​     In an interesting article published in the New York Times on July 23, Adam Tooze, an economic historian and Professor of History at Columbia University, maintains that “Trump is wrong about trade” when he calls the European Union a “foe,” because of “what they do to us in trade.”  Tooze writes:  “To think, as Mr. Trump appears to do, of nations locked in mortal economic rivalry shows a grave misunderstanding of how competition actually works in the global economy. Competition is, of course, an ordering principle. . . .  But the protagonists aren’t supposed to be states . . . , but businesses, investors and workers.”  The role of states, he maintains, is to sign treaties that regulate what preferences can be shown to national firms.  Neoliberalism, as he sees it, “creates the largest possible economic space for competition;” and in the European Union, “national preference is outlawed as far as possible.”  Such neoliberal principles have become entrenched in the world-economy in recent decades, such that there have emerged “transnational production systems that make nonsense of economic nationalism.”
 
      Tooze also believes that everyone, not only Trump. is confused about trade.  In spite of the integration of production and finance in the world-economy, there exists a cognitive dissonance.  “In the popular imagination and in the words of politicians, the world economy continues to be thought of like the World Cup: cosmopolitan and transnational, yet made up of discrete national teams competing for a single prize.”  Like Trump, European Council President Donald Tusk and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Tooze notes, speak of the world-economy as a competition among nations; as did Trump’s Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  Trump’s comments are upsetting, Tooze maintains, because he broke taboo by naming particular nations that are economic competitors to the USA, and by threatening to rupture the liberal order with a U.S. policy of economic nationalism.  He writes:

      Tooze does not mention the fact that the rules of the liberal order favor those corporations and nations with economic advantages, reinforcing a tendency of the world-system to increasing inequality.  The system could tolerate this defect as long as it could continually expand, which it did on the basis of the conquest of new lands and peoples, incorporating more cheap labor, raw materials, and markets into the system, combined with a tendency for higher wages of workers in the core regions.  But when the world-system reached the geographical limits of the earth, and overextended its ecological limits, it could no longer expand in the same way and at the same rate.  Symptoms of its unsustainability emerged: deterioration of small-scale rural production, urban overpopulation, widespread extreme poverty, uncontrolled internal and international migrations, and forms of political and criminal violence without precedent.  The post-1980 neoliberal turn did not alleviate these symptoms, but exacerbated them. 
 
       Meanwhile, the United States has experienced an economic decline relative to Europe since the 1960s, giving rise to the need for protectionist policies.  The U.S. power elite, however, has not addressed the problem.  Economic, fiscal, and taxing policies have favored factory relocation, foreign investment, and financial speculation, rather than investment in production and in communities that were dependent on old industries.  The power elite looked at the problem only from the point of view of its particular interests, rather than taking into account the long-term economic health of the nation.  As a result, the people feel betrayed, a situation that Trump has been able to exploit.
 
      The need for economic protectionism is hardly unknown to the great majority of the peoples of the world, whose nations of the world are among the disadvantaged.  They were put in this position by nearly five centuries of actions and policies that violated liberal principles, often proclaimed by those who carried them out: military conquest and occupation, control of economies through colonial domination, and penetration of economies through imperialism and the shoring-up of subordinate national elites.  When the colonized peoples attained voice in global affairs, they declared the need for a world-system based on principles different from domination and superexploitation.  Accordingly, the 1974 UN General Assembly declaration of a New International Economic Order envisioned a world in which sovereign states would protect their national industries and their national currencies and would seek mutually beneficial trade with other states.  The 1980 neoliberal turn dashed these hopes, as the global powers severely reduced the already limited sovereignty of the disadvantaged nations.  However, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, the Non-Aligned Movement has reemerged to reaffirm the alternative principles that are the foundation of the proposal for a New International Economic Order.  The governments of the Non-Aligned Movement, representing three quarters of humanity, consistently have rejected the liberal order that Tooze and Merkel defend.  They believe that economic nationalism, combined with mutual respect and a spirit of internationalism, is necessary for the future of humanity.
 
