NATO Hanging in the Balance

The NATO Summit

We are in the run-up to the NATO summit in Washington from July 9 to July 11. Both sides will be seeking to score dramatic gains during the summit - the West to justify its inordinate expenditure of public wealth on the false pretext that Russia has designs west of Ukraine, Russia to endorse the reality that it is winning on the battlefields and is nowhere near a position of needing to negotiate anything.

Russia always insists that it remains open to negotiation; the West persistently shows that it is not serious about any mooted negotiation point given that those that have so far been suggested have no relation to conditions on the ground, nor to Russian security needs, and show no understanding of Russia’s complete loss of confidence in Western capability, even, of good faith, or in the suitability of an illegitimate Ukrainian president as an interlocutor.

The NATO summit occurs just at the moment at which it becomes publicly apparent that the US, the principal member of NATO, has no capable president and, as yet, no cogent Democratic ideas for how to rescue the nation from this dire descent (the pressure on Biden to resign is mounting) and that the next most likely successor as president following the November elections will be Donald Trump.

Trump appears to challenge the official narrative of Western pretext for the conflict in Ukraine, to want to end that war and, while he is at it, demanding that all NATO members undertake expenditures of 2 and a half percent of GDP as their fair shares of the burden in keeping NATO afloat. Of course we have to bear in mind that the last time thst Trump was in office his foreign policy was hijacked by the Deep State’s false Russiagate narrative which claimed that Trump and Putin were in cahoots.

While Trump remained under investigation on these ridiculous charges for over three years, he could not afford to be anything other than very hostile to Russia. This tells us that Trump is easily vanquished by the Deep State. The Deep State is pro-war because that is the most efficient way of siphoning taxpayer money into Deep State investment in weapons production and the MICIMATT, which requires permanent war for permanent profit.

Therefore, Trump, whatever he says now, will be pro-war.

In any case, Trump is also likely to be counted in the camp of those US elites who claim that America’s most important opponent is China and that the US must gear up for the final great battle of the Universe against China, leaving to one side the distractions of Russia and Ukraine.

The three main problems with this argument are:

(1) Russia is already a very firm ally with China, along with other anti-US powers that can help consolidate non-western control over Eurasia: notably, North Korea and Iran and, I would argue, several of the “stans".

(2) One must never forget that even when Trump manages to make a bit of sense in the foreign policy realm, his main interests in life are to secure more wealth for himself and for his closest family members, to do this by relaxing all constraints on the greed of the billionaire and corporate class, taking full advantage of a Supreme Court which is corrupt, venal and bought out by the plutocracy and, in the process, doing nothing whatsoever, even reversing measures, to stop global warming, a nuclear weapons race, pollution or any other known threat to the human species thsat benefits capitalism (for the short-term, which is, the only term that capitalism can deal with).

(3) Talk of the great war against China - in the midst of a three-pronged Western counterrevolution (over Ukraine, Palestine and Taiwan) against the revolution of multipolarity that the West itself initiated during the period of peak globalization in the 1990s, and China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 - is magical thinking on the part of an exceptionally dim foreign policy and neocon-brainwashed elite, at a time when the US is facing the possibility of a real financial collapse under the weight of a dangerous level of debt, and when Western weapons stocks are over-extended and depleted, to the absurd point that in order to supply more Patriot batteries and missiles (which Russia can shoot down anyway) to Ukraine, the US and Europe have to scrape through their trash cans in order to cobble together components from various sources.

The Battlefields

Back behind a full-sized screen today and referring as usual to Dima’s Belarussian-based twice-daily military summary channel, which follows Russian, Ukrainian and neutral sources of battlefield developments, I have surmised the following.

Russia has been bombing and droning Ukrainian airfields intensely over the past few days, in advance of the arrival, expected later this month of July, of the first US F-16s, and has already taken out a full squadron of Su-27s (near Mashiska), a helicopter (near Mashiska), a MiG29 (near Kryvyi Rih), aviation fuel tanks at Seleshchyna, near Mashiska and, possibly, a naval drone facility in Odessa. Russia appears to be meeting with little or no Ukrainian resistance, suggesting considerable degradation of Ukrainian air-defenses although, along the Black Sea shore of Odessa, Ukraine has installed fortifications to block a potential Russian sea landing.

I noted yesterday that a third Ukrainian counter-offensive is now in doubt. This appears to be confirmed in a Bloomberg interview with Zelenskiy in which he says that Ukraine is waiting for the arrival of weapons before such a counteroffensive can take place, also claiming that fourteen brigades are in reserve for this purpose (this, I doubt). Yet all over the combat lines there are reports of strikes and protests among Ukrainian forces complaining of insufficient supplies.

Intense Russian offensive activity is reported near a Ukrainian temporary deployment point near Prechystivk in South Donetsk; and Russian bombing of Ukrainian drone operator positions in Kostyantynivka. West of Ocheretyne near Avdiivka Russia has now taken control of a large amount of territory on every side of Novooleksandrivka and appears to be preparing to take Lozuvatske to the west which, if captured, will give Russia purchase on Tymofiivka to the west, Vozdvyzhenk to the north, and Prohres to the south. Sokil is now reportedly under complete Russian control and Russia is moving on Novopokrovske and Novoselivka Persha.

