Chinese Clout
BRICS Pre-eminent
Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) now provide 31.5% of global GDP, with further projected growth – while Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States (G7) provide 30.7%.
China is by far the strongest of the BRICS, accounting for 70% of the group’s economy. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP) it has already overtaken the US economy.
The 5 existing members of the BRICS are home to over three billion people. These account for over 40% of the world’s population and, as we have just seen, nearly a third of the global GDP.
The BRICS are due to further expand, with membership very likely to extend in the near future to Iran, Argentina, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The inclusion of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt represents an additional 220 million people. More countries will inevitably want to join this enviable club which is so clearly more dedicated to development than Washington’s dreary militaristic obsessions and ideology of private capital accummulation for a small class of international corporate plutocrats.
BRICS membership will soon include all the major fossil fuel powers, with the exception of the USA. Fossil fuel is self-evidently a very bad thing for the planet, and not the best economic foundation for the world’s newest, major alliance, but is another very good reason why the accelerating and possibly fatal tensions between West and East need to be resolved as quickly as possible, so that strategies for a massive transition away from fossil fuel can be planned for and executed within the decade
Hegemonic Terror
The prospects for a peaceful transition to a multipolar world have declined considerably since the days that China was admitted as a member of the World Trade Organization in 2001. This occurred within a few days, interestingly, of the US invasion of China’s neighbor, Afghanistan, with whom its shares a 92km border at the Wakhan corridor that links Afghanistan with Xinjiang province. This is an area of operation for anti-Chinese terrorist movements such as the East Turkmenistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which the US removed from its list of terrorist organizations in 2020. ETIM has links to ISIS, and has been used as proxy by western powers in their struggle to destabilize Xinjiang, not least through propagation of a narrative of Chinese “genocide” of the Uygur population (which, as I have argued elsewhere - see Uygurs - is a lunatic claim to advance about a 12 million population that has grown considerably in size in recent decades) and suppression (evidence for which, I believe, is greatly exaggerated and sometimes clearly falsified).
The neoconservative cabal that took control of Washington in the 1990s , and which published its 1998 manifesto Project for the New American Century, even as one of its first major experiments in destruction, Yugoslavia, were unfolding, adapted its tactics to a mission for the preservation of US hegemony from the consequences of neoliberalism, first by exploiting the events of 9/11, as we now know, for a program of destabilization of multiple Islamic countries (with a view to reshaping the Middle East for the benefit of US fuel security) and of any other countries that threatened to compete with the US. This philosophy, once described as the Wolfowitz doctrine, was forged into steel in the US foreign policy of George Bush Jnr, in his 2002 proclamation of the “Bush doctrine,” which in reality endorsed an established US foreign policy that had been developed far earlier through the concept of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, the notion of US exceptionalism first deployed in 1861, and more recently by George Kennan’s post World War 2 “containment” strategy.
China Uncontained
The US struggle to contain China is losing steam and conviction. The US has increasingly behaved like the eternal spoilt child, spilling everyone’s milk even to its own disadvantage, waging wars, destabilizing economies, initiating trading wars, conjuring up sanctions policies that run totally contrary to the once-lauded concept of “globalization,” converting patently absurd discourses into formal policy positions, all at the service of an ever tighter clique of plutocrats and their eager poodles in the military industrial Incubus. US and western destabilization of Ukraine was essentially a bid not so much to secure Ukrainian membership of Europe but to open Ukraine’s markets to western capital - agricultural, industrial, and financial - and Zelenskiy was annointed by the west with that end in view. (I recommend Olga Baysha’s 2021 book on this topic, among others Baysha). It remains US and NATO hope that such a future can one day be visited upon the Russian Federation.
Back to Bakhmut
NATO’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine is not going well. Russia has managed to stretch Ukrainian military resources to near exhaustion, with a war of attrition along many points of a very long front line. Both significant cities of Bakhmut and Avdievka have been almost encircled - entrapping, in the case of Bakhmut (principally by the Wagner group, supported with Russian artillery), as many as 10,000 or more Ukrainian soldiers. Fighting in Avdievka (involving, principally, the Donetsk militia) is now just as intense. Its fall will offer final reprieve for Donetsk City from shelling by the Ukrainian army that has long preceded the current conflict. Other significant points of conflict include Kupiansk and its surrounding region,and Vuhledar, whose fall would give Russia easy access to Kramatorsk.