       The vision of the New International Economic Order differs from tendencies in Western Marxism, anarchism, and utopianism, in which national identities are viewed as a manifestation of backward and/or ethnocentric consciousness.  The Third World project envisioned not a utopian order without nations, but a world-system in which the sovereign rights and self-determination of all nations is respected.  Although appropriating important concepts from Marxism, the Third World project did not fall into the error of underappreciating the importance of national identity among their peoples.  In the Third World revolutions and social movements, Marxism was synthesized with nationalist visions, on the basis of which the sovereignty and the dignity of the nation was constituted as the underlying, unifying principle.  This stands in contrast to the ideological situation in the global North, where Leftist ideas could attain limited influence among the peoples, in part because they lacked full appreciation of the importance of national identities.  Consequently, Leftist intellectuals and organizations have not been prepared politically or ideologically to respond effectively to neoliberal globalism. 
 
       But neither do the neoliberal defenders of a corporate dominated international order with limited states appreciate the significance of national identities.  The defenders of the post-1980 globalized neoliberal order offend the peoples of the world by implicitly dismissing their nationalist and patriotic sentiments as parochial survivals of an earlier era; and by limiting the role of the states, which constitute the most effective political voice of the peoples. 
 
     The global neoliberal project has given rise to different ideological dynamics in different zones of the world-economy.  In the North, myopic forms of nationalism have emerged, provoking an intense political conflict between right-wing nationalism and neoliberal globalism, with the Left at the margins.  In the South, anti-imperialist Third World nationalism has emerged to challenge the globalized neoliberal order on the basis of the rights of the nations to sovereignty and the rights of peoples to economic and social development, with the imperialist governments of the North waging unconventional war in defense of its specific interests.  In the political conflicts of the South, the anti-imperialist Left occasionally notes and cheers on the Leftist popular protests of the North, without necessarily appreciating the limited political effectiveness of these protest actions.  In these global ideological dynamics, both the myopic nationalism of the North and the anti-imperialist nationalism of the South reject the assumptions of the globalized neoliberal order. 
 
      Trump, therefore, should not be dismissed as one who does not understand how competition in the world-economy works.  It is not wrong for the President of the United States, or for the chief of state of any nation, to seek beneficial terms of trade for companies based in the nation, or to protect national industries through tariffs.  Trump does not appear to understand, however, that states should protect their national economies in the context of appreciation of the importance and sustainability of the world-system as a whole.  States should defend their national economies not by aggressively pursuing economic interests, as do imperialist policies, but by seeking mutually beneficial trade with other nations, and by cooperating with other states in the development of a world-system that is just, democratic, and sustainable. 
 
      Such a vision of a cooperative world-system has been proclaimed by the Third World nations for more than fifty years, and it is the vision proclaimed by the foreign policy of China, as it seeks mutually beneficial trade with all regions of the world.  For this reason, Tooze is very concerned about China.  He does not express awareness that China is seeking ascent in the world-economy in accordance with rules different from previous cases of ascent in the modern world-economy; and that as it ascends, China is seeking to transform the rules of the world-system itself, basing them on cooperation, rather than domination and superexploitation.  But Tooze does recognize that the integration of China into the world-economy has not had the consequences that were anticipated in the 1990s.  He writes:

​      Perhaps in the 1990s Western politicians and economists did not understand the logic and aspirations of the Chinese socialist project, which has sought to construct socialism with Chinese characteristics, including space for foreign and domestic capital in a national economy regulated by the state.  Now, concerned with this “fearsome prospect,” Tooze hopes that Europe will take steps to address its trade surplus with the United States, so that the two can function as allies to block the ascent of China.  In effect, he is calling on the nations of the North to defend the liberal order against the efforts to construct an alternative world-system from below, in which the role of states as formulators of national social and economic development projects and as regulators of their national economies would be the international norm.
 
      If the peoples of the nations of the North were to understand the issue in these terms, perhaps they would be less inclined to wage unconventional war against those who have less and are seeking a better deal, and more inclined to favor the cooperative approach of China and the Third World.  The vision of China and the Third World recognizes that the world-system, constructed on a foundation of conquest and domination, has reached its economic limits, because it has reached and overextended the geographical and ecological limits of the earth.  The unsustainability of a world-system driven since 1980 by the aggressive imposition of liberal principles is symbolized most clearly by such phenomena as uncontrollable international migration, terrorism, and criminal violence.  In contrast, the possibilities for the future are indicated by the pragmatic socialist policies of nations like China, Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua, which have registered important gains in the construction of viable national projects.  Their delegates display dignified comportment in international fora, calling the nations and peoples of the world to the construction of a more just, democratic, and sustainable world-system.  Let us learn to listen to that voice, which expresses the essential dignity of the human species in its hour of crisis.

