Category Archives: Eurasian Axis

Putin and Xi Standing Firm on the Right Side of History, by Finian Cunningham

Posted on March 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are putting together a hell of an alliance. From Finian Cunningham at strategic-culture.org:

The world is changing before our eyes. Western imperialist regimes are being exposed for the warmongers they are, and a new multipolar order of partnership and peace is emerging.

The historic summit this week between the Russian and Chinese leaders provoked paroxysms of angst in the Western media. President Vladimir Putin’s hosting of China’s Xi Jinping in Moscow was presented as the “world’s two most prominent autocrats” purportedly establishing a hostile “anti-West axis”.

The American and European media – slavishly echoing the talking points of their imperialist regimes – were in hyper-bogeyman mode. The meeting of Putin and Xi was distorted in every way to appear as something illegitimately threatening and sinister to the Western “rules-based global order” (euphemism for Western capitalist privileges and predation.)

Bogeyman mode also entails collective amnesia. The summit coincided with the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British launching their war on Iraq – arguably the biggest crime of the 21st century so far. Yet this vile anniversary has hardly stirred any Western media condemnation or shame, never mind legal accountability.

The wanton cynicism towards the Putin-Xi meeting belies the deep anxiety among the U.S.-dominated clique of Western states that the much-vaunted “rules-based order” is collapsing. A collapse caused by its own inherent corruption and systematic abuse of power and international law over many decades.

Both Putin and Xi emphasized that the Russia-China alliance was not meant to threaten any third party.

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Sergey Glazyev: ‘The road to financial multipolarity will be long and rocky’, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on March 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

It’s not easy putting together monetary arrangements that will be accepted by nations comprising over half the world’s population. (SLL maintains that it will be impossible.) From Pepe Escobar at thecradle.co:

In an exclusive interview with The Cradle, Russia’s top macroeconomics strategist criticizes Moscow’s slow pace of financial reform and warns there will be no new global currency without Beijing.

The headquarters of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) in Moscow, linked to the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) is arguably one of the most crucial nodes of the emerging multipolar world.

That’s where I was received by Minister of Integration and Macroeconomics Sergey Glazyev – who was previously interviewed in detail by The Cradle –  for an exclusive, expanded discussion on the geoeconomics of multipolarity.

Glazyev was joined by his top economic advisor Dmitry Mityaev, who is also the secretary of the Eurasian Economic Commission’s (EEC) science and technology council. The EAEU and EEC are formed by Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia. The group is currently engaged in establishing a series of free trade agreements with nations from West Asia to Southeast Asia.

Our conversation was unscripted, free flowing and straight to the point. I had initially proposed some talking points revolving around discussions between the EAEU and China on designing a new gold/commodities-based currency bypassing the US dollar, and how it would be realistically possible to have the EAEU, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and BRICS+ to adopt the same currency design.

Glazyev and Mityaev were completely frank and also asked questions on the Global South. As much as extremely sensitive political issues should remain off the record, what they said about the road towards multipolarity was quite sobering – in fact realpolitik-based.

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Posted in Currencies, Debt, Economy, Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments

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Biden’s Genius Detente Has Cost America the Old Ballgame, by Phil Butler

Posted on March 14, 2023 | Leave a comment

Biden has built up a formidable anti-U.S. alliance and turned itself into a banana republic. From Phil Butler at lewrockwell.com:

President Joe Biden’s benefactors have lost the world, whether Russia wins or loses in Ukraine. This was a poignant message delivered by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson the other day. Forcing the Russians to act, and pushing them into unbreakable alliances with China, India, and Iran, Biden and Co. have almost overnight turned the United States into one great big meaningless banana republic.

I know, these are strong words, a dramatic revelation. But I and Tucker Carlson are not the only people on Earth who recognize what’s happening. The New Yorker just featured a piece entitled. “Russia and China Unveil a Pact Against America and the West.” February 7th, Moscow and Beijing declare their opposition to the further enlargement of NATO and the formation of other regional security alliances.

It’s America’s worst nightmare. Biden’s blundering, blustery policy toward Putin and Russia is a disaster for the dinosaurs clinging to their Cold War ideologies, and for the average US citizen who will end up devastated when our country has nowhere left to grow or go. Carlson quotes former President Donald Trump saying that “We will never be Russia’s close ally, but if Russia and China ally, we America will be in deep trouble.” And, so we are. The Fox commentator went on to point out that preventing such an alliance against the west, was former President Richard Nixon’s reason for going to China in 1972.

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The stage is set for Hybrid World War III, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on March 1, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Russians and Chinese see quite clearly that they stand in opposition to the U.S., and they are determined to build something different and what they regard as better than the American model. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

A powerful feeling rhythms your skin and drums up your soul as you’re immersed in a long walk under persistent snow flurries, pinpointed by selected stops and enlightening conversations, crystallizing disparate vectors one year after the start of the accelerated phase of the proxy war between US/NATO and Russia.

That’s how Moscow welcomes you: the undisputed capital of the 21st century multipolar world.

A long, walking meditation impregnates on us how President Putin’s address – rather, a civilizational speech – last week was a game-changer when it comes to the demarcation of the civilizational red lines we are all now facing. It acted like a powerful drill perforating the less than short, actually zero term memory of the Collective West. No wonder it exercised a somewhat sobering effect contrasting the non-stop Russophobia binge of the NATOstan space.

Alexey Dobrinin, Director of the Foreign Policy Planning Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Russia, has correctly described

Putin’s address as “a methodological basis for understanding, describing and constructing multipolarity.”

For years some of us have been showing how the emerging multipolar world is defined – but goes way beyond – high speed interconnectivity, physical and geoeconomic. Now, as we reach the next stage, it’s as if Putin and Xi Jinping, each in their own way, are conceptualizing the two key civilizational vectors of multipolarity. That’s the deeper meaning of the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership, invisible to the naked eye.

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Posted in Economics, Economy, Energy, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Politics

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5 Reasons Why Much Of Global South Isn’t Automatically Supporting The West In Ukraine – OpEd by Krishen Mehta

Posted on February 27, 2023 | Leave a comment

These are not the kind of problems that are going to go away with a U.S. presidential visit or a big check. They are long fermented and are deeply ingrained. From Krishen Mehta at eurasiareview.com:

In October 2022, about eight months after the war in Ukraine started, the University of Cambridge in the UK harmonized surveys conducted in 137 countries about their attitudes towards the West and towards Russia and China.

The findings in the study, while not free of a margin of error, are robust enough to take seriously.

These are:

  • For the 6.3 billion people who live outside of the West, 66 percent feel positively towards Russia and 70 percent feel positively towards China, and,
  • Among the 66 percent who feel positively about Russia the breakdown is 75 percent in South Asia, 68 percent in Francophone Africa, and 62 percent in Southeast Asia.
  • Public opinion of Russia remains positive in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

Sentiments of this nature have caused some ire, surprise, and even anger in the West. It is difficult for them to believe that two-thirds of the world’s population is not siding with the West.

What are some of the reasons or causes for this? I believe there are five reasons as explained in this brief essay.

1. The Global South does not believe that the West understands or empathizes with their problems.

India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, summed it up succinctly in a recent interview: “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” He is referring to the many challenges that developing countries face whether they relate to the aftermath of the pandemic, the high cost of debt service, the climate crisis that is ravaging their lives, the pain of poverty, food shortages, droughts, and high energy prices. The West has barely given lip service to the Global South on many of these problems. Yet the West is insisting that the Global South join it in sanctioning Russia.

The Covid pandemic is a perfect example—despite the Global South’s repeated pleas to share intellectual property on the vaccines, with the goal of saving lives, no Western nation was willing to do so. Africa remains to this day the most unvaccinated continent in the world. Africa had the capability to make the vaccines but without the intellectual property they could not do it.

But help did come from Russia, China, and India. Algeria launched a vaccination program in January 2021 after it received its first batch of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccines. Egypt started vaccinations after it got China’s Sinopharm vaccine at about the same time. South Africa procured a million doses of AstraZeneca from the Serum Institute of India. In Argentina, Sputnik became the backbone of their vaccine program. All of this was happening while the West was using its financial resources to buy millions of doses in advance, and often destroying them when they became outdated. The message to the Global South was clear—your problems are your problems, they are not our problems.

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Iran-China strategic partnership: The big picture, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on February 19, 2023 | Leave a comment

Asian countries are turning towards Asia, which doesn’t bode well for Americans who think America has to control Asia to control the world. From Pepe Escobar at presstv.ir:]

US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (L) talks with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during a rally with fellow Democrats before voting on H.R. 1, or the People Act, on the East Steps of the US Capitol on March 08, 2019 in Washington, DC. (AFP photo)

The national flags of China and Iran fly in Tiananmen Square during Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi’s visit to Beijing, China, February 14, 2023. (Photo by Reuters)

The key takeaway of President Ebrahim Raeisi’s state visit to Beijing goes way beyond the signing of 20 bilateral cooperation agreements.

