Having been impressed with the youtube clip Lauren posted on Friedman's presentation in Chicago, plus the content of his interview I posted in the Eurasia thread earlier today, I opted to read some of the other material he is offering to subscribers.
And I have to say it is pretty damn poor, low-key and punch pulling stuff. Witness below where, amongst other things, he still implies that Putin was responsible for MH17, even as he lists this false flag operation to have been crucial in destroying Putin's credibility and thus undermining his survivability.
This essay is almost certainly designed as part of the US strategy to regime change Putin.
It also, in my opinion, shows Friedman and Stratfor to speak with a forked tongue.
By George Friedman Editor's Note: This week, we revisit a Geopolitical Weekly first published in July 2014 that explored whether Russian President Vladimir Putin could hold on to power despite his miscalculations in Ukraine, a topic that returned to prominence with his recenttemporary absence from public view. While Putin has since reappeared, the issues highlighted by his disappearing act persist.
There is a general view that Vladimir Putin governs the Russian Federation as a dictator, that he has defeated and intimidated his opponents and that he has marshaled a powerful threat to surrounding countries. This is a reasonable view, but perhaps it should be re-evaluated in the context of recent events.
Ukraine and the Bid to Reverse Russia's Decline
Ukraine is, of course, the place to start. The country is vital to Russia as a buffer against the West and as a route for delivering energy to Europe, which is the foundation of the Russian economy. On Jan. 1, Ukraine's president was Viktor Yanukovich, generally regarded as favorably inclined to Russia. Given the complexity of Ukrainian society and politics, it would be unreasonable to say Ukraine under him was merely a Russian puppet. But it is fair to say that under Yanukovich and his supporters, fundamental Russian interests in Ukraine were secure.
This was extremely important to Putin. Part of the reason Putin had replaced Boris Yeltsin in 2000 was Yeltsin's performance during the Kosovo war. Russia was allied with the Serbs and had not wanted NATO to launch a war against Serbia. Russian wishes were disregarded. The Russian views simply didn't matter to the West. Still, when the air war failed to force Belgrade's capitulation, the Russians negotiated a settlement that allowed U.S. and other NATO troops to enter and administer Kosovo. As part of that settlement, Russian troops were promised a significant part in peacekeeping in Kosovo. But the Russians were never allowed to take up that role, and Yeltsin proved unable to respond to the insult.
Putin also replaced Yeltsin because of the disastrous state of the Russian economy. Though Russia had always been poor, there was a pervasive sense that it been a force to be reckoned with in international affairs. Under Yeltsin, however, Russia had become even poorer and was now held in contempt in international affairs. Putin had to deal with both issues. He took a long time before moving to recreate Russian power, though he said early on that the fall of the Soviet Union had been the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. This did not mean he wanted to resurrect the Soviet Union in its failed form, but rather that he wanted Russian power to be taken seriously again, and he wanted to protect and enhance Russian national interests.
The breaking point came in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution of 2004. Yanukovich was elected president that year under dubious circumstances, but demonstrators forced him to submit to a second election. He lost, and a pro-Western government took office. At that time, Putin accused the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies of having organized the demonstrations. Fairly publicly, this was the point when Putin became convinced that the West intended to destroy the Russian Federation, sending it the way of the Soviet Union. For him, Ukraine's importance to Russia was self-evident. He therefore believed that the CIA organized the demonstration to put Russia in a dangerous position, and that the only reason for this was the overarching desire to cripple or destroy Russia. Following the Kosovo affair, Putin publicly moved from suspicion to hostility to the West.
The Russians worked from 2004 to 2010 to undo the Orange Revolution. They worked to rebuild the Russian military, focus their intelligence apparatus and use whatever economic influence they had to reshape their relationship with Ukraine. If they couldn't control Ukraine, they did not want it to be controlled by the United States and Europe. This was, of course, not their only international interest, but it was the pivotal one.
Russia's invasion of Georgia had more to do with Ukraine than it had to do with the Caucasus. At the time, the United States was still bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Washington had no formal obligation to Georgia, there were close ties and implicit guarantees. The invasion of Georgia was designed to do two things. The first was to show the region that the Russian military, which had been in shambles in 2000, was able to act decisively in 2008. The second was to demonstrate to the region, and particularly to Kiev, that American guarantees, explicit or implicit, had no value. In 2010, Yanukovich was elected president of Ukraine, reversing the Orange Revolution and limiting Western influence in the country.
Recognizing the rift that was developing with Russia and the general trend against the United States in the region, the Obama administration tried to recreate older models of relationships when Hillary Clinton presented Putin with a "restart" button in 2009. But Washington wanted to restore the relationship in place during what Putin regarded as the "bad old days." He naturally had no interest in such a restart. Instead, he saw the United States as having adopted a defensive posture, and he intended to exploit his advantage.
One place he did so was in Europe, using EU dependence on Russian energy to grow closer to the Continent, particularly Germany. But his high point came during the Syrian affair, when the Obama administration threatened airstrikes after Damascus used chemical weapons only to back off from its threat. The Russians aggressively opposed Obama's move, proposing a process of negotiations instead. The Russians emerged from the crisis appearing decisive and capable, the United States indecisive and feckless. Russian power accordingly appeared on the rise, and in spite of a weakening economy, this boosted Putin's standing.
