Shahid Bolsen | Middle Nation Geopolitics vs the Western Predator Mindset

If you read the standard, sort of canon of geopolitics, western geopolitics, it's all about states, it's all about militaries, arms races, intimidation, and so forth. Like in the Kissinger sort of tradition, geopolitics is the management of rivalry between so called great powers. Great powers. And their power and their greatness are being defined according to very basic, very primitive western terms. You understand?

Domination is the core issue in standard geopolitics, western geopolitics, you know. The world is a competition of power. Who will dominate this region or that region and so forth? And diplomacy is just sort of how you can achieve that through restricted or managed violence to enforce hierarchy. Morality is only a PR tool.

It's a packaging device. It's a sales pitch. But the real substance is cold calculation by sovereign states, trying to avoid loss of power, loss of prestige, and preserving their advantages. It continues the adversarial. Now if you look at someone like a George Friedman, for example, you get a kind of a deterministic narrative about geopolitics.

Geography is destiny. Nations behave like sort of geological forces. Their rivers, their planes, their choke points, all of these things according to Friedman pushes them into predictable patterns. The United States with an ocean on each side, it's fertile heartland, farmland is according to him structurally designed to be a dominant power. In in Friedman's model, it's sort of a permanently powerful model.

Crises may come and go, but everything all factors lead to Washington staying on top. It's a kind of a secular providence for American hegemony in Friedman's view. Then you go to people like Mackinder and Spikeman, and they have theories about the heartlands and the Mainlands and so forth, the control of the Eurasian core and its surrounding coastal belt. And if you can control that, you can control the world. Then Then you've got Huntington saying that Huntington's talking about civilizations colliding along cultural fault lines and so forth.

The the neorealists talk about an anarchic international system where states are all the same, in that they all just seek security under uncertainty. Now liberal theorists talk about institutions and interdependence and trying to use that to tame this this in this innate rivalry between states. And these are sort of the fundamental foundational concepts of western geopolitics or geopolitical theory. But I'm saying, and I have been saying, you cannot divorce all of these theories from western history and western culture. You understand?

Their views, the views that they present are all sort of, presented as if they are objective, semi scientific, just sort of conclusions about nature. But they're they're all deeply embedded in historical and cultural assumptions, western assumptions about what motivates human beings, what power even is, how you define what power is, and about how communities relate to one another, you know. It's all very embedded in Western thinking. In other words, as usual, they are universalizing their own peculiarities, the peculiarities of Western assumptions, they're universalizing these as natural facts that are applicable to the whole of humanity. And obviously they're completely Eurocentric assumptions, you know, taking the so called West as the basically the center of the world, the most important territory on the the Earth, and and that it's the job of the West to manage everyone else.

This is this is at the heart of their geopolitical thinking. And most importantly, and most crucially, it's a completely atheistic framework. Their framework of geopolitics assumes two major things. First, that God does not exist, and then all of the you have all of the associated repercussions of that assumption, that follow that assumption. And second, they assumed that human beings are nothing but highly evolved predatory animals.

Okay? These assumptions permeate and influence everything in their understanding of geopolitics, and obviously these assumptions are in throughout all of their fields of study. And obviously these assumptions are both entirely wrong and entirely self serving. So they begin from a place of dishonesty and they begin from a very skewed interpretation of how life works and about what life is. And of course, like I've talked about before, the mainstream theories of geopolitics, like I say, focus on states, exclusively on states, really.

They have no real acknowledgment of private sector power. This is a major flaw in their thinking. They work from really what is an obsolete model, where in their assumption the nation state is supreme and central, and that business is subordinate to government, which is no longer the case. Certainly, that's no longer the case in the West. And globally, the the truth of the matter is, as I've talked about many, many times, globally, private sector power operates untethered to states.

You understand? They they never acknowledge mainstream geopolitical analysts never acknowledge the presence of these non state actors and that they form a sort of parallel power structure that inordinately influences geopolitical realities in the world. They never really addressed that. Now, I'm not saying that this sort of, as I say, the canon of modern, geopolitical theory, western geopolitical theory. I'm not saying it's useless.

