Category Archives: Eurasian Axis

In Eurasia, the War of Economic Corridors is in full swing, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on July 17, 2022 | Leave a comment

Eurasian initiatives are a lot more constructive than whatever the U.S and Europe are doing to themselves. From Pepe Escobar at thecradle.co:

Mega Eurasian organizations and their respective projects are now converging at record speed, with one global pole way ahead of the other.

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Photo Credit: The Cradle

The War of Economic Corridors is now proceeding full speed ahead, with the game-changing first cargo flow of goods from Russia to India via the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) already in effect.

Very few, both in the east and west, are aware of how this actually has long been in the making: the Russia-Iran-India agreement for implementing a shorter and cheaper Eurasian trade route via the Caspian Sea (compared to the Suez Canal), was first signed in 2000, in the pre-9/11 era.

The INSTC in full operational mode signals a powerful hallmark of Eurasian integration – alongside the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and last but not least, what I described as “Pipelineistan” two decades ago.

Caspian is key

Let’s have a first look on how these vectors are interacting.

The genesis of the current acceleration lies in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent visit to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan’s capital, for the 6th Caspian Summit. This event not only brought the evolving Russia-Iran strategic partnership to a deeper level, but crucially, all five Caspian Sea littoral states agreed that no NATO warships or bases will be allowed on site.

That essentially configures the Caspian as a virtual Russian lake, and in a minor sense, Iranian – without compromising the interests of the three “stans,” Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. For all practical purposes, Moscow has tightened its grip on Central Asia a notch.

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Posted in Economy, Eurasian Axis, Geopolitics, Governments

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Russia and China haven’t even started to ratchet up the pain dial, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on July 14, 2022 | Leave a comment

When the U.S. and its NATO puppies started “covertly” aiding the Ukrainians and printing up propaganda, it never seems to have occurred to them that other side fights back. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

The Suicide Spectacular Summer Show, currently on screen across Europe, proceeds in full regalia, much to the astonishment of virtually the whole Global South: a trashy, woke Gotterdammerung remake, with Wagnerian grandeur replaced by twerking.

Decadent Roman Emperors at least exhibited some degree of pathos. Here we’re just faced by a toxic mix of hubris, abhorrent mediocrity, delusion, crude ideological sheep-think and outright irrationality wallowing in white man’s burden racist/supremacist slush – all symptoms of a profound sickness of the soul.

To call it the Biden-Leyen-Blinken West or so would be too reductionist: after all these are puny politico/functionaries merely parroting orders. This is a historical process: physical, psychic and moral cognitive degeneration embedded in NATOstan’s manifest desperation in trying to contain Eurasia, allowing occasional tragicomic sketches such as a NATO summit proclaiming Woke War against virtually the whole non-West.

So when President Putin addresses the collective West in front of Duma leaders and heads of political parties, it does feel like a comet striking an inert planet. It’s not even a case of “lost in translation”. “They” simply aren’t equipped to get it.

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NATO: By Making China the Enemy, the Alliance Is Threatening World Peace, by Jonathan Cook

Posted on July 11, 2022 | 1 comment

Remember the good old days when NATO was a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union? Now it’s a tool of U.S. wet dreams of global hegemony. From Jonathan Cook at antiwar.com:

As the saying goes, if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The West has the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a self-declared “defensive” military alliance – so any country that refuses its dictates must, by definition, be an offensive military threat.

That is part of the reason why NATO issued a new “strategic concept” document last week at its summit in Madrid, declaring for the first time that China poses a “systemic challenge” to the alliance, alongside a primary “threat” from Russia.

Beijing views this new designation as a decisive step by NATO on the path to pronouncing it a “threat” too – echoing the alliance’s escalatory approach towards Moscow over the past decade. In its previous mission statement, issued in 2010, NATO advocated “a true strategic partnership” with Russia.

According to a report in the New York Times, China would have found itself openly classed as a “threat” last week had it not been for Germany and France. They insisted that the more hostile terminology be watered down so as to avoid harming their trade and technology links with China.

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

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You’re either with us or you’re a “systemic challenge”, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on July 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

Ultimately the world will not be defined by whether countries are with or against the U.S. or any other wanna-be empire. For the next few years, chaos and collapse will probably be the themes. What emerges from that? Who knows? Pepe Escobar, as he frequently does, tries his hand at predicting the future. From Escobar at thesaker.is:

After all we’re deep into the metaverse spectrum, where things are the opposite of what they seem.

Fast but not furious, the Global South is revving up. The key takeaway of the BRICS+ summit in Beijing,  held in sharp contrast with the G7 in the Bavarian Alps, is that both West Asia’s Iran and South America’s Argentina officially applied for BRICS membership.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry has highlighted how BRICS has “a very creative mechanism with broad aspects”. Tehran – a close partner of both Beijing and Moscow – already had “a series of consultations” about the application: the Iranians are sure that will “add value” to the expanded BRICS.

