Category Archives: Eurasian Axis

The 2023 War – ‘Setting the Theatre’ by Alastair Crooke

Posted on January 13, 2023 | 1 comment

The Ukraine-Russia war is the focal point of a war that already encompasses much of the rest of the world. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

The China-Russia axis are lighting the fires of a structural insurrection against the West across much of the Rest of World. Its fires are aimed at ‘boiling the frog slowly’

A top US Marine General, James Bierman, in a recent interview with the Financial Times, explained in a moment of candour how the US is “setting the theatre” for possible war with China, whilst casually admitting as an aside, how US defence planners had been busy inside Ukraine years ago, “earnestly preparing” for war with Russia — even down to the “pre-positioning of supplies”, identifying sites from which the US might operate support, and sustain operations. Simply put, they were there,readying the battle space for years.

No surprise really, as such military responses flow directly from the core US strategic decision to actuate the 1992 ‘WolfowitzDoctrine’ that the US must plan and preemptively act, to disable any potential Great Power — well before it reaches the point at which it can rival or impair US hegemony.

NATO today has progressed to war with Russia in a battlespace, which in 2023, may or may not stay limited to Ukraine. Simply put the point is that the shift to ‘War’ (whether incremental or not) marks a fundamental transition from which there is no going back to ab initio — ‘war economies’ in essence, are structurally different to the ‘normal’ from which the West began, and to which it has grown accustomed over recent decades. A war society — even if only partly mobilised — thinks and acts structurally differently from peacetime society.

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China Cements its Position in the Middle East, by Judith Bergman

Posted on January 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

It’s real simple. Most nations prefer mutually beneficial exchange (offered by China) over bullets, bombs, bribery, and bombast (offered by the U.S.). From Judith Bergman at gatestoneinstitute.org:

  • Saudi Arabia is now not only one of China’s most important suppliers of energy, but the kingdom is also an important link in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — a gigantic global development project to enhance China’s global influence from East Asia to Europe by making countries worldwide increasingly dependent on China. Under the BRI, China has signed cooperation agreements with 20 Arab countries.
  • China is also Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner — an arrangement that extends to military cooperation….
  • Biden took a longstanding ally, Saudi Arabia, and, by repeating that he would make the kingdom a “pariah nation,” created an adversary. “For an American president to be silent on the issue of human rights is inconsistent with who we are and who I am,” Biden said. The same concern for human rights has not seemed to bother him, however, when it comes to China or Iran, whose record on human rights is at least as bad as Saudi Arabia’s, if not worse.
  • China jumped in to fill the vacuum.
  • Xi Jinping has made no secret of his wishes to “replace America as the global superpower” economically, militarily, diplomatically and technologically by 2049. The United States might be “well poised to lead,” but is it leading?

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

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How General Soleimani Kick-Started The Multipolar World, by Pablo Escobar

Posted on January 9, 2023 | Leave a comment

Talk about blowback. From Pablo Escobar at zerohedge.com:

The consensus among future historians will be inevitable: the 2020s started with a diabolic murder.            

Baghdad airport, January 3, 2020, 00:52 a.m. local time. The assassination of Gen.QassemSoleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic RevolutionGuards Corps (IRGC), alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’abi, by laser-guided AGM-114 Hellfire missiles launched from two MQ-9 Reaper drones, was, in fact, murder as an act of war.

This act of war set the tone for the new decade and inspired my book Raging Twenties: Great Power Politics Meets Techno-Feudalism, published in early 2021.

The drone strikes at Baghdad airport, directly approved by the pop entertainer/entrepreneur then ruling the Hegemon, Donald Trump, constituted an imperial act engineered as a stark provocation, capable of engendering an Iranian reaction that would then be countered by, “self-defense”, packaged as “deterrence”.

The proverbial narrative barrage spun to saturation, ruled it as a “targeted killing”: a pre-emptive op squashing Gen. Soleimani’s alleged planning of “imminent attacks” against US diplomats and troops.No evidence whatsoever was provided to support the claim.

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Bye Bye 1991-2022, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on January 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

It would be a lot easier to share Pepe Escobar’s enthusiasm for Eurasion axis governments and their many projects if every one of those governments didn’t disregard human rights. The projects are state driven and within the countries, individuals are the property of the state. (Yes, the same can be said of the West, which is why the West is falling apart.) Nevertheless, Escobar has some perceptive comments about both East and West. From Escobar at strategic-culture.org:

The hard work starts now. Welcome to the New Great Game on crack, Pepe Escobar writes.

2023 starts with collective NATO in Absolutely Freak Out Mode as Russian Defense Minister Shoigu announces that Russian Navy frigate Admiral Gorshkov is now on tour – complete with a set of Mr. Zircon’s hypersonic business cards.

The business tour will encompass the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and of course include the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire’s former Mare Nostrum. Mr. Zircon on the prowl has absolutely nothing to do with the war in Ukraine: it’s a sign of what happens next when it comes to frying much bigger fishes than a bunch of Kiev psychos.

The end of 2022 did seal the frying of the Big Ukraine Negotiation Fish. It has now been served on a hot plate – and fully digested. Moscow has made it painfully clear there’s no reason whatsoever to trust the “non-agreement capable” declining superpower.

So even taxi drivers in Dacca are now betting on when the much- vaunted “winter offensive” starts, and how far will it go. General Armageddon’s path ahead is clear: all-out demilitarization and de-electrification on steroids, complete with grinding up masses of Ukrainians at the lowest possible cost to the Russian Armed Forces in Donbass until Kiev psychos beg for mercy. Or not.

Another big fried fish on a hot plate at the end of 2022 was the 2014 Minsk Agreement. The cook was no other than former chancellor Merkel (“an attempt to buy time for Ukraine”). Implied is the not exactly smokin’ gun: the strategy of the Straussian/neo-con and neoliberal-con combo in charge of U.S. foreign policy, from the beginning, was to unleash a Forever War, by proxy, against Russia.

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Why BRI Is Back with a Bang in 2023, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on January 7, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Eurasian axis the U.S. is trying to thwart becomes increasingly interconnected and increasingly strong. From Pepe Escobar at unz.com:

The year 2022 ended with a Zoom call to end all Zoom calls: Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping discussing all aspects of the Russia-China strategic partnership in an exclusive video call.

Putin told Xi how “Russia and China managed to ensure record high growth rates of mutual trade,” meaning “we will be able to reach our target of $200 billion by 2024 ahead of schedule.”

On their coordination to “form a just world order based on international law,” Putin emphasized how “we share the same views on the causes, course, and logic of the ongoing transformation of the global geopolitical landscape.”

Facing “unprecedented pressure and provocations from the west,” Putin noted how Russia-China are not only defending their own interests “but also all those who stand for a truly democratic world order and the right of countries to freely determine their own destiny.”

Earlier, Xi had announced that Beijing will hold the 3rd Belt and Road Forum in 2023. This has been confirmed, off the record, by diplomatic sources. The forum was initially designed to be bi-annual, first held in 2017 and then 2019. 2021 didn’t happen because of Covid-19.

The return of the forum signals not only a renewed drive but an extremely significant landmark as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched in Astana and then Jakarta in 2013, will be celebrating its 10th anniversary.

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Systems Dynamics Follow Their Own Rules – and Not Groupthink, by Alasdair Crooke

Posted on January 2, 2023 | Leave a comment

What happens when reality refuses to follow the rules. The decline and fall of the American empire is offering a concrete demonstration. From Alasdair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

While America’s cultural and economic ascendency is portrayed as an End of History ‘normal’, it represents an obvious anomaly, Alastair Crooke writes.

Toward the end of his The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), “[Yale Historian] Paul Kennedy expressed the then-controversial belief that great power wars were not a thing of the past. One of the main themes of Kennedy’s history was the concept of overstretch – that is to say, that the relative decline of great powers often resulted from an imbalance between a nation’s resources and its commitments”, writes Professor Francis Sempa.

Few in the western Ruling Class even accept that we have reached such a point of inflection. Like it or not, however, great power combinations are fast rising across the globe. U.S. influence already is shrinking back to its Atlanticist core. This shrinkage is not simply a matter of resources vs commitments; that is too simplistic as an explanation.