You know? You obviously do have to pay attention to geography. You do have to pay attention to state power. You do have to pay attention to, you know, institutional frameworks, cultural blocks, and so forth. Geography and demographics, you have to pay attention to location, obviously.

These are all essential factors that you have to consider in any analysis that you're doing geopolitically. But, you know, this is all very typical materialist, empiricist, surface level type of thing. You know, what you can see and hear and touch and so forth. It's really quite rudimentary if you think about it, simplistic. And, yes, they have they they have major blind spots, like I say.

And those blind spots are not just small details. They are structural errors in the way that they approach their analysis. Like I said, they treat the state like it's the final boss of world politics. In reality, by the late twentieth century and now in the twenty first century, a national corporate control, a national corporate capital has surpassed many states in functional power functional power. Financial conglomerates, tech platforms, arms industries, consulting firms, ratings agencies, lending institutions, obviously, transnational investors, They set constraints on what government can and cannot do.

That's a that's a reality. They finance the political class. They write the policy templates. They arbitrage whole jurisdictions. But modern geopolitical analysts still talk as if we're in the eighteen hundreds.

And in this atheistic materialistic framework, they treat morality as sort of an ideological story that societies just tell themselves that they need to believe for whatever reason. For them, it's purely cosmetic. Moral narratives are just propaganda for them. They don't take seriously that belief in justice, belief in peace, belief in harmony, or dignity, or honor can actually restructure what counts as interest for people, for a nation, and what price people are willing are willing to pay for that. And again, more importantly, they do not even believe that there even is a moral physics that governs creation because they don't believe in God.

They don't believe that God exists. So they don't think there's a moral architecture to the universe. They don't think that more more morality itself needs to be a strategic consideration except as a as a PR tool, like I say. But it absolutely does have to be a strategic consideration. You'll also notice that they have very little regard generally.

They have very little regard for history. You know, they treat history like it's just a library. It's not a living trauma that people are grappling with, that nations are grappling with. You know, they'll reference Versailles or Yalta or what have you, but they don't build a rigorous method for integrating what you can call the collective memory of people. The collective humiliation, the collective pride, into their predictive geopolitical and, analytical models.

The result is that for them, so called irrational decisions by societies that are under deep historical stress are just written off as mistakes instead of being modeled as the inevitable outcome, of long held, long stored grievances and aspirations. You know, if you put it in Western academic terms, then geopolitical analysis really should incorporate the study of anthropology, the field of anthropology. But of course, you know, ultimately this wouldn't help them because even their approach to anthropology is just as similarly biased as their approach to geopolitics, but you get my point. The history and the character of a people, are factors that influence geopolitical outcomes. It's not just materialism.

It's not. They treat the global order as if it must be managed by one single dominant power. Because as I've talked about, they still think of human beings as animals. Right? They think that morality is just decorative.

And they believe that people's natural state, they believe the natural state of people is conflict and strife. So, this is why you have Kissinger's conception that the world is a world that will just remain endlessly balancing nation states, so called great powers. And Friedman's world is a world in which the the the single permanent great power is America itself, and that their primacy is absolute even though there will be periodic turbulence. This is what these are paradigms that everyone has accepted in in mainstream geopolitics. The most furthest they'll go is is is to say that there could be alternate managers to the system, like, say, China, know, instead of America, or maybe a a a sort of multipolar concert instead of a a unipolar hegemon.

The horizon of their thinking can never extend beyond, you know, who holds the steering wheel of a of an intrinsically unjust world. Okay? They can't comprehend harmony, they can't comprehend mutual upliftment, they can't comprehend benefit for its own sake, mutual benefit for its own sake. Now the middle nation approach to geopolitics obviously starts from a very different place. We start from a very different place both analytically and obviously, theologically.

First, we acknowledge that power, power is not a metaphorical concept or a symbolic concept, it's a measurable concept and it is a concept within the context of relationships. Who can impose outcomes on whom? Who controls critical inputs? Who shapes the mental horizon of others? Who can act with impunity?

Who's replaceable? Who's trapped? Okay? That's what we formalize in the relative power index admonition. Decision authority, control of crucial resources and systems, narrative influence or narrative control, immunity to retaliation, adaptability, and then we offset that by degrees of dependence, what degree of dependence do you have, exposure to disruption, and the perception of weakness.

