On this centennial of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, the true land of Fatima - Persia - has stolen the show from Russia (which was the original focal point of the Marian revelations 100 years ago in Portugal).
Trump's decision to decertify the Iran nuclear deal today will have far-reaching repercussions: he has telegraphed that Iran is guilty until proven innocent and that the US and Israel will not accept the undue increase in its regional influence in the last few years, but that the Ayatollahs must effectively pull back from Syria and Iraq if they still want sanctions relief from the West.
Iran will likely respond with just the opposite: stepping up their regional ambitions with what's almost certain to be the moral and diplomatic backing of Russia. Unfortunately, given the nadir of US-Russia relations as well, Putin is likely to use the Iranians as leverage for what he hopes to be a new attempt to reset with the Trump administration...but this is a more farfetched prospect than he probably realizes - in fact Trump's bravado today could already be a big defeat for him, because recent indications are that Russia's been making overtures to the Saudis, Israelis, and Europeans for the express purpose of improving its chances for reversing the slide in relations with the US.
So just when Russia was about to do a victory lap over its apparent success in engineering a new balance of power in the Mideast, the Kremlin's going back to square one: Putin could well be compelled now to fully realign with Iran even if that hurts his advances with the Saudis and Israelis; and his probable failure to leverage Tehran's nuclear program for better relations with the US will also dent his hopes of rapprochement with the EU, which has effectively followed Moscow's cues in opening up to Iran themselves.
So Fatima's back with a vengeance on this centennial of the great sign in the village that bears her name in Portugal...and her star has clearly shifted on this very day from Russia to Iran...just as one could have expected. Putin is now very much at the mercy of the guardians of Shiite Islam, the Ayatollahs...he made a good last-ditch effort to make nice with the US and the Western alliance, but it looks like all it did was embolden imperial Washington to push back even more flagrantly. He now has little leverage to restrain what the Iranians might do regionally in reprisal against Trump's virtual declaration of war.
In fact, Trump himself may have calculated that nuking the Iran deal kills two birds with one stone for him and as such is a silver bullet: it burnishes his credentials further with his Bannonite-nationalist base while simultaneously setting up a confrontation with Russia that can only help relieve the pressure on his administration from the Establishment on account of Russiagate, which despite a respite from the headlines is quietly building to a boiling point with looming indictments.
The Donald is gambling that Putin wants a restoration of ties with the US badly enough - or at least a prevention of even further deterioration - that Vlad will cut the Ayatollahs out to dry...alas, both of them may now find out the hard way that the Persian empire will simply not take orders from Israel, whether its western (US) or eastern (Russia) subsidiaries...
The inflection point could be here...October 13, 2017 - the centennial of the great Miracle of the Sun at Fatima - could be the date on which Fatima herself truly seizes the narrative from her Judeo-Christian proxy, Mary.
Friday, October 13, 2017
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
Is Russia playing the US on North Korea?
As the North Korean nuclear crisis again seems to teeter on the brink of spiraling out of control, given the latest war of words between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un, it's worth pondering whether this whole act is being staged by the Kremlin - as just about anything to do with US security should be suspect these days.
The geopolitical play by Pyongyang seems rather obvious: because the North's principal goal is the ejection of US military forces from the Korean peninsula, its imperative is to make the Trump administration as unpopular, even detested, among the South Korean public as possible. And the only sure way to do this is to taunt The Donald's fragile ego such that the full might of the US military - its massive nuclear arsenal - is brought to bear on the defiant little hermit kingdom which has made a mockery not only of Washington's military superpower credentials, but more generally of the residual Western imperialist footprint in what is more and more rightfully the exclusive home turf of the civilizations and cultures of the Orient.
Indeed, the cost-benefit analysis for Kim is such a no-brainer: without Trump's hubris as the driving force of the standoff, both South Korean and global pressure would instead fall on himself. Knowing full well that neither of his two great patrons - Moscow and Beijing - would tolerate the collapse of his regime, he can rest assured that even the worst of additional sanctions on top of the new ones already approved by Russia and China in the UN Security Council will achieve little of further consequence; as such, he has little to lose by defying the new economic pressure by stirring the pot and trolling his American counterpart in such a way that guarantees it will be the latter who quickly takes on the role of the bigger madman.
But there's one huge risk for the North: Trump might actually just carry through on his verbal threats and turn the tit-for-tat war of words into an actual shooting war of missiles and possibly even nukes. No matter how minuscule the possibility, in any moment of supreme crisis the US commander-in-chief just might "lose it" and override the sober, even grim warnings against war of his military advisers; the buck ultimately stops with The Donald, and for a small rogue state like Pyongyang, that alone can't be a reassuring thought.
Hence, it's legitimate to question whether Vladimir Putin not only has Kim Jong-Un's back against Trumpian Washington, but may in fact be orchestrating the whole Korean crisis behind the scenes. Given the abysmal state of US-Russia relations - a fact of life these days that no degree of personal rapport between Trump and Putin themselves can change - Putin has no more domestic political leeway to refrain from pushing back on American interests wherever he can than the Trussia-tied White House has left to avoid turning Russia into an outright enemy for the first time since the headier days of the Cold War.
This possibility acquires more credence if one considers that, for all his bluster, Kim simply isn't a lunatic: as Trump himself grudgingly admitted, the young strongman must by all means be a skillfully calculating political survivalist - and this can only apply internationally no less than domestically. For Pyongyang to so brazenly provoke a character such as The Donald in such a serial manner, something else might be afoot.
That something else would be that Russia has determined to shrink US strategic and military influence in East Asia now no less than in Europe or the Middle East. Nearly seven months into the Trump administration, it may have settled on this course of action not merely generally because of the drastic deterioration of relations with Washington, but in the Korean context more specifically because the Kremlin has determined that the White House simply lacks the political flexibility to actually resolve the nuclear crisis.
Because the cold hard fact is that the entire issue has slipped well beyond Washington's grasp even a good while before Trump took office: no acceptable military option was ever on the table, and Chinese fear of complete regime collapse in Pyongyang always made sanctions at best a broader strategic restraining (as opposed to reducing) measure. Even without an ego the size of Trump's in the decision-making seat, imperial Washington would have been hard-pressed to have allowed itself to be dragged to the negotiating table with such humiliating opening terms: if complete denuclearization, then complete withdrawal of US troops from the South; if retention of the US presence on the peninsula, then only a freeze of the North's weapons programs.
Trump's ego, alas, appears now to have been the last straw on the camel's back: if before there were still a sliver of hope that the US would come to its senses and finally cut its steadily growing losses, then The Donald's unpredictable explosions of megalomania have snuffed out that glimmer of light as well. For Russia and China, the only option left is to brace themselves for the worst - by proactively shielding the North and not wait until it actually finds itself on the receiving end of US wrath to come to Kim's rescue.
And for Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, that can only mean one thing: make Donald Trump far more hated in South Korea - especially among the young who just swept a dovish Moon Jae-in into office in Seoul - than Kim Jong-Un. Kim can now have free rein to taunt and troll the US taunter- and troll-in-chief himself such that your typical 22-year-old South Korean youth serving out his mandatory term in the DMZ would sooner blame Trump for the risk to his life than the North Korean snipers peering across the no-man's land at him and his buddies. As soon as this shift occurs at a broad or general level, the game is up for the Yankee imperialists and their new redneck cheerleader.
The geopolitical play by Pyongyang seems rather obvious: because the North's principal goal is the ejection of US military forces from the Korean peninsula, its imperative is to make the Trump administration as unpopular, even detested, among the South Korean public as possible. And the only sure way to do this is to taunt The Donald's fragile ego such that the full might of the US military - its massive nuclear arsenal - is brought to bear on the defiant little hermit kingdom which has made a mockery not only of Washington's military superpower credentials, but more generally of the residual Western imperialist footprint in what is more and more rightfully the exclusive home turf of the civilizations and cultures of the Orient.