The Tide Turns Against Putin
Events in Ukraine this year, by contrast, have proved devastating to Putin. In January, Russia dominated Ukraine. By February, Yanukovich had fled the country and a pro-Western government had taken power. The general uprising against Kiev that Putin had been expecting in eastern Ukraine after Yanukovich's ouster never happened. Meanwhile, the Kiev government, with Western advisers, implanted itself more firmly. By July, the Russians controlled only small parts of Ukraine. These included Crimea, where the Russians had always held overwhelming military force by virtue of treaty, and a triangle of territory from Donetsk to Luhansk to Severodonetsk, where a small number of insurgents apparently supported by Russian special operations forces controlled a dozen or so towns.
If no Ukrainian uprising occurred, Putin's strategy was to allow the government in Kiev to unravel of its own accord and to split the United States from Europe by exploiting Russia's strong trade and energy ties with the Continent. And this is where the crash of the Malaysia Airlines jet is crucial. If it turns out as appears to be the case that Russia supplied air defense systems to the separatists and sent crews to man them (since operating those systems requires extensive training), Russia could be held responsible for shooting down the plane. And this means Moscow's ability to divide the Europeans from the Americans would decline. Putin then moves from being an effective, sophisticated ruler who ruthlessly uses power to being a dangerous incompetent supporting a hopeless insurrection with wholly inappropriate weapons. And the West, no matter how opposed some countries might be to a split with Putin, must come to grips with how effective and rational he really is.
Meanwhile, Putin must consider the fate of his predecessors. Nikita Khrushchev returned from vacation in October 1964 to find himself replaced by his protege, Leonid Brezhnev, and facing charges of, among other things, "harebrained scheming." Khrushchev had recently been humiliated in the Cuban missile crisis. This plus his failure to move the economy forward after about a decade in power saw his closest colleagues "retire" him. A massive setback in foreign affairs and economic failures had resulted in an apparently unassailable figure being deposed.
Russia's economic situation is nowhere near as catastrophic as it was under Khrushchev or Yeltsin, butit has deteriorated substantially recently, and perhaps more important, has failed to meet expectations. After recovering from the 2008 crisis, Russia has seen several years of declining gross domestic product growth rates, and its central bank is forecasting zero growth this year. Given current pressures, we would guess the Russian economy will slide into recession sometime in 2014. The debt levels of regional governments have doubled in the past four years, and several regions are close to bankruptcy. Moreover, some metals and mining firms are facing bankruptcy. The Ukrainian crisis has made things worse. Capital flight from Russia in the first six months stood at $76 billion, compared to $63 billion for all of 2013. Foreign direct investment fell 50 percent in the first half of 2014 compared to the same period in 2013. And all this happened in spite of oil prices remaining higher than $100 per barrel.
Putin's popularity at home soared after the successful Sochi Winter Olympics and after the Western media made him look like the aggressor in Crimea. He has, after all, built his reputation on being tough and aggressive. But as the reality of the situation in Ukraine becomes more obvious, the great victory will be seen as covering a retreat coming at a time of serious economic problems. For many leaders, the events in Ukraine would not represent such an immense challenge. But Putin has built his image on a tough foreign policy, and the economy meant his ratings were not very high before Ukraine.
Imagining Russia After Putin
In the sort of regime that Putin has helped craft, the democratic process may not be the key to understanding what will happen next. Putin has restored Soviet elements to the structure of the government, even using the term "Politburo" for his inner Cabinets. These are all men of his choosing, of course, and so one might assume they would be loyal to him. But in the Soviet-style Politburo, close colleagues were frequently the most feared.
The Politburo model is designed for a leader to build coalitions among factions. Putin has been very good at doing that, but then he has been very successful at all the things he has done until now. His ability to hold things together declines as trust in his abilities declines and various factions concerned about the consequences of remaining closely tied to a failing leader start to maneuver. Like Khrushchev, who was failing in economic and foreign policy, Putin could have his colleagues remove him.
It is difficult to know how a succession crisis would play out, given that the constitutional process of succession exists alongside the informal government Putin has created. From a democratic standpoint, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin are as popular as Putin is, and I suspect they both will become more popular in time. In a Soviet-style struggle, Chief of Staff Sergei Ivanov and Security Council Chief Nicolai Patryushev would be possible contenders. But there are others. Who, after all, expected the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev?
Ultimately, politicians who miscalculate and mismanage tend not to survive. Putin miscalculated in Ukraine, failing to anticipate the fall of an ally, failing to respond effectively and then stumbling badly in trying to recoup. His management of the economy has not been exemplary of late either, to say the least. He has colleagues who believe they could do a better job, and now there are important people in Europe who would be glad to see him go. He must reverse this tide rapidly, or he may be replaced.
Putin is far from finished. But he has governed for 14 years counting the time Dmitri Medvedev was officially in charge, and that is a long time. He may well regain his footing, but as things stand at the moment, I would expect quiet thoughts to be stirring in his colleagues' minds. Putin himself must be re-examining his options daily. Retreating in the face of the West and accepting the status quo in Ukraine would be difficult, given that the Kosovo issue that helped propel him to power and given what he has said about Ukraine over the years. But the current situation cannot sustain itself. The wild card in this situation is that if Putin finds himself in serious political trouble, he might become more rather than less aggressive. Whether Putin is in real trouble is not something I can be certain of, but too many things have gone wrong for him lately for me not to consider the possibility. And as in any political crisis, more and more extreme options are contemplated if the situation deteriorates.
Those who think that Putin is both the most repressive and aggressive Russian leader imaginable should bear in mind that this is far from the case. Lenin, for example, was fearsome. But Stalin was much worse. There may similarly come a time when the world looks at the Putin era as a time of liberality. For if the struggle by Putin to survive, and by his challengers to displace him, becomes more intense, the willingness of all to become more brutal might well increase.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
It's going to take me a while to get to all this material. But, we have to remember that Stratfor was hacked a couple of years ago and suffered a near fatal blow to its reputation, and is trying to rebuild it. Second, I see him as trying to talk sense to the neocon persuasion that has taken hold. In essence, he is speaking to elites in very coded ways, in essence, saying, Do you really want to bring chaos to a country that has 1200 nukes ready to launch? When he says, We are an empire, but we don't have to use all of our power. Grow up.
He is speaking as a advocate of the American imperium but one which is very dangerous to itself.
I'll get to reading later when I get some time.
"We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American public believes is false." --William J. Casey, D.C.I
"We will lead every revolution against us." --Theodore Herzl
I certainly hope we're working harder to understand Russia and its peoples, before forcing some sort of irrevocable decision with consequences, than we worked to understand Iraq and it's peoples, or Cuba. In both Iraq and Cuba, our decision makers were led to expect parades and popular support. And in both cases, wholly wrong.
"All that is necessary for tyranny to succeed is for good men to do nothing." (unknown)
James Tracy: "There is sometimes an undue amount of paranoia among some conspiracy researchers that can contribute to flawed observations and analysis."
Gary Cornwell (Dept. Chief Counsel HSCA): "A fact merely marks the point at which we have agreed to let investigation cease."
Alan Ford: "Just because you believe it, that doesn't make it so."
Leading American Scholar John Mearsheimer: The West Blew It Big Time and Irreversibly Endangered European Security
Round Table on "Defining a new security architecture for Europe that brings Russia in from the cold" was held in Brussels on March 2.
The organizer of the event was the American committee for East West Accord.
Three key presenters were American scholars Professor John Mearsheimer and Professor Steve Cohen, and publisher-editor of The Nation, Katrina Vanden Heuvel.
Q&A session was conducted by VIP guest panel which included five Members of the European Parliament from Left, Center and Right party groupings, two ambassadors and other senior diplomats from several missions, a senior member of the EU External Action Service, and Professor Richard Sakwa, author of the recently published Frontline Ukraine.
Professor John J. Mearsheimer is an American senior professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He is a leading international relations theorist. We owe a special thanks to Gilbert Doctorow, our invaluable RI contributor and moderator of this round table, for providing us with the video material.
The key points of Mearsheimer's speech:
The best we can hope for is to return to the Status quo ante - the situation that existed in Europe before 2008. However it will be extremely difficulty to achieve this.
1990-2008 was a golden period for Europe with no serious possibility of conflict between Russia ad the West.
This is because NATO remained intact and Americans served as a pacifier, ultimate arbiter, higher authority and NATO did not threaten Russia.
2008 was a fateful year - NATO announced that both Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO member states. This was categorically unacceptable for Russians.
Furthermore, in May 2008, the EU announced its Eastern Partnership, thus, the EU too will be expanding to the east.
Not surprisingly in August 2008 there was a war between Georgia and Russia with Georgians hoping for NATO support that didn't come.
Obama failed to reset the relationship with Russia because the West lead by the US continues to try to make Ukraine part of the West.
Democracy promotion, run by the US, actually means toppling leaders who are seen as anti-American and putting in their place leaders who are pro-American.
Major crises emerged with the toppling of Yanukovich and the rise of the pro-American regime.
The solution is to return to the situation that existed before 2008.
Ukraine needs to be turned into a neutral, buffer state.
Putin is basically telling the West it has two choices: back off or we will use every means available to ensure Ukraine never joins the West.
NATO and EU expansion as well as "democracy promotion" must be explicitly taken off the table for Ukraine. However, it's unlikely this will happen.
Western leaders are heavily invested in these post-2008 policies, and now Russia doesn't trust the West anymore and NATO itself is in trouble since US focus moved from Europe to Asia.
Fundamental transformation if China continues to rise: Asia is the most important area of the world for US, Persian Gulf second and Europe only a distant third place.
Europe had excellent security before 2008, and we (the West) blew it big time.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
A really interesting and informative - and brief - presentation, I thought.
