Tag: Russia

We’re Not Locked Out, You’re Locked Out

As I anticipated on a recent Darkstream, China and Russia are collaborating to provide the world with an alternative payment infrastructure that will compete, most likely favorably, with SWIFT and the US dollar.

Russia and China will develop shared financial structures to enable them to deepen economic ties in a way that foreign states will be unable to influence, the Kremlin has announced following talks between the countries’ leaders. The move appears to be a response to a series of warnings that Western nations could push to disconnect Russia from the Brussels-based SWIFT financial system as a form of sanctions.

The payment platform underpins the vast majority of international transactions. During the talks on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping called for increasing the share of national currencies in mutual settlements and expanding cooperation to provide Russian and Chinese investors with access to stock markets, said Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy advisor.

Ushakov said “particular attention was paid to the need to intensify efforts to form an independent financial infrastructure to service trade operations between Russia and China.”

“We mean creating an infrastructure that cannot be influenced by third countries,” the Kremlin aide added.

Ahead of the video summit, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov hinted that economic discussions were likely to be on the agenda for the two heads of state.

Both Russia and China are said to be increasingly looking to move away from using the US dollar as the main currency of international trade, instead using their own denominations to underpin the booming volume of Moscow-Beijing trade.

It’s probably not a bad time to get an Alipay account, if you don’t have one already.

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The Easy Way or the Hard Way

China makes it clear that the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland is going to happen, one way or the other, and there is nothing the US can do to prevent it:

Recently, US senior officials have repeatedly shown their tough yet empty attitude on the situation in the Taiwan Straits. On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also accused China of attempting to “reshape not only its own territory but also the global system to its benefit.” Again, Blinken threatened that “if Beijing were to decide to try to change the status quo unilaterally by force, it would be a very serious mistake.”

Sullivan blustered to ensure that China’s reunification by force “never happens,” which is particularly alarming. This is the biggest boast made by a senior US official so far. Almost no one would believe Sullivan’s impromptu to a reporter would become a manifesto of US policy. This is because the US simply cannot build a deterrent to prevent the Chinese mainland from carrying out reunification by force when necessary. No one would believe the US has the true will to defend Taiwan at all costs, which goes against China’s military growth and its resolution in reunification.

So far, the official attitude of Washington is to encourage the Taiwan authority to build up self-defense capabilities. The US mainly provides military support to Taiwan by selling weapons. Those weapons are generally destined to be destroyed by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as soon as the reunification by force takes place. It is credible that the PLA will heavily attack US troops who come to Taiwan’s rescue. Such credibility is increasingly overwhelming the deterrence that US troops may have.

Indeed, the US does have a way of ensuring that reunification by force “never happens.” That is to blow the ambitions of the Taiwan authority to promote the “Taiwan independence,” to force them to return to the 1992 Consensus and meet half way with the Chinese mainland on the path of peaceful reunification and to accept the principle of “one country, two systems.” If Washington supports the Taiwan authority’s path of seeking secession and encourages the Taiwan authority to rely on it, then reunification by force will definitely happen. The more the US and the island of Taiwan collude, the sooner reunification by force will come.

All of this nonsensical blustering by the increasingly fangless US political leadership is making me wonder what it is they are trying to conceal and what it is that they are actually trying to prevent, because we know they can’t stop China from taking Taiwan and they can’t stop Russia from taking Ukraine. The only thing that is preventing the regional powers from taking successful military action is a) China would prefer a peaceful reunification process ala Hong Kong, and b) Russia wants nothing to do with being responsible for Ukraine and its inhabitants.

It shouldn’t escape your attention that while the Fake Biden Fake Administration is actively threatening a) China, b) Russia, c) Iran, and d) India, all four of those countries are calmly refusing to respond in kind. This makes me suspect that some sort of serious unrestricted – by which I mean economic – global assault is being prepared by the New and Improved Whole-Process Democracies, and the USA is desperately casting about for a way to shut it down before it starts with the military superiority it no longer possesses.

