We always have to remember that it’s not just the conflict in Ukraine, it’s not just Gaza, it’s not just Taiwan or the Philippines; all of this is interconnected. Please look at a map. Look at how the US is attempting to encircle and control all of Eurasia. And they’re not going to stop, no matter how irrational, implausible, unsustainable this policy is. They are determined to continue doing this. They are burning entire nations to the ground in the process, and until they themselves have to pay some sort of cost, they will continue. It will be up to the multipolar world led by nations like Russia, China, increasingly India; for them to mitigate the damage … to ensure that the multipolar order is able to build and move the world forward faster than the US is able to divide and destroy it.
Brian Berletic
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Only connect, urged EM Forster, and whatever transgressions may be laid at Andrew Korybko’s door, failure to do that isn’t one of them. The Moscow based American political analyst is well to the right of me, but what of it? With the world at its most dangerous point of my entire life, and our media systemically incapable of honestly saying why …
… I don’t promote alternative voices on the basis of fully sharing their views. I do so because they have something important to offer.
What Mr Korybko has to offer is a comprehensive approach. His prolific polemics, always to the point, have wide ranging topics. Though it was his writings on the US-led proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, now failed, 1 that first drew my attention, he writes also on the Horn of Africa, Central Asia, the Sahel in the wake of the July coup, India rising and, of course, the genocide in Gaza.
In all these things he sees the same old same old: an empire mired, as waning empires tend to be, in chaos:
Chaos by design, as in its ‘colour revolutions’: successful in Yugoslavia, Tunisia, Ukraine and elsewhere; less so in Kazakhstan, Chechnya and Xinjiang.
Chaos not by design but opportunistically leveraged, as in its marginalising of France in Niger.
Chaos whose healing, especially when facilitated by a global challenger, is anathema to Washington. Witness its sour response, in March this year, to China’s brokering of that momentous rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Chaos both by design and out of control in its unconditional support for the single most divisive entity in the Middle East – see Israel: a beachhead – only to find it cannot rein in the monster it and the collective West did so much to create, arm and licence to kill. See in this regard the piece three days ago by former UK diplomat Alastair Crooke, another gamekeeper turned poacher. It asks, Will the Scorpion Sting the US Frog? 2
Check Andrew Korybko’s substack. You may wish to have his near daily but always short posts delivered to your inbox.
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Jeffrey Sachs, a man I described only the other day – The US has played a losing hand badly – as an idealist but a brilliant one, is another to heed Forster’s advice. Two days ago he was to be found addressing the UN Security Council. Citing four of the world’s many current wars – in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria and the Sahel – he sets out his vision of how the UN could in theory bring about lasting peace, and the prosperity on which it depends.
It’s a dream of course. Such a vision requires the US to be onboard, and for reasons which may be beyond his ken (see yesterday’s post) that is not going to happen – since mere removal, in November next, of an exceptionally incompetent administration won’t suffice – until the US is confronted by the inescapable truth that it has run out of options.
But it’s a dream with much to commend it; a blueprint for a saner world. And if that doesn’t get your attention, how about the fact he sets it out in under 15 minutes? Classy.
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Last but not by any stretch of the imagination least is yet another gamekeeper turned poacher, 3 a man who, like Scott Ritter, once served as a US marine but now blogs from Bangkok. Brian Berletic never fails to impress. Here he applies closely reasoned battle front assessment while never losing sight of a bigger picture not so very far, when we look beyond differences of style and approach, from the new world order implicit in Professor Sachs’ address to the UNSC.
Though frankly I’m a Belt & Road man myself. As, I’m sure, is Mr Berletic.
I’ve linked several video or written texts. Should you only have time for one, let it be Brian’s 42 minute assessment – its conclusion the words I opened with – of how Washington is seeking at horrendous risk to us all, yet with rapidly diminishing success, to shore up a global empire now collapsing the way empires always do.
Under its own weight.
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- For dark but much needed comic relief, see Andrew Korybko’s post today on Zelensky’s newfound recollection – aided by EMDR therapy? – that Vlad the Bad has made “five or six” assassination attempts on this lionhearted man. I’m wagering two by AK-47, two by drone strike and seven or eight – to be revealed in his next session at the shrink’s – by Novichok.
- Alastair Crooke is another voice to reckon with. See this interview a fortnight ago with Judge Napolitano, joining the dots to link Ukraine and Gaza. On which he speaks of the “elephant in the room”: an Israeli Right intoxicated by blood lust and its historic vision, brought tantalisingly closer on October 7, of the Final Solution: a Greater Israel devoid of Palestinians, with Washington powerless to prevent it. (I don’t say it will happen, mind; just that if it – with its inbuilt guarantee of regional conflagration – doesn’t, that won’t be because Uncle Sam was able to stop it. See my October post, Floating pointlessness … See also my early November assessment – Can MAD bring a modicum of sanity? – of the October 28 speech by Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrullah.)
- The proliferation of gamekeepers turned poacher is a clear sign, one of many, of a deeper malaise in the West. Hence my frequent pairing of this metaphor with that of the canary in the coal mine.
“They are burning entire nations to the ground in the process, and until they themselves have to pay some sort of cost, they will continue.”
In the context of the content of the video there seems to be all kinds of questions to be unpacked in this observation.