Just so everyone of us can be clear who was driving this change in NATO policy --- because Prof. Mearsheimer declined to actually name the responsible party using euphemisms like "the west" when pointing his finger --- the following:
Quote:
US, Germany clash over NATO expansion plan
By Bill Van Auken
2 April 2008
In a provocative gesture on the eve of the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, US President George W. Bush flew to Kiev and appeared with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko to press for the former Soviet republic's admittance into NATO. "Your country has made a bold decision," Bush said of Yushchenko's quest for NATO membership, "and the United States strongly supports your request." Bush praised the Ukrainian government for having dispatched token military forces to aid the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the NATO force in Kosovo. A poll released last month indicated that barely 11 percent of the Ukrainian people back membership in NATO, while 36 percent strongly oppose it. Opposition is particularly strong in the country's east. Thousands of people gathered in Kiev's Independence Square and rallied outside the US embassy carrying banners with slogans that included "NATO is Worse than the Gestapo" and "Put Bush's Bloody Dictatorship before an International Tribunal." The crowd chanted "Yankee go home!" Anger towards Bush was heightened by a report leaked to the Ukrainian media that the US president had come to Kiev accompanied by American sniper teams, which had been authorized to fire on anyone suspected of carrying a weapon. V. Geletey, chief of Ukraine's state security service, issued a public statement warning residents of downtown Kiev not to "go out on balconies, open windows, climb roofs of the houses and take photos and videos." In January, Ukraine's government asked to join NATO's Membership Action Plan (MAP), a process that sets out a timetable and set of conditions to be met to achieve NATO membership. Washington immediately backed the move, as it has the request by the former Soviet republic of Georgia for MAP status. "In Bucharest this week, I will continue to make America's position clear: we support MAP for Ukraine and Georgia," Bush said after meeting with Yushchenko. "My stop here should be a clear signal to everybody that I mean what I say: It's in our interest for Ukraine to join." The Kremlin responded in February to Kiev's NATO application with a warning that, if Ukraine joined the Western alliance and allowed it to establish bases on its soil, Russia would treat it as a military target. "Russia could target its missile systems at Ukraine," declared Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Imagine that for a second." The Kremlin has also strongly opposed NATO's expansion into Georgia, threatening that it could lead to Moscow's recognition of separatist republics in the Georgian territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both of which border on Russia. "The sharpest problems are Georgia and Ukraine," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the newspaper Izvestia Monday. "They are being impudently drawn into NATO. Even though, as is known, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians are against this and in Abkhazia and South Ossetia they won't even hear of it." In the past decade, NATO has admitted nine ex-member states of the former Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, beginning with Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1999. Moscow has viewed the expansion as a growing military encirclement, which would be qualitatively intensified if it were to be extended to Ukraine and Georgia, both formerly part of the Soviet Union. The German government of Chancellor Angela Merkel has made it clear it will oppose admission of both Ukraine and Georgia. As the NATO alliance functions on the basis of consensus, Berlin can effectively wield a veto over the further expansion of the alliance. Germany is heavily dependent on Russian energy and is also Russia's biggest trading partner. Likewise, German capitalism is by far the largest source of foreign direct investment in Ukraine, having invested four times as much as US-based interests. Politically motivated cutoffs of energy supplies in recent years have demonstrated how vulnerable Ukraine is to Russian retaliation. Last month, Merkel spelled out the position of the German government in a speech to German armed forces commanders in Berlin that was also attended by NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. "Countries that are entangled in regional and internal conflicts cannot become NATO members," she said in a transparent reference to Georgia and its confrontations with the breakaway movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. German officials have warned that Georgia's admission could result in NATO being drawn into a confrontation with Russia over the two territories if the Georgian government were to invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty, committing the alliance to come to the aid of member states under attack or the threat of attack. Merkel continued by declaring that a country should be admitted into the trans-Atlantic alliance only if there exists "numerically significant support for NATO membership in that country's population," a condition that was clearly meant to exclude Ukraine. The German position appears to be widely shared in Western Europe. In a radio interview Tuesday, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon warned against moving ahead with NATO membership for the two former Soviet republics. "We are opposed to the entry of Georgia and Ukraine because we think it is not the right response to the balance of power within Europe and between Europe and Russia, and we want to have a dialogue on this subject with Russia," he said. "France will not give the green light to the entry of Ukraine and Georgia," he told France Inter Radio, adding, "France has an opinion which is different from that of the United States on this question." In an interview with the New York Times Tuesday, France's European affairs minister, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, stressed that while Paris opposed NATO membership for the two former Soviet territories as premature, the European Union should work to develop close strategic ties with both countries. "Because we consider NATO to be premature, in a way such partnerships become even more important," he said. NATO's eastward expansion has been a source of tension between Western Europe and Washington since it began. In 2003, faced with European opposition to the US war against Iraq, one of the war's chief architects, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dismissed Germany and France as "old Europe" and insisted that the "center of gravity" was shifting eastward, where former eastern bloc countries were closely aligned with US policy. Washington viewed NATO's expansion into the former Warsaw Pact region as a means of advancing its strategic interests, taking advantage of the liquidation of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the opening up of whole new areas to capitalism. With the European Union, and Germany in particular, emerging as the preeminent economic power in the region, the US has sought to advance its own interests by asserting its military power and dominance over the NATO alliance, into which these former eastern bloc countries were recruited. The statement of French opposition to Washington's policy came even as President Nicolas Sarkozy was signaling that France intends to rejoin NATO's integrated military structure, from which Charles de Gaulle broke in 1966. According to news reports in France and Britain, Sarkozy is also preparing to announce at the Bucharest summit that he is willing to send another 1,000 French troops into eastern Afghanistan. The move would allow the US, which launched the Afghanistan war and continues to bear the brunt of the fighting, to shift a similar number of its own forces to Kandahar to support a Canadian force of some 2,500. Ottawa had threatened to pull out of the tense region unless it received reinforcement from other NATO members. Afghanistan will be another source of sharp friction between Washington and its European NATO partners in Bucharest. Recent reports have warned that Afghanistan is becoming a "failed state." In a report prepared by the Atlantic Council's Afghanistan Study Group, former NATO commander Gen. James Jones put it bluntly: "Make no mistake; NATO is not winning in Afghanistan." The report warned that failure in Afghanistan would "put in grave jeopardy NATO's future as a credible, cohesive and relevant military alliance." Goading Germany over its refusal to send its troops into combat in the embattled south of the country, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates asserted at a European security conference in Munich last February that NATO was becoming a "two-tiered alliance" in which some had "the luxury of opting only for stability and civilian operations, thus forcing other allies to bear a disproportionate share of the fighting and dying." The Merkel government has thus far refused to alter the rules of engagement for the 3,200 German troops in Afghanistan, which largely restrict them to security and civilian support operations in the north of the country. The German weekly, Der Spiegel, reported that German officials hoped to stall on contested issues like NATO expansion and the Bush administration's proposalbitterly opposed by Moscowto deploy a missile shield in eastern Europe until after Bush leaves office. "But even a new US president will not make things easier for Germany in Afghanistan," the magazine commented. "One thing that Bush and all of his potential successors have in common is the call for more German troops. They agree that what Obama calls the dirty work' in the embattled south and east should no longer be left entirely to the Americans, Canadians, British and Dutch."
