One month into 2018, despite the appearance of calm and an apparently more resounding global economic recovery, the most dangerous international dispute - that between the United States and Russia - is ripe for major escalation.
The specific and immediate reasons for this are variegated, but the overarching cause of a confrontation that neither Washington nor Moscow wants is beyond their control - an ideological East-West conflict that is no closer to resolution today than it was in 2014, when the impasse began with the Ukrainian Maidan revolution, the Russian seizure of Crimea, and the subsequent outbreak of civil war in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and the pro-Western Kiev government.
The maverick US presidency of Donald Trump, far from reducing tensions with Russia as both sides had hoped, has actually introduced what may well be the spark that lights up the powder keg: an aggressive American leader keen to demonstrate his credentials as defender of the free world and the increasingly shaky US-led global order in the face of accusations of being soft on Russia and overly cozy with the Kremlin of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Indeed, the most worrying aspect of potential US-Russia conflict in 2018 is that domestic political restraints against it are steadily eroding in both countries; not only is the nationalist base of Putin's United Russia party set to capitalize on the atmosphere of deteriorating relations with America in the upcoming presidential elections, but the slow but steady resurgence of Russia's communist and far-left socialist parties - a development which has almost completely eluded Western observation - is poised to add a further element of general anti-Western sentiment to the Russian sociopolitical environment. If anything, the option Russians will likely exercise in 2018 may not be between pro-Western and anti-Western worldviews - but between anti-Western and even more anti-Western ones.
Meanwhile, the climate in America is becoming little short of outright Russophobic: a fact exacerbated by the stunning reversal of Democrat with Republican parties in the national outlook on Russia. Largely because of Russiagate and the ongoing special counsel investigation into Trump's alleged collusion with the Kremlin during the 2016 election and his subsequent alleged obstruction of the counterespionage investigations that threatened to ensnare his aides, even traditionally dovish Democrats have effectively conspired to create and escalate what could be dubbed as a kind of hysteria with respect to any and all American links (both public and private) with Russia. In a time of escalating actual tensions with Moscow, this could hardly be more inopportune and possibly even dangerous: it virtually ensures that the most powerful elements of both parties - especially in the globalist-leaning Senate, whose interventionist members disproportionately set the tone for US foreign policy - will be in a race to the bottom in terms of the depth and breadth of measures to take to contain and roll back perceived malign machinations worldwide by Putin and the Kremlin.
And this brings us to the most troubling and salient feature of US-Russia relations of all: the very real retreat of American influence across the board in the Eurasian supercontinent in the face of an increasingly powerful Russo-Chinese challenge to its supremacy in all facets of national and international strength.
As it becomes clearer that the North Korean nuclear crisis simply cannot be resolved on terms even remotely palatable to it, Washington will instinctively seek to impose costs on China but even more so Russia for the pair's real and perceived collusion in engineering such a dramatic reversal of US fortunes in East Asia through their rogue client. The problem is, at this late stage in the game, there is little chance of American escalation in the region not provoking an instant, more powerful counterescalation by the Eurasian heavyweights: they are able and willing to not only match but considerably exceed the military, diplomatic, and economic muscle the US will find itself capable of bringing to bear. Just as South Korea has already buckled to North Korea's escalation dominance on the Korean peninsula by reopening peace talks with the regime of Kim Jong-Un largely on the latter's terms, so will all regional US allies - South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines - fold quickly before Chinese pressure (especially if backed up by Russia) at the prospect of a new arms race in the Western Pacific that could quickly exacerbate the security of all parties involved, but leave America's friends on the maritime periphery of the Asian landmass particularly exposed and vulnerable.
Unable to push back against the Sino-Russian axis in the Far East, Washington will then turn to constrain Russia in the Middle East; but here too, the hour is late and US resources increasingly ineffectual and American resolve even more questionable. With the Turkish invasion of Syrian Kurdistan being only the latest in a series of strategic setbacks for the US and its allies against the regional ambitions of Iran - coming quickly on the heels of the failure of the bid for independence by Iraqi Kurdistan, the meltdown of a Saudi-Israeli bid to whip up a war against Iranian proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, the fracturing of the Saudi-led Gulf coalition with the defection of Qatar to the Iranian-Turkish camp, and last but not least the steady consolidation of Iranian influence in the core of both Iraq and Syria post-ISIS - there is less and less room for maneuver that Washington can afford as it seeks to salvage its position in the region. And this is not even to include the declining US outlook in Afghanistan in the wake of its falling out with Pakistan (sending the latter even deeper into China's orbit).