While overall Russia has fought a war of attrition involving a private army (Wagner), the Donbass militia, Chechnyan forces and some elements of the regular Russian army, the main power of Russian forces, including the 350,000 reservists mobilized last fall, together with the bulk of regular Russian soldiers (1,500,000), have barely been used. Reports of a further mobilization of 400,000 contract soldiers from April have not been confirmed.
Counteroffensives and Crimea
Ukraine has come under considerable pressure from its western sponsors to push back against Russia in the very near future, and before the summer of 2023 after which, western spokespersons regularly warn, its support for Ukraine will wane, in favor of massive reindustrialization and investment in preparation for war with China. There are, as I write, a growing number of signs, in the form of Ukraine reconnaisance attacks, that a significant counteroffensive is being prepared, with the aid of a (final?) major splurge in western weapons. These include, thanks to the UK, the first NATO “dirty bomb” deployment against Russia in Ukraine, in the form of depleted uranium shells, whose power of armor penetration, while significant, will be insufficient against Russian T90M tanks and updated T71&72 tanks, and have less penetrating power than Russian Tunsten shells.
The purpose of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive (in addition to a still-possible but less significant counteroffensive intended to rescue the entrapped soldiers in Bakhmut) may be to cut off the land route between Russia and Crimea. Recent drone attacks by Ukraine on Crimea (all of them, Russia insists, have been intercepted) may signal an intention to “soften up” its staunchly pro-Russian opponent. Such an attempt would likely have an optics rather than a real advantage. Crimea would not, in fact, be cut of, even if such a counteroffensive was successful, since it would retain the Kerch bridge, together with the sizable port of Kerch itself, not to mention Sebastopol, and many airports, that would offer multiple routes for supply. The attempt would very likely prompt a massive response by Russia from Crimea (base for many cruise and possibly nuclear missiles) on other Ukrainian targets.
NATO Direct
In the event of a failure of any such counteroffensive - or perhaps designed to complement the counteroffensive - the next escalatory step (since NATO has no brief as to how to step off escalators) will be direct NATO intervention, possibly in the form of a Polish invasion. This runs the danger of a conversion from an invading force into a Polish occupation force of what was once its own territory in Ukraine, Galicia. Some meddling from Georgia is conceivable in the event that Washington’s regime change tactics gain greater traction there (but this would not likely occur quickly), and some other shennanigans involving Moldavan action to suppress Transnistria could further intensify the fog of war.
The thought that direct NATO involvement of some kind might accompany rather than follow in the wake of a (failed) Ukrainian counteroffensive is inspired by the realization of just how much Ukrainian treasure gifted it from the US and NATO has been burned. To the point, for example, that only 300 air-defense systems are left for Ukraine to defend its long front line; that a Washington-dictated limit of only 2,000 or so 155mm shells is available for firing each day as against Russia’s constantly replenished 20,000 (notwithstanding poorly-founded western claims to the contrary); and that one third of its 350 howitzer launchers are now out of action and awaiting the journey for repair in Poland, given that the barrels of M777 launchers need complete replacing at regular intervals when subject to gross overuse (as has been the case until Washington-imposed austerity).
The west has now promised Ukraine a million shells. These will have to come from the dregs of western weapons stocks (further undermining the seriousness of western threats against China any time in the near future). They may offer less compelling weight when set against the up to 90,000 or so shells that Russia has been producing each month for the past decade or more. The million shells will soon be spent and will not be replaced. Russian factories, on the other hand, will continue producing far more each month than the NATO powers will be capable of.
Washington has dismissed China’s overtures for peace talks. Zelenskiy, while sticking to his totally unreal demand that Russia would first have to withdraw all its troops from Ukraine, seems more open. But he has little to no discretion until given a green light from Washington, or until Ukraine is completely crushed, or until Ukraine achieves sufficient battlefield success that Russia, with strong encouragement from China, decides that it is in for a conflict that will endure far longer than it prepared for, provided that it can still walk away with Crimea, the Donbass, Ukrainian demilitarization, and Ukrainian neutrality.