So George W Bush and his administration ignored Germany's wishes not to incite Russia and pushed ahead to cause conflict in Europe. This, for me, confirms, George Friedman's earlier observation that the US wished to drive a wedge between Germany and Russia. Last year's decision by the US to manifest a coup d'etat in Ukraine simply continued this policy.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
More Friedman - this time using his crystal ball for the next 100 years.
For me, the intriguing things he focuses on are the Japanese economic collapse on the late 1980's and the Asian Tiger nations economic collapse of the late 1990's. I recall from the researching the latter event at the time that it was US hedge funds working in concert, but in particular Julian Robertson's Tiger Hedge Fund, that (allegedly) drove the Tiger economies to the wall via, so I was told, a bribe paid to a senior member of the central bank of one of those nations. A bribe that had designer consequences.
But in any event, if I am reading Friedman correctly, based on earlier comments of his, the crash of Japan and the Asian Tiger's was as a consequence of US economic warfare designed to bring a halt to any potential challenger.
PS, on Friedman's argument that the weakness in those two economies was clear from the Japanese and other Asian nations buying assets overseas, I would only add that the US has vast overseas investments too.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
Friedman is an imperialist, no doubt. I understand him to be to provide a note of caution when dealing with a country that has 1200 nuclear weapons targeted at the US. In essence, I understand him to be saying, Let's be smarter imperialists when advancing US "interests." And of course he would deny he is cheerleading for the US by saying his beginning presupposition is that the US is and will remain the world's per-eminent power. Nevertheless, there is this bluntness about him that I find refreshing, which begs Paul's question
as to why is he so garrulous?
Mearsheimer on the other hand says the US blew it in Europe. Poppycock. Europe's weakness is so far a raging success.
EDIT: I have his predictions for the next ten years. He predicts there will be increased terrorism in Russia's underbelly. I wonder how he knows that besides getting tips on the future direction of ISIS-like iterations of CIA controlled Islamist extremists.
"We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American public believes is false." --William J. Casey, D.C.I
"We will lead every revolution against us." --Theodore Herzl
I have found him also to be highly informative too. It is evident, I think anyway, that he gets a lot of input, either officially or unofficially from official sources and has a pretty solid grasp of future US foreign affairs thinking and designs.
There is another long Youtube clip of him predicting the future of the European Union (presented in Poland) where he says that Poland and Turkey will become major European powers in the future. Based on his previous presentations where he explained, for example, that the US made Korea an economic power by the transfer of technology and capital, because it suited the US to have a strong Korea in the region, then I take his predictions about Turkey and Poland to imply the same sort of backing.
However, that presentation was back in 2012 - apparently a very long time ago, because things seem to have changed considerably in Turkey, and it no longer seems to be one of those favoured nation states the US loves and adores anymore.
My take from watching his vids and that of Mearsheimer is that a really gigantic shift has taken place in Europe vis-a-vis NATO and future US dominance. Bush was the first to make a big deal out of "old Europe" ann instead began focusing on "new Europe", meaning those emerging nations to the east. The western Europeans did not, and do not, want to damage their relations with Russia. The US considers isolating Russia to be an essential requirement now that it is gaining back its strength.
Hence Ukraine and hence MH17. But the Europeans quickly saw through that, I think - but for the sake of window dressing had to go along with the US driven sanctions, that I understand aren't especially enforced anyway.
Then we have recently seen the British causing apoplexy in Washington by joining the Chinese AIIB, quickly followed by France, Germany and Italy and quite possibly Australia and Switzerland. The US meanwhile had been lobbying hard for Britain and G7 to act in concert over the AIIB - meaning meekly following the US lead on it. The US has also been lobbying hard in Canberra to ensure that Australia stays out of the AIIB, and it will be interesting, indeed, if Oz snubs that pressure and joins too.
This all suggests quite strongly to me, that a major shift in power is taking place. There is going to be an entirely different world developing in the 21st century and I doubt the US will be able to maintain its dominance as it has expected and planned to do.
What has driven this shift remains unclear - at least to me - but I get the sense that de facto announcement at the NATO summit in 2008 by Dubya, shifting emphasis from old Europe to new Europe spelled the slow end of the NATO alliance. And western Europe is responding accordingly. And the UK is shifting its priorities according to its trading patterns, namely Europe and the far east.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
An article from Pepe Escobar from back in November 2014 setting out the Trans-Eurasia rail link/New Land-Bridge/Silk Road that connects almost everywhere. The interesting thing here is that this will nullify the US dominance of the oceans and is a lot faster than shipping by the sea anyway. It seems to be a real game changer.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin (l) shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping during a welcoming ceremony at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation. (Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon)
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com. November 18, 2014: it's a day that should live forever in history. On that day, in the city of Yiwu in China's Zhejiang province, 300 kilometers south of Shanghai, the first train carrying eighty-two containers of export goods weighing more than 1,000 tons left a massive warehouse complex heading for Madrid. It arrived on December 9. Welcome to the new trans-Eurasia choo-choo train. At over 13,000 kilometers, it will regularly traverse the longest freight train route in the world, 40 percent farther than the legendaryTrans-Siberian Railway. Its cargo will cross China from East to West, then Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, France and, finally, Spain. You may not have the faintest idea where Yiwu is, but businessmen plying their trades across Eurasia, especially from the Arab world, are already hooked on the city "where amazing happens!" We're talking about the largest wholesale center for small-sized consumer goodsfrom clothes to toyspossibly anywhere on Earth. The Yiwu-Madrid route across Eurasia represents the beginning of a set of game-changing developments. It will be an efficient logistics channel of incredible length. It will represent geopolitics with a human touch, knitting together small traders and huge markets across a vast landmass. It's already a graphic example of Eurasian integration on the go. And most of all, it's the first building block on China's "New Silk Road," conceivably the project of the new century and undoubtedly the greatest trade story in the world for the next decade. Go west, young Han. One day, if everything happens according to plan (and according to the dreams of China's leaders), all this will be yoursvia high-speed rail, no less. The trip from China to Europe will be a two-day affair, not the twenty-one days of the present moment. In fact, as that freight train left Yiwu, the D8602 bullet train was leaving Urumqi in Xinjiang Province, heading for Hami in China's far west. That's the first high-speed railway built in Xinjiang, and more like it will be coming soon across China at what is likely to prove dizzying speed. Today, 90 percent of the global container trade still travels by ocean, and that's what Beijing plans to change. Its embryonic, still relatively slow New Silk Road represents its first breakthrough in what is bound to be an overland trans-continental container trade revolution. And with it will go a basket of future "win-win" deals, including lower transportation costs, the expansion of Chinese construction companies ever further into the Central Asian "stans," as well as into Europe, an easier and faster way to move uranium and rare metals from Central Asia elsewhere, and the opening of myriad new markets harboring hundreds of millions of people. So if Washington is intent on "pivoting to Asia," China has its own plan in mind. Think of it as a pirouette to Europe across Eurasia. Defecting to the East? The speed with which all of this is happening is staggering. Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the New Silk Road Economic Belt in Astana, Kazakhstan, in September 2013. One month later, while in Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, he announced a twenty-first-century Maritime Silk Road. Beijing defines the overall concept behind its planning as "one road and one belt," when what it's actually thinking about is a boggling maze of prospective roads, rail lines, sea lanes and belts. We're talking about a national strategy that aims to draw on the historical aura of the ancient Silk Road, which bridged and connected civilizations, east and west, while creating the basis for a vast set of interlocked pan-Eurasian economic cooperation zones. Already the Chinese leadership has green-lighted a $40 billion infrastructure fund, overseen by the China Development Bank, to build roads, high-speed rail lines and energy pipelines in assorted Chinese provinces. The fund will sooner or later expand to cover projects in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and parts of Europe. But Central Asia is the key immediate target. Chinese companies will be investing in, and bidding for contracts in, dozens of countries along those planned silk roads. After three decades of development while sucking up foreign investment at breakneck speed, China's strategy is now to let its own capital flow to its neighbors. It's already clinched $30 billion in contracts with Kazakhstan and $15 billion with Uzbekistan. It has provided Turkmenistan with $8 billion in loans and a billion more has gone to Tajikistan. In 2013, relations with Kyrgyzstan were upgraded to what the Chinese term "strategic level." China is already the largest trading partner for all of them except Uzbekistan and, though the former Central Asian socialist republics of the Soviet Union are still tied to Russia's network of energy pipelines, China is at work there, too, creating its own version of Pipelineistan, including anew gas pipeline to Turkmenistan, with more to come. The competition among Chinese provinces for much of this business and the infrastructure that goes with it will be fierce. Xinjiang is already being reconfigured by Beijing as a key hub in its new Eurasian network. In early November 2014, Guangdongthe "factory of the world"hosted the first international expo for the country's Maritime Silk Road and representatives of no less than forty-two countries attended the party. President Xi himself is now enthusiastically selling his home province, Shaanxi, which once harbored the start of the historic Silk Road in Xian, as a twenty-first-century transportation hub. He's made his New Silk Road pitch for it to, among others, Tajikistan, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, India and Afghanistan. Just like the historic Silk Road, the new one has to be thought of in the plural. Imagine it as a future branching maze of roads, rail lines and pipelines. A key stretch is going to run through Central Asia, Iran and Turkey, with Istanbul as a crossroads site. Iran and Central Asia are already actively promoting their own connections to it. Another key stretch will follow the Trans-Siberian Railway with Moscow as a key node. Once that trans-Siberian high-speed rail remix is completed, travel time between Beijing and Moscow will plunge from the current six and a half days to only thirty-three hours. In the end, Rotterdam, Duisburg and Berlin could all be nodes on this future "highway" and German business execs are enthusiastic about the prospect. The Maritime Silk Road will start in Guangdong province en route to the Malacca Strait, the Indian Ocean, the Horn of Africa, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, ending essentially in Venice, which would be poetic justice indeed. Think of it as Marco Polo in reverse. All of this is slated to be completed by 2025, providing China with the kind of future "soft power" that it now sorely lacks. When President Xi hails the push to "break the connectivity bottleneck" across Asia, he's also promising Chinese credit to a wide range of countries. Now, mix the Silk Road strategy with heightened cooperation among the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), with accelerated cooperation among the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), with a more influential Chinese role over the 120-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)no wonder there's the perception across the Global South that, while the United States remains embroiled in its endless wars, the world is defecting to the East. New Banks and New Dreams The recent Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Beijing was certainly aChinese success story, but the bigger APEC story went virtually unreported in the United States. Twenty-two Asian countries approved the creation of an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) only one year after Xi initially proposed it. This is to be yet another bank, like the BRICS Development Bank, that will help finance projects in energy, telecommunications and transportation. Its initial capital will be $50 billion and China and India will be its main shareholders. Consider its establishment a Sino-Indian response to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), founded in 1966 under the aegis of the World Bank and considered by most of the world as a stalking horse for the Washington consensus. When China and India insist that the new bank's loans will be made on the basis of "justice, equity and transparency," they mean that to be in stark contrast to the ADB (which remains a US-Japan affair with those two countries contributing 31 percent of its capital and holding 25 percent of its voting power)and a sign of a coming new order in Asia. In addition, at a purely practical level, the ADB won't finance the real needs of the Asian infrastructure push that the Chinese leadership is dreaming about, which is why the AIIB is going to come in so handy. Keep in mind that China is already the top trading partner for India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. It's in second place when it comes to Sri Lanka and Nepal. It's number one again when it comes to virtually all the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), despite China's recent well-publicized conflicts over who controls waters rich in energy deposits in the region. We're talking here about the compelling dream of a convergence of 600 million people in Southeast Asia, 1.3 billion in China and 1.5 billion on the Indian subcontinent. Only three APEC membersapart from the United Statesdid not vote to approve the new bank: Japan, South Korea and Australia, all under immense pressure from the Obama administration. (Indonesia signed on a few days late.) And Australia is finding it increasingly difficult to resist the lure of what, these days, is being called "yuan diplomacy." In fact, whatever the overwhelming majority of Asian nations may think about China's self-described "peaceful rise," most are already shying away from or turning their backs on a Washington-and-NATO-dominated trade and commercial world and the set of pactsfrom the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) for Europe to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for Asiathat would go with it. When Dragon Embraces Bear Russian President Vladimir Putin had a fabulous APEC. After his country and China clinched a massive $400 billion natural gas deal in Mayaround the Power of Siberia pipeline, whose construction began this yearthey added a second agreement worth $325 billion around the Altai pipeline originating in western Siberia. These two mega-energy deals don't mean that Beijing will become Moscow-dependent when it comes to energy, though it's estimated that they will provide 17 percent of China's natural gas needs by 2020. (Gas, however, makes up only 10 percent of China's energy mix at present.) But these deals signal where the wind is blowing in the heart of Eurasia. Though Chinese banks can't replace those affected by Washington and EU sanctions against Russia, they are offering a Moscow battered by recent plummeting oil prices some relief in the form of access to Chinese credit. On the military front, Russia and China are now committed to large-scale joint military exercises, while Russia's advanced S-400 air defense missile system will soon enough be heading for Beijing. In addition, for the first time in the postCold War era, Putin recently raised the old Soviet-era doctrine of "collective security" in Asia as a possible pillar for a new Sino-Russian strategic partnership. Chinese President Xi has taken to calling all this the "evergreen tree of Chinese-Russian friendship"or you could think of it as Putin's strategic "pivot" to China. In either case, Washington is not exactly thrilled to see Russia and China beginning to mesh their strengths: Russian excellence in aerospace, defense technology and heavy equipment manufacturingmatching Chinese excellence in agriculture, light industry and information technology. It's also been clear for years that, across Eurasia, Russian, not Western, pipelines are likely to prevail. The latest spectacular Pipelineistan operaGazprom's cancellation of the prospective South Stream pipeline that was to bring yet more Russian natural gas to Europewill, in the end, only guarantee an even greater energy integration of both Turkey and Russia into the new Eurasia. So Long to the Unipolar Moment All these interlocked developments suggest a geopolitical tectonic shift in Eurasia that the American media simply hasn't begun to grasp. Which doesn't mean that no one notices anything. You can smell the incipient panic in the air in the Washington establishment. The Council on Foreign Relations is already publishing laments about the possibility that the former sole superpower's exceptionalist moment is "unraveling." The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission can only blame the Chinese leadership for being "disloyal," adverse to "reform," and an enemy of the "liberalization" of their own economy. The usual suspects carp that upstart China is upsetting the "international order," will doom "peace and prosperity" in Asia for all eternity and may be creating a "new kind of Cold War" in the region. From Washington's perspective, a rising China, of course, remains the major "threat" in Asia, if not the world, even as the Pentagon spends gigantic sums to keep its sprawling global empire of bases intact. Those Washington-based stories about the new China threat in the Pacific and Southeast Asia, however, never mention that China remains encircled by US bases, while lacking a base of its own outside its territory. Of course, China does face titanic problems, including the pressures being applied by the globe's "sole superpower." Among other things, Beijing fears threats to the security of its sea-borne energy supply from abroad, which helps explain its massive investment in helping create a welcoming Eurasian Pipelineistan from Central Asia to Siberia. Fears for its energy future also explain its urge to "escape from Malacca" by reaching for energy