This can be applied now, only between states, but between states and corporations, between regimes and populations, between blocks and between movements and so forth. The nation state is not automatically the main character or the center of our analysis. Also, we treat history and we treat culture as real structural variables, not just background color, it's not just scenery. Societies carry wounds and they carry triumphs and they carry betrayals and they carry memories across generations and these become reflexes for that culture, for that people. A country that lived through colonial partition, for example, is going to tend to read every foreign so called security arrangement as a potential repeat episode, particularly when, former colonizers, who are involved in that security arrangement have completely remained unevolved and totally consistent in their own reflexes as they were at the time of the, colonial partition.

You understand? A community that values their own dignity is not going to accept permanent humiliation as a normal equilibrium. These are things you have to understand about people and about cultures. Concepts like honor, concepts like liberation, betrayal, covenant, like keeping your word, promises, sovereignty. These aren't just cultural factoids, they shape the fault lines and the endurance levels and the willingness of a people to accept short term loss for long term vindication.

This is the character of a people, how they think as a nation, and that makes them far more complex than most westerners ever realize. And of course in Middle Nation we sent a revelation as the unrivaled epistemic authority for us. It defines what's real, defines it what's real, it defines what's normal, it defines what's possible, it defines what is legitimate, what's valid. Western frameworks always assume that their own epistemology is is is neutral and universal and and unbiased and it's the baseline. Middle nation however treats western epistemic dominance as a historical artifact.

That's all that is. It's not a law of nature. And we anticipate and we are anticipating and that's part of what we're doing, the erosion of western epistemic dominance as civilizations decentered themselves and reclaimed the right to define truth themselves, justice themselves, rationality on their own terms. And part of this, part of our epistemic epistemological sovereignty is where we diverge, I think most sharply from western geopolitical models in that at Middle Nation we operate within an explicitly Islamic victorious narrative about the future and about history. That doesn't mean wishful thinking and it doesn't mean ignoring facts.

It means that we accept as a hard constraint of analysis that history is not just wandering aimlessly. It's moving towards the triumph of Tawhid, it's moving towards the triumph of justice, even if it goes through cycles of defeat and collapse and difficulty and so forth. The victorious retrospective analysis of Middle Nation asks us if we stand in a future where the Muslim world has recovered sovereignty and has fulfilled its civilizational role in this in humanity, so then how do we interpret present events as stages on that journey because that's what they are. What mechanisms, what alignments, what decisions have been made or are being made to contribute to that outcome and which decisions and so forth led nowhere and were not helpful towards that outcome. Okay.

This isn't just for sort of motivational purposes. This is literally grounded in our epistemology. This is rooted in revelation of Quran and sunnah. It's rooted in the knowledge that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala exists, and that human beings are not animals, and that there is a moral physics to the world and to the universe, to creation. And it's it's rooted in understanding that those who did defy such physics, they can't do so for long.

And those who align with the moral physics of the universe will inevitably and ultimately prevail. These are facts that we take as absolute. Western geopolitical theory assumes, even sometimes unconsciously, they assume the prominence, or at least the long duration of dominance of Western power. All of their modeling is done under that assumption. Middle nation, modeling does not assume that.

We assume that sooner or later the current configuration of Western supremacy, the current configuration of Western oligarchic corporate control will break and inevitably so. That's a different axiom and that produces different interpretations of risk, different interpretations of sacrifice and alliance and opportunity and so forth. Like I said, I don't treat western fields of study as if they're neutral, as if they're objective. No. They are absolutely riddled with fallacious assumptions, with biases and with usually extremely arrogant and self supremacist notions about themselves that are radically irrational.

We embed morality into the mechanics of decision analysis as a factor of reality. You understand? Instead of treating it as a as sort of a separate optional PR issue, morality isn't a PR issue. Now, the Middle Nation strategic probability index is built on the insight that actors don't only weigh costs and benefits in material terms, they also act under moral frameworks. They act under sort of stories of legitimacy that they tell themselves, and they act on the reality of the threat of divine punishment.

