Meditations on a sinking ship

Yesterday in the first twenty-five of seventy minutes with an interviewer unnamed and unknown to me, John Mearsheimer demonstrated both the astuteness and gravitas which keep me tuning in, and the limits to the “Offensive Realism” school of which the Chicago based professor is the world’s leading exponent.

On the credit side, he opens with a categoric statement – long obvious to anyone paying close attention and not confining their sources to corporate media systemically incapable of being fully truthful on such a matter – that there can be no negotiated end to America’s proxy war on Russia since the positions of Moscow and Kiev are radically irreconcilable. That this is not more widely recognised I put down to our having been lied to for years on both the war’s causes and its progress.

Still on the credit side, that nameless interlocutor plays devil’s advocate to ask why those who say Russia’s demands are reasonable should not be derided as Appeasers whose concessions – like Chamberlain’s in Munich ’38 – would simply feed the monster that is Putin. We all know the script. Donbas today. Kiev next week. Berlin, Paris and London by Xmas.

The professor’s three point rebuttal, between 19:52 and 24:50, is masterly. One, Russia lacks the capability to overpower Europe. Two, there’s zero evidence that Russia wants to. Three (actually an extension of one) after forty-two months of fighting, Russia – though close to the end game – has not even secured the Donbas.

All three are foreshadowed in my post of a month ago, Road to WW3. Part 3: capturing minds, and more specifically in political economist Michael Hudson’s observations that “the world is at a point at which no industrial economy has the manpower and political ability to mobilize a standing army of the size needed to invade or even wage a major battle with a significant adversary”, ¹ and that Russia and China “have far more to gain by offering mutual economic benefits to the West”.

The idea that Putin has Hitlerian designs on Europe is, of course, widely accepted by a credulati who’d already bought the lie that Russia’s SMO was a land grab when in truth it was a refusal to accept, on its 2,295 km border with Ukraine, a situation the USA would never accept on its own border.

So what now, as our media pick over the bones of the Alaska summit, and that sideshow three days later when Zelensky came to Washington escorted by Europe’s Comic Strip Team? What now is that Ukraine is finished as a state in any meaningful sense of the word, ² torched on the altar of preserving US unipolarity by tying down the Russian Federation in an exhausting war as advocated in the 2019 Rand Report, Extending Russia. ³ We are speaking, as a slowly growing minority are waking up to, of an entirely avoidable infamy comparable to those inflicted by a dying hence triply dangerous US empire on, inter alia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Palestine.

This would be catastrophe enough but America’s criminal proxy war in Ukraine has hastened – I don’t say caused, ⁴ but catalysts for implosion seldom come more powerful than this betrayal of European interests by leaders groomed in Washington – Europe’s descent into economic and political irrelevance.

Catalysts for implosion seldom come more powerful than Europe’s betrayal by leaders groomed in Washington

This brings me to the limitations of Offensive Realism. Yes, John brings a desperately needed materialist perspective to global events and processes routinely mis-sold as battles between Good and Evil. For that we should be thankful and, more important, continue to consult him as an invaluable source in a tsunami of spin all the more engulfing for the fact its purveyors likely buy it themselves. But John’s blindness to empire leaves him incapable of seeing that Ukraine was never a mistake on Washington’s part. Beneath all the theatrics and off-the-cuff chaos of a Donald Trump, vicious senility of a Biden and arrogant meddling of an Obama can be seen – if we only look – a continuity of deep state agendas serving the true masters of a sinking ship.

Which in turn brings me to Bangkok based Brian Berletic, guesting with the impressive KJ Noh on Danny Haiphong’s channel in a thirty minute discussion two days ago. It anticipates the theme of Road to WW3: Part 4 – when, after many distractions, that sees light of day – viz, an inextricable interlinkage of conflicts across the globe which has led some to say WW3 is not a possibility, probability or even inevitability.

WW3 is already underway.

* * *

1. In yesterday’s interview Mearsheimer points out that in September 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland, a far smaller country than Ukraine, he committed 1.5 million troops. Russia’s SMO began with 100,000 and even now, forty-two months on, Western sources put the numbers at below 700,000.
2. For a mercilessly entertaining assessment of Europe’s and Kiev’s folly see yesterday’s dialogue between Nima Alkhorshid and Dmitry Orlov. Like John Mearsheimer though for different reasons, Dimitry overstates the scale of disaster for the US – there’s credible evidence the Washington planners never thought Ukraine could win: that was just the sales talk – and like John understates the division of labour now underway; with Europe selling ‘austerity’ to its peoples while taking on the costs of tying down Russia in Ukraine to free up the US to continue encircling its main adversary, China. More damning than either, the beard he’s recently sprouted is ridiculous but – also like John – he gets a good deal right, and delivers it in his trademark tongue-in style. For we who like our takedowns served with stiletto wit and free of ruth, Dmitry never fails.
3. So infamous has its 2019 report on Russia become that the Rand website now prefaces it with a disclaimer that “Russian entities and individuals sympathetic to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine have mischaracterized this research”. But facts are stubborn things. If you haven’t time to read the full report, see the sections quoted by me on the eve of Russia’s SMO and apropos the failed US coup in Kazakhstan of January 2022.
4. For a wider perspective on Europe’s decline within that of the West at large, see Why read Michael Hudson? and/or yesterday’s assessment by his fellow and likeminded political economist, Richard Wolff.