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2:03 pm, September 11th, 2025 - 11 comments
Categories: Deep stuff, FiveEyes, media abuse, Peace, Propaganda, spin, the praiseworthy and the pitiful, war -
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‘Shared values,’ ‘like-minded partners,’ the ‘rules-based order,’ and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ have become the Five Eyes nations’ favourite rhetorical weapons in their contest with declared adversaries.
Words matter. Sometimes they matter more than weapons. They shape the battlefield of public consciousness. In geopolitics, nowhere is this more visible than in the Five Eyes nations’ repeated invocation of four benign-sounding phrases: shared values, like-minded partners, the rules-based order, and the Indo-Pacific.
A keyword search of public statements, policy papers, and associated media coverage reveals a marked upsurge in the synchronistic use of these phrases across Five Eyes information spaces, beginning with the U.S. pivot to Asia in 2011 and building steadily since.
Individually, each term sounds reasonable, even reassuring. Together, they function as what might be called the Four Linguistic Horsemen of our geopolitical age — rhetorical weapons deployed to shape perception, forge alliances, and define adversaries.
Shared Values
On its surface, “shared values” appeals to a comforting sense of common ground. Who wouldn’t want to believe that free societies are bound together by mutual respect for democracy, human rights, and the rule of law? Yet scratch beneath the surface, and the phrase serves a harder function. It defines who is “in” and who is “out.”
As one commentator put it:
“You keep using the word ‘shared value.’ I am living in China. Am I supposed to share your value by you saying so? By saying so, you draw a line in the sand — I am on this side, you may be on the other side. If you don’t share my value, you are not one of my own. By saying it, you are dividing the world”.
What sounds like an invitation to unity can also be a tool of division, branding billions of people as outsiders by linguistic fiat.
Like-Minded Partners
“Like-minded partners” performs a similar trick. It is less about actual mindsets than about aligning political will. It creates a coalition not of geography or necessity, but of perception: those who agree with us are “like-minded,” those with different ethnicity, systems of governance, or religious beliefs are suspect. The phrase glosses over both divergence of interest among apparent allies and powerful convergence of interest with designated enemies.
In George Orwell’s terms, it is a kind of Newspeak: soft language that conceals the exertion of power and control behind an illusion of natural affinity.
The Rules-Based Order
Then there is the ever-present “rules-based order.” It implies a neutral, universal framework of conduct. Yet the obvious question lingers: whose rules? For much of the Global South, the phrase rings hollow, recalling decades, even centuries, of colonialism, forceful interventions, sanctions, and double standards.
Noam Chomsky’s phrase “manufacturing consent” comes to mind. By invoking “the rules,” leaders invite their domestic audiences to assume legitimacy without questioning whether these rules are equitably applied — or maybe, in fact, a fig leaf for U.S. and Anglo-sphere primacy.
The Indo-Pacific
Finally, there is the geographic sleight of hand: the Indo-Pacific. Until a decade ago, the dominant framing was Asia-Pacific, a descriptor that matched simple geography. But “Indo-Pacific” shifts the mental map. By pulling India into the frame, the term casts the net of U.S. strategy over the region and implicitly counterweights and excludes China.
This is not just cartography; it is strategy encoded in language. Every time officials and media outlets repeat Indo-Pacific, they reinforce the framing of India as an included central partner and China as the excluded central adversary in Asia.
The Four Horsemen Ride Together
The real power of these phrases lies not in their individual use, but in their choreography. They appear in Five Eyes nations’ speeches, communiqués, and policy papers in tight formation — as if on cue. Together they portray a landscape in which Five Eyes nations and the “Collective West” are benevolent, unified, and rule-bound, while adversaries are fragmented, alien, and disruptive.
Why It Matters
This is not to say that values, partnerships, or international rules are unimportant. But when these terms are used with this kind of strategic intent and frequency, they stop describing reality and start constructing it. They function as instruments of perception management.
For thinking citizens exposed to this language, especially when emanating from apparently authoritative sources, the first challenge is to recognize how language itself is being weaponized and to see the “Four Horsemen” for what they are : framing devices deployed to mobilize consent and foreclose debate.
Seeing beyond the shorthand of this propagandistic framing offers us the opportunity to enquire more deeply and arrive at an apprehension of international realities far more complex and nuanced than that offered by these four horsemen. This should be the domain of journalists, but sadly the capture of mainstream media by the intelligence services and corporate interests means this task is left to a minority of independent analysts and academics.
As Neo discovered after swallowing the Red Pill in the movie The Matrix, things are not as they seem or as they are described by those with a vested interest in keeping you asleep.
A Cautionary Note
So next time you hear a politician or pundit extolling “shared values” with “like-minded partners” in defense of the “rules-based order” across the Indo-Pacific, pause for a moment. Ask yourself: who benefits from this framing? What agenda are they inviting you to support? And what alternative perspectives or facts are being ignored?
In geopolitics, words are never neutral. They are the first battlefield. Recognizing the Four Horsemen is not about choosing sides — it is about opening up to a greater clarity about the world and the peoples that we live among.