Indeed, the cost-benefit analysis for Kim is such a no-brainer: without Trump's hubris as the driving force of the standoff, both South Korean and global pressure would instead fall on himself. Knowing full well that neither of his two great patrons - Moscow and Beijing - would tolerate the collapse of his regime, he can rest assured that even the worst of additional sanctions on top of the new ones already approved by Russia and China in the UN Security Council will achieve little of further consequence; as such, he has little to lose by defying the new economic pressure by stirring the pot and trolling his American counterpart in such a way that guarantees it will be the latter who quickly takes on the role of the bigger madman.
But there's one huge risk for the North: Trump might actually just carry through on his verbal threats and turn the tit-for-tat war of words into an actual shooting war of missiles and possibly even nukes. No matter how minuscule the possibility, in any moment of supreme crisis the US commander-in-chief just might "lose it" and override the sober, even grim warnings against war of his military advisers; the buck ultimately stops with The Donald, and for a small rogue state like Pyongyang, that alone can't be a reassuring thought.
Hence, it's legitimate to question whether Vladimir Putin not only has Kim Jong-Un's back against Trumpian Washington, but may in fact be orchestrating the whole Korean crisis behind the scenes. Given the abysmal state of US-Russia relations - a fact of life these days that no degree of personal rapport between Trump and Putin themselves can change - Putin has no more domestic political leeway to refrain from pushing back on American interests wherever he can than the Trussia-tied White House has left to avoid turning Russia into an outright enemy for the first time since the headier days of the Cold War.
This possibility acquires more credence if one considers that, for all his bluster, Kim simply isn't a lunatic: as Trump himself grudgingly admitted, the young strongman must by all means be a skillfully calculating political survivalist - and this can only apply internationally no less than domestically. For Pyongyang to so brazenly provoke a character such as The Donald in such a serial manner, something else might be afoot.
That something else would be that Russia has determined to shrink US strategic and military influence in East Asia now no less than in Europe or the Middle East. Nearly seven months into the Trump administration, it may have settled on this course of action not merely generally because of the drastic deterioration of relations with Washington, but in the Korean context more specifically because the Kremlin has determined that the White House simply lacks the political flexibility to actually resolve the nuclear crisis.
Because the cold hard fact is that the entire issue has slipped well beyond Washington's grasp even a good while before Trump took office: no acceptable military option was ever on the table, and Chinese fear of complete regime collapse in Pyongyang always made sanctions at best a broader strategic restraining (as opposed to reducing) measure. Even without an ego the size of Trump's in the decision-making seat, imperial Washington would have been hard-pressed to have allowed itself to be dragged to the negotiating table with such humiliating opening terms: if complete denuclearization, then complete withdrawal of US troops from the South; if retention of the US presence on the peninsula, then only a freeze of the North's weapons programs.
Trump's ego, alas, appears now to have been the last straw on the camel's back: if before there were still a sliver of hope that the US would come to its senses and finally cut its steadily growing losses, then The Donald's unpredictable explosions of megalomania have snuffed out that glimmer of light as well. For Russia and China, the only option left is to brace themselves for the worst - by proactively shielding the North and not wait until it actually finds itself on the receiving end of US wrath to come to Kim's rescue.
And for Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, that can only mean one thing: make Donald Trump far more hated in South Korea - especially among the young who just swept a dovish Moon Jae-in into office in Seoul - than Kim Jong-Un. Kim can now have free rein to taunt and troll the US taunter- and troll-in-chief himself such that your typical 22-year-old South Korean youth serving out his mandatory term in the DMZ would sooner blame Trump for the risk to his life than the North Korean snipers peering across the no-man's land at him and his buddies. As soon as this shift occurs at a broad or general level, the game is up for the Yankee imperialists and their new redneck cheerleader.
Saturday, August 5, 2017
Having taken the Mideast, Russia may now get Europe too
As Russian power continues to rise dramatically at America's expense, there is good reason to suspect that Moscow's next prize will be even bigger than the newfound ascendancy it has gained in the Middle East via its successful intervention in the Syrian conflict: it may well be Berlin and Paris.
The cold hard fact is that Russia is far too large and attractive an economic market for the major industrial states of Western Europe to ignore indefinitely; the fact that over three years of confrontation between the EU and the Kremlin over Ukraine have failed to produce broad sector-wide sanctions against the latter by the former has been a conclusive proof that the entire policy of mercantile isolation was never a realistic one against the world's largest and naturally wealthiest country. It was only a matter of time, in hindsight, that the pendulum would swing back decisively in Moscow's favor: what with various European firms of systemic consequence across the entire range of industries beginning to lobby for increased Russian market access at just the moment when they're also flirting with near-open hostility with the newly protectionist and nativist US under Donald Trump.
In this sense, the Eurozone periphery has been something of a harbinger for the core: perceiving themselves as having been unfairly shafted under the German-dominated common currency, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece have remained on relatively or even warmly friendly terms with the Kremlin throughout the period of the present East-West standoff dating to the seizure of Crimea in early 2014. So long as the US was seen as the bedrock of European security and stability, however, the dominant duo of the EU core - Germany and France - would not have taken much note of this lack of compliance by their effective subordinates.
All this changed, of course, with the onset of the Trump era and the continued slow-roll catastrophe of its early-warning European tremor, Brexit: with Western unity now in shambles - the EU effectively pitted as a rival against both the US and UK, even as the US and UK struggle to re-coordinate the Anglophone order with one another - the new atmosphere of a free-for-all between individual nation-states has suddenly made even the European heavyweight capitals of London, Paris, and Berlin feel relatively less bulky in comparison to Rome or even Madrid, let alone Moscow.
This gives Putin's resurgent Russia every economic and thus geopolitical advantage. French and German firms now chafe at the prospect that lesser Italian or even Spanish counterparts may get lucrative Russian business contracts at their expense simply because nobody really takes the US-led campaign to isolate Moscow as anything other than hot air anymore; at the same time the new Trump administration's efforts to rebuild and recalibrate relations with Europe have become increasingly atomized to a more or less bilateral basis, giving even Germany and France far less leverage in dealing with Russia than had Washington continued to work through the traditional multilateral channels of NATO and the EU.
In this new Trumpian environment of Western factionalism, Russia wins hands-down in Europe. Its combination of proximity, sheer size, and most important of all centralized unity - something that is increasingly slipping away from the US itself - ensures that it can play off even the biggest European powers besides itself against one another more effectively than Washington can.
To conclude, although the East-West standoff's focal point remains Ukraine - a crisis that could yet again threaten to spiral out of control - it's safe to think that Putin and his henchmen at the Kremlin already have their eyes set on a more ultimate prize, namely Europe itself. After all, even the peskiest nuisance in next-door Ukraine is more than compensated for by a Germany or a France - or both - which no longer toe America's anti-Russian line and (whether consciously or subconsciously) begin taking steps to admit Moscow fully back into the European fold, where its sheer heft ensures it a pivotal and even potentially dominant seat.
The cold hard fact is that Russia is far too large and attractive an economic market for the major industrial states of Western Europe to ignore indefinitely; the fact that over three years of confrontation between the EU and the Kremlin over Ukraine have failed to produce broad sector-wide sanctions against the latter by the former has been a conclusive proof that the entire policy of mercantile isolation was never a realistic one against the world's largest and naturally wealthiest country. It was only a matter of time, in hindsight, that the pendulum would swing back decisively in Moscow's favor: what with various European firms of systemic consequence across the entire range of industries beginning to lobby for increased Russian market access at just the moment when they're also flirting with near-open hostility with the newly protectionist and nativist US under Donald Trump.
In this sense, the Eurozone periphery has been something of a harbinger for the core: perceiving themselves as having been unfairly shafted under the German-dominated common currency, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece have remained on relatively or even warmly friendly terms with the Kremlin throughout the period of the present East-West standoff dating to the seizure of Crimea in early 2014. So long as the US was seen as the bedrock of European security and stability, however, the dominant duo of the EU core - Germany and France - would not have taken much note of this lack of compliance by their effective subordinates.
All this changed, of course, with the onset of the Trump era and the continued slow-roll catastrophe of its early-warning European tremor, Brexit: with Western unity now in shambles - the EU effectively pitted as a rival against both the US and UK, even as the US and UK struggle to re-coordinate the Anglophone order with one another - the new atmosphere of a free-for-all between individual nation-states has suddenly made even the European heavyweight capitals of London, Paris, and Berlin feel relatively less bulky in comparison to Rome or even Madrid, let alone Moscow.