​      The modern world-system was constructed on a foundation of European conquest of vast regions of the earth (see the category World-System), and its essential economic structures were preserved in the twentieth century transition to neocolonialism, conceded by the colonial powers to the anti-colonial movements that had emerged in what the movements called the Third World (see the category Neocolonialism).  Accordingly, competition among empires, or competing imperialisms, has been and continues to be an integral component of the modern world-system.
 
      In the first place, there were the European colonial empires, larger and smaller.  Spain and Portugal took the lead in the sixteenth century, conquering the indigenous empires and nations of the “New World”, and establishing the basis for the first structures of a capitalist world-economy, in which the peripheral regions provided forced and cheap labor, raw materials, and markets for surplus goods.  Benefitting from the Iberian conquest, Holland was a financial center during the seventeenth century, but its territorial control was limited.  During the geographical expansion of the capitalist world-economy during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, England and France, which also had benefitted from the Iberian conquest, conquered vast regions of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, again in pursuit of forced and cheap labor, raw materials, and markets.  Germany and Italy, late in their unification as nation-states, had smaller colonial empires, as did Belgium. 
 
      In the forging of a world-system on a foundation of competing colonial empires, the Japanese, Russian, and American empires were special cases.  The Japanese and the Russian empires were both of regional scope, to a considerable extent confining their domination to their geographical regions, although both did confront American expansionism in the Pacific.  In the case of the American Empire, there were considerable ideological constraints to expansionism beyond the North American continent, such that the United States was oriented to economic and financial penetration, buttressed by military occupation, with indirect political rule, supporting client states in the peripheral zones.  This form of imperialism served the United States well during the twentieth century, because it was well suited to the global transition to neocolonialism.
 
      The Chinese Empire was a particular case.  The Chinese Empire was forged in ancient times by conquest and domination, providing the foundation for an advanced Chinese civilization.  However, the dynasties of ancient China extended their reach not by military domination or political control, but through commerce; and China did not participate in the forging of the modern world-system as one of several competing imperialisms.  To the contrary, China was invaded by the expansionist European empires, and it was compelled to make damaging economic concessions to the European powers and to Japan.  Such that during the course of the nineteenth century, China had become an underdeveloped country, and one of the poorest nations of the world.  The Chinese socialist revolution was forged in reaction to this national loss of honor and international prestige.  Its triumph in 1949 made possible the establishment of the definitive independence of China, on a socialist foundation, during the period 1949 to 1978.  From 1978 to the present, China, continuing on a socialist foundation, has reinserted itself into the capitalist world-economy with terms much more advantageous to the economic development of the nation, thus facilitating its ascent.
 
      All cases of ascent in the modern world-system have their unique characteristics.  But the recent ascent of China departs in fundamental ways from the norm, because it is not based on military domination, direct or indirect political control, or the superexploitation of peripheral regions.  As it ascends, China seeks to redefine the rules of the world-system and the rules of ascent.  Its foreign policy recognizes that the neocolonial world-system is not sustainable, and that human economic and social development can no longer proceed on a foundation of conquest, domination, and superexploitation, but on a foundation of cooperation and mutually beneficial trade.  China thus is forging alliance with the Third World governments and regional groups of nations, such as the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.  It is reaffirming the basic principles and concepts of the New International Economic Order, developed by the Non-Aligned Movement, and endorsed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1974, with the support of the socialist nations of the era (see the categories Third World, South-South Cooperation, and China).
 
      Russia also has been moving toward cooperation with the Third World, most clearly indicated by its participating in BRICS with China and by its policies and relations with respect to Syria, Iran, and Cuba.
 
      Thus, throughout its history, the modern world-system has been characterized by competing imperialisms, with shifting alliances among the empires.  During the territorial expansion and spectacular ascent of the United States, it forged what came to be known as the American Empire.  During the U.S. westward expansion of the nineteenth century, the emerging American Empire was in conflict and competition principally with the English, French, and Spanish empires, attaining territories that all had claimed.  During the course of the twentieth century, with the reach of the European and American empires global in scope, American imperialism was for the most part allied with English and French imperialisms, while on the other hand, it entered into alternating moments of alliance and conflict with the German, Russian (Soviet), and Japanese empires.  At the present time, in the context of the sustained structural crisis of the world-system, the major competing imperialisms are the American, German, British, and French, with Russia also present, but tending to ally with the new actor, China, which is seeking to ascend without imperialist policies.
 
      Into this scenario enters Donald Trump.  He took the presidency at a time in which the United States of America had declined from its hegemonic position of the 1950s.  Its overspending for military and consumer goods in relation to its actual productive and commercial capacity stimulated its relative decline.  It continues to be the world’s largest economy, but it no longer is the most competitive economy, and its international prestige has suffered enormous erosion since 1965.  In response to this relative economic decline and erosion of international prestige, and taking a political slogan that dates to the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Trump arrived to power on a promise of making America great again.
 
     Part of the Trump plan for a restoration of national greatness is a realignment of the competing imperialisms, a changing of the alliances and axes of opposition among the imperialisms.  The Trump realignment plan identifies China as the emerging threat to what remains of U.S. hegemony.  There is no sign that the Trump administration discerns that China is a double threat.  Not only is China seeking to capture a higher percentage of the world’s production, commerce, and influence.  It also seeks structural change in the world-system itself, seeking to establish new international norms of cooperation and mutual respect.  This represents a serious threat for the United States, because the Chinese project of ascent implies a mode of international relations for which the USA is ill prepared, having invested considerable resources in the preservation of its military domination, in order to preserve its advantage in the neocolonial world-system, in accordance with the established rules.
 
        The Trump administration appears to perceive China as a threat in the established form of competing empires, even though China was not among the competing imperialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The Trump strategy appears to be the forging of an alliance among the major imperialisms against China, retarding its economic ascent.  For the moment, the strategy appears to be keeping the UK and Japan on board in an American-led anti-Chinese alliance, and trying to coopt Russia into the project. 
 
       The current tension with Germany and France reflects their overly competitive economic position vis-à-vis the United States, and their interest in a European-led anti-Chinese alliance.  However, in spite of this competition for a dominant position, the elites of both the United States and Western Europe assume a common interest in preserving the US-European centered neocolonial world-system, and in blocking the ascent of China, especially as a potential hegemon in an alternative world-system.  This common European-American interest has been evident since the onset of the sustained structural crisis of the world-system in the 1970s.  Since that time, the European Union and the UK, like the United States, have demonstrated their commitment to the preservation of the core-peripheral relation of the North with the vast regions of the Third World, and to the established neocolonial world-system, imposing draconian neoliberal measures in pursuit of this goal.  They have brushed aside persistent Third World calls for a more just and sustainable world order as unworkable and/or unimportant.
 
      So the question really is whether the USA, the UK, and the European Union can overcome their competitive differences and can coopt Japan and Russia into an alliance that would commercially isolate China and brake its ascent, before China can forge with the Third World and Russia  (and possibly Japan) an alternative, more just and sustainable world-system, based on cooperation.  Both Japan and Russia, with historical trajectories of regional rather than global imperialisms, which at important historic moments were excluded from power in the European-centered world-economy, will hear calls for cooperation with China and the Third World in their national debates. 
 
       The global realignment sought by Trump, in conjunction with his economic nationalism and xenophobic pronouncements, has provoked as strong reaction among certain sectors of the elite.  There appears to be a civil war within the U.S. power elite, with some sectors of the major news media virulently criticizing the President.  One would think that the military-industrial complex, which is the strongest part of the U.S. economy, would be in the President’s camp, given his escalation of the military budget and his ideological identification of enemies, such as China, foreign terrorists, and immigrants.  On the other hand, a sector of the U.S. elite is comfortable with the global neoliberal order that has been evolving since 1980, even though it has resulted in a continued decline in the U.S. economy, its international prestige, and the standard of living for those in the bottom half.

​     In his recent visit to the United Kingdom, Donald Trump undiplomatically criticized Prime Minister Theresa May’s management of Brexit.  He supported Boris Johnson, who had resigned as Foreign Minister of May’s government.  Johnson favors a “hard Brexit,” involving a complete break with the European Union and a new beginning for trade negotiations with European nations; in opposition to May’s more pragmatic “soft Brexit,” which maintains many of the rules of the European Union, even as the UK exits the Union. 
 