A real possibility exists that, with the likely collapse of the Iran nuclear deal sometime in spring, the US and Israel will seriously consider or even threaten a massive preemptive strike on suspected illicit Iranian nuclear facilities. The problem with this is the same that plagued US and Israeli planners during the Obama years, when the accord with Tehran was being negotiated: Washington and its Arab allies are ill-positioned in the region to fight a general war across multiple fronts against the Ayatollahs and their powerful cross-border Shiite proxies. The diplomatic fallout from any such preventive war - which may well require tactical nuclear attacks to be effective - will be massive, and could well isolate America and Israel in the region and the broader Islamic world for an entire decade or generation, only hastening the ascent of China and Russia to dominance of Eurasia.
Nonetheless, it could well be that only Russian resolve to block such a cataclysmic move by the precipitously declining American empire - i.e. a preemptive nuclear assault on Iran - will ensure it doesn't happen. Even should things not come to this, Washington will inevitably realize - when push comes to shove on the Iran nuclear deal - that it has been sidelined by Moscow far faster and far more completely than it could have ever hitherto supposed in a part of the world it has treated as its prerogative sphere of influence since the 1970s.
When this happens, calls to penalize Russia - as suicidal and fantastical as they practically and realistically are - could then approach fever pitch in an increasingly panicked imperial Washington. Much as American support for the 2013-14 Ukrainian revolution against a pro-Russian leader was largely a retaliation for Putin's original sin of entering the Syrian conflict by warding off a threatened US military action against Bashar al-Assad (triggered by his crossing the Obama administration's "red line" of using chemical weapons on civilians), so will a more advanced reversal of the US position in the Middle East trigger what could quite possibly be a substantially bigger response against Russian interests that are more core to the Kremlin.
Although the possibility of a renewed large-scale conflict in eastern Ukraine cannot be ruled out - especially now that the latest US-Russian attempt to broker a UN peacekeeping mission in the Donbas has fizzled - the gravest danger is not military escalation but a broader financial and economic war.
The likelihood of such an East-West exchange of monetary hostilities has quietly but definitively shot up dramatically in the last year. The key catalyst has been the nascent ascent of a new Eurasian economic order with China at its axis and Russia its security enforcer; the combination of Beijing's vaunted "Belt and Road" initiative and Moscow's Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) since the second half of 2016 has already fundamentally sidelined the EU and even to an increasing extent the US from the major geopolitical decision-making processes of the Eurasian supercontinent. Though this is best exhibited by the virtually complete evisceration of the Western-sponsored Geneva peace process for Syria by the Russian-led trilateral deescalation track for the nearly seven-year-old Syrian conflict in conjunction with Iran and Turkey (in that order), the effects of the massive rebalancing of the global economic order are increasingly evident in various other developments.
With the rise of the Chinese yuan as a reserve currency as the dollar weakens - partly by market demand, but also partly by the Trump administration's design - the long untouchable petrodollar is in real danger of being partly supplanted by an incipient "petroyuan" in the Chinese-dominated global commodity trade. As Russia switches to yuan for hydrocarbon payments from Beijing, deteriorating US relations with the Islamic world - the loss of Pakistan and increasingly Turkey to the pro-Iranian camp having accelerated greatly just since the December decision by the US to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital - mean that a good chunk of the resource-rich, 1.4 billion-strong community of majority Muslim nations could in relatively short order add the Chinese "redback" to their list of both reserve and transaction options.
