Geopolitical musings
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Wednesday, June 2, 2021 01:04
VIEWED: 904
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During the massive Russian military "readiness exercises" on the Ukraine border, Biden* called Putin about a month ago and asked for a summit meeting. One is scheduled for June16 in Geneva.
Apparently the Russians agreed to a summit after much negotiation with Jake Sullivan, Biden's* national security advisor. Both the Russians and the Chinese have expressed much skepticism about what might be accomplished with a "not agreement-capable" USA, which has broken pretty much every treaty and agreement it ever signed.
I wonder about the timing of this all, and also the risk that the USA deep state is taking with exposing Biden's presumed diminished mental capacity during two days of direct talks.
The Duran has had several videos about this, and they've mentioned separately, but not all together, what appears to have been a series of coordinated "regime change" projects undertaken by the neocons in the Biden" administration, which were all supposed to have come to fruition in April/May but right now look like belly-up fish floating in scummy water.
Kiev was supposed to invade east Ukraine. USA and British warships were suppposed to be providing support from the Black Sea, and Turkey was supposed to supply drones tothe Kiev-backed soldiers. That failed.
"Ceasar sanctions" - signed by Trump - were supposed to have killed the Syrian economy and made the re-election of Assad impossible. But the sanctions failed to dent support for Assad and he just won the vote.
There were a series of actions against Belarus and its leader, Lukashenko, beginning with protests that were supposed to result in a "color revolution", and - when that filed- moving on the an outright coupbeing plotted against him. Which also failed. The only thing that did was drive Lukashenko -who was ctually somewhat friendly tothe west - deep into Putin's arms. Talk about counter-productive!
And then there was the whole Navalny "poisoning" - a clumsy theater production if there ever was one- that was supposed to result in sanctions that would FINALLY kill NordStream2 (Germany didn't go along with that) and maybe even cause protests and disruptions in Russia itself. But when it was shown that Navalny was getting funding from abroad, most Russians scraped him off as a traitor.
There are prolly some things that we didn't even know about. Like some cyber-bombs that were supposed to go off in Russia, but didn't. (I wonder if the Colonial pipeline hack was a Russian counter-threat. You know how you know that something is seriously wrong when all the officials are telling you "Don't panic"? Well, all of the officials are saying that hack had nothing to do with the Russian government. Of course, if it had been that would be the LAST thing they'd want you to know, bc it exposes our vulnerability to cyberbombs. But that's sheer speculation.)
Meanwhile, Russia and China are having VERY high-level talks (over five days) about political and geoplitical coordination.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-23/china-s-top-diploma
t-to-visit-russia-for-strategic-talks
After that, Yang Jeichi will visit Croatia and Slovenia.
Both Lavrov and various high-level foreign ministers in China have said that there "is no upper limit" on Chinese-Russian collaboration, which is an implied threattoboth USA dn EU.
Given the apparent failure of a series of US-sponsored destabilization efforts, and the failure of USA sanctions to dent Russia, China, Iran and Syrai, what cards does the USA have left to play?
It seems that the Russian-Chinese combine has all of the cards: military. intelligence, financial, economic, and political.
Given that the USA has almost no leverage, what can Biden* hope to accomplish by talking and, more importantly, what would satisfy the Russian-Chinese combine? Outside of meaningless words, that is? What can the USA offer them that they won'teventually achieve between them?
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I didn't see you mention energy.
China, Germany, Russia, Ukraine.
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Yes, energy too. Overall combined resources, if you want to expand on that thought.
Putin has said that Russia has "red lines" too, just like the USA, but he left the listener guessing what those are.
It's not too hard to figure out what some of them are:
attempting to destabilize Russia's "near abroad"
bringing NATO ever-closer to Russia's border
attempting "regime change" operations within Russia
expelling Russian diplomats on silly pretexts and seizing Russian diplomatic property
The Russian-Chines (Iranian) combine has resisted a lot of pressure from the west, including destabilization efforts in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and attempting to break Taiwan free of its historic link with the mainland.
I don't think that Putin will attempt to negotiate on China's behalf, but Putin/Xi and Lavrov/Yang will have certainly discussed in detail what Russia intends to demand and what Russia (and by extension, China) are willing to offer.
Maybe the offer goes: You leave us alone, and we'll leave you alone. You mess with us, and we'll mess with you.
Aside from successfully resisting western destabilization efforts and slowly bringing various nations into Russia's/China's sphere of influence (Turkey, Belarus, Iran, Syria, Hungary, etc) most of the leverage, IMHO, comes from China, because it is CHINA that has active trade with the west, and lots of dollars and treasuries as hostages.
It could offer loans in USD.
It could dump dollars and treasuries.
It could negate its multi-billion-dollar trade deal with the EU
It could demand to pay saudi Arabia for oil in digital yuan or other non-dollar currency
Full-on arms race between Russia/China and the USA
China, being fully enmeshed with the west, could do a lot of damage.
I think what the Russians will demand as proof of good faith from the faithless USA/EU is the implementation of the Minsk Accords. As a start.
If no agreement is reached I expect to see more military activity from Russiaand possiby from China. China, in theory, has a huge military but they need to get their feet wet in combat situations. Arms race in space, high tech (hypersonic) missiles, nuclear threat (nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarine drones), and conventional weaponry (China)
If things get bad enough, financial squeeze on the dollar and economic squeeze on China/USA and China/EU trade.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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You probably wouldn't know this from western prss, but there's been a lot of speculation what Patrushev (Russia's Security Advisor) and is Chinese equivalent (Yang Jeichi) and their many, many additional delegates across many economic and political sectors have been talking about over so many days.
I've been attempting to find the readout from Russia's National Security Advisor website, but here are some links to what China (via the Global Times) had to say
Quote:
US defense budget a huge bubble ready to burst: Global Times editorial
US President Joe Biden is scheduled to submit the Fiscal Year 2022 budget to Congress on Friday. US media has disclosed in advance that in this $6 trillion budget, $753 billion will be used for defense, an increase of 1.7 percent over the 2021 figure. The huge investment in the US nuclear triad and the support in the Pacific Deterrence Initiative have received particular attention.
This is the largest budget with the most shocking national defense expenditure worldwide. It is worth mentioning that the 1.7 percent increase given by the Democratic government is considered too little by many Republicans. The US defense budget is still about four times that of China, and is almost the sum of the defense budgets of the 15 countries that follow. But there is still such a domestic response. People can imagine how distorted and deformed the US' overall national security concept is.
What the US wants is absolute security. One of its meanings is that it can overwhelm other major powers' will on key issues at critical moments. This is a completely unrealistic goal. The US still feels anxious despite the fact that its defense budget is far ahead, Washington always feels that the defense budget should grow.
The US' national defense has in fact gone beyond the traditional military field, pursuing the overflow of various functions to maintain global hegemony. The US economy is increasingly relying on the hegemony of the US dollar and the country's dominant position in international politics and ideology. The US' super military power has compensated for the weakening of its actual competitiveness in these systems.
In the past, US technological leadership and economic advantages were absolute. But now, such superiority is shrinking. It is complicated to maintain the leadership in those areas, but it is simple and encouraging to raise military expenditure. Thus, the US has unrestrainedly let itself stay deformed as a system.
However, this is destined to be very inefficient. It will cause fundamental trouble to the healthy functioning of the international community and disrupt people's traditional sense of national security. The US could have definitely been the most secure country worldwide, but it has always believed it has the most security challenges. As long as other countries' national strength has increased - although still not as strong as the US and they have no willingness to confront it - the US will have a sense of being threatened.
Washington has perverted greed for national security, and China's rise will definitely have a subversive psychological impact on the US. If China increases its military expenditure by one dollar, then the US will increase by a few dollars to maintain the gap with China. It will stop improving infrastructure or expanding people's welfare, but it will be still not even enough to put all other increased budgets into the defense budget. This is an ambition which is impossible to realize.
China will not be in an arms race with the US. The increase in China's defense budget and military strength is the natural result of economic development and technological progress. Everything happened naturally and China does not need to make difficult choices. China does not have the will to challenge the US worldwide, but we cannot allow the US to act arbitrarily in the West Pacific, especially in China's coastal waters, to harm China's interests. China's determination is also uNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME