It has been 4 months since Ukraine began the counter-offensive, this time with a large infusion of NATO equipment. The Russian Ministry of Defense, meanwhile, has revealed that Ukraine has suffered a staggering 90,000 battlefield deaths since the start of the – failed – counteroffensive four months ago. Then add nearly 600 tanks and more than 1,500 armored vehicles, plus helicopters, drones and fighter jets. In addition, Russia has destroyed critical military infrastructure, such as military bases, ammo and fuel depots, command-and-control centers, and arms supplies from NATO. And Defense Minister Shoigu all but gave away the game in terms of the long-term strategy, when he said, “the consistent implementation of measures and activity plans until 2025 will allow us to achieve our goals. “So the SMO will not be rounded up before 2025 – incidentally, much later than the next US presidential election. After all, Moscow’s ultimate aim is de-NATOization.
Faced with a cosmic NATO humiliation on the battlefield, the two families and their networks of power, has no way out: even if it declared a unilateral ceasefire to re-weaponize Kiev’s forces for a new counteroffensive in the spring/summer of 2024, the war would keep rumbling on all the way to the presidential election. Since February 2022, Ukraine has lost 3 armies. The first was between February and August. The second army destroyed was between September and April this year. The third army was completely destroyed between June and now. Ukraine has lost about 500,000 dead soldiers plus another 1 million wounded. The problem is that a wish doesn’t translate into reality. The combined NATO industrial capacity is not able to supply Ukraine, as the rate of losses is far higher than the MIC can produce. In addition, NATO has fallen far behind in military technology. Its weapon systems are outdated and perform poorly on the battlefield.
The kinetic aspect of MICIMATT is all about protection of the global interests of big US banks, investment/hedge funds and multinational corporations. It’s not a coincidence that MICIMATT monster Lockheed-Martin is mostly owned by Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street- all entities within the Rockefeller orbit. NATO is essentially a mafia protection racket controlled by the US (Rockefeller Empire) and the UK (Rothschild Empire) that has nothing to do with “defending” Europe from the “Russian threat.” The actual MICIMATT and its NATO extension’s wet dream is to weaken and dismember Russia to control its immense natural resources- as a means of dominating the global economy- and, most importantly, the need to latch onto NEW INCOME STREAMS, in order to save its collapsing financial system.
War against the New ‘Axis of Evil’
NATO’s incoming graphic humiliation in Ukraine is now compounded with the inexorable rise of BRICS 11 – which embodies a lethal threat to the hegemon’s geoeconomics. There’s next to nothing the MICIMATT can do about that short of nuclear war – except turbo-charging multiple instances of Hybrid War, color revolutions and assorted divide-and-rule schemes. What’s at stake is no less than a complete implosion of neoliberalism.
The Russia-China strategic partnership of true sovereigns has been coordinating full-time. Strategic patience is the norm. China is “de-risking” geopolitically when it comes to not falling for serial provocations by the Hegemon, while Russia exercises control to not risk a kinetic war. Still, what Medvedev just said carries the implication that the hegemon on desperation row could even be tempted to launch WWIII against, in fact, a new “axis of evil” of three BRICS nations – Russia, China and Iran.
Secretary of the [Russian] National Security Council Nikolai Patrushev could not have been more crystal clear: “In its attempts to maintain its dominance, the West itself destroyed the tools that worked better for it than the military machine. These are freedom of movement of goods and services, transport and logistics corridors, a unified system of payments, global division of labor and value chains. As a result, Westerners are shutting themselves off from the rest of the world at a rapid pace.”
Translation:it’s NATO as a whole that is completely losing credibility, as its humiliation in the Ukraine battlefield is now painfully graphic for all the Global Majority to see.
A credible path ahead is that Moscow will not negotiate with NATO – a mere Pentagon add-on – but offer individual European nations a security pact with Russia that would make their need to belong to NATO redundant. That would assure security for any participating nation and relieve pressure on it from Washington. Bets could be made that the most relevant European powers might accept it, but certainly not Poland – the hyena of Europe – and the Baltic vassals.
In parallel, China could offer peace treaties to Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and subsequently a significant part of the US Empire of Bases might vanish.
The problem, once again, is that vassal states don’t have the authority or power to comply with any agreement ensuring peace. German businessmen, off the record, are sure that sooner or later Berlin may defy Washington and do business with the Russia-China strategic partnership because it benefits Germany. Yet the golden rule still has not been met: if a vassal state wants to be treated as a sovereign state, the first thing to do is to shut down key branches of the Empire of Bases and expel US troops.