Additionally, evidence has accrued for years that Beijing intends to back the yuan with the only surefire store of value proven by history to humanity - gold - and since 2016 reports have grown of Russo-Chinese cooperation in linking their bullion commodity markets and reserve infrastructure to form the basis of a Eurasian currency system independent of the dollar. As a final critical factor in the reshuffle of economic power from West to East, China enjoys an increasingly dominant, even market-making position in the $10 trillion market for offshore dollars or "Eurodollars" - centered on the hub of London but with key spoke points in Sinosphere East Asia such as Singapore, Hong Kong, and increasingly (needless to say) Shanghai.
All this means that the close strategic partnership with China - even well short of any formal security alliance beyond the limited Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) - affords Russia a great deal of autonomy and leverage in its fraught relations with the West and particularly the US; but Washington and its European partners are yet to even remotely fully realize this.
Instead, even as the central frontline state against Russian revanchism - Ukraine - turns to Kazakhstan and away from Belarus to mediate with Moscow, the Anglo-American-led Western coalition is loathe to recognize that it's approaching the brink of losing all of Turkic-speaking Central Asia, emerging as it is as the next great region of economic dynamism and development, to a collection of Islamist regimes eager to balance and play off Russian and Chinese interests against one another to maximize their decidedly un-Western (even increasingly anti-Western) developmental models and international strategic outlooks.
But it has become ever more apparent in recent years that the Anglo-Zionist postwar and especially post-Cold War order is at a stage of perhaps terminal maturity (read: decline); unwilling or simply unable to connect the dots of what can only be assessed to be a grimly receding and deteriorating overall situation, it prefers to dwell on the bits of good news in their isolation - and there's plenty of that to go around lately, what with the "Trump boom" fueled by the short-term boost of high stock prices and a tax cut for the wealthy and large corporations that promises to bring such an influx of foreign investment into the US that the trade deficits with Mexico and China will soon be a thing of the past (as if a shrinking trade surplus were intrinsically bad for China, even should it transpire, which to date it's done just the opposite). In the geopolitical realm, perhaps the most ludicrous manifestation of this wishful thinking by Washington is its renewed attempt to promote a so-called "Info-Pacific" alliance of "free democracies" with India as the key linchpin and counterweight to an assertively anti-Western China - never mind that Delhi is in cahoots with both Russia and Iran to an extent that actually concerns Beijing.
As such, one can only expect the Anglo-Zionist empire to continue to vastly overestimate its relative strength against the Russian Federation, whose own relative weaknesses and imbalances it has replayed in its own mind so instinctively and with such religious repetition that it can't rationally weigh them against its own deficiencies or Moscow's already proven resilience and toughness - while capable of doing this in strict objective terms, definitely not soberly enough to conclude that directly threatening Russia at this juncture, if even just financially and economically, could be little short of suicidal.
Ultimately, Washington and its European partners which are still liable to do its bidding - think Poland, Lithuania, and the residual security deep state of the UK - may just decide that however bad or long the odds are, not standing up to Putin in the most drastic manner could well be even more costly because no damage or pain, if even short-term, will have been inflicted on the enemy. For because the hour is so late to reverse imperial decline, the US and its remaining loyalists with much skin in the game must make the ultimate measurement of the scale: the price of guaranteed loss of something major via inaction versus the price of likely loss of something even more via action.
Given the "extend and pretend" nature of the Trump presidency in particular - just look at its approach to the immigration and border security impasse - this can mean only one thing: when the chips are down and it's time to bet the farm or just fold without bluffing, there can't be much confidence, let alone any degree of reassurance, that widening a localized crisis (i.e. Donbas) by enticing a violent Russian reaction - such that global-level sanctions (i.e. kicking Russia off SWIFT) can then be considered commensurate by parties (i.e. Brussels and Berlin) far less interested in conflict with Moscow - will not be the course of action pursued by Washington.
Which brings us to the final question mark: Trump himself. If The Donald's ultimate decision in a Russia crisis hangs on the then current state of the Russiagate investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller - assuming he still hasn't been fired or otherwise emasculated by an enraged Republican Congress - then the world may have to brace itself for the possibility that a US-Russia confrontation in 2018 is already inevitable.
The only question then is how badly it will end for the US, its allies, and for Trump personally - and how seamlessly or not so seamlessly the world will simply reset through the outcome.
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