This is a crucial inflexion point in an absorbing, complex, decades-long, ongoing historical process: Eurasia integration.   

Little wonder that President Raeisi, welcomed by a standing ovation at Peking University before receiving an honorary academic title, stressed “a new world order is forming and taking the place of the older one”, characterized by “real multilateralism, maximum synergy, solidarity and dissociation from unilateralisms”.

And the epicenter of the new world order, he asserted, is Asia.  

It was quite heartening to see the Iranian president eulogizing the Ancient Silk Road, not only in terms of trade but also as a “cultural bond” and “connecting different societies together throughout history”.

Raeisi could have been talking about Sassanid Persia, whose empire ranged from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, and was the great intermediary Silk Road trading power for centuries between China and Europe.

It’s as if he was corroborating Chinese President Xi Jinping’s famed notion of “people to people exchanges” applied to the New Silk Roads. 

And then President Raeisi jump cut to the inescapable historical connection: he addressed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), of which Iran is a key partner.

All that spells out Iran’s full reconnection with Asia – after those arguably wasted years of trying an entente cordiale with the collective West. That was symbolized by the fate of the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal: negotiated, unilaterally buried and then, last year, all but condemned all over gain.

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Posted in Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments, Uncategorized

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The Big Stiff: Russia-Iran dump the dollar and bust US sanctions, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on February 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

The U.S. government has managed to piss off a number of large and geopolitically important nations. From Pepe Escobar at thecradle.co:

News of Russian banks connecting to Iran’s financial messaging system strengthens the resistance against US-imposed sanctions on both countries and accelerates global de-dollarization.

https://media.thecradle.co/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Iran-Russia-4.jpg

Photo credit: The Cradle

The agreement between the Central Banks of Russia and Iran formally signed on 29 January connecting their interbank transfer systems is a game-changer in more ways than one.

Technically, from now on 52 Iranian banks already using SEPAM, Iran’s interbank telecom system, are connecting with 106 banks using SPFS, Russia’s equivalent to the western banking messaging system SWIFT.

Less than a week before the deal, State Duma Chairman Vyachslav Volodin was in Tehran overseeing the last-minute details, part of a meeting of the Russia-Iran Inter-Parliamentary Commission on Cooperation: he was adamant both nations should quickly increase trade in their own currencies.

Ruble-rial trade

Confirming that the share of ruble and rial in mutual settlements already exceeds 60 percent, Volodin ratified the success of “joint use of the Mir and Shetab national payment systems.” Not only does this bypass western sanctions, but it is able to “solve issues related to mutually beneficial cooperation, and increasing trade.”

It is quite possible that the ruble will eventually become the main currency in bilateral trade, according to Iran’s ambassador in Moscow, Kazem Jalali: “Now more than 40 percent of trade between our countries is in rubles.”

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Posted in Banking, Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments

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Will U.S. ‘Interests’ Become Sacrificed on Altar of New Indo-Pacific Strategy? By Matthew Ehret

Posted on February 5, 2023 | 1 comment

Will the U.S. do any better with its Indo-Pacific strategy than its done with its Eurasian strategy? The question almost answers itself. From Matthew Ehret at strategic-culture.org:

The Anglo-American foreign policy hawks imagine that the world is yearning to be liberated from Beijing’s nefarious agenda to end poverty

As the trans-Atlantic world is pulled into the vortex of a McCarthyite nightmare with a renewed wave of anti-Russian and now anti-China hysterics, a wave of new “Asia Pacific” doctrines have emerged across captured states… I mean “member” states throughout NATO.

Starting with the February 2022 American ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’, similar anti-China programs have popped up left and right with one principled target in mind: eliminate the threat of China through every tool available.

By early June 2022, the UK announced its own branding of the Asia Pivot remixed into the oddly named ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ which focuses less on the liberal eco-friendly language of the EU and devotes itself entirely to vastly increasing its military presence in China’s backyard.

After NATO’s June 2022 Madrid Summit officially designated China as ‘a systemic rival’, Canada’s foreign ministry announced its own Indo-Pacific Strategy in November 2022 followed by an absurd 26 page program published in January 10, 2023 outlining the details of Canada’s new role in the Pacific (which will be the subject of a subsequent report).