Iraq is trying to do it for years now, with no success. One third of Syria remains US-occupied – even as the US lost its proxy war against Damascus due to Russian intervention.
The Ukraine Project as an Existential Conflict
Russia has been forced to fight against a neighbor and kin that it simply can’t afford to lose; and as a nuclear and hypersonic power, it won’t. Even if Moscow will be somewhat strategically weakened, whatever the outcome, it’s the US that may have committed its greatest strategic blunder since the establishment of the Empire: turning the Ukraine Project into an existential conflict, and committing the entire Empire and all its vassals to a Total War against Russia. That’s why we have no peace negotiations, and the refusal even of a cease fire; the only possible outcome devised by the neocon that runs US foreign policy is unconditional Russian surrender.
In the recent past, Washington could afford to lose its wars of choice against Vietnam and Afghanistan. But it simply can’t afford to lose the war on Russia. When that happens, and it’s already on the horizon, the Revolt of the Vassals will be far reaching.
It’s quite clear that from now on China and BRICS+ will turbo-charge the undermining of the US dollar, with or without India. The BRICS+ approach will evolve from improved cross border settlement mechanisms – something everyone from Putin to Central Bank head Elvira Nabiullina have stressed – to eventually a new currency way further down the road. This would probably be a trade instrument rather than a sovereign currency like the euro. It will be designed to compete against the US dollar in trade, initially among BRICS+ nations, and capable of circumventing the hegemonic US dollar ecosystem.
The key question is how long the Empire’s fake economy can hold out in this wide spectrum geoeconomic war.
Everything is a ‘National Security Threat’
On the electronic technology front, the Empire has gone no holds barred to impose global economic dependency, monopolizing intellectual property rights and “extracting economic rent from charging high prices for high-technology computer chips, communications, and arms production.” In practice, not much is happening other than the prohibition for Taiwan to supply valuable chips to China, and asking TSMC to build, as soon as possible, a chip manufacturing complex in Arizona. However, TSMC chairman Mark Liu has remarked that the plant faced a shortage of workers with the “specialized expertise required for equipment installation in a semiconductor-grade facility.” So the much lauded TSMC chip plant in Arizona won’t start production before 2025.
The top Empire/vassal NATO demand is that Germany and the EU must impose a Trade Iron Curtain against the Russia-China strategic partnership and their allies, thus ensuring “de-risk” trade. In fact that dovetails with Washington smashing international free trade rules and international law, and treating any form of trade and SWIFT and financial exchanges as “national security threats” to US economic and military control. So the pattern ahead is not China imposing trade sanctions on the EU – which remains a top trade partner for Beijing; its Washington imposing a tsunami of sanctions on nations daring to break the US-led trade boycott.
Russia-DPRK meets Russia-Africa
Only last week, the chessboard went through two game-changing moves: the high-profile visit by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to the DPRK, and the Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg.
Shoigu was received in Pyongyang as a rock star. He had a personal meeting with Kim Jong-Un. The mutual goodwill leads to the strong possibility of North Korea eventually joining one of the multilateral organizations carving the path towards multipolarity. That would be, arguably, an extended Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).
Russia is the top power in the EAEU and it can ignore sanctions on the DPRK, while BRICS+, SCO or ASEAN have too many second thoughts. A key priority for Moscow is the development of the Far East, more integration with both Koreas, and the Northern Sea Route, or Arctic Silk Road. The DPRK is then a natural partner. Getting the DPRK into the EAEU will do wonders for BRI investment: a sort of cover which Beijing does not enjoy for the moment when it invests in the DPRK. That could become a classic case of deeper BRI-EAEU integration.
Russian diplomacy at the highest levels is going all out to relieve the pressure over the DPRK. Strategically, that’s a real game-changer; imagine the huge and quite sophisticated North Korean industrial-military complex added to the Russia-China strategic partnership and turning the whole Asia-Pacific paradigm upside down.