     William Davies writes that the conflict involving “hard Brexit” versus “soft Brexit” concerns the nature of political power.  The hard Brexiteers distrust government in the form that it has evolved.  Davies maintains that governments today are characterized by dependence on technical and bureaucratic means to implement policies, and on data gathering and regulation to enforce them.  In his view, the hard Brexiteers imagine the restauration of popular sovereignty over government, without the mediation of bureaucratic officials, technicians, and professionals.  Davies sees such popular resentment of the contemporary form of government as central to the recent emergence of reactionary populism in the core nations of the world-economy.  He writes:

     What Davies writes is true, but it is not the whole story.  It is true, as Davies implies, that the people do not have sufficient appreciation of the necessary complexities of government, and conservative politicians are able to exploit this to undermine “the very possibility of workable government.” However, popular rejection of government itself (and of all politicians who play by the established political rules) is fueled also by popular awareness of the fact that elite actors always are present in the established political process to defend their particular interests, often with little concern for the people or the nation.  The problem, therefore, is not only the unavoidable complexity of the process, but also the ever-present elite, guiding and manipulating the process in accordance with its interests.  With the bureaucrats, technicians, and professionals, on the one hand, and the elite, on the other, who is present as a delegate of the people?
 
     We also should be aware that the elite has deliberately promoted the false concept of a limited state since 1980.  Prior to that time, the concept of the limited role of government had been present only as a declining secondary ideological tendency, as a result of elite support for Keynesian economic policies.  However, with the first signs of the profound structural crisis of the world-system and the relative decline of the hegemonic neocolonial power in the 1970s, the elite turned to a global neoliberal project.  It sought to reduce the role of the state in the core economies as well as in the neocolonies of the Third World, in order to reverse the recent tendency toward declining rates of profits.  It thus launched an ideological attack on the state, ignoring the necessary role of government in modern complex economies and societies.  This dissemination of the anti-governmental ideology generated confusion among the peoples of North America and Europe.
 
      Furthermore, we should be aware of the failure of the Left in response to the post-1980 ideological attack on the state.  The US and European Left should have been present with an alternative narrative that included, among other elements, a clear explanation to the people of the necessary role of government in modern complex societies.  In the case of the United States, the alternative narrative would have drawn upon the historical popular movements of various sectors of the people, including workers, farmers, blacks, and women, all of which formulated important analyses.  Such an alternative narrative, if historically informed, could have critiqued the turn of the national elite to monopoly capitalism and imperialism in the period 1865 to 1914, which became the basis for elite direction of world affairs during the course of the twentieth century.  And such an alternative narrative, if informed by the popular movements and revolutions of the nation as well as of other lands, could have been able to promote an alternative concept of popular democracy, based on the principles of citizen participation, protection of the social and economic rights of all persons, and respect for the sovereignty of all nations.  Of course, to be politically effective, such an alternative narrative of the Left would have had to be sensitive to the values, sentiments, and concerns of the people, treating with intelligent sensibility any issues that are divisive among the people.
 
       With the failure of the Left in the United States and Europe to offer a comprehensive and politically effective alternative narrative, the ideological terrain has been left open to myopic nationalisms of all stripes to fill the void created by the increasingly delegitimated globalized centrist liberalism.  We have arrived to a point where public “debate” is reduced to superficial conflict between centrist liberalism and the Right.  Having not formulated a politically effective narrative, the Left is confined to organizing protests with respect to particular issues, thus demonstrating to the people its incapacity to lead the peoples and the nations of the North in an alternative direction.
 
       In the context of the sustained and profound structural crisis of the world-system and the absence of a politically effectively and scientifically sound proposal, the Left must reconsider its approach.  The Left should establish an alternative political power that formulates and disseminates manifestos and platforms that are responsible and that garner political support and that expects its members to be continually educating themselves.  The alternative political party should use the established structures of representative democracy to take political power in the name of the people, even as it criticizes representative democracy as a democracy in appearance but not in substance.  It should promise to seek structural reforms in the political process, working toward the development of an alternative process in which power is in the hands of the people’s delegates, who would direct necessarily bureaucratic and complex states in accordance with the interests of the people.  Our message to the people should be that complex, bureaucratic governments are unavoidable, but indifference to the needs of the people is not.