Metamorphosis is occurring both as the result of the exhaustion of the political and cultural dynamics which powered the previous era, as much as is energised by the vitality of new dynamics. And by ‘dynamics’ is meant too, the exhaustion and coming demise of underlying mechanical financial and cultural structures which in, and of, themselves are moulding the new politics and culture.

Systems follow their own rules – the rules of physical mechanics too – as in, what happens when a further grain of sand is added to a complex, unstable sand pile. Thus, unlike in politics, neither human opinion, nor election outcomes in Washington, will necessarily have the capacity to mould the next era – any more than the opinion of Congress alone can reverse a cascade in a financial sand pile – if big enough – by pouring more sand grains on its top.

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Posted in Collapse, Economy, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Government, Imperialism, Propaganda, War

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2022… The Year That Marked the End of America’s Hegemony, by the Strategic Culture Editorial Board

Posted on January 1, 2023 | 1 comment

The war in the Ukraine will mark the end of the American empire. From the Strategic Culture Editorial Board at strategic-culture.org:

The war in Ukraine has dominated the past year. Other global crises of soaring energy and food costs are collateral damage from the conflict in Ukraine.

The war in Ukraine has dominated the past year. Other global crises of soaring energy and food costs are collateral damage from the conflict in Ukraine.

The conflict is not simply a localized one in the center of Europe on Russia’s doorstep involving a reactionary anti-Russian regime in Kiev. The conflict represents a historic showdown between the United States and its allies in the NATO military alliance it leads, and Russia. The showdown has been a long time coming.

It didn’t have to happen in this violent, atrocious way.

Russia had long warned the United States and its NATO partners that the expansion of the alliance towards Russia’s borders was an unacceptable strategic security threat. Moscow’s warnings went unheeded year after year.

Almost one year ago, Russia offered a last-ditch diplomatic way to avoid conflict by appealing for a comprehensive security treaty, one based on the previously accepted principle of “indivisible security”. That diplomatic initiative was dismissed out of hand by Washington and its European allies.

Moscow had repeatedly warned that it would not accept the further militarization of the NeoNazi-espousing Kiev regime. Eight years of low-intensity war against Russian-speaking people in former Southeast Ukraine had to stop. Ukraine’s militarization by NATO and its touted membership of the alliance was Russia’s red line. It was the United States and its NATO partners who chose to cross that line. In that case, Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed to take military-technical measures. The military defanging of the Kiev regime that began on February 24 was the result.

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Xi of Arabia and the petroyuan drive, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on December 18, 2022 | Leave a comment

Bit by bit the dollar is losing its reserve currency status. If the Middle East and China do their oil business in currencies other than the dollar, particularly the yuan, it will hasten the process. From Pepe Escobar at thecradle.co:

Xi Jinping has made an offer difficult for the Arabian Peninsula to ignore: China will be guaranteed buyers of your oil and gas, but we will pay in yuan.

 
https://media.thecradle.co/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Chinas-Xi-and-the-GCC-countries.jpg

Photo Credit: The Cradle

 

It would be so tempting to qualify Chinese President Xi Jinping landing in Riyadh a week ago, welcomed with royal pomp and circumstance, as Xi of Arabia proclaiming the dawn of the petroyuan era.

But it’s more complicated than that. As much as the seismic shift implied by the petroyuan move applies, Chinese diplomacy is way too sophisticated to engage in direct confrontation, especially with a wounded, ferocious Empire. So there’s way more going here than meets the (Eurasian) eye.

Xi of Arabia’s announcement was a prodigy of finesse: it was packaged as the internationalization of the yuan. From now on, Xi said, China will use the yuan for oil trade, through the Shanghai Petroleum and National Gas Exchange, and invited the Persian Gulf monarchies to get on board. Nearly 80 percent of trade in the global oil market continues to be priced in US dollars.

Ostensibly, Xi of Arabia, and his large Chinese delegation of officials and business leaders, met with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to promote increased trade. Beijing promised to “import crude oil in a consistent manner and in large quantities from the GCC.” And the same goes for natural gas.

