Tag: war

The Long, Slow Defeat

Germany is actively disproving the neocon axiom that “freedom is always good for the economy”.

One in four German companies is considering moving production to other countries amid the energy crisis, Tanja Gönner, CEO of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), told Die Welt am Sonntag news outlet.

“The high energy prices and the weakening economy are hitting the German economy with full force and are placing a great burden on our companies compared to other international locations. The German business model is under enormous stress…Every fourth German company is thinking about relocating production abroad,” Gönner stated.

Germany’s energy-intensive chemical industry is particularly affected by the crisis, Wolfgang Grosse Entrup, CEO of the German chemical industry association (VCI), told the news outlet.

“The brutal energy prices are knocking us out…Without a functioning price brake, the government is willfully accepting deindustrialization,” he warned, adding that if the chemical industry fails, other industries will follow, which “could be the knockout for Germany as a business location.”

The report says German companies are suffering a variety of problems, including high energy prices, disrupted supply chains, and even the aftershocks from China’s rigid crackdown on the Covid-19 pandemic.

In very-related news, the reason why Russia has been engaging in low-intensity attrition warfare is finally becoming to obvious to ignore, even for the globalist media.

Western weapon stockpiles have become strained after countless arms transfers to Ukraine, making it increasingly difficult for NATO militaries to keep up with politicians’ pledges to continue supporting Kiev with whatever it needs for as long as it takes, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

“Smaller countries have exhausted their potential,” and according to one NATO official, at least 20 of the alliance’s 30 members are “pretty tapped out,” the newspaper wrote. Only “larger allies,” including France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, have enough stockpiles to continues or potentially increase their weapon shipments to Ukraine.

Since the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine in late February, the US and its Western allies have been providing Kiev with billions of dollars in security assistance, to the tune of nearly $40 billion, now comparable to the entire annual defense budget of France. Moscow has repeatedly warned that the weapon shipments will only prolong the conflict and increase the risk of a direct conflict between Russia and NATO.

As Ukraine continues to call for more weapons, EU stockpiles are running low, with Germany already “reaching its limit” as of early September. Meanwhile, Lithuania, which does not have any more weapons to donate, has urged the allies to give Ukraine “everything we have.”

US President Joe Biden has vowed to keep the arms pipeline open for “as long as it takes,” but even American military stockpiles have taken a toll after repeated shipments to Kiev. As early as March, just weeks after the conflict in Ukraine kicked off, the US Defense Department was already scrambling to replenish thousands of shoulder-fired missiles supplied to Kiev. By August, US stockpiles of 155mm artillery ammunition were “uncomfortably low,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

The US think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) previously pointed out that the American military is “not structured to fight or support an extended conflict,” while the defense industry is “sized for peacetime production rates,” and expanding capabilities would take years.

Putin has stated, from the start, that the objective was to demilitarize his enemies. Now the USA is being defeated and Europe is paying the initial price. It’s not over, but the trend is clear and on the verge of becoming inexorable. The sooner that the neoclown imperialists give up their global ambitions, the better off they will be, but because the seeds of failure are sown in the field of past success, they are very unlikely to assess the situation correctly and make intelligent decisions based on accurate information.

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An Easy Decision

Big Serge game-theories the Russian Kherson withdrawal and reaches the obvious conclusion:

Kherson was becoming an inefficient front for Russia because of the logistical strain of supplying forces across the river with limited bridge and road capacity. Russia demonstrated that it was capable of shouldering this sustainment burden (keeping troops supplied all through Ukraine’s summer offensives), but the question becomes 1) to what purpose, and 2) for how long.

Ideally, the bridgehead becomes the launching point for offensive action against Nikolayev, but launching an offensive would require strengthening the force grouping in Kherson, which correspondingly raises the logistical burden of projecting force across the river. With a very long front to play with, Kherson is clearly one of the most logistically intensive axes. My guess is that Surovikin took charge and almost immediately decided he did not want to increase the sustainment burden by trying to push on Nikolayev.

Therefore, if an offensive is not going to be launched from the Kherson position, the question becomes – why hold the position at all? Politically, it is important to defend a regional capital, but militarily the position becomes meaningless if one is not going to go on the offensive in the south.

