The Next Stage: Fruitful or Futile?
On Proxy War
The next most significant step in what I have always called the “proxy” war by the collective West, led by the US against Russia over the body of Ukraine, will take place in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday as US and Ukrainian delegations meet (sans Zelenskiy The Inveterate Spoiler).
I concede that the term “proxy” war is something of a misnomer, given what for a long time now, has been the evidence of direct involvement by the US and NATO (but especially British and French and German) forces in Ukraine. There is no reason why the term “direct” should imply combat roles, as in hand-to-hand fighting, or in exchanges between artillery piece and artillery piece.
It’s pretty “direct” if nations of the collective West, and particularly, of course, the US, brazenly provide virtually every category of lethal weaponry short of nuclear. It’s pretty “direct” if satellite data from the US enables Ukraine to fire ballistic missiles that the collective West has given Ukraine for firing against Russian positions in Ukraine or against targets, civilian included, in “mainland” Russia, or if they give Ukrainians the satellite data that warns Ukraine of Russian missiles approaching Ukrainian targets so that the Ukrainians have the chance to shoot those missiles down.
It’s pretty “direct,” if the collective West in the years leading up to 2014 provided to Ukrainian “NGOs” and neo-nazi or Banderite movements the resources and cover they needed to overthrow the democratically elected government (that of Yukashenko) which would have sustained collaborative relations with Russia. It’s pretty direct if they then proceeded to arm Ukraine in preparation - despite the Minsk agreements of 2015, which Ukraine and the collective West now admit they simply played along with in order to give Ukraine more time to build up its army and its defenses - for an ultimate contest against Russia on the pretext of hammering “secessionist” oblasts in the East. These had never asked for more than greater autonomy within a federalized system of Ukrainian government.
It is pretty “direct,” if NATO countries installed their intelligence operatives in Ukraine to aid its war with Russia, and closely advised Ukrainian military in significant but failed operations as in Bryansk, Krynky and, above all, Kursk (where perhaps tens of thousands of trapped Ukrainian soldiers are likely to meet their end this week), not to mention many other, even darker shenanigans.
I think in calling this a “proxy” war, I myself have risked falling into the same trap that much of the collective West fell (or willingly jumped) into, of thinking that evidence of an “invasion” of sovereign territory (even sovereign territory that has declared itself an “independent republic) is evidence of an absolute evil, drawing for support of this view the groupthink Western narrative of how the UN Charter is to be interpreted.
I dont have the time, unfortunately, to enter into the details of the Charter and the range of legally plausible interpretations of it. But what I will say is that the collective West very conveniently interpreted the Russian invasion of February 2022 as an absolute evil. Even if you quite liked Russia and sympathized with its dilemmas at that time - concerning US reneging on promises to talk about US nuclear missile capabililty in Poland, Romania and, possibly Ukraine; provocative annual NATO military “exercises” in Ukraine on Russian borders; Ukrainian build-up of forces readying for attacks on the independent republics of Luhansk and Donetsk - you simply had to go along with the judgment that Russia had committed the absolute evil.
Even on its face, this was problematic in view of aggressive invasions by the collective West against sovereign territories such as Yugoslavia in the 1990s to 2000s, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 1991 and Iraq in 2003, not to mention the destruction of both Libya and Syria.
The Problem with Invasion as Existential Evil
So prostration before the “absolute evil” admonition in the case of Russia’s SMO required a compromising blindess to the total hypocrisy of the collective West (now compounded by its active weaponising and support for Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, and Israel’s seizure of vast swathes of territory in Southern Lebanon and Southern Syria, about which hardly a peep from the house on the hill).
In addition, it required slavish submission to a very simplistic, very misleading idea that rules out of the court of what is deemed (by Western politicians and mainstream media) to be “legitimate,” the possibility that regardless of all other contextual variables a nation can never ever invade someone else’s “sovereign” territory, EVEN…
When a nation sees that its ethnic brothers in a neighboring territory are being primed for genocide (the case in Donbass in 2014);
Can see patently obvious evidence of a gradual but determined build-up of lethal hostility by an extremely powerful aggressor (the collective West);
By an aggressor whose war plan has been carefully spelled out by the aggressor’s leading military think-tank (the RAND’s 2019 report on Extending Russia);
And an aggressor that has casually trampled on previous promises and agreements in such a way that the aggressor has become an imminent security threat;
And an aggressor that wilfully continues to build up its nuclear capacity along its victim’s border;
When it is clear that the more time that is extended to the agressor to pursue its ambitions the more lethal that aggressor becomes;
When the only forum in which the victim’s complaints might be aired (the UN) is a toothless tiger
Saudi Arabia
In my previous post I explored the idea that events are not unfolding in their most logical order. Although he is illegitimate, Zelenskiy is still acknowledged by the collective West as the leader of Ukraine. Yet Zelenskiy, doubtless because he is obviously not a fit person with whom any kind of move to real peace, or only just a real ceasefire, can be negotiated.
