Tag Archives: India

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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India Takes A Leading Role In De-Dollarization, by Andrew Korybko

Posted on March 11, 2023 | Leave a comment

India is in an enviable position. Its population and economy are too large for either the West or the Eurasian alliance to ignore it. The country is basically free to pursue its own national interest. From Andrew Korybko at theautomaticearth.com:

Reuters reported on Wednesday that “India’s Oil Deals With Russia Dent Decades-Old Dollar Dominance”, which informed their audience that the growing trend of those two using national or third-party currencies like the UAE’s is something significant for everyone to pay attention to. To that outlet’s credit, it also reminded readers that IMF Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath foresaw in the month after Russia’s special operation began that the West’s sanctions “could erode the dollar’s dominance”.

Lo and behold, that’s precisely what happened, with India of all countries accelerating de-dollarization through its non-dollar-denominated energy deals with Russia. About them, Russia has since become India’s largest supplier over the past year and now provides a whopping 35% of that country’s needs, which is also the world’s third-largest oil importer and fifth-largest economy. Their new energy ties, and particularly the growing de-dollarization dimension of their deals, are thus globally important.

None of what was just described is driven by any anti-American animus on India’s part since everything is purely motivated by the pursuit of that country’s objective national interests. Delhi had no choice but to gradually diversify away from dollar-denominated energy deals with Moscow due to Washington’s illegal sanctions. Its multipolar leadership wasn’t going to let the world’s most populous country slip into an economic crisis just to please the US by eschewing the import of discounted oil from Russia.

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Posted in Currencies, Energy, Geopolitics, Governments

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Russia’s Shadow Fleet, by Bill Bonner and Joel Bowman

Posted on February 14, 2023 | Leave a comment

Everybody has figured out how to game U.S. sanctions. From Bill Bonner and Joel Bowman at bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com:

600 tankers carry Russian oil around the world, India imports ‘soaring,’ as USA drains its Strategic Petroleum Reserve…

(Source: Getty Images)

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Youghal, Ireland…

How are all those sanctions working out? Bloomberg reports:

Russia Did Most Oil Drilling in a Decade Even as Sanctions Hit

Another headline tells us that India’s imports of Russian oil are ‘soaring.’ And here’s Russia-briefing.com:

Russia’s Rail Freight Volumes Heading East Exceed Westbound Freight For The First Time      

Russia’s Eastbound rail freight shipments exceeded westbound shipments for the first time in 2022, at 80 million tonnes compared with 76 million tonnes, according to Russian Railways (RZD) Chairman Oleg Belozerov, commenting during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The reversal shouldn’t really be a surprise as the European Union has reduced access to its markets by Russia and blocked passenger trains. However, it does symbolize the extent of the ‘Pivot to Asia’ that Russia has gone through in little under 12 months, itself a quite remarkable feat.

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Sanctions Made India Indispensable To The Global Energy Market, by Andrew Korybko

Posted on February 10, 2023 | Leave a comment

Well played, India. From Andrewe Korybko at theautomaticearth.com:

Indian media revealed in mid-January that their country had been processing and re-exporting discounted Russian oil to the West, including the US, in a move that discredited the spirit of that de facto New Cold War bloc’s anti-Russian sanctions. Most observers brushed off those reports since they went against their worldview wherein it was taken for granted that the US-led West’s Golden Billion wouldn’t ever relieve pressure on Russia by having India serve as the middleman in their oil trade.

According to an expert quoted by Bloomberg in their latest report titled “Oil’s New Map: How India Turns Russia Crude Into The West’s Fuel”, “India’s willingness to buy more Russian crude at a steeper discount is a feature, not a bug, in the plan of Western nations to impose economic pain on Putin without imposing it on themselves.” Another one was cited as saying that “US treasury officials have two main goals: keep the market well supplied, and deprive Russia of oil revenue.”

That other expert added that “They are aware that Indian and Chinese refiners can earn bigger margins by buying discounted Russian crude and exporting products at market prices. They’re fine with that.” This insight from Bloomberg, which is held in high regard as one of the world’s premier business outlets, completely shifts the paradigm through which observers interpret the energy dimension of the Golden Billion’s anti-Russian sanctions.

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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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Russia, India, China, Iran: the Quad that really matters, by Pepe Escobar

Posted on November 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Eurasian Axis Quad is going to end up controlling Eurasia, not the United States. The Quad has a huge home field advantage. From Pepe Escobar at thesaker.is:

Southeast Asia is right at the center of international relations for a whole week viz a viz three consecutive summits: Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Phnom Penh, the Group of Twenty (G20) summit in Bali, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Bangkok.

Eighteen nations accounting for roughly half of the global economy represented at the first in-person ASEAN summit since the Covid-19 pandemic in Cambodia: the ASEAN 10, Japan, South Korea, China, India, US, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand.