Talk about China, Russia and Iran being sooooo isolated. Well, after all we’re deep into the metaverse spectrum, where things are the opposite of what they seem.

Moscow’s obstinacy in not following Washington’s Plan A to start a pan-European war is rattling Atlanticist nerves to the core. So right after the G7 summit significantly held at a former Nazi sanatorium, enter NATO’s, in full warmongering regalia.

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

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War Makes for Clarity, by Alasdair Crooke

Posted on June 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

What’s becoming increasingly clear is that the West is losing this war with Russia and China. From Alasdair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

A NUMBER OF SLL READERS HAVE REPORTED THEY GET ERROR MESSAGES WHEN THEY TRY TO ACCESS STRATEGIC CULTURE LINKS. SLL NORMALLY POSTS EXCERPTS AND THEN LINKS TO THE ARTICLE AT A SITE OF PUBLICATION. FOR STRATEGIC CULTURE ARTICLES WE WILL POST THE ENTIRE ARTICLE ON SLL. HOWEVER, IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A PROBLEM ACCESSING STRATEGIC CULTURE AND YOU ARE GOING TO READ THE ARTICLE, PLEASE GO TO THAT SITE SO THAT THEY GET THE CLICK AND ANY ASSOCIATED ADVERTISING REVENUE. THE STRATEGIC CULTURE LINK WILL BE IN THE SLL OPENING INTRODUCTORY SECTION AS IT ALWAYS HAS BEEN. PLEASE FOLLOW THAT LINK IF YOU CAN ACCESS STRATEGIC CULTURE. IF YOU CAN’T, READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE AT SLL IF YOU SO CHOOSE. IT’S NOT A PERFECT SOLUTION, BUT IT’S THE BEST SLL CAN COME UP WITH UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES.

In America – as in Europe – there is fear and anger at system disintegration, Alastair Crooke writes.

The train wreck has been expected for so long that we have become comfortable living under its shadow. Life went on; markets were sanguine that the market lifestyle subsidy provided by the Central Banks would continue unabated. And not without good reason either: Any trader disappointment at Central Bank action, any dip in markets, brought forth a collective market hissy fit that usually strong-armed the Central Banks into immediate appeasement. We were hard pressed to imagine differently.

Now, however, we’re in a new era, in many ways. The West has entered upon a war with Russia and China. The West, however, did not do its homework first, and now is finding that the ‘war’ is cruelly revealing the structural rigidities and flaws integral to its own economic system, rather than mining the weaknesses of its rivals.

Why is this new era so grave? Firstly, because of what lies ‘beneath the stones’. These structural contradictions have been accumulating over decades, lurking in the dark damp underside to the stones. Kept hidden from sight by the serendipitous (for the U.S.) economic outcome to WW2, and the equally serendipitous combination of factors that kept inflation low (so low that western economists believed they had found the ‘holy grail’ of monetary ‘easing’ – they had banished recessions for ever). So simple, really, just turn on the money-printer!

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Posted in Currencies, Debt, Eurasian Axis, Financial markets, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Military, Politics, Propaganda, War

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The Entire World Order Has Changed, by Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Posted on June 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

Are we seeing the death knell of the West and the emergence of a multi-polar order? From Raúl Ilargi Meijer at theautomaticearth.com:

It was Jim O’Neill, Goldman’s chief economist at the time, who coined the term BRICS in 2001 for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Little did he know. He was talking about emerging economies. 13 years later, they no longer are. They are good for about 40% of the world population, and some 25% of global GDP. The world has not stood still since 2009, and it’s moving faster now.

Ironically, the BRICS countries never looked to be as prominent economically as they are today, they were happy to build up one step at a time. But then NATO decided to move east at a pace that Russia found intolerable, and now the BRICS have taken on a whole new meaning. 25% of global GDP may not seem that much, but the 5 countries hold a much bigger share of -essential- global resources and/or raw materials than that, and China moreover delivers an outsize part of finished products.