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Starving Ukraine Again

The difference is, this time they deserve it. Last time, it was the Bolsheviks starving the Russians in Ukraine. This time, it’s the Russians depriving the Neocon puppets in Kiev of a primary source of revenue:

Russia does not want to extend its gas transit contract with Ukraine after 2024 when the current deal ends, the head of the Kiev-based state-run oil and gas company Naftogaz claimed on Monday. Speaking to Reuters, Yury Vitrenko said that there is “not even a hint” of negotiations on a new contract.

“We are discussing it with the Americans and the Germans that all of us would like the transit to continue, but the Russians are reluctant to start these discussions,” he said.

Transiting gas from Russia to Europe is an integral part of Ukraine’s economy, and the country receives billions of dollars annually from Russian energy giant Gazprom for the use of its aging facilities, which were constructed by Moscow during the Soviet period. Following the completion of Nord Stream 2, a controversial gas pipeline that connects Russia to Germany without passing through any third country, many in Kiev now believe the country’s economy is under threat, as Ukrainian pipes become less critical for the European grid.

Earlier this year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Nord Stream 2 would “disconnect Ukraine from gas supplies,” which in turn would cost Ukraine “at least $3 billion a year.”

“We will have nothing to pay the Ukrainian Army,” he told a delegation from the US Congress.

Now, why would the Russians ever decide to end the gas transit contract, when it could serve as a reasonable backup to Nord Stream 2? Probably because of insanely stupid threats of invasion and partition from globalist Neocon puppets like this one.

The world’s largest nation should be partitioned by Western powers and divided up into around a dozen separate states, Ukraine’s former foreign minister has said, insisting the move would be beneficial for all concerned.

Speaking in an interview with Ukraine’s Channel Five on Monday, ex-Foreign Minister Vladimir Ogryzko argued that the West should “go all the way” on the issue and allocate hundreds of billions of dollars for new countries to be carved out of territory currently governed from Moscow.

“Imagine that a collection of independent 10-15 non-nuclear nations is created in place of the current Russian Federation… Who will benefit from this? Everybody wins,” Ogryzko claimed.

According to him, the US and EU would be able to profit highly from this state-making venture, and would make the money back that they spent rehashing Russia’s borders.

In the future, when someone asks you if something is either evil or stupid, remember this idea put forth by Ogryzko is incontrovertible proof that something can be both evil and stupid.

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The Four Clashing Civilizations

Even Francis Fukuyama now accepts that his End of History thesis was incorrect, and that Sam Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations model is much more descriptive of the real world. But this clash is not, as this article states, a coming clash, it is an ongoing one.

It is often argued, mainly by those in the West, that the current geopolitical rivalries can’t be compared to the Cold War, because there is no clash of ideologies. Communism has been vanquished and capitalist triumph is eternal.
Their view is one of the ‘end of history’, as proclaimed by the scholar Francis Fukuyama. The problem is, Fukuyama proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy more than three decades ago. It’s fair to say the world has moved on a little bit since then.

It is hard to deny that ideological competition is now making a comeback. And it looks as though in the coming decades the clash of ideologies will only become more intense. All three contemporary great powers – the United States, China, and Russia – are competing for more than material power. Representing distinct ideological faiths, they are also in competition for human souls. There is also a fourth competing ideology – radical Islamism – but it is now disembodied and lacks a ‘carrier state’ after the defeat of its most vociferous advocates.

The US now champions a liberal-progressivist ideology, which, in its most extreme version, is known as wokeness. In wokeness, the two main ideological strands of the modern West that have their origins in the European Enlightenment – liberalism and communism – finally reunite after a bitter internecine feud. When the opponents of wokeness compare it to radical Bolshevism, it is not without reason. In its fight against structural oppression, wokeness is ultimately about destroying social hierarchies for the sake of justice – and at the expense of order.

Taken to its extremes, this new Western ideological struggle for equity and equality leads to universal homogenization, inevitably destroying the diversity of social and even physical identities. In a novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, one of the characters, a fiery Bolshevik, was dreaming about a post-revolutionary world in which the borders come crashing down and people intermarry so there are no dominant and oppressed groups any more: “everyone’s appearance will be pleasantly brown – and everyone will be the same.” This Russian Bolshevik from the 1920s could join the woke squads in Seattle or Bristol in the 2020s.