For Muslims, any action that violates clear ethical and moral boundaries. It may appear to be tactically attractive, but in reality, it erodes your barakah, it destroys your credibility, and it increases internal corruption, and it triggers a destructive feedback over time because you've earned the the wrath of Allah. Don't leave this as vague piety, we formalize it. Strategic incentive isn't simply benefit minus cost multiplied by risk, you know, it's also shaped by the degree to which an action is morally justified in the first place. The degree to which it is effective in its stated aims aligned with the long term victory of justice, and in some cases, indirectly beneficial by weakening a hostile oppressor, even if the Muslims are not their direct protagonists in that scenario.

When we run strategic probability style reasoning, we're asking, given the structure of the system, given the historical trajectory that we can see, given the actors capacity, given their internal constraints, given the moral architecture in which they operate, what is the real likelihood that they're gonna choose a particular path? Okay? That's the first part. And then the next part, we then weigh all of this against the reality of the moral physics that revelation, that the Quran and Sunnah has informed us govern creation. Because, yes, for example, the West or America or whoever else, they may act in a way, you know, they may implement a implement a policy and that policy will align with their moral system, with their moral system, their real moral system, not the one that they espouse in public, the one that they espouse in public consumption for PR purposes.

Because we know what their real operating moral system is. So we can predict that they will act in this way because it aligns with their real moral system that we have identified. But we also know that what aligns with their moral code does not align with the moral code or the moral laws that actually govern the universe. And thus we can also foresee when they take this action, we can foresee how this action will inevitably descend the actor into the spiral of complex consequences that are gonna end up depleting their power and depleting their options and depleting or diminishing their position in the world. You understand?

Consequences. And for us, geopolitics is the study of probabilities. Probabilities of action, what people or nations will actually do or can actually do, not just inventories of their theoretical capabilities. Because you might have the capability on paper, for example. You might have capability on paper but not in reality.

Because your capabilities are actually bound sometimes by insurmountable constraints that essentially nullify the existence of those capabilities. This is evaluating real power, not theoretical power. Like for example, you might have a gun, but you don't have a clear shot. So that's the same thing as not having a gun at all in that specific scenario. You've got a gun but no clear shot, so you may as well not have a gun at all.

Just stop pretending that economics, culture, theology, and history, stop stop pretending that these are all separate and unrelated, that these are compartmentalized disciplines. They shouldn't be. In the real world people don't live like that, people don't live in compartments, you know, and you look at a nation's balance of payments, you look at its family structure, you look at its media diet, you look at the urban design of its cities, you look at its industry, you look at its character, you look at its foreign policy and you'll see that all of these things are entangled. Middle nation analysis insists on tracing all of these threads together. We refuse the western habit of reducing everything to sort of technocratic specialties that never meet, that are never brought together, that are never collated.

This is why the same framework can speak about water tables in Iran, can speak about debt restructuring in Nigeria, can speak about GCC sovereign wealth and their strategies, can speak about Gaza reconstruction, media discourse on Sudan, youth unemployment in France through one language of power. One language of power, dependence, moral legitimacy, and probability. Okay? When you combine all of this, when you combine it all, then you get a a sort of a theory or a model of geopolitics where geopolitics is the struggle over who defines reality, who allocates risk, who controls, the conditions of survival and meaning for societies across time. And the players here are states, they are private empires, they are movements, they are civilizational projects.

Okay? Their interactions are shaped by geography, they are shaped by technology and they are shaped by economics, but they're also shaped by the wounds of history, by culture, cultural reflexes and by religious beliefs. The current system is dominated by an a national oligarchy of financialized capital that has captured Western states and that uses western states as instruments while the rest of the world negotiates and resists and navigates or else integrates to one degree or another between subordination and autonomy. Within all of this the ummah is not a passive audience. The ummah is a nascent civilizational actor that is, struggling to transition from fragmentation and dependency to coordinated multi level agency between multiple countries, multiple peoples.