On January 25, 2023 NATO’s ironically named ‘Science for Peace and Security Program’ launched a new ‘cooperative initiative on the Indo-Pacific, followed by a January 30, 2023 Atlantic Council Indo-Pacific Security Initiative focused on dealing with “China’s growing threat to the international order”. The same day the Atlantic Council unveiled this new doctrine, an American intelligence spook named Markus Garlauskas was named the program’s new director.

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Posted in Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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A tale of two worlds, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on February 3, 2023 | Leave a comment

One world is based on debt and fiat currencies, the other world is moving towards production and gold. Which shall prevail? From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

In the war between the western alliance and the Asian axis, the media focus is on the Ukrainian battlefield. The real war is in currencies, with Russia capable of destroying the dollar.

So far, Putin’s actions have been relatively passive. But already, both Russia and China have accumulated enough gold to implement gold standards. It is now overwhelmingly in their interests to do so.

From Sergey Glazyev’s recent article in a Russian business newspaper, it is clear that settlement of trade balances between members, dialog partners, and associate members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) optionally will be in gold. Furthermore, the Russian economy would benefit enormously from a decline in borrowing rates from current levels of over 13% to a level more consistent with sound money.

To understand the consequences, in this article the comparison is made between the western alliance’s fiat currency and deficit spending regime and the Russian-Chinese axis’s planned industrial revolution for some 3.8 billion people in the SCO family. China has a remarkable savings rate, which will underscore the investment capital for a rapid increase in Asian industrialisation, without inflationary consequences.

With a new round of military action in Ukraine shortly to kick off, it will be in Putin’s interest to move from passivity to financial aggression. It will not take much for him to undermine the entire western fiat currency system — a danger barely recognised by a gung-ho NATO military complex.

Introduction

In the geopolitical tussle between the old and new hegemons, we see the best of strategies and the worst of strategies, where belief is pitted against credulity. It is the season of light and the season of darkness, the spring of hope and the winter of despair…

Recalling some of Charles Dickens’ famous opening lines from his Tale of Two Cities to describe the current state of global politics sums up the potential of a new industrial revolution throughout Asia and much of the rest of the under-developed world (the best of times), compared with the western alliance abetted by its military arm, NATO, which is determined to suppress the plans for the new hegemons at its own peoples’ expense (the worst of times). Ironically, the nations which will benefit most from the western alliance’s proxy war are those which align themselves with its enemies. 

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Posted in Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Energy, Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments, History

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Russia’s intentions are clarifying, by Alasdair Macleod

Posted on January 27, 2023 | 1 comment

The Russians have a not-so-secret weapon that would devastate the U.S.: back the ruble with gold. From Alasdair Macleod at goldmoney.com:

We have confirmation from the highest sources that Russia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) are considering using gold for pan-Asian trade settlements, fully replacing dollars and euros.

In an article written for Vedomosti, a Moscow-based Russian newspaper published on 27 December, Sergey Glazyev, a prominent economic adviser to Vladimir Putin who is heading up the Eurasian Economic Union committee charged with devising a replacement for dollars in trade settlements sent a very clear signal to that effect. It appears he will drop earlier plans to design a new commodity-linked trade currency because it has been superseded.

Furthermore, increasing numbers of nations have joined or have applied to join the SCO as dialog members, including Saudi Arabia and other important Gulf Cooperation Organisation members. The economic benefits of discounted energy, China’s investment capital, and sound money are the ingredients for a new, Asia-wide industrial revolution, while the economies of the western alliance sink under rising prices, rising interest rates, collapsing financial markets, and collapsing currencies.

While it will mark the end of the road for the western alliance and its fiat currencies, Putin must be careful not to take the blame. Now that the alliance is racking up tanks and other equipment for the Ukrainians, they are actively promoting a new battle, with NATO getting almost directly involved. It is that action which will drive up commodity prices, undermine western financial markets, undermine government finances, and ultimately collapse their currencies. 

Putin is likely to use NATO’s impetuous action in defence of Ukraine as cover for securing Russia’s future as an Asian superstate, which will be the west’s undoing.

Introduction

We forget, perhaps, that from 1 March 1950 the Soviet rouble was on a gold standard at 4 roubles 45 kopecks for 1 gram of pure gold until 1961, when Khrushchev devalued it and refixed it to the dollar. Stalin had been a signatory to the Bretton Woods agreement but refused to join it and make the rouble subservient to the dollar as its intermediary for a gold standard.

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