Filed under: China, EU, Europe, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, USA | Tagged: All out war, Central Asia, Douglas Maccregor, UAF, Ukrainian refugees, Western proxy Wars against Russia, WWII | Comments Off on U.S. Not Prepared to take on Russia / Col Doug Macgregor
January 31, 2023
by Hugo Dionísio
Something is changing on Mount Olympus and it is leaving in tatters the union of tendencies connected to the U.S.-state falconry. To understand and predict the actions of the political elite that commands, through their transnational mandataries, our destinies, implies knowing what one of the most important US defense think tanks reflects and publishes. This research leads us to an entity that rarely appears in the “informative” moments of the North Atlantic press: the RAND Corporation.
RAND’s best-known moment with regard to the conflict in Eastern Europe is signaled by the publication of the report “Extending Russia – Competing from Advantageous Ground”. This report contains the entire menu of malfeasance that, in the claims made public and repeated by the US power summit, would lead to a fulminating defeat of the political, economic, and military power of the Russian Federation.
The analysis expressed publicly, by the various political actors, was that the Russian Federation was nothing more than “a gasoline bomb with nuclear weapons,” a “paper tiger” with a GDP equal to that of Holland, and a people gagged by a “mad dictator” who remained in power only through “authoritarianism” and “repression”.
Based on an analysis whose information seemed to substantiate such political positions, the RAND report advocated a type of intervention, some of which were well reported – others not so well reported – in the official press. This was the case with the attempted “colored” revolutions made in CIA in Belarus, Kazakhstan, and the Central Asian countries, which, together with Georgia and Moldova, would probably be “promoted” and “supported” to the condition of an actual Ukraine. The Russian Federation, having to meet all the fires, some because they would become proxy armies (like Ukraine), others turned into bases of destabilizing operations launched by the CIA, would eventually “extend” itself until it broke into pieces and collapsed, putting an end to the current threat. Even without this partition, a point could always be reached where, after the destruction of the incumbent political power, a more docile “regime” would be installed, pointing to a more “advantageous position on the ground.”
Given to be known only in 2019, we are forced to note that this strategy had long been in preparation, especially since the Russian president lost hope that he could count on a Western “partnership” and announce the end of the unipolar world. Fact is, the report has a logical connection with the 2018 National Defense Strategy (US national defense strategy).
At any rate, this strategy points to the “Yugoslavization” of the Russian Federation. The truth is that the constant itinerary of this work has been followed almost scrupulously by the U.S. security and defense establishment: “colored” revolutions; states transformed into proxy armies; communication and disinformation campaigns; destabilization and sabotage operations; economic sanctions and embargoes. A menu of fulminating “democratic” activities on the rise!
And why is it important to talk about this today? It is important because in the last few days a new paper from the RAND corporation was published, but this time in reverse, a study entitled “Avoiding a Long War U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict.”
If the previous works pointed to the goals that Anthony Blinken, Biden, Nuland and Kirby have so often trumpeted, namely, a long-lasting conflict that would exhaust Russian energies so that the obstacle could be removed by force if necessary, the study published this time points to the realization of a cost-benefit ratio between the costs and risks resulting from a long war with Moscow and the benefits that the U.S. can derive from a trajectory that is expected to escalate and could result in a direct confrontation.
Something has changed and in what ways. First it was triumphalism and threat destruction, now a long conflict brings risks and costs that prevent the US from focusing on more pressing priorities. Where do we stand? At first it was intended, precisely, a long-lasting conflict… Now, not only does it carry costs and risks, but it seems to be Russia itself that is more comfortable with the foreseeable extension of the conflict in time, to the point of appointing Gerasimov as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, envisaging more than one theater of operations simultaneously (RAND pointed to the bilateral Polish possibility).
According to the site http://www.moonofalabama.org , one of the best sources on US foreign policy, the publication of this study does not come by chance, but after an attempt by the US Chief of Staff, Mark Milley, to promote an internal debate on possible peace negotiations with Biden. Having lost the battle in the White House, and unable to persuade Biden, as he only listens to Nuland, Blinken and Sullivan (the hawks on duty), he opted for the public display of his claim, calling for the start of negotiations first and, perhaps, leading to the publication of this study later.
The problem is, as Tyler Durden writes in one of today’s best opinion sites http://www.zerohedge.com , in his article “The most egregious Mistake”, going back and reversing the direction of US policy in this matter is simply not an option. The White House has taken the entire West in such a direction and speed of triumphalism, arrogance and “egregious” imbecility that there is no going back or reversal possible without a total defeat of the official narrative and the consequent eternal shame. Hence, these efforts by Mark Miller should result in very little, except the deepening of internal fractures, which may be positive. The fact is, there are already people who intend to step out of this path to the abyss.
Now, unlike the various writings on the subject, which tend to explain the impossibility of reversing the direction of the current suicidal strategy, with the sectarianism of the official narrative, which only offers certainties and unequivocal results, according to which, initially, this strategy did not result from a necessity but from a choice, translated into the so-called “egregious error”, I, personally, tend to consider that it was not an “error”, nor even less a choice, but rather, an act of desperation.
The alternative – American – narrative to the official current says that the outlined strategy represented an existential threat for Russia, but not for the United States. For the US, it would be possible to take other paths than that of creating this conflict.
In my view, this is a condescending position that devalues the feelings of urgency that resulted from the catastrophic analysis (never made public) that many have probably made of the state of American hegemony. The fact is that while the US has spent 8 trillion dollars on the war on terror, channeling all its diplomatic, economic and military efforts into it… What have Russia and China done?
While the U.S. used the pretext of terrorism (which they themselves have so often fomented and used as a weapon against political opponents – Syria, for example) to dominate the world’s largest oil reserves (in the Middle East), sidelining other natural resources, which today are important (such as lithium, for example), China developed its infrastructure, industry, army and, above all, its international trade platform, today known as the Belt and Road Initiative. During this period, the global south was able to experience a new form of “soft power”, which instead of demanding privatizations, dollarization of the economy, and reformulation of the political system in the manner that was most convenient, of which the IMF and the World Bank were the proxies on duty, the integration into the BRI only requires that the projects facilitate trade between countries (hence the infrastructure). In exchange for natural resources, these countries – instead of Western corporations and “investment” translated into the purchase of public companies – receive schools, hospitals, 4G and 5G networks, ports, airports, bridges, and the bigger and more challenging the better.
Not even the propaganda of the “debt trap”, well known to the IMF and the association treaties with the USA, prevented more than 120 countries from joining this network. Meanwhile and in the same period of time, Russia was able to get back on its feet from the neoliberal nightmare of the 1990s, recovering its industry and, above all, its self-esteem and national pride. A mortal sin in the eyes of the white house. Eurasian integration (EUEA), international cooperation (BRICS) and infrastructure (INSTC) projects have been made that circumvent US influence across the seas, which helps shield the economies of the countries involved.
While this multipolar world was being born in the beards of the most arrogant and sectarian hawks, the military industrial complex focused its attentions on the war on terror. Our news reports at the time, instead of Ukraine, began and ended with suicide bombings and time bombs. Until…
When information about this world began to emerge in the form of hard data, panic began to set in. It was around the time of 2017/18. Of course, from my perspective, this panic cannot be confessed. Its externalization began to emerge through Euromaidan, pressure and destabilization on less aligned Latin American nations, with the arrest of Lula da Silva and other national leaders with whose policies the white house was not comfortable. Gradually we saw U.S. foreign policy shift back toward dominance of natural resources and markets and less toward terrorism. They even “abandoned” the Middle East, leaving only the Zionist and Kurdish watchdogs. It was the time of the news that opened and closed with Venezuela.
However, this reversal of course already denoted, in my opinion, a kind of race against time. Time that had to be won.
Faced with the continuous loss of ground, we have reached the time of Covid (which according to many is a White House “card”, provoked or opportunistic, we shall see in due time) and the construction of a military strategy that has been elected as the last of the means – far from being remote – to “contain” China, recently classified as an “existential threat”. The confrontation in the Pacific would pass through the creation of an Eastern NATO, baptized AUKUS. In this strategy, the obstacles that could tip the balance in favor of the enemy had to be removed. That obstacle is the Russian Federation. The conclusion of a true strategic alliance between the Russian Federation and China shows that the leaders of these two countries no longer have any illusions about the real intentions of the United States. The more they are together, the greater their protection and the greater the threat to the United States.
This is where the “Ukrainian” option comes in! The strategy of extending Russia until it left was not an option. It was a desperate action. Absolutely! And why?
I say this not only because of what I mentioned earlier and the urgency that the elite leaders of the Transnational Corporations (the backbone of the U.S. Empire) must have felt at the information that was reaching them. At this stage, it must be said that the “failure” of the Chinese strategy played a part in this desperation. For the corporate elite who control the political power in the US, the economic “opening” of China would certainly lead (I don’t know what science they based their opinion on) to the destruction of the Communist Party’s power and the installation of a neo-liberal type government. Hong Kong will have already been a forced step, as these folks believed that the process would be more or less “natural”, resulting in a “USSR” type collapse, this time in China. But no… By around 2018 it was already being said in the white house that they would have to learn to live with China as it was. There would be no new “Tiananmen” in sight.
For the transnational corporate elite there is no cooperation. There is domination. After all, that is the fuel and the adrenaline of empire. Anyone’s. But back to Eastern Europe, why do I say that the Ukrainian choice was desperate?
First it was forced. And it was forced because it resulted from the failure of people like Navalny and other neoliberal puppets, who should have been able to produce an attrition of United Russia’s power. The preferred option is always the one that involves the internal deconstruction and submission of the adversary. Failing this, the only option left is the military one. The military is the component in which the United States still considers itself superior.
The RAND report pointed to a set of “tasks” that should be accomplished in order to achieve the goal of “extending Russia” and thus achieve a “more advantageous position on the ground. Has that desideratum been achieved? No, not by a long shot.
First, the “color” revolutions in Belarus and Kazakhstan failed. Not only did they fail to remove their respective rulers, they worsened their situation on the ground by strengthening Russia’s power over those countries (the respective governments “saved” by it). Second, they failed the sanctions from 2014 onward by not destroying the Russian economy. Worse, they gave the country an ability to live with the West’s sanctions. The sanctions were “the” development opportunity, the missing pretext to move from an economy based solely on resource extraction, to an industrial, in some cases cutting-edge and full-cycle economy, i.e., with key sectors sovereign and shielded against sabotage maneuvers, from the outside. Third, Georgia did not take the bait and set itself up as a proxy army, failing the plan of creating several battlefronts. Out of all this the Russian Federation came out stronger.
While the outward discourse, for ideological and strategic reasons, continued to be that of the “fuel station,” the actions denoted only desperation. The very instrumentalization of the Minsk agreements, agreements sanctioned by the UN, as a way to gain time to arm Ukraine, totally discredited the West in the eyes of the global south. Anyone who deceives like this, a country like Russia, by relying on a process like the Minsk one, is capable of anything.
The fact that they managed to “convince” a country to sacrifice itself for the sake of the power of another, basing this “convincing” on the establishment of a neo-Nazi doctrine, recovering Bandera (directly responsible for the death of millions of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews), based on xenophobia, racial and cultural hatred, leading that country to a coup d’état perpetrated by forces comparable to the SS, and making all these people look like martyrs and heroes, and even removing the Azov battalion from the list of extremist organizations… It was another stab in the back of the confidence of a world composed of nations whose memories have not yet been erased and who know what bad things fascism and Nazism brought them. This same world also knows the decisive contribution that the USSR – and Russia, for that matter – made in the 20th century to the defeat of colonialism and to the national liberation of the majority of humanity.
It was also about liberation from the clutches of Western imperialism and colonialism. From the same West that used plunder as a moment of primitive appropriation of wealth, that allowed it to first achieve development, and then used it to further subjugate the plundered. No, this world no longer trusts the West. This world is not the same world that the corporate media claims to be with Zelinsky.
The official discourse denied all this reality and sold an illusion, according to which, Ukraine, with the help of the powerful NATO, would win, without appeal or aggravation, a war of attrition against Russia. Of course, the victory would be so resounding that the attrition would not even begin, for at the first sanctions, power would fall to the street. Even the thousands of Russian agents the CIA has in its pocket weren’t able to pull it off. Power not only fell but strengthened, demonstrating that the proud nation that, being harried from without, turns on itself is yet to be born. RAND’s assumptions kept getting further and further from being true.
According to the imbecility resulting from the superiority complex of Western elites, a country with 3% of global GDP would not stand a chance against the mighty G7/NATO/US. Which says a lot about the GDP method as a way of characterizing an economy. As “old man” Marx explained, only labor produces wealth and only the transformation of matter into something with use value translates that wealth. This is the “real economy” of which Martyanov speaks so much. Unlike the speculative and ultra-financialized economy of the West, Russia has a real economy, which produces things with use value. With “real” use value, without which we cannot live, unlike an iPhone or a Chanel perfume. In fact, the global south has been gradually discovering that it has the resources, the technology and the wealth to have a real economy. And it doesn’t need the West for that. It is the West that cannot live without the global south, not the other way around. The global south has figured it out, and so has the US.
Seeing this, and watching the deplorable spectacle that is the constant confiscation of sovereign amounts deposited in dollars or euros, which the West, at the behest of the US, steals so much, today we are witnessing a movement away from the dollar…
In this, too, we have much despair, such as the process that led to the “installation” of a Guaido in Venezuela or the successive attempts at a “colored” revolution in Iran. In both cases, the two countries saw their reservations “frozen” in the G7/NATO/EU space. If this move by itself had already put many countries on their guard, since it was no longer only the “communist” Cuba and the People’s Republic of Korea, this time, the freezing and intended confiscation of Russian reserves clearly pushed the panic button. Any country, regardless of size, if it does not accept submission, is subject to confiscation of everything it has in currencies of the collective West.
The result? The result is BRICS+ and the basket of currencies, the proposal for a Latin American currency between Brazil and Argentina, the return to gold, cryptoyuan and the multiplication of exchanges in national currencies, as is already happening between the Eurasian countries, Iran, China, India, Turkey and Russia, recently joined by Pakistan, or the case of Saudi Arabia and China. The challenge seems to be simple: escape the “cursed” currencies, but without appearing to do so urgently, lest everything fall into place.
This result was obvious and has been predicted so many times over the past decade. Even in unsuspecting channels from the point of view of neoliberal ideology like Bloomberg or Politico. But not even these warnings have deterred the suicidal arrogance and prepotency that results from 500 years of Western racial supremacy.
Today, after Annalena Berbock confirmed to us that we have been dragged into a war, without any democratic background discussion and public reflection, except for endless hours of “slava Ukraini” propaganda in the corporate media; such a war also starts from an underestimation of the military and industrial capabilities of the Russian federation itself. If we read the report made by the Congress a couple of years ago about the military capabilities of the Russian Federation, we would see that the general conclusion was something like: a lot of weapons, but unsophisticated, with precision problems and outdated in relation to the U.S. But this is not the story told by the more than 7,500 tanks shot down, the more than 300 planes, more than 200 helicopters and, most important of all, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, mainly of soldiers (Zaluzhny reportedly told the Pentagon that there were 232,000, CIA sources say 305,000, and Chinese intelligence is already talking about 500,000 to 680,000). Whether it is the smallest or the smallest, especially when compared to the Russian losses, it gives us a catastrophic idea of the disproportion of forces. We are indeed witnessing a process of demilitarization and denazification.
With this background, the sending of tanks was discussed, in another episode of “wonder weapons”. But this time, and after the others did not have the desired effect, the US no longer wants to throw more arms sales deals on the back burner, as happened with the “wonderful” HIMAR or M777. Send their Abrahms tanks there and soon the number of sales would drop. So, let the Germans send their Panzer-Gepard there. Sholz didn’t want to? When I heard him say that he would only send them if… I immediately thought, “he still hasn’t received the non-refusable request from Biden and friends”. It didn’t take a day for pictures of the tanks to appear on their way to Poland, even before the public announcement. This is the Germany of today: a cluster of Teutonic identity riders mounted on unicorns, wearing pink armor, and holding sunflowers instead of swords. How sad!
Be that as it may, a spring campaign is being prepared in which, to defend the USA, another 100,000 forcibly recruited Ukrainian soldiers will be sacrificed in the name of Bandera (the videos of people being caught in the streets, in shopping malls, hiding from the police… are multiplying at breakneck speed)!
Having already guaranteed the defeat of the offensive (come on… a country like FR would rather sacrifice millions of its best children than submit to some Western empire), the US is already preparing for the next desperate maneuver. Playing Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Meanwhile follow the so far frustrated attempts at “colored” revolution (the others are learning how to disarm the CIA’s NGO army), to get more candidates for the post of “ukraine” in the pacific.
The RAND study points precisely to this “priority”. One more that will lead to actions whose prerequisites are not verified and, therefore, doomed to failure. But as someone, from the US, said some time ago: “there are no more good options”. Only the desperate ones. It reminds one of the last days of the Reich with its search for the “wonder weapons”.
But if the rest of the world has already seen the scenes of the next chapters, here in NATO territory, the corporate media is still in delusional mode, according to which, the world is a US backyard and the collective West is the civilizational reference… It’s like the cliché “Ukraine is winning the war”.
It will be my pleasure to watch a whole crowd of newsmen, analysts, politologists, and other charlatans doing the pin-up… and saying “no one saw this coming”!
Isn’t that what they always do? In a sign of desperation?
And some people still believe in them!
Hugo Dionísio’s Telegram:
Filed under: China, Germany, India, Iran, NATO Alliance, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine | Tagged: Antony Blinken, AUKUS, Belarus, BRICS, brl, Central Asia, CIA, Color Revolutions, IMF, KSA, Minsk Agreements, RAND Corporation, Unipolar World Order, Victoria Nuland | Comments Off on Desperate actions
24 Dec 2022
By Al Mayadeen English
Some participants of closed projects, however, remain hidden even though they represent main figures in Ukraine’s biological program.
Commander of Russian Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov confirmed during the 9th Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention that the US Pentagon is transferring military-biological research in Ukraine to Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
“According to the available information, the Pentagon is actively transferring studies that are not completed within the framework of Ukrainian projects to the countries of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Simultaneously, the US Department of Defense is increasing its cooperation with the states of Africa and the Asia-Pacific region – Kenya, Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand. States that already have laboratories with a high level of biological isolation are of particular interest to the American military department,” he said.
Kirillov also confirmed that the Russian Defense Ministry received access to the US Department of Defense report on Biological Threat Reduction Program Activities in Ukraine, in which several Ukrainian biological research institutes and three Pentagon contractors are partaking.
“Earlier we cited the report of Defense Threat Reduction Agency on activities in Ukraine, published by an American non-governmental organization. The Pentagon subjected the document to serious censorship, completely removing about 80% of the information. An expanded version of this report has become available to the Russian Defense Ministry, which reveals the names and posts of specialists and managers of biological projects, a list of laboratories involved, as well as facts confirming the conduct of exercises and training with pathogens of particularly dangerous infections,” he relayed.
The report harbors the personal data of thirty laboratory employees and seven managers from the US DoD.
Read more: Russia releases documents on US-funded bio-weapons, Hunter Biden exposed
In early September, Kirillov warned that the US is planning on transferring its programs of biological research from Ukraine to post-Soviet republics, as well as Eastern European and Baltic states. “The Pentagon is poised to shortly relocate the programs unfinished in Ukraine to other post-Soviet states, as well as to Eastern European states, such as Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states,” Kirillov said.
A week later, US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price went on to dismiss Russia’s assertions about Washington developing biological weapons in Ukraine, claiming that Russia’s accusations were part of Moscow’s “ongoing disinformation campaign” and an attempt to “malign peaceful US cooperation with Ukraine.”
The Russian Defense Ministry also named new high-ranking participants in the military biological program in Ukraine, including ex-heads of structures of the US Department of Health, Kirillov said on Friday.
“Earlier, we presented materials confirming the participation of Hunter Biden and his Rosemont Seneca Foundation, as well as other structures controlled by the US Democratic Party in financing Pentagon’s main contractors operating in Ukraine. It was shown how deeply the son of the current US President [Joe Biden], Hunter Biden, is involved in financing the Metabiota company controlled by the US Ministry of Defense,” Kirillov said.
Read next: US-led biolabs in Ukraine experiment on soldiers, mentally ill
Some participants of closed projects, however, remain hidden even though they represent main figures in Ukraine’s biological program.
“Among them are former director of Defense Threat Reduction Agency Kenneth Myers, executive vice president of the CIA-controlled In-Q-Tel venture fund Tara O’Toole, former head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thomas Frieden, former director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, former CEO of the Battelle Memorial Institute Jeffrey Wadsworth, chief researcher and president of the Department of International Research, Development and Medicine of Pfizer, and many others,” Kirillov revealed.
He did leave a plot twist: all of the above-mentioned are associated with the US Democratic Party.
It’s noteworthy that back in March, the Defense Ministry Spokesperson Major General Igor Konashenkov revealed that Kiev was urgently covering up traces of a military biological program carried out in Ukraine and funded by the Pentagon. Konashenkov told reporters that “during the special military operation, [Russia] revealed the facts of an urgent sweep by the Kiev regime of traces of a military biological program being implemented in Ukraine, financed by the US Defense Ministry.”
Read more: US funded 46 biolabs in Ukraine: Pentagon
Filed under: East Eurpoe, Russia, Ukraine, USA | Tagged: Baltic republics, Bioterroism, Central Asia, Hunter Biden, US-run biolabs in Ukraine | Comments Off on Pentagon transferring biolab research in Ukraine elsewhere: Russia
Thursday, 13 October 2022 7:10 PM [ Last Update: Friday, 14 October 2022 9:14 AM ]
Everything that matters in the complex process of Eurasia integration was once again at play in Astana, as the – renamed – Kazakh capital hosted the 6th Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA).
The roll call was a Eurasian thing of beauty – featuring the leaders of Russia and Belarus (EAEU), West Asia (Azerbaijan, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Qatar, Palestine) and Central Asia (Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan).
China and Vietnam (East and Southeast Asia) attended at the level of vice presidents.
CICA is a multinational forum focused on cooperation toward peace, security, and stability across Asia.,Kazakh President Tokayev revealed that CICA has just adopted a declaration to turn the forum into an international organization.
CICA has already established a partnership with the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). So in practice, it will soon be working together side-by-side with the SCO, the EAEU and certainly BRICS+.
The Russia-Iran strategic partnership was prominently featured at CICA, especially after Iran being welcomed to the SCO as a full member.
President Raeisi, addressing the forum, stressed the crucial notion of an emerging “new Asia”, where “convergence and security” are “not compatible with the interests of hegemonic countries and any attempt to destabilize independent nations has goals and consequences beyond national geographies, and in fact, aims to target the stability and prosperity of regional countries.”
For Tehran, being a partner in the integration of CICA, within a maze of pan-Asia institutions, is essential after all these decades of”maximum pressure” unleashed by the Hegemon.
Moreover, it opens an opportunity, as Raeisi noted, for Iran to profit from “Asia’s economic infrastructure.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, predictably, was the star of the show in Astana. It’s essential to note that Putin is supported by “all”nations represented at CICA.
High-level bilaterals with Putin included the Emir of Qatar: everyone that matters in West Asia wants to talk to “isolated” Russia.
Putin called for “compensation for the damage caused to the Afghans during the years of occupation” (we all know the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder will refuse it), and emphasized the key role of the SCO to develop Afghanistan.
He stated that Asia, “where new centers of power are growing stronger, plays a big role in the transition to a multipolar world order”.
He warned, “there is a real threat of famine and large-scale shocks against the backdrop of volatility in energy and food prices in the world.”
Hefurther called for the end of a financial system that benefits the “Golden billion” – who “live at the expense of others” (there’s nothing “golden” about this “billion”: at best such definition of wealth applies to 10 million.)
And he stressed that Russia is doing everything to “form a system of equal and indivisible security”. Exactly what drives the hegemonic imperial elites completely berserk.
“Offer you can’t refuse” bites the dust
The imminent juxtaposition between CICA and the SCO and EAEU is yet another instance of how the pieces of the complex Eurasia jigsaw puzzle are coming together.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia – in theory, staunch imperial military allies – are itching to join the SCO, which has recently welcomed Iran as a full member.
That spells out Ankara and Riyadh’s geopolitical choice of forcefully eschewing the imperial Russophobia cum Sinophobia offensive.
Erdogan, as an observer at the recent SCO summit in Samarkand, sent out exactly this message. The SCO is fast reaching the point where we may have, sitting at the same table, and taking important consensual decisions, not only the “RICs” (Russia, India, China) in BRICS (soon to be expanded to BRICS+) but arguably the top players inMuslim countries: Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar.
This evolving process, not without its serious challenges, testifies to the concerted Russia-China drive to incorporate the lands of Islam as essential strategic partners in forging the post-Western multipolar world. Call it a soft Islamization of multipolarity.
No wonder the Anglo-American axis is absolutely petrified.
Now cut to a graphic illustration of all of the above – the way it’s being played in the energy markets: the already legendary Opec+ meeting in Vienna a week ago.
A tectonic geopolitical shift was inbuilt in the – collective – decision to slash oil production by 2 million barrels a day.
The Saudi Foreign Ministry issued a very diplomatic note with a stunning piece of information for those equipped to read between the lines.
For all practical purposes, the combo behind the teleprompter reader in Washington had issued a trademark Mafia threat to stop “protection” to Riyadh if the decision on the oil cuts was taken before the US mid-term elections.
Only this time the “offer you can’t refuse” didn’t bite. OPEC+ made a collective decision, led by Russia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Following Putin and MBS famously getting along, it was up to Putin to host UAE President Sheikh Zayed – or MBZ, MBS’s mentor – at the stunning Konstantinovsky Palace in St. Petersburg, which datesback to Peter the Great.
That was a sort of informal celebration of how OPEC+ had provoked, with a single move, a superpower strategic debacle when it comes to the geopolitics of oil, which the Empire had controlled for a century.
Everyone remembers, after the bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, how US neo-cons bragged, “we are the new OPEC”.
Well, not anymore. And the move had to come from the Russians and US Persian Gulf “allies” when everyone expected that would happen the day a Chinese delegation lands in Riyadh and asks for payment of all the energy they need in yuan.
OPEC+ called the American bluff and left the superpower high’n dry. So what are they going to do to “punish” Riyadh and Abu Dhabi? Call CENTCOM in Qatar and Bahrain to mobilize their aircraft carriers and unleash regime change?
What’s certain is that the Straussian/neocon psychos in charge in Washington will double down on hybrid war.
The art of “spreading instability”
In St. Petersburg, as he addressed MBZ, Putin made it clear that it’s OPEC+ – led by Russia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – that is now setting the pace to “stabilize global energy markets” so consumers and suppliers would “feel calm, stable and confident” and supply and demand “would be balanced”.
On the gas front, at Russian Energy Week, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller made it clear that Russia may still “save” Europe from an energy black hole.
Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) may become operational: but all political roadblocks must be removed before any repairing work starts on the pipelines.
And on West Asia, Miller said additions to Turk Stream have already been planned, much to the delight of Ankara, keen to become a key energy hub.
In a parallel track, it’s absolutely clear that the G7’s desperate gambit of imposing an oil price cap – which translates as the weaponization of sanctions extended to the global energy market – is a losing proposition.
Slightly over a month before hosting the G20 in Bali, Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati could not make it clearer: “When the United States is imposing sanctions using economic instruments, that creates a precedent for everything”, spreading instability “not only for Indonesia but for all other countries.”
Meanwhile, allMuslim-majority countries are paying very close attention to Russia. The Russia-Iran strategic partnership is now advancing in parallel to the Russia-Saudi-UAE entente as crucial vectors of multipolarity.
In the near future, all these vectors are bound to unite in what ideally should be a supra-organization capable of managing the top story of the 21st century: Eurasia integration.
Pepe Escobar is a veteran journalist, author and independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia.
(The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)
Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:
Filed under: American crimes, Bahrain, BRICS, China, Iran, Muslims, Qatar, Russia | Tagged: (CICA) summit, BRICS+, Central Asia, EAEU, Ebrahim Raeisi, Empire of Chaos, Eurasian integration, KSA, MBS, MBZ, Nord Stream 2, Opec+, Pepe Escobar, SCO, Turkstream pipeline, West Asia | Comments Off on Russia courts Muslim countries as strategic Eurasian partners
The SCO summit of Asian power players delineated a road map for strengthening the multipolar world
By Pepe Escobar
Amidst serious tremors in the world of geopolitics, it is so fitting that this year’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) heads of state summit should have taken place in Samarkand – the ultimate Silk Road crossroads for 2,500 years.
When in 329 BC Alexander the Great reached the then Sogdian city of Marakanda, part of the Achaemenid empire, he was stunned: “Everything I have heard about Samarkand it’s true, except it is even more beautiful than I had imagined.”
Fast forward to an Op-Ed by Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev published ahead of the SCO summit, where he stresses how Samarkand now “can become a platform that is able to unite and reconcile states with various foreign policy priorities.”
After all, historically, the world from the point of view of the Silk Road landmark has always been “perceived as one and indivisible, not divided. This is the essence of a unique phenomenon – the ‘Samarkand spirit’.”
And here Mirziyoyev ties the “Samarkand Spirit” to the original SCO “Shanghai Spirit” established in early 2001, a few months before the events of September 11, when the world was forced into strife and endless war, almost overnight.
All these years, the culture of the SCO has been evolving in a distinctive Chinese way. Initially, the Shanghai Five were focused on fighting terrorism – months before the US war of terror (italics mine) metastasized from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond.
Over the years, the initial “three no’s” – no alliance, no confrontation, no targeting any third party – ended up equipping a fast, hybrid vehicle whose ‘four wheels’ are ‘politics, security, economy, and humanities,’ complete with a Global Development Initiative, all of which contrast sharply with the priorities of a hegemonic, confrontational west.
Arguably the biggest takeaway of this week’s Samarkand summit is that Chinese President Xi Jinping presented China and Russia, together, as “responsible global powers” bent on securing the emergence of multipolarity, and refusing the arbitrary “order” imposed by the United States and its unipolar worldview.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pronounced Xi’s bilateral conversation with President Vladimir Putin as “excellent.” Xi Jinping, previous to their meeting, and addressing Putin directly, had already stressed the common Russia-China objectives:
“In the face of the colossal changes of our time on a global scale, unprecedented in history, we are ready with our Russian colleagues to set an example of a responsible world power and play a leading role in order to put such a rapidly changing world on the trajectory of sustainable and positive development.”
Later, in the preamble to the heads of state meeting, Xi went straight to the point: it is important to “prevent attempts by external forces to organize ‘color revolutions’ in the SCO countries.” Well, Europe wouldn’t be able to tell, because it has been color-revolutionized non-stop since 1945.
Putin, for his part, sent a message that will be ringing all across the Global South: “Fundamental transformations have been outlined in world politics and economics, and they are irreversible.” (italics mine)
Iran: it’s showtime
Iran was the guest star of the Samarkand show, officially embraced as the 9th member of the SCO. President Ebrahim Raisi, significantly, stressed before meeting Putin that “Iran does not recognize sanctions against Russia.” Their strategic partnership will be enhanced. On the business front, a hefty delegation comprising leaders of 80 large Russian companies will be visiting Tehran next week.
The increasing Russia-China-Iran interpolation – the three top drivers of Eurasia integration – scares the hell out of the usual suspects, who may be starting to grasp how the SCO represents, in the long run, a serious challenge to their geoeconomic game. So, as every grain of sand in every Heartland desert is already aware, the geopolitical pressure against the trio will increase exponentially.
And then there was the mega-crucial Samarkand trilateral: Russia-China-Mongolia. There were no official leaks, but this trio arguably discussed the Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline – the interconnector to be built across Mongolia; and Mongolia’s enhanced role in a crucial Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) connectivity corridor, now that China is not using the Trans-Siberian route for exports to Europe because of sanctions.
Putin briefed Xi on all aspects of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, and arguably answered some really tough questions, many of them circulating wildly on the Chinese web for months now.
Which brings us to Putin’s presser at the end of the summit – with virtually all questions predictably revolving around the military theater in Ukraine.
The key takeaway from the Russian president: “There are no changes on the SMO plan. The main tasks are being implemented.” On peace prospects, it is Ukraine that “is not ready to talk to Russia.” And overall, “it is regrettable that the west had the idea to use Ukraine to try to collapse Russia.”
On the fertilizer soap opera, Putin remarked, “food supply, energy supply, they (the west) created these problems, and now are trying to resolve them at the expense of someone else” – meaning the poorest nations. “European countries are former colonial powers and they still have this paradigm of colonial philosophy. The time has come to change their behavior, to become more civilized.”
On his meeting with Xi Jinping: “It was just a regular meeting, it’s been quite some time we haven’t had a meeting face to face.” They talked about how to “expand trade turnover” and circumvent the “trade wars caused by our so-called partners,” with “expansion of settlements in national currencies not progressing as fast as we want.”
Strenghtening multipolarity
Putin’s bilateral with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi could not have been more cordial – on a “very special friendship” register – with Modi calling for serious solutions to the food and fuel crises, actually addressing the west. Meanwhile, the State Bank of India will be opening special rupee accounts to handle Russia-related trade.
This is Xi’s first foreign trip since the Covid pandemic. He could do it because he’s totally confident of being awarded a third term during the Communist Party Congress next month in Beijing. Xi now controls and/or has allies placed in at least 90 percent of the Politburo.
The other serious reason was to recharge the appeal of BRI in close connection to the SCO. China’s ambitious BRI project was officially launched by Xi in Astana (now Nur-Sultan) nine years ago. It will remain the overarching Chinese foreign policy concept for decades ahead.
BRI’s emphasis on trade and connectivity ties in with the SCO’s evolving multilateral cooperation mechanisms, congregating nations focusing on economic development independent from the hazy, hegemonic “rules-based order.” Even India under Modi is having second thoughts about relying on western blocs, where New Delhi is at best a neo-colonized “partner.”
So Xi and Putin, in Samarkand, for all practical purposes delineated a road map for strengthening multipolarity – as stressed by the final Samarkand declaration signed by all SCO members.
The Kazakh puzzle
There will be bumps on the road aplenty. It’s no accident that Xi started his trip in Kazakhstan – China’s mega-strategic western rear, sharing a very long border with Xinjiang. The tri-border at the dry port of Khorgos – for lorries, buses and trains, separately – is quite something, an absolutely key BRI node.
The administration of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in Nur-Sultan (soon to be re-named Astana again) is quite tricky, swinging between eastern and western political orientations, and infiltrated by Americans as much as during the era of predecessor Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s first post-USSR president.
Earlier this month, for instance, Nur-Sultan, in partnership with Ankara and British Petroleum (BP) – which virtually rules Azerbaijan – agreed to increase the volume of oil on the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline to up to 4 million tons a month by the end of this year. Chevron and ExxonMobil, very active in Kazakhstan, are part of the deal.
The avowed agenda of the usual suspects is to “ultimately disconnect the economies of Central Asian countries from the Russian economy.” As Kazakhstan is a member not only of the Russian-led Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), but also the BRI, it is fair to assume that Xi – as well as Putin – discussed some pretty serious issues with Tokayev, told him to grasp which way the wind is blowing, and advised him to keep the internal political situation under control (see the aborted coup in January, when Tokayev was de facto saved by the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization [CSTO]).
There’s no question Central Asia, historically known as a “box of gems” at the center of the Heartland, striding the Ancient Silk Roads and blessed with immense natural wealth – fossil fuels, rare earth metals, fertile agrarian lands – will be used by the usual suspects as a Pandora’s box, releasing all manner of toxic tricks against legitimate Eurasian integration.
That’s in sharp contrast with West Asia, where Iran in the SCO will turbo-charge its key role of crossroads connectivity between Eurasia and Africa, in connection with the BRI and the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).
So it’s no wonder that the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait, all in West Asia, do recognize which way the wind is blowing. The three Persian Gulf states received official SCO ‘partner status’ in Samarkand, alongside the Maldives and Myanmar.
A cohesion of goals
Samarkand also gave an extra impulse to integration along the Russian-conceptualized Greater Eurasia Partnership – which includes the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) – and that, just two weeks after the game-changing Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) held in Vladivostok, on Russia’s strategic Pacific coast.
Moscow’s priority at the EAEU is to implement a union-state with Belarus (which looks bound to become a new SCO member before 2024), side-by-side with closer integration with the BRI. Serbia, Singapore and Iran have trade agreements with the EAEU too.
The Greater Eurasian Partnership was proposed by Putin in 2015 – and it’s getting sharper as the EAEU commission, led by Sergey Glazyev, actively designs a new financial system, based on gold and natural resources and counter-acting the Bretton Woods system. Once the new framework is ready to be tested, the key disseminator is likely to be the SCO.
So here we see in play the full cohesion of goals – and the interaction mechanisms – deployed by the Greater Eurasia Partnership, BRI, EAEU, SCO, BRICS+ and the INSTC. It’s a titanic struggle to unite all these organizations and take into account the geoeconomic priorities of each member and associate partner, but that’s exactly what’s happening, at breakneck speed.
In this connectivity feast, practical imperatives range from fighting local bottlenecks to setting up complex multi-party corridors – from the Caucasus to Central Asia, from Iran to India, everything discussed in multiple roundtables.
Successes are already notable: from Russia and Iran introducing direct settlements in rubles and rials, to Russia and China increasing their trade in rubles and yuan to 20 percent – and counting. An Eastern Commodity Exchange may be soon established in Vladivostok to facilitate trade in futures and derivatives with the Asia-Pacific.
China is the undisputed primary creditor/investor in infrastructure across Central Asia. Beijing’s priorities may be importing gas from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and oil from Kazakhstan, but connectivity is not far behind.
The $5 billion construction of the 600 km-long Pakistan-Afghanistan-Uzbekistan (Pakafuz) railway will deliver cargo from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean in only three days instead of 30. And that railway will be linked to Kazakhstan and the already in progress 4,380 km-long Chinese-built railway from Lanzhou to Tashkent, a BRI project.
Nur-Sultan is also interested in a Turkmenistan-Iran-Türkiye railway, which would connect its port of Aktau on the Caspian Sea with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea.
Türkiye, meanwhile, still a SCO observer and constantly hedging its bets, slowly but surely is trying to strategically advance its own Pax Turcica, from technological development to defense cooperation, all that under a sort of politico-economic-security package. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did discuss it in Samarkand with Putin, as the latter later announced that 25 percent of Russian gas bought by Ankara will be paid in rubles.
Welcome to Great Game 2.0
Russia, even more than China, knows that the usual suspects are going for broke. In 2022 alone, there was a failed coup in Kazakhstan in January; troubles in Badakhshan, in Tajikistan, in May; troubles in Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan in June; the non-stop border clashes between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (both presidents, in Samarkand, at least agreed on a ceasefire and to remove troops from their borders).
And then there is recently-liberated Afghanistan – with no less than 11 provinces crisscrossed by ISIS-Khorasan and its Tajik and Uzbek associates. Thousands of would-be Heartland jihadis have made the trip to Idlib in Syria and then back to Afghanistan – ‘encouraged’ by the usual suspects, who will use every trick under the sun to harass and ‘isolate’ Russia from Central Asia.
So Russia and China should be ready to be involved in a sort of immensely complex, rolling Great Game 2.0 on steroids, with the US/NATO fighting united Eurasia and Turkiye in the middle.
On a brighter note, Samarkand proved that at least consensus exists among all the players at different institutional organizations that: technological sovereignty will determine sovereignty; and that regionalization – in this case Eurasian – is bound to replace US-ruled globalization.
These players also understand that the Mackinder and Spykman era is coming to a close – when Eurasia was ‘contained’ in a semi-disassembled shape so western maritime powers could exercise total domination, contrary to the national interests of Global South actors.
It’s now a completely different ball game. As much as the Greater Eurasia Partnership is fully supported by China, both favor the interconnection of BRI and EAEU projects, while the SCO shapes a common environment.
Yes, this is an Eurasian civilizational project for the 21st century and beyond. Under the aegis of the ‘Spirit of Samarkand.’
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Filed under: Afghanistan, American Wars, China, India-Russia Relations, Iran, NATO Alliance, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, USA, Western Hegemony | Tagged: Anti-Russian sanctions, Asia-Pacific, BRICS+, brl, Central Asia, EAEU, Eurasian integration, Global South, INSTC, Kazakhstan, Multi-polar world order, Pepe Escobar, SCO, Silk Road, SMO, Unipolar World Order, Xi Jinping | Comments Off on ‘Samarkand Spirit’ to be driven by ‘responsible powers’ Russia and China
by Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted
Sixty-eight countries gathered on Russia’s far eastern coast to listen to Moscow’s economic and political vision for the Asia-Pacific
The Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok is one of the indispensable annual milestones for keeping up not only with the complex development process of the Russian Far East but major plays for Eurasia integration.
Mirroring an immensely turbulent 2022, the current theme in Vladivostok is ‘On the Path to a Multipolar World.’ Russian President Vladimir Putin himself, in a short message to business and government participants from 68 nations, set the stage:
“The obsolete unipolar model is being replaced by a new world order based on the fundamental principles of justice and equality, as well as the recognition of the right of each state and people to their own sovereign path of development. Powerful political and economic centers are taking shape right here in the Asia-Pacific region, acting as a driving force in this irreversible process.”
In his speech to the EEF plenary session, Ukraine was barely mentioned. Putin’s response when asked about it: “Is this country part of Asia-Pacific?”
The speech was largely structured as a serious message to the collective west, as well as to what top analyst Sergey Karaganov calls the “global majority.” Among several takeaways, these may be the most relevant:
In a nutshell: Asia is the new epicenter of technological progress and productivity.
No more an ‘object of colonization’
Taking place only two weeks before another essential annual gathering – the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Samarkand – it is no wonder some of the top discussions at the EEF revolve around the increasing economic interpolation between the SCO and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
This theme is as crucial as the development of the Russian Arctic: at 41 percent of total territory, that’s the largest resource base in the federation, spread out over nine regions, and encompassing the largest Special Economic Zone (SEZ) on the planet, linked to the free port of Vladivostok. The Arctic is being developed via several strategically important projects processing mineral, energy, water and biological natural resources.
So it’s perfectly fitting that Austria’s former foreign minister Karin Kneissel, self-described as “a passionate historian,” quipped about her fascination at how Russia and its Asian partners are tackling the development of the Northern Sea Route: “One of my favorite expressions is that airlines and pipelines are moving east. And I keep saying this for twenty years.”
Amidst a wealth of roundtables exploring everything from the power of territory, supply chains and global education to “the three whales” (science, nature, human), arguably the top discussion this Tuesday at the forum was centered on the role of the SCO.
Apart from the current full members – Russia, China, India, Pakistan, four Central Asians (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan), plus the recent accession of Iran – no less than 11 further nations want to join, from observer Afghanistan to dialogue partner Turkey.
Grigory Logvinov, the SCO’s deputy secretary general, stressed how the economic, political and scientific potential of players comprising “the center of gravity” for Asia – over a quarter of the world’s GDP, 50 percent of the world’s population – has not been fully harvested yet.
Kirill Barsky, from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, explained how the SCO is actually the model of multipolarity, according to its charter, compared to the backdrop of “destructive processes” launched by the west.
And that leads to the economic agenda in the Eurasian integration progress, with the Russian-led Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) configured as the SCO’s most important partner.
Barsky identifies the SCO as “the core Eurasian structure, forming the agenda of Greater Eurasia within a network of partnership organizations.” That’s where the importance of the cooperation with ASEAN comes in.
Barsky could not but evoke Mackinder, Spykman and Brzezinski – who regarded Eurasia “as an object to be acted upon the wishes of western states, confined within the continent, away from the ocean shores, so the western world could dominate in a global confrontation of land and sea. The SCO as it developed can triumph over these negative concepts.”
And here we hit a notion widely shared from Tehran to Vladivostok:
Eurasia no longer as “an object of colonization by ‘civilized Europe’ but again an agent of global policy.”
‘India wants a 21st Asian century’
Sun Zuangnzhi from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) elaborated on China’s interest in the SCO. He focused on achievements: In the 21 years since its founding, a mechanism to establish security between China, Russia and Central Asian states evolved into “multi-tiered, multi-sector cooperation mechanisms.”
Instead of “turning into a political instrument,” the SCO should capitalize on its role of dialogue forum for states with a difficult history of conflicts – “interactions are sometimes difficult” – and focus on economic cooperation “on health, energy, food security, reduction of poverty.”
Rashid Alimov, a former SCO secretary general, now a professor at the Taihe Institute, stressed the “high expectations” from Central Asian nations, the core of the organization. The original idea remains – based on the indivisibility of security on a trans-regional level in Eurasia.
Well, we all know how the US and NATO reacted when Russia late last year proposed a serious dialogue on “indivisibility of security.”
As Central Asia does not have an outlet to the sea, it is inevitable, as Alimov stressed, that Uzbekistan’s foreign policy privileges involvement in accelerated intra-SCO trade. Russia and China may be the leading investors, and now “Iran also plays an important role. Over 1,200 Iranian companies are working in Central Asia.”
Connectivity, once again, must increase: “The World Bank rates Central Asia as one of the least connected economies in the world.”
Sergey Storchak of Russian bank VEB explained the workings of the “SCO interbank consortium.” Partners have used “a credit line from the Bank of China” and want to sign a deal with Uzbekistan. The SCO interbank consortium will be led by the Indians on a rotation basis – and they want to step up its game. At the upcoming summit in Samarkand, Storchak expects a road map for the transition towards the use of national currencies in regional trade.
Kumar Rajan from the School of International Studies of the Jawaharlal Nehru University articulated the Indian position. He went straight to the point: “India wants a 21st Asian century. Close cooperation between India and China is necessary. They can make the Asian century happen.”
Rajan remarked how India does not see the SCO as an alliance, but committed to the development and political stability of Eurasia.
He made the crucial point about connectivity revolving around India “working with Russia and Central Asia with the INSTC” – the International North South Transportation Corridor, and one of its key hubs, the Chabahar port in Iran: “India does not have direct physical connectivity with Central Asia. The INSTC has the participation of an Iranian shipping line with 300 vessels, connecting to Mumbai. President Putin, in the [recent] Caspian meeting, referred directly to the INSTC.”
Crucially, India not only supports the Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership but is engaged in setting up a free trade agreement with the EAEU: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, incidentally, came to the Vladivostok forum last year.
In all of the above nuanced interventions, some themes are constant. After the Afghanistan disaster and the end of the US occupation there, the stabilizing role of the SCO cannot be overstated enough. An ambitious road map for cooperation is a must – probably to be approved at the Samarkand summit. All players will be gradually changing to trade in bilateral currencies. And creation of transit corridors is leading to the progressive integration of national transit systems.
Let there be light
A key roundtable on the ‘Gateway to a Multipolar World’ expanded on the SCO role, outlining how most Asian nations are “friendly” or “benevolently neutral” when it comes to Russia after the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine.
So the possibilities for expanding cooperation across Eurasia remain practically unlimited. Complementarity of economies is the main factor. That would lead, among other developments, to the Russian Far East, as a multipolar hub, turning into “Russia’s gateway to Asia” by the 2030s.
Wang Wen from the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies stressed the need for Russia to rediscover China – finding “mutual trust in the middle level and elites level”. At the same time, there’s a sort of global rush to join BRICS, from Saudi Arabia and Iran to Afghanistan and Argentina:
“That means a new civilization model for emerging economies like China and Argentina because they want to rise up peacefully (…) I think we are in the new civilization age.”
B. K. Sharma from the United Service Institution of India got back to Spykman pigeonholing the nation as a rimland state. Not anymore: India now has multiple strategies, from connecting to Central Asia to the ‘Act East’ policy. Overall, it’s an outreach to Eurasia, as India “is not competitive and needs to diversify to get better access to Eurasia, with logistical help from Russia.“
Sharma stresses how India takes SCO, BRICS and RICs very seriously while seeing Russia playing “an important role in the Indian Ocean.” He nuances the Indo-Pacific outlook: India does not want Quad as a military alliance, privileging instead “interdependence and complementarity between India, Russia and China.”
All of these discussions interconnect with the two overarching themes in several Vladivostok roundtables: energy and the development of the Arctic’s natural resources.
Pavel Sorokin, Russian First Deputy Minister of Energy, dismissed the notion of a storm or typhoon in the energy markets: “It’s a far cry from a natural process. It’s a man-made situation.” The Russian economy, in contrast, is seen by most analysts as slowly but surely designing its Arctic/Asian cooperation future – including, for instance, the creation of a sophisticated trans-shipment infrastructure for Liquified Natural Gas (LNG).
Energy Minister Nikolay Shulginov made sure that Russia will actually increase its gas production, considering the rise of LNG deliveries and the construction of Power of Siberia-2 to China: “We will not merely scale up the pipeline capacity but we will also expand LNG production: it has mobility and excellent purchases on the global market.”
On the Northern Sea Route, the emphasis is on building a powerful, modern icebreaker fleet – including nuclear. Gadzhimagomed Guseynov, First Deputy Minister for the Development of the Far East and the Arctic, is adamant: “What Russia has to do is to make the Northern Sea Route a sustainable and important transit route.”
There is a long-term plan up to 2035 to create infrastructure for safe shipping navigation, following an ‘Arctic best practices’ of learning step by step. NOVATEK, according to its deputy chairman Evgeniy Ambrosov, has been conducting no less than a revolution in terms of Arctic navigation and shipbuilding in the last few years.
Kniessel, the former Austrian minister, recalled that she always missed the larger geopolitical picture in her discussions when she was active in European politics (she now lives in Lebanon): “I wrote about the passing of the torch from Atlanticism to the Pacific. Airlines, pipelines and waterways are moving East. The Far East is actually Pacific Russia.”
Whatever Atlanticists may think of it, the last word for the moment might belong to Vitaly Markelov, from the board of directors of Gazprom: Russia is ready for winter. There will be warmth and light everywhere.”
Filed under: Asia, BRICS, India, Iran, Pakistan, Putin, Russia, Ukraine, Uncategorized | Tagged: Anti-Russian sanctions, Asia-Pacific, Central Asia, Chabahar port, EAEU, Eurasian integration, Indivisibility of security, LNG, Multi-polar world order, Pepe Escobar, SCO, SMO, Unipolar World Order | Comments Off on Asia’s future takes shape in Vladivostok, the Russian Pacific
Shrugging off western obstacles, Eurasia’s ambitious connectivity projects helmed by China and Russia are now progressing deep into Asia’s Heartland
SAMARKAND – Interconnecting Inner Eurasia is an exercise in Taoist equilibrium: adding piece by piece, patiently, to a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. It takes time, skill, vision, and of course major breakthroughs.
A key piece was added to the puzzle recently in Uzbekistan, bolstering the links between the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).
The Mirzoyoyev government in Tashkent is deeply engaged in turbo-driving yet another Central Asian transportation corridor: a China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan-Afghanistan railway.
That was at the center of a meeting between the chairman of the board of Temir Yullari – the Uzbek national railways – and his counterparts in Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan, as well as managers of the Chinese Wakhan Corridor logistics company.
In terms of the complex intersection of Xinjiang with Central and South Asia, this is as groundbreaking as it gets, as part of what I call the War of Economic Corridors.
The Uzbeks have pragmatically spun the new corridor as essential to cargo transport under low tariffs – but that goes way beyond mere trade calculations.
Imagine, in practice, cargo containers coming by train from Kashgar in Xinjiang to Osh in Kyrgyzstan and then to Hairatan in Afghanistan. Annual volume is planned to reach 60,000 containers in the first year alone.
That would be crucial to develop Afghanistan’s productive trade – away from the “aid” obsession of the US occupation. Afghan products will finally be able to be easily exported to Central Asian neighbors and also China, for instance to the bustling Kashgar market.
And that stabilizing factor would bolster the Taliban’s coffers, now that the leadership in Kabul is very much interested in buying Russian oil, gas and wheat under vastly attractive discounts.
How to get Afghanistan back in the game
There’s also the possibility of spinning off a road project from this railway that would cross the ultra-strategic Wakhan corridor – something that Beijing has already been contemplating for a few years.
The Wakhan is shared by northern Afghanistan and the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan: a long, barren, spectacular geological strip, advancing all the way to Xinjiang.
By now it’s clear not only to Kabul, but also to members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), that the humiliated Americans will not restitute the billions of dollars ‘confiscated’ from the Afghan Central Bank’s reserves – something that would at least mitigate Afghanistan’s current, dire economic crisis and imminent mass famine.
So Plan B is to bolster the – for the moment devastated – Afghan supply and trade chains. Russia will be in charge of security for the whole Central-South Asian crossroads. China will provide the bulk of the financing. And that’s where the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan-Afghanistan railway fits in.
China sees a road across the Wakhan – a very complicated proposition – as an extra BRI corridor, linking to the China-repaved Pamir highway in Tajikistan and China-rebuilt Kyrgyzstan roads.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has already built an 80 km access road from the Chinese stretch of the Karakoram Highway – before it reaches the Pakistan border – to a mountain pass in the Wakhan, currently only available for cars and jeeps.
The next Chinese move would be to proceed further on down that road by 450 km, all the way to Fayzabad, the provincial capital of Afghan Badakhshan. That would constitute the roadside back-up corridor to the China-Central Asia-Afghanistan railway.
The key point is that the Chinese, as much as the Uzbeks, fully understand the extremely strategic location of Afghanistan: not only as a Central/South Asian crossroads, connecting to key ocean ports in Pakistan and Iran (Karachi, Gwadar, Chabahar) and to the Caspian Sea via Turkmenistan, but also helping landlocked Uzbekistan to connect to markets in South Asia.
That’s all part of the BRI corridor maze; and at the same time interlocks with the INSTC because of the key role of Iran (itself increasingly linked with Russia).
Tehran is already engaged in building a railway to Herat, in western Afghanistan (it already rebuilt the road). Then we will have Afghanistan inbuilt in both BRI (as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, CPEC) and the INSTC, giving momentum to yet another project: a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Tajikistan (TAT) railway, to be linked to Iran and thus the INSTC.
From the Karakoram to Pakafuz
The Karakoram highway – the northern part of which was rebuilt by the Chinese – may sooner or later get a railway sister. The Chinese have been thinking about it since 2014.
By 2016, a railway from the China-Pakistan border to Gilgit, in the northern areas and then further down to Peshawar, was enshrined as part of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) blueprint. But then nothing happened: the railway is not included in the 2017-2030 CPEC Long Term Plan.
That may eventually happen in the next decade: the engineering and logistics are an enormous challenge, as they were for the building of the Karakoram highway.
And then there’s the “follow the money” angle. The top two Chinese banks financing BRI – and thus CPEC – projects are the China Development Bank and the Export Import Bank. Even before Covid they were already toning down their loans. And with Covid, they now have to balance foreign projects with domestic loans for the Chinese economy.
The connectivity priority instead shifted to the Pakistan-Afghanistan-Uzbekistan (Pakafuz) railway.
The key stretch of Pakafuz links Peshawar (the capital of the tribal areas) to Kabul. When it’s finished, we’ll see Pakafuz directly interacting with the upcoming China-Central Asia-Afghanistan railway: a new BRI maze directly connected with the INSTC.
All of the above developments reveal their true complexity when we see they are simultaneously inserted into the interaction of BRI and the INSTC and the harmonization between BRI and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).
Essentially, in geopolitical and geoeconomic terms, the relation between BRI and EAEU projects allows Russia and China to cooperate across Eurasia while avoiding a race to reach a dominant position in the Heartland.
For instance, both Beijing and Moscow agree on the supreme need to stabilize Afghanistan and help it to run a sustainable economy.
In parallel, some important BRI members – like Uzbekistan – are not members of the EAEU, but that is compensated by their membership in the SCO. At the same time, the BRI-EAEU entente facilitates economic cooperation between EAEU members such as Kyrgyzstan and China.
Beijing de facto got full approval from Moscow to invest in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia, all EAEU members. A future currency or basket of currencies bypassing the US dollar is being jointly discussed between the EAEU – led by Sergei Glazyev – and China.
China focuses on Central/West Asia
There’s no question that the proxy war in Ukraine between the US and Russia has been creating serious problems for BRI expansion. After all, the US war on Russia is also a war against BRI.
The top three BRI corridors from Xinjiang to Europe are the New Eurasian Land Bridge, the China-Central Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor, and the China-Russia-Mongolia Economic Corridor.
The New Eurasian Land Bridge uses the Trans-Siberian and a second link through Xinjiang-Kazakhstan (via the dry land port of Khorgos) and then Russia. The corridor via Mongolia is in fact two corridors: one from Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei to Inner Mongolia and then Russia; and the other from Dalian and Shenyang and then to Chita in Russia, near the Chinese border.
As it stands, the Chinese are not using Land Bridge and the Mongolian corridor as much as before, mainly because of western sanctions on Russia. The current BRI emphasis is via Central Asia and West Asia, with one branch then bisecting toward the Persian Gulf and on the Mediterranean.
And this is where we see another – highly complex – level of intersection quickly developing: how the increasing importance for China of Central Asia and West Asia mixes with the increasing importance of the INSTC for both Russia and Iran in their trade with India.
Call it the friendly vector of the War of Transportation Corridors.
The hardcore vector – real war – is already being deployed by the usual suspects. They are predictably bent on destabilizing and/or smashing any node of BRI/INSTC/EAEU/SCO Eurasia integration, by any means necessary: be it in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Balochistan, the Central Asian “stans” or Xinjiang.
As far as the major Eurasian actors are concerned, that’s bound to be an Anglo-American train to nowhere.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Filed under: Afghanistan, China, Eurasia, India, Iran | Tagged: brl, Central Asia, CPEC, EAEU, INSTC, Pepe Escobar | Comments Off on A Eurasian jigsaw: BRI and INSTC interconnectivity will complete the puzzle
July 30 2022
By Pepe Escobar
KONYA – Mystic poet, Sufi, theosophist, and thinker, Jalal al-Din Rumi remains one of the most beloved historical personalities in history, east and west. A wanderer in search of the light, he famously characterized himself thus: “I am nothing more than a humble lover of God.”
The era of Rumi’s father – Sultan Bahaeddin Veled (1152-1231) and son (1207-1273) – was an extraordinary socio-political rollercoaster. It’s absolutely impossible for us today to understand the ideas, allusions and parables that trespass Rumi’s magnum opus, the six-volume Masnevi , in 25,620 couplets, without delving into some serious time travel.
In the Masnevi , written in Persian – the prime literary language in West and Central Asia in those times – Rumi used poetry essentially as a tool for teaching divine secrets, explaining them via parables. The Rumi Project is to show Man the path to Divine Love, leading him from a low stage to the highest. Squeezed and subdued by the techno-feudalism juggernaut, we may now need to heed these lessons more than ever in history.
The Masnevi became hugely popular across Eurasia immediately after Rumi’s death in 1273 – from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan to Central Asia, Iran and Turkey. Then, slowly but surely, the man and the opus ended up reaching even the collective west (Goethe was mesmerized) and inspiring a wealth of learned commentaries, in Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu and English.
“The master from Anatolia”
Let’s start our time travel in the 11th century, when some Turkish tribes, after crossing Transoxiana, began to settle in northern Persia. These new Turkish tribes – from the Ghaznavids to the Seljuks (actually the branch of a Turkoman tribe) – constituted fabulous dynasties that played a key role in the inter-mixing of Turkic and Persian culture (what the Chinese today, applying it to the New Silk Roads, call “people to people contacts”).
Islam spread very fast in Persia under the rule of the religiously tolerant Samanids. That was the foundation stone for Mahmud of Ghazna (998-1030) to form a great Turkish empire, from northeastern Persia to very remote parts of India. Mahmud made a great impression on Rumi.
While the Ghaznavids remained powerful in eastern Persia, the Seljuks established a powerful empire not only in parts of Iran but also in the remote lands of Anatolia (called Arz-I Rum). That’s the reason why Rumi is called Mavlana-yi Rum (“the master from Anatolia”).
Rumi as a kid lived in legendary Balkh (part of Khorasan in northern Afghanistan), capital of the Khwarazm empire. When he and his father were still there, the king was Ala al-Din, who came from a dynasty established by a Turkish slave.
After a series of incredibly messy kingdom clashes, Ala al-Din saw himself pitted in battle against the king of Samarkand, Osman Khan. That ended up in a massacre in 1212, in which Ala al-Din’s soldiers killed 10,000 people in Samarkand. The young Rumi was shocked.
Ala al-Din wanted to be no less than the absolute ruler of the Muslim world. He refused to obey the Caliph in Baghdad. He even started entertaining designs on China – where Genghis Khan had already conquered Pekin.
Ala al-Din sent an envoy to China who was very well treated by Genghis, who had an eye on – what else – good business between the two empires (the Silk Road bug, again). Genghis sent his ambassadors back, full of gifts. Ala al-Din received them in Transoxiana in 1218.
But then the governor of one of his provinces, a close relative, robbed and killed some of the Mongols. Genghis demanded punishment. The Sultan refused. Well, you don’t want to pick up a fight with Genghis Khan. He duly started a series of massacres in Persia, and inevitably the Khwarazm empire – along with its great cities, Samarkand, Bukhara, Balkh, Merv – collapsed. By then, Rumi and his father had already left.
Like Baghdad, each of these fabulous cities was a center of learning. Rumi’s Balkh had a mixed culture of Arabs, Sassanians, Turks, Buddhists and Christians. After Alexander The Great, Balkh became the hub of Greco-Bactria. Just before the coming of Islam, it was a Buddhist hub and a center of Zoroastrian teaching. All along, one of the great centers of the Ancient Silk Roads.
On the road with 300 camels
The hero of Rumi’s Masnevi, Ibrahim Adham, like the Buddha, had relinquished his throne for the love of God, setting the example for the Sufism that later came to flourish across these latitudes, known as the Khorasani school.
As Prof Dr Erkan Turkmen, who was born in Peshawar and today is a top scholar at Karatay University in Konya, and author, among others, of a lovely volume, ‘Roses from Rumi’s Rose Garden’ says, there are two top reliable sources for the extraordinary pilgrimage of Rumi’s father Bahaeddin and his family from Balkh to Konya, with books, food and house ware loaded on the back of 300 camels, accompanied by 40 religious people. The sources, inevitably, are father and son (Rumi’s account is written in verse).
