Towards the State
I shall be very brief today, as I am recuperating from a hospital procedure. Main developments today in the wake of what Ben Gvir described as his own country’s weak retaliation against Iran include a barely believable anonymous Asian source cited by Pepe Escobar that Israel had actually planned a F-35 flight from Jordan to Iran loaded with a nuclear bomb, but that this was destroyed by Russia. I don’t doubt there are elements of Israeli leadership who would be capable of such stupidity but I don’t think such a plan would attract official endorsement. More likely the story is a hoax, perhaps put about by Mossad as a message to the world never to take Israel for granted.
The House of Representatives was this morning of April 20th expected to vote on the aid packages permitted on to the floor by Republican House leader Mike Johnson, to the intense anger of the Republican caucus opposed to further aid to Ukraine, especially in the absence of a Democratic concession on border funding. Johnson can now only survive a challenge to his leadership with support from the Democrats.
The $61 billion will likely be sufficient to keep Ukraine afloat for a few more months, at least to November -doubtless at enormous further loss of Ukrainian and Russian lives but primarily Ukrainian lives (because I believe Ukrainian commanders are more reckless with the lives of their own soldiers than are Russian).
More significant would be the seizure of $300 billion of frozen Russian assets in Europe and the USA but this would provoke a Russian response to Western assets in Russia and create turbulence in investment markets that could be damaging to Western hegemony.
Nothing can remove, within a matter of several years, the disparity of weapons production capability between Russia and the collective West, and the increasing attraction of the Chinese development model for the Global South. China is likely to prove a far better partner to countries like Saudi Arabia, with whom it already has a strong trading relationship, and Egypt, which is currently sitting astride a powder keg, than Washington.
The West may yet be driven to an economic State-driven model that it has adamantly rejected for a hundred years but it will ultimately have to do so from a position of weakness.
Russia will have certainly strategized the arrival of the $61 billion and even of the $300 billion in assets. Will Russia be inspired to move more quickly to its big offensive, assuming that such a thing is on the cards? I think not. It is a little too soon so far as a hardening of the ground is concerned, and Ukraine’s resistance, though flagging of late, has been relatively robust. Russia does not seem to me to be a country in a hurry and certainly not in a hurry to deal with nitwits like the Swiss who think it is OK to stage a peace conference to which Russia is only invited as a cipher at the end for the great privilege of receiving the concluding deliberations of Europe’s silliest.
As I have long argued here - and it has been a somewhat lonely position - Russia cannot any longer afford to “negotiate” with clowns, but only from a position of its enemy’s capitulation; and the enemy is increasingly looking to be the collective West, not merely a rump Ukraine. Unless it arrives at a nuclear point imposed upon it by losers, I think Russia will persist with a policy of attrition. This has worked quite well till now; it tends to encompass fewer brutish surprises and gives everyone more thinking time, including China, which most needs it right now.
What difference might a Middle East war over Gaza and Iran make? Apart from the nuclear option, an attritional war works best: it continues to drain the West; a West being drained will fall apart more quickly and deliver even more converts to the way of BRICS which is now the only way forward for the remaining band of the world’s reasonable - very few of whom are to be found in the world’s most bought-out capitol, Washington D.C. They sing only for money.