The Russia-Africa summit in St. Petersburg, in itself, was another game-changer that left collective West mainstream media apoplectic.That was nothing less than Russia publicly announcing, in words and deeds, a comprehensive strategic partnership with the whole of Africa even as a hostile collective West wages Hybrid War – and otherwise – against Afro-Eurasia. Putin showed how Russia holds a 20% share of the global wheat market. In the first 6 months of 2023, it had already exported 10 million tons of grain to Africa. Now Russia will be providing Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Somalia and Eritrea with 25-50 thousand tons of grain each in the next 3-4 months, for free. Putin detailed everything from approximately 30 energy projects across Africa to the expansion of oil and gas exports and “unique non-energy applications of nuclear technology, including in medicine”; the launching of a Russian industrial zone near the Suez Canal with products to be exported throughout Africa; and the development of Africa’s financial infrastructure, including connection to the Russian payment system. The scope of the forum was quite impressive. There were “de-neocolonialization” panels, such as “Achieving Technological Sovereignty Through Industrial Cooperation” or “New World Order: from the Legacy of Colonialism to Sovereignty and Development.”
Separate from the frantic action in St. Petersburg, Niger went through a military coup. Although the end-result remains to be seen, Niger is likely to join neighboring Mali in reasserting its foreign policy independence from Paris. French influence is also being at least “reset” in the Central African Republic (CAR) and Burkina Faso. Translation: France and the West are being evicted all across the Sahel, one-step at a time, in an irreversible process of decolonization.
Beware the Pale Horses of Destruction
These movements across the chessboard, from the DPRK to Africa and the chip war against China, are as crucial as the coming, shattering humiliation of NATO in Ukraine. Yet not only the Russia-China strategic partnership but also key players across the Global South/Global Majority are fully aware that Washington views Russia as a tactical enemy in preparation for the overriding Total War against China.
As it stands, the still unresolved tragedy in Donbass as it keeps the Empire busy and away from Asia-Pacific. Yet Washington under the neocon psychos is increasingly mired in Desperation Row, making it even more dangerous.
All that while the BRICS+ “jungle” turbo-charges the necessary mechanisms capable of sidelining the unipolar Western “garden”, as a helpless Europe is being driven to an abyss, forced to split itself from China, BRICS+ and the de facto Global Majority.
It doesn’t take a seasoned weatherman to see which way the steppe wind blows – as the Pale Horses of Destruction plot the trampling of the chessboard, and the wind begins to howl.
Today, the Rockefeller’s MIC has one overriding mission: protect the overseas interests of big U.S. banks, investment and hedge funds, and multinational corporations. The biggest U.S. defense firm is Lockheed, which itself is largely owned by three giant hedge funds: State Street, Vanguard, and BlackRock. The CIA is there to control foreign governments, overthrow them as needed, and keep foreign leaders and journalists on the payroll while quaking with fear for their careers or even lives. The paradigm is most egregious in Europe, which the Anglo-Americans view as vassals, with the E.U. a policeman. NATO is an enforcement mechanism for U.S. /U.K. control, not to defend against Russia, which today has no discernible interest in political control over Europe, even if it were capable of making such a move, which it isn’t. Rather than defend against a non-existent Russian threat, the West would love to get its hands on Russian oil, gas, and mineral resources, as it began to do in the 1990s before Putin took over and fostered a nationalistic revival. The U.S. had long been targeting the Caspian Basin and Central Asia, which now seemed vulnerable with the separation from Russia of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. These countries are still in play for the West, as are the microstates of the Caucasus. The 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup in Ukraine was partly for acquisition of Ukrainian land and resources, including the fertile farmland of the steppes. Big players are Cargill, ADM, and BlackRock, along with numerous E.U. companies. Despite global warming and professions of getting rid of fossil fuels, trying to get hold of hydrocarbons worldwide remains a matter of Western urgency.
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.
But with the current situation, another dimension is “dollar hegemony.” This brings us to BRICS. Perhaps the biggest threat to Western economic imperialism is the formation of the economic compact consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. As the Ukraine conflict deepens, BRICS expansion has become of particular importance to Russia, as it is obviously a means of outflanking the West and beating it at its own geopolitical game.
At the South African BRICS summit of August 22-24, 2023, six new nations were added: Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Argentina, leading to BRICS+. Added to the earlier rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the effects of BRICS and its expansion are seismic. Additional nations that have expressed an interest in BRICS are Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Comoros, Gabon, Kazakhstan, and at least a dozen others.
The potential of BRICS is the inclusion of half or more of the world’s population. BRICS economies had overtaken G-7 economies by 2012, and the gap between BRICS and G-7 economies is widening irreversibly.