Its strength doesn't only lie in weapons and its strength doesn't only lie in GDP. It lies in demographic vitality, strategic geography, resource endowment, and crucially in a moral and epistemic framework that can and will outlast the exhaustion of western liberalism. The victorious narrative of Islam tells us that this transition eventually succeeds, but not automatically. It doesn't succeed automatically. It succeeds through deliberate choices that increase functional sovereignty, that increase discipline consumption, that weaponize interdependence between nations against the oppressors, and that builds alternative circuits of trade, of finance, of knowledge and legitimacy and so forth.

From this perspective, western theorists, geopolitical theorists are to one extent or another useful in mapping the pieces of the board, but they're completely unreliable in terms of as as being guides for how the game is going. You understand? They look at empires and they see permanent architecture, but we look at the same thing and we just see scaffolding that's around a structure that's already being demolished. There's nothing but fragility in a system that requires constant narrative hypnosis and coercion just to survive. They see irrationality when people prioritize dignity and prioritize faith because they don't prioritize these things.

They don't think these things are important, they don't value them. So they see irrationality when any non western country, for example, even tries to assert their own sovereignty and their own independence because their obsolete paradigm insists irrationally that western domination is supposed to be permanent. So they can't they think that anyone who's trying to be free from them is irrational. Western geopolitics is content to just sort of manage indefinitely a world where the population is chaotic and the powerful will exploit and the weak will just adjust to their exploitation. In middle nation geopolitics, we're not content with that at all.

We study the same world with the same rigor, but we operate under a different axiom. That the sunnah of Allah in history favors justice over oppression in the long run. And that our task is to try to understand the patterns of power, to try to understand it so precisely that we can align our strategies with the sunnah of Allah Increasing the probability that our sacrifices, that our strategies, that our alliances, and our coalitions, and our work and so forth, and our refusals, and our defiance, and our opposition are all structurally effective. That's the difference. And it's not just a different opinion.

This is a different assumption about who owns history and where history is moving. Like I said before, you cannot remove Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. You cannot remove God from your analysis of geopolitics or from any other area of study for that matter. You can't do that and and not end up having a very deeply flawed analysis. No.

You cannot have a worldview that denies the reality of God and the uniqueness of human beings and the system of moral physics that Allah has created into creation, has embedded into creation and ever really properly understand reality at all. If you if you deny all of these things. And you can never really trust anyone's analysis when it's not informed by a source that is external to themselves. You understand me? You know, what the West calls objectivity is actually the ultimate form of subjectivity.

You see? Because they are using their own minds as the source of truth. They're not using an objective standard, and this is why every aspect of their theories, every aspect of their models is always thoroughly self serving, and self reinforcing, and wrong. They are never disinterested parties, they're never witnesses, they don't act as witnesses. They are constantly, relentlessly, and to one extent or another helplessly spin doctors, propagandists, engaging in self justification and rationalization with varying degrees of elaborateness.

That's all their theories are, that's all their academics is. I mean, like, they they they like to say, right, that you can be a good person without believing in God. Okay. Well, first of all, let's correct that statement for accuracy. And when you correct the statement for accuracy, it will sound a little bit different.

What they're what they're saying is you can be a good person without acknowledging the one who created you, the one who created existence, and the one who infused moral governance into creation. You can be a good person while denying all of that. How? Denial of your creator is in and of itself an immoral act. Never mind it's an an unintelligent act.

It's an immoral act that is followed by the act of pretending that you can now be the arbiter of morality. That you can define what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong and somehow we are all supposed to trust you and we're all supposed to trust that you can define all of this without being swayed in any way whatsoever by your own personal self interest. Well, this is obvious nonsense. And as I say, the entire history of western so called civilization is the proof of how much nonsense that is. And throughout your whole blood soaked vicious history, you were never as inhumane and as savage as you have been ever since you became officially secular humanist atheists.

That's when you became the most inhumane, when you became humanist. No, I'm sorry. I don't trust your qualifications to arbitrate morality and I've seen no evidence whatsoever that you are capable of this neither on an individual personal level and certainly not on a societal level. And of course with the with the dishonest western mentality, you're gonna say, I don't need to believe in God to know that it's wrong to murder and it's wrong to steal. Right?

That's what the that's what their argument. As if not murdering and not stealing is the definition of a moral person. You're proving my point. Not to mention the fact that you actually do approve of murder and you approve of stealing all the time on an industrial scale. Using your subjective morality to create rationales and to create justifications for that industrial scale murder and theft.

I mean, atheists like to say that religion has caused so many wars. Right? They say it has caused so much bloodshed in history. But first of all, religious wars are a drop in the bucket in terms of the sheer scale of savagery compared to the wars and the conflicts that have been launched by the secular West? And second of all, what religion?

What religion are you talking about? What religion has historically been so devastating and so persistently warlike? When you talk about religious wars, the truth of the matter is you're talking about sectarian Christian wars in Europe, wars between Christians. And you're talking about the crusades, and you're talking about colonization. But the truth of the matter is that that religion even in those cases, religion was mostly just a pretext.

It was a pretext, it was a tactic, it was a PR tool to to to justify religions or wars that were being engaged in for other reasons. You wrapped a religious justification around your real base operating system of predatory morality, which is the same moral or the same amoral or immoral system that you adhere to today. You know, colonization was almost entirely the enterprise of enlightenment Europe, in which your church just collaborated with you. 300,000,000 dead, hundreds of millions more enslaved, hundreds of millions oppressed, raped, tortured, impoverished, exploited, robbed, dispossessed, all by the rational self regulating morality of the atheistic West. That's why I say, personally, I do not personally recognize any distinction between Adolf Hitler and any other European or American leader of at least the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth or twenty first centuries.

I mean forcing people, really, forcing people to pretend that Hitler was some sort of an anomaly of wickedness in the West actually causes extreme cognitive dissonance. The Nazis weren't unique, they weren't unique. And you didn't fight them for moral reasons. No, you didn't. World war two was fought for the same reasons that you always fight.

It was fought for the same reason that you fought every war that you ever have fought. If Russia had not fought Germany, America would not have fought Germany. Do you understand? You just saw, America saw that the Nazis were gonna lose against the Soviets and you didn't want the Kremlin to take over all of the territories and all of the countries that were under the hand of the Nazis. Otherwise, you didn't have any objection whatsoever to Nazis or to Nazism and we see that right now.

You still don't have a problem with it until today. That's your morality. So you see, this is the subtext of all of their theories. This is the subtext of all of their theories, geopolitical, economic, governmental, societal, philosophical, etcetera, etcetera. The subtext is predatory, primitive, selfish, ruthless, contemptuous and greedy.

And you think that everyone in the world is the same way that you are. That's how you approach the world, that's how you view. This is the skewed and dysfunctional base upon which the West constructs all of their theories and all of their models and they construct all of that basically to try to gloss over the dysfunction and ugliness of that base while continuing to operate in the world in the same way that they always have according to that base, that operative amorality or immorality. I mean look at what I just told you about what they what they include in their geopolitical analysis, in their geopolitical models. It's basically a macro version of a thief casing a burglary target.

Are there guard dogs? Where the entrances are? Where's the exits? Are there cameras? Right?

How many cameras are there? How many guards are there? Is there an alarm system? And what are the easily removable valuables from that target and so forth? That's basically what their geopolitics consists of.

Just like that's the micro version of their macro version. I mean, look at it. I'm not saying that there isn't anything useful, that there isn't useful information here, but when this is the only information that you're considering, then yes, it is exactly like a predatory animal that is sizing up its prey. So for us, for the Muslims and for the people of the global South in in general, I think that the most useful thing that we can take from western theories is to understand how these people look at things, how westerners are looking at things, how they view the world, how they view us, how they think and so forth. You can't really be familiar with their particular geopolitical models and not understand from that, that we're talking about a so called civilization that's nothing but a menace.

And it is upon us, it is upon civilized people, it is upon the Muslims to try to protect ourselves and to try to protect humanity from this clear and present danger as much as we can by distancing ourselves as much as possible, by disentangling ourselves as much as possible from their systems, from their systems of power, from their economic systems, from their political systems, from their philosophical systems, from their systems of thought, from their academic systems, and isolate that menace as much as we possibly can, and purify our own discourse, purify our own fields of study, purify our own academics, purify our own theories, purify our own models from the pathogens of primitive western predatory influence.