​     Twenty-eight years ago, Donald Trump expressed in a Playboy interview that the United States was stupid for spending for the military defense of Europe, when the European nations were not spending sufficiently for their own defense.  At a July 18 NATO meeting in Brussels, now President Trump expressed this belief in undiplomatic and sometimes careless language, castigating the European allies, particularly Germany, for not contributing more to the military defense of Europe.
 
     The workings of NATO have historic roots.  The North Atlantic Alliance between the United States and Europe was established in 1949, a time in which the United States possessed hegemonic dominance of the capitalist world-economy, enjoying a substantial productive, commercial, financial, and military advantage over all nations, even the more advanced European economies. Moreover, it was a time in which the prevailing Cold War ideology falsely defined the Soviet Union as an expansionist threat to Western civilization.  US foreign policy sought to extend and deepen its reach in a world-system that was in transition to neocolonialism; and as dimension of this, it sought to contain Soviet influence in the Third World.  Given the assumptions of US foreign policy at the time, the NATO alliance, with nearly total military and financial dependency on the United States, had advantages for the USA.  In the first place, it ensured the expansion of the military-industrial complex, on which the US economy had become dependent. Secondly, US military support made it possible for the European nations to focus on the rebuilding of their economies, thus increasing their capacity to serve as a consumer market for US products.  Thirdly, US global military presence, with military bases in Europe and in all regions of the world, guaranteed US dominance in international affairs.
 
      However, by the 1970s, the situation had changed.  The European economies, especially Germany, had become effective competitors to the United States, such that many European goods were marketed in the USA, and the United States began to have a balance of payments deficits.  In addition, the United States had become overextended with respect to military expenditures, principally because of the Vietnam War.  As a result, adjustments were made in the 1970s, particularly in the form of the devaluation of the dollar through the elimination of the gold standard.  However, the adjustments were insufficient for the new situation.  The United States continued to overspend on the military, relative to its actual productive capacity, including its disproportionate financing of NATO.  The European allies gradually contributed more, but much less than what the evolving situation required.
 
      Accordingly, it can reasonably be said, as Trump implies, that the US power elite has failed since the 1970s to defend US economic interests vis-à-vis Europe.  Trump was right when he declared in his undiplomatic discourse that no previous US president dared to speak to the allies in such a form.  If we accept the premise that Europe needs a strong military defense, he was right in maintaining that the European allies should pay more.  No doubt, many of his followers in the United States were delighted to see him set diplomacy aside and speak publicly in defense of the interests of the nation in a form unprecedented in the history of the North Atlantic Alliance.
 
     However, the debate occurs in the context of a limited and narrow frame reference.  It ignores another dynamic that has been unfolding since the 1970s, namely, the growing signs of the unsustainability of the world-system in the form in which it is presently structured.  The root of the problem is that the world-system has overreached the geographical limits of the earth, eliminating the possibility for productive and commercial expansion of the world-economy through the conquest of new lands and peoples, through which new sources of raw materials, cheap labor, and markets were acquired.  At the same time, the previously conquered peoples have increased their political capacity to resist and structurally transform the world-system, which has evolved to a neocolonial world-system.  In light of these dynamics, the world-system is increasingly making evident its economic, ecological, and political unsustainability, in the form in which it is presently structured.   
 
     The profound structural crisis of the world-system and the relative decline of the hegemonic neocolonial power require enlightened world leadership.  They require a reformulation of the necessary direction of humanity.  Whereas the world-system has been established on a foundation of conquest forged by competing empires, the future direction of humanity must be forged on a fundamentally different foundation of mutually beneficial international cooperation, if global chaos is to be avoided. 
 
      We have, therefore, a situation in which the leaders of the world are unprepared to attend to the issues of importance to humanity.  The situation requires lifting up of new leaders by popular movements, leaders who are prepared morally and intellectually to lead the peoples of the world on the necessary road.  This alternative direction is being constructed in theory and practice by the progressive and socialist governments and movements of the Third World, with the cooperation of China and Russia (see various posts in the categories Third World and South-South Cooperation).