The following can be noted:
- The BRICS economies overtook G-7 economies in 2012, with the gap increasing steadily since.
- G-7 economies have not witnessed any growth since the 2008-2009 “Great Financial Crisis.”
- G-7 economies have shrunk by 6 percent since their peak in 2007.
- BRICS economies were 50 percent greater than G-7 economies by 2020.
- BRICS+ economies (BRICS plus six candidate countries) were 60 percent greater than G-7 economies by 2020.
This also explains why the BRICS nations are not pursuing aggressive policies, despite Western propaganda, as they view time as being on their side. Naturally they refuse the “reserve currency” prerogative which allows G-7 countries to siphon hard earned wealth from the rest of the world. The most worrying aspect for the U.S. is the obvious intention of BRICS to foster trade exchanges in local currencies, bypassing the primacy of the dollar, and secondarily the Euro.
According to Stephen Jen, CEO of Eurizon SLJ Capital Ltd. and former IMF/Morgan Stanley economist, “The dollar share in foreign reserves has lost about 11 percent since 2016. The decisive event has been Western sanctions and the freezing of Russia’s dollar reserves.” He adds: “Taking purchasing power into account the BRICS nations currently account for 32 percent of global economic output, compared to 30 percent covered by the G7 countries.” This differential is bound to worsen as new nations are added to BRICS.
As BRICS, ASEAN and other countries increasingly trade in national currencies in lieu of Western Reserve currencies, this results in weakening of those Western currencies, as evidenced by the drop in their purchasing power, aka inflation. Over time, the standards of living commensurate with the production of tradable goods will result in growing poverty in the U.S. and the EU that will result in social instability. But the damage will fall largely to the lower income echelons, this explains several observations:
Trade in national currencies will bring an end to the wealth siphoning mechanism of U.S. dollar hegemony.
Why Russia and China are trying to maintain non-confrontational policies despite provocations: As trade away from the U.S., UK, and EU increases with growing use of national currencies, political instability, particularly in the most de-industrialized Western nations, will result. Social discontent and political instability can already be witnessed throughout the West. This will only increase as impoverishment spreads due to depreciating currencies, leading to eventual implosion of the neoliberal political system. Thus Russia, China, and other sovereign nations have adopted a policy of “wait it out” rather than risk a kinetic war which would result in the deaths of millions. Nevertheless, these countries are embarking on an accelerated program of military development, along with strengthened alliances, in case war is inevitable.
Why the West is embarking on highly aggressive policies: The neoliberal cabals in control of the West realize that the changes occurring in the world, particularly as regards the monetary and financial global architecture, spell their doom, and hence are increasingly acting hysterically, fomenting conflict and chaos wherever they can. It is dollar hegemony, dating back to the World War II-era Bretton Woods Agreements and the Nixonian removal of the international currency gold peg, that has allowed the U.S. to attempt overcoming its massive trade deficit and its public debt at $33.1 trillion and growing. Only by selling trillions of dollars of Treasury bonds to foreign countries, especially China, Japan, and Korea, has the U.S. been able to straddle the globe with the hundreds of military bases and other facilities it relies on to secure a world order friendly to its interests. For decades, foreign countries have needed dollars to trade in petroleum and other commodities. But with BRICS, that imperative may end sooner rather than later.
And the prospects of BRICS are so serious that the U.S. could launch World War III against its main powers, Russia, China, and now Iran, as a last-ditch act of desperation as its entire world order veers toward collapse?
Better Listen to Medvedev’s Warning
The hegemon is already preparing the next stages of its hybrid war against China – even as it remains buried deep down into a de facto proxy hot war against Russia in Ukraine. Russian strategic policy, in essence, completely aligns with the Chinese white paper, proposing a Greater Eurasian Partnership, a concerted drive towards multipolarity, and the primacy of the Global South/global majority in forging a new system of international relations.
But the neocon psychos in charge of the hegemon’s foreign policy keep raising the stakes. So it’s no wonder that after the recent attack on the HQ of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, a new National Security Council report leads to an ominous warning by Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev:
“NATO has turned into an openly fascist bloc similar to Hitler’s Axis, only bigger (…) It looks like Russia is being left with little choice other than a direct conflict with NATO (…) The result would be much heavier losses for humanity than in 1945.”
Our next article deals with the impending financial Armageddon, which is around the corner.
Till then, stay tuned.
