The center does not hold, crises accumulate and magnify, structures implode. Corruption, desperation and despair take over.

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.

All Hail, Golden Emperor!

I did not need the LA fires to make me any less inclined to take seriously the threats of climate change. I don’t believe we are anywhere near getting on top of, or containing these threats. The world has already surpassed the 1.5 degrees increase in average temperatures since the start of the industrial age - the ceiling agreed by experts (and the world’s political class (although with no sense of equanimity) as to the extent to which the world can safely go without containing the problem.

We know the problem is not only not contained but is still getting worse. There is no solution known to us that does not carry with it significant risk; there is no safe solution known to us that can be scaled up to the necessary degree or that the world as presently constituted can afford. And we know that continuing warming is already factored in, that we are on an apparently unstoppable train.

That much I believe we “know.” The rest is speculation, wishful thinking, blind trust in the roulette wheel of technological innovation, or head in the sand. I assume that several billion other human beings, although not all, of course, are inclined to something roughy aligned with my view. I cannot help but wonder, therefore, whether the scale of such a threat, one that already takes large numbers of human lives through enhanced likelihood of death by fire, flood, drought, hurricane, mudslide and the rest of it, and will with certainty take far more lives with every passing year - even if some maniacs place their hope in the reduction of human population, whether natural or induced - undermines some fundamentals of human “civilization,” for want of a better term.

It undermines faith in human agency. It robs the species of a sense of something worthwhile that each generation can achieve that can contribute towards a better, more hopeful future. It robs us, simply, of a future, and it robs us of many of the sources of belief that enable human beings to make meaning of their existence. It reduces each of us to a focus on day-to-day survival. It reduces human relations to the brutally transactionsal.

Which is why we have a President who doesn’t care about climate change, who may not even believe that there is something called climate change and who is committed to removing many of the regulations on corporate activity that currently require them to show at least a minimal respect for the environment and for the quality of human life.

Not coincidentally therefore, this is the President who boasts about the primacy of the transaction. If you want to live today, what are you going to do for the corporate class that they will want to make it possible for that to happen? If you want to live tomorrow - who the hell are you? What power have you got? What resources do you have? Who are your friends? What is it about you that is worth keeping?

If you want to live next month, forgeddabudit.

In such a context, therefore, the center does not hold, crises accumulate and magnify, structures implode. Corruption, desperation and despair take over.

All Hail, US Empire, While We’re Still Here!

It seemed, for a moment or two, that Trump might be coming into power with a new vision, a grand vision, of a return of the global order away from unipolar US hegemony to a brave new multipolar global order of competing spheres of interest centered in Beijing, Moscow and the United States.

Part of this vision involved a new phase in the history of imperialism more similar to the land-grabbing (and people-enslaving) of the nineteenth century than to the subtelties of financial and sanctions coercion of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This somehow seemed to make Trumpian fantasies of the US absorbing Canada, buying Greenland, seizing the Panama Canal and subduing Mexico a fraction more palatable.

Except that these ideas are inherently ridiculous. If the US wants to control Greenland, it hardly needs to buy it in order to fulfil its ambitions. Absorbing Canada can hardly make Canada any more subservient than it already is to US imperial requirements (and would actually give Canada more voice in imperial affairs than Washington wants to hear, since its politicians would have representation in the US Congress). Mexico has long been tethered through NAFTA and its successors.

Take the Panama Canal? Like Suez, the Panama Canal is twentieth century. The twenty-first century is Russia’s northern sea route, its hub in Murmansk, and Russia’s north-south corridor (the Iran deal is a part of this) to China and India, and outsized China container ships and tankers, too large for Panama at least which, together, will make for faster and cheaper trade for those countries that have actually bought in to the twenty-first century. They will network beautifully with China belt and road initiative.

In all this, Trump is late to the table. Foresightful in some ways, his vision is deeply regressive in others.

He believes for example, that he can wage the big sanctions stick like a stern patriarch for the US to gets it way in wars and contests that it is already prime to fail.

On what planet is the threat of more sanctions on Russia, making their removal conditional on Russian “good behavior” for entering negotiations over Ukraine likely to actually achieve the desired effect of meek subservience? Let us put to one side, for a moment, the thought that sanctions have provenly made Russia stronger, that sanctions on oil and gas that increase the prices of Russian oil and gas simply hurt Europe, hurt other US allies such as India, which is the principle single national client for Russian oil, yet help Russian revenues (because work-arounds for sanctions are always found) yet also - what could be more suspicious? - help the US, by further boosting the already sky-rocketing sales of expensive US LNG to Europe.

Is not the threat of sanctions more likely to persuade Russia that its only option is to dig in, and to keep going, whether to Lvov or the Baltics (where NATO powers are trying to engineer ways of blockading Saint Petersburg) until Washington and its Keystone Cop European lackeys learn to digest the scale of their foolishness? Already Russia is beginning the mass production of Oreshnik missiles and a new, larger TOS-style missile that Russia will be readying for use, if it still has to, against Ukraine by mid-2025.

Then would be the time for Europe to start thinking through the concept of a new global security architecture negotiated between east and west, one that perhaps Trump in his heart, but alone within his party or political system, understands must happen but whose shape will be tempered more by Asian than US interest with every passing day of Western intransigence.

Double-Down Foolishness in Britain and Europe

For the moment, therefore, this tiresome moment, Trump and his team can play make-believe games of sanctions power that do not actually exist, wielding paper weapons made of tariffs that the world will ignore. Asia does not need trade with the US to survive. It generates sufficient wealth from within Asisa. The US needs Asia far more than Asisa needs the US.

Instead, Biden-Trumpian tariff regimes will piss off US allies, first and foremost, inducing them to look further eastwards, finally to embrace the logics of multipolarity and reject the deep illogics of hegemony. Europe will one day stretch its arms across a land once called Ukraine (a country that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban says no longer exists other than as a depository for Western money and whose accession to the European Union, if ever such a thing ever becomes seriously imaginable, will destabilize Europe’s economy and agricuture).

Starmer’s Century

Time will tell. In the meantime Britain, under Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government is doing its very best to place its bets on the most likely losers. Britain has an insufficiently resourced, moderately-sized army of 78,000, an out-of-date navy that the country cannot afford, and an overall armed strength that even Britain’s House of Lords decries as inadequate for a war of any duration beyond a few week.

Yet Starmer has decided to align Britain militarily and in various other ways with Ukraine - yes, that very same country that Russia’s former President Medvedev doubts will even be still around by the end of 2025 - in a new agreement that extends Britain’s limp hand of comradeship to Ukraine for one hundred years (only either party can end it at their own volition at any time, giving six months’ notice of same).

Britain will do anything and everything, it seems, to make sure that Ukraine achieves membership of NATO - something that, if NATO had ever seriously wanted to see happen, could have happened years ago but wont, because Ukrainian membership would tear NATO apart.

And even though the future of NATO seems bleak, even though President Trump is threatening to pull out from NATO (does not want to see Ukraine in NATO, would like to see European members of NATO support the institution by themselves to the tune of up to 5% of their GDPs),and even though NATO has shown it cannot win the war against Russia, Britain will support Ukraine’s case for membership of NATO for one hundred years.

While it is at it, Britain will help Ukraine - which has no Baltic coast - serve Ukraine’s interests in Baltic Security and likewise in the Azov sea which is currently controlled by Russia. Never mind that the new US President actually rejects the very logic which sustains NATO’s war with Russia.

Such is the lure to British elites of a former imperial glory and sense of importance, the same self-delusion that justifies British deployment of its RAF in support of Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and British sacrifice of ancient, declared principles of free press and freedom of expression at the false altar of “anti-semitism.”

Britain’s 100 year agreement with Ukraine feeds Zelenskiy’s false sense of Churchillian greatness and builds up thoroughly unrealistic expectations in Ukraine as to the meaningfulness of British support specifically, and European support more generally, while anti-Ukraine and anti-war sentiment builds across the continent.

The 100 year agreement also greatly intensifies Russian hostility to the idea of any British or other West European intervention in the role of “peace-keepers” as embedded in many proposals to partition Ukraine. Clearly, there is no possible reason why Russia would take seriously the notion that British, Polish, French, or German troops can be “peaceful” on Russian borders. These are the standard-bearers of Europe’s authoritarian liberalism that can brook no opposition to the neocon philosophies that European leaders have imported to their great personal advantage and geopolitical downfall.

Intellinews (Starmer) critiques the lack of financial substance to Starmer’s 100 years’ outreach to Ukraine:

‘Does this 100-year partnership come with a commitment to provide part of the $500bn Ukraine needs to rebuild? No. And in fact no one has breached this topic as almost no money has been earmarked to pay for the reconstruction. At the moment the plan is “the private sector will pay for it”, which fund managers that bne IntelliNews has talked say is a pipedream, due to the obvious and massive political risk concerns: aka a second Russian invasion.

‘Starmer did say that the UK would “give” Ukraine about GBP6bn in assistance, but half of that is actually a loan that will be repaid out of the profits from the frozen Central Bank of Russia (CBR) money. In other words, the UK makes a profit by being able to tap into the profits earned on the frozen Russian money, with almost no risk.

‘Indeed, this is going on across the board. Over the past year, the composition of international financial assistance to Ukraine has seen a notable shift away from grants which don’t have to be repaid (the US was the most generous on this score) to loans that do. Ever since the US ran out of money for Ukraine at the start of last year, it has switched to loans too.”

NATO and the Baltics

For World Socialist Web Site Jordan Shilton (Shilton) reports that NATO on Thursday announced a major strengthening of its military presence in the Baltic Sea, using as pretext recent damage to undersea cables allegedly caused by ships associated with Russia’s “shadow fleet.” “Baltic Sentry,” will involve ships, surveillance planes, air and undersea drones, and other intelligence gathering to deter, detect and counter any attempts at sabotage. The initial phase will last three months. Germany, will play a key role in overseeing the increased military activity throughout the Baltic. Shilton observes that since Finland and Sweden joined NATO in 2023 and 2024 respectively, the Baltic Sea has effectively been turned into a NATO lake. NATO’s operation aims ultimately to restrict Russia’s oil and gas trade, which is key to the Kremlin’s revenue. The latest measures move the NATO powers ever closer to a position of outright war with Russia.

“In November, the Swedish government sent an updated version of a pamphlet, “In case of crisis or war,” to all households with advice on how to survive a military conflict. The Norwegian government sent 2.2 million copies of a similar pamphlet to all households last summer…

“Rutte’s assertion that Europe’s ruling class only needs “a fraction” of the funds spent on social services to fund its mad plans for world war is a flat-out lie. The reality is that what is already underway is a massive restructuring of social relations involving the subordination of all of society’s resources to the waging of imperialist war and the enrichment of the financial oligarchy.

“In Germany, the EU’s largest economy, the health budget has already been cut by over half in recent years to fund major increases in military spending. But this is only the beginning”.

Russia-Iran Strategic Partnership Agreement

Now signed, there are still many details of the agreement that will need to be further thrashed out. Essentially, the agreement augurs an increase in the value of Russian-Iranian annual trade from its currently modest $4.5 billion towards something resembling the value of Russian trade with Turkey, which is $60 billion annually. The agreement helps strengthen the backbone for Russia’s north-south trading corridor. Just as in Turkey it will vastly expand on the development by Russia’s Rosatom of nuclear energy in Iran and may involve the construction of gas pipelines to Iran.

Both countries are full members of the BRICS, so the Russian-Iranian alliance will also address the issues in which BRICS as a whole is highly invested namely, the construction of interbank relations that side-step Western SWIFT networks, the building of other alternative or parallel financial institutions (e.g. the Russian MIR credit card and an Iranian equivalenrt) and allow trade in national currencies. The text of the agreement makes it clear that both Russia and Iran are committed to the principles of nuclear non-proliferation. Allied with Russia, in short, there is even less likelihood than at present that Iran will contemplate the development of nuclear weapons.

Gaza Ceasefire

The ceasefire has been agreed and is due to take effect tomorrow. Israel has taken the opportunity to murder another couple of hundred or so Palestinians in the space between first announcement and ratification by Israel’s cabinet. The chances that the agreement will stick beyond Trump’s inauguration or, at least, the handover by Hamas of Israeli hostages are, in my view, slim. (See Craig Murray’s pessimistic assessment here: Murray). We have a good understanding of the sheer evil for which Biden, Sullivan and Blinken are, alongside Netanyahu and his fanatics, responsible and for which we may hope they will one day be held accountable. Here is an account from Jonathan Cook (Cook) of British perfidy in this tragedy. Oh, yes, and once again there is Keir Starmer…..

Starmer’s Support for Gaza Ceasefire Riddled With Lies

“There are so many lies, deceptions and misdirections in Sir Keir Starmer’s statement on the ceasefire agreed between Israel and Hamas this week that they need to be picked apart line by line…”

We can so afford to kill Palestinians, but we cannot afford to help protect Americans from the savagery of climate change. See Robert Inlakesh (Inlakesh) for Mint Press News:

LA Fire Cuts … Billions for Israel & Ukraine

As Los Angeles battles historic wildfires, residents are demanding accountability for why the city’s fire department faced budget cuts while greater disaster preparedness measures were overlooked.

These frustrations have fueled questions about the prioritization of aid to Israel and Ukraine.

Just months before the wildfires ravaged the city, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass approved the budget for the next fiscal year, which included a $17.5 million reduction to the fire department’s funding.

Almost the only source of real courage in fighting to help protect Palestinians in Gaza from Israeli genocide (Shuaib Almosawa - Almosawa):

Houthis vow to respect Gaza ceasefire, but pledge to resume attacks if Israel breaks the deal

With the Gaza “ceasefire” agreement slated to begin on Sunday, the leadership of the Houthis in Yemen are signalling that they will stop their own attacks against Israel if the deal holds. For over a year, the Houthis have been launching ballistic missiles and conducting drone attacks against Israel, at times successfully evading the country’s much-vaunted Iron Dome missile defense system. The Houthis have also conducted a campaign of sustained attacks in the Red Sea, targeting what they said are Israeli-linked merchant shipping vessels. The attacks have disrupted regional trade and damaged Israel economically.

Western economic analysts have been salivating over the self-generated details of a coming Russisan economic crisis, while trying not to look too hard at evidence of the coming financial collapse of the collective West. But here is no less than The Bell (The Bell), usually a neocon sycophant, to tell them to cool off:

No, Russia is not on the verge of a banking crisis

“In our view, all things being equal, it’s unlikely that the economy will implode soon, forcing Russia to scale back its military campaign in Ukraine; or that deposits will be frozen. That doesn’t mean, however, that nothing will ever happen to deposits, nor that the banking sector will always be trouble-free. However, there are far bigger threats to the Russian economy at the moment: for example, a lack of transparent decision-making, little independent expertise, and the classification of much economic data all undermines trust in the authorities. This is more likely to, eventually, lead to some sort of hard-to-predict, man made crisis”.