Stay curious out there. Avoid the proposed Apocalypse.
Trevor Johnston
We need not worry about "rules-based order" or "Indo-Pacific" anymore.
President Trump has managed to eradicate most of the first one, and his trashing of the India-US relationship has most certainly doomed the second (apart from within the febrile fantasies of a final few within the AU and UK Defence Departments).
Yup. So pre POTUS 47, MAGA or America First.
It might lead to the end of AUKUS, given they now want to build subs for themselves first. Oz then waits as a port for UK and USA nuclear sub visits for decades.
They should buy some of the older Japanese subs, with an upgrade option to their new ones later on (while developing their own drones). Japan is not going anywhere.
The 4, now the real leaders of the free world, albeit now as partners of the EU, are themselves divided.
While the UK has acquiesced to the Americans on AI, Canada and Australia have not.
While 3 have indicated an intent to recognise Palestine soon, one has not.
The USA interest in Taiwan is now based on it having secured a western guard because of its chip R and D and production leadership.
That will pass. They will rebase as many Hong Kong companies did. One that did not had to sell its Panama ports to BlackRock.
PS. The Quad was a reprise of NATO (George Kennan containment strategy) developed by the many knighted one.
It was only ever a concept to maintain the 1945 order to the 2040's, but POTUS 47 has ruined it. And Foggybottom is left to fix the mess of 1949 (fleet covering the Nationalist retreat) and 1950 (Acheson).
The POTUS who does it will get the peace prize.
There’s an important distinction between analysing language and mistaking language for reality.
Because the only propaganda in evidence here are the lines from Russian or Iranian state TV you are so faithfully parroting.
Yes, the “rules-based order” is imperfect: sometimes inconsistent, sometimes hypocritical. But the alternative isn’t a utopian free-for-all where everyone gets an equal say. It’s a power vacuum dominated by authoritarian regimes that make fewer apologies for coercion.
That’s not theory; that’s history.
In the grown-up world, governments use language as signals. To allies, adversaries, and domestic audiences. Quelle horreur! They also send diplomats, negotiate treaties, and make policies in their own interests. That isn’t manipulation; it’s how statecraft has worked for centuries.
Diplomacy isn’t a Marvel movie with good guys and bad guys. It’s about aligning interests, communicating intent, and managing risk in a messy, multipolar world. “Shared values” and “like-minded partners” are shorthand for convergences of governance, economic policy, and security. Not declarations of moral supremacy.
If you want to critique the inconsistencies, fine. But pretending the words are the whole game misses the point entirely.
And yes, Chomsky was a brilliant linguist. But Chomskyism-as-political-framework expired around 2012, when the comforting idea that all power is equally illegitimate ran straight into the material realities of Russian aggression, Chinese digital authoritarianism, and Iranian proxy warfare.
You attack the Western world for using language strategically — fair enough — but where’s your equivalent scepticism of Moscow (which invaded and tried to subjugate a neighbour), Beijing (a one-party surveillance state that crushes dissent), or Tehran (a fundamentalist regime that funds terrorism as policy)?
The uncomfortable truth is that everyone uses framing, and everyone has interests. The question isn’t whether governments “manufacture consent.” They all do. The question is: which strategic visions, values, and alliances are better aligned with our own? Pretending there’s moral equivalence between open societies and authoritarian regimes isn’t nuance.
It’s just tankie talking points dressed up as insight and yelled really loudly, with just enough big words sprinkled in to pass as serious. The kind of lazy shlock that might just squeak a C- in a first-year POLS101 course. But only if the lecturer was feeling overly generous.
By reducing everything to “linguistic manipulation,” you end up flattening geopolitics into performance. But the stakes: trade, sovereignty, security, technological standards, even basic freedoms, are material.
Words matter, yes. But actions, institutions, and competing systems matter more.
Comment 3 is a reply to 2.
Think you have simply failed to understand the primary theme of Chomsky's political writing. The common theme of his writing is to highlight that there are ongoing real geopolitical interests of western states behind most applications of the rules based order. Further that the rules being applied hypocritically don't get applied to the states deploying them in even a remotely balanced manner, but one should not mistake the thoroughness of this debuking with an implication that states dont have real geopolitical interests they follow.
Yeah, that’s basically the point I was making. States don’t have friends: they have interests. I’m well aware the current order works badly for some countries while working very well for others (like us).
As a matter of national policy, we should align ourselves with states where and when our interests and values converge. The USA, for all its flaws, is still a democracy. And maybe, once the specter of Trumpism passes, it will return to the norm of being a relatively sane and stable partner again.
My argument is simply that the moral outrage is window dressing. Much as Chomsky argued (in a fashion that was totally original, and not at all cribbed from Marx), political language is fluff layered over the naked, cynical exercise of power by elites.
Values can be a great way to signal friendship, build ties, and send messages to allies and adversaries alike. But what they can’t be is the be-all and end-all of foreign policy.
I get the reality that the 1945 global order was one not lived up to.*
But now that the USA has re-invented its leadership as one to be feared rather than be admired/respected (because this is their MAGA, their oligarchy plus nationalist populism in a dual power axis), the nakedness of the 1945-2024 order is there to be seen.
Will the USA return to being a democracy (constitutional republic based) while SCOTUS declares POTUS above the law?
The GOP seems to be intent on an America first hegemony building a global corporate order by fiat/dictate (tax free profit taking from the world etc).
One pre 1945.
*Adherence to the UN Charter security order, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention against genocide and such as WTO MFN trade rules?
Individually, each term sounds reasonable, even reassuring. Together, they function as what might be called the Four Linguistic Horsemen of our geopolitical age — rhetorical weapons deployed to shape perception, forge alliances, and define adversaries.
Framing ideology as apocalyptic is a fun doomster thing to do. Yet the techne involved is instructive: a tetrad. Taking the 4 elements one by one, to examine if they are likely to be sufficiently influential to form a potent mental tool for ideological warfare, we can appraise the likely effect of the framing design.
First, shared values identifies the emotional glue that binds folks into a state of mutuality. This meme operates at the level of techne but is devoid of merit until those values are specified; thus it operates as jargon in discourse unless qualified.
Second, like-minded partners is hypothetical unless evidence-based. In a democracy consensus is defined via parties, and the extent is typically measured at elections into categories of size 30-50% for major parties, 5% or less for minor and in between for parties potentially ascendant. Like-mindedness is therefore partial by design.
Thirdly, the rules-based order is often in evidence as status quo, yet often seen as an aspiration. It is partly real and partly imaginal, therefore only partly reliable.
Fourthly, the ‘Indo-Pacific’: It comprises the tropical waters of the Indian Ocean, the western and central Pacific Ocean, and the seas connecting the two. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pacific] This is a real triad of marine regions, rarely viewed as a unitary notion by anyone, so mass traction is likely to be zilch.
As a tetrad, the design is systemic, grounded in intellectual context, but only for users inclined to use it like a garden fork. Those 4 prongs readily insert the framing into fertile mental terrain where it can grow into a personal belief system. Gardeners must later weed it. Trevor's worry that it grow big enough to capture the global ecosystem does have a forerunner: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eggplant_That_Ate_Chicago
War, famine and disease has been around a long time. Dying of old age is what is more uncommon.
Israel's is victory over Hamas in Gaza, annexation of Area C and claim of sovereignty over all of the West Bank (what then the PA, take up offices in New York as the PLO in exile).
Lancet forecast the outcome of the ambition to defeat Hamas (end their ambition to rule a Palestine state) some time back.
The ICJ will be asked to determine by late 2026 or 2027 whether genocide occurred.
The Israeli defence to the ICJ is to be made in Jan 2026. It will be be based around the imperative to end a war by victory (with the removal of the losing government).
Russia's is its agenda for Ukraine and new order imposed in Europe.
China's is to have Taiwan by 2049. Americas is really to delay this to 2049.
But they will have their 1970's/1980's Cold War arm wrestle first. War hawks gotta strut and this suits CCP and GOP politics.
Lots of good points for discussion.
My contribution in particular is to complain about NZ mass media reporting of the international news since the emergence of the military conflict in Ukraine. I can recall that on the six o'clock news on TV1 every night of the week, behind the announcer's desk up on the wall, in big letters was the poster/placard:-
RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE
My assumption was that someone, somewhere was determined to control the narrative so that none of us would forget our lines. And ever since, the problem has been repeatedly identified as being caused by the "Russian invasion of Ukraine".
What we never get told is that Russian 'special military operation' commenced only at the end of long years of right-wing para-military intervention from Kiev in the Russian-speaking frontier districts of Eastern Ukraine. Those Russian speaking citizens are repeatedly described as separatists. Even though their language rights, their religious beliefs had been under constant attack since the Maidan 'revolution'.
Going further back, at the time of the dissolution of the USSR, in order to facilitate the re-incorporation of the G.D.R. into the Federal Republic of Germany, Russia accepted the word of George Bush Senior that the boundary of N.A.T.O. would not move one meter further to the East. Russia withdrew its sizeable military force from East Germany.
Subsequently the two Minsk agreements could have settled the on-going differences. But as we now know, from the mouth of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, NATO never intended to carry out their side of the deal – she said they were only stalling for time in order to improve their military position.
Later you will remember when a deal supported by Turkey and another major power (I forget which) was ready to be signed it was killed off when Boris Johnson flew to Istanbul (almost certainly at the behest of the US) with the doom seal.
In Auckland we know that the Russians have been coming since the late 19th Century – we can see around the Waitemata the gun emplacements built to deter Russian naval attack.
Long story short. We can't expect the news announcer to give us the back-story every time they say 'Russian Invasion'. But they wouldn't have to if they called what's happening there in more neutral terms like for instance: Russia-Ukraine Conflict. That wouldn't be hard would it?
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