The first major stop was Baghdad. At the entrance gates, the guards asked who they were. Rumi’s father said, “We are coming from God and shall go back to Him. We have come from the non-existent world and shall go there again.”
Caliph al-Nasir summoned his top scholar Suhreverdi, who immediately gave the green light to the newcomers. But Rumi’s father did not want to stay under the protection of the Caliph, who was noted for his cruelness. So after a few years he left for Mecca on a Hajj and then to Damascus – which was an extremely well organized city at the time of the Abbasids and the Seljuks, crammed with 660 mosques, more than 40 madrassas, 100 baths and plenty of famous scholars.
The final steps on the family journey were Erjinzan in Anatolia – already a center of trade and culture – and then Larende (now Karaman), 100km south of Konya. Today, Karaman is only a small Turkish province, but in those times extended as far as Antalya to the south. It housed a lot of Christian Turks, who wrote Turkish using the Greek alphabet.
That’s where Rumi got married. Afterwards, his father was invited by Sultan Ala al-Din Kayqubad I (1220-1237) to Konya, finally establishing himself and the family until his death in 1231.
The Seljuks in Anatolia erupted into history in the year 1075, when Alp Arslan defeated the Byzantines in the legendary battle of Manzikert. A century later, in 1107, Qilich Arslan defeated the Crusaders, and the Seljuk empire began to spread very fast. It took a few decades before Christians started to accept the inevitable: the presence of Turks in Anatolia. Later, they even started to intermix.
The golden era of the Seljuks was under Sultan Ala al-Din Kayqubad I (the one who invited Rumi’s family to Konya), who built citadels around Konya and Kayseri to protect them from the coming Mongol invasion, and spent his winters at the beautiful Mediterranean coast in Antalya.
In Konya, Rumi did not get into politics, and does not seem to have had close relations with the royal family. He was widely known either as Mevlana (our master) or Rumi (the Anatolian). In Turkey today he is simply known as Mevlana, and in the west as Rumi. In his lyrical poetry, he uses the pseudonym Khamush (Silent). Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP – a highly materialistic enterprise wallowing in dodgy businesses – is not exactly fond of Rumi’s Sufism.
Under the Green Dome
As we’ve seen, Rumi spent most of his childhood on the road – so he never attended regular school. His early education was provided by his father and other scholars who followed the family to Karaman. Rumi also met many other famous scholars along the way, especially in Baghdad and Damascus, where he studied Islamic history, the Quran, and Arabic.
When Rumi was about to finish the 6th volume of the Masnevi, he fell ill, under constant fever. He passed away on 17 December, 1273. A fund of 130,000 dirhams was organized to build his tomb, which includes the world-famous Green Dome (Qubbat ul-Khazra), originally finished in 1274 and currently under renovation.
The tomb today is a museum (Konya holds astonishing relics especially in the Ethnography and Archeology museums). But for most pilgrims from all lands of Islam and beyond who come to pay their spiritual tributes, it is actually regarded as a lover’s shrine (Kaaba-yi Ushaq).
These lines, inscribed in his splendid wooden sarcophagus, may be a summary of all that Rumi attempted to teach during his lifetime:
“If wheat is grown on the clay of my grave, and if you bake bread of it, your intoxication will increase, the dough and the baker will go mad and the oven will also begin to recite verses out of madness. When you pay a visit to my tomb, it will seem to be dancing for God has created me out of the wine of love and I am still the same love even if death may crush me.”
A Sufi is by definition a lover of God. Islamic mysticism considers three stages of knowledge: the knowledge of certainty, the eye of certainty, and the truth of certainty.
In the first stage, one tries to find God by intellectual proof (failure is inevitable). In the second stage, one may be tuned in to divine secrets. In the third stage, one is able to see Reality and understand It spiritually. That’s a path not dissimilar to reaching enlightenment in Buddhism.
In addition to these three stages, there are paths to follow toward God. Choosing a path – Tarikat – is a very complicated business. It can be any Sufi order – such as Mavleviya, Kadriya, Nakshbandiya – under the guidance of a sheikh of that particular Tarikat.
In these absurdist times of grain diplomacy barely able to remedy the toxic effects of imperial sanctions, part of a proxy war of civilizations, a Rumi verse – “The celestial mill gives nothing if you have no wheat” – may open unexpected vistas.
Rumi is essentially saying that if one goes to a flour mill without wheat, what shall we gain? Nothing but the whiteness of one’s beard and hair (because of the flour). In the same vein: “If we have no good deeds to take with us to the other world, we will gain nothing but pain in the heart, while if we have developed our spiritual being, we will gain honor and Divine Love.”
Now try to explain that to a crusading collective west.
Filed under: Afghanistan, Eurasia, Islam, Pakistan, Turkey | Tagged: Central Asia, Islamic civilization, Jalal-al-Din Rumi, Pepe Escobar, Persia, Silk Road | Comments Off on From Balkh to Konya: Discovering Rumi’s spiritual geopolitics
كلّ الأنباء التي تلفّ الكون في هذه الأيام تشير الى حقيقة واحدة باتت أوضح من الشمس…
الأميركيّ الذي كان يوماً القطب الأوحد في العالم والآمر الناهي وشرطي الجهات الأربع في الكون غدا مأزوماً ومهزوماً في كلّ جبهاته وميادينه، ولكن بخاصة على الجبهة الأوروآسيوية، حيث المستنقع الأوكراني او الحفرة التي حفرها بنفسه ظناً منه أنه قادر على تشتيت الاتحاد الصيني الروسي الاستراتيجي الجديد من جهة وجعل أوروبا تخضع له دون شروط!
لكن هذا الأميركي المتعجرف ولشدة عناده ومكابرته، وانغماسه في المستنقع الأوكراني لم يجد خلاصاً له على ما يبدو بعد كلّ جهوده التي ذهبت هباء لهزّ عرش بوتين إلا أن يفعل خديعة تحالف الناتو المزعوم بين أصحاب التيه وأصحاب ما بعد التيه في الرمال العربية المتحركة مغرياً إياهم بأنظمة دفاع جوي حديثة تقيهم خطر إيران المزعوم ويحقق لابنه «الإسرائيلي» المدلل لعبته المفضلة وحلمه بقيادة تحالف «شرق أوسطي» ليدمج وجوده المؤقت الزائل بكيانات مصنوعة من الشمع مثله…
فيما عقل واشنطن البراغماتي، لا يزال مشدوداً نحو التهديد الصيني وكيفية ضرب البيئة الحيوية للصين وطريقها وحزامها الواحد الممتدّ من شنغهاي مروراً بالجغرافيا الحيوية لروسيا ـ آسيا الوسطى والقوقاز، ومن ثم إيران، وصولاً إلى المياه الدافئة يعني بحر الشام وخليج فارس…
لذلك لا بدّ من النظر بريبة شديدة الى خططهم وحشدهم الحقيقي هناك ودور كلّ واحد من لاعبيهم الصغار في منطقتنا وهم البيادق المتحركة بأوامر الشيطان الأكبر…
وفي هذا السياق، يفيد مصدر ديبلوماسي إقليمي مطلع، تعليقاً على الحملة الدعائية لما يُسمّى «حلفاً دفاعياً عربياً إسرائيلياً»، بما يلي:
أولا ـ ان لا وجود لهذا التحالف إلا في عقلية المسؤولين «الإسرائيليين» الأمنيين والعسكريين وأسيادهم في الدولة العميقة الأميركية وليس إدارة بايدن، وهو طرح بعيد عن الاستراتيجية الأميركية العملية.
ثانيا ـ انّ الهدف الاستراتيجي الحالي للولايات المتحدة الأميركية (ادارة بايدن)، في «الشرق الأوسط» ودول أواسط آسيا، هو استكمال الحشد الاستراتيجي ضدّ الصين الشعبية وروسيا وإيران.
ثالثا ـ انّ ادوات واشنطن لتحقيق ذلك هي التالية:
ـ نظام أردوغان، الذي يقدّم التدريب العسكري والإمداد والتزويد، لكلّ العناصر التي تخدم الاستراتيجية الأميركية في المنطقة المشار إليها أعلاه.
والذي سبق أن درّب المجموعات الإرهابية المسلحة، التي عاثت خراباً واسعاً في جمهورية كازاخستان السوڤياتية السابقة، بداية العام الحالي. وهي التي أشرفت الاستخبارات العسكرية التركية على تنفيذ عمليات تسلل وإنزال جوي لها، من خلال طائرات نقل مستأجرة ولا تحمل شارات أيّ دولة، في مطار ألماآتا (العاصمة القديمة لكازاخستان) بعد أن سيطر المخرّبون المسلحون الإرهابيون على هذا المطار في اليوم الأول من الموجة الإرهابية التي ضربت البلاد.
ـ النظام السعودي، الذي يقوم بتمويل ثمانية عشر ألف منظمة غير حكومية، في جمهوريات آسيا الوسطى السوڤياتية السابقة، وهي قوات احتياط بيد الولايات المتحدة جاهزة للاستخدام، إما في ثورات ملوّنة أو في هزات مسلحة وتخريبية، عندما يصلها أمر العمليات من واشنطن.
ـ مشيخات قطر والإمارات، بالتعاون مع حركة طالبان، من خلال إدارة المطارات الأفغانية الرئيسية الثلاثة، حيث وقعت الإمارات العربية اتفاقية خاصة بذلك، مع حكومة طالبان، بتاريخ ٢٤/٥/٢٠٢٢، وهو الأمر الذي يعني سيطرة أميركية غير مباشرة، على تلك المطارات، وما لذلك من أهمية قصوى في نقل الأفراد والمعدات الى أفغانستان، خاصة في ضوء تمركز تركي قطري «تقني» في تلك المطارات، منذ بداية العام الحالي، وذلك بناءً على اتفاقيات موقعة مع حكومة طالبان.
ـ حركة طالبان نفسها، والتي تجري معها الولايات المتحدة محادثات متواصلة تتعلق بمجموعة طلبات أميركية للحركة وعلى رأسها السماح للمسلحين الإيرانيين، سواء من «مجاهدي خلق» الإرهابية المقيمة في ألبانيا، أو غيرهم، بالعمل من الأراضي الأفغانية مقابل رفع تدريجي للتجميد الأميركي المفروض على الأموال الأفغانية.
ـ فلول تنظيم داعش، الذين نقلت منهم القيادة المركزية الأميركية، من العراق وسورية، ما يزيد على ثلاثة آلاف مسلح تمّ نشرهم في محافظة:
*بدخشان/ شمال شرق أفغانستان/ بالقرب من الحدود الصينية والطاجيكية.
*محافظتا تخار وقندوز/ في شمال أفغانستان/ والمحاذيتان لحدود طاجيكستان.
وهنا لا بدّ أن نستذكر موجة التحركات التخريبية المنظمة التي تجتاح محافظة: كاركال باكستان الأوزبيكية، منذ عدة أيام، والتي حاول فيها المشاغبون الاستيلاء على الأسلحة من المباني الحكومية الرسمية.
رابعا ـ انّ الولايات المتحدة الأميركية هي من يقف وراء الحملة الدعائية، التي يروّج لها الإعلام «الإسرائيلي» وبعض الإعلام العربي، بما في ذلك للأسف الشديد بعض وسائل إعلامنا، حول التحالف المزعوم والمشار إليه اعلاه. وذلك لحرف الأنظار عن ساحة الفعل الحقيقي الأميركي، في جمهوريات آسيا الوسطى، بهدف السيطرة عليها واستخدامها كمنصات هجومية او رؤوس جسور استراتيجية، ضدّ جمهورية الصين الشعبية من جهة الشرق، وجمهورية روسيا الاتحادية من جهة الشمال، والجمهورية الإسلامية الإيرانية في الغرب، لزعزعة تحالف الشرق الصاعد هذا…
واحلوا قومهم دار البوار
Filed under: Afghanistan, American Empire, China, Eurasia, GCC, House of Saud, Iran, ISIS, Qatar, Russia, Takfiris, Taliban, Turkey, UAE, Ukraine | Tagged: American Hegemony in Global Media, brl, Central Asia, Color Revolutions, GCC Media Lies, The Zio-temporary entity | Comments Off on من رمال الصحراء إلى القوقاز العين على الصين…
Establishing channels of cooperation to overcome western sanctions is reportedly high on Lavrov’s agenda
ByNews Desk
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi welcomed the Foreign Minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, to Tehran on 22 June for talks on boosting trade and energy cooperation.
During their conversation, Raisi stressed the need to end the war in Ukraine as soon as possible and expressed Tehran’s willingness to help the two nations find a diplomatic solution. He also warned against the expansionist agenda of NATO.
“There is no doubt that the US and NATO provocations have been the factor behind these conflicts [in Ukraine], and therefore, it is necessary to be active in the face of attempts to expand NATO’s influence in any part of the world, including in West Asia, the Caucasus and Central Asia,” the Iranian president said.
This is the first visit by Russia’s top diplomat to the Islamic Republic since Raisi took power in 2021. It comes at a time when the Kremlin is facing sweeping sanctions from the west, overtaking Iran as the most sanctioned nation on the planet.
Establishing avenues of cooperation despite the existence of sanctions is reportedly a main point in Lavrov’s agenda.
“Strengthening cooperation and coordination is an effective way to counter US sanctions and economic unilateralism against independent nations,” the Iranian president told Lavrov.
Tehran and Moscow both have significant oil and gas reserves, but their energy industries are constrained by US sanctions, which limit their ability to export their output.
According to a report in the Qatari daily Al Araby Al Jadeed, Russian officials visited Iran secretly and publicly in recent months to “benefit from its experience in facing sanctions.”
On 23 June, the Russian foreign minister is set to meet with his Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, to discuss the Iran nuclear deal, the war in Ukraine, and cooperation in regional security concerning Syria and Afghanistan.
Over recent months, Iran has played host to high-ranking officials from sanctioned nations like Russia, Venezuela, and Syria, as part of Raisi’s policy to boost ties with countries faced with economic warfare from the west.
To this end, Tehran has signed long-term cooperation documents with China and Venezuela, and is in the process of signing another one with Russia.
This strategy is part of Raisi’s foreign policy agenda of fostering relations with neighboring countries and major non-western powers, known as the Neighborhood Policy.
Filed under: Iran, NATO Alliance, Russia, USA | Tagged: Anti-Russian sanctions, Caucasus, Central Asia, Ebrahim Raeisi, Lavrov, NATO Expansion, West Asia | Comments Off on Iranian president welcomes Russian FM, warns against NATO expansion
The coming of the new G8 points to the inevitable advent of BRICS +, one of the key themes to be discussed in the upcoming BRICS summit in China.
By Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted
The speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, may have created the defining acronym for the emerging multipolar world: “the new G8”.
As Volodin noted, “the United States has created conditions with its own hands so that countries wishing to build an equal dialogue and mutually beneficial relations will actually form a ‘new G8’ together with Russia.”
This non Russia-sanctioning G8, he added, is 24.4% ahead of the old one, which is in fact the G7, in terms of GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP), as G7 economies are on the verge of collapsing and the U.S. registers record inflation.
The power of the acronym was confirmed by one of the researchers on Europe at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sergei Fedorov: three BRICS members (Brazil, China and India) alongside Russia, plus Indonesia, Iran, Turkey and Mexico, all non adherents to the all-out Western economic war against Russia, will soon dominate global markets.
Fedorov stressed the power of the new G8 in population as well as economically: “If the West, which restricted all international organizations, follows its own policies, and pressures everyone, then why are these organizations necessary? Russia does not follow these rules.”
The new G8, instead, “does not impose anything on anyone, but tries to find common solutions.”
The coming of the new G8 points to the inevitable advent of BRICS +, one of the key themes to be discussed in the upcoming BRICS summit in China. Argentina is very much interested in becoming part of the extended BRICS and those (informal) members of the new G8 – Indonesia, Iran, Turkey, Mexico – are all likely candidates.
The intersection of the new G8 and BRICS + will lead Beijing to turbo-charge what has already been conceptualized as the Three Rings strategy by Cheng Yawen, from the Institute of International Relations and Public Affairs at the Shanghai International Studies University.
Cheng argues that since the beginning of the 2018 U.S.-China trade war the Empire of Lies and its vassals have aimed to “decouple”; thus the Middle Kingdom should strategically downgrade its relations with the West and promote a new international system based on South-South cooperation.
Looks like if it walks and talks like the new G8, that’s because it’s the real deal.
The revolution reaches the “global countryside”
Cheng stresses how “the center-periphery hierarchy of the West has been perpetuated as an implicit rule” in international relations; and how China and Russia, “because of their strict capital controls, are the last two obstacles to further U.S. control of the global periphery”.
So how would the Three Rings – in fact a new global system – be deployed?
The first ring “is China’s neighboring countries in East Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East; the second ring is the vast number of developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and the third ring extends to the traditional industrialized countries, mainly Europe and the United States.”
The basis for building the Three Rings is deeper Global South integration. Cheng notes how “between 1980-2021, the economic volume of developing countries rose from 21 to 42.2 percent of the world’s total output.”
And yet “current trade flows and mutual investments of developing countries are still heavily dependent on the financial and monetary institutions/networks controlled by the West. In order to break their dependence on the West and further enhance economic and political autonomy, a broader financial and monetary cooperation, and new sets of instruments among developing countries should be constructed”.
This is a veiled reference to the current discussions inside the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), with Chinese participation, designing an alternative financial-monetary system not only for Eurasia but for the Global South – bypassing possible American attempts to enforce a sort of Bretton Woods 3.0.
Cheng uses a Maoist metaphor to illustrate his point – referring to ‘the revolutionary path of ‘encircling the cities from the countryside’”. What is needed now, he argues, is for China and the Global South to “overcome the West’s preventive measures and cooperate with the ‘global countryside’ – the peripheral countries – in the same way.”
So what seems to be in the horizon, as conceptualized by Chinese academia, is a “new G8/BRICS+” interaction as the revolutionary vanguard of the emerging multipolar world, designed to expand to the whole Global South.
That of course will mean a deepened internationalization of Chinese geopolitical and geoeconomic power, including its currency. Cheng qualifies the creation of a “three ring “ international system as essential to “break through the [American] siege”.
It’s more than evident that the Empire won’t take that lying down.
The siege will continue. Enter the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), spun as yet another proverbial “effort” to – what else – contain China, but this time all the way from Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia, with Oceania thrown in as a bonus.
The American spin on IPEF is heavy on “economic engagement”: fog of (hybrid) war disguising the real intent to divert as much trade as possible from China – which produces virtually everything – to the U.S. – which produces very little.
The Americans give away the game by heavily focusing their strategy on 7 of the 10 ASEAN nations – as part of yet another desperate dash to control the American-denominated “Indo-Pacific”. Their logic: ASEAN after all needs a “stable partner”; the American economy is “comparatively stable”; thus ASEAN must subject itself to American geopolitical aims.
IPEF, under the cover of trade and economics, plays the same old tune, with the U.S. going after China from three different angles.
– The South China Sea, instrumentalizing ASEAN.
– The Yellow and East China Seas, instrumentalizing Japan and South Korea to prevent direct Chinese access to the Pacific.
– The larger “Indo-Pacific” (that’s were India as a member of the Quad comes in).
It’s all labeled as a sweet apple pie of “stronger and more resilient Indo-Pacific with diversified trade.”
BRI corridors are back
Beijing is hardly losing any sleep thinking about IPEF: after all most of its multiple trade connections across ASEAN are rock solid. Taiwan though is a completely different story.
At the annual Shangri-La dialogue this past weekend in Singapore, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe went straight to the point, actually defining Beijing’s vision for an East Asia order (not “rules-based”, of course).
Taiwan independence is a “dead end”, said General Wei, as he asserted Beijing’s peaceful aims while vigorously slamming assorted U.S. “threats against China”. At any attempt at interference, “we will fight at all costs, and we will fight to the very end”. Wei also handily dismissed the U.S. drive to “hijack” Indo-Pacific nations, without even mentioning IPEF.
China at it stands is firmly concentrated on stabilizing its western borders – which will allow it to devote more time to the South China Sea and the “Indo-Pacific” further on down the road.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi went on a crucial trip to Kazakhstan – a full member of both BRI and the EAEU – where he met President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and all his counterparts from the Central Asian “stans” in a summit in Nur-Sultan. The group – billed as C+C5 – discussed everything from security, energy and transportation to Afghanistan and vaccines.
In sum, this was all about developing much-needed corridors of BRI/ New Silk Roads – in sharp contrast to the proverbial Western lamentations about BRI reaching a dead end.
Two BRI-to-the-bone projects will go on overdrive: the China-Central Asia Gas Pipeline Line D, and the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway. Both have been years in the making, but now have become absolutely essential, and will be the flagship BRI projects in the Central Asian corridor.
The China-Central Asia Gas Pipeline Line D will link Turkmenistan’s gas fields to Xinjiang via Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. That was the main theme of the discussions when Turkmen President Berdimuhamedow visited Beijing for the Winter Olympics.
The 523 km China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway for its part will crucially link the two Central Asian “stans” to the China-Europe freight rail network, via the existing rail networks in Turkmenistan.
Considering the current incandescent geopolitical scenario in Ukraine, this is a bombshell in itself, because it will enable freight from China to travel via Iran or via Caspian ports, bypassing sanctioned Russia. No hard feelings, in terms of the Russia-China strategic partnership: just business.
The Kyrgyz, predictably, were ecstatic. Construction begins next year. According to Kyrgyz President Zhaparov, “there will be jobs. Our economy will boom.”
Talk about China acting decisively in its “first ring”, in Central Asia. Don’t expect anything of such geoeconomic breadth and scope being “offered” by IPEF anywhere in ASEAN.
Filed under: BRICS, China, EU, Europe, India, Indonesia, Iran, Latin America, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey | Tagged: Argentine, ASEAN, “Empire of Lies”, brl, Central Asia, EAEU, East Asia, G7, G8, Global South, Mexico, Pepe Escobar, Russian and Chinese Alliance, Wang Yi | Comments Off on The ‘New G8’ Meets China’s ‘Three Rings’
Divergent policies on Moscow will not get in the way of Indo-US efforts to counter Beijing’s regional influence.
Once referred to as ‘Enduring Global Partners in the 21st Century,’ the strategic alliance between India and the United States has entered a challenging phase since the February launch of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine.
As the only ‘major democracy’ to maintain a neutral position on the Ukraine conflict, New Delhi’s ties with Washington are being tested over disagreements on how to deal with Moscow.
The duo’s ‘Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership’ is based purely on guaranteeing mutual national interests: securing international peace and security through regional cooperation in the Pacific, strengthening ‘shared democratic values,’ policing nuclear non-proliferation, and enhancing cooperation on economic and security priorities.
Today, although New Delhi and Washington are poles apart on Russia’s actions in Ukraine, one area where Indo-US relations remain in lockstep is the issue of containing China’s rising influence.
The Quad squad
This was illustrated in February during this year’s fourth Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) Foreign Ministers Meeting when India signalled its lack of enthusiasm for the Quad’s sharp criticism of Russia.
Initiated in 2007, the Quad is an informal alliance comprising the US, India, Australia and Japan, and was especially formed to collectively stand as a bulwark against Chinese ‘expansion’ in the region.
India, unlike its Quad allies, maintained silence on Ukraine, but continued its alignment with their positions against China’s growing role and ambitions in the Indo-Pacific.
The Leaders’ Meeting held in Tokyo this week comes amid growing concern over whether the US will take military action should China – theoretically emboldened by Russia – decide to invade Taiwan. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also held bilateral talks with US President Joe Biden, with greater emphasis on cooperation between their National Security Councils.
Mutual concerns over China
During February’s Quad meeting for foreign ministers, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also hinted that while punishing Russia for its Ukraine policy was ‘front and center’ of the US’ immediate foreign policy priorities, the long-term challenge was working closely with regional allies to “out-compete” China. In this context, India is a pivotal US ally.
The US and India are thus likely to soft pedal Russia-related differences for the sake of consolidating a ‘maritime rules-based order’ in the Pacific, where the US and its regional allies seek to thwart Chinese influence.
In its effort to bolster India as a potential counterweight to China, the US has inserted itself directly into Indo-Pacific affairs, a political development that has irked the Chinese and Russian leadership alike.
Why did India resist US pressure to condemn Russia?
India’s refusal to sanction Russia over Ukraine is understandable within the context of their decades of close relations, cooperation and commerce. In recent years, Moscow and Delhi have together increased their global clout as members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS, cooperative political platforms that have proactively advanced more multipolar agendas.
The fact is, while Washington may have pushed New Delhi to adopt a tough stance against Moscow, Russia is still India’s largest defence partner and the country’s weapons are heavily reliant on Russian spare parts for proper functioning.
Security interests for both countries have converged in neighbouring Afghanistan. After the chaotic US withdrawal from the war-torn country, India has also repositioned its priorities there.
After the Taliban’s accession to power in Kabul last summer, both India and Russia have further expanded their cooperation by establishing a ‘permanent bilateral channel for consultations’ on Afghan affairs.
Russia effectively aids India’s engagement with the Taliban-led government. Both countries have been actively engaging on Afghan terrorism and drug trafficking priorities, and bilateral intelligence cooperation between Moscow and New Delhi appears to also be expanding into Central Asia.
Despite the recent strengthening of Russian and Chinese strategic cooperation, competition continues to exist between the two states in Central Asia, the Arctic and the Russian Far East. A politically stable and economically powerful Russia is in Indian interests as it could potentially act as a counterbalance to rising Chinese power in these regions.
To this end, a maritime corridor between India and Russia has already been formalized. The corridor, upon functioning, can improve their mutual economic clout and allow the duo to potentially rival China in the South China Sea and Russian Far East.
A strong Russia is in India’s interests
Tanvi Madan, an Indian foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, fears that Russia’s excessive reliance on China may damage Kremlin’s political and economic leverage and push it into China’s sphere of influence, thus costing New Delhi a viable mediator in the event Sino-Indian border tensions re-erupt. It is one of the reasons compelling India to oppose the US policy of weakening Russia through economic sanctions.
There are also widespread concerns in New Delhi that growing Chinese influence in Moscow may halt weapons supplies to India and make India vulnerable to any likely assault from Beijing in the future.
During a series of border skirmishes between Indian and Chinese armed forces, Washington issued mere boilerplate statements rather than playing a constructive role in diffusing the crisis. This, among other factors, has convinced Indian policy makers that the Kremlin can be a more reliable partner in resolving any future flare-ups with Beijing.
Indo-US cooperation on China
While the Biden administration remains unsure about whether or not to impose sanctions on India under CAATSA (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) for purchasing Russian S-400 missiles, both states continue to deepen their strategic partnership on China.
Similarly, against all western expectations during April’s 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue between the US and India, the latter again declined to condemn Russian military operations in Ukraine. India continues to buy oil from Russia at competitive prices and resents the US for admonishing it over this.
Despite US statements on deteriorating human rights conditions in India, increasing disquietness about trade policy matters, and India’s repeat abstentions on US-sponsored resolutions against Russia, their mutual rivalry against China has kept the relationship engaged and afloat.
The Indo-US focus on China has played out in various spheres. During the US administration of Donald Trump, India was granted a sanctions waiver to continue purchasing oil from Iran – part of efforts to support India’s INSTC (International North South Transport Corridor) which New Delhi presents as a counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Bilateral trade and investment between the US and India also hit record levels last year. In their collective quest to contain Chinese economic influence in its own region, both duo appear unanimous in criticizing the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a political development perturbing policy makers in Islamabad.
Why is the Sino-Indian rivlary intensifying?
The Indian Ocean Region (IOR) has lately transformed into a major hotspot over the growing rivalry between Beijing and New Delhi, two of Asia’s biggest economic powerhouses. The region’s growing geostrategic importance – connecting energy-rich West Asia to energy-hungry East Asia – has compelled the two to vie for that dominance.
As both China and India are heavily reliant on hydrocarbons to shore up their economic engine, the IOR becomes pivotal for the uninterrupted flow of their seaborne trade and energy imports. The US naval presence in the region, however, has indisputably played a key role in the intensification of hostility between the two Asian giants.
The US considers the region crucial for its economic interests and security as any likely disruption to these seaborne lanes can have serious implications for US hegemony and the global economy at large.
The New Silk Road
In order to contain China’s rise, the US has inserted itself into the region by aggressively consolidating strategic, diplomatic, and military ties with regional allies – in it much-ballyhooed “Pivot to Asia.” Inevitably, this strategic move has heightened tensions between China and allies of the US, notably India.
Washington’s strategy is not necessarily working as seamlessly elsewhere. On Wednesday, the Japanese foreign ministry announced the results of a 2021 ASEAN survey that showed respondents selecting China as the G20’s most important future partner country. Japan slipped to second place for the first time since the survey launched in 2015, with the US coming in third.
To circumnavigate the threats posed to its sea lanes by the Indo-US presence in the IOR, China is diversifying its energy and trade routes. In this regard, the BRI has become an instrument of reducing strategic vulnerabilities through expansion of regional trade and infrastructural investments in areas falling outside the strategic choke point of the Strait of Malacca, a narrow sea area between the Indonesia island of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula through which China imports more than 80 percent of its oil.
As the rivalry between China and India is not limited to the Himalayan region and has largely become maritime-focused, the expansion of China’s BRI in South and Central Asia is reducing China’s vulnerability to possible future Indian and US attacks in the East China Sea and the South China Sea to disrupt Chinese seaborne trade.
Another relevant component of the BRI, is the aforementioned CPEC, connecting China’s Xinjiang region to Pakistan’s Gwadar seaport. Through CPEC, China aims to solve its ‘Malacca Dilemma’ while simultaneously consolidating its economic and political ties with New Delhi’s nemesis, Islamabad.
A Passage to India…or Bharat
India fears that after the Chinese encirclement of its sea lanes through growing strategic presence in Pakistan, Myanmar (Burma), Sri Lanka, and Djibouti, the BRI can also pose threats to India’s land trade routes while simultaneously mitigating the impact on China from a combined Indo-US assault on its sea lanes.
The current ‘Hindu nationalist’ government of India, with its own ideologically expansionist designs, has also been responsible for exacerbating the crisis with China. New Delhi’s ties with its neighbours are largely dictated by the idea of Akhand Bharat, a term used by right-wing Hindu nationalists for a vision to restore a unified Indian subcontinent.
By referring to India as Vishwa Guru or ‘teacher to the world’, Modi has convinced his devotees that only he can restore the lost greatness of Hindustan. This expansionist mindset has pitted the country against its many neighbors, while Modi has used the narrative to consolidate his Hindu support base.
Who needs who?
In addition to Washington’s efforts at propping up India as an outsourcing-alternative to China for US companies, the growing Indian middle class are also perceived as a desired and lucrative destination for US exports.
The ‘limitless friendship’ between Russia and China is seen as a threat to US hegemony and may even require India as a bridge to reach out to Russia in the future. In fact, some strategists in Washington even suggest a ‘wedge’ strategy of engaging Russia to prevent it becoming overly dependent on China, and thus fostering a sense of rivalry between these two great-power rivals in their shared Eurasian space.
In this context, India’s partnership with Russia in key parts of Eurasia – such as Afghanistan and Central Asia – make it an ideal bridge to Moscow.
India and the US are likely to compartmentalize their priorities without coercing each other to veer too far from their respective interests. While unhappy about it, the US understands India’s sensitivities towards Russia and will pragmatically tone down its criticism of New Dehli’s positions.
The alternative would drive a wedge between the two allies and compromise their collective effort to contain China. If the US needs India to counter China, India surely needs both Russia and the US to keep China at bay.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Filed under: Australia, BRICS, China, Eurasia, India, Japan, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine, USA | Tagged: Antony Blinken, “the Quad”, BRI, Central Asia, CPEC, INSTC, Myanmar, New Silk Roads, SCO, SMO, US defeat in Afghanistan, West Asia | Comments Off on Balancing grenades: To contain China, the US will ignore Russia in India
It’s unrealistic that China would ever abandon its investments in Russia or Pakistan, but those two’s connectivity roles for it vis-à-vis the EU and West Asia/Africa respectively can be complemented by Turkey and Iran via the Middle Corridor.
Up until the beginning of this year, China’s grand strategy was to rely on a network of connectivity corridors across its Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) to integrate Eurasia and thus advance its non-Western model of globalization, which Beijing believes to be more equal, just, and multipolar than the declining Western-centric one. This ambitious plan was abruptly disrupted by two black swan events that created sudden uncertainty about the viability of BRI’s Russian and Pakistani routes: Moscow’s ongoing special military operation in Ukraine and Islamabad’s scandalous change of government.
The first-mentioned prompted the US-led West to impose unprecedented sanctions that resulted in the forced decoupling of Russia and the EU while the second led to the global pivot state’s worst-ever political crisis since independence that’s also been exploited by BLA terrorists. Regarding Russia, it’s no longer a realistic transit route for overland trade between Eastern and Western Eurasia. As for Pakistan, there are suspicions that its new authorities’ speculative pro–US pivot will occur at China’s expense. The BLA’s recent terrorist attack also led to all Confucius Institution teachers returning home for their safety.
China still considers Russia and Pakistan to be among its top strategic partners anywhere in the world, especially since both veritably play indispensable roles in Eurasia’s irreversible multipolar integration due to BRI’s Eurasian Land Bridge and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) respectively. Nevertheless, their reliability in the present is less than it was at the start of the year, which is why China might understandably begin hedging against their uncertainties that could last for an indeterminate length of time by focusing more on the Middle Corridor.
This project refers to the connectivity route between Turkey and China via the South Caucasus, Caspian Sea, and Central Asia. In the current conditions, it represents the most viable trans-Eurasian corridor. There are undoubtedly some risks associated with it as evidenced by the sudden attempted terrorist takeover of Kazakhstan in January, which had previously been considered to be Central Asia’s most stable state. That said, compared to the connectivity risks connected to Russia and Pakistan nowadays, the Middle Corridor is much more reliable and safer in all respects.
The implications of the People’s Republic pressing through with this pragmatic back-up plan could be enormous since it would throw a spanner in Russia and Pakistan’s geo-economic strategies, even though it’s not Beijing’s fault that they’re no longer viable connectivity partners, but their own due to the decisions they made. That’s not to cast judgement on them, but just to point out that China would simply be responding to events beyond its control or influence in order to advance its interests that it considers to be to the greater benefit of mankind due to its envisioned community of common destiny.
Russia and Pakistan are obviously part of mankind just like everyone else is but China cannot keep a disproportionate amount of its BRI eggs in their basket, so to speak, which is why it’ll likely be compelled by circumstances to focus more on the Middle Corridor in the coming years. Despite occasional troubles in its ties with Turkey stemming from the sympathy that some in that West Asian country have for Uyghur separatists that China considers to be terrorists, relations are generally solid and actually stand to become much more strategic the longer that uncertainty prevails in Russia and Pakistan.
To explain, Europe hasn’t yet been pressured by its American overlord to curtail ties with China exactly like it recently curtailed those with Russia. For the time being, they’re still in a relationship of complex economic interdependence with the People’s Republic, yet the Eurasian Land Bridge through Russia is no longer a viable means for conducting their future overland trade. For that reason, the Middle Corridor anchored in Turkey is much more attractive since goods can transit through this route between the EU and China instead of remaining dependent on the Suez Canal.
President Erdogan could leverage his civilization-state’s unexpectedly disproportionate geo-economic role in Eurasian integration to reduce the US-led West’s pressure upon Turkey exactly as he could do the same in the event that he succeeds in clinching an EU-Israeli pipeline deal in the coming future. His isn’t the only Muslim Great Power that would benefit from the Middle Corridor though since neighboring Iran can prospectively do as well. It can connect to that BRI route via Turkmenistan or perhaps by pioneering its own “Persian Corridor” to China through Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
Whichever way it happens, there’s no doubt that there’s mutual interest between Iran and China to strengthen their connectivity with one another after last year’s 25-year strategic partnership pact. They could have possibly done so by expanding CPEC in the western direction (W-CPEC+) but the newfound political and security uncertainty in Pakistan has made that unviable for the foreseeable future, hence why China might simply go ahead with expanding the Middle Corridor to Iran and/or cooperating on the Persian Corridor proposal.
China’s ties with the Gulf Kingdoms are also very strong, especially since the People’s Republic plans to invest in their systemic reform programs for diversifying their economies from their hitherto disproportionate dependence on resource exports. While their relations with Iran remain complex, there’s been visible progress over the past year or so in taking baby steps towards a rapprochement, particularly in terms of Tehran’s ties with Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. In the event that this continues, Iran could serve as the transit state for facilitating real-sector Chinese-Gulf trade.
Iran also abuts the Indian Ocean just like neighboring Pakistan does, but unlike the latter, Iran isn’t mired in political and security uncertainty so it could complement – though importantly never replace – the envisioned role that Pakistan was supposed to play with respect to facilitating Chinese-African trade. Nobody should misunderstand what’s being written in this analysis: it’s unrealistic that China would ever abandon its investments in Russia or Pakistan, but those two’s connectivity roles for it vis-à-vis the EU and West Asia/Africa respectively can be complemented by Turkey and Iran via the Middle Corridor.
What all of this means is that the uncertainty in Russia and Pakistan, while detrimental for their own interests as well as their role in Eurasia’s multipolar integration, provides unexpected opportunities for China to diversify BRI by focusing more on the Central Asian-Caspian Sea-South Caucasus-Gulf direction through the comparatively much more reliable and safer Middle Corridor. Turkey and Iran are the two Great Powers that stand to benefit the most from this, not to mention the medium- and smaller-sized countries between them and China. All told, the comprehensive gains might outweigh the setbacks.
Filed under: China, Eurasia, GCC, Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, USA | Tagged: Central Asia, CPEC, Erdogan, Multi-polar world order, SMO, W-CPEC+ | Comments Off on The Middle Corridor Will Help China Hedge Against Uncertainty In Russia & Pakistan
May 07, 2022
By Francis Lee
Here is a typical political offering from the British centre-left. As follows:
‘’Putin’s war on Ukraine has led to thousands of deaths, upended the world order, and intensified the global energy crisis. At home in Britain, it has led to an outpouring of support for Ukrainian refugees – if not for black and brown people fleeing war and persecution – and provided cover for Keir Starmer to further crack down on the Left of Labour, from socialist MPs to Young Labour.
In this extract of an interview from the latest Momentum political education bulletin, The Educator, David Wearing (whomever he is!- FL) discusses the geopolitical interests at stake, the reactions of Western states, especially the UK, and how the Left in Britain can meaningfully engage in anti-imperialist struggle today.
Momentum a centre-left political grouping within the British Labour Party: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused untold devastation and loss of life. Evidence of fresh atrocities seem to emerge almost daily. Why has Vladimir Putin’s regime launched this war of aggression, in your opinion?’’ (Red Pepper – leftist British publication.)
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Francis Lee (FL). You see the Russians are the really bad guys, or so we are told, and this is regarded as being axiomatic coming straight from the NATO propaganda handbook, the media, and the political elites in the west. But actually, the war against the Eastern Provinces in the Donbass in Eastern Ukraine started shortly after 2014 when the US organized the coup in Independence Square. Kiev was eager to march East and ‘deal with’ (to put it mildly) the two republics who subsequently were put under a siege by the Ukrainian army and death squads and 14000 of the two Republics of Lugansk and Donetsk were killed after being under the Ukie siege from 2014 to the present time. Of course, no mention was made of this in Mr. Wearing’s piece.
David Wearing holds forth as follows: There’s a standard imperialist mentality at work. (Agreed, but read Washington for Moscow – FL) Moscow evidently regards Ukraine with a strong sense of entitlement; part of its sphere of influence in the same way that the United States has historically treated Latin America as its ‘backyard’ under the so-called ‘Monroe Doctrine‘, and sought to dominate the Middle East more recently. Reasserting substantive control over Russia’s near abroad has been an overriding strategic priority for Moscow since the mid-1990s at least.
Indeed, the guiding principle across two decades of Putin’s presidency has essentially been ‘Make Russia Great Again‘. His revanchist, authoritarian nationalism is a product of the 1990s, when Moscow lost its grip on many of its former Tsarist and Soviet possessions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and when the Russian economy imploded under neoliberal shock therapy. The ugly machismo of Putin’s rule is a backlash against all of this.
FL – Actually, it was Putin who pulled Russia out of the grip of the oligarchs and free riders who had almost destroyed Russia. Moreover, this would of course be yet another eastern expansion in NATO’s relentless march whose object is and always has been to place an ever-tightening tourniquet around Russia’s neck. It is the West through the instrumentality of NATO which has pushed right up to Russia’s borders in a defiance of the deal in 1991 where NATO would not move ‘’one inch’’ closer to Russia’s borders with a flight time of 5 minutes to Moscow by hypersonic missile.
In fact, Russia offered a peace deal with a view to winding down the conflict which involved an implementation of the Minsk Accords, restoration of the Lugansk/Donetsk independent republics and neutrality for Ukraine. Initially the Ukrainian diplomatic delegation seemed interested in these proposals during the peace talks in Turkey. But as soon as they got back home to Ukraine the delegation was told in short order – almost certainly by the Americans – that none of these proposals were acceptable. So, according to the hard-liners and the Americans, that leaves only war as an option.
But according to Mr Wearing
So, the imperial logic is obvious (yes, but whose imperial logic? FL) but it hardly adds up to a justification for war. Certainly not one you can sell to the Russian public as good reason to sacrifice their sons and daughters on the battlefield. Hence the various pretexts for the invasion that Putin has offered in terms of defending the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine. We don’t need to detain ourselves with any of that. (sic! FL) Really, why not?
Wearing continues: Every imperial aggressor throughout history has claimed to be acting on some noble, virtuous principle.
FL – In actual fact the USSR as it was then constituted, was only too glad to get rid of these burdens, i.e., the Baltics, Georgia et cetera.
Aside from geopolitical motives, there’s been a palpable sense of hubris from Putin following previous military victories in Chechnya, Georgia (Georgia who firstly attacked South Ossetia killing a number of Russian Peacekeepers) and Syria (Presumably the writer thinks that a Russian victory in Syria was a defeat for democracy, when it was actually a defeat for the Takfiris).
But this war has proved a major miscalculation, and the danger now is that — like the US in Vietnam and Afghanistan – he (Putin) digs in for the long term rather than suffer the humiliation of accepting defeat. Given the sheer viciousness of the Russian campaign so far, this is not something that the people of Ukraine can afford.
Wearing: Clearly, responsibility for this heinous violence lies first and foremost with Putin and the Russian state.
(F.L., I beg your pardon, but heinous violence came from the Ukrainian military and particularly from the neo-nazi units who couldn’t wait to start shelling the Donbass and continuing to do so for 8 long years killing 14000 ethnic Russians in their homes. Moreover, by 2021 Ukie army decided to take a second bite of the cherry. One hundred thousand Ukrainian troops were about to roll over the Donbass, but Putin after all the dithering stopped them in their tracks with the Russian Regular Forces and the Don Bass Militias.
Such is the policy of the British left’s framing of the situation which is one that they don’t understand and have no wish to.)
DW: There’s been a debate within the US foreign policy establishment about the wisdom of expanding NATO going back over a quarter of a century. One side (the old conservatives and Cold War veterans) argued that expanding the alliance too far into Russia’s former sphere of influence would raise tensions between Washington and Moscow to a dangerous degree. The other side (the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives of the post-Cold War era) argued that Washington’s interests lay in opening the alliance up to any state that wanted to join. At least initially, it was the latter group that got their way.
This is a debate among imperialists about the best policy for Washington to adopt Moscow in its own imperial interests. So, it’s been a little odd to see the anti-expansionist position in that debate being portrayed in recent weeks as ‘pro-Moscow’. Take the US diplomat George Kennan, who argued in 1997 that ‘expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’, which would ‘inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion [and] restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations’. Back in the 1940s, Kennan had been one of the key intellectual architects of Washington’s entire Cold War strategy toward the USSR. It’s a sign of the depths to which the current debate has degenerated that even the sort of analysis offered by people like him is now routinely denounced as apologia for Putin.
For myself, I can see some logic in the arguments made by these old conservatives of the US foreign policy establishment. Clearly, they are attempting to explain, rather than excuse, their imperial adversary’s response to the expansion of NATO. And clearly some of their predictions have come true.
However, as socialist anti-imperialists we have our own language and frames of reference which are much more analytically useful than some of the shoddy euphemisms of the grand strategists. For example, we should dispense with talk of Russia’s ‘security concerns’ (Oh, yes Russia’s ‘paranoia’ about ‘security concerns’ regarding NATO’s inexorable moving up to the Russian border and stationing their hypersonic assets right on the Russian doorstep with 5 minutes flight time to Moscow and St. Petersburg – FL) as a ‘great power’, and instead refer more frankly and accurately to Russia’s imperial ambitions in places like Ukraine.
FL – (BS! Russia and Putin did not harbour any imperial ambitions, nor did it want a war either with any of its ex-soviet republics, or NATO’s relentless push to its western borders. It was NATO who were belligerently encouraged for exactly that eventuality, not Russia).
The term ‘security’ is one that mostly has an obfuscators effect in political discourse. Imperialists may see control over neighbouring countries as a matter of security, even ‘defence’, but the rest of us don’t have to indulge that.
We also need to think beyond how imperial powers should best manage competition over their respective spheres of interest. A better question for us might be, how can West, Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia, be made into a common home rather than a geopolitical battleground? This is likely a question for a post-Putin world, but we should start thinking about it now. If we’re lucky enough at some point in the future to enjoy another historical moment of détente between the West and Russia, and another interlocutor in Moscow like Mikhail Gorbachev, then we should seize that moment to build a durable peace, rather than squander it a second time.
FL – (But Gorbachov was tricked by the US – this in the shape of Chief US negotiator, James Baker, and the Americans whom NATO had promised would not move ‘’one inch further to the East’’ who then reneged on the promise. The NATO military machine then predictably moved right up to the old Soviet borders. From the US-NATO viewpoint this was a shrewd move, which caught the Russians napping. Well Putin must have mused ‘fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.)
Momentum: So that’s the Western meta-narrative around the confrontation with Russia. What about the West’s approach to the Ukraine war itself?
DW: The fact that the Western powers find themselves on the right side (‘’the right side indeed’’! Along with, Svoboda, C14, Right Sector, the Azov Regiment! These are the shock-troops of NATO under US leadership) the Ukraine war reflects imperial interests and expediency not some high moral principle. They perceive a clear geopolitical advantage to be gained either from a Ukrainian victory or at least a Russian military failure. Support comes in the form of arms supplies to Ukraine and sanctions against Moscow, but a no-fly zone or some other direct intervention has thankfully been ruled out so far, due to the entirely rational fear that this would trigger World War Three.
There’s been no groundswell of opposition to this from the left, and rightly so. Ukraine has no option but to defend itself (sic!) militarily, (by marching east presumably and attempting to over-run the Don Bass and killing its own citizens therein? FL) and it has the right to do so (yes, apparently on a regular basis. FL ), and it has the right to seek the means of self-defence. (self-defence! But of course, shelling your own citizens in the Don Bass – a strange form of self-defence this!) from the only sources credibly able to provide it, namely Russia’s Western adversaries.
But given the nature of Western power we are understandably wary. We are wary of sanctions having a devastating effect on the Russian population, and without seriously hurting the regime. We are wary of any escalation into a direct NATO-Russia war, which would be utterly catastrophic.
Already in the past few weeks we’ve seen US President Biden announce huge additional spending on nuclear weapons. Experts have long warned that upgrading and renewing nuclear arsenals makes the world less, nor safer. We can expect a serious rise in military spending in the UK, and in Germany as well, where decades of foreign policy have been torn up. It’s really important that we stand by our anti-militarist principles in this moment. That doesn’t mean an absolutist form of pacifism, but it does mean an insistence that people recognise that arms races inflame rather than guard against the danger of military conflict.
Finally, in the prevailing atmosphere of machismo, we need to ensure people don’t forget the non-military, humanitarian dimension. That means demanding swift and safe paths to entry for Ukrainian refugees (as part of our wider demand for a complete change in UK border policy). It means aid for displaced Ukrainians wherever they might be. And it means any other economic measures that might help, such as cancelling Ukraine’s national debt to support its recovery whenever the war finally ends.’’
FL – Yes, I get it, a sort of ‘soft NATO’ approach?
OK, so let’s have another version. The Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1941. During the retreat the Red Army was pushed back almost to Moscow. Ukraine was occupied by Germany and also by indigenous Ukrainian fascist collaborators – still unfortunately with us – for most of WW2. Not only did Bandera’s (OUN-B) and Shukeyvich (UPA) fascist (yes, fascists!) collaborate with the Wehrmacht particularly in the massacre in Volhynia (1943-44) of Poles, Jews, and Russians, they were also lauded by the local population (and still are to this day) of the inhabitants of the western Ukraine centred around the cities of Lviv, Ternopol and Vinnytsia, et al. Not to be missed are the statues of Bandera lovingly adorned with flowers in the major cities west of the river Dnieper.
Around the period of 2013, ultra-nationalist groups (inveterate fascists) in the shape of Right Sector and Svoboda C14, and those lovely chaps of the Azov Regiment (1) began to emerge from the shadows and appear among the genuine moderate majority and joined in pitched battles in Kiev with the Berkut (riot Police) daily which the opposition forces finally won. This was, according to the UK’s Guardian ‘newspaper’ a victory for democracy (sic!) and peoples’ power. Well, it might have started like this, but it soon transmuted into something very different. Nobody should be in any doubt about the political complexion of these ultra-nationalist groups – who were and continue to be more than a marginalist political-military force – who went on to hold 6 portfolios in the new ‘government’ based in Kiev. Nor should anyone be in any doubt about both the overt and covert roles played by both the US and EU officials (not forgetting the ever-present Mr. Soros, who is always a fixture in these situations) and the formation of the future interim government.
Throughout this period the EU and high-ranking US officials were openly engaged in Ukraine’s internal affairs. The US Ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, and the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, were strolling around Independence Square reassuring the protestors that America stood behind them. Also basking in the political sunlight were US NGOs (such as the National Endowment for Democracy – NED – directly funded by the US Government) and (USAID). Also involved was the US Human Rights Watch (HRW) and not forgetting of course the ubiquitous Mr. Soros. Identified as GS in the leaked Open Society Foundation (OSF) documents, others involved in the Ukrainian coup in the planning, were the already named, US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, along with the following: David Meale (Economic Counsellor to Pyatt, Lenny Benardo (Open Society Foundation – OSF) Yevhen Bystry (Executive Director International Renaissance Foundation – IRF) Oleksandr Sushko (Board Chair, IRF) Ivan Krastev (Chairman Centre for Liberal Studies, a Soros and US government-influenced operation in Sofia, Bulgaria) and Deff Barton (Director, US Agency for International Development AID – USAID – Ukraine). USAID is a conduit for the CIA.
Even right-wing thinkers such as George Freidman at Stratfor described these events as being ‘the most blatant coup in history.’
The new ‘government’ in Kiev was represented by a hotch-potch of oligarchs, Kolomoisky, Akhmetof, Pinchuk, Poroshenko, et al, and petty fuhrers including Pariuby, Yarosh, Biletsky, from the Western Ukraine with their violent armed Squadristi units (as in Italy’s period under Mussolini’s regime) terrorizing their opponents. The ultra-right Svoboda Party had a presence in the Ukrainian parliament (Rada). It was and still is a neo-nazi, ultra-right, anti-Semitic, Russophobic party with its base of support in the western Ukraine. The most important governmental post was handed to its fuhrer Andriy Parubiy who was appointed as Secretary of the Security and National Defence Committee, which supervised the defence ministry and the armed forces. The Parubiy appointment to such an important post should, alone, be cause for international outrage. He led the masked Right-Sector thugs who battled riot police in the Maidan in Kiev.
Like Svoboda, Right-Sector led by their own tin-pot fuhrer Dmitry Yarosh is an openly fascist, anti-semitic and anti-Russian organization. Most of the snipers and bomb-throwers in the crowds related to this group. Right Sector members had been participating in military training camps for the last 2 years or more in preparation for street activity of the kind witnessed in the Ukraine during the events in Independence Square in 2013-14. The Right Sector as can be seen by the appointment of Parubiy, is not able to control major appointments to the provisional government but he has succeeded in achieving his long-term goal of legalizing discrimination against Russians. What the Anglo-American left fail to understand – quite deliberately in my view – is the notion that the Ukrainian right-wing extremists are a marginal force in Ukraine. How much evidence do they need exactly? In fact, the politics of the western Ukraine is dominated by the ultras of the right, and every major city has statues of Bandera lovingly cared for and adorned with flower bouquets around his feet.
This discrimination took the forms of mass murder of the 45 people who passed out leaflets in the southern Black Sea port of Odessa when pro-Yanukovich supporters were attacked by fascist mobs and chased into a nearby building, a trade union HQ. The building was then set on fire and its exits blocked, the unfortunate people trapped inside were either burnt to death or, jumped out of the windows only to be clubbed to death when they landed. The practices of the political heirs of Bandera had apparently not been forgotten by the present generation. There is a video of the incident, but frankly, it was so horrific that I could only watch it once. (See more recently the whole murderous episode in the American publication Consortium News 2022). These barbarians were described by Luke Harding a ‘journalist’ of the Guardian as being ‘’an eccentric group of people with unpleasant right-wing views.’’ Yes, they were really nice chaps who got a little carried away!
One week later with the open support of Washington and its European allies, the regime installed by Washington and Berlin in February’s fascist-led putsch then began extending its reign of terror against all popular resistance in Ukraine. That was the significance of the events in the major eastern Ukrainian sea-port city of Mariupol less than a week after the Odessa outrage. (Mariupol has also come into the recent news for a second time around,)
After tanks, armoured personnel carriers and heavily armed troops were unleashed on unarmed civilians in the city, the Kiev regime claimed to have killed some 20 people. The Obama administration immediately blamed the violent repression on “pro-Russian separatists.’’
One week later Poroshenko, ex-Finance Minister in Yanukovich’s government, was elected as President on 29 May and duly announced that “My first presidential trip will be to Donbass where armed pro-Russian rebels had declared the separatist Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and control a large part of the region.’’ This was the beginning of the Anti-Terrorist Operation the ATO. However, things didn’t quite work out as planned. After 2 heavy defeats at Iloviask and Debaltsevo the Ukie army was stopped in its tracks and the situation has remained static to roughly this day.
Until that is things changed. Some 8 years later the Ukie army started doing what comes naturally to them: namely to start shelling the Donbass again. It should be understood that the shelling had started in 2014 immediately after the Kiev coup. During the whole period some 14000 hapless citizens of the Don Bass were killed. Moreover, a large Ukie army of some 100,000 were beginning to mass outside of the Don Bass and were preparing their move.
There was no way that Putin was going to allow this. Not only would it mean mass murder of the Don Bass, but it would also put Ukraine (qua western proxy) right on Russia’s border with NATO hypersonic missiles 5 minutes flying time from Moscow. That settled it – Putin had had enough. The Russian Army moved in. It was left with no alternative.
No great power can allow a peer competitor to mass on its borders by any other great power. The US/NATO was precisely doing this. As Putin pointed out, the flying time for hypersonic missiles from the Russian border to Moscow was 5 minutes. See the American Realist theorist John Mearsheimer in this respect.
Yet, all we get from the legacy left is the incessant virtue signalling and anti-Russian rhetoric. In truth Putin didn’t want this war, but there was pressure building up not only from the US neo-cons but also internally in Russia for a more militant approach in both the Parliament and with the Russian public. Any disinterested account of Putin’s turned on the initial attack of NATO and its proxies and Russia’s counterattack. The neo-cons should have heeded Obama’s warning that Russia had an ‘escalation dominance’ and that the US would be advised to tread carefully on Russia’s doorstep.
Russia is slowly but inexorably winning the battlefield in what has been a total defeat for the regime in Kiev, and more importantly for the US-NATO bloc. The tectonic geopolitical plates seem to be moving.
Filed under: American Lies, EU, Europe, Labour Party, NATO Alliance, Russia, UK, Ukraine, USA, USSR, Western Lies | Tagged: Central Asia, Chechnya, Donbass, Donetsk, Georgia, Lugansk, Monroe Doctrine, NATO Expansion, South Ossetia and Abkhazia | Comments Off on On Wars, Propaganda and outright Lies
The transition from a western economic order toward a multipolar one is ushering in unprecedented economic and security advancements for West Asia.
With Russia and Iran standing guard, and China’s ambitious investments, West Asia must sever its western economic dependencies and race toward the riches of multipolarity.
A race is now underway that will determine the shape of things to come for many generations.
While it is easy to get lost in the swarm of chaotic facts, sound bites, narrative spin, and other noise, it is vital to keep sight of the larger historical forces shaping our present crisis-ridden age.
Two weeks ago, in an important exclusive interview for The Cradle, influential Russian economist Sergey Glazyev outlined the terms and operating principles quickly being brought online by the leading member states of the Greater Eurasian Partnership.
Glazyev laid out the fundamental principles upon which the new post-US dollar economic system will be based. Although some common unit will be agreed upon, it will not be based upon any particular currency as with the Bretton Woods order, but rather a market basket of local currencies tied more deeply to an array of real commodities such as gold and other precious metals, grain, hydrocarbons, sugar, etc.
Real science, not casino-economics
The difference between this system and the now defunct Anglo-American economic structures is that Glazyev’s conception is based on real, tangible, measurable processes defining economic value among participants of the multipolar alliance.
This new paradigm of value stands in stark contrast to the post-1971 floating exchange rate system of rampant speculation and hyperbolically increasing rates of unpayable debts supporting decades of western economic malpractice.
Whereas one system justifies the increase of monetary flows within its system by speculative casino-logic devoid of any measurable improvement in the productive powers of labor, the opposing Eurasian system as described by Glazyev is very different. This multipolar system justifies economic growth, investment, and profit by activities that are tied to improving the conditions of life of people through practices tied to agro-industrial and scientific progress.
For those willing to do their research, they will take note that this is ironically how the west behaved when it was still growing industrially during the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. Sadly, two generations of a post-industrial consumer society logic have destroyed that earlier heritage.
Glazyev is not just any theoretician. He is the Russian minister in charge of Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Union (EEU) and a leading strategist behind the Eurasian Economic Union-China commission for a new financial architecture. As such, his words are not merely academic, but an active force of grand strategy which keeps even monetarist ideologues at the Russian Central Bank up at night.
In all of his recent interviews and writings, Glazyev has also made it clear that the principles of this new system are already operational in the form of China’s unique approach to finance and international relations, recently describing China in the following terms:
“The entire banking system in China is state-owned, it operates as a single development institution, directing cash flows to expand output and develop new technologies. In the United States, the money supply is used to finance the budget deficit and is reallocated to financial bubbles. As a result, the efficiency of the US financial and economic system is 20 percent-there only one in five dollars reaches the real sector, and in China almost 90 percent (that is, almost all the yuan created by the Central Bank of the PRC) feed the contours of expanding production and ensure ultra-high economic growth.”
Across South and Central Asia, the Sino-Russian alliance has been transformative with Moscow providing strategic military and intelligence assistance to prevent western-directed regime change over the past seven years, as we have seen in the case of Syria since 2015, Turkey in 2016, and most recently Kazakhstan in 2022.
However, Russia lacks the economic freedom to carry out construction of mega-projects due to the continuing (for now) IMF hold on its economy — this is where China comes in. Beijing has been able to use its vast state banking apparatus to provide long term investments for the reconstruction of all nations abused by globalization for generations.
‘Tunxi’ to transform western Asia
While China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has been evolving at a fast pace since it was first unveiled in 2013, nowhere does it offer more hope than in the regions of West and Southwest Asia which have suffered under Anglo-American manipulation for generations and whose people are hungry for economic advancement.
With the April 1, 2022 comprehensive Tunxi Agreement signed by the foreign ministers of Russia, Pakistan, China, Afghanistan, Iran, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the Southwest and Central Asian BRI projects took on new energy.
Among the many initiatives in the Tunxi’s goal of integrating Afghanistan into the BRI while also amplifying BRI influence in surrounding regions, we see a high priority on energy projects, transport/connectivity, integration, agriculture, telecommunications and integration with surrounding nations. Among its 72 points, the agreement states:
“China supports the extension of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the China-Central Asia-West Asia Economic Corridor to Afghanistan, and is ready to promote synergy between the Belt and Road Initiative and the development strategies of Afghanistan, and support the smooth operation of the China-Afghanistan freight train services, to help Afghanistan better integrate into the regional economic integration process.”
Leading projects will include the Khaf-Herat railway which will be completed and extended to central Asian countries via the Mazar-e-Sharif rail line and also the Chabahar Port in Iran.
Iran’s Deputy Transport Minister Abbas Khatibi pointed out that this project will soon link to China and other regional nations saying, “In addition to connect Iran’s rail network to Europe, the new Khaf-Herat railroad will link the country’s southern ports to Central Asian countries, the Caucasus, Iraq and even China.”
Increased interconnectivity
On February 23, 2022, The Silk Road Briefing stated:
“There is much to be done to attain Iran-Afghanistan-China rail connectivity. The planned route east would exit Afghanistan on the border with Tajikistan, then continue east to Kyrgyzstan before entering China through valleys of the Tian Shan mountain range that divide the two countries. A likely terminus would be Kashgar, with existing spurs heading north to Urumqi and connecting to China’s high-speed national rail network and through West to Kazakhstan. There are as yet unrealised plans to create a southern rail connection from Kashgar through to Pakistan.”
According to the Tunxi agreement, Turkmenistan also vowed to contributed to the “development of the transport, transit and communication system of Afghanistan, the intensification of the transit of cargo and passenger flows, by maintaining the operation of the railways along the route Atamyrat-Imamnazar-Akina-Andkhoy, which is designed to connect the countries of the region with further access to the railway network of China.”
Also important is the 6540 km Pakistan-Iran-Turkey freight line now being re-opened after 10 years of disarray. This strategic line which can easily intersect with CPEC and rail networks in China cuts travel down from 21 days at sea to only 10 days. Plans to add a new parallel passenger line to the freight service are also underway.
Commenting on the significance of this project, Pakistan’s Railway minister Azam Khan Swati said, “The start of the container train from Pakistan to Iran and Turkey was a long-standing dream of the countries of the region which has come true again.”
Following the Economic Cooperation Organization meeting in November 2021, projects to connect the Persian Gulf (at the Port of Bandar Abbas in Iran) with the Black Sea via rail were advanced by representatives of Iran, Azerbaijan and Georgia.
This development is part of the broader International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) which has become increasingly synergistic with the East-West BRI in recent years and which offers multiple points of intersection with both Russia, Ukraine and Europe. If a wider conflict is to be avoided among Russia and its European neighbors, win-win projects of economic cooperation embodied by this project are essential.
A high priority in the Tunxi agreement was placed on energy projects which Afghanistan desperately needs. Among the many coal, natural gas and other projects showcased, much effort was made to emphasize their complementarity with the CASA-1000 project launched in 2016. This $1.2 billion energy mega project involves creating a vast system of transmission lines stretching from the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Another high priority project featured in Tunxi is the 1814 km Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) Natural Gas Pipeline whose construction began in 2018 which will be an important force for residential and industrial development of all four nations.
How ‘new’ will the international order be?
While the Russia-China alliance is robust, other nations among the 148 which have so far signed cooperation agreements with the BRI are on shakier ground. It is in these weaker zones that efforts are being made to loosen the fabric of the Eurasian alliance through any and all possible means.
Such has been the fate of Pakistan which saw an alleged US State Department-directed overthrow of Prime Minister Imran Khan on 10 April. This has cast doubt over the new government’s level of commitment to the CPEC and BRI projects as outlined in Tunxi and other locations as well as broader pro-Eurasian security agreements advanced through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in recent years. At least for the time being, the new Pakistani government of Shehbaz Sharif has vowed to maintain CPEC as a top national priority.
Whatever the outcome of the unfolding conflict in Ukraine, military saber-rattling by the US in Asia-Pacific, or broader efforts to destabilize the allies of Russia, Iran and China (RIC), the fact is that the current order as we know it is in terminal decline, while a new economic system will arise one way or another.
The question isn’t “will it collapse?” but “will the new system be based on the principles advocated by Sergey Glazyev?” If not, will it be premised on the model of a new Roman Empire managing a divided, impoverished, and warring world under the influence of a sociopathic supranational hegemon?
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Filed under: China, Iran, Russia, USA | Tagged: brl, Central Asia, Chabahar port, China's Economic Strategy, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, Eurasian integration, Iran-China strategic partnership, Multi-polar world order, Russia-China strategic partnership, West Asia | Comments Off on West Asia’s economic savior is called ‘multipolarity’
Energy-rich Qatar’s designation as a major non-NATO ally may upset the Persian Gulf balance, but could be a means for the US to counter a Sino-Russian lockhold on Eurasia.
By Agha Hussain
The US’ designation of Qatar as a Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) carries more geopolitical significance than is immediately evident. It in fact can be viewed as one of Washington’s first steps toward a new strategy for a US riposte against Russia and China at key theaters in Eurasian great-power competition.
On 31 January, US President Joe Biden hosted the Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hammad Al-Thani in Washington and declared Qatar an MNNA. Also discussed was gas-rich Qatar’s potential role in alleviating Europe’s reliance on Russian gas for its energy supply – a key leverage point for Moscow to dissuade European NATO members from confronting it over Ukraine.
It should be noted, however, that Qatar itself has cast doubt over any speculation that it could unilaterally replace the continent’s gas needs in case of a shortage.
Indeed, there is no western military response to current Russian operations in Ukraine. Whether US or European Union (EU), the western strategic calculus does not deem Kiev important enough to rescue from Russia.
Nonetheless, Ukraine is still crucial for the US as a means to help counter Russian influence in vast, resource-rich Eurasia. Namely, through connecting China to Europe via the multimodal Kazakhstan-Azerbaijan (via the Caspian Sea)-Georgia-Ukraine (via the Black Sea) route and thus helping China reduce reliance on its currently most-used land route to Europe, i.e. via Russia and Belarus, a close Russian ally.
This strategy would give the US a rare opportunity to leverage China’s global economic expansion through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which it usually tries to counter with limited success, to reduce Russia’s geo-economic depth in Eurasia.
However, the aforementioned Trans-Caspian International Transport Route (TITR) is more time-consuming, costly, and closer to conflict areas than Russia-Belarus. And Moscow and Tehran have all but blocked the Caspian Sea as a transit route for pipelines. Moreover, to justify the investment needed to improve Ukraine’s transit capacity and to ensure that traders even use the TITR, the EU needs to sanction Moscow and render the Russia-Belarus route untenable.
Thus, the EU hypothetically replacing Russia with Qatar as its gas supplier, and subsequently becoming more willing to confront Moscow, unlocks a major roadmap for the US to counter Russia.
In this scenario, the EU could enhance and leverage China’s own interest in tilting to the TITR from Russia. According to a 2016 study in the European Council of Foreign Affairs, Ukraine’s harmonization with EU trade standards boosted China’s interest in increasing its Ukrainian food imports, which necessitated enhancing Ukraine’s transport infrastructure since these imports cannot travel to China via the Belarus-Russia route due to Moscow’s sanctions on Kyiv. Indeed, China signed agreements with Ukraine last year to develop the latter’s transport infrastructure.
Afghanistan
The freezing of Afghan central bank assets are burning US bridges with Afghanistan – where the US fought its longest war (2001-21) in its short history. However, the US’ withdrawal from Afghanistan in July 2021 provided an opportunity for Russian and Chinese influence to fill the void. Thus, as the US’ great-power rivalries with Russia and China deepen, the case for rebuilding contacts and connections in Afghanistan will strengthen in Washington.
Afghanistan is central to the US’ goal of building new international transport routes for the Central Asian Republics (CARs) that do not transit through Russia, whose territory and infrastructure the CARs disproportionately rely on. This is an official US objective, as represented by the C5+1 platform and Washington’s official ‘Strategy for Central Asia 2019-25’. Afghanistan is the transit state for this strategy, to connect the CARs to its own neighbor Pakistan and Pakistani Arabian Sea ports for access to global shipment.
For a proper ‘return’ to Afghanistan as a Eurasia-focused great-power, the US appears to have selected Qatar as its conduit. In this vein, Washington shifted its operational command for Afghanistan to Qatar during the withdrawal and designated Doha its official diplomatic representative in Kabul in November 2021.
Moreover, the US picked Qatar from amongst a broad mix of options for military involvement in post-withdrawal Afghanistan. Such options included negotiating with Pakistan to allow US aircraft to transit its airspace into Afghanistan for combat purposes and even Moscow’s offer, made during the withdrawal, for the US to use Russian bases in Central Asia for intel gathering flights over Afghanistan.
Qatar stood out as the best choice from the US’ great-power perspective. Pakistan’s close regional rapport with China and emphasis on cooperation, made it unlikely to facilitate an inroad for the US. Furthermore, Qatar’s retention of its own diplomatic channels to Afghanistan makes it yet more suitable to the US’ great-power sensitivities.
Qatar hosted US-Taliban peace talks since 2013, years before platforms such as the Moscow-led ‘Extended Troika’ or Beijing’s ‘Quadrilateral Coordination Group’ (QCG) were launched. Doha was not party to either platform, or of other multilateral dialogues on Afghanistan.
Hence, the US can integrate Qatar into its bigger-picture for Afghanistan without making the Gulf state feel as if it is sacrificing its positive bilateral relations with Afghanistan’s other external stakeholders.
Aside from Ukraine and Afghanistan, Washington has another potential front against its Eurasian rivals: Qatar’s home turf in the Persian Gulf region, where common ground exists between Doha’s own ambitions and the US’ containment efforts aimed at China in particular.
The Persian Gulf and China
China and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states are especially important trading partners to each other given the unmatched size of the former’s market for the latters’ energy exports. Beijing also invests heavily in the GCC to turn it into a commercial and logistics hub for the (BRI), the single most consequential driver of Eurasian geoeconomics.
The US views China’s expanding role in the Gulf – whether in the BRI, tech investment or security realms – as a challenge to its own decades-old status as the GCC states’ main security guarantor. How the Sino-GCC embrace pans out is therefore of special interest to Washington.
As noted by Jonathan Fulton, a specialist on Sino-GCC relations, the extent of GCC participation in the BRI is dependent on each Gulf state’s own development plans with BRI. Saudi Arabia and the UAE lead the way in this respect, hosting the bulk of China’s BRI supply chain in the region in the form of industrial parks and ports heavily invested in by Beijing.
In contrast, Chinese-Qatari relations lack this connectivity dimension and are more restricted to just trade.
“In general, Qatar and China maintain a very warm relationship,” noted Gulf affairs analysts Giorgio Cafiero and Anastasia Chisholm in August last year. “The Sino-Qatari partnership is mainly energy-oriented. Beyond the cooperation in the liquefied natural gas (LNG) sector, however, there is much less to Doha’s relationship with Beijing compared to Saudi Arabia or the UAE’s relations with China.”
China has also signed ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnerships’ with the Saudis and Emiratis in contrast to the lower-level ‘Strategic Partnership’ with Qatar.
Since Chinese investments in Qatar do not springboard the BRI the way those in Saudi Arabia and the UAE do, it makes sense for the US to boost Qatar as a hedge against complete Chinese monopoly over the Gulf’s integration with Eurasia via BRI.
The end of the three-and-a-half year, Saudi-led blockade against Qatar has not necessarily led to a halt in Doha’s rivalry with Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. Rather it has grown more central to its foreign policy as it reclaims its place in the GCC without letting its guard down. This is a reality of Gulf affairs that will likely accompany the GCC’s closer integration with the BRI.
Qatar can offset its GCC rivals’ gains from the BRI by increasing its military engagement with the US. Both the Saudis and Emiratis still rely on the security umbrella that complying with the US’ great-power priorities brings yet have also strengthened ties with China.
This dilemma could also turn Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s increasing defence ties with both China and Russia into driving factors of a partisan pro-Qatari slant in the US’ Gulf policy. After all, Qatar has kept its own defence dealings with China and Russia minimal compared to those with the US.
The UAE recently suspended talks with the US to import the latter’s F-35 fighter jets. One of the reasons for this impasse is Emirati resentment at the US tying the deal to Abu Dhabi’s 5g contract with Chinese telecom giant Huawei, which Washington sees as means for China to compromise the Emirati-imported F35s’ technology. Meanwhile, Qatar’s own talks for the F-35s proceed with less complications and are arguably boosted by its MNNA designation.
China does not want its regional investments getting caught up in the intra-GCC competition for primacy in the Gulf, which could happen if the US greenlights the F-35s for Qatar but not for the UAE, thus setting a precedent for deeper rivalry.
After all, intra-GCC competition has increasingly exhibited zero-sum tendencies. This was seen last year when Saudi Arabia told companies doing business in the kingdom that they would lose their government contracts unless they shifted their regional headquarters to Riyadh from Dubai and then also excluded imports from Emirati economic zones from their preferential tariffs.
Such “zero-sumism” is antithetical to what China wants in the Gulf, which is the harmonization of each Gulf state’s trade and connectivity policies. Beijing needs this to synergize its various Gulf investments into serving a broader, unified global strategy as per the BRI.
Thus, the US could use its ascendant ties with Qatar to cause China a significant headache in the Gulf, especially considering how far Beijing stays from contributing to zero-sum rivalries and standoffs due to its neutrality-oriented foreign policy.
Mutual convenience
However it pans out, the emerging US-Qatari alliance in Eurasia is highly convenient to both sides.
At the very least, the US can try to leverage Qatar’s potential energy role in Europe, its diplomatic role in Afghanistan and its ambitious Gulf policies relative to growing Chinese influence there for its own geopolitical interests.
As for Qatar, the fact that these roles do not threaten its bilateral relations with either China or Russia is a major plus point. Neither of the Eurasian great-powers is zero-sum in its foreign relations outlook and is unlikely to deem Qatar’s prospective participation in the US’ Eurasia strategy a major problem.
Eurasia is once again at the forefront of geopolitics and great power rivalries. Following the US exit from Afghanistan last summer, the incumbent superpower, was perceived to be scaling back if not withdrawing from this strategically important region, however in its relationship with Qatar, the US has shown it may be down but not quite out of Eurasia.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
Filed under: Afghanistan, Bloody Gas, China, EU, Eurasia, Europe, GCC, Iran, NATO Alliance, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Taliban, Ukraine, USA | Tagged: American "Muslim" Brotherhood, Belarus, BRI, Caspian Sea, Central Asia, F-35, Huawei, Kazakhstan, KSA, Persian Gulf, Sheikh Tamim bin Hammad Al-Thani, US Withdrawal from Afghanistan | Comments Off on Is Qatar the means for a US comeback in Eurasia?
I’m not sure even a NATO mosquito could cross the Russian border unmolested. And when a bear is lethally threatened, it doesn’t posture; it charges in a mighty roar. So why the Russian ultimatum? There are many plausible motives, many of which are not mutually exclusive. I’d like to focus on an aspect that hasn’t been discussed yet.
The last ten to twenty years could be characterized as a rivalry between China’s desire to re-balance the world’s economy, and the US’s effort to maintain the Dollar’s supremacy. China rose on the back of Western consumerism. There is only that much the West economy can absorb of China’s growing production, and that limit has clearly been exceeded. If China is to pursue its economic development, it needs additional “advanced” export markets to sustain its growing middle class. This is the Chinese necessity underlying the BRI, it cannot grow without the world growing with it.
Until recently it was content with a simple strategy: Enter several disparate countries at a time and start economic projects. Soon enough the US intervened to discipline the offenders; but they cannot strike all at once, choices must be made. Meanwhile, China approaches another bunch with still more economic projects. The US gets slowly overwhelmed, while the projects advance two steps forward, one step backward. On paper, it looks like an expensive proposition, but that is the beauty of it, it’s all paid for with US paper, while gold is accumulated. This entire period is comparable to the early and middle stages of a Go game
There is a point however when all these mini economic hubs must consolidate into a unified stream of connections to realize their full potential. That means no more US military interference and economic/financial disruptions. It seems we are now entering the late stage when “eyes” must be locked and linked.
There is little question the latest Russian move was long prepared and discussed with China. We may assume a common goal, and that none of the recent events are coincidences.
China and Russia favor and promote inter-currency settlement of trades. The Digital Yuan (E-CNY, electronic China Yuan) is designed for this purpose and has just completed successfully its live trials. It is reasonable to expect its official announcement in the near future. There are rumors this will be done during Putin’s visit to the Olympics. Regardless of the exact launch date, preparation must be made against the predictably harshest US resistance to its international deployment. There’s little doubt in my mind that many, if not most of East Asia will readily incorporate the new crypto iteration of the Yuan. However the Kazakhstan events, which were clearly foreseen with great precision, essentially opened up the entire Central Asian economies to its eventual use. With the recent 400bn commitment to Iran and the ongoing Pakistani projects, one may merrily add them to the bunch. India is free to join whenever they deem it in their best interest. This brings us right to the doorsteps of the Middle East.
Let’s now briefly revisit the US’ choices taken during the middle stage game. Since East Asia was growing to displace the US and EU as China’s main trading partner, Washington initiated their “pivot East” strategy to disrupt their momentum. Because of the sorry state of both their economy and military, they had to “delegate” the task of containing Russia on its western border to the EU. The Ukraine, in this context, can be seen as the “pretext” for the EU to activate NATO in Eastern Europe. However, as “pivot East” was floundering, they further needed to draw on their middle east assets (it’s becoming increasingly difficult not to laugh at what I must write). To this effect, they devised the Abraham Accords to similarly delegate the task of containing the “Shiite Axis” to Israel and the Golf States. The first “casualty” of these infamous Accords was probably Pakistan’s definite defection to the BRI, which further precipitated the Afghani debacle. To correct that mistake they then tried another formation with India, Japan, and a few others, followed by AUKUS, which both turned into flops, guided by the same imperative to relieve the strain on their military in an attempt to remain relevant on all fronts.
To control the Middle East, the US needs control of Europe, if only to secure their supply line. And to influence Central Asia they must control the Middle East. Until now Washington was essentially calling the shots, while Russia and China adapted their plans to whatever was thrown their way. By submitting their security demands, Russia is signaling unequivocally it is now taking the initiative. While the reinforcement of the Ukrainian Army was first designed to pressure some Russian reaction so as to increase the European nations’ commitment to toe the anti Russia line, the resulting Russian built-up of forces and large scale exercises have effectively reversed the pressure. The bulk of NATO forces are now bogged down on the eastern European front in a self induced paranoia, severely restricting their possible redeployment elsewhere.
With the Russian ultimatum the US is now basically faced with the following choices. Sign the documents, which by extension will mean the Minsk agreement and opening of NS2, but would free NATO reinforcement to the Middle East, no matter how futile this would ultimately prove. Because if this happens Europe will quickly “organically” link to the Asian network and recover most of its sovereignty from the US. At that moment, the Middle East is lost.
By not signing, the choice becomes loosing the middle East or release the pressure in East Asia, in both cases China wins.
If they don’t reinforce the Middle East, Pakistan is soon to be followed by the entire region. Though there could be some fireworks in the process, once the dust settles the BRI will be staring straight at Africa, throwing its full weight at European and American interests on that continent. If that happens, Europe falls.
Finally if they do “save” the Middle East at the detriment of East Asia, the Asian power house will become such that no one will escape its gravitational pull for long.
It is not very difficult to see, in this context, that whichever region the US decides to forsake, it’s only a matter of time before they lose the rest. Of course, this all assumes they don’t first crumble under the weight of their debts. Will they turn nuts and try blow it all up? I can only attest that the one thing greater than their evil idiocy, is their cowardice.
“Russia plans to engage its nuclear weapons not against those countries where it was launched against Russia, but against the mastermind cities where the decisions were made. To be exact, it is Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other American cities. Please fully understand, in case American nuclear weapons are launched from, eg. Taiwan, or Poland, the response will hit New York or Washington.” Russian Duma deputy, Yevgeny Fyodorov.
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السبت 15 كانون ثاني 2022
طبول الحرب في أوكرانيا باتت تستحضر حروب متنقلة في أكثر من قارة، والتصريحات والتصريحات المضادة أخذت تتدافع بين الروس والأميركان وحلفائهم في حلف الناتو، بشكل غير مسبوق… حتى باتت حدود أوكرانيا لا سيما الجنوبية الغربية منها أشبه بالفتيل الذي يمكن ان يشعل حرباً عالمية.
في هذه الأثناء صعّد الروس من تهديداتهم للغرب لتصل حدود الحديقة الخلفية للولايات المتحدة الأميركية.
فقد نشر موقع ميليتاري ووتش الأميركي أول أمس تصريحاً لنائب وزير الخارجية الروسي، سيرغي ريابكوڤ، قال فيه انه «لا يستبعد ان تقوم روسيا بإنشاء قواعد عسكرية في كوبا وڤنزويلا» على الرغم من انه لا يريد تأكيد الأمر حالياً ولكنه لا يستبعد ايّ شيء في الوقت نفسه.
فيما تعتقد مصادر روسية قريبة من الكرملين على انّ الروس قد قاموا بنشر أسلحة استراتيجية هناك، وأنهم سيعلنون عن ذلك في الوقت المناسب.
في هذه الأثناء نقل الموقع نفسه عن الأمين العام لحلف شمال الأطلسي، إيان شتولتينبيرغ قوله، في الإطار نفسه، انّ من المحتمل ان تنضمّ أوكرانيا وجورجيا للحلف وهو ما سيسهل نشر أسلحة نووية أميركية بالقرب من الأراضي الروسية.
وهذا في تقديرنا تصريح قريب من إعلان حرب، مؤجلة حالياً، ضدّ روسيا. وهو ما لن تسمح به موسكو تحت ايّ ظرف كان برأي المصادر آنفة الذكر.
فالرئيس بوتين برأي هذه المصادر ليس بوريس يلتسين، وما لم يقبل به الأخير، لن يقبل به رئيس الكي جي بي السابق في ألمانيا الشرقية، وزعيم معسكر تحالف الشرق الجديد، الذي ركب يوماً طائرة السوخوي بنفسه منطلقاً من موسكو وذهب لمقاتلة ميليشيا الغرب القاعدية المموّلة يومها سعودياً في الشيشان وجورجيا يوم كان رئيساً للوزراء في عهد يلتسين في العام ٢٠٠٠.
المصادر نفسها تؤكد بأنّ لدى فلاديمير بوتين خطة هجومية مضادة متكاملة لمواجهة احتمالية قيام الغرب بضم أوكرانيا لحلف الناتو.
والخطة حسب تلك المصادر تقوم على التالي:
أولا ـ الإعلان عن نشر قوات وأسلحة استراتيجية في كوبا وفنزويلا.
ثانيا ـ دعم سورية وحلفائها في حلف المقاومة على الطريقة الفيتنامية في الصراع العربي «الإسرائيلي»أو.
ثالثا ـ دعم كلّ ما من شأنه إثارة القلاقل في تركيا للإطاحة بالركن الجنوبي من حلف الأطلسي وتفكيك دولة أردوغانُ.
رابعا ـ وانْ تطلب الأمر اجتياح بولندا وصولاً الى حدود ألمانيا الشرقية سابقاً اي عند جدار برلين!
ويملك بوتين في هذا السياق حججاً قانونية وسياسية وأمنية قوية جداً ومقنعة للرأي العام الروسي والعالمي.
فثمة اتفاق سوفياتي مع الغرب يقضي بانسحاب الروس (السوفيات) من أوروبا الشرقية مقابل عدم توسع الناتو شرقاً…
في حين انّ الناتو ليس فقط اجتاح أوروبا الشرقية بل وأصبح اليوم في البلطيق والآن يريد ضمّ جمهوريات سوفياتية سابقة مثل جورجيا وأوكرانيا، فاتحاً شهيته باتجاه تفكيك الاتحاد الروسي نفسه!
ثم انّ شخصية بوتين القومية الروسية وتاريخه السياسي الشخصي وهو ابن لينينغراد والكي جي بي، لا تسمح له بان يقبل ان تقارعه سلطة نازية جديدة ركّبها الغرب في جمهورية اعتبرها الروس حتى الأمس القريب جزءاً من لا يتجزأ من روسيا ـ أوكرانيا.
فضلاً ان تتمرّد عليه جمهورية مثل جورجيا عمل فيها الغرب ثورة ملونة وركّب فيها رئيسة عميلة للغرب كانت سفيرة فرنسا في جورجيا تمّ فرضها على الشعب الجورجي، فقط لاعتبارها من أصول جورجية في لحظة غفلة روسية!
ثم ان ما حصل في كازاخستان قبل أيام من عملية ردعية استراتيجية، قادها بوتين شخصياً استهدفت ضرب النيوليبرالية في كلّ آسيا الوسطى والقوقاز فضلاً عن قمع رديفتها في نفس روسيا، كان كفيلاً برأي أهل الاختصاص بتغيير قواعد الاشتباك الدولية ما سيمنع الغرب، من ارتكاب حماقة الانقضاض على أوكرانيا والتي يملك بوتين فيها نفوذاً غير مرئيّ أكثر مما يملك مجموع الغرب بكلّ قواعده المتعددة التي باتت مزروعة على امتداد حدود الخاصرة الأمنية القومية الروسية الأهمّ!
العالم يتغيّر بسرعة كبيرة، ومركز ثقله انتقل عملياً من الغرب الى الشرق.
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2022 الثلاثاء 11كانون ثاني
عندما اشتدّت حدة التوتر بين روسيا وأوكرانيا حتى بلغت حدّ التكهّن بقرب إطلاق روسيا عملاً عسكرياً واسعاً داخل تلك الدولة التي ترشح نفسها للانضمام الى حلف الناتو لتضع الحلف ملاصقاً لروسيا عند حدودها الغربية، عندها صرّح بايدن أنّ أميركا لن تكون على استعداد للتدخل العسكري ضدّ روسيا في أوكرانيا، لكنها ستتخذ من التدابير بحقها ما يجعلها تتألم او تندم اذا نفذت تهديدها بالاجتياح؛ موقف جاء بعد أشهر من قرار بايدن الانسحاب السريع من أفغانستان وإعلان أميركا عن تفاهم مع العراق يضع حداً لانتشار قواتها القتالية فيه ويحوّله الى وجود من طبيعة عسكرية استشارية ولوجستية من أجل تدريب ودعم القوات المسلحة العراقية من أمن وجيش. ترافق ذلك مع رفع درجة الاهتمام الأميركي بمسألة الصين والاتجاه الى «احتواء» خطرها المتعاظم ضدّ أميركا، اهتمام أطلق عليه وصف «الانزياح الأميركي نحو الشرق الأقصى».
هذه المواقف وغيرها مما هو معلن أميركياً بشأن اليمن والسعودية وغيرهما حملت البعض على القول بأنّ أميركا بصدد اعتماد استراتيجية جديدة تنسحب بموجبها من الشرق الأوسط لتتفرّغ للشرق الأقصى بعد فشلها في الحرب الكونية التي استهدفت بها سورية وكامل محور المقاومة، قول لم يتقبّله فريق آخر من الباحثين ونحن منهم، حيث كان من الصعوبة بمكان القبول الآن بفكرة تخلي أميركا عن الشرق الأوسط ذي الأهمية الاستراتيجية التي تفرض على من يتطلع الى الإمساك بقرار العالم أو التأثير فيه أن يكون ممسكاً بقرار هذه المنطقة أو له موقع مؤثر فيها، وأنّ أميركا لا تزال ورغم النكسات والفشل في أكثر من جبهة وميدان، لا تزال تطرح نفسها قائدة للعالم، وأنها لا تزال ترفض فكرة النظام العالمي الجديد القائم واقعياً على تعدّد الأقطاب والتنوّع في المجموعات الاستراتيجية التي تشكلت وتتشكل في سياقه.
ربطاً بما تقدّم من وقائع ومفاهيم وتناقضات في السلوكيات الأميركية حيال المنطقة التي تسمّيها أميركا وفقاً لتقسيمات انتشار جيوشها وأساطيلها في العالم تسمّيها «المنطقة الوسطى» كان لا بدّ من أن تكون أميركا تخفي شيئاً كبيراً يمكنها من البقاء الفاعل في آسيا الوسطى وغربي آسيا، وجوداً تواجه به أعداءها الأساسيين الأخطر على سياستها في العالم والمتمثلين بشكل أساسي بثلاثي الصين وروسيا وإيران.
ولهذا فإنه عندما انفجرت أعمال الاحتجاج في شوارع مدن كازاخستان الرئيسية بهذا الشكل، احتجاجات انقلبت بسرعة هائلة الى أعمال عنف دمويّة أوْدت خلال ٤٨ ساعة بحياة ١٦٤ مواطناً كازاخياً، كان لا بدّ من البحث عن يد خفية أعدّت وحرّكت هذه الأعمال بمثل هذا التأثير والشدة، وكان أيضاً من المُلحّ أن تدرس الظاهرة من قبل المعنيين من الدول المهدّدة بهذه الأعمال، أو التي يمكن أن تتأثر بتداعياتها.
فكازاخستان دولة ذات أهمية استراتيجية قصوى في آسيا الوسطى، أهمية تستمدّ من موقعها الجغرافي وثرواتها الطبيعية وتأثيرها الفاعل على المستهدفين الأساسيين الثلاثة بالسياسة الأميركية باعتبارها منطقة الوسط بينهم (الصين وروسيا وإيران). فهي تتشارك مع روسيا بحدود هي الأطول بين دولتين في العالم (٧٠٠٠ كلم)، وتتصل بالصين من الشرق بما يجعلها الممرّ الإجباري لطريق الحرير الجديد المعبّر عنه بمشروع «الحزام والطريق» الواعد، وهي تقع شمالي إيران التي يعنيها أكثر من أمر من أمورها المشتركة مع كازاخستان ديمغرافياً وانتماء وعقيدة وأمناً.
وكان من المنطقيّ أن يكون البحث عن اليد الأميركية في أحداث كازاخستان التي سرعان ما أسميت في الإعلام الغربي «الثورة»، وربطت بالثورات الملوّنة التي اعتمدتها أميركا لقلب أنظمة الحكم في أكثر من دولة في العالم ووضع اليد عليها والإمساك بقرارها، وبالفعل تبيّن بعد بعض من بحث وتمحيص انّ أحداث كازاخستان كان بدأ الإعداد لها منذ العام ٢٠١٩ بقيادة أميركية ومشاركة بريطانية وتمويل سعودي ودور تركي.
ومهمّ أن نتوقف عند العام ٢٠١٩ أيّ مباشرة بعد أن تأكد لهؤلاء فشل الحرب الكونية على سورية ومحور المقاومة ونجاح روسيا في التقدّم لإشغال موقعها في الصف الأول دولياً وتأكد نجاح الصين في التعامل مع التدابير الأميركية ضدّها واحتواءها كما ينبغي.
ولهذا أدركت روسيا حجم الخطر المتشكّل عند حدودها الجنوبية، والذي شرعت أبوابه عليها من كازاخستان وهي ما برحت تعالج المسألة الأوكرانية وتداعياتها، لذلك كان عليها وبدون تردّد او إبطاء أن تسارع إلى عمل دفاعيّ جوهري وفقاً لما تتيحه لها «معاهدة الأمن الجماعيّ» التي ينتظم فيها الى جانبها كلّ من كازاخستان، وتركمانستان، وقيرغيزستان، وطاجيكستان، وأوزبكستان، والتي تتيح للأعضاء في هذه المنظومة تبادل المساعدة العسكريّة للحفاظ على الأمن والسيادة على أراضيها، فوجهت قوة عسكرية قتاليّة يناهز عديدها الـ ٢٠ ألف جندي وضابط انتشروا في مدن كازاخستان الرئيسيّة لحماية البنى والمقار الرسمية والعامة ولقطع الطريق على الفوضى التي خطط لها لإسقاط النظام ونقل البلاد إلى الضفة المعاكسة وإقامة حكومة تديرها أميركا وبريطانيا.
لقد أنقذت روسيا بتدخلها العسكري السريع والمشروع في كازاخستان، أنقذت نفسها وحلفاءها ومنطقة آسيا الوسطى من مشروع فوضى وعدم استقرار وأخطار لا تُحصى وأجهضت خطة غربية خبيثة كان من المقدّر لها لو نجحت ان تعوّض خسائر الغرب في العقد الأخير في ميادين وساحات الشرق الوسط وآسيا الوسطى، وأن تحجب التقدّم الروسي على الصعيد الدولي، وتشغل روسيا عن الخطر الأوكراني، وان تقطع الطريق على الصين في خطة «الحزام والطريق»، وان تجبر إيران على الاهتمام شمالاً وتخصيص جهد لا بأس به لاتقاء الخطر من الجمهوريات الإسلامية التي تتغلغل فيها اليد الصهيوأميركية وذلك على حساب ملفات أساسية استراتيجية تهتمّ بها عادة.
لقد قطعت الطريق حتى على مشروع كارثي في أوراسيا وآسيا الوسطى وصولاً الى غربي آسيا، ومع ذلك فإنّ الموضوع لم ينته بعد والخطر لم يستبعد كلياً طالما انّ هناك جمراً وناراً يمكن ان تنبعث في الشوارع الكازاخية رغم انّ الدولة ومع المساعدة الروسية أمسكت بزمام الأمور وسيطرت على الوضع، لكن التجارب تعلّمنا انّ أميركا من طباعها الاستمرار في المحاولة وطالما انها تلعب بدماء الغير وأمنه وماله دون ان تمسّ هي بجندها ومالها فإنها لا تتوقف عن العدوان والعبث بأمور الغير، من هنا تبدو أهمية بلورة موقف دولي إقليمي متماسك يكون الى جانب كازاخستان ليدافع عنها تكون نواته منظمة معاهدة الأمن الجماعي ويستفيد من قدرات دولية أخرى خاصة الصين وإيران.
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السبت 8 يناير 2022
كل ما أعدّه له الغرب والرجعية العربية خلال سنوات وصرفوا عليه المليارات تبخر بين ليلة وضحى على يد فلاديمير بوتين!
فخلال أقل من 24 ساعة تمكن بوتين من إحباط أخطر عملية أميركية كانت تقضي بإحراق آسيا الوسطى والقوقاز انطلاقاً من كازاخستان!
فقد استطاعت موسكو نقل أكثر من 20 ألف جندي الى هذا البلد المترامي الأطراف، ونجاحها بضرب الثورة الملوّنة المدعومة أميركياً والمموّلة سعودياً والسيطرة على مفاصل البلاد السياسية والإدارية والجغرافية، ما جعل بوتين ينجح بإخراج بايدن من اللعبة بخفي حنين ويخرج من كازاخستان خالي الوفاض، لا يملك في القمة الافتراضية المنتظرة بينه وبين نظيره الروسي في ١٠ الشهر الحالي سوى خيبة الأمل والذلّ والانكسار بعدما كان بايدن يريدها ورقته الرابحة المضمونة…
جو بايدن الذي كان قد أخفق تماماً في جرّ غريمه على المسرح الدولي فلاديمير بوتين إلى فخ اجتياح جيب أوكرانيا رغم كثرة الضجيج الإعلامي والتحشيد الاستخباري والعسكري على حدود الأمن القومي الروسي.
فكان قرار الدولة العميقة في واشنطن ان ذهبت للعمل بالخطة «ب» في إطار إشغال روسيا بمسرح عمليات أوسع وإبعادها عن تجميع قوى الشرق الصاعدة.
وهكذا تكون روسيا من الآن حتى ذلك اليوم قد نجحت في تفكيك كلّ الوحدات الإرهابية المدرّبة في القواعد التركية والمموّلة خليجياً، والقضاء عليها وتدميرها على امتداد البلاد الكازاخية.
ما يعني موسكو قد أحبطت عملياً أخطر مؤامرة كانت قد أعدّت لها واشنطن وأدواتها منذ سنوات لكازاخستان كما تقول مصادر مطلعة اقتضت نزول من تمّ تدريبهم وإعدادهم جيداً الى الشارع في أكبر بلاد آسيا المركزية الحاضنة للأمن القومي الروسي.
انّ نجاح هذا الإنزال الروسي المجوقل يحمل في طياته دلالات واسعة واستراتيجية في غاية الأهمية لواشنطن والناتو.
فالعملية جرت بسرعة فائقة تمّت السيطرة فيها على مساحة تفوق مساحة كلّ أوروبا، وفي بلاد أكثر تعقيداً من أوكرانيا وبولندا اللتين باتتا عملياً لقمة سهلة على الابتلاع والهضم بالنسبة لموسكو لو قرّرت ذلك في الجولات المقبلة من النزال مع الغرب، ما يجعل واشنطن تحت الصدمة الكبرى الآن وهي تشاهد خططها تتهاوى أمام عيونها من جديد كما حصل في سورية ولكن هذه المرة كلمح البصر!
فالمعروف انّ كلّ الأدوات المنفذة للخطة الأميركية كانت جاهزة عبر توظيف أحزاب ومنظمات مجتمع مدني ومجموعات مستعارة من دول الجوار (مقرّها اوكرانيا) مع غرفة العمليات المشتركة في الما ـ اتا في قبضة الروس!
وبهذا يكون قد سقط سيناريو إشعال «ربيع عربي» معادٍ لموسكو كان يهدف الضغط عليها لتقديم تنازلات للغرب او الانزلاق الى العنف والتورّط بالدم الكازاخي، للذهاب بالبلد الى مسار الثورات الملوّنة.
وكازاخستان الدولة الأهمّ للحلف الروسي الآسيوي للأمن والدفاع المشترك وإحدى مقرات تأمين حشد الأسلحة الاستراتيجية الروسية، كانت البداية التي افترضها الغرب للتسلل الى الصين والى الجمهوريات المسلمة بما فيها المنضوية تحت الاتحاد الروسي.
وهي الدولة الكبرى بمساحة تزيد على 3 ملايين كم2 التي تحاذي كلّ الجنوب الروسي تقريباً بطول حدود مشتركة مع روسيا يبلغ 7664 كلم، وتحاذي الصين شرقاً وشمالاً ايضاً…
وكازاخستان الدولة الغنية بالنفط والغاز وبالمعادن الكثيرة ومنها اليورانيوم كذلك.
تمكنت موسكو عملياً من إنقاذها من أخطر عملية هجوم غربي مسلح في أقل من ٢٤ ساعة من خلال تسيير جسر جوي فائق السرعة والتسليح جعل الناتو مبهوتاً وفاقداً لزمام المبادرة تماماً!
وهكذا تكون موسكو عملياً قد أحبطت مؤامرة نقل كازاخستان من ضفة الى ضفة أخرى من خلال استخدامها ديناميكية دفاعية عالية جداً ذكرت العالم بعملية كوسوفو وصربيا عندما سيطر الروس على مطار بريشتينا في العام 1999 ما دفع يومها قوات الناتو للتقهقر عن البوسنة وصربيا حتى يومنا هذا…
ويعزو المتابعون نجاح الخطة الروسية للإنزال الجوي في كازاخستان الى علم القيادة الروسية العليا جيداً بما كانت قد خططت له القيادة المركزية الأميركية، المتمركزة في قطر، يوم نقلت آلاف من عناصر داعش، من كلّ من سورية والعراق منذ العام 2017، بعد هزيمتهم على بوابات الشام وبلاد الرافدين على يد جيوش محور المقاومة وانعدام إمكانية معاودتهم القتال بشكل جبهوي (أيّ على شكل جبهه قادرة على شنّ عمليات عسكرية واسعة).
وكيف انّ عمليات النقل لهذه المجموعات، كانت قد جرت بتمويل سعودي قطري، وأنها قد بلغت ذروتها بعد هزيمة داعش في العراق أواخر العام المذكور.
حيث تمّ نقل ما لا يقلّ عن 12 الف عنصر الى شمال أفغانستان وبدأ تسريبهم من يومها الى داخل الجمهوريات الآسيويه السوفياتية السابقة وبينها كازاخستان .
وقد وجد هؤلاء قواعد حاضنة لهم في تلك البلدان، وذلك من خلال 18 ألف منظمة غير حكومية، تموّلها السعودية، في تلك الدول .
ويبلغ تعداد أفراد هذه المنظمات، القادرين على حمل السلاح والمدرّبين والمجهّزين جيداً حسب مصادر محور المقاومة، ما يزيد على 280 ألف فرد .
وما حصل خلال الأيام الماضية، من فوضى ونهب وسلب وتدمير الممتلكات الخاصة والعامة، إنما كان بإشراف غرفة عمليات أميركية «إسرائيلية»، مقرّها مدينة المآ ـ اتا، العاصمة الاقتصادية لكازاخستان.
ـ وقد تشكلت هذه الغرفة من 22 ضابط عمليات أميركي وستة ضباط استخبارات عسكرية «إسرائيلية» و16 ضابط استخبارات تركي، كما استخدمت في تنفيذ العمليات مجموعات مدرّبة على تنفيذ عمليات تخريبية «خلف خطوط العدو/ قوات خاصه أو صاعقة»، كانت حكومة أنقرة قد درّبتهم وأعدّتهم في قواعدها التركية وأرسلتهم بشكل ممنهج ومنظم الى داخل البلاد في تنسيق تامّ مع حلف الناتو.
ولكن مرة أخرى كانت موسكو لهم بالمرصاد وقد بدأت بإفشال العملية عندما تمكّن الجيش الكازاخي بدعم روسي واضح من استعادة السيطرة على مطار المآ ـ تا، الذي كان يُفترض ـ حسب الخطة ـ ان يتحوّل الى مركز لاستقبال الامدادات العسكرية الآتية من الدول التي تدير الجميع .
هذه المعرفة السابقة للخطة الغربية الرجعية هي التي دفعت الرئيس الكازاخي الى اتخاذ إجراءات ميدانيه فورية وحاسمة، ودعوته الى تفعيل دور منظمة الأمن والتعاون، التي تضمً كلاً من روسيا وكازاخستان وروسيا البيضاء وأرمينيا وطاجيكستان الى نشر قوات مشتركة، ما وضع الارضية والإمكانية العملية لحسم الهجوم المعادي وتدمير البنى التحتية لذلك التنظيم .
ـ وكان وصول طلائع القوات المساندة، من الدول المذكورة أعلاه، وعلى رأسها روسيا، هو الذي وضع حداً لعمليات التهريب والفوضى وقطع دابر المؤامرة وقضى عليها في مهدها .
ـ خاصة أنّ هذه القوات كلفت على الفور بحماية المؤسسات والمباني الحكومية والمنشآت الاستراتيجية الكبرى.
ـ وهذا يعني حماية الدولة الكازاخية ومنع سقوطها وتقسيمها وتحويلها الى قاعدة ارتكاز لتنفيذ عمليات أميركية «إسرائيلية» ضدّ كلّ من روسيا والصين وإيران .
ذلك لأنّ المعلومات المؤكدة التي توافرت لدى القيادة الروسية كانت تفيد بأنّ واشنطن وعواصم الناتو كانت تعدّ عملياً لنقل هذا السيناريو قريباً الى موسكو وطهران تحت عنوان الخطة «ج» فور الانتهاء من السيطرة على كازاخستان!
لكن الجميع في دول منظمة شانغهاي كان مستعداً ويقظاً هذه المرة لإسقاط المؤامرة تماماً، ومنع حلم المخطط الأميركي ومنفذيه، الذين باتوا مصابين بالعمى الاستراتيجي والتكتيكي، من التحقق وجعل أدواته تغرق في عملية استنزاف لا تعرف كيف تخرج منها !
الدلالة الأهمّ في ما حصل خلال الساعات الماضية يمكن تلخيصه بأنّ موازين القوى الاستراتيجي بين واشنطن وموسكو قد تغيّر لمصلحة الأخيرة وقواعد الاشتباك بين الشرق والغرب تغيّرت، وانّ أوكرانيا وبولندا باتتا ساقطتين نارياً.
وبهت الذي كفر.
بعدنا طيّبين قولوا الله…
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