China and Russia are often lumped together as ‘fellow autocracies’. But, in fact, Beijing and Moscow stand for very different ideological models. China’s is a synthesis of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism blended with traditional Chinese ways, such as Confucianism and legalism, all boosted by advanced digital technology. The West increasingly fears China not only due to the growth in Beijing’s economic and military power, but also because modern China’s hugely successful record of development seems to validate the CCP’s ideology….

Putin’s Russia has its ideals mainly in the past. That’s a major reason why the ideology of modern Russia appeals to many right-wing conservatives in Europe and North America who see Russia as the last major state that adheres to the values of what used to be European Christian civilization. Putin’s Russia has another advantage. Among the competing ideologies, it is the most appealing aesthetically. This may be because for Putin’s state, order is prioritised over justice.

This is a useful, and generally accurate summary of the current state of the civilizational clash. But what it leaves out is the religious and ethnic angles which actually delineate the lines of grand strategic conflict. Although it is now based in the US, the Western power is neither American nor liberal-progressive; it is not even Western, but actually a satanic shadow power in which the dominant ethnicity is Jewish and the ambitions are global. Russia is the Christian nationalist power, and China, under Xi and his Wangist ideology, is the virtuous pagan nationalist power.

This is why the Promethean-ruled US is already engaged in a virtual war with both nationalist powers and the other globalist power. The Prometheans are at war with China because China broke its alliance with them in 2015. They are at war with Russia because Russia, as a Christian nation, rejects their satanism and because Russia escaped their influence in 2000. And they are at war with their fellow globalists in the Dar al-Islam over the territory of Palestine in general and Jerusalem in particular, even as they use them to suppress Christian nationalism in Europe.

The reason Trump is so furiously hated is because he represented – however well or poorly – the Christian West’s attempt to break free of Promethean rule. Whether he failed or whether he is still engaged in some sort of secretive Q-like battle is irrelevant to understanding the shape of the overall situation; he is the West’s equivalent of Putin and Xi, ergo he represents the fundamental danger to the shadow power.

And the fundamental weakness of the Prometheans is that, unlike the other three powers, they do not represent a true civilization. They are not, technically, even civilized, as they have never progressed beyond tribalism. This is why they so reliably fail once they achieve enough power in a society to become responsible for it, as they do not know how to maintain a civilization, let alone build one. It is always much easier to destroy than to create.

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The Temptation of Empire

The War on Russia / War on China crowd constantly engages in psychological projection, insisting that their own dreams of ruling over a global empire is shared by both the Russian and Chinese leaders. But as anyone who has paid any attention to the thoughts of Vladimir Putin and Xi Xinping in this regard knows, both leaders are very well aware of the fatal trap that empire poses to any powerful nation, and both leaders seek to avoid the temptation.

You know what the problem is? I will tell you as a citizen of the former Soviet Union. What is the problem with an empire? They think they are so mighty they can afford minor faults and mistakes. It is okay, we will buy these people and scare other people; we will reach an agreement with still others, give beads to those and threaten others with our warships – problem solved. But problems are piling up, and there comes a time when it is no longer possible to cope with them all. And the United States is firmly and steadily following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Putin

Xi Jinping’s thinking is never as transparent or straightforward as the Russian leader’s, being occluded by Communist Party jargon, the customary Chinese ornamentation, and a vast panoply of classical quotes and allusions, but those who are familiar with them don’t have too much trouble interpreting what he’s saying.

“Governing a state with vast territory is a heavy burden; succeeding to the crown is much harder than building an empire.”

Founding a state requires a multitude of talents, while succeeding and strengthening the inheritance of ancestors requires even more. By quoting the sentence, President Xi Jinping indicated that the glorious and resplendent Chinese civilization was founded by large numbers of outstanding people throughout history. Today we are being passed the baton from previous generations and carrying on a great historical mission. Strengthening and rejuvenating the country by cultivating talent has become a priority for the Party and the country. To carry forward Chinese civilization, to build a strong and prosperous country, we must use history as mirror and study and utilize outstanding intellects.

