What It’s Really All About (UpDate)
(This was written ahead of the new national security review which is being hailed as a seismic shift away from NATO, deescalation of tensions with China, and leaving Ukraine for Europe to sort out. I’ll believe it when I see it).
We have different but compatible theories:
(1) The US is no longer the world’s sole or even the world’s most powerful hegemon, coming second to China economically (in PPP terms) and second to Russia in nuclear capability.
The US believes it can restore its status as sole global superpower, however, if it (1) exploits its primary advantage of a global network of military bases in returning to an aggressive model of 19th century imperialism and regime change in the seizure of land and resources; (2) relieves itself of any humanitarian obligations (remember Hegseth’s instructions to the US armed forces to ignore “stupid” rules of engagement as in wanton murder on the high seas); (3) deprives any of its partner trading nations of any trading advantage they thought they had, with a view to getting them to pay off US debt; (4) corralling the entire media landscape across the US and its allies (tiny “alternative” media exceptions) inside a small Fox News navigated command post - US government is increasingly Fox News government); (5) to intimidate potentially dissident US serfs, creates an apartheid-like underclass, the US “untouchables” - the “undocumented,” asylum seekers from the “ wrong” countries, anyone whose skin color provokes Trumpian wordmongering, “Marxists,” people who are critical of capitalism, Christianity and Donald Trump, who can be deprived of citizenship rights in a heartbeat and whose lives can be destroyed with impunity; and:
(6) nurtures a culture of sycophancy, dishonesty, corruption, secrecy, extravagant expenditure which allows, for example, the President of the US to forgive and free a former Honduran drug lord, while spending a billion $ a day to intimidate a country, Venezuela, whose leader he falsely accuses of being a drug-lord, in order (a) to rob that country of its oil; (b) cripple a country that is dependent on cheap Venezuelan oil - Cuba; (c) destabilize another socially progressive neighboring country, Colombia; and (d) to acquire the means to control global oil prices, further politicizing oil to gain leverage over Russia.
(2) The US wants to recover its unipolar dominance principally by crippling China. To do this it is now hoping (1) to prise Russia free of Chinese influence by stopping aid to Ukraine and leaving the Ukraine issue for the Europeans to deal with, ceding battlefield victory to Russia while the US and Russia explore joint business projects in Russia and the Arctic while (2) building a new NATO style structure in the east that will serve to blockade China, pit Japan against China in a Japanese bid to restore some new form of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, mobilize South Korea against North Korea, have the Philippines create casus belli across the South China Sea, fictional or otherwise, and continue to regime-change Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, and Bangladesh against Chinese interest.
The US is trying but largely failing to capture India, as demonstrated by Modi’s very enthusiastic welcome of Putin in New Delhi this week. Claims that India had cut off its orders for Russian gas appear to be incorrect. Russia is investing in India to produce the kind of goods for which there is Russian demand so that Russia will be able to spend the rupees it gets for its oil more meaningfully
Also working against the US Asian strategy are the deep ties between Russia and several Central Asian countries, notably Kazakhstan; Russian recognition of the importance of China, and the BRICS as the best guarantors of its long term security not least as the most important customer for its oil, and what must be Russian wariness of the US reputation as agreement-incapable, and as a fatally immoral, deceiving and mercurial negotiator. But also taking cognizance, one would hope, of the descent of the US into a horror-comic style fascist status in which the three arms of government are welded together under the control of a demented, ignorant narcissist, a state that is prelude to the next American civil war and the continental disintegration into separate warring nations.
Russia must know that any kind of broad understanding with the US is temporary, long enough to get the world through the madcap Merz nightmare promise of war with Russia by 2029 (an invitation to Russia to strike first on Dec 31 2028?).
An increasing US commercial and corporate presence in Russia’s immediate zone of interest is otherwise inadvisable because the current US DNA demands constant meddling and vicious game playing. However Putin may accept it (or fall for it, in Putin’s dangerous penchant for an excess of rationality) on the grounds that greater involvement in significant projects will create an interest by the US in Russian stability, create opportunities for knowledge transfer and will help finance big things while giving Russia time to further develop non-nuclear nuclear-equivalent weaponry.