And we now know that they won’t be BRICS for much longer. Many countries choose to be affiliated, in one form or another, with the BRICS rather than the “west”. They see that Russia is winning in Ukraine, and they see the damage the sanctions do. It’s just practical considerations. Saudi Arabia and Argentina are interested in joining BRICS. So are Uruguay, Iran, Egypt, Thailand, and a number of post-Soviet States. They see where the real economic power resides.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Currencies, Economics, Economy, Eurasian Axis, Financial markets, Geopolitics, Governments, Politics, Propaganda, War

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Brzezinski’s Proxy War Playbook, by Patrick Macfarlane

Posted on June 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

The U.S. has been going after Russia via proxies for quite some time. From Patrick Macfarlane at libertarianinstitute.org:

untitled design

In 1998, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbiegnew Brzezinski told Le Nouvel Observateur that the CIA “knowingly increased the probability” that the Russians would invade Afghanistan by covertly supporting the Mujahideen before the Soviet invasion. Later in that same interview, Brzezinski claims that this covert intervention caused the end of the Soviet Union:

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

In July 2014, almost six months after the Maidan Revolution and Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea, Brzezinski hinted at a similar plan for Ukraine, although he couched it in defensive terms. He wrote on the Atlantic Council’s blog:

If Ukraine has to be supported so that it does resist, the Ukrainians have to know the West is prepared to help them resist. And there’s no reason to be secretive about it. It would be much better to be open about it and to say to the Ukrainians and to those who may threaten Ukraine that if Ukrainians resist, they will have weapons. And we’ll provide some of those weapons in advance of the very act of invasion. Because in the absence of that, the temptation to invade and to preempt may become overwhelming. But what kind of weapons is important. And in my view, they should be weapons designed particularly to permit the Ukrainians to engage in effective urban warfare of resistance.

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The Neocon’s Dream – Decolonize Russia, Re-colonize China, by Moon of Alabama

Posted on June 23, 2022 | Leave a comment

Multipolarity is turning into the neocons’ nightmare. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

On March 26 U.S. President Joe Biden called for regime change in Russia:

Speaking in Warsaw, Poland, on Saturday, President Biden said of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The White House immediately rushed to talk back that call for regime change and a day later Biden himself denied that he was calling for regime change:

President Joe Biden told reporters on Sunday he was not calling for a regime change in Russia when he said a day earlier that Russian President Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power,” a surprising comment the White House quickly tried to walk back Saturday.When a reporter asked if he was calling for Putin’s removal from office, Biden replied “no” as he walked out of church Sunday afternoon, according to Bloomberg pool reporter Courtney Rozen.

However, other parts of the U.S. government makes unmistakeably clear that its aims in Russia go even much than regime change. Tomorrow the US Government’s Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) will hold a briefing on the “Moral and Strategic Imperative” that makes it necessary to “Decolonize Russia”.

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What Difference Does a War Make?, by Alfred McCoy

Posted on June 22, 2022 | Leave a comment

The rise of China dooms U.S. designs on the Eurasian “center of the world.” From Alfred McCoy at tomdispatch.com:

The Geopolitics of the New Cold War

From his first days in office, Joe Biden and his national security advisers seemed determined to revive America’s fading global leadership via the strategy they knew best — challenging the “revisionist powers” Russia and China with a Cold War-style aggressiveness. When it came to Beijing, the president combined the policy initiatives of his predecessors, pursuing Barack Obama’s “strategic pivot” from the Middle East to Asia, while continuing Donald Trump’s trade war with China. In the process, Biden revived the kind of bipartisan foreign policy not seen in Washington since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Writing in the December 2021 Foreign Affairs, a group of famously disputatious diplomatic historians agreed on one thing: “Today, China and the United States are locked in what can only be called a new cold war.” Just weeks later, the present mimed the past in ways that went well beyond even that pessimistic assessment as Russia began massing 190,000 troops on the border of Ukraine. Soon, Russian President Vladimir Putin would join China’s Xi Jinping in Beijing where they would demand that the West “abandon the ideologized approaches of the Cold War” by curtailing both NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe and similar security pacts in the Pacific.

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

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World War 3 for dummies, by Gaius Baltar

Posted on June 22, 2022 | 2 comments

By now its become easier to cut through the propaganda, find honest sources, and understand what is happening in Ukraine. However, the perspective that this fiasco may be symptomatic of the collapse of the American empire and its satrapies has yet to take hold, at least in the West. Gaius Baltar has that perspective and backs it up with some sound arguments. From Baltar at thesaker.is:

Some knowledgeable people, apparently including the Pope, are beginning to suspect that there may be more going on in the world than just the war in the Ukraine. They say that World War 3 has already started and things will get worse from now on. This can be difficult to determine while we are participating in the unfolding events and do not have the benefit of the historical perspective. It is doubtful that people back in 1939 realized that they were looking at the start of a major worldwide conflict, although some may have suspected it.

The current global situation is in many ways like a giant jigsaw puzzle where the general public only sees a tiny part of the complete picture. Most don’t even realize that there may be more pieces and don’t even ask these simple questions: Why is all this happening and why is it happening now?

Things are more complicated than most people realize. What they see is the evil wizard Vladimir Saruman Putin invading innocent Ukraine with his orc army – for absolutely no reason. This is a simplistic view, to say the least because nothing happens without a reason. Let’s put things in perspective and see what is really going on – and why the world is going crazy before our eyes. Let’s see what World War 3 is all about.

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