How to Read Confucius and other Chinese Classical Thinkers, Xi Jinping

The point is that neither the Russians nor the Chinese are foolish enough to seek empire because they do not wish to lose control of their national destinies. While both nations have the power required to pursue it, they also have a clear and obvious disinclination to do so, as Hazony recognizes in The Virtue of Nationalism.

The most natural state is, therefore, one nation, an extended family with one national character. This it retains for ages and develops most naturally if the leaders come from the people.… Nothing, therefore, is more manifestly contrary to the purposes of political government than the unnatural enlargement of states, the wild mixing of various races and nationalities under one scepter. A human scepter is far too weak and slender for such incongruous parts to be engrafted upon it. Such states are but patched up contraptions, fragile machines,… and their component parts are connected by mechanical contrivances instead of bonds of sentiment.… It would only be the curse of fate that would condemn to immortality these forced unions, these lifeless monstrosities. But history shows sufficiently that the instruments of human pride are formed of clay, and like all clay, they will dissolve or crumble to pieces.

In this passage, Herder describes the imperial state as nothing other than a “curse” to all involved. According to this point of view, human government is inherently limited in what it can attain, and can be strong and effective only when it relies on the “bonds of sentiment” that unite a single nation in a national state whose leaders are drawn from the people. The “unnatural enlargement of states,” which forces many nations together under a single rule, is not based on such bonds of sentiment. It only increases the burdens and difficulties piled on the state as “incongruous parts” that are not bound together by mutual loyalty are added to it, until eventually it survives only as a “patched up contraption” groaning under the weight of these troubles.

Underlying such an approach is the recognition that the health of a nation is measured not only in terms of its military and economic strength, but also along other dimensions that are no less significant. What Herder describes as a “national character[, which] it retains for ages and develops,” refers to what I have called the internal integrity and cultural inheritance of the nation. And it is these things that tend to be lost as the imperial state expands. This is because conquered nations bring their own aspirations, troubles, and interests into the state. And this growing diversity makes the state more difficult to govern, weakening the mutual loyalties that had held it together, dissipating its attention and resources in the effort to suppress internal conflicts and violence that had previously been unknown to it, and forcing the rulers to adopt oppressive means of maintaining the peace. As this happens, the rulers become absorbed in intrigues and negotiations among distant parties in distant lands. This appeals to their vanity, as it allows them to see themselves as “men of the world.” But in reality, their understanding of the foreign nations they seek to pacify is nearly always limited to externals, to hollowed-out caricatures, so that they tend to do as much harm as good by applying the shallow, supposedly “universal” categories at their disposal to circumstances at the ends of the earth.52 In the meantime, when anyone approaches them with a matter that concerns the health and prosperity of their own nation, they have only scant attention to devote to it, and secretly resent this intrusion of “domestic affairs” when greater things are pressing. In this way, the minds of the rulers turn away, and they become almost as unaware of the concerns of their own people as they are of the interests of the foreign nations they seek to govern.

All of this is regarded with horror by peoples with strong national-state traditions, which tend to scorn the idea that their country’s leaders should lose themselves in efforts for the preservation and government of an empire of foreign nations, rather than strengthening the tribes of their own nation in their own land.

The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony

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Desperate for War

Revenge war with Russia or revenge war with China? It appears the former is preferred, if CDAN is to be believed:

The heads of several cable networks/news organizations from the far left to the far right, all agreed that a war with Russia would be amazing for ratings.

War with either Russia or China – which would mean war with both – would be sheer lunacy, of course, but when has that ever stopped the lunatics before? They’re like gamblers who believe that winning their past bets mean that their next one is a sure thing.

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Hundreds of Troops

The script writers are getting lazy. Or, as is more likely the case, desperate. When hundreds of police on the Mexican border can’t stop poor and huddled masses of Africans and South Americans yearning to breathe free, are we really supposed to believe that hundreds of British soldiers are even going to slow down the Russian Army? They wouldn’t even qualify as a speed bump.