(Vlad, don’t do it. You will make China and the BRICS uneasy and you don’t want to do that. Your people will wonder whether you’re still Russian. And, like I said, it is best not to be a friend of the US: it will crush you to death if and when it can because its sole ambition, ultimately, is global hegemony).
(3) The US wants to be global hegemon by keeping everyone else weak. So far, it may be telling itself that it is doing quite well in this regard. It has persuaded Europe to cut itself off from cheap energy in favor of expensive US energy. Well, not quite. Europe says the final cut off date is 2027. We shall see. But also the US has persuaded Europe to further cripple itself by paying for the proxy war of the West against Russia and for the US weapons needed to fight the war.
So Europe gets weaker while the US gets stronger at Europe’s expense. And Europe’s fight with Russia perpetuates the war and mires Russia in a continuing conflict so that whereas, for the first four years of war, Russia has been successfully attriting the West in a war the West cannot win, Europe will attrite Russia in Ukraine, for a while longer, and then in a war for Europe that Russia does not want but which it will be forced into fighting.
This makes the US even more powerful relative to Europe and Russia (although I don’t believe the US will remain truly neutral in this period) but it does threaten the world with nuclear war. War is not fought only by the bankers and is never only rational. Reason will lose.
Herein lies the great paradox. Everyone sees the folly of nuclear war, yet Europe is doing everything in its power to provoke it. Because Russia tries to escalate in small increments only the West thinks Russia is fundamentally weak. So Europe, now long deprived of real leadership, keeps prodding. Because ultimately, with covert help from the US, Russia will feel itself outmaneuvered, it must resort to its new range of nuclear or nuke-equivalent weapons (incl. Oreshniks, Burevesniks and Poseidons). But because the US and Europe lack these they will respond with nuclear weapons.
Russia may decide to forestall all this, nip it in the bud, by a non-nuclear, nuclear-equivalent early first “demonstration” strike on military targets of such magnitude that the West has to stop and reconsider.
The lunacatic situation in which we find ourselves owes a great deal to the legacy of British Empire and Britain’s continuing self-serving righteousness on behalf of a US-led West. Nothing about this is accidental or the result of short-term thinking. The Ukraine war was clearly envisaged no later than in 2019 and the Rand Report, Extending Russia, and is very visible in Western strategic documentation since the fall of the Soviet Union and, to be frank, in British strategic thinking that goes back at least to the time when John Stuart Mill coined the term “Russophobia” to describe the pretexts used by British elites to raise more money for “defense” of aggressive British imperialism. Not to forget the Crimean war of the 1850s, engineered by Britain to try to stop Russia from taking advantage of the crumbling Ottoman empire.
More about this history of British anti-Russian propaganda and its peculiar recent manifestations in such instances as the first color revolution in Ukraine in 2004 to ensure ultimate victory of the failed electoral candidate; the Wesatern-backed Georgian provocation of Russia in 2008; NATO promises of membership to Georgia and Ukraine in 2008; the Litvinenko and Browder scandals; the phoney narratives of Russian responsibility for the shooting down of MH17 in 2014; the phoney Western agreements to the Minsk accords 2014-2015; British establishment of the White Helmets and jihadi militia in Syria and…..then Skripal, 2018.
At the very moment when Britain was looking particularly silly over its evil meddling in Syria (the Assad government, with Russian and Hezbollah support, then winning the war) and the Brexit nonsense, what better than a totally fabricated narrative about looney Russian GRU operatives traveling on public transport in view of CCTV monitors, spraying a dangerous nerve agent on a door handle they could not possibly have known for sure would be opened by their intended victim. How comforting to know that Russians could be even more stupid than the British!
Only the story is a fictition, and it is Britain and its looney political peers across Europe that qualify for the honor of Most Stupid.
See here: