Roller Coaster Time

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.

Events are moving rapidly, with numerous sharp left and right turns or even complete reversals. A time, as they say, to hold on to one’s hat.

Beachfront for Jared

My post yesterday - correctly, I believe - singled out the implications of the release by Hamas of the first four Israelis held hostage by al-Qassam, and the strong impact this appeared to be having on Israeli consciousness of the survival, even the victory, of Hamas on the very same day as audiences in Israel and the West were treated to amazing media footage of tens of thousands of Palestinians walking by foot along the Meditteranean back home towards northern Gaza from which they had been forcibly and brutally evicted by the IDF.

The resilience of the Palestinians seemed to directly and brazenly fly in the face of the repulsive comments emitted by Donald Trump only hours beforehand insinuating that the demolition wasteland created by the IDF in one of the greatest war crimes of modern history would present a wonderful opportunity for property developers of the likes of Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner but only once the people living there could be shunted off to Egypt, Jordan or even Indonesia.

Egypt has long refused to go along with this idea, although Egypt’s President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi in a mirror image of Trump’s own ugly transactionalism expressed his opposition in racist anti-Palestinian terms, while Jordan’s King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein (progeny of a Saudi line and a lackey of Washington) protested that his country was already, to use the language of Max Blumenthal earlier today, a “neocon warehouse” for millions of Palestinians. The country simply had no room for more.

As for Indonesia, I have yet to see any evidence whatsoever that anyone has asked Indonesians as to what they think of the idea. Nor do I expect to find any, just as I do not expect to find any clear-cut acknowledgement in western mainstream media that the very idea of forcibly displacing a settled (or, for that matter any kind of) people from their own country to somewhere else is to entertain a massive war crime and humanitarian injustice.

There is no evidence, whatsoever, that the Palestinians are going to buy into this filthy Western White discourse.

The collective West is owner of and heir to genocides, massive displacements and impoverishment of peoples thoughout the formerly colonized worlds and now in the post-colonial as well. We can include the Holocaust in this collective condemnation of a self-declared “civilized race,” whose criminal and immoral acts of greed and lust across five or more centuries contribute to practically every one of our major political, social and cultural crises today.

Yet even now, in the face of so much historical knowledge, amidst evidence of shocking, massive abuses still ongoing, the leaders of this pathetic legacy, desperately cling to the pretense they have some kind of entitlement to be regarded as “serious people” who are morally pure and superior to everyone else.

Elaborating on his argument that, Jared Kushner and his ilk notwithstanding, the Palestinians are not going to go anywhere, Max Blumenthal in interview today with Judge Napolitano says that the reality of the strip, over whose destruction Israeli finance minister Smotrich and his brother fanatics have so recently gloated, is actually promised to Qatar and will not be going to IDF baby-killers any time soon.

Qatar, with Hamas, Egypt and Jordan have all shared responsibility for overseeing the ceasefire negotiations. Qatar will play a very significant role, Blumenthal claims, in the reconstruction of Gaza, the “domestication” of Hamas, and leadership of the post-conflict territory. He traces a history of collaboration between Qatar and the first Trump administration. It is a story not unlike the tangled narrative of Qatari, Saudi, and Emirati shenanigans that ended with the sinking of the Muslim Brotherhood government of Morsi in the post-Mubarak period of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, and its reinstatement by a good old-fashioned Egyptian military dictator (Sisi).

Qatari influence in Gaza goes back to the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Qatar in that period of the first Trump administration. This relates at least in part to the fact that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were backing different and competing species of jihadis - essentially Wahhabi as opposed to Muslim Brotherhood versions - in their struggle to take down the Assad regime in Syria. Saudi Arabia at one point was threatening to crush Qatar. Qatar turned to the Trump administration for help. A deal was struck whereby Qatar invested a large amount of money in the US economy (notably, the redevelopment of parts of Washington D.C.) and Trump, in turn, pressured Saudi’s Prince MBS to back off from Qatar. Blumenthal describes Trump’s Attorney General in this period as being virtually a lobbyist for Qatar. In his interview, Blumenthal appears not to have had time to fully unpack the latter stages of this narrative but at its heart is the concept of a tight alliance between Qatar and members of the Trump administration and Trump himself in matters relating to Hamas and to Gaza.

