Call to the Real
New readers should know that my Substack posts are dedicated to surveillance of matters related to a central premise, and that premise, put at its simplest, is that the collective West, made ever more desperate and ruthless because of its unsustainable debt load, is attempting to beat back the multiple forces of multipolarity. It is currently doing this on three main fronts: against Russia over the proxy excuse of defending Ukraine; against Iran over the proxy excuse of defending Israel; against China over the proxy excuse of defending Taiwan. But there is no limit to the number of fronts that the West will entertain.
Trump to Kill 18 Year Olds in Ukraine?
Mike Walz, Trump’s National Security Adviser appears to be doubling down on the same policies of the Biden Administration to pressure Ukraine to lower the conscription age to 18, even though Ukraine itself (1) appears to be stalling in legislating this development; (2) the Ukrainian population is strongly opposed to this idea and three quarters of the population support a negotiated peace; (3) proceeding with it might finally destroy Zelensky’s electoral chances in the event that Ukraine ever does return to the kind of “democracy” that Walz thinks should a move would represent; (4) the measure could be profoundly counterproductive, diminishing the labor supply that is needed to sustain any kind of future economy, and further incentivizing mass migration of young men out of Ukraine in whatever ways they can find to dodge restrictions on their movement.
Trump-Putin to the US Senate: Perilous Journey
Walz may of course be attempting to pressure Zelenskiy to drop some of his conditions for a negotiated peace (i.e. which are, essentially, that Russia should just give everything back and pay reparations), and even paving the way for the departure of the US from Ukraine, allowing the US to blame Ukraine for its own defeat on the grounds that it was not prepared to sacrifice sufficient numbers of its own men.
Walz also says in interview that the Trump administration is working in preparation for a meeting between Trump and Putin very soon, perhaps even by Trump’s inauguration next Monday.
Such a meeting seems highly likely to take place. But what can it achieve? It is taken for granted by pessimistic commentators that there is nothing negotiable on the table. Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, Kellogg, has yet to demonstrate any imaginative leap that gets us even to Russia’s minimum starting point for negotiation namely, the agreement reached and signed off by Ukraine and then sabotaged by NATO in March or April 2022.
There is nowhere for Kellogg to go, because Kellogg cannot possibly get close to an agreement that would be both meaningful to Russia and minimally acceptable to the US Senate.
Therefore, the realistic position is this: we may not be quite sure what is minimally meaningful to Russia, but we can be sure that whatever it is, it won’t be acceptable to two thirds of the US Senate even if it is acceptable to Trump. Trump, even were he to imagine that he is endeavoring to “go big” in order to camouflage the smell of failure from the American people when they see that Russia has actually won, simply will not be able to sell the “big idea” to Senate. The “big idea” would be something along the lines of a commitment to a global or, at the very least, European security architecture negotiated between the US, Russia and China that returns the global order back to a law-based balance of power.
No Peace, Only Conquest
Therefore, no peace is possible. The US might, as Trump has threatened, further escalate. But no amount of escalation to date has sufficed. Both the US and Europe have seriously drained their stocks of weapons. Europe is in or is entering recession. Its militaries, for the most part, are in deplorable condition. Their weapons production facilities are unfit for purpose.
The US economy, by contrast, is doing quite well (if you turn your eyes away from $36 trillion debt), in part because the US has impoverished Europe and secured vast new profits for its arms and oil sectors. But the US people are thoroughly fed up with Ukraine. The majority of US leaders however - whether or not they want the US to get out of Ukraine and, perhaps, out of Europe - favor wars against Iran for Israel, and, above all, favor war with China because China is the single greatest threat to US hegemony.
So for the US to escalate against Russia over Ukraine means, first, that it has less resource to expend in a war with Iran (which could start any day now), and second, far less than it needs to sustain any kind of war with China, especially given China’s alliance with Russia, and China’s leading position in the BRICS.
The best that Trump can achieve in these circumstances is to get the US out of Ukraine at least, leaving the problem of Ukraine and Russia for Europe to resolve. But Europe, whether we are talking about the EU or NATO or both, cannot actually take this responsibility for the reasons I have just cited, and also because European leaders, or a good proportion of them, are thoroughly uncritical, classically-educated, plutocratic, corporate, brain-washed victims of hundreds of years of self-interested, self-congratulatory Western propaganda with little actual knowledge of Russia and barely any of China or Asia.
Bye Bye EU
Not implausibly, Trump has long sensed this. He may not therefore want to escalate. He would rather that Europe, by itself, loses the war in Ukraine, and that the US simply cuts off aid to Ukraine, pushes NATO members to drawing on 5% of their GDPs to waste on the Incubus and, even before they fail to actually manage this sacrifice, withdraws the US from NATO. There will be growing political destabilization of Europe.
Western mainstream media pretend to assume (or do they actually believe?) that the parties that today they find most immediately threatening are “extreme right” - a term that is meant to insinuate that these parties are Nazi. They are in fact driven by exasperation with (1) the unacceptable burdens of '“liberal authoritarian” presumptions of moral superiority as the basis for “human rights” interventionism abroad, which come with unsustainable costs of militarization and social sacrifce; (2) waves of immigration foisted without consent on the working classes in order to absorb the costs of US and European imperialism in Africa and the Middle East; (3) the priorization of “Globalist” values in support of US hegemony and its coopted national elites, over patriotic and historically embedded nationalism; and (4) “woke” identitarian policies of race, gender and belief that are also abruptly imposed on working classes from above, in the face of traditional values.
France will find itself unable to assemble governments that can both survive censure votes and approve budgets until Marine Le Pen’s party is given real power that it can then use to bring an end to the nonsense in Ukraine. This eventuality seems plausibly close. A little less close, perhaps, is the rise to influence in Germany of the AfD; there, we will see continuing attempts by establishment parties to cut off AfD (and its left equivalent, the BSW). This will inevitably create an angry and vengeful electoral force to push the establishment off a cliff.
AfD would take Germany out of NATO, stop the war in Ukraine, restart the flow of Russian oil via Nord Stream, reindustrialize, and instal diplomatic, economic and political bridges to Moscow. A very similar scenario will likely play out for the FPO in Austria. The pathetic and deceitful remnants of Blairite imperialism in the UK, in the form of the genocide-supporting Starmer government, one whose army is effectively condemned as too pathetic for words in a recent UK government assessment, may yet be fatally kicked aside by the British people with a little help from Elon Musk.
The efforts of the EU simply to cancel the emergence of governments it knows it will not like, as has happened in Romania where the results of an election were tossed aside with no pretence whatsoever at democratic accountability or even rational good cause, will almost certainly backfire.
We could see the formation of an effective alliance of Romania, Hungary and Slovakia, perhaps in the near future to be joined by the Czech Republic, against Poland and the Baltic States, that will lead the disintegration of the Europe project, and with it of course, the Ukraine project, and the emergence of a new Europe whose center will be in Moscow, even though that thought or intention was surely never even dreamed of by the Kremlin until the US, UK and Europe - Biden, Johnson and Scholz - induced it all by themselves, without provocation.
US escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, in short, is unlikely to succeed in its objectives. Russia is far too strong, much stronger than Western economists can bring themselves to admit, and, to be honest, frighteningly strong if we are talking about Russia in close alliance with China. I talked yesterday of the very low rate of Russian debt by contrast to that of the US. Some critics, in response, decry Russia’s increase in corporate debt in the period 2022-2024 (71%), without bothering to note that the Russian Central Bank encouraged domestic investment as international companies withdrew from Russia in 2022 - a move that had highly beneficial impacts for the Russian economy as a whole - but then reapplied brakes on borrowing in 2024 so as to reduce inflation and overheating.
The latest round of US sanctions on Russian oil exports, as I argued yesterday, if they survive even the first few days of the Trump administration, which is doubtful - he may simply decide not to put them into effect - will have only a temporary impact. They apply only to two of Russia’s five main oil companies, accounting for less than half of Russian oil exports. There will be work-arounds as necessary, that is certain. And already oil prices are rising around the world to the tune of 3%, ensuring, in direct contradiction to Jake Sullivan’s assurances, that the pain will be felt first by the US and its allies, and the global South.
An effective US pullout from Europe will further weaken Europe but it will be good for the US, because it will put US taxpayer money to much better use, if Trump can resist the temptation (and face down the lobby industry) to direct the wealth that is released to fighting more wars in vain support of US hegemony - which will ultimately cripple the US in it competitive fight with the BRICS - and spend it, instead, on internal investment and the American people, who really, really need it. We could start in Los Angeles.
On the Battlefield
Russia meanwhile will simply proceed to the Dnieper and, because the US through Trump, Kellogg and the Senate will have been unable to come up with any viable alternative resolution, Russia will simply have to keep going, as its former President Medvedev (also leader of the leading Russia United party) has just indicated.
This is because there are no circumstances in which Russia is going to live side-by-side with a Banderite rump Ukraine, one that is still pro-NATO, Nazi, militarized, fanatical and armed by the West and sold out to Blackrock, even if a “new Ukraine” is invented to sandwich it off from the Russian East.
Besides, a Russian advance west of the Dnieper may seem to justify Trump plans for territorial expansion by the US (Canada, Greenland, Panama) and the expansionist plans of his gruesome protege, Israel (Syria, Lebanon) or fellow NATO member, Turkiye (Syria).
There needs be no timeline for Russia’s attritional advance. Today we see the final fall of Chasiv Yar and that of Velyka Novosilka, while Russian forces continue the battering of Ukrainian in Kursk, while likely advances south of Pokrovsk through Daichne towards Andriivka and Kostiantinivka will open up to Russian tanks, without obstacle, almost all territories east of the Dnieper. The longer it takes, the more Ukrainian youth die, the angrier become Ukraine’s people, and the more certain is the end of Zelenskiy
The Scourge of Greater Israel
The threat of all-out war between US-Israel and Iran remains considerable. Some take comfort from Trump’s republication on his Truth Social site of a statement by Jeffrey Sachs condemning the evil of Netanyahu and his responibilities for many US wars of intervention going back to 9/11 (and perhaps 9/11 itself?). Republication very likely expresses Trump’s determination not to be suckered into a war with Iran just because this would suit Netanyahu.
Others say that we are entering a highly precarious period - the next few days, or until the Russian strategic partnership agreement with Iran is signed next Friday. I myself think the agreement is irrelevant. Signed or not, Russia and Iran are joined at the hip even though the agreement may not formally commit either party to come to the aid of the other if the other is attacked. Credibility of the always-ludicrous pretext for Israel’s angst over Iran - that Iran is a “nuclear threat” to Israel - is further undermined by the pact with Russia.
Russia will not want to see Iran acquire a nuclear weapon. What Russia wants is stability to the south, and what this requires is not an Iran with a nuclear weapon but an Israel that has been shown its own limits. Russia and Iran will have no trouble with the necessary demonstration, in the form of multiple hypersonic and Oreshnik weapons as necessary. Could it even be preemptive? Some Iranian voices think so.
Iran has already demonstrated extreme reservation about nuclear weapons: the fatwa against their development, the very slow progress towards uranium purification beyond 60% (always just a negotiating tactic, this), the knowledge that an Iran with one nuclear weapon is nothing against an Israel with 400, repetitive confirmations from the IAEA and US intelligence, ever since 2007, that Iran does not have a bomb, and the fact that Iran is a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty.