Moscow Times, November 21st
In the sole footnote to my post yesterday, Ukraine and the escalation ladder, I wrote:
Today, both Caitlin Johnstone and Simplicius the Thinker – she with her characteristic forthrightness of tone, he more nuanced – point to Trump’s latest cabinet picks as signalling intent to play hardball on Ukraine. I think the situation more intricate; that Trump – who, like Putin, has home audiences to placate – is in sabre-rattling ‘escalate to de-escalate’ mode. But who can be sure, given both the fix we’re in and the president-elect’s unpredictability? Watch this space.
Later that day – prompted separately by two steel city readers – I watched Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris, as I do at least thrice a week at The Duran.
Yesterday they were joined by another vlogger, one I greatly admire and often feature: the US marine turned geopolitical analyst, Brian Berletic, whose podcasts from his Bangkok channel, The New Atlas, never disappoint in their masterful weavings of closely argued detail into the broader picture of an empire lethally flailing in counterproductive efforts – as in some Greek tragedy – to reverse a decline no mainstream source dare mention. Always calmly lucid, and word-efficient to the point of terse; always backing broader assessment with hard fact, often as not from the corporate think-tanks to which Washington outsources what are fondly believed to be democratic processes …
A cartel of industries fund think tanks producing papers which become policies and bills that the media sell to the American people. That’s how it works …
… Brian is up there with the handful of sources I see as truly indispensable for all who seek to make sense of the US empire and its forever wars, hot or cold.
This episode, focusing on the implications of Russia’s use of the Oreshkin hypersonic missile on Thursday, makes for the most compelling viewing I’ve seen on any channel in months. Since I view by a conservative estimate fifteen to twenty hours of empire-watch vlogging a week, that’s saying something.
This is long but stick around if you can. The second half of its two hours thirty-five is Q & A (with Brian exiting halfway through that) but Alex curates the questions well, so the answers by Brian and Alexander are as on point as in the first half.
What if you haven’t time to watch even a part of this? That’s a shame but my main takeaway is Brian’s caution, in line with Caitlin, not to not get lost in the rabbit hole of whether Trump will be better on Ukraine than Biden. He points out that while it’s narrowly true that Trump started no new wars, he did pick up where Obama (and Bush and Clinton before) left off, to advance all of them. More specifically he reminds us that, after Obama, Nuland and Mrs Clinton had ousted Ukraine’s elected leader in the Maidan Coup, Trump – already on the backfoot owing to the not yet debunked ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory – continued to provoke Moscow in ways which did their bit to bring about the RF response of February 2022.
Alexander, who has often shown a soft spot for Trump on Ukraine, attempts to push back – as to a degree do I in my opening self-quote – by opining that US presidents have to do a lot of fancy footwork with multiple trade-offs to achieve anything. But you can tell his heart isn’t in it. Brian’s insistence on the big picture, of an empire whose deep agendas stay constant whichever name is on the White House front door, is hard to gainsay by anyone acquainted with the facts of its forever wars. Is Alexander right to point to differing priorities within the US ruling class on whether to focus on China or Russia first? Though once a serious rift on the Beltway, it’s hard to envisage anyone who now believes a wedge can be driven between Beijing and Moscow. That ship sailed in February 2022 – if not a good deal earlier:
The Biden Administration had this meeting with Putin in Geneva, and they said “we want you to cut your relations with China. If you do that we can move forward and improve relations and if you don’t well there’ll be all kinds of problems”. Well the problems ended up with the war in Ukraine. A very well-connected Russian journalist called Fyodor Lukan says “China is our biggest neighbor. To destroy our profitable relationship with our biggest neighbor to create a whole crisis on our longest border in return for ephemeral promises of ‘better relations’ with a United States consistently adversarial to us is stupid. And nobody who knows Mr Putin thinks he’s stupid.”
It’s basically asking Russia, “please cut yourself off from China so we can get rid of China and then we can just completely bulldoze over you because you’ll have no one to help you”.
Abridged extract, commencing 1:13:14
On an only slightly different note, two of this week’s posts – Five things to know about Kiev’s ATACMS and Hands up if you think Russia is bluffing – make a point lost on the many whose media-induced lack of the faintest idea of what this is about still has them believing the war is a “Putin land grab”:
[Europe’s] gamble that Russia would lose, Putin be ousted and the RF broken up USSR style for easy asset-stripping was born of blinkered hubris
That’s me. But what does Alexander have to say?
Everything has been tried up to this time [by Europe] to win the war in Ukraine – to defeat Russia to provoke a regime change in Moscow to force the Russians to change their strategic orientation from China to the west to open up their economy to Western investment, which is a wonderful euphemism for returning in effect to the economic policies of the 1990s and their plunder and asset and resource stripping. 1
Everything has been thrown at this, and nothing has worked. Now they’re getting increasingly desperate because they can see the writing is well and truly on the wall so they’re not able or willing at the moment to change their policies. The Europeans feel especially exposed because of course they’ve gambled very heavily on gaining access to Russian resources. So for them this is an existential issue. They sense the crisis of their economies, and you have to live in Europe – especially Western Europe – to understand how grave that crisis is. 2 The great plan is falling apart and they’re doing everything they can to try to save the situation; to try to turn it around and push the Russians in some kind of way that would either drag the Americans in or provoke a crisis in Moscow.
Abridged extract, commencing 00: 04:32
But these are almost random picks. To get a grip on the terrifying pass we’ve arrived at courtesy our elites’ folly in Ukraine do please take the time to watch this podcast in its entirety. As one of the two readers who alerted me to it said:
You couldn’t ask for a more in-depth survey – historic, philosophical, geopolitical, military and psychological – of our present reality.
* * *
- A compelling, almost obsessively documented account of Russia’s plunder on Yeltsin’s watch is given in chapters 10-11 of Naomi Klein’s superb Shock Doctrine.
- Alexander may be right in saying you have to be in Western Europe to know how grave the crisis is, but if that’s a necessary condition it is not a sufficient one. Those not yet obliged to turn to food banks to see their children fed have no material incentive, and those who rely on mainstream media for their understandings of the world have no cognitive incentive, to locate the roots of that crisis in our hyper-financialised economies and the failed gamble our elites took in the Ukraine.