The US scapegoat: Europe dragged into yet another conflict

27 Feb, 2023

Source: Al Mayadeen

By Mohammad Al-Jaber 

The United States, like the great ally that it is, has dragged Europe into another conflict, this time right at home, and bleeding it dry economically and politically under the pretext of fighting Russia.

The US scapegoat: Europe dragged into yet another conflict

It is a tale as old as time; ever since their declared allyship in the wake of World War II and the global status quo amid the Cold War, the United States and Europe – at least Western Europe – have been as close as allies can be. However, the United States is quite the abusive partner, forcing Europe to bear the brunt of any conflict it gets into as it emerges unscathed from its far-away lands across the Atlantic Ocean, and the Ukraine war serves as another prime example of how the US treats its allies.

Months before the Ukraine war, the United States and its European allies began bolstering their eastern flank through NATO member states. Little did Europe know what it was diving headfirst into: years of brewing tensions between Russia and the United States over Ukraine and its treatment of the people of the Donbass, as well as its usage as a political tool in the face of Moscow, exploded, and Europe was covered in ash while Washington was watching everything unfold from the comfort of its distant lands.

The situation hit the fan; Russia was now knee-deep in Ukraine and the United States started using everything in its power, including Europe, to curb Moscow and bolster Kiev’s standing. Washington had many tools at hand, most notably sanctions on Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine, both of which would be quite costly for Europe, especially due to how inconvenient the time was, given that the world was just now going back into full throttle after the pandemic brought the entire global economy into a grinding halt. 

The West, somehow underestimating the repercussions of an economy as tremendous as Russia’s being thrown out of the global market, sanctioned the country in a bid to “punish” it for going against their expansionist aspirations, and the sanctions in question were not your run-of-the-mill sanctions because we are not talking about your run-of-the-mill economy here. The sanctions at hand affected everything from natural gas to gold – key pillars in any economy aspiring not to crash – which had massive reverberations throughout the West, all the way from Germany to the United States. 

Gas prices reached all-time highs, and the global economy was bracing for disaster as inflation was affecting some of its biggest players. Economic powerhouses such as Germany, France, and the United States were being driven up walls due to the economic woes they were experiencing, all of which they were attributing to Russia itself rather than admitting to having committed numerous mistakes when it came to the measures they took against Russia.

US economy holding up better

A swift study of inflation rates and energy prices would be more than sufficient to exhibit the suffering inflicted on the West in the wake of war:

According to Eurostat, the European Union’s official statistical office, inflation in the EU in November 2022 was 11.1%, a stark year-on-year increase from November 2021’s 5.2% inflation rate. The Eurozone, meanwhile, was also suffering, just a little less. In November 2022, the inflation rate in the Eurozone was 10.1%, a less significant year-on-year increase from November 2021’s 4.9%. 

Energy prices, on the other hand, are something else entirely. What had been 82.81 euros per megawatt-hour in terms of monthly electricity wholesale prices months before the war in August 2021 in Germany rose to a whopping 469.35 euros per megawatt-hour, an increase of 466.7%, a year later in August of 2022, six months after the start of the Ukraine war and about three months after the West to decided to try and take Russia entirely out of the global energy market.

Other countries were not better off. In fact, some were dealt even worse hands, as energy prices in Italy soared 382.4% to 543 euros per megawatt-hour, in Hungary, they rose 354.4% to 495.65 euros per megawatt-hour, and in Switzerland, they rose 490.5% to 488.14 euros per megawatt-hour. France was by far the worst off, with a striking increase of 536.9% to 492.99 euros per megawatt-hour.

At the same time, energy prices in the US averaged $167 per megawatt-hour in August 2022, a very mild year-on-year increase from August 2021’s $144 per megawatt-hour, showing that the energy crises barely affected the United States as it was not at all reliant on Russian gas.

Historic lows

Of course, the governments of the EU states had to heavily subsidize electricity as their citizens would not be able to pay off their bills if they were as high as they were driven up due to the sanctions on Russia, which led the governments in question to print more money in order to cover all the new, extra costs they had, plunging the Eurozone into record-high inflation, the likes of which had not been seen in decades. 

The euro had not gone down below a dollar per since the early 2000s when it hit the low of $0.98 in January 2000, a year-on-year depreciation of 15% against the USD. The euro went through more woes, dropping to as low as $0.83 before bouncing back above the threshold three years later. What must be understood is that the decline of the euro in 2000 was the consequence of a free market reigning in the West, with many investors selling the euros they were holding in anticipation of an appreciation in the Eurozone’s currency after it had been tied with the greenback for some time at that point, with impatience prevailing, which led the euro to lose value. Securities had dominated in the euro, but as it had been at near-parity with the USD, investors felt forced to sell as the US government was making various moves that made the US economy more attractive for investors, such as the US Treasury’s 30-year bond posting strong gains and the US government reporting that orders for durable goods sharply increased before the new years, prompting experts to speculate incoming interest rate hikes. 

Many things just happened to go right for the USD at the same time, making the greenback tremendous gains and putting it above the euro until the dollar fell in 2003 and made for one of the causes of the 2000s energy crisis. All in all, the euro was holding strong against the USD for nearly two decades before it made a sharp drop throughout 2022 that culminated in the Eurozone’s currency briefly dipping below parity against the USD in August amid fears of a worse energy crisis. 

The euro was doing tremendously for decades, but European countries being forced to subsidies energy for their citizens and businesses so as not to leave their economies in shambles led the USD to rise above the euro due to the inflation the money-printing machines caused. The euro reached a low of $0.97 in September 2022 after having been at $1.17 a year earlier. It managed to slightly recover since, selling at $1.10 in early February, nearing pre-war levels, but the latest data shows that the euro is now on a downturn even against a struggling USD that is being bolstered by austerity measures from the Federal Reserve.

Struggling across the Atlantic, still doing better

In light of all the suffering in Europe, the United States was doing quite badly for itself. With energy prices reaching all-time highs and inflation soaring uncontrollably, Washington was between a rock and a hard place.

However, it wanted to ensure that Europe was just in a bad a position and wanted to ensure its own prosperity at the expense of the Europeans’, selling them energy with stark hikes that were unbearable, which largely affected the euro and gave further impetus to the USD. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Mair even went as far as taking shots at Washington, saying it should not be allowed to dominate the global energy market as the EU suffers the consequences of the conflict in Ukraine, stressing that it was unacceptable to let the US export LNG at prices four times higher than those paid by companies in the country.

According to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) measurement, inflation in the United States increased by 7.7% in a year until October of 2022, rising at its slowest rate in nine months after topping a forty-year high of 9.1% in a year until June of 2022. The inflation rates, though better than the EU’s, were mitigated by the Federal Reserve raising interest rates consecutive times, increasing the rate by 4.25% between March and December of last year.

Meanwhile, as the US economy showed growth in Q4 of 2022, increasing by 2.9%, the Eurozone was left in the dust with a mere 0.1% in growth after experts were expecting a recession for one of the most significant economic players in the international arena. At the same time, the European Union’s economy was stagnant, remaining stable in Q4 of 2022.

Despite the lack of a recession in the Eurozone as a whole, the German economy contracted by 0.2% in the last quarter of 2022, prompting experts to believe that the economic powerhouse was heading into a recession. 

Italy, the EU’s third-largest economy, also experienced negative growth, as its GDP contracted by 0.1% in Q4 of 2022. Both Germany and Italy were among the hardest hit due to their heavy reliance on Russian gas, the stream of which was cut off from Europe in light of the Ukraine war.

The latest signs are showing that the Eurozone is heading for a recession in Q1 or Q2 of 2023, with experts saying that the European Central Bank’s policy of economic tightening through various austerity measures will cause the region’s economy to struggle as households themselves struggle with the cost of living crisis and sluggish demand.

Buddy-buddy with the wrong guy

One key aspect of the crisis that the EU and the Eurozone have been hit by is that they were caused by a conflict that spurred out between Russia and the United States that Washington sought to turn into a proxy war by using its allies in Europe against Moscow rather than embroiling itself in any direct conflict.

The European Union is no stranger to getting dragged into conflict by the United States, but the extent to which Washington is alienated from the ongoing war is quite stark in comparison to previous wars.

As discussed previously in “Analysis of Euro-paralysis: Uncle Sam’s last Afghan stand” while shedding light on the United States dragging Europe into the Afghanistan war, when Washington dragged NATO into a multi-generational war in Afghanistan, the organization’s first commitment outside European territories, the United States is not the best ally one could have by their side.

In the end, the European hand was forced into Afghanistan, and the burden was basically split in half, with Europe reaping fewer benefits, the US was in control of a geopolitically significant country, and it was intimidating its regional foes, namely Russia, China, and Iran.

Europe has been the chief bearer of consequences whenever there was a US-related flop anywhere in the Eastern hemisphere, such as the Syrian refugee crisis that took place in the wake of the war on Syria. Alongside many other crises, this is a fine testament to Washington’s strategy toward Europe.

All that Europe gained from Afghanistan was more refugees, more dead soldiers, and wasted taxpayer money. The UK and Germany, the second-largest troop contributors, spent an estimated $30 billion and $19 billion, respectively, throughout 20 years of war in Afghanistan.

The situation today is not too different from how it was back during and after the Afghan war, as the United States is now emerging with loads of profits made from the war after having Europe spend hundreds of millions on Ukraine, with the Kiel Institute for the World Economy reporting that: “The United States, for example, spent more than 3 times as much per year compared to their expenses in the Afghanistan war after 2001 (measured as a percent of GDP). Germany committed more than 3 times as much to Allies in the Gulf War of 1990/91 compared to what it has committed to Ukraine (again measured in percent of GDP).”

According to the institute, “The Americans have earmarked a total of just over 73.1 billion euros for Ukraine support. For the EU, the comparable figure is 54.9 billion euros.”

The head of the German Chambers of Industry and Commerce said the Ukraine war will have cost the German economy around 160 billion euros ($171 billion), or some 4% of its gross domestic output, in lost value creation by the end of the year.

‘Give’ only to take

Though the United States gave more aid to Ukraine, around $20 billion more, Europe is still doing worse than the US. The US economy is doing far better than expected, especially as key companies, especially energy companies, and firms within the military-industrial complex, are making bank off the suffering of Europeans and Ukrainians alike.

The share price of Lockheed Martin was up 37% by the end of 2022 as the production of Javelin anti-tank missiles by the company increased from 2,100 to about 4,000 a year. The arms company signed a $7.8 billion contract on the modification of the F-35 aircraft and $431 million to deliver new HIMARS and “support services for the US Army and its foreign allies.”

Meanwhile, in November last year, the US awarded Raytheon a $1.2 billion contract for the supply of six National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) to Ukraine. Last year, it was reported that Washington was intending to send 6,500 Javelin anti-tank missile systems made by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin to Ukraine. Other contractors, such as Boeing and Northrop Grumman, are among other profiteers from the war.

The EU is not making similar profits in light of all the losses it is dealing with. Even when it comes to post-war reconstruction efforts. “The Ministry of Economy of Ukraine and BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding agreeing on a framework for consultative assistance in developing a special platform to attract private capital for the recovery and support of Ukraine’s economy,” the Ukrainian government announced in November, meaning the US is making profits when it comes to the destruction of Ukraine and is making profits when it comes to its reconstruction. 

One conclusion can be drawn from the whole debacle surrounding Ukraine: The United States is using the situation to subvert Europe and leave its economy in shambles, prompting many to talk about the de-industrialization of the European Union, with numerous economic sectors, such as glass, chemicals, metals, fertilizer, pulp and paper, ceramics, and cement suffering in light of the ongoing crisis.

Additionally, with gas prices four times that of the US and six times higher than they were before, several industries are considering the option of relocating abroad for cheaper energy prices, meaning that at the end of the day, many European powerhouses might be left with nothing, or just crumbs, if this situation is upheld.

Europe is before a grim reality once again because of the United States, with its economy heading toward the ghastly unknown and its industry dealing with the repercussions of terrible policy-making. Europe, once a US ally, might become a vassal for Washington as it grows more dependent on a country that only seeks to exploit it to bolster its standing in the international arena.

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Legal Iranian oil exports to Pakistan hindered by sanctions and thriving black market

February 07 2023

Photo Credit: The Cradle

ByF.M. Shakil

Despite defying US sanctions on Russian fuel imports, Islamabad has shied away from doing the same with Tehran, hindering potential lucrative bilateral trade between the two neighboring states. 

Pakistan appears willing to import Russian crude oil despite US sanctions, but is wary of importing Iranian gasoline for fear of annoying Washington and the EU. The fact that Islamabad has different rules for dealing with Moscow and Tehran reveals fundamental inconsistencies and dependencies in Pakistan’s foreign policy.

Pakistani authorities maintained that their deal to acquire Russian crude oil did not violate any laws or limits. In a late January interview with Russian satellite network RT, Pakistan’s Petroleum and Energy Minister Musadik Malik downplayed potential US retaliatory measures, stating, “I do not see any complications; we are not violating or doing anything the world has never seen before.”

Malik rightly pointed out that Europe continues to import energy from Russia, while Pakistan only purchases a small fraction of Europe’s amount.

Price cap on Russian oil

Malik’s confidence conceivably stems from the G7 and EU countries’ $60 per barrel cap on Russian oil to prevent Moscow from using the proceeds to fund its war against Ukraine. The US also, quite unexpectedly, supported Islamabad’s position last week.

During a question-and-answer session with journalists, US State Department Spokesman Ned Price said that Pakistan and other nations that have not formally committed to the price cap may also benefit from the discounts on Russian oil.

However, it remains to be seen if Moscow is willing to sell oil at the capped price. Russia, which is the world’s second-largest oil exporter, has already declared that it will not accept the restriction and will continue to sell oil, even if it has to cut production.

In December 2022, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak argued that the western price cap measure was a flagrant violation of free trade laws which disrupted the global energy markets by causing a supply crisis.

Alternative consumers 

China, India, Turkiye, and several other countries are not adhering to the G7 price formula, and despite the price cap on Russia’s seaborne oil supply, its oil exports did not see any meaningful cut, despite fierce western efforts.

In 2021, around 3 million barrels per day (mb/d), or 45 percent of Russian crude oil exports were imported by the EU. The price cap may reduce that amount to a little more than 0.25 mb/d, but Russian oil will still flow into the EU. This is largely because Germany and Poland have agreed to stop importing oil through the northern Druzhba pipeline by 2023, while Bulgaria has been permitted to keep importing oil from Russia by sea.

The immediate impact of this ban is a decrease in demand for Russian oil and, consequently, its relative price. But oil markets are interdependent and will themselves independently test the global appeal for Russian fuel. When the EU appealed to world markets to replace their purchases from Russia, new and alternative purchasers for Russian barrels came forward instead. The global oil trade is very likely to simply re-equilibrate itself with perfect market corrections.

As the EU increasingly spurned Russian oil, Russia found new consumers for approximately 1 mb/d of displaced crude oil, albeit with price discounts relative to the global market. Russia is now on the lookout for clients to take an additional 0.8 mb/d of exports through western ports.

On a four-week rolling average basis, the total volume of crude expected to wind up in Asia remained at 2.28 mb/d, including 89,000 barrels per day on tankers whose point of discharge is unknown. Fuel cargos bound for Asia were purchased at a price exceeding the $60 per barrel G7 price cap at the time of loading.

Media reports claim that Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean (ESPO) crude oil prices exceeded the cap in Asia. The reports say that China’s teapot refiners had placed orders at $67.11 per barrel with Russia in December last year. To bypass the price limit, Russia is using its own tankers and insurance coverage.

Pakistan’s oil imports from Iran

Pakistan has a hard time securing enough energy supplies, and the Iranian oil in its backyard is more affordable than its Russian counterpart. However, US and EU sanctions make it difficult for Islamabad to engage in official trade with Tehran.

Tehran is now seeking to establish a land route trading system with Islamabad, similar to the one Pakistan has enjoyed with Afghanistan through the Sistan-Balochistan province’s 1,000-kilometer common border, to curb the illegal trade in Iranian oil and consumer goods.

The informal border trade with Pakistan, according to Iranian officials, has risen to over $5 billion per annum and should ideally be moved into legal channels to improve state-to-state bilateral trade relations. Tehran has also suggested bartering trade in local currency with Pakistan to transfer the $5 billion worth of illegal commerce between the two countries at the Sistan border into the formal, official trade sector.

Iran’s Consul General in Karachi, Hassan Nourian, stated during a visit to the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry in December last year that if Pakistani authorities allowed legal trade across the Sistan border, trade volumes between the two countries could surpass $5 billion – up from the current $1.5 billion that flows within legal channels.

Nourian said this would address urgent, mutual, national needs, whereby Iran could transport natural gas, crude oil, and petrochemicals to Pakistan in exchange for Pakistani agricultural products.

Opposition to regulated trade with Iran

Majyd Aziz, president of the UN Global Compact and a former president of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI), told The Cradle that various Pakistani “interest groups” do not want Islamabad to regularize trade with Iran.

“Countries, organizations, and individuals with vested interests in the region oppose the development of bilateral trade between neighboring nations. These parties prevented the government from establishing seven border markets in Iran and five in Afghanistan,” he said, noting that the Saudi factor has also contributed to the deterioration of trade relations with Iran.

Despite repeated pledges, Aziz lamented, the Pakistani Ministry of Commerce has yet to execute the barter trade modalities necessary to restart regular trade with Iran. Similarly, he stated that there were no direct banking connections between the two nations to facilitate trade.

“By not directing the unlawful border trade to the legitimate sector, we deprived ourselves of a low-cost oil supply from Iran, which India, China, and Afghanistan already enjoy,” he explained.

In an exclusive interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) in August 2022, Miftah Ismail, a former Pakistani minister for finance and revenue, admitted that unregistered trade between the two countries was a burden on the economy. He stressed that trade should rightfully flourish between Iranian and Pakistani border communities.

“There is no downside to formalizing this trade, as nations often prefer to do business with their neighbors first. I look forward to the day when there is more trade between Iran and Pakistan,” Miftah added.

Lucrative cross-border smuggling

In the absence of a border trade mechanism, Iranian oil smuggling through the Balochistan border involving the illegal transfer of crude oil, fuel, and other petroleum products is rampant.

This illegal activity is usually perpetrated by mainly Pakistani organized crime networks and is facilitated by both local and international actors. The smuggling of Iranian oil through the Balochistan border is a major source of income for these criminal groups and helps to fund activities such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, and terrorism.

If the illicit oil trade is legalized and bilateral trade with the neighboring countries is restored, Pakistan’s civil and military bureaucracies stand to lose spectacular earnings from Iranian oil smuggling. According to credible business sources in Balochistan, the highest-ranking border forces and local government officials profit billions from the illegal oil traffic between the two neighboring countries.