Israeli War Crimes in Southern Lebanon

In the light of a disturbing analysis by former British ambassador Craig Murray - who is present on the ground in Southern Lebanon, visiting the scenes of Israeli war crimes - published in Consortium News earlier today (Murray), I need to revise my rather sunny overview yesterday of the renascence of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Murray begins his article with the failure of Israel to meet the conditions of the much-trumpeted ceasefire negotiated between Hezbollah, Israel and the Lebanese government under whose terms Israel should have retreated out of Lebanon:

“Not only did Israel fail to evacuate its army from Southern Lebanon on Sunday, as stipulated in the ceasefire agreement, its forces also shot over 130 Lebanese civilians attempting to return home in accordance with the deal, killing 23 and wounding 109 (of whom some are in critical condition).

This included a 12-year-old boy wounded in the neck in Kfarkela, standing right next to my local producer Mahmood. I was 20 yards away and on my way to them. Four were killed in Kfarkela and overnight the Israeli army demolished numerous homes there in “punishment.”

Apart from one Lebanese army soldier, all of the dead were civilians simply attempting to return to their homes. At least five of the dead were children. All were shot, not bombed.

“Israel’s excuse for not withdrawing is that the ceasefire agreement is not fulfilled, in that Hezbollah have not been disarmed south of the Litani River, and that the Lebanese army has not assumed control.”

Murray testifies that there are no arms-bearing Hezbollah south of the Litani, that the only people carrying weapons there, other than the IDF, is the Lebanese Army which is wholly under US control - the US pays 50% of its salaries and it is fully supportive of the Israeli occupiers who have committed massacres and other aggressions on Lebanese territory.

The Lebanese government (now under US-puppet General Aoun) did not even protest Israel’s failure to withdraw. Murray notes that Israel has demolished more than 2,000 Lebanese homes during the ceasefire period, about half of them in towns and villages which Israel was unable to reach during the fighting but has occupied during the ceasefire. He finds evidence of industrial scale looting, officially sanctioned by the IDF and involving military transport vehicles, or vehicles requisitioned by the military. Israel has committed over 120 documented violations of the ceasefire (Hezbollah, only one).

Aid to Ukraine

So far as I can make out, the recent Trump order for a temporary (100-day) stop to foreign aid does not include a stop on the flow of weapons to Ukraine, and Zelenskiy has made no such claim that it does. As I write, the order to the OBM is currently under a very brief hold (until next Monday) imposed by a federal judge. Should it go ahead, it will have enormous ramifications across the world, not only in Ukraine (even if we are not talking about flows of weapons) because it will impact the activities of countless numbers of NGOs that receive money through USAID and comparable US agencies, money that is often used in regime-change or color-revolution operations of the kind that we are currently seeing in Georgia and Romania.

In Moscow, the foreign intelligence service (SVR) is in the process of calling a meeting to discuss the division of Ukraine, and is inviting Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, each of whom has historical claims on the westernmost quarter of Ukrainian territory, to participate in the conversation. For the Military Summary Channel, Dima opines that in this way Moscow is trying and will probably succeed in dividing NATO and the EU (and this will not be the only such pressure on those alliances, see below).

Trumpian Chaos in the Old World

Even as Europe begins to digest the landscape of international relations in the Trump 2 era, and in particular relating to how this might entail the withdrawl of the US from the conflict in Ukraine, even the withdrawal of the US from NATO, Europe must now react to other Trumpian threats, including the threat to forcibly seize Greenland from Denmark and from Greenlanders.

France has said to Denmark that it may send troops to Greenland in support of Denmark. Denmark itself has earmarked over two billion dollars in order to strengthen its presence in the Arctic. And Robert Briger, chair of the EU’s Military Committee, has said that the EU could deploy troops to Greenland.

Unlikely as it still seems, we are talking of a scenario in which Europe - whose ability to fight Russia over Ukraine without the aid of the US is very much in question, even if NATO members agree to increase their military expenditures to 5% of GDP (the Baltic countries say they will actually do this) - will now have to fight the US in Greenland!

The chances are good that Europe, and NATO, will fragment long before then.

Critical to the future of Europe will be the outcome of the February 23rd election in Germany. Central to this narrative is the speedy ascent of AfD, which stands against the deindustrialization of Germany, is in favor of a renewal of supplies of Russian energy to Germany, and opposes NATOs proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. According to the Economist’s calculations, leadership of the new Germany will fall to the centre-right CDU/CSU, led by Friedrich Merz, forecast to win between 176 and 275 seats, compared with the centre-left SPD’s projected 72 to 181 and what the Economist misleadingly describes as the “hard right” AfD’s 95 to 207. But because all other parties have ruled out working with the AfD, the CDU/CSU has no viable path to governance and coalitions without the involvement of AfD (or of the new left-wing SWA party which is also skeptical of the proxy war) will (1) be shaky and (2) have no prospect whatsoever of resolving the mess of German’s industrial decline or, therefore (3) of arresting European decline.

Gas Politics

The EU avoided a rift after the European Commission (EC) conceded Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s demands that he be allowed to continue to import Russian oil and gas. Intellinews reports that Russian deliveries of gas, both piped and LNG, were up last year to 14%. and that Europe’s dependency - US and EU hysteria about Russian gas notwithstanding - is growing again. Europe’s own gas production is in decline after the shutting down of the Groningen gas field (it was causing earthquakes) and Germany turned off its six state of the art nuclear power stations.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico whose country has been challenged by Ukraine’s cutting it off from supplies of Russian energy, is struggling to keep his coalition government afloat, and street protests (in a characteristic mixture of local grievances and Western-sponsored color-revolution NGO electoral interference) have been growing, not only in Slovakia but also in Georgia, Serbia, Montenegro and Azerbaijan. The resignation of Serbian Prime Minister Milos Vucevic marks the latest casualty.

For NZZ Erika Burri (Burri_ discusses the oil relationship between India and Russia. She writes that India is helping ensure that Russian oil continues to be processed and reaches the world market in the form of diesel and petrol. She confirms what I have long been reporting here, that heating oil, diesel, aviation fuel and other petrochemical products made from Russian oil do indeed find their way to Europe, probably even to Switzerland.

According to Burri’s sources Russian oil accounted for less than 2% of Indian oil imports before the 2022, but a few months later it made up around 40% of imports. Russia earns around $10 billion a month from crude oil exports, to which India contributes. India has expanded its refinery capacities due to cheap Russian crude. The country has to cover 85% of its crude oil requirements with imports. With 22 refineries – 18 of which belong to the state – India has many times more refined product capacity than it needs for its own requirements. So, it re-exports.

Petroleum products manufactured in India account for around a fifth of India's total exports. Much of this activity is the responsibility of Reliance Industries conglomerate. Reliance Industries is therefore one of the major beneficiaries of cheap Russian oil. Indian refineries have announced that, going forward, they will no longer work with ships affected by sanctions but tankers that have already been booked are allowed to unload their cargo in India.

Starting on Jan. 1, 2025, 500,000 barrels of oil have been shipped daily from Russia to India, which is processed in the Jamnagar refineries on the Gulf of Kutch. A 10-year contract was signed, with an option to extend. In mid-December, it was announced that the Russian oil company Rosneft and the Indian megarefinery in Jamnagar had signed a trade agreement. The second largest refinery in India, Vadinar, not far from the Jamnagar twin refineries, is half-owned by the Russian oil company Rosneft.all Indian refineries together bought almost half the crude oil transported by the Russian shadow fleet last year.

Agitating Colombia

Trump’s clash with Colombian President Gustavo Francisco Petro Urrego over the forced expulsion of two planes’ worth of illegal Colombian migrants to the US is being interpreted as a humiliating climb-down by Petro. I am not so sure. Petro stood up for the dignity of fellow citizens and exposed the impulsiveness and needless cruelty of Trump’s migration policies. He even offered (I do not find evidence that this actually happened) to send out his own plane to bring back the migrants. What Trump has mainly shown in this brief but telling episode, is that far from knowing how to negotiate or bargain, Trump is an amateur who fails to understand that all negotiation is both about content or substsance and about relationship. Trump knows only about content, not about relationship. He has needlessly risked making an enemy of one of the USA’s main Latin American supporters, one who may very well now be inclined to look to firming up its collaboration with anti-US Venezuela over matters related to oil, borders and regional migration.