supplies in Africa and South America, and its much-discussed offensive to claim energy-rich areas of the East and South China seas, which Beijing is betting could become a "second Persian Gulf," ultimately yielding 130 billion barrels of oil. On the internal front, President Xi has outlined in detail his vision of a "results-oriented" path for his country over the next decade. As road maps go, China's "must-do" list of reforms is nothing short of impressive. And worrying about keeping China's economy, already the world's number one by size, rolling along at a feverish pitch, Xi is also turbo-charging thefight against corruption, graft and waste, especially within the Communist Party itself. Economic efficiency is another crucial problem. Chinese state-owned enterprises are now investing a staggering $2.3 trillion a year43 percent of the country's total investmentin infrastructure. Yet studies at Tsinghua University's School of Management have shown that an array of investments in facilities ranging from steel mills to cement factories have only added to overcapacity and so actually undercut China's productivity. Xiaolu Wang and Yixiao Zhou, authors of the academic paper "Deepening Reform for China's Long-term Growth and Development," contend that it will be difficult for China to jump from middle-income to high-income statusa key requirement for a truly global power. For this, an avalanche of extra government funds would have to go into areas like social security/unemployment benefits and healthcare, which take up at present 9.8 percent and 15.1 percent of the 2014 budgethigh for some Western countries, but not high enough for China's needs. Still, anyone who has closely followed what China has accomplished over these past three decades knows that, whatever its problems, whatever the threats, it won't fall apart. As a measure of the country's ambitions for economically reconfiguring the commercial and power maps of the world, China's leaders are also thinking about how, in the near future, relations with Europe, too, could be reshaped in ways that would be historic. What About That "Harmonious Community"? At the same moment that China is proposing a new Eurasian integration, Washington has opted for an "empire of chaos," a dysfunctional global system now breeding mayhem andblowback across the Greater Middle East into Africa and even to the peripheries of Europe. In this context, a "new Cold War" paranoia is on the rise in the United States, Europe and Russia. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who knows a thing or two about Cold Wars (having ended one), couldn't be more alarmed. Washington's agenda of "isolating" and arguably crippling Russia is ultimately dangerous, even if in the long run it may also bedoomed to failure.
At the moment, whatever its weaknesses, Moscow remains the only power capable of negotiating a global strategic balance with Washington and putting some limits on its empire of chaos. NATO nations still follow meekly in Washington's wake and China as yet lacks the strategic clout. Russia, like China, is betting on Eurasian integration. No one, of course, knows how all this will end. Only four years ago, Vladimir Putin was proposing "a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok," involving a trans-Eurasian free trade agreement. Yet today, with the United States, NATO and Russia locked in a Cold Warlike battle in the shadows over Ukraine, and with the European Union incapable of disentangling itself from NATO, the most immediate new paradigm seems to be less total integration than war hysteria and fear of future chaos spreading to other parts of Eurasia. Don't rule out a change in the dynamics of the situation, however. In the long run, it seems to be in the cards. One day, Germany may lead parts of Europe away from NATO's "logic," since German business leaders and industrialists have an eye on their potentially lucrative commercial future in a new Eurasia. Strange as it might seem amid today's war of words over Ukraine, the endgame could still prove to involve a Berlin-Moscow-Beijing alliance. At present, the choice between the two available models on the planet seems stark indeed: Eurasian integration or a spreading empire of chaos. China and Russia know what they want, and so, it seems, does Washington. The question is: What will the other moving parts of Eurasia choose to do?
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
David Guyatt Wrote:There is another long Youtube clip of him predicting the future of the European Union (presented in Poland) where he says that Poland and Turkey will become major European powers in the future. Based on his previous presentations where he explained, for example, that the US made Korea an economic power by the transfer of technology and capital, because it suited the US to have a strong Korea in the region, then I take his predictions about Turkey and Poland to imply the same sort of backing.
Except Turkey, like Iceland, has recently withdrawn from wanting to even be in the EU. Now that membership is shown to be a major liability. Wonder when they will leave NATO. Except NATO pays them tons of $ to have their bases there.
David Guyatt Wrote:Then we have recently seen the British causing apoplexy in Washington by joining the Chinese AIIB, quickly followed by France, Germany and Italy and quite possibly Australia and Switzerland. The US meanwhile had been lobbying hard for Britain and G7 to act in concert over the AIIB - meaning meekly following the US lead on it. The US has also been lobbying hard in Canberra to ensure that Australia stays out of the AIIB, and it will be interesting, indeed, if Oz snubs that pressure and joins too.
This indeed seems to be really panicking the US. They are trying to put the pressure on the everyone to do what the US wants but most are just signing up to the Chinese bank regardless. Australia's national security committee has given it the green light but cabinet has to approve it on Monday. It will be interesting given their traditional US lapdog role but also fetish for obeying national security talking heads. I suspect they will sign up. China is our biggest trading partner. And we don't have the same history with China that Japan does. And indeed have some of the same history with Japan that China has. The weakest party seems the be Japan. And I'm sure the US is turning the screws quite hard on them too.
David Guyatt Wrote:This all suggests quite strongly to me, that a major shift in power is taking place. There is going to be an entirely different world developing in the 21st century and I doubt the US will be able to maintain its dominance as it has expected and planned to do.
Bring it on! Nothing but death and chaos with US Inc.
David Guyatt Wrote:What has driven this shift remains unclear - at least to me - but I get the sense that de facto announcement at the NATO summit in 2008 by Dubya, shifting emphasis from old Europe to new Europe spelled the slow end of the NATO alliance. And western Europe is responding accordingly. And the UK is shifting its priorities according to its trading patterns, namely Europe and the far east.
All those blinged up grunts that hitched their wagon to the NATO steamroller are probably having deep regrets now. Like Breedlove. And explains his recent major dummy spit which so upset Merkel. But really it is no surprise since the US has been so odious to deal with that others have created alternatives that leave them out of the picture.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
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