So, instead of the West simply enforcing an immediate move to pressure Ukraine into holding elections and removing Zelenskiy from the equation, we still have a meeting between a US delegation with a Ukrainian delegation, a delegation that can hardly consider itself free even to contemplate forcing the Zelenskiy regime into elections, without putting its members at risk of their own lives on return to Kiev. Whatever emerges from Saudi Arabia will need the support of Zelenskiy if it is to be executed.
I will not be surprised if the best that Trump and his team are hoping for at this juncture is a ceasefire and a timeline to elections that would take place after the ceasefire. Left in abeyance, for the moment, would be all the ludicrous posturings by the British and French about assembling “peace-keeping” forces that everyone knows will end up being war-mongering forces and whose main responsibility will be to stage some kind of trigger that they think will force the US to re-engage in Ukraine and, by extension in Europe.
The chances that anything will come out of Saudi Arabia that Russia will find it in its best interest to concede, I believe, are very slim. The question of the hour, therefore, is what Trump will do.
There are two main possibilities.
One is that at this point Trump will simply walk away from Ukraine and allow Russia to proceed as it will, to allow Russia to deal with Europe as it will.
Within this scenario we can imagine two principal possibilities.
The first is that the “Europe” with which Russia deals will still contain a US imprint, perhaps in the form of a continuing membership of the US in NATO. If the US is still in NATO it will likely continue to pressure European members to radically increase the proportion of their GDPs that they commit to NATO as a condition for resumption of US contributions of cash, weapons and intelligence (all for the moment paused - explaining why Ukraine is being hammered so mercilessly in Kursk).
The amount that the US itself contributes would not increase, but the total military expenditure by NATO on Ukraine would increase. But it would take some time to get to that point, perhaps five years or more before there was a notable increase in real NATO military expenditure. Clearly, Ukraine cannot wait that long. In the meantime Russia too will be augmenting its military expenditure.
Or Trump could simply walk away from all of it: Ukraine, Europe, NATO. Europe, either through a diminished NATO, or through some collective EU force, would perhaps rally to try to make up for the complete loss of US support, as is now being indicated by Ursula von der Leyen’s ambitious proposal for a new $800 billion defense fund, and by Germany’s Chancellor Merz’s proposal to massively inflate German expenditure on both infrastructure and defense. The first of these is intended to turn the EU into an even more hideously unelected, unrepresentative bureaucratic monster that will ultimately be torn apart, I think, by Europe’s citizenry. The second will be great news for those like Merz’s former boss, BlackRock and its ilk who will be putting up the money to construct a new German Reich. Like Ukraine, Germany will ultimately be the property of BlackRock. To sustain its debt repayments to BlackRock, Germany will have to expand its power regionally and globally. War is the customary destination in these circumstances.
Alternatively, Trump, upon realizing that there is very little he can do to put a wedge between Russia and China or to offer Russia anything that it would want badly enough to risk a deal that does not respect Russian security needs - the basis of the conflict - may then decide:
(a) To return to maximum engagement with Europe against Russia over the body of Ukraine, pumping in even more US money than before, and adding yet more sanctions. It seems unlikely that this would intimidate Russia, so this strategy would re-ignite a forever war that would be very costly for the US and Europe, just as it has been up until now, at a time when the US is looking at the possibility of an economic recession.
It would mean not simply postponing the OK Corral moment with China, but risk China joining in the conflict now, first indirectly and then ever more directly, knowing, as China does, that one way or another the US is gunning for China and that Chinese engagement may be more effective now, before the US has had time to rebuild its armed forces.
(b) Allow Russia to do whatever it wants; let Europe and Ukraine deal as they must with the mess they have helped create, while fostering better direct set see. Edge age the US and Russia in the context of a new world order based either on “spheres of interest,” or on a more egalitarian BRICS-style model of “everyone wins,” a movement that might, in time, create the necessary platform for Europe to find its way back to a rational foreign policy.
NATO’s US Dependency
The Financial Times has just published a piece that looks at the respective contributions currently of the US and other NATO members to NATO air power. It notes, in the first place, the heavy dependence of Europe on the US for its air power. Not only is it possible that US parts contain “kill switches” that might immobilize the use of weapons for purposes of which the US disapproves, but on a more mundane basis, the US has merely to withhold maintenance and spare parts to bring European air power to heel.
