Commenting on my post of November 7, Let’s talk about Venezuela, 1 reader Jams O’Donnell cited Military Watch on the possibility that Russia:
… will introduce the US to their own Ukraine on their own doorstep. As well as recently signing military treaties with Cuba, –
First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee Alexei Zhuravlev has raised the possibility that Russia may deliver long range cruise and ballistic missile systems to equip the Venezuelan Armed Forces, providing the country with a deterrent at a time of high tensions with the United States. “Information about volumes and exact types is classified, so the Americans could be in for some surprises … I also see no obstacles to supplying a friendly country with new developments like the Oreshnik or, say, the proven Kalibr missiles.” Zhuravlev made this statement while confirming deliveries of new Pantsir and BuK-M2 short and medium range air defence system to enhance Venezuelan Air Force capabilities.
Lower profile alternatives to the Oreshnik could be delivered sooner, including 9M729 Novator cruise missiles, and the Bastion coastal defence system with P-800 medium range anti-ship missiles. The Novator’s’ 2500 km range puts Florida in reach, but Russia has during prior periods of past tension deployed Tu-160 strategic bombers, equipping the Venezuelan Armed Forces with the ability to retaliate against targets on the American mainland and against U.S. Navy warships in the Caribbean.
[Abridged slightly]
I replied that the MW piece:
doesn’t address (a) the likelihood of such an escalation; (b) the logistics of backing Caracas should the US retaliate. In Ukraine, decades of baiting Russia have been possible through [Washington’s] capture of European elites. While parts of Latin America are registering unease with Washington, and both Russian and Chinese – and to some extent Iranian – presence has been steadily growing, the axis of resistance has no equivalent of NATO (and its political wing, the EU) in the region.
And there we left it. Though in broad alignment on core issues, Jams and I at times take slightly different views of some things – even whether John or Paul was the more important Beatle! But here’s the thing. Today John Mearsheimer – a man I don’t always agree with but do always take seriously as a true mensch – weighed in on the matter with what I deem his most gripping and cogent podcast 2 to date. 3
And he’s firmly in Jams’s corner …
* * *
- I hope today’s podcast stays up. The one I linked to on November 7 has, I learned when retrieving my exchange with Jams, been taken down due to a “legal complaint”. As Mr Shakespeare helpfully reminds us, “if it were viewed when ’tis viewed, then ’twere well it were viewed quickly.”
- ‘Gripping and cogent’ despite – or because – it’s been AI altered. While the implications of such AI ‘modification’ are terrifying in a ‘post-truth’ world, in this case it brings clarity of a sort. The arguments “Mearsheimer” makes can be weighed in their own right, and in any case time will tell.
- Update December 3. I’ve only skimmed Caitlin’s piece this morning but her title brought a grim smile to my face: World’s most tyrannical government wants to free Venezuela from tyranny.
In regard to footnote 1.
This might help:
https://publer.com/tools/youtube-video-downloader
It also seems to work with non-YouTube videos, as I captured the full thirty-five-minute version of a recent talk by Yanis Varoufakis on Techno feudalism this morning which was on a different internal website platform, just in case it gets taken down. Although it did take a little longer to download.
Thanks Dave. I want to weigh in on has-capitalism-morphed-into-neofeudalism? It’s one of the reasons I need that elusive ‘semi-sabbatical’, to enable immersion in the deeper contemplation my near daily firefighting posts don’t allow sufficient space for.
Others being the relationships between power and morality, in the context of the brazen criminality of the post-Enlightenment West.
Coincidentally, I’d recently been giving some thought to that concept of a “post-Enlightenment West” as, among other aspects, a descriptive term.
Around the middle of last week, it occurred that the late Terry Pratchett (albeit in a totally different context) arrived at a more pithy description in coining the term “Endarkenment”.
You can have that one buckshee (army slang for free gratis – from the Egyptian term “baksheesh) if you can find a use for it.
Addendum: A few random thoughts.
I was watching this earlier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYfDQdcVKaQ 18:49
Courtesy of Andrei Martyanov:
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/12/this-is-really-old-news.html
And part way through I had an E.M. Forster moment connecting to this:
“….the relationships between power and morality, in the context of the brazen criminality of the post-Enlightenment West.”
Because it does not seem possible to talk about that relationship without considering what sort of results the ‘values’ of that post-Enlightenment/Endarkenment culture would produce?
A key support vector of that criminality in terms of current high profile events such as Ukraine, The Levant, Venezuela etc is the propaganda optics.
Martyanov takes those optics to task in most every post he publishes. One of his pet soap box issues being the poor educational skills of Western elites in particular and western populations in general.
What the educator in that eighteen-minute video fleshes out in terms of the focus on optics is the criminal damage to education and wider society of an Endarkenment process which teaches that there is no difference between quantity (90%+ tick in a box High School Graduation rate that every school is chasing for the optics) and quality (actually understanding concepts and how to apply them effectively in a meaningful way – not just in maths but in any subject).
(Which produces outcomes in which a high proportion of High School ‘Graduates’ have to sit remedial classes in maths because even though the optics say they’ve passed at that level, they don’t actually know what they need to know. Which cascades all the way to the top of the system, as Martyanov keeps telling us).
This seems analogous to Hudson’s point about the difference between Classical Economics (Enlightenment) and neo-Liberal Economics (Post-Enlightenment/Endarkenment). Where neo-liberal economics denies that there is any difference between price (the number) and actual real value.
It mirrors the same processes and predictable outcomes in workplaces across the Western world. Where, to take just one example, a higher rating in a quarterly appraisement has a higher ‘value’ than a handful of degrees and relevant experience in a job application process. Producing the kind of system-wide mediocrity that Martyanov, among others, write about for a living.
Meanwhile, to compare and contrast, in what might as well be a Galaxy far, far away:
https://herecomeschina.substack.com/p/chinas-smartest-34-million-fight
“Next week China’s smartest 3.4 million university graduates, average IQ 114, will take the three-day guokao, the national civil service exam, competing for 39,700 jobs. Their IQ puts them in the top 15–20 % of the entire population and among them 40,000 have genius level IQs above 140. At the extreme right end of the curve, 650 of them will have super-genius 160 IQs, compared to just 220 such age mates in the US and EU combined. …..
……The 39,700 who pass do not simply get a job; they enter a decades-long performance tournament. Their careers are tracked, the best are relentlessly promoted, the rest are sidelined. By their forties, the top percentile will govern provinces larger than France or Spain; by their fifties, some will reach the Politburo. China is systematically identifying the highest-IQ, most productive fraction of 1.4 billion people, stress-testing them under conditions of extraordinary competition and giving them real, long-term power. The best and brightest from the demographic that built Huawei, CATL and the HSR are funnelled directly into the bureaucracy…..
……A nation’s institutions and honesty are determined by the intelligence of its people: the brightest can see the long-term benefits of honesty and of institutions that support honest behavior. Any institution with a code of conduct leads its members toward probity and shows prospective applicants what standards are expected of them, and there is a causal link between intellectual development and moral awareness: the individual process of development represents an advance from cognitive egocentrism to de-centered thinking, from ethical egocentrism to the consideration of the interests and rights of others. Cognitive ability has the strongest causal effect on the honesty of a society, and intelligence explains whether some societies cheat at games and cheat in real life.
Allowing only its brightest citizens to enter government confers an added bonus on the Peoples Republic of China: bright people by nature are less prone to corruption. ”
The point is that this post-Enlightenment/Endarkenment is embedded throughout the system at every level. It is, in effect, Western Culture. It represents what is, in terms of optics, Western “civilisation”. Whether it’s foreign policy, forever wars, the economy, education, health, technology, employment, whatever feature you look at the template is the same* in terms of structure, process, how value itself is defined and enforced across different elements, levels and parts of the non-systemic anti-mess**, and, depressingly, the outcomes.
Hudson, citing the historical precedent of Rome and the inherited Western economic paradigm, predicts eventual collapse. However, there does seem to be room to flesh out that line of analysis beyond economics to consider the culture and cultural traits which lead to such structures and processes along with other linked and related elements?
*Which is why you have clueless managers who know nothing about the industry or enterprise they are supposed to be managing, migrating and interchanging between different companies which are no longer organisations but disparate separate sub units acting independently and against of each other resulting in outcomes which are less than the sum of the parts.
**The American Systems writer Ackoff wrote about systems in terms of their complexity being a ‘Mess’. Defining the term in a very specific way. It seems reasonable to find a suitable term to describe something which acts, behaves and produces outcomes and results which are the anti-thesis of a system. “Anti-mess” will have to do until I can think of something more pithy.
Caitlin’s cutting denunciation of the US Empire for what it is begs the question for the liberal left where does that leave the UK its partner, vassal state and attack dog of the Empire? The UK whose foreign policy is so opaque its crimes invisible to public scrutiny that it can parade itself as the epitome of democracy. This deception is on thin ice in Ukraine where in its allotted role as chief protagonist of the fascist Zelensky Junta it supports escalating a covert WW3 hybrid war against Russia to keep the conflict going and weaken Russia. The Neo conservative Brzezinski doctrine never left the table in the UK Foreign Office or for that matter the UK Intelligence Services!
I’m confident that, ten to twenty years hence, Guardian writers will win plaudits for their fearless investigations of MI6 wrongdoing!
Whilst airbrushing out the role of their predecessor writers in what they are investigating.
I applaud your optimism but I doubt the rationale of the ruling class and its intelligence subalterns to exit the smog of Russophobia and navigate HMS UK to peaceful waters upstream such is their fear and contempt of us (the people) and Russia!
Nah. Once bought, bought forever. These clowns have no capacity for honesty.