossroads. There are many flags, but as before there are only two sources of gravity, and each attracts those who recognize in it "their" properties. This is how any creation works: it diverges into opposites when qualities diverge, and as long as they are antagonistic, the poles will exist. The question is whose properties will be more attractive to the world - the line of creation or the line of control, and whose immortality will be real, and whose will remain only an extension of the tyrants' lives at the expense of other people's dead and living bodies obtained during their barbaric wars.
Aaron Lea, Boruch Taskin, The Moscow Times