Containing the Future

Readers of this site will know that I have long argued, almost from the beginning of NATO’s proxy war against Russia over Ukraine, that not only was Russia provoked into this conflict by two decades of arrogant Western aggression, greatly augmented when in 2013-2014 the West instigated a regime change operation in Kiev that was undemocratic, unrepresentative of the majority of Ukrainians, and murderously violent….But that, given this Western aggression, direct and indirect, against Russia, Russia had no alternative but to take the kind of action that it began to take in February 2022. Otherwise, a display of weakness would have been interpreted as a sign of fatal indecision by the West, inciting the West to even more egregious action against Russia with a view to the break-up of the Russian Federation.

The extraordinary stubbornness of the West in not heeding Russia’s SMO as a warning to the West to cease and desist - for example, the West could have gone along with the nearly-complete Istanbul peace negotiations of March to April 2022 - has itself become a manifestation of the extent to which Ukraine was merely one step in a long-calculated Western campaign for the destruction of a former superpower that it believed, vainly, that it had “defeated” in the Cold War, with a view to Western corporate interests acquiring the leverage and the access to take control over the vast mineral wealth of Russia.

Russia, unmoved by Trump, has said it will continue its advance to the Dnieper and in an important development we are hearing Kremlin voices indicating that short of a settlement, Russia will continue to take territory in Kharkiv and Sumy, while it subjects both Kiev and Odessa to exceptionally heavy missile attacks. Putin’s moderate demands for Crimea and the original four oblasts of Donbass have, in my view, now been overtaken by new geopolitical realities.

Like Iran, like China, Russia had for far too long been taken in by the West’s own totally-unfounded propaganda about the superiority of Western civilization, a narrative that has been fed by Western soft power to the attempted exclusion of its history of the mass murders, genocides, pillage , colonization and economic exploitation of peoples around the world. Pro-western sectors within the elites of these countries had for far too long gained ascendancy in political, cultural, educational and economic domains. Rather too late, their misplaced loyalty has been exposed by the ever-more egregious crimes of a decaying imperial order dominated from Washington, within a highly toxic and highly dangerous environment of Western corporate-originated climate change and the threat of nuclear war.

So, of course, President Putin of Russia, while keeping the door open to any chance of a convincing display of honest and transparent interest from Washington in the possibility of a warmer collaboration between Russia and the US, has in no way been taken in by the deeply duplicitous and often infantile expressions of concern for ceasefires in Ukraine, or in Iran or in Gaza. He rightly remains unintimidated by Western threats of impossibly high tariffs on Russia exports to the US (almost non-existent, with the major exception of something the US really needs, uranium), and on Russia’s main customers (China, India, Brazil and others) for its energy exports - threats that Trump must know that these countries will ridicule and ignore, to the longer-term disadvantage of a US that will be exposed for its weakness, pusillanamity, foolish leadership, institutional corruption and the grotesque freakishness of the behavior of its plutocrats and legislators and of the products of its mainstream cultural industries, and of its harem-like dopes among European equivalents.

Of these, we include German Chancellor Friedrich Merz who, instead of insisting upon justice for Iran, having been illegally, lethally and dangerously attacked without warning, in the midst of negotiations with the US, by Israel and then by the US, actually thanks Israel for doing the “dirty work.”

“Freakish” is the kindest descriptor for this utterly strange even satanic behavior, though not quite as much as Freddie’s endearing address to Trump as “Daddy.” And then we have Macaroni of France (not to be confused with Messoloni of Italy) whose prime minister Francois Bayrou has introduced a 44 billion euro financial package of tax increases and social cuts to be imposed on the long-suffering serfs of that fading country, inlcuding 7 billion euro cuts on pensions and public sector salaries, 5 billion euro cuts on healthcare, while adding 4 billion euros to the defense budget. French soveriegn debt will doubtless be a role model for neighboring Freddie, now as high as 114% of GDP. The country will this year spend 100 billion euros simply servicing its own debt. That is precisely the future to which Freddie has committed Germany. In short, these clowns (along with most of their mates in the collective EU) are hollowing out Europe to the benefit of the US, under the pretence that by doing so they are containing the non-existent Russian threat. I say “non-existent” knowing that while this is a historical accuracy, the clowns are trying to turn it into reality by their heightened, apparently drug-addled war fever.

Debt is the prime driver of Western neo-imperialism.

We have learned that the US came dangerously close in the last few weeks to further ennabling “Ukraine” (the mythical perpetrator of NATO aggressions) to fire nuclear-capable missiles on Russia’s major cities, that there are too many among the neocon-suffused ambits of the White House, intelligence services and Congress who still hanker for an opportunity to risk or even to crave a nuclear war.

This is the same crew that is now trying to create a NATO sister in Asia, with attempts to form a pro-US Asia-Pacific alliance that will include Japan, South Korea, Australia and the 10-member ASEAN pact (Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia - just been subjected to 19% tariffs by Trump - Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam - this latter country now to be subject to a 20% tariff, probably insufficient to stop it growing as a major hub for Chinese manufacture and export), in addition to the AUKUS countries (Australia, UK and US) and the Quad (US, UK , Japan, and Australia).

Now NATO and its Asia-Pacific sister will all be furnishing gigantic weapons orders to US arms manufacturers to ‘keep the world safe.” Even though, as the Ukraine conflict has shown us, Western weapons are actually not that good and they are hideously expensive. A reason among many why members and putative members of these alliances will have significant private doubts about the merits of mortgaging their future to the imperial interests of the US.

The US has recently asked Japan and Australia to declare their determination to protect Taiwan against China. Australia’s PM has very sensibly said that Australia does not make commitments based on hypotheticals. And that is a sharp reminder that all nations can see the weakness of the hegemon and being pushed to choose between US and Chinese hegemony they will in most cases want to give significant weight to the relative trade volumes between their respective nations, a logic that leads at worst to a non-aligned choice or even, at best, perhaps, a vote in favor of China and multipolarity.

So far, however, relatively few counties are choosing to challenge Trump’s tariffs; they may reason that (1) Trump’s inconstancy is an argument for not engaging with the US at all; or (2) it is impossible that the current US chaos can endure for long without an economic collapse of some description or again (3) that the tariffs represent a commitment to pay the US to be emperor, at least until some better offer comes along, amounting to a protection fee of $50 billion to the US for as long (probably not long) as it survives.

That Paraguay has assured Taiwan of its firm support should provide us with some light, transitory comic relief in this tense scenario.

US efforts to contain China factor into its efforts to contain Russia. In Central Asia an interesting development is the surpassing of Russia by China as the principal trading partner of all the major Central Asian republics of Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan. Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan are particularly important suppliers of gas to China. This may boost the opposing ambitions of Türkiye’s Erdogan to form a Turkmen axis across Central Asia to the Uyghur area of Western China, an aspiration that is supported by the West because it will inevitably put Türkiye on a route to conflict with Russia and China. possibly undermining Türkiye’s commitment to neutrality in the Bosphorus.

At play also is Türkiye’s alignment with Azerbaijan, it’s interest in a passage via the Zangezur corridor, and Azerbaijani ambition to seize the Azeri-dominated northwest of Iran (which is resident to more Azeris than live in Azerbaijan).

So here we see major threats to Russia and Iran while to the east Iran may yet be vulnerable to growing instability in western Afghanistan as a result of the forced displacement by Iran of 1.4 million undocumented Afghan refugees (in part as a panic reaction to fears of Mossad penetration of the four to six million Afghan refugees in Iran).