China has been the largest importer of crude on the planet for five years now – half of it from the Arabian peninsula, and more than a quarter from Saudi Arabia. So it’s no wonder that the prelude for Xi of Arabia’s lavish welcome in Riyadh was a special op-ed expanding the trading scope, and praising increased strategic/commercial partnerships across the GCC, complete with “5G communications, new energy, space and digital economy.”

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Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies, Energy, Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics

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German Interview, with Michael Hudson

Posted on December 17, 2022 | Leave a comment

The U.S. is turning Europe into a dependency. From Michael Hudson at unz.com:

Dear Prof Hudson,

Once again: Herzliche Grüße aus Berlin!

Last time we spoke for German print magazine “Four” in June. Right now I also work for MEGA Radio, a radio news station for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We broadcast from Vienna and are located in Berlin, Bavaria and Austria.

Hereby I would like to invite you to another interview via ZOOM to record it for our radio program. It would be an update on our last interview. Maybe around 20-30 Minutes long.

See also our last talk:

I don’t know if that’s too short notice, but would you have time for such a conversation next week or the week after?

Otherwise, also at the beginning of January.

 

Here are my questions:

(1.) You made some predictions in our last interview for “Four” magazine which became true.

You talked about crisis for German companies in the production of fertilizer. This just hit the headlines weeks after our interview.

You also said: “What you characterize as “blocking Nord Stream 2” is really a Buy-American policy.” This now also became more than clear after the destroyed Nord Stream pipelines.

Could you comment that?

MH: U.S. foreign policy has long concentrated on control of the international oil trade. This trade is a leading contributor to the U.S. balance of payments, and its control gives U.S. diplomats the ability to impose a chokehold on other countries.

Oil is the key supplier of energy, and the rise in labor productivity and GDP for the leading economies tends to reflect the rise in energy use per worker. Oil and gas are not only for burning for energy, but are also a basic chemical input for fertilizers, and hence for agricultural productivity, as well as for much plastic and other chemical production.

So U.S. strategists recognize that cutting countries off from oil and its derivatives will stifle their industry and agriculture. The ability to impose such sanctions enables the U.S. to make countries dependent on compliance with U.S. policy so as not to be “excommunicated” from the oil trade.

U.S. diplomats have been telling Europe for many years not to rely on Russian oil and gas. The aim is twofold: to deprive Russia of its major trade surplus, and to capture the vast European market for U.S. oil producers. U.S. diplomats convinced German leaders not to approve the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and finally used the excuse of the NATO war with Russia in Ukraine to act unilaterally to arrange the destruction of both Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Economics, Economy, Energy, Eurasian Axis, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Russia withdraws from the Western project, by Alexander Khramchikhin

Posted on December 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Russian perspective: Why bother? From Alexander Khramchikin at thesaker.is:

translated by the Saker community translators

source

The world elite is not ready to compromise with Moscow

The training of Australian submariners on the British nuclear submarine Anson is being carried out as part of the effort to put together a new Anglo-Saxon coalition on a world-wide scale. Photo from http://www.gov.uk
The most important political outcome of the outgoing year should become a radical change in Russia’s relations with the West. Not at the level of propaganda for the “plebeian multitudes”, but at the political, economic and, most importantly, mental level.

BEFORE AND NOW

At present, Russia’s complete and final break with the “collective West” (which means the countries of NATO, the EU, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and, with some reservations, the Republic of Korea, Taiwan and Singapore) is becoming not only an objective reality, but also an objective necessity. Over the past half century, the Western model of development has undergone a very serious degradation, and this degradation continues to deepen.

Half a century ago, the West, with its classical democracy, was qualitatively superior to the then Soviet Union in all respects – both in terms of the living standards and quality of life, and in terms of democratic freedoms (competitive elections, real pluralism of opinions, equality of all before the law). If a Soviet person had the opportunity to emigrate, only two things could stop them – patriotism (in relation to the country and its culture, and not to the system) or sincere adherence to communist ideology (although there has been no smell of communism in the USSR for a long time).

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