Nicolas de Largillière, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In an age obsessed with stability, optimisation, and institutional authority, we are losing sight of the simplest truth: freedom of speech is the core condition for national and international security.
Not because speech itself is inherently orderly, but because the freedom to question power is the only mechanism that preserves legitimacy. Without it, corruption festers silently, and institutions collapse from within.
Even AI—our newest instrument of projection—remains a tool. Technology does not create values, it exposes them. A civilisation cannot outsource moral courage.
Yet we defend free speech reluctantly, apologetically, and only when it flatters our side.
This is the fatal error.
Free speech rests on a deeper value—an absolute value.
That value is courage.
Courage precedes honesty. Honesty precedes legitimacy. Legitimacy precedes security.
Multipolarity Is Inevitable — And Technology Is Accelerating It
Multipolarity does not arise purely from geopolitics or demographics.
It is being forced into existence by technology itself.
Digital networks, decentralised finance, diversified production, AI driven automation—all of these dissolve the bottlenecks through which a single hegemon could once control global order.
The world is too connected to be dominated, and too distributed to be centralised.
This does not mean a Thucydidean collision is inevitable.
A multipolar world can be peaceful—if its foundations are honest.
The Reserve Currency Conundrum
For eighty years, global power and global finance converged.
Now they are diverging.
We are heading toward a world:
- with no universally trusted reserve
- no single anchor of settlement
- no neutral guarantor
This is not merely a financial transformation.
It is a civilisational one.
And without courageous leadership, it risks becoming a crisis of confidence with no stabilising mechanism to contain it.
The Ideological Faultline Between Russia and China
We often treat Russia and China as interchangeable partners.
But their philosophical worlds are not merely distinct—they may be incompatible.
Russia is fundamentally Western in its metaphysics, for reasons the modern West seems to have forgotten:
- Greek logic
- Christian theology
- Enlightenment thought
- Literature of conscience and guilt
Russia’s historical identity is anchored in Christianity and religious freedom as a moral right, not merely a civic liberty.
China is built on a wholly different intellectual lineage, and its social contract reflects that heritage.
This is not a value judgement— it is a strategic fact.
And it is where the divergence may begin.
The Western Strategic Error
The current Western strategy attempts to bend outcomes through:
- isolation
- coercion
- exclusion
- punitive alignment
This approach is performative and costly.
It has:
- fractured global energy flows
- destabilised capital movement
- weakened industrial foundations
- militarised supply chains
- empowered parallel institutions
- invited counter-systems
We are paying an enormous price to reinforce our own insecurity.
The Untapped Strategic Lever
- If there is a tool the West has abandoned—and authoritarian systems fear most—it is not military strength.
- It is courageous free speech, paired with religious liberty.
- Freedom of speech and freedom of worship share the same moral source:
- the belief that conscience precedes authority.
- And that is the argument Russia instinctively understands.
- Not force. Not humiliation. Not containment.
- But shared philosophical inheritance grounded in courage and faith.
We Have Forgotten Our Greatest Strength
- Multipolarity is not the danger.
- A world without courage is.
- If the West wants a stable, secure, and principled future, it must reclaim the values on which it was built:
- courage, free speech, and religious freedom.
- Those are the forces that bind, not break.
Everything else is noise.
© Roger Mellie 2025
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