In the area of Toretsk, some 40 kilometers from the city of Donestsk, Russian forces have taken control of 40% of Niu-York, and are likely to move on to take the villages of Sakha Balka, Valentynivka and Nelipivka. Russia has broken into Sotsgorodok, and is advancing inside Pivnichne, taking more positions between Russian-controlled Shumy and Pivchene. Russia has control over Durzhba and is ready to move on to Dyliivka, Dahce and further into Toretsk itself.

In Chasiv Yar, Russia has reportedly now established control over the eastern microdistrict and is readying forces both in the north and in the south from the western side of the aquaduct for an attack on the main center of the settlement.

In Kupyansk ,Russia has reentered Makiivka. In Kharkiv, it appears that Russia is preparing for a new major push southwards in and around Lyptsi (on the center of which it is dropping heavy FAB bombs) and Vovchansk, and has improved its position near Prylipka, east of Starytsia. Russian forces have attacked the Ukrainian army near Zelene. Further west, Russian forces have established control over the border village of Sotnitski Kozackok, in the direction of Zolochev.

Elections

Britain goes to the polls today in what is reportedly likely to be a landslide Labor victory. This may leave little room for Nigel Farage’s party to make sufficient impact on the overriding ideological capture of British thought by Western neocon pro-war thinking and Western civilizational presumptions of innate superiority and moral rectitude. In other words: more war, more Ukraine nonsense, more idiotic Churchillian wannabees. In France, the latest assessments I have seen suggest that despite the rise of Le Pen, the final outcome may leave France in the hands of a disorganized, multi-centered French parliament open to manipulation by Macron, outpaced by developments as he may have been. In Iran, the second round of voting is likely, in my view, to return a so-called conservative “hard-liner” (a term which US analysts use for Iranian politicians who stand for nationalist, Islamic dignity, independence and military capability).

Russian Economy

The orthodox Western narrative about Russia is that it is a country posing as a gasoline station, and that it has been well and truly clobbered by Western sanctions, Western disengagement from Russian oil and gas supplies, Russian isolation in the global economy and Western “cancel Russia” cultural warfare.

This narrative is of course wrong in every conceivable way. Russia has not been crippled by the loss of trade with the West; its sales of oil and gas to China, India and others has more than compensated for its loss of Western customers. Its economy is growing at a comfortable 5%. It has proven itself immensely adaptive and innovative in every domain of the economy, and especially in weapons production. Its loss of allies in the West has been more than compensated by Russian centrality to the BRICS, and the strong support for the Russian position in Ukraine by most of the Global South.

Nonetheless, as Andrea Peters reminds us in a piece in the World Socialist Web Site today (Peters), no economy improves forever, there are real dangers of overheating, there are always sources or threats of imbalance and that, like all capitalist countries, Russia must attend to the downsides of economic growth in terms of economic and social inequality.

Peters notes that the state raised military and security expenditures to an unprecedented 40 percent of the federal budget for 2024. Russian endeavor to honor both military and social programs, she claims, is failing amidst mounting inequality “in the face of an unsustainable budget that cannot survive the breakdown of the world order.” In this respect we should note that however serious the level of US threat, the USA remains the world’s single most powerful nation across all indicators, that the BRICS order is still in a period of emergence, and that in a period of global financial collapse, the instinctual movement of the financial community is to move assets towards gold, the dollar and towards Washington.

As noted, Russian GDP is expected to grow by 5 percent this year. Real wages are also reportedly up, as is consumer spending. Official unemployment is just 2.6 percent. But according to Peters, the Kremlin’s commitment to capitalism requires that it makes the Russian working class pay for the oligarchy’s struggle to survive. Further:

“Government spending in 2024 is now expected to significantly exceed what was previously approved, even as income from the energy sector is predicted to drop by 768 billion rubles this year. Meanwhile, the liquid assets of the country’s National Welfare Fund, an emergency financial reserve, fell by 44 percent between January 2022 and December 2023. Between $300 and $350 billion of Russian government assets are frozen in foreign accounts”.

The Duma is approving increases to deficit spending. The legislature has authorized a boost in borrowing for 2024 of nearly 33 percent. While the Kremlin is shifting the country from a flat-tax system to a progressive one, expected to bring in an additional 2.5 to 2.7 trillion rubles, broad layers of the population are so poor that they fall in the bottom tax bracket, will continue to be taxed at the rate of 13 percent and, even as they may earn a little more, will move into a higher bracket. Corporate profits will be taxed at 25 percent, up from the 20 percent previously, but Russian businesses are expected to evade one-time “windfall” taxes that the Kremlin imposed previously to fill the breach in the federal budget.

The social programs that the Kremlin says it will finance with the additional revenue will not fundamentally change the social position of tens of millions of Russian workers whose living standards, Peters claims, have been falling for years and whose salaries are being eaten up by inflation. The rise in real wages is overwhelmingly concentrated in a handful of economic sectors—banking, oil, gas, and war-related industries. Inflation is running at about 7 percent, but this is much higher among many essential products. From July 1st, utility rates are scheduled to rise from 9 to 14 percent more than previously. Costs of healthcare, medicine and education are rising, often precipitately. Efforts to substitute Russian-made products for cheaper foreign-produced goods are placing many products outside of the reach of ordinary people. Domestic gasoline prices are rising.

28 percent of people report either not having enough money for food or can buy food but not clothes and shoes. The gap between the top 10 percent and bottom 10 percent of earners has grown substantially and is nearly 17:1. Over half of respondents to a recent sociological survey say that inequality has risen in Russia in the last five years, and many believe inequality is inherently wrong.