“They do not want to formalize the transaction and risk losing a substantial amount of money due to the massive smuggling of Iranian oil,” a reliable business source told The Cradle.

“The Pakistani government is dragging its feet on establishing formal border trade with Iran primarily because Islamabad is concerned that trading with Iran, which is already subject to US and EU sanctions, would send the west the wrong message,” the source added.

Pakistan, which is susceptible to US influence, fears a backlash from Washington if it pursues bilateral trade expansion with Iran. The Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline, also known as the “Peace Pipeline,” has been shut down for the past ten years because of western sanctions against Iran.

This further showcases Washington’s dogged efforts to isolate Iran, at least economically. Numerous factors motivate the US to oppose this pipeline project, whose completion would represent a symbolic win for Iran in the realm of oil exports. It also raises the possibility of a deeper relationship between China and Iran, particularly in light of Iran’s ambition to participate in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

Oil sanctions are a fail for the West, a win for Russia: The Economist

2 Feb 14, 2023

Source: The Economist

By Al Mayadeen English 

It is argued that Russian oil now sells at a 38% discount per price-reporting agencies, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who helped devise the price cap, sees as a success that the cap is working effectively. 

Russian crude and fuel have been subject to a European price cap with a second round due this month (Reuters)

The price cap is proving to be a flop for the West as the second round of sanctions second round of on diesel and other refined products by the EU is due to take effect on February 5th. 

Sales of Russian crude have not decreased as the West had hoped, and shipments have dodged European ports and headed to China and India instead.

In a report by The Economist, it is stated that this actually goes towards the point of the price cap: to keep Russian crude on the market and thus keep the market stable but to curb its profits through the price. 

This in turn offers buyers negotiating power, considering that the longer export routes also pose higher freight costs which Russia has to compensate. 

It is argued that Russian oil now sells at a 38% discount per price-reporting agencies, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who helped devise the price cap, sees as a success that the cap is working effectively. 

How is the cap possibly a flop?

These price-reporting agencies haven’t applied their techniques to areas where Russian oil is sold through channels that they are not aware of. For instance, European refiners report to these price-tracking agencies, but Indians do not.

Rates for ferrying oil from Russia to Asia are private and thus not available for these price-reporting agencies to evaluate. Hence, the discounts that Western analysts refer to are actually inaccurate. 

The Economist also adds that it is difficult to evaluate real pricing because everyone pretends the prices are low.

Read next: Putin signs decree banning sales of oil to price cap abiding states

Russian export, as a result, has become less dependent on Western shipping and financing, which helped evade the sanction somewhat. More than half of western Russian crude was managed by a European shipping or financing firm, but that percentage has decreased to 36%.

Regarding market pricing, Putin said on December 22, “You know, this is a slightly different regulation than an attempt to regulate oil prices. Here, the European Commission talked more about the need to regulate the situation on the stock exchange, linking it to LNG, saying that prices should be correlated with LNG prices and so on, but still it is an attempt to administratively regulate prices.”

What’s in store for the Feb. 5 sanctions?

As of February 5, Europe will and can no longer purchase Russian diesel and will enforce the price cap on its shipping and insurance companies. 

Although Russia “won’t find a replacement for their EU buyers,” both China and India pose as possible candidates even though they have refineries of their own, according to reports. 

Moreover, a majority of Russian refined products amounting to a third of Russia’s oil-export revenues could raise global prices even higher as they would go unsold.

But here’s the twist: These outcomes may fade with time since Russia would make up for the loss of refined with crude instead. With that and with time, the West will find itself having to resort to Chinese and Indian diesel supply, which will come from Russian crude. 

That proves that Western-imposed sanctions will eventually become ineffective for the economy and the war in Ukraine.

Bloomberg revealed on Thursday that the US is hesitant to approve a lower price cap on Russian oil, despite some EU countries urging for further cuts to Russia’s energy profits.

According to the report, citing people with knowledge of the issue, Washington will review the price cap on Russia’s crude oil only after the G7 adopts price caps on Russian oil derivatives, such as diesel.

Europe’s gas emergency: A continent hostage to seller prices

January 16 2023

Europe’s reliance on Russian gas imports has been upended by sanctions against Moscow. With few options for practical alternatives, the continent will remain energy-dependent and financially-vulnerable regardless of who it imports from.

Photo Credit: The Cradle

By Mohamad Hasan Sweidan

The 2022 outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine revealed the importance of energy security in bolstering Moscow’s geopolitical power in Europe. The continent, which imported about 46 percent of its gas needs from Russia in 2021, found itself in a vulnerable position as it sought alternative sources.https://thecradle.co/Article/Analysis/20403

This presented an opportunity for the US to replace Russia and become the primary supplier of natural gas to Europe at significantly higher prices, resulting in large profits at the expense of its European allies. According France-based data and analytics firm, Kpler, in 2022 the EU imported 140 billion cubic meters (BCM) of liquefied natural gas (LNG), an increase of 55 BCM from the previous year.