With characteristic Asian politeness, the summit chair, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen (or “Colombian”, according to the so-called “leader of the free world”), said the plenary meeting was somewhat heated, but the atmosphere was not tense: “Leaders talked in a mature way, no one left.”

It was up to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to express what was really significant at the end of the summit.

While praising the “inclusive, open, equal structure of security and cooperation at ASEAN”, Lavrov stressed how Europe and NATO “want to militarize the region in order to contain Russia and China’s interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

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Russia Sends Record Volumes Of Oil To India, China, by Tsvetana Paraskova

Posted on May 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

The U.S. is just killing Russia with its sanctions. From Tsvetana Paraskova at oilprice.com:

  • India and China have stepped up purchases and are importing record volumes of Russian crude.
  • some Chinese state giants haven’t ramped up imports of spot cargoes from Russia despite steep discounts.
  • China registered in April its first annual increase in crude oil imports.

While Europe shuns Russian oil amid sanctions and expectations of an oil embargo on Russian oil imports, India and China have stepped up purchases and are importing record volumes of Russian crude, according to data from energy analytics company Kpler cited by Bloomberg on Friday.

Russia had up to 79 million barrels of crude either traveling on tankers or held in floating storage over the past week, Kpler’s estimates have shown. That’s more than double the 27 million barrels of crude Russia had seaborne in February, just before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Biden’s Folly in Ukraine, by Douglas Macgregor

Posted on April 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

Biden is cementing an Eurasian bloc that American policymakers have feared since World War II. From Douglas Macgregor at theamericanconservative.com:

President Biden and the foreign policy uniparty are restoring the strategic condition Washington feared in 1940.

U.S. President Joe Biden gestures as he delivers remarks on the jobs report for the month of March from the State Dining Room of the White House on April 01, 2022. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Americans find it difficult to determine whether the Biden administration’s policy decisions regarding Ukraine are the product of a deliberate strategy, extraordinary incompetence, or some combination of both. Threatening Russia, a nuclear armed power, with regime change and then annunciating a nuclear weapons policy that allows for the United States’ first-strike use of nuclear weapons under “extreme circumstances”—responding to an invasion by conventional forces, or chemical or biological attacks—suggests President Biden and his administration really are out of touch with reality.

American voters instinctively grasp the truth that Americans have nothing to gain from a war with Russia, declared or undeclared. A short trip to almost any supermarket or gas station in America explains why. Last week, inflation hit its highest point in nearly 40 years and gas prices have skyrocketed since the conflict in Ukraine began.

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

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No (mRNA/DNA) vaccines, no epidemic, by Alex Berenson

Posted on November 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s amazing how few Covid cases there are in a number of countries with low vaccination rates. Actually it’s not amazing at all. From Alex Berenson at alexberenson.substack.com:

India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Indonesia collectively have 2 billion people… and essentially no access to advanced Covid vaccines.

They are among the world’s most densely populated and poorest countries – fertile ground for Sars-Cov-2.

So the epidemic must be out of control from Karachi to Jakata, right?

Let’s take a look.

India:

Pakistan:

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Washington Wants to Conquer by Dividing, by Brian Cloughley

Posted on October 20, 2021 | 1 comment

Most Americans don’t pay much attention to either Pakistan or India, but they are both nuclear armed, they are in a geopolitically vital area, and they have been at loggerheads for decades. From Brian Cloughley at strategic-culture.org:

Biden and his hawks should pause to think where they’re trying to take the world, and consider an approach that could lead to compromise.

India and Pakistan share a long border and do not get along well, to put it mildly. The main cause of disagreement is the divided territory of Kashmir which as long ago as 1948 necessitated UN Security Council attention, resulting in a Resolution determining, among other things, that there should be a “free and impartial plebiscite to decide whether the State of Jammu and Kashmir is to accede to India or Pakistan.” This has not happened and the seemingly insoluble dispute could well lead to a fourth war between the countries, both of which are nuclear-armed.

It might be thought that in such circumstances the world’s “best-educated, best-prepared” nation that President Biden also declares has “unmatched strength” would apply at least some of its education, preparation and power to encouraging India and Pakistan to engage in meaningful negotiations and move towards rapprochement.

Not a hope.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman recently visited India and Pakistan, but rather than attempting to coax and persuade her host nations to reduce bilateral tension and confrontation she publicly insulted Pakistan and urged India to cooperate militarily even more closely with the U.S. She widened the chasm of polarisation in a public speech in India’s commercial centre, Mumbai, by declaring “We don’t see ourselves building a broad relationship with Pakistan, and we have no interest in returning to the days of hyphenated India-Pakistan. That’s not where we are. That’s not where we’re going to be.” Not content with demonstrably taking sides and thus stoking fires in a tinder-box region, she said that when she went on to Pakistan next day her discussions there would be for “a very specific and narrow purpose”, and everything that was discussed would be passed on to India because “we share information back and forth between our governments”.

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