Let’s be even more explicit: unless an offensive towards Nikolayev is planned, the Kherson bridgehead is militarily counterproductive… In the broader operational sense, Surovikin seems to be declining battle in the south while preparing in the north and in the Donbas. It is clear that he made this decision shortly after taking command of the operation – he has been hinting at it for weeks, and the speed and cleanliness of the withdrawal suggests that it was well planned , long in advance. Withdrawing across the river increases the combat effectiveness of the army significantly and decreases the logistical burden, freeing resources for other sectors.

This isn’t that hard. And it wasn’t a difficult decision, at least not from a military perspective, because any other decision by General Surovikin would have been not only incorrect, but reprehensibly stupid. War is not a game of Risk. A general does not win a battle, much less a war, by simply moving his forces forward blindly and drawing new lines on the map. It’s entirely normal for generals to try advancing one way, decide that the terrain is not favorable, then withdraw in favor of advancing somewhere else. This is particularly true of so-called maneuver warfare, hence the term.

The optics that so concern the media are part of politics, not war-making. The only time optics matter is with regards to prospective allies deciding to enter or abandon the war, and Russia’s prospective allies could not care less how the Russians manage their lines on the Ukraine battlefield. China’s decision to move against Taiwan and Turkey’s decision to move against Greece will not depend upon whether Russia loses Kherson or takes Odessa. No matter what Russia does, Iran is unlikely to move against Israel unless Israel attacks first, although it would have moved against Azerbaijan if the NATO ally had attacked Armenia.

Moreover, the fact that NATO and the Ukrainians are so obsessed with optics while the Russians are almost entirely focused on genuine military issues is a good reason to surmise that Russia will ultimately win its war with NATO.

The Allies didn’t lose World War II because Operation Market Garden failed and they withdrew from Arnhem. And the Russians aren’t going to lose the NATO-Russian war because they withdrew from Kherson either.

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Bolsonero Crosses the Rubicon

Brazil shows Americans what actual resistance to electoral fraud looks like:

The people of Brazil have risen up against alleged voter fraud in the nation’s recent presidential election, with millions flooding the streets in protest.

During Tuesday’s national Republican Day, an estimated 3 million citizens took to the streets across the country and demanded the election be annulled.

Incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro and his party have responded by moving to annul the election.

Bolsonaro’s conservative Partido Liberal (PL) party presented its report and announced it will apply for the election’s annulment since the results could not be validated.

Since the massive fraud during the runoff election on October 30th in Brazil, millions of Brazilians have been protesting on the streets every day.

The election was “won” by Bolsonaro’s far-left socialist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Whether this Brazilian revolt against fake democracy is successful or not, it demonstrates why the Second Amendment has become irrelevant. Weapons are of no use to a people who are unwilling to use them. Since Americans wouldn’t use their God-given gun rights to a) defend their borders against foreign immigration or b) to prevent at least two successive fraudulent governments from ruling over them when they had those rights, history indicates they are probably going to eventually lose them.

I understand the natural reaction to protest “we didn’t know” or “people weren’t ready” or “there is nothing we could have done”. But the cold reality of history is that a people have a limited window of opportunity in which successful self-defense is possible. Once the Pilgrims have established themselves, the Visigoths have crossed the Rhine, or the Lombards have crossed the Alps, it’s already too late to turn back time.

That’s why, at this point, the collapse of the United States is probably the optimal outcome for the American posterity.

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False Flag #237

The Russians are invading Poland now and murdering Poles! Because we can totally trust “a senior US intelligence offical”, right?

Two people have been killed in Poland after explosions hit a farm near the border with Ukraine in what is thought to be a botched Russian missile attack. Twin explosions rang out this afternoon in Przewodów, a rural village located five miles from the Ukrainian border in south western Poland.

A senior US intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the fatal blasts were caused by a pair of wayward Russian missiles – though the blast site sits more than 10 miles from the nearest Ukrainian urban settlement of note, Chervonohrad.

It follows a report by Polish Radio ZET which also claimed two stray missiles hit Polish soil, without providing more details. The blasts came as Moscow launched fresh missile attacks across Ukraine today in what Kyiv said was the heaviest wave of missile strikes in nearly nine months of war.

I’m mostly interested that they’re repeatedly trying to sell such small “provocations” as a potential casus belli. I mean, do they really think anyone other than the Boomers gives one hair on an airborne rodent’s posterior about NATO or its oft-misrepresented Article 5, which commits absolutely no one to doing anything.

UPDATE: The British are vowing “WE WILL DEFEND POLAND”.

They seem to have forgotten that the last time they promised to defend Poland, the Russians ended up with all of Poland, all of Eastern Europe, and most of Central Europe.

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The Irrelevance of Optics

Nora Hoppe makes some astute observations concerning the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine and the very poor level of analyses on both sides of the conflict, especially in light of the Russian withdrawal from Kherson:

When people speak of the “optics not looking good“… a film set immediately comes to my mind (I have worked in the film world for many years). And that immediately tells me how some people view this operation – as spectators: it has to have a good catchy script, suspense, uninterrupted action and – heaven forbid – no lulls! It has to ultimately supply a dopamine release. It has to have a “Dirty Harry Catharsis”.

This reminds me of similar reactions to the prisoner exchange in mid-September, where some saw it as a sign of weakness to even think of releasing Azov prisoners… or when the Chinese government did not deliver a dramatic retort when Pelosi went to do her skit in Taiwan.

What is at the base of these kinds of reactions? Why such impatience? Why such concern with “appearances”? Why such a need to satiate one’s own personal sense of justice and retribution? Does it have something to do with consuming? Especially in the western world one has become an addicted consumer of not only things but “experiences” that can be lived indirectly… We have become spectators… and our world has become a spectacle.

In his powerful masterpiece, “War and Peace”, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy depicts the Battle of Borodino as the greatest example of Russian patriotism… The collective engagement of all those involved in the Battle of Borodino is what ultimately attained the end result: despite all their losses and the sacrificial need to evacuate Moscow and burn its resources – in order to save the army and Russia, the Russians, achieved a moral victory in this battle… which ultimately led to the comprehensive victory of the Russian army and the entire campaign.

“Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davýdov family and to the crown serfs—those fields and meadows where for hundreds of years the peasants of Borodinó, Górki, Shevárdino, and Semënovsk had reaped their harvests and pastured their cattle. At the dressing stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood for a space of some three acres around. Crowds of men of various arms, wounded and unwounded, with frightened faces, dragged themselves back to Mozháysk from the one army and back to Valúevo from the other. Other crowds, exhausted and hungry, went forward led by their officers. Others held their ground and continued to fire.” [“War and Peace” – book 10; chapter 39]

General-in-chief Mikhail I. Kutuzov’s motto of “patience and time” allowed the Russian army to be victorious when he was able to embrace, as opposed to trying to know, the contingencies of war and prepare his soldiers as best he could for such battle. He knew that, by fighting the pitched battle and adopting the strategy of attrition warfare, he could now retreat with the Russian army still intact, lead its recovery, and force the weakened French forces to move even further from their bases of supply.

Retreat is not defeat. It can be the result of a defeat, or, as in the case of Kherson, where no significant combat even took place, it can be strategic maneuver. Or, as in the case of Borodino, it can be both.

Optics are an illusion. They are transient, easily manipulated, and are not reflective of the underlying reality. Those who concern themselves first and foremost and solely with optics are inevitably media creatures whose opinions are reliably wrong and assuredly irrelevant.

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Winds of Change

I don’t think The Scorpions will be writing any ballads if the rumors that Germany is attempting to break free of US hegemony are true:

Solid German business sources completely contradict the “message” delivered by the German Council on Foreign Relations on the trip to China. According to these sources, the Scholz caravan went to Beijing to essentially lay down the preparatory steps for working out a peace deal with Russia, with China as privileged messenger.

This is – literally – as explosive, geopolitically and geoeconomically, as it gets. As I pointed out in one of my previous columns, Berlin and Moscow were keeping a secret communication back channel – via business interlocutors – right to the minute the usual suspects, in desperation, decided to blow up the Nord Streams.

Cue to the now-notorious SMS from Liz Truss’s iPhone to Tony Blinken, one minute after the explosions: “It’s done.”

There’s more: the Scholz caravan may be trying to start a long and convoluted process of eventually replacing the US with China as a key ally. One should never forget that the top BRI trade/connectivity terminal in the EU is Germany (the Ruhr valley).

According to one of the sources, “if this effort is successful, then Germany, China and Russia can ally themselves together and drive the US out of Europe.”

Another source provided the cherry on the cake: “Olaf Scholz is being accompanied on this trip by German industrialists who actually control Germany and are not going to sit back watching themselves being destroyed.”

The borders of the Great Bifurcation may not be what the rulers of the neo-liberal world order believe they are going to be. They’ve already discovered that 87 percent of the global population are on the other side of the fence, and that 87 percent may be growing as Europeans realize that their US-imposed “freedom and democracy” is actually nothing more than a long-term societal suicide pact.

The remarkable truth of the matter is that it would probably be less economically painful for Europe to cut ties with the USA than with both Russian and China. So, the real question would appear to be how intent is China on undercutting the global dominance of the USA.

I wish it were needless to say that a peaceful transition to a bifurcated global economy would be a much better outcome than Europe needing the Sino-Russian Alliance to militarily defeat the USA in order to remove Europe’s subordination to the globalist elite. But history suggests that at least some amount of direct war between the forces of the Nationalist Alliance and the US military in service to the Neo-Liberal Empire will be necessary before the latter accepts the situation.

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The Importance of Maneuver

And perhaps even more significant, as demonstrated by this excellent piece on military history, is the importance of tactical flexibility:

Few ancient warriors have amassed such an enduring and widely known legacy as the Spartans. From the cinematic reimagining, to the science fiction super soldiers of the Halo series, to the use of the word Spartan itself as a synonym for arduous and ascetic ruggedness – Spartans are, for many, the archetypical warrior. Most with at least a cursory knowledge of ancient history know the Spartans by acclaim to be the best warriors of all the Greeks.

It is true that the Spartans fielded notably competent and powerful armies. This, of course, had less to do with some sort of genetic predisposition for combat, and more to do with the structure of Spartan society. In the classical era, most Greek city-states fielded citizen armies – quite literally the adult male population under arms, with farmers and craftsman mobilizing into a militia. In contrast, Spartan society was decidedly more martial, even in peacetime. Sparta had a large workforce of slaves (helots) who comprised the majority of the population – Herodotus claimed that there were something like seven helots for each Spartan. The presence of such a large, servile labor force enabled Spartan men to participate in rigorous military-social institutions, including regular training in arms and a military academy for young men. So while the average Athenian soldier was likely to be a farmer who grabbed the family shield, spear, and helmet when he was called up, a Spartan was more like a professional soldier who had helots to do the farming for him.

Sparta’s peculiar social structure and martial institutions bore their intended fruit. From roughly 431 to 404 BC, the Spartans fought a protracted conflict with Athens (the Peloponnesian War) which shattered Athenian preeminence in southern Greece and established Sparta as the dominant Greek power. This struggle witnessed many decisive Spartan victories, including the famous Battle of Syracuse, which saw an Athenian army entirely crushed by Sparta and her proxies.

The Battle of Leuctra brought a sudden, unexpected, and spectacular end to the era of Spartan hegemony.

Athens and Sparta are by far the two best known ancient Greek city states – Athens for its philosophers and Sparta for its warriors. Far less famous is Thebes – the third city of Greece. Yet it was this same uncelebrated Thebes that won a decisive victory against the Spartans, despite being heavily outnumbered, crushing the Spartan army and breaking its power….

At Leuctra, the Spartans arrayed in standard formation, with their battle lines formed up at 8 to 12 ranks deep. This was viewed as the correct formation to ensure both adequate depth and width. In short, the considered “best practice” was to maintain a properly balanced formation, with as little drift or dissipation as possible, to prevent the formation from breaking apart altogether. A broken formation was deadly. It is estimated that, in Greek hoplite battles, losing armies lost on average nearly three times as many men as winning armies. This was the price of a shattered phalanx.

At Leuctra, Epaminondas and the Thebans threw all the conventional wisdom out the window.

Instead of a balanced, rectangular formation, the Thebans assembled in a lopsided, weighted formation, with their left wing packed, both with far deeper ranks and their best troops. While the Spartans followed the conventional wisdom and lined up at a consistent depth all across the line, the Thebans assembled a massive package, fifty ranks deep, on the left (facing the Spartan right).

By forming up the vast bulk of their forces in the left wing (in a formation 4 to 5 times deeper than a traditional Hoplite mass), the Thebans had already deviated from one standard practice of the time. They abandoned a second standard operating procedure when they proceeded to advance that left wing far ahead of the remainder of their line. While the 50-deep left-hand mass smashed into the Spartan right, the Theban center and right lagged far behind. As a result, the mass of the overweight Theban left broke through the Spartan right wing and began to roll up the rear before the rest of the Spartan line even engaged in battle. Most of the Spartan army never got to join the battle before their formation was shattered from the rear. The Theban mass rolled into the rear, began concentric attacks on the Spartan army, and sparked a total rout in short order.

Leuctra was a titanic victory with massive geopolitical implications. The loss of an army to an outnumbered and underestimated foe rocked both Sparta’s material strength and its perception as the leading military power in Greece, and set in motion a strategic defeat that permanently relegated it to a second rate power within Greece.

The Battle of Leuctra also marked the beginning of the end of classical Greek hoplite warfare, with its focus on uniform, tactically simplified heavy infantry formations. To a modern reader, the strategy adopted by the Thebans at Leuctra, aimed at a decisive action to penetrate and exploit the enemy line, seems fairly obvious. Yet to accomplish this, the Thebans had to break a variety of “rules” for hoplite warfare, massing their forces into what the Spartans surely viewed as an unwieldy, imbalanced, and excessively deep left wing. Innovation rarely looks like innovation to those that have the benefit of hindsight, but the Thebans had, in a word, discovered the power of schwerpunkt. Thebes would itself soon be overwhelmed by another Greek power fielding similarly flexible, but even more powerful phalanx formations: Macedonia.

Epaminondas’ tactics at Leuctra marked one of the earliest documented examples of coordinated and planned battlefield maneuver.

The History of Battle: Maneuver, Part 1, 4 November 2022

Keep the Battle of Leuctra in mind whenever you’re tempted to “stick to the plan” in the face of a situation that has obviously departed from what was anticipated. If the Spartans had simply withdrawn in order to figure out the probable consequences of the anomaly they were witnessing at Leuctra, they might have been able to adapt to it and overcome it, thereby changing Greek history and preventing Sparta’s decline.

Mindless sticking to one’s pre-established position, either physically and conceptually, can be fatal.

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Dr. Doom Confirms WWIII

It’s rather intriguing to observe that economist Nouriel Roubini, the man who most famously predicted the financial crisis of 2008 – as did Steve Keen and I – is now also in agreement with me that WWIII has already begun and that the global economy is going to bifurcate:

Last week, the New York University professor was interviewed by Der Spiegel and listed some of the world’s most acute problems.

Recalling a recent event hosted by the International Monetary Fund, he referred to historian Niall Ferguson who “said in a speech there that we would be lucky if we got an economic crisis like in the 1970s — and not a war like in the 1940s.”

When speaking about major global threats, Roubini mentioned the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, adding that Iran and Israel are “on a collision course” as well.

“I read that the Biden administration expects China to attack Taiwan sooner rather than later,” the economist said, summarizing that “World War III has already effectively begun.”

The rivalry between Washington and Beijing is driving tension to a large degree, Roubini noted, adding that the US has banned the export of certain semiconductors to China and is pressuring European nations into cutting trade ties with the country on national security grounds. He believes that a breakup of the globalized world is looming.

“Trade, finance, technology, internet: Everything will split in two,” he predicted.

It was not clear if non-allied nations would pick the US side in the confrontation, he said. “I asked the president of an African country why he gets 5G technology from China and not from the West. He told me, we are a small country, so someone will spy on us anyway. Then, I might as well take the Chinese technology, it’s cheaper,” the economist revealed to Der Spiegel.

There simply isn’t any reason for any self-interested third party to choose the side of what Vladimir Putin describes as the Second West. Unlike the USA, which has been attacking countries, undermining their currencies, and murdering their leaders for decades, the Chinese are mostly content to simply do business with other countries. And while that may change, and the massive Chinese diaspora is not exactly popular in countries such as Indonesia, Australia, and Canada, the fact is that the Chinese track record concerning foreign relations is considerably better than that of the USA or of its representative in Asia, Japan.

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Australia is the New Ukraine

The US appears hell-bent on making sure that the Chinese are incentivized to not only take Taiwan, but attack Australia as well.

The US military has devised a plan which would see nuclear-capable B-52 strategic bombers deployed in Australia on long-term rotational missions, and turn the country’s Northern Territory into a crucial military hub in Washington’s standoff with Beijing, the national broadcaster reported on Monday.

The Pentagon reportedly seeks to build a “squadron operations facility,” which would include a maintenance center and enough parking area for six B-52s at the Royal Australian Air Force military air base Tindal, according to ABC’s Four Corners investigative program.

The air base expansion could cost up to $100 million and is expected to be finished in late 2026. The new facilities are “required to support strategic operations and to run multiple 15-day training exercises during the Northern Territory dry season for deployed B-52 squadrons,” the report said, citing US documents.

An “enhanced air cooperation” between Australia and the US was discussed during last year’s AUSMIN ministerial meetings, but while the sides agreed on “rotational deployment of US aircraft of all types,” there was no official confirmation of plans to deploy B-52s at Tindal.

“The ability to deploy US Air Force bombers to Australia sends a strong message to adversaries about our ability to project lethal air power,” the US Air Force reportedly told the program.

To say that the US military is behaving in an overtly provocative manner would be an understatement. It’s not at all unreasonable to wonder if the predominantly foreign elite dictating the US military’s actions in Europe and Asia are pursuing this course of action, not because they are crazy or stupid, but in order to ensure the destruction of the US military.

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War and the Two Wests

Vladimir Putin makes it clear that he is not the enemy of Americans or Europeans, but rather, of the neoliberal, mercantile and cosmopolitan elite that rules over them and seeks to heal the world by ruling it.

The so-called West which is, of course, a theoretical construct since it is not united and clearly is a highly complex conglomerate, but I will still say that the West has taken a number of steps in recent years and especially in recent months that are designed to escalate the situation. As a matter of fact, they always seek to aggravate matters, which is nothing new, either. This includes the stoking of war in Ukraine, the provocations around Taiwan, and the destabilisation of the global food and energy markets. To be sure, the latter was, of course, not done on purpose, there is no doubt about it. The destabilisation of the energy market resulted from a number of systemic missteps made by the Western authorities that I mentioned above. As we can see now, the situation was further aggravated by the destruction of the pan-European gas pipelines. This is something otherworldly altogether, but we are nevertheless witnessing these sad developments.

Global power is exactly what the so-called West has at stake in its game. But this game is certainly dangerous, bloody and, I would say, dirty. It denies the sovereignty of countries and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and tramples upon other states’ interests. In any case, even if denial is the not the word used, they are doing it in real life. No one, except those who create these rules I have mentioned is entitled to retain their identity: everyone else must comply with these rules…

This brings me to the key point all of us have gathered here for. Is it not equally important to maintain cultural, social, political and civilisational diversity?

At the same time, the smoothing out and erasure of all and any differences is essentially what the modern West is all about. What stands behind this? First of all, it is the decaying creative potential of the West and a desire to restrain and block the free development of other civilisations.

There is also an openly mercantile interest, of course. By imposing their values, consumption habits and standardisation on others, our opponents – I will be careful with words – are trying to expand markets for their products. The goal on this track is, ultimately, very primitive. It is notable that the West proclaims the universal value of its culture and worldview. Even if they do not say so openly, which they actually often do, they behave as if this is so, that it is a fact of life, and the policy they pursue is designed to show that these values must be unconditionally accepted by all other members of the international community…

It is simply necessary to understand clearly that, as I have already said before, two Wests – at least two and maybe more but two at least – the West of traditional, primarily Christian values, freedom, patriotism, great culture and now Islamic values as well – a substantial part of the population in many Western countries follows Islam. This West is close to us in something. We share with it common, even ancient roots. But there is also a different West – aggressive, cosmopolitan, and neocolonial. It is acting as a tool of neoliberal elites. Naturally, Russia will never reconcile itself to the dictates of this West.

I suspect the neoliberal lords of the Second West will find it rather easier to cancel Kanye West than the man with the finger on the trigger of the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. This is not a man who doesn’t understand exactly “who, in fact, is at the helm of the world, who runs it, and whether the world is amenable to being run at all.” And it is also clear that Vladimir Putin is a man who understands that his nation’s war with the Second West is not entirely one of this world.

On a very related note, even the globalist media is belatedly beginning to realize that the Second West’s geostrategic position is nowhere nearly as strong as they previously believed.

Our familiar system of global political and economic alliances is shifting, and nothing has made this change clearer than the varied reactions to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While the United States and its closest allies in Europe and Asia have imposed tough economic sanctions on Moscow, 87 percent of the world’s population has declined to follow us. Economic sanctions have united our adversaries in shared resistance. Less predictably, the outbreak of Cold War II, has also led countries that were once partners or non-aligned to become increasingly multi-aligned.

History never ended, but the neoliberal rules-based “New” world order is observably in trouble.

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