Hundreds of British special force troops are ready to deploy to the Ukranian border at a moment’s notice, amid rising tensions and fears of a possible Russian invasion in the region, according to reports.

The UK’s Special Air Service and Parachute Regiment are prepared to enter the region with medics, engineers, signalers, and hundred of paratroopers, The Mirror reported.

“The high readiness element of the brigade was told it may need to deploy at very short notice, a source told The Mirror.

“Between 400 and 600 troops are ready. Their equipment is packed and they are ready to fly to Ukraine and either land or parachute in. They have trained for both eventualities.”

The military move comes after the European Union accused Belarus, which borders both the Ukraine and Poland, of manufacturing a humanitarian crisis by urging migrants to illegally cross into the EU via Poland.

The age of carrier diplomacy is over. So is the short-lived era of the color revolution. If the neocons are successful in starting a war on or near the Russian border, it’s not going to be limited to the region. China and Iran will also take action, because they know that one of them will be next. And the new Axis of Nations is more powerful in every way than the Arsenal of Globohomo, with more population, more soldiers, more nukes, and more industrial capacity.

And isn’t it remarkable how Belarus is being accused of manufacturing the very humanitarian crisis that Angela Merkel caused six years ago? On the basis of this justification, the British should be sending troops to the US southern border and threatening Joe Biden for offering $450,000 in incentives for migrants to illegally cross into the USA.

But it proves once more that Martin van Creveld was right: immigration is war.

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The new power pyramid

I don’t put a lot of credence in Sorcha Faal’s dramatic reports, but this analysis of the transformation from a global monopower to a tripartite system in which China plays the leading role strikes me as highly credible:

American efforts to undermine Russia-China partnership are doomed to fail because Washington doesn’t understand Moscow’s concerns.

The US is increasingly worried that Russia and China are forging a strong new strategic partnership. With Moscow and Beijing aligning their foreign policy stances, the relationship now seems to be an alliance in all but name.

It was initially expected that the Russian-Chinese partnership would run aground over Beijing’s economic ambitions in Central Asia. China is evidently the more powerful economy in the partnership with Russia, and those kinds of asymmetries create certain limitations.

Moscow accepts Chinese leadership but rejects Chinese dominance.

Thus, if China chooses the “first among equals” principle, the partnership will prove to be durable and Moscow can make its peace with playing second fiddle in economic affairs to the world’s most populous nation.

To date, China has not tried to make use of those asymmetries with Russia.

Unlike Washington’s efforts to peel Russia away from its neighbours in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Beijing has avoided these kinds of schemes and instead worked towards accommodating Russian strategic interests.

Simply put, it is not in China’s interest to abandon its “first among equals” position in favour of unipolar ambitions. Russia is an indispensable partner for China to establish an economic leadership position in the Greater Eurasian region.

In a multipolar world, Moscow can adopt a swing power position and pivot to other centres of power if Beijing starts aspiring to move beyond leadership, in order to try and dominate.

The US domination of Europe is officially over. Despite its best efforts, the US could not convince Europeans to stop the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. And those who have read Corporate Cancer will understand the significance of the fact that one of the leading sponsors of Euro 2020, whose TV ads are running frequently before the matches, is Alipay.

If Russia is content to play second fiddle to China – and there is every sign that it is, due to the way the USA has waged economic war on Russia over the last decade – the USA will not only lose its premier global position, but soon find itself demoted to the number three world power when it loses its Western European economic force multiplier. This is good news, as it will give actual Americans a better chance to take back control in their own country.

Meanwhile, as China courts Russia, the USA continues to ineffectually try to impose its will:

The ban on purchasing Russia’s sovereign debt by US investors introduced by Washington earlier this year came into force on Monday. In April, US President Joe Biden signed an executive order authorizing the imposition of yet more restrictions. The move signaled a further expansion of Washington’s existing sanctions policy on Moscow, which is aimed at cutting off Russia from the global financial markets.

This idiocy is almost certainly going to boomerang on the neo-liberal world order, as the countries of the world will react to Russia’s financial deplatforming in much the same way that consumers concerned about being deplatformed by Paypal are turning to new alternatives with relief and gratitude.