Around 57.4 BCM of this amount (41 percent) now comes from the US, an increase of 31.8 BCM, 29 BCM from Africa (20.7 percent) – mainly from Egypt, Nigeria, Algeria and Angola – 22.3 BCM from Russia (16 percent), 19.8 BCM from Qatar (14 percent), 4.1 BCM from Latin America (2.92 percent) – mainly from Trinidad and Tobago – and 3.37 BCM from Norway (2.4 percent).

European gas imports 2022

In 2022, France was the leading importer of LNG in Europe, accounting for 26.23 percent of total imports. Other significant importers included Spain (22.3 percent), the Netherlands (12.65 percent), Italy (11 percent), and Belgium (10.42 percent).

These countries, along with Poland (4.7 percent), Greece (2.9 percent), and Lithuania (2.31 percent), imported over 90 percent of LNG exported to Europe at prices higher than Russian pipeline gas. It is worth noting that upon arrival, LNG is converted back to its gaseous state at receiving stations in Europe before being distributed to countries without such infrastructure, such as Germany.

Graph: 2020-2022 European gas imports, by month 

Switching dependencies

Europe was able to reduce its reliance on Russian pipeline gas from 46 percent to 10 percent last year. This decrease, however, came at a high cost to the economy, as the price of gas rose to $70 per million British thermal units (Btu), up from $27 before the Ukraine war. By the end of the year, the price had fallen to $36, compared to $7.03 in the US.

This price disparity has been hard to stomach. French President Emmanuel Macron went public with his annoyance: “American gas is 3-4 times cheaper on the domestic market than the price at which they offer it to Europeans,” criticizing what he called “American double standards.”

High gas prices have made Europe an appealing destination for gas exporters from around the world, with increased interest from countries such as Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, UAE, Iran, Libya, Algeria, and those bordering the Mediterranean basin, as they either export gas, or possess gas but lack infrastructure.

To replace the cheaper Russian pipeline gas, European countries are being forced to seek out the more expensive LNG. The EU and Britain are working to increase LNG import capacity by 5.3 billion cubic feet (BCF) per day by the end of 2023, and by 34 percent, or 6.8 BCF per day, by 2024.

Can West Asia, North Africa meet Europe’s gas needs?

The West Asia and North Africa region has the potential to partially meet Europe’s gas needs due to its geographic proximity and the presence of countries with large gas reserves and export infrastructure, such as Palestine/Israel, Algeria, and Egypt. However, there are several obstacles that must be considered.

Map of natural gas pipelines to Europe

For example, Egypt’s high production costs and increasing domestic consumption limit its export capacity. Additionally, Europe would need to be willing to pay a higher price than the Asian market for Egyptian gas.

Israel, on the other hand, has seen an increase in gas exports to Europe in the first half of 2022 after the pipeline to Egypt via Jordan was restored in March, but it is unlikely to significantly increase exports in 2023 due to factors such as limited export capacity and high domestic consumption. Experts predict that Israel may export around 10 BCM of gas to Europe this year, similar to the amount exported in 2022.

Qatar is the only Persian Gulf emirate that has increased its gas exports to Europe for 2022. This is largely because Persian Gulf countries prefer to sell their gas to Asian markets, where they can garner higher profits due to lower shipping costs and longer-term contracts.

Last year, Qatar took advantage of the significant increase in gas prices to sell part of its shipments on the European spot market. According to the Qatari Minister of Energy, between 10 percent and 15 percent of Qatar’s production can be diverted to this market.

However, it may be difficult for Europe to attract Qatari gas away from the Asian market, especially as China is expected to recover its demand for gas in 2023. In a policy home-goal, western sanctions on Iran, which has the second-largest natural gas reserves in the world, impede the investment needed to increase Iranian production.

No real alternatives

Iran’s lack of infrastructure connecting it to Europe and high domestic consumption also affect its export capacity. According to a report by BP, Iran produced 257 BCM of gas in 2021, of which 241.1 BCM were consumed domestically.

With regards to Algeria, the main obstacle in increasing its gas exports to Europe is political tension with Morocco and Spain that led to the suspension of the Moroccan-European gas pipeline project, which can export 10.3 billion cubic meters of Algerian gas.

In the case of the UAE, despite having the seventh-largest proven natural gas reserves in the world, its production is not sufficient to meet the demands of the local market and it imports a third of its gas consumption from Qatar through an undersea pipeline. European countries are currently in talks with Abu Dhabi to accelerate work on gas projects and increase production.