In 2024, of NATO’s entire strength in fighter and ground attack aircraft, the US accounted for 2951 and the rest of NATO accounted for 2064. Of that 2064 in the possession of non-US NATO members, over half, 1108, originated from the US. The main US fighter force was made up primarily from F-35s (150), F/A-18s (232) and F-16s (619). The main fighter force in the possession of other NATO powers was made up primarily from Eurofighters (426), Rafale (163) and Gripen (127).
The US provided 55% of Europe’s defense equipment in the period 2019 and 2023. The article confirmed Britain’s dependence on the US for its UK Trident nuclear submarines - the missiles are leased from the US and returned to the US regularly for maintenance. Some critics of UK dependence on the US believe that the UK should revert to French M51 submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
The March of Europe Against Democracy
However hypocritical his words may have been, Vance’s recent hectoring of Europe in Munich on its democratic shortcomings, was right on the ball. British scholars and journalists dare not take the risk of being detained, imprisoned or in some other way intimidated by saying anthing that might be interpreted as somehow supportive of a foreign power or movement that does not have the blessing of Official Speak. Across the continent, as in the US, critics of Israeli genocide worry that they will be smeared and punished on the grounds that they are “anti-semite.” And now we learn that Romania, with the blessing of top European politicians, has ruled out Georgescu’s candidacy in the presidential election in May. The May election is the replacement for the one that was cancelled at the end of 2024. In the first round of the November election, Georgescu was the leading candidate and was slated to win the second round. The reasons given and the processes through which this election was cancelled, having a lot in common with the stale 2016-style hoax Russiagate claims of social media manipulation in the US, were deeply mendacious and anticonstitutional. This is all fully explained in a recent article by Alexander Zeitchick in Drop Site News. Here is an extract from the latter part of that article, before today’s news that Georgescu’s candidacy was not going to be permitted.
As we see in Germany, anti-war candidates in European elections are frequently described as “far-rght,” yet rarely is there satisfactory evidence to support this label. Instead what is going on is a war between neocon “globalists” shoed into power by USAID-NED-CIA-other “NGO” type manipulation to favor US hegemony, on the one hand and, on the other, old-fashioned nationalists who believe that their countries should exercise robust control over their own borders; that their citizens’ wealth should be spent in pursuit of the interests of their own countries, not on foreign wars fought to benefit US empire; and that they should have the right to protect their information infrastructures from the corrosive power of the propaganda machineries of the largest globalist powers. Zeitchik writes:
“For the better part of a decade, allegations of Russian influence in elections have been at the center of a sophisticated two-way information war that has grown apace with NATO-Russia tensions and geopolitical jockeying in the region. This competition has been especially fierce along the southeastern frontier of the western military alliance, with Romania emerging as perhaps the most important chess piece. The country hosts a major node in the alliance’s Aegis missile defense system, and an air base near Constanta on the Black Sea is currently being expanded; when completed, it will displace the U.S. Air Force-NATO Ramstein base as the largest U.S. military outpost in Europe.
“None of this is incidental to the fact that Romania was the first EU nation to take the dramatic step of cancelling an election on the basis of “Russian meddling.” When releasing the documents that led to the cancelled election, the government foregrounded Russia’s motive in boosting Georgescu’s campaign. “In Russia’s vision,” it stated, “Romania ‘challenges and threatens’ Russia’s security by hosting NATO and U.S. military potential.” Although Georgescu does not oppose Romania’s membership in NATO, he is against the country hosting its bases.
“Of course, the U.S. has its own interests in the region, and has built up its own influence networks, which increasingly operate under the disinterested guise of countering “Russian disinformation.” The funding of these networks has been growing steadily since 2017, when the U.S. Congress created a $1.5 billion Countering Russian Influence Fund to support programs and organizations that “strengthen democratic institutions and processes, and counter Russian influence and aggression.” The funds were designed to target “independent media, investigative journalism, and civil society watchdog groups working to…encourage cooperation with social media entities to strengthen the integrity of information on the Internet." The dollar-spigot was loosened following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, allowing more media related grants to flow through the USAID’s Strengthening the Foundations of Freedom Development Framework (formerly known as the Countering Malign Kremlin Influence Development Framework.)