This gives Putin's resurgent Russia every economic and thus geopolitical advantage. French and German firms now chafe at the prospect that lesser Italian or even Spanish counterparts may get lucrative Russian business contracts at their expense simply because nobody really takes the US-led campaign to isolate Moscow as anything other than hot air anymore; at the same time the new Trump administration's efforts to rebuild and recalibrate relations with Europe have become increasingly atomized to a more or less bilateral basis, giving even Germany and France far less leverage in dealing with Russia than had Washington continued to work through the traditional multilateral channels of NATO and the EU.
In this new Trumpian environment of Western factionalism, Russia wins hands-down in Europe. Its combination of proximity, sheer size, and most important of all centralized unity - something that is increasingly slipping away from the US itself - ensures that it can play off even the biggest European powers besides itself against one another more effectively than Washington can.
To conclude, although the East-West standoff's focal point remains Ukraine - a crisis that could yet again threaten to spiral out of control - it's safe to think that Putin and his henchmen at the Kremlin already have their eyes set on a more ultimate prize, namely Europe itself. After all, even the peskiest nuisance in next-door Ukraine is more than compensated for by a Germany or a France - or both - which no longer toe America's anti-Russian line and (whether consciously or subconsciously) begin taking steps to admit Moscow fully back into the European fold, where its sheer heft ensures it a pivotal and even potentially dominant seat.
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Fatima's vengeance: Is America heading for an existential confrontation with Iran?
A critical moment is approaching for the post-post-Cold War global order. In the coming weeks, how the new US presidential administration of Donald Trump handles the simultaneous strategic crises on the Korean peninsula, in eastern Europe, and the Middle East could well determine the shape of global geopolitics for years to come.
Nearly three weeks ago, when Trump stunned the world by launching retaliatory missile strikes against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad over the latter's purported reuse of banned chemical weapons, both euphoria and dismay accompanied the dramatic pronouncement by Washington that it was no longer hesitant to use its sheer military might against sovereign nation-states again, not merely terrorist and non-state militant extremist groups.
And today, proponents of a more aggressive US military posture towards unfriendly rogue regimes got what could turn out to be a major vindication of newfound American hawkishness in both objective military as well as subjective propaganda terms: an announcement by Russia that it has withdrawn nearly half its air wing from Syria that had been supporting the Assad regime's nearly six-year-long campaign against armed rebels aiming to topple him.
Were Syrian peace to be determined by the Syrian people in conjunction with the US and Russia as respective honest brokers for the opposition and the Damascus government, there would be much ground for optimism in this Russian pullback: Washington and Moscow, despite sharp differences both in Syria and elsewhere, have essentially mutually arrived at a point of swapping arms for diplomacy as the tool of choice for ending the conflict that has claimed up to half a million lives and displaced a mild-apocalyptic 10-plus million refugees. A peace deal struck now stands a fair chance of securing both the American interest of easing Assad out of power and the Russian interest of maintaining military access to the country, especially its critical sole Mediterranean naval base; whatever the eventual fate of Assad personally - a negotiable matter, for all its delicacy - the remnants of the Syrian state can now be preserved and eventually rebuilt by all legitimate native stakeholders under the watchful gaze of the UN Security Council.
But the grave lurking danger is that Russian disengagement from military operations on behalf of Assad in favor of intensified re-engagement in a political process may only expose the far more intractable underlying contradiction which has fueled the long Syrian war: the emergence of Shiite superpower Iran as a powerful and even potentially dominant regional player, with tentacles stretching from the Gaza strip to the steppes of central Afghanistan, from the highlands of eastern Turkey to the desert swathes of Houthi-held Yemen.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal currently under intense fresh scrutiny by the Trump administration could yet emerge as the great stumbling block to US-Iranian détente and, with it, peace in Syria and Iraq as well.
Central to the dilemma for Washington is that even with full Iranian compliance, as the Trump team has in fact just certified in a regular review, it simply doesn't comprehensively cover the entire scope of Tehran's suspected nuclear activities; even worse, neither does it roll back any know-how acquired to date by Iranian scientists and weapons developers. As such, the accord's promised eventual benefits to the Ayatollahs - sanctions relief and a greater opening to the global economy - are seemingly too great to concede for only partial denuclearization; and yet at the same time, it has drastically reduced American freedom of maneuver with respect to Iranian ambitions in the critical Syrian-Levantine sector where Tehran's powerful proxy Hezbollah has only further entrenched its pivotal military and political role at the expense of Washington's chief regional allies, Israel, Turkey, and the Sunni Arab states.
A confrontation of some kind is therefore all but inevitable, because the longer-term trend of creeping Shiite ascendancy led by a resurgent successor to ancient Persia is becoming unmistakably structural and chronic in its apparent nature; if ever there were a moment to forcefully reverse, halt, or even merely delay it, now would be it. And it can only be done with a severity backed up by real concrete ability and willingness to inflict pain and loss on Tehran's now almost four-decade-old theocratic regime - a recipe for a dangerous brinkmanship that nobody wants, but that nobody may be able to back down from without a dear domestic political price.
It has in fact emerged (via his son) that for President Trump, it was none other than the "disastrous" Iran nuclear deal - as its contours began to emerge in late spring 2015 - that compelled him more than any other single factor to run for the most powerful office. There can be little doubt, then, that he intends to stare down Ayatollah Khamenei to the bitter end if it came to it, with no intention of blinking first. The Iranian supreme leader for his part has staked too much of his historical credibility - not merely in-the-moment approval ratings - on ascribing substance to the chants of "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!" which have remained such a hallmark and staple of his state's rallying principle even long after any personal animosity towards the West has largely disappeared among ordinary Iranians.
And so, actual conflict or avoidance thereof with Iran - and thereby the peace and stability of the greater Middle East - could all boil down to how astutely Trump and Khamenei first sense and then either collude or clash with the greater currents of both Islamic and world history. War is by no means inevitable between America and Iran; but neither is peace. Something far bigger - over and beyond Trump or Khamenei or even Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu themselves - may be coming into play here: a truly escalating crescendo to the end of the end times. A clash of civilizations with apocalyptic overtones: can America and Israel accept the prospect of an Iran which won't be cowed into stopping its march to eventually bring Jerusalem effectively under its mercy?
Perhaps, in the end, the vengeance of Fatima cannot be avoided...but only so that it ushers in the ever greater Providence of her prototype, Mary.
Nearly three weeks ago, when Trump stunned the world by launching retaliatory missile strikes against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad over the latter's purported reuse of banned chemical weapons, both euphoria and dismay accompanied the dramatic pronouncement by Washington that it was no longer hesitant to use its sheer military might against sovereign nation-states again, not merely terrorist and non-state militant extremist groups.
And today, proponents of a more aggressive US military posture towards unfriendly rogue regimes got what could turn out to be a major vindication of newfound American hawkishness in both objective military as well as subjective propaganda terms: an announcement by Russia that it has withdrawn nearly half its air wing from Syria that had been supporting the Assad regime's nearly six-year-long campaign against armed rebels aiming to topple him.
Were Syrian peace to be determined by the Syrian people in conjunction with the US and Russia as respective honest brokers for the opposition and the Damascus government, there would be much ground for optimism in this Russian pullback: Washington and Moscow, despite sharp differences both in Syria and elsewhere, have essentially mutually arrived at a point of swapping arms for diplomacy as the tool of choice for ending the conflict that has claimed up to half a million lives and displaced a mild-apocalyptic 10-plus million refugees. A peace deal struck now stands a fair chance of securing both the American interest of easing Assad out of power and the Russian interest of maintaining military access to the country, especially its critical sole Mediterranean naval base; whatever the eventual fate of Assad personally - a negotiable matter, for all its delicacy - the remnants of the Syrian state can now be preserved and eventually rebuilt by all legitimate native stakeholders under the watchful gaze of the UN Security Council.
But the grave lurking danger is that Russian disengagement from military operations on behalf of Assad in favor of intensified re-engagement in a political process may only expose the far more intractable underlying contradiction which has fueled the long Syrian war: the emergence of Shiite superpower Iran as a powerful and even potentially dominant regional player, with tentacles stretching from the Gaza strip to the steppes of central Afghanistan, from the highlands of eastern Turkey to the desert swathes of Houthi-held Yemen.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal currently under intense fresh scrutiny by the Trump administration could yet emerge as the great stumbling block to US-Iranian détente and, with it, peace in Syria and Iraq as well.
Central to the dilemma for Washington is that even with full Iranian compliance, as the Trump team has in fact just certified in a regular review, it simply doesn't comprehensively cover the entire scope of Tehran's suspected nuclear activities; even worse, neither does it roll back any know-how acquired to date by Iranian scientists and weapons developers. As such, the accord's promised eventual benefits to the Ayatollahs - sanctions relief and a greater opening to the global economy - are seemingly too great to concede for only partial denuclearization; and yet at the same time, it has drastically reduced American freedom of maneuver with respect to Iranian ambitions in the critical Syrian-Levantine sector where Tehran's powerful proxy Hezbollah has only further entrenched its pivotal military and political role at the expense of Washington's chief regional allies, Israel, Turkey, and the Sunni Arab states.
A confrontation of some kind is therefore all but inevitable, because the longer-term trend of creeping Shiite ascendancy led by a resurgent successor to ancient Persia is becoming unmistakably structural and chronic in its apparent nature; if ever there were a moment to forcefully reverse, halt, or even merely delay it, now would be it. And it can only be done with a severity backed up by real concrete ability and willingness to inflict pain and loss on Tehran's now almost four-decade-old theocratic regime - a recipe for a dangerous brinkmanship that nobody wants, but that nobody may be able to back down from without a dear domestic political price.
It has in fact emerged (via his son) that for President Trump, it was none other than the "disastrous" Iran nuclear deal - as its contours began to emerge in late spring 2015 - that compelled him more than any other single factor to run for the most powerful office. There can be little doubt, then, that he intends to stare down Ayatollah Khamenei to the bitter end if it came to it, with no intention of blinking first. The Iranian supreme leader for his part has staked too much of his historical credibility - not merely in-the-moment approval ratings - on ascribing substance to the chants of "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!" which have remained such a hallmark and staple of his state's rallying principle even long after any personal animosity towards the West has largely disappeared among ordinary Iranians.
And so, actual conflict or avoidance thereof with Iran - and thereby the peace and stability of the greater Middle East - could all boil down to how astutely Trump and Khamenei first sense and then either collude or clash with the greater currents of both Islamic and world history. War is by no means inevitable between America and Iran; but neither is peace. Something far bigger - over and beyond Trump or Khamenei or even Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu themselves - may be coming into play here: a truly escalating crescendo to the end of the end times. A clash of civilizations with apocalyptic overtones: can America and Israel accept the prospect of an Iran which won't be cowed into stopping its march to eventually bring Jerusalem effectively under its mercy?
Perhaps, in the end, the vengeance of Fatima cannot be avoided...but only so that it ushers in the ever greater Providence of her prototype, Mary.
Thursday, April 20, 2017
The clock is ticking down for Ukraine
As Ukraine spirals downward towards another possible revolution, Donald Trump appears trapped on this most critical front of the comprehensive East-West standoff between the US-led global alliance system and Vladimir Putin's Russian-led Eurasian authoritarian axis.
Trump can't concede much to Putin on Ukraine - as anywhere else for that matter, notably Syria - for fear of domestic political blowback, given that the bad press about his campaign's ties to the Kremlin in late 2015 and 2016 is still fresh and if anything only intensifying with further exposés about the infamous "dossier" on him and his associates compiled by the FBI; this reduces his leverage over far-right Ukrainian nationalists who know that time is quickly running out to salvage anything honorable from the Maidan revolution.
So the most powerful leader in the world is reduced to begging the same old post-Soviet oligarchs to rein in their patriotically aroused populace, where in fact it's this whole rotten kleptocracy that's to blame in the first place. Had they been more prudent and cautious, they wouldn't have whipped up the "anti-terrorist" operation against the pro-Russian east back in 2014 to begin with - they'd have negotiated the best deal with Putin right away, knowing that their national sovereignty card would eventually fizzle out because of a lack of Western military support, and that all the attention would return to their own corruption.
As it is, now that everyone sees that they're still the same self-serving quasi-syndicate bosses, that leaves them even less room to concede the sovereignty card by cracking down on the anti-Russian extremists, whose gun-sights are perilously close to turning on the Kiev authorities as well as the Donbas militants. It could soon be merely a question of whether an imploding Ukrainian state, having turned on itself, takes Western interests on the Eurasian frontier as a whole down with it.
Russia for its part has no desire for additional instability in its sister state; its nascent economic recovery is too fragile for it to bear the sudden additional expenditure of either military spending or refugee and reconstruction aid. But one gets the feeling that the Kremlin has steeled both itself and the Russian people for just this grim contingency for practically three years now; if push came to shove, don't expect Putin or his regime to have the weaker internal hand to play - either vis-à-vis the West or Ukraine itself.
The clock is ticking down for Ukraine...just as it's ticking down with North Korea and Syria. Spring 2017 could be remembered as the moment in which all three of these Eurasian fronts of the renewed "great game" for strategic supremacy between East and West simultaneously erupted - with the entirely foreseeable result that a sleepwalking and distracted West is steamrollered by a ruthlessly rapt East in a showdown that's as one-sided as it is expediently decided.
Trump can't concede much to Putin on Ukraine - as anywhere else for that matter, notably Syria - for fear of domestic political blowback, given that the bad press about his campaign's ties to the Kremlin in late 2015 and 2016 is still fresh and if anything only intensifying with further exposés about the infamous "dossier" on him and his associates compiled by the FBI; this reduces his leverage over far-right Ukrainian nationalists who know that time is quickly running out to salvage anything honorable from the Maidan revolution.
So the most powerful leader in the world is reduced to begging the same old post-Soviet oligarchs to rein in their patriotically aroused populace, where in fact it's this whole rotten kleptocracy that's to blame in the first place. Had they been more prudent and cautious, they wouldn't have whipped up the "anti-terrorist" operation against the pro-Russian east back in 2014 to begin with - they'd have negotiated the best deal with Putin right away, knowing that their national sovereignty card would eventually fizzle out because of a lack of Western military support, and that all the attention would return to their own corruption.
As it is, now that everyone sees that they're still the same self-serving quasi-syndicate bosses, that leaves them even less room to concede the sovereignty card by cracking down on the anti-Russian extremists, whose gun-sights are perilously close to turning on the Kiev authorities as well as the Donbas militants. It could soon be merely a question of whether an imploding Ukrainian state, having turned on itself, takes Western interests on the Eurasian frontier as a whole down with it.
Russia for its part has no desire for additional instability in its sister state; its nascent economic recovery is too fragile for it to bear the sudden additional expenditure of either military spending or refugee and reconstruction aid. But one gets the feeling that the Kremlin has steeled both itself and the Russian people for just this grim contingency for practically three years now; if push came to shove, don't expect Putin or his regime to have the weaker internal hand to play - either vis-à-vis the West or Ukraine itself.
The clock is ticking down for Ukraine...just as it's ticking down with North Korea and Syria. Spring 2017 could be remembered as the moment in which all three of these Eurasian fronts of the renewed "great game" for strategic supremacy between East and West simultaneously erupted - with the entirely foreseeable result that a sleepwalking and distracted West is steamrollered by a ruthlessly rapt East in a showdown that's as one-sided as it is expediently decided.
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Russia's entry into North Korean crisis means general East-West accord is imperative
As the North Korean nuclear crisis slowly but surely escalates to a soft boil, China has officially asked Russia for help in cooling tensions between the US and the dictatorship of Kim Jong-Un before red lines are crossed by either side. Coming less than a week after new US president Donald Trump seemingly enlisted Chinese communist general secretary Xi Jinping in a quasi-alliance to eliminate the North's accelerating weapons program, it sets up an apparent contradiction at the heart of US-China relations in the strategic security realm - a reaffirmation of the Sino-Russian Eurasian axis which stands in direct defiance of Washington's apparent newfangled threat of unilateral coercion against rogue states like North Korea and Syria. All this in spite of continued US-China integration in the economic realm that both sides cheerfully blessed in Trump's recent summit with Xi at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Whether or not Washington expected Beijing to turn so quickly to Vladimir Putin - a move that also further signals Chinese ambivalence over the West's confrontation with Russia in Syria - the imperative for trilateral horsetrading between the world's greatest powers is growing by the day.
There were compelling reasons for China to turn without hesitation back to Russia. For one, Russia remains a far bigger strategic military power, courtesy of the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons - the only credible existential threat to the US mainland. With the distant but undeniable prospect of nuclear war breaking out on the critical Northeast Asian crossroads of the Korean peninsula, Russia's entry introduces a major new element of risk and potential cost to any one-sided US military action, which Washington's heightened nuclear posture in the region has unmistakably signaled the small but real possibility of all-out nuclear strikes to neutralize Kim's vast army as quickly as possible in the event of a general Korean conflict.
In a more fundamental sense, China simply cannot directly confront America over North Korea. In concrete terms, what it gains by defending Kim from Trump is too negligible compared to the benefits of playing to Trump's tune to the greatest extent possible short of its own non-negotiable red lines. Should it see that neither Kim nor Trump will back down, Beijing will do its utmost to retain a neutral stance, yet this leaves it unacceptably vulnerable to the risk that the Pyongyang regime falls violently in an all-out war and that suddenly its longstanding buffer to the US military's sole East Asian mainland deployment is obliterated.
That leaves Xi with no option but to draw Putin in to balance Trump. By posing North Korea as a broader East-West balance-of-power issue, not simply a US-China bargaining point, Beijing subsumes any denuclearization efforts into the wider legitimate context of maintaining strategic equilibrium. It simultaneously relieves China of the burden of directly confronting the lopsided US military superiority which can so readily ratchet up the pressure on Pyongyang to the point of apparently threatening regime change, however unlikely that ominous escalation scenario remains in all cases.
Russia for its part would appear particularly unwilling to further fuel regional tensions with any of its own military posturing in the Far East; but its current nadir of relations with the US over Syria and Ukraine alike gives it the leeway to incrementally constrain American options that China lacks - for instance, by selling advanced antiaircraft or antimissile systems such as the S-300 to Pyongyang, or possibly even stepping up military cooperation with the Kim regime in the form of advisers. All this would be in direct contravention of existing UN agreements and protocols, but if there's any time when the Kremlin could feel unshackled by these, now would be it: with both it and Washington having reneged not merely strategic and nuclear arms control agreements in themselves, but more importantly the status-quo logic behind them, the bar for more drastic cold power plays has been significantly lowered.
Should Putin conclude that Trump still doesn't realize that with Kim, it's simply not the case that all options are on the table, he could well decide that the imperative to block another UN-unauthorized attack on a member state - even a pariah - actually outweigh the prior infractions of the offending target. At the very least, it gives Moscow yet another bargaining chip with respect to its more core interests in Ukraine and Syria; and gives Washington yet another reminder of the imperative of finding common ground on fundamental security policy with Russia no less than China.
The main point is that the deep fissures between East and West - between the US-led global alliance bloc of primarily liberal democracies and the Sino-Russian Eurasian authoritarian axis - are coming to a head simultaneously in all three critical regions, namely Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. What transpires in one sector now automatically reverberates to the others. The sooner that all sides - especially the Trump administration, which is seemingly intent on exhausting the pursuit of all its maximalist starting goalposts - realize that a general East-West accord is becoming necessary, the more readily all crises can be tackled in a unified and coherent manner.
Whether or not Washington expected Beijing to turn so quickly to Vladimir Putin - a move that also further signals Chinese ambivalence over the West's confrontation with Russia in Syria - the imperative for trilateral horsetrading between the world's greatest powers is growing by the day.
There were compelling reasons for China to turn without hesitation back to Russia. For one, Russia remains a far bigger strategic military power, courtesy of the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons - the only credible existential threat to the US mainland. With the distant but undeniable prospect of nuclear war breaking out on the critical Northeast Asian crossroads of the Korean peninsula, Russia's entry introduces a major new element of risk and potential cost to any one-sided US military action, which Washington's heightened nuclear posture in the region has unmistakably signaled the small but real possibility of all-out nuclear strikes to neutralize Kim's vast army as quickly as possible in the event of a general Korean conflict.
In a more fundamental sense, China simply cannot directly confront America over North Korea. In concrete terms, what it gains by defending Kim from Trump is too negligible compared to the benefits of playing to Trump's tune to the greatest extent possible short of its own non-negotiable red lines. Should it see that neither Kim nor Trump will back down, Beijing will do its utmost to retain a neutral stance, yet this leaves it unacceptably vulnerable to the risk that the Pyongyang regime falls violently in an all-out war and that suddenly its longstanding buffer to the US military's sole East Asian mainland deployment is obliterated.
That leaves Xi with no option but to draw Putin in to balance Trump. By posing North Korea as a broader East-West balance-of-power issue, not simply a US-China bargaining point, Beijing subsumes any denuclearization efforts into the wider legitimate context of maintaining strategic equilibrium. It simultaneously relieves China of the burden of directly confronting the lopsided US military superiority which can so readily ratchet up the pressure on Pyongyang to the point of apparently threatening regime change, however unlikely that ominous escalation scenario remains in all cases.
Russia for its part would appear particularly unwilling to further fuel regional tensions with any of its own military posturing in the Far East; but its current nadir of relations with the US over Syria and Ukraine alike gives it the leeway to incrementally constrain American options that China lacks - for instance, by selling advanced antiaircraft or antimissile systems such as the S-300 to Pyongyang, or possibly even stepping up military cooperation with the Kim regime in the form of advisers. All this would be in direct contravention of existing UN agreements and protocols, but if there's any time when the Kremlin could feel unshackled by these, now would be it: with both it and Washington having reneged not merely strategic and nuclear arms control agreements in themselves, but more importantly the status-quo logic behind them, the bar for more drastic cold power plays has been significantly lowered.
Should Putin conclude that Trump still doesn't realize that with Kim, it's simply not the case that all options are on the table, he could well decide that the imperative to block another UN-unauthorized attack on a member state - even a pariah - actually outweigh the prior infractions of the offending target. At the very least, it gives Moscow yet another bargaining chip with respect to its more core interests in Ukraine and Syria; and gives Washington yet another reminder of the imperative of finding common ground on fundamental security policy with Russia no less than China.
The main point is that the deep fissures between East and West - between the US-led global alliance bloc of primarily liberal democracies and the Sino-Russian Eurasian authoritarian axis - are coming to a head simultaneously in all three critical regions, namely Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. What transpires in one sector now automatically reverberates to the others. The sooner that all sides - especially the Trump administration, which is seemingly intent on exhausting the pursuit of all its maximalist starting goalposts - realize that a general East-West accord is becoming necessary, the more readily all crises can be tackled in a unified and coherent manner.
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Star Wars returns: the new nuclear arms race
As of mid-March 2017, the new nuclear arms race between Russia and the US is well afoot. The consequences for global peace and stability may well be dire.
Reports have emerged that the US Navy has so dramatically increased the precision killing power of its formidable D-5 Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) that the American underwater arsenal alone can now completely eliminate the entire stationary silo-based Russian arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM).
At last year's St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin could barely contain his outrage at the nonchalance with which the US was proceeding with its trillion-dollar nuclear modernization program, especially how the so-called "missile defense system" was being used as a convenient media and public relations cover to in fact develop far more rapid and effective offensive nuclear, first-strike capabilities. The end goal of everything being crystal clear: to render Russia's massive nuclear arsenal essentially obsolete, its missiles overwhelmed by an anti-missile shield if not simply exposed to the debilitating blitz of a preemptive attack the speed and surprise of which was never feasible throughout the last century's Cold War, and which in practice ended up being little more than the aspiration of Ronald Reagan's celebrated "Star Wars" program of the early-to-mid 1980s.
Star Wars is now coming back alright - with a vengeance. There can be no other intent of such a massive and ambitious US nuclear modernization program than to once more tip the scales of doomsday supremacy in the West's favor: the best defense, in nuclear as well as conventional warfare, is as ever a good offense.
From Russia's perspective, what's so troubling about the new US nuclear arms push is that it all seems to boil down to squeezing its early warning window to virtually nil: the crux of Washington's efforts to gain a nuclear edge on Moscow seems to be to render the existing Russian early warning network utterly incapable of giving sufficient advance notification of a preemptive strike.
Russia's predicament, being as it is still far behind the US in any kind of space-based strategic detection system, is that it now has less than ten minutes of total preparation before the cream of its strategic nuclear arsenal is eliminated in a sea-launched first strike by America's feared Ohio-class "boomer" subs, each with their 24 Trident II D-5 missiles carrying between them a whopping 192 half-megaton, independently targeted warheads. With the addition of the chilling "super-fuze" technology to dramatically augment both the precision and timing of their detonations, the US Navy now needs as little as two to three such boomers stationed off Russia's Arctic coast - still practically undetectable by available Russian sonar technology - to wipe out Russia's entire stationary land-based nuclear deterrent within a mere 600 seconds.
No wonder the urgency of Russia's recent push for nuclear modernization, which has itself set off alarm bells in the Pentagon as to the relative frustratingly slow progress of its own land-based and air-launched nuclear upgrades. In the interests of sheer survival, the Kremlin has had no option but to reduce the warning-to-launch interval for its silo-based rockets to a mere four minutes or less - matching for the first time their American counterparts.
Worse is set to come. Should Moscow determine that American plans for augmenting rapid first-strike are indeed far more ambitious - that they indeed will include not merely new-generation ultra-fast cruise missiles ("scramjet" systems) which will be conveniently deployed in forward areas via so-called "missile defense systems" as well as on nuclear attack subs and new stealthy destroyers, but eventually will include true space-based platforms like hypersonic weapon delivery vehicles which can hypothetically be stationed permanently adjacent to or even directly above Russian airspace - then little will stand in the way of a full-blown Star Wars competition for the ultimate high ground in combat.
Realistically, that day is still a ways off if it comes, but in the meantime the real problem nonetheless for the Kremlin is how to preserve a credible nuclear deterrent in the face of an ever more formidably prompt American first-strike posture. And realistically, its response can only be an essentially asymmetric one, given its technical and financial shortfalls vis-à-vis Washington.
While Russia can eventually match US super-cruise missiles with its own, these would mainly be effective against ground-based NATO targets to the west; the overwhelming American superiority at sea and in the air, however - that is, the Arctic and the Pacific - necessitates a fundamental dispersal of the bulk of Moscow's land-based deterrent. So in the coming decade, we should at the very least expect to see two wide-scale developments: 1) the scattering of Russian silos from their existing clusters which date to the last Cold War to a considerably larger constellation of far more solitary deployments, 2) the introduction of much greater numbers of truck-launched mobile systems, which themselves along with their support networks must be augmented for prolonged off-roading and constant concealment maneuvers.
Further, as the actual US missile defense capability improves and expands, Russia will have little choice but to boost the sheer number of missiles and warheads to ensure that an appreciable portion of its deterrent can indeed penetrate.
Russia may also determine that the best asymmetric investments are to be made in countering the fundamental American strength: space-based surveillance and reconnaissance. It may find common cause with China in spending heavily on anti-satellite and anti-radiation countermeasures; yet this would have the effect of only accelerating the American push into truly next-generation space systems, i.e. the hypersonic glide bomber and other advanced high-altitude drones.
Taken together, given how formidable the technical and monetary demands of keeping apace with the US, it appears inevitable that Russia will enter into a full-blown strategic alliance with China: the two individually by themselves simply cannot hope to block American supremacy from reasserting itself in their respective spheres of influence, and must increasingly work and move in lockstep to balance it.
China for its part would prefer to not acquire a massive nuclear arsenal of its own, despite its capability to do so - this would take far too much away from its priority of economic modernization, and sour relations with America so badly that this goal is unacceptably compromised. Beijing thus needs Moscow to remain the militarily superior party - and will gladly lend its increased (and still increasing) technological and financial muscle to aid the latter's belated quest to stay generally abreast of the Americans. The already extant Chinese edge over Russia in such areas as surface warships and drones will be of particular interest to both sides: filling Russian deficiencies is vital to China's security, and doing so is far less costly to Sino-US relations than becoming the new Russia itself.
Thus, as of spring 2017, as the world enters the post-post-Cold War era in earnest, it stands to reason that nuclear arms races are far from a thing of the past. The only question more consequential than the Sword of Damocles lingering over from the post-Cold War period (1991-2014), namely that of nukes in the hands of rogue states and actors, is the renewed conundrum of how nukes will play their long-established role in great power competition and dealing, with all the implications this has for both the diplomatic and military aspects of the overarching international system still dominated by just a few select marquee players. And as this piece makes clear, this latter question is far more consequential, in fact.
Reports have emerged that the US Navy has so dramatically increased the precision killing power of its formidable D-5 Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) that the American underwater arsenal alone can now completely eliminate the entire stationary silo-based Russian arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM).
At last year's St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin could barely contain his outrage at the nonchalance with which the US was proceeding with its trillion-dollar nuclear modernization program, especially how the so-called "missile defense system" was being used as a convenient media and public relations cover to in fact develop far more rapid and effective offensive nuclear, first-strike capabilities. The end goal of everything being crystal clear: to render Russia's massive nuclear arsenal essentially obsolete, its missiles overwhelmed by an anti-missile shield if not simply exposed to the debilitating blitz of a preemptive attack the speed and surprise of which was never feasible throughout the last century's Cold War, and which in practice ended up being little more than the aspiration of Ronald Reagan's celebrated "Star Wars" program of the early-to-mid 1980s.
Star Wars is now coming back alright - with a vengeance. There can be no other intent of such a massive and ambitious US nuclear modernization program than to once more tip the scales of doomsday supremacy in the West's favor: the best defense, in nuclear as well as conventional warfare, is as ever a good offense.
From Russia's perspective, what's so troubling about the new US nuclear arms push is that it all seems to boil down to squeezing its early warning window to virtually nil: the crux of Washington's efforts to gain a nuclear edge on Moscow seems to be to render the existing Russian early warning network utterly incapable of giving sufficient advance notification of a preemptive strike.
Russia's predicament, being as it is still far behind the US in any kind of space-based strategic detection system, is that it now has less than ten minutes of total preparation before the cream of its strategic nuclear arsenal is eliminated in a sea-launched first strike by America's feared Ohio-class "boomer" subs, each with their 24 Trident II D-5 missiles carrying between them a whopping 192 half-megaton, independently targeted warheads. With the addition of the chilling "super-fuze" technology to dramatically augment both the precision and timing of their detonations, the US Navy now needs as little as two to three such boomers stationed off Russia's Arctic coast - still practically undetectable by available Russian sonar technology - to wipe out Russia's entire stationary land-based nuclear deterrent within a mere 600 seconds.
No wonder the urgency of Russia's recent push for nuclear modernization, which has itself set off alarm bells in the Pentagon as to the relative frustratingly slow progress of its own land-based and air-launched nuclear upgrades. In the interests of sheer survival, the Kremlin has had no option but to reduce the warning-to-launch interval for its silo-based rockets to a mere four minutes or less - matching for the first time their American counterparts.
Worse is set to come. Should Moscow determine that American plans for augmenting rapid first-strike are indeed far more ambitious - that they indeed will include not merely new-generation ultra-fast cruise missiles ("scramjet" systems) which will be conveniently deployed in forward areas via so-called "missile defense systems" as well as on nuclear attack subs and new stealthy destroyers, but eventually will include true space-based platforms like hypersonic weapon delivery vehicles which can hypothetically be stationed permanently adjacent to or even directly above Russian airspace - then little will stand in the way of a full-blown Star Wars competition for the ultimate high ground in combat.
Realistically, that day is still a ways off if it comes, but in the meantime the real problem nonetheless for the Kremlin is how to preserve a credible nuclear deterrent in the face of an ever more formidably prompt American first-strike posture. And realistically, its response can only be an essentially asymmetric one, given its technical and financial shortfalls vis-à-vis Washington.
While Russia can eventually match US super-cruise missiles with its own, these would mainly be effective against ground-based NATO targets to the west; the overwhelming American superiority at sea and in the air, however - that is, the Arctic and the Pacific - necessitates a fundamental dispersal of the bulk of Moscow's land-based deterrent. So in the coming decade, we should at the very least expect to see two wide-scale developments: 1) the scattering of Russian silos from their existing clusters which date to the last Cold War to a considerably larger constellation of far more solitary deployments, 2) the introduction of much greater numbers of truck-launched mobile systems, which themselves along with their support networks must be augmented for prolonged off-roading and constant concealment maneuvers.
Further, as the actual US missile defense capability improves and expands, Russia will have little choice but to boost the sheer number of missiles and warheads to ensure that an appreciable portion of its deterrent can indeed penetrate.
Russia may also determine that the best asymmetric investments are to be made in countering the fundamental American strength: space-based surveillance and reconnaissance. It may find common cause with China in spending heavily on anti-satellite and anti-radiation countermeasures; yet this would have the effect of only accelerating the American push into truly next-generation space systems, i.e. the hypersonic glide bomber and other advanced high-altitude drones.
Taken together, given how formidable the technical and monetary demands of keeping apace with the US, it appears inevitable that Russia will enter into a full-blown strategic alliance with China: the two individually by themselves simply cannot hope to block American supremacy from reasserting itself in their respective spheres of influence, and must increasingly work and move in lockstep to balance it.
China for its part would prefer to not acquire a massive nuclear arsenal of its own, despite its capability to do so - this would take far too much away from its priority of economic modernization, and sour relations with America so badly that this goal is unacceptably compromised. Beijing thus needs Moscow to remain the militarily superior party - and will gladly lend its increased (and still increasing) technological and financial muscle to aid the latter's belated quest to stay generally abreast of the Americans. The already extant Chinese edge over Russia in such areas as surface warships and drones will be of particular interest to both sides: filling Russian deficiencies is vital to China's security, and doing so is far less costly to Sino-US relations than becoming the new Russia itself.
Thus, as of spring 2017, as the world enters the post-post-Cold War era in earnest, it stands to reason that nuclear arms races are far from a thing of the past. The only question more consequential than the Sword of Damocles lingering over from the post-Cold War period (1991-2014), namely that of nukes in the hands of rogue states and actors, is the renewed conundrum of how nukes will play their long-established role in great power competition and dealing, with all the implications this has for both the diplomatic and military aspects of the overarching international system still dominated by just a few select marquee players. And as this piece makes clear, this latter question is far more consequential, in fact.
Monday, February 27, 2017
3 years ago, Russia ended Pax Americana - and it is on the move again
Three years ago today, February 27, 2014, Pax Americana was abruptly ended when a small but ultra-elite detachment of Russian special forces, stripped of their official military insignia and reduced to "little green men", seized control of key state buildings and critical infrastructure across the heavily Russophone Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, virtually instantly effecting the first violent expansion of national borders in Europe since World War Two.
Today, both the US and the West generally remain in practical denial of what a monumental shift this event signaled: it was the moment that their triumphalist march since the end of the Cold War (1989-1991), which had already sputtered badly in the 2008-09 financial crisis, effectively went into full retreat.
In the days and weeks following the Crimean seizure, which Russia's Vladimir Putin clearly ordered both as vengeance for the pro-Western "Euromaidan" revolution which toppled his ally president Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine in the preceding week and also as a prudent precaution against future NATO takeover of Russia's longtime principal warm-water naval base at Sevastopol, it became clear that the US-led alliance had no coercive options whatsoever to punish Moscow for its aggression. Instead, as the worst East-West standoff in a quarter-century escalated in the ensuing months with the rise of a Russian-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine, the increasingly fantastic US and EU demand for Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine has become a virtual byword for Western fecklessness and timidity.
As of today, early 2017, Russia is emerging as the clear winner in the new Cold War lite whose origins can be traced to the Ukraine crisis of 2013-14. It has survived the West's determined effort to bring it to its knees through sanctions and economic blackmail, even as it has beefed up both its conventional and nuclear military posture to a level that intimidates the cream puffs of NATO and EU capitals, who have finally been put on notice by a new administration in Washington that their effective free-riding on American military might won't be tolerated any longer.
As it turns out, the very things that the West points to as signs of Russia's inherent weakness and inferiority - its ruthless suppression of dissent and civil liberties - are now the Kremlin's most salient strengths in what it clearly views as an existential war against the US empire: Moscow relishes its ability to brand its domestic opponents as nothing less than traitors and fifth columnists working with Washington and Brussels to undermine Russian sovereignty and integrity, and thus furnish an easy justification for their ruthless repression and terrorization.
Russia, not America, is now to be feared and respected as the big boss with all the big guns - and no compunction about using them, albeit judiciously. Its own borders are secure and sealed. It can conduct military operations in support of its friends in the Muslim world (i.e. Syria) that show no quarter to unruly insurgents and "terrorists", and even more to the point, aren't concerned with civilian casualties as a hindrance to accomplishing the brutal mission. Security and order take precedence over freedom and rights; sovereignty and cultural jingoism over open commons and universal brotherhood. Since 2014, Putin's Russia has effectively rewritten the post-post-Cold War values playbook - and the West still doesn't realize it.
Russia is on the move again in 2017 - the centennial of its great revolution which gave birth to the Soviet Union, a great double-edged sword in her history whose legacy is something of a love-hate matter for its present rulers. In the last three years, she has simply given up trying to become Western in the fullest sense of individual rights and pluralism of competing ideas; she may still tolerate some degree of these but in her essence has moved closer to China dramatically in terms of a founding and overarching worldview. And between her 5,000-warhead nuclear arsenal and Beijing's $10 trillion economy, she is increasingly confident that it is America - under a divisive new president who (not so) secretly wishes he could also jail or even shoot hostile journalists - who will now follow Russia's cues on the issues that matter most.
Today, both the US and the West generally remain in practical denial of what a monumental shift this event signaled: it was the moment that their triumphalist march since the end of the Cold War (1989-1991), which had already sputtered badly in the 2008-09 financial crisis, effectively went into full retreat.
In the days and weeks following the Crimean seizure, which Russia's Vladimir Putin clearly ordered both as vengeance for the pro-Western "Euromaidan" revolution which toppled his ally president Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine in the preceding week and also as a prudent precaution against future NATO takeover of Russia's longtime principal warm-water naval base at Sevastopol, it became clear that the US-led alliance had no coercive options whatsoever to punish Moscow for its aggression. Instead, as the worst East-West standoff in a quarter-century escalated in the ensuing months with the rise of a Russian-backed insurgency in eastern Ukraine, the increasingly fantastic US and EU demand for Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine has become a virtual byword for Western fecklessness and timidity.
As of today, early 2017, Russia is emerging as the clear winner in the new Cold War lite whose origins can be traced to the Ukraine crisis of 2013-14. It has survived the West's determined effort to bring it to its knees through sanctions and economic blackmail, even as it has beefed up both its conventional and nuclear military posture to a level that intimidates the cream puffs of NATO and EU capitals, who have finally been put on notice by a new administration in Washington that their effective free-riding on American military might won't be tolerated any longer.
As it turns out, the very things that the West points to as signs of Russia's inherent weakness and inferiority - its ruthless suppression of dissent and civil liberties - are now the Kremlin's most salient strengths in what it clearly views as an existential war against the US empire: Moscow relishes its ability to brand its domestic opponents as nothing less than traitors and fifth columnists working with Washington and Brussels to undermine Russian sovereignty and integrity, and thus furnish an easy justification for their ruthless repression and terrorization.
Russia, not America, is now to be feared and respected as the big boss with all the big guns - and no compunction about using them, albeit judiciously. Its own borders are secure and sealed. It can conduct military operations in support of its friends in the Muslim world (i.e. Syria) that show no quarter to unruly insurgents and "terrorists", and even more to the point, aren't concerned with civilian casualties as a hindrance to accomplishing the brutal mission. Security and order take precedence over freedom and rights; sovereignty and cultural jingoism over open commons and universal brotherhood. Since 2014, Putin's Russia has effectively rewritten the post-post-Cold War values playbook - and the West still doesn't realize it.
Russia is on the move again in 2017 - the centennial of its great revolution which gave birth to the Soviet Union, a great double-edged sword in her history whose legacy is something of a love-hate matter for its present rulers. In the last three years, she has simply given up trying to become Western in the fullest sense of individual rights and pluralism of competing ideas; she may still tolerate some degree of these but in her essence has moved closer to China dramatically in terms of a founding and overarching worldview. And between her 5,000-warhead nuclear arsenal and Beijing's $10 trillion economy, she is increasingly confident that it is America - under a divisive new president who (not so) secretly wishes he could also jail or even shoot hostile journalists - who will now follow Russia's cues on the issues that matter most.
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
Russia's only a regional power alright - it's just in every region that matters
Russia has already emerged as the big winner in the final year of the closing Obama era, which will officially end as of January 20, when Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th US president.
Since the shocking election nearly two months ago, US liberals and centrist Establishment figures on both sides of the aisle have been aghast that Vladimir Putin's klepto-petrostate has apparently emerged as a peer competitor again, able to challenge and even thwart US interests for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Quite a far cry from Obama's dismissal of Moscow as merely a regional power back in 2014, when it annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine at the outset of the current standoff with the West.
In fact, Russia's indeed merely a regional power - today no less than three years ago. But it just so happens to be simultaneously situated in every single part of the world that truly matters geopolitically: Europe, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, the Far East, and the Americas. No wonder, then, that merely being a regional player in the Kremlin's case still seems to accord it with such seemingly global clout.
This is, from start to end, a function of plain geography: Russia's very essence is land, land, and then more land. Endless landmass from sunrise to sunset: even after losing a third of its territory, primarily on its southern and western flanks, from the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moscow boasts sovereignty over 11 of 24 global time zones; as the sun sets on St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad in the far west, it still rises over the Chukchi peninsula in the far eastern tip of the Siberian Arctic.
It goes without saying that this alone dictates the imperative for one of the world's most formidable military forces and most extensive security apparatuses. For Russia is no isolated continental mass like Australia or subsidiary northern expanse like Canada (to the US); on every side she pushed outwards towards more temperate and hospitable climates or warmer and deeper access to the sea, she encountered firmly established rival powers which were typically aggressive militarist empires in their own right - and in the case of Eastern foes like China and the Ottoman and Persian empires, far older and more experienced ones, at that.
So in hindsight, Russia's hiatus from the world stage in the 1990s was an anomalous blip: as soon as the center reasserted itself, it was only a matter of time that Moscow would be back at the apex of the global power structure as a broker whose wishes must be heeded, whether or not they were benign or honest.
The Syrian crisis, which has singularly catapulted Putin's resurgent nationalist Russia back into the exclusive elite with the US and a rising China, has also demonstrated conclusively that this didn't require two ingredients which no previous Russophone imperium ever relied on for strategic expansion, either: a dynamic economy or a first-class navy. Since the Kremlin launched its Levantine adventure in late 2015, the world has also relearned that the warfare-driven Russian economy utterly lacks civilian or consumerist innovative capacity even as its land-centered military utterly underwhelms in naval power projection (as the embarrassing flop of the expeditionary deployment of its sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, so glaringly revealed).
After all, that's the double-edged sword if you happen to be Russia: the minute you pursue these luxury characteristics which befit a far more maritime-tailored and open socioeconomic order, the minute you betray your own essence. It's hardly a coincidence that both maritime or naval expansion and greater exposure to international financial flows tend to be associated with the fall of Moscow's empires, not their rise or heyday: the Russian state's inherent strength as a centrally command-and-controlled continental economy - its longstanding place as the world's regional power par excellence, if you will - has as its flip side an unusually strong aversion to laissez-faire finance and commerce which is the domain of decentralized seafaring states.
To put it in other words: What makes Russia such a formidable regional power - so much so that it appears to be a global power - is also what makes it impossible for even the most ambitious Czar to match the Anglo-American supremacy on the three-quarters of the world's surface which is water and not land. In the new Trump era, this stands to remain Pax Americana's saving grace against a Sino-Russian Eurasian axis (should it even come to pass, considering Trump's clear attempt to pry Moscow out of Beijing's orbit).
Since the shocking election nearly two months ago, US liberals and centrist Establishment figures on both sides of the aisle have been aghast that Vladimir Putin's klepto-petrostate has apparently emerged as a peer competitor again, able to challenge and even thwart US interests for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Quite a far cry from Obama's dismissal of Moscow as merely a regional power back in 2014, when it annexed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine at the outset of the current standoff with the West.
In fact, Russia's indeed merely a regional power - today no less than three years ago. But it just so happens to be simultaneously situated in every single part of the world that truly matters geopolitically: Europe, the Middle East, Central and South Asia, the Far East, and the Americas. No wonder, then, that merely being a regional player in the Kremlin's case still seems to accord it with such seemingly global clout.
This is, from start to end, a function of plain geography: Russia's very essence is land, land, and then more land. Endless landmass from sunrise to sunset: even after losing a third of its territory, primarily on its southern and western flanks, from the breakup of the Soviet Union, Moscow boasts sovereignty over 11 of 24 global time zones; as the sun sets on St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad in the far west, it still rises over the Chukchi peninsula in the far eastern tip of the Siberian Arctic.
It goes without saying that this alone dictates the imperative for one of the world's most formidable military forces and most extensive security apparatuses. For Russia is no isolated continental mass like Australia or subsidiary northern expanse like Canada (to the US); on every side she pushed outwards towards more temperate and hospitable climates or warmer and deeper access to the sea, she encountered firmly established rival powers which were typically aggressive militarist empires in their own right - and in the case of Eastern foes like China and the Ottoman and Persian empires, far older and more experienced ones, at that.
So in hindsight, Russia's hiatus from the world stage in the 1990s was an anomalous blip: as soon as the center reasserted itself, it was only a matter of time that Moscow would be back at the apex of the global power structure as a broker whose wishes must be heeded, whether or not they were benign or honest.
The Syrian crisis, which has singularly catapulted Putin's resurgent nationalist Russia back into the exclusive elite with the US and a rising China, has also demonstrated conclusively that this didn't require two ingredients which no previous Russophone imperium ever relied on for strategic expansion, either: a dynamic economy or a first-class navy. Since the Kremlin launched its Levantine adventure in late 2015, the world has also relearned that the warfare-driven Russian economy utterly lacks civilian or consumerist innovative capacity even as its land-centered military utterly underwhelms in naval power projection (as the embarrassing flop of the expeditionary deployment of its sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, so glaringly revealed).
After all, that's the double-edged sword if you happen to be Russia: the minute you pursue these luxury characteristics which befit a far more maritime-tailored and open socioeconomic order, the minute you betray your own essence. It's hardly a coincidence that both maritime or naval expansion and greater exposure to international financial flows tend to be associated with the fall of Moscow's empires, not their rise or heyday: the Russian state's inherent strength as a centrally command-and-controlled continental economy - its longstanding place as the world's regional power par excellence, if you will - has as its flip side an unusually strong aversion to laissez-faire finance and commerce which is the domain of decentralized seafaring states.
To put it in other words: What makes Russia such a formidable regional power - so much so that it appears to be a global power - is also what makes it impossible for even the most ambitious Czar to match the Anglo-American supremacy on the three-quarters of the world's surface which is water and not land. In the new Trump era, this stands to remain Pax Americana's saving grace against a Sino-Russian Eurasian axis (should it even come to pass, considering Trump's clear attempt to pry Moscow out of Beijing's orbit).
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