As for Saudi Arabia, it consumes all of its gas production domestically and does not export any, with a total production of 117.3 BCM in 2021. There are also expectations for a significant increase in the demand for oil and coal in 2023. The World Bank reports that this is due to an increase in European countries’ reliance on these fossil fuels instead of natural gas. This increase in demand will keep oil prices high, allowing Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ members to make large profits.

The dilemma of growing demand

The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that global demand for natural gas will increase to 394 BCM this year, driven in part by Europe’s need to diversify its sources of gas away from Russia. And West Asia, with its significant reserves, remains a key region for Europe to tap into for this purpose.

The challenge remains in finding cost-effective ways to transport the gas from the region to Europe, which will necessitate building a pipeline connecting the Mediterranean Basin to the Old Continent.

Failure to do so will result in Europe continuing to pay a high premium for its energy security without achieving true independence. The alternative for Europe is to rely on LNG from the US. This gives Europe almost complete independence from Russian gas, but keeps it weak, obedient, and dependent on American energy supplies.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

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Michael Hudson gives an interview to a German magazine

December 16, 2022

Posted with the author’s permission

Boos German interview Dec 15 2022

Dear Prof Hudson,

Once again: Herzliche Grüße aus Berlin!

Last time we spoke for German print magazine “Four” in June. Right now I also work for MEGA Radio, a radio news station for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We broadcast from Vienna and are located in Berlin, Bavaria and Austria.

Hereby I would like to invite you to another interview via ZOOM to record it for our radio program. It would be an update on our last interview. Maybe around 20-30 Minutes long.

See also our last talk: https://www.vierte.online/2022/06/03/ukraine-a-trojan-for-germanys-us-dependence/

I don’t know if that’s too short notice, but would you have time for such a conversation next week or the week after?

Otherwise, also at the beginning of January.

Here are my questions:

(1.) You made some predictions in our last interview for “Four” magazine which became true.

You talked about crisis for German companies in the production of fertilizer. This just hit the headlines weeks after our interview.

You also said: “What you characterize as “blocking Nord Stream 2” is really a Buy-American policy.” This now also became more than clear after the destroyed Nord Stream pipelines.

Could you comment that?

MH: U.S. foreign policy has long concentrated on control of the international oil trade. This trade is a leading contributor to the U.S. balance of payments, and its control gives U.S. diplomats the ability to impose a chokehold on other countries.

Oil is the key supplier of energy, and the rise in labor productivity and GDP for the leading economies tends to reflect the rise in energy use per worker. Oil and gas are not only for burning for energy, but are also a basic chemical input for fertilizers, and hence for agricultural productivity, as well as for much plastic and other chemical production.

So U.S. strategists recognize that cutting countries off from oil and its derivatives will stifle their industry and agriculture. The ability to impose such sanctions enables the U.S. to make countries dependent on compliance with U.S. policy so as not to be “excommunicated” from the oil trade.

U.S. diplomats have been telling Europe for many years not to rely on Russian oil and gas. The aim is twofold: to deprive Russia of its major trade surplus, and to capture the vast European market for U.S. oil producers. U.S. diplomats convinced German leaders not to approve the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and finally used the excuse of the NATO war with Russia in Ukraine to act unilaterally to arrange the destruction of both Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines.

(2.) For our audience, our listeners: In your new book “The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism, or Socialism”

You state that the world economy is now fracturing between two parts, the United States and Europe is the dollarized part.

And this Western neoliberal unit is driving Eurasia and most of the Global South into a separate group. You just stated this in an interview from November.

The Rentier Economy is a Free Lunch

Could you explain this for our outlet?

MH: The split is not only geographic but above all reflects the conflict between Western neoliberalism and the traditional logic of industrial capitalism. The West has deindustrialized its economies by replacing industrial capitalism with finance capitalism, initially in an attempt to keep its wages down by moving abroad to employ foreign labor, and then to try and establish monopoly privileges and captive markets or arms (and now oil) and high-technology essentials, becoming rentier economies.

A century ago, industrial capitalism was expected to evolve into industrial socialism, with governments providing subsidized basic infrastructure services (such as health care, education, communication, research and development) to minimize their cost of living and doing business. That is how the United States, Germany and other countries built up their industrial power, and it also is how China and other Eurasian countries have done so more recently.

But the West’s choice to privatize and financialize its basic infrastructure, dismantling the role of government and shifting planning to Wall Street, London and other financial centers, has left it with little to offer other countries – except or the promise not to bomb them or treat them as enemies if they seek to keep their wealth in their own hands instead of transferring it to U.S. investors and corporations.

The result is that when China and other countries build up their economies in the same way that the United States did from the end of its Civil War to World War II, they are treated as enemies. It is as if U.S. diplomats see that the game is lost, and that their economy has become so debt-ridden, privatized and high-cost that it cannot compete, that it simply hopes to keep making other countries dependent tributaries for as long as it can until the game finally is over.

If the U.S. succeeds in imposing financial neoliberalism on the world, then other countries will end up with the same problems that the United States is experiencing.

(3.) Now the first terminals for LNG from the US are opened in Germany. How will this effect trade and interdependence / dependency between Germany and United States?

MH: The U.S. sanctions and destruction of Nord Stream 1 and 2 have made Europe dependent on U.S. supplies, at so high a cost of LNG gas (about six times what Americans and Asians have to pay) that Germany and other countries have lost their ability to compete in steel making, glass making, aluminum and many other sectors. This creates a vacuum which U.S. affiliates home to fill from their investments in other countries or even from the U.S. itself.

The expectation is that German and other European heavy industry, chemical and other manufacturing will have to move to the United States to obtain oil and other essentials that they are told not to buy from Russia, Iran or other alternatives. The assumption is that they can be blocked from relocating in Russia or Asia by imposing sanctions, fines and political meddling European politics by U.S. NGOs and National Endowment for Democracy satellites in, as has been the case since 1945. We can expect a new Operation Gladio to promote politicians willing to sustain this Global Fracture and the shift of European industry to the United States.

One question is whether Germany’s skilled labor will follow. That typically is what occurs in such situations. This kind of demographic shrinkage is what the Baltic states have experienced. It is a byproduct of neoliberal policies.

(4.) What is your view on the current military situation in the Russian/Ukrainian war?

MH: It looks like Russia will easily win in February or March. It probably will create a Demiliarized Zone to protect the Russian-speaking areas (probably incorporated into Russia) from the pro-NATO West in order to prevent sabotage and terrorism.

Europe will be told to continue to boycott Russia and its allies instead of seeking mutual gains by reciprocal trade and investment. The U.S. may urge Poland and other countries to “fight to the last Pole” or Lithuanian, emulating Ukraine. It will put pressure on Hungary. But most of all, it will insist that Europe spend an immense sum to re-arm, mainly with U.S. arms. This expense will crowd out social spending to help Europe cope with its spreading industrial depression or subsidies to revive its industry. So a militarized economy will become a rising overhead – while consumer and industrial debt increase, along with government debt.

As this occurs, Russia may demand that NATO roll back its borders to pre-1991 boundaries. That is the most likely flash point of conflict.

(5.) What is your view on the current financial situation in this war. The G7 and EU governments talk already about rebuilding and reconstruction of Ukraine after the war. What does this mean for Western businesses and finance capitalism?

MH: Ukraine hardly can be rebuilt. First of all, much of its population has left, and is unlikely to return, given the destruction of housing and infrastructure – and husbands.

Second, Ukraine is owned mainly by a narrow group of kleptocrats – who are trying to sell out to Western agricultural investors and other vultures. (I think you know who they are.)

Ukraine is already debt-ridden, and has become a fiefdom of the IMF (meaning in practice, of NATO). Europe will be asked to “contribute,” and the foreign reserves seized from Russia may be spent on hiring U.S. companies to make a financial killing rebuilding a pretense of an economy in Ukraine – leaving the country even more debt ridden.

A new Democratic Party secretary of state will echo Madeline Albright and say that the killing of Ukraine’s economy, children and soldiers “was all worth it” as the cost of spreading democracy U.S.-style.

(6.) I’ve read lots of background reports on the sanctions against Russia. It seems more and more the sanctions hit Russia hard, because they cannot produce all products, esp. technology, by themselves. On the other hand Russia have now more stable business and buyers with and in China, India.

What real effect do the sanctions have according to your analysis?

MH: The U.S. sanctions have turned out to be an unanticipated godsend for Russia. In agriculture, for instance, sanctions against Lithuanian and other Baltic dairy exports has led to a flowering of a domestic Russian cheese and dairy sector. Russia is now the world’s largest grain exporter, thanks to the Western sanctions that have had much the same effect as protective tariffs and import quotas of the sort that the United States used in the 1930s to modernize its agricultural sector.

If President Biden were a secret Russian agent, he hardly could have helped Russia more. Russia needed the economic isolation of protectionism, but was still too entranced by neoliberal free-trade policy to do this by itself. So the U.S. did it for it.

Sanctions oblige countries to become more self-reliant, at least in basic needs such as food and energy. This self-reliance is the best defense against U.S. economic destabilization to force regime change and similar compliance.

One effect is that Russia will need to buy much less from Europe even after the fighting in Ukraine ends. So there will be less need for Russia to export raw materials to Europe. It can work these up themselves. The industrial core that was Europe may end up more in Russia and its Asian allies than in the United States.

That is the ironic result of NATO’s new Iron Curtain.

(7.) How would you describe China, Russia and India: Do you see Industrial Capitalism or Socialism there?

MH: RIC was the original core of the BRICS, now greatly extended to include