“Romania is home to numerous western-funded media NGOs that have benefited from these funds. Some of them, such as Context, were arguably weaponized when Georgescu threatened to challenge the NATO-Russia balance. For the past several years, Context has participated in a region wide NGO project, “Firehose of Falsehood,” to investigate the “pro-Kremlin, conspiracy and alt-right disinformation ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe.” The participating groups often have similar funding streams and various western institutional connections. In the case of Context, its budget is overwhelmingly covered by funding from the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy, and its executive director, Mihaela Armaselu, spent 20 years working in the press office of the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest. (Context is also a member of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global reporting network also heavily funded by the U.S. government.)
“Five days after November’s first-round vote, on November 29, Context anticipated the imminent government report by releasing its own social media analysis, headlined, “EXCLUSIVE: Operation Georgescu on X, Telegram and Facebook.” It was topped by a credit to a Ukrainian tech firm, Osavul, which identifies Kremlin social media narratives for a client list that includes the British, Canadian, Ukrainian and Estonian governments, the European Commission, and NATO. According to the report, Osavul’s “AI-powered software” had detected “possible coordination between…a series of Russia-linked accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and with obvious pro-Russian, anti-Western and conspiratorial sympathies that constantly promote Călin Georgescu.” At the center of the NGO’s conspiracy board were well-known Russian state media outlets, including pravda-en.com and pravda-es.com.
“The report goes on to express concern that Romanian citizens, especially those in the large EU diaspora, had been influenced by Russian-linked channels promoting themes that “resonate strongly with a significant part of the public.” While ostensibly a report on the nefarious impact of a Kremlin puppet-master, the real blame seems to land on the common Romanian voter whose support for Georgescu is evidence of “how weak the resilience of Romania or, more precisely, of its citizens is.”
“Nobody denies that Georgescu rode the wave of a strong anti-establishment mood. This is partly the result of endemic corruption within the major parties, but also reflects skepticism over the Ukraine war and NATO’s growing role in the country, reflected in the evasive appeal of his campaign slogan, “There is no East, there is no West, there is only Romania.” Georgescu’s positions are streaked with QAnon-style conspiracy theories and odious historical echoes with the country’s fascist past—including praise for the World War Two-era Iron Guard—but the main themes of his independent campaign have broad appeal at home, where he benefited from the work of military groups, church networks, and an active diaspora that gave him 80 percent support. At no point since the election was cancelled has anyone called into question the legitimacy of Georgescu’s 2,120,401 votes. Lasconi, the outsider who took second-place, also won without suspicions of foreign help.
“Wherever you look—healthcare, education, transportation, environment, justice—we see big problems in every sector,” says Nicoleta Fotiade, president of the Bucharest-based Mediawise Society. “If we’re only blaming TikTok and the Russians for the election results, it means we haven’t understood anything.”
“In May, the government and media will likely have a second opportunity to show how well it understands the dynamics driving Georgescu’s success. On January 22, the other far-right party in the race threw its support behind Georgescu, whom polls now show in first place with 38 percent support—15 percent more than his voided victory. Lasconi, the reformist candidate who took second place in the first November ballot and might have triumphed in the scratched second round, is now polling at just six percent.
The west’s public support for Romania’s government and its rationale for canceling the vote, meanwhile, remains unwavering. It was re-stated at the U.S. embassy in Bucharest during a mid-January press conference held by a senior State Department official named James O’Brien.
"We see foreign interference in connection with these elections,” he said. “If I were Romanian, I would ask who is paying for what, and who will benefit from a certain outcome. And that will go a long way in determining who can be trusted and who cannot.”
Fair and important questions. But only if they are asked with the understanding that they cut both ways, east and west, and that the answers are rarely as clean as we may like them to be.”
Middle East
What we are witnessing in Romania is simply the same-old same-old anti-democratic theatrics that have played out with US money in one color revolution after another for the past three decades or so. It was rarely more bloody than in Syria, where it took the form of Western-backed support for jihadist groups to take down Syrian President Assad, who was too close to Russia and was insufficiently neocon for the collective West. With the help both of Russia and Hezbollah, Assad held out successfully for almost a decade against an extraordinary barrage of jihadi uprisings and false flag stagings, and he ultimtely won, except that his country had been reduced to an unholy and unsustainable mess. When the system was attacked by Turkish-supported terrorist organization HTS, it simply folded. And now, as we witness hundreds of Alawites and other non-Sunni minorities attacked and murdered by HTS militia in Latakia and elsewhere, the utter insanity and stupidity of Western machinations is laid predictably bare for all to see. Turkey, HTS, perhaps even the West, are now encouraging Russia to keep its bases in Syria and stay on as a source of stability. By ‘stability” these vipers may mean that anything that can keep Russia preoccupied outside of its main foci of interest in Ukraine, Central Asia and Iran can be exploited with new regime-change antics against the Kremlin.