Not least of which is who exactly is “they” here?
The segment of the video in which Brian Berletic considers the concept of the ‘Global North’ – ie The Collective West – versus the ‘Global South’ – ie The Rest of the World – contains within it an idea which is seen in its starkest form in the attitudes being displayed towards Palestinians and Arabs by Israel.
Here, the term “they” has a tendency to refer to the Government of Israel, the IDF/Security Services and the Zionist religious and political right. Indeed, all sorts of arguments are advanced on the basis of because the Netenyahu Government is unpopular the ‘Superiority’ mindset which Berletic touches upon in an albeit much wider context is limited to a small section of the populace. A line of argument which seems to imply that a simple change of Government will significantly alter that key dynamic.
A notion which has certainly not been the case anywhere else in the Collective West/Global North which, for the sake of brevity, might best be lumped under the heading provided by ‘Jungle’ Josep Borrell of “The Garden”.
Perusing this vox pop video from inside Israel suggests that the situation is far more complex:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e_dbsVQrk4
Point being that the internalisation of this superiority complex driving the Collective West – which can be unpacked from the example in this post of Michael Parenti’s exchange with Marina Hyde – is not limited to a small sample of society in ‘The Garden’. It has wider traction. This ‘biggest, baddest, bestest’ internalisation can occasionally be spotted even among some otherwise excellent analysis from ‘gatekeepers turned poachers’ like Scott Ritter on occassions.
Which may well be, at least in large part, why the ‘left’ alternative to that superiority complex has until now largely failed in ‘The Garden’. In much the same way in which Michael Hudson’s tome ‘The Collapse of Antiquity’ charts the alternative failed to gain traction under the same oligarchical system/mindset in Rome. with inevitable consequences.
Based on past and present observed behaviour – of which many examples could be cited – it seems more than reasonable to anticipate that any “cost paid” by a “they” defined as ‘The Garden’s’ elite establishment and their wider entourage will not so much be passed unto the rest of ‘The Gardens’ civil populace, who have less than zero clout in these shenanigans, as offloaded in a ‘pass the parcel’ type of way.
Or to put it another way; If “they” – ie the elites controlling ‘The Garden’ – go down (“pay the price”) “they” will have a far wider definition should that “price” be extracted from outside by ‘The Jungle’ rather than as a result of being internally driven.
So is this an Empire of chaos? That’s what the man is saying, in a 42 minute appraisal of the planet’s likeliest WW3 flashpoints. And he’s saying it not to an echo chamber but to the widest audience his (considerable) skills and knowledge permit.
It certainly is.
Though that chaos is being experienced in different ways across the planet and not only outside ‘The Garden’ but inside it as well.
Here’s one, albeit small, example….
https://wingsoverscotland.com/when-its-just-too-dark-to-care/
….of Pratchett’s ‘Fifth Rider’ of the apocalypse. Where all organisation has simply been managed out of yet another system where, just like on the front lines in Ukraine – albeit via a very different process – there are no longer sufficient bodies to achieve any kind of goal or objective. Because whether you are talking about soldiering, social care, diplomacy, journalism, whatever; once the very necessary skills, expertise and experience which make up competence have been thrown away – as they have over at least two or more generations in ‘The Garden’ – they’re gone for good and all you have is the Kaos described here…..
https://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2018/01/31/in-the-eternal-inferno-fiends-torment-ronald-coase-with-the-fate-of-his-ideas/
….everywhere inside as well as that projected outside. With the kind of predictable results being experienced.
Particularly when the manufactured common consensus across ‘The Garden’ is set dead against replacing that lost competence from outside via immigration from a ‘Jungle’ which really cannot spare the capacity to save ‘The Garden’ from its own self inflicted wounds anyway.
Who/where inside any part of ‘The Garden’ responsible for both the external and internal chaos taking place everywhere around us is going to turn this around?
Will the US significantly act any different with Trump at the helm?
Is anyone anticipating that the logic of the Zionist mindset will change the position and trajectory of Israel to any significant degree if Netenyahu is ousted tomorrow?
Does anyone seriously think a Starmer* administration will be any different to that of Sunak in terms of the mindset and policies pursuing this chaos?
Look what’s just taken place in Holland…
https://www.politico.eu/article/far-right-leader-geert-wilders-wins-dutch-election-exit-poll/
….where the largest Party in this weeks election is led by a headbanger who wants to ban Mosques.
To stop that chaos will require some kind of process. And if the chaos being inflicted from ‘The Garden’ cannot be stopped or contained via internal mechanisms and processes from within that ‘Garden’ the logic suggests it will need to be imposed from outside. From ‘The Jungle’.
With all that implies.**
* Following the recent precedent of Cameron elevated to the House of Lords to become Foreign Secretary it is not beyond the bounds of reason to anticipate a similar process occurring should independents standing against Starmer in his constituency succeed in winning the seat.
** The logic of Russian objectives in Ukraine – denazification and stopping an out of control NATO – in a context in which Ukraine is merely a proxy for a NATO that is not agreement capable is that the objectives cannot be achieved simply by clearing the swamp in Ukraine. To achieve those security objectives faced with a Western elite which has not only no competence but which has eliminated all internal competence inside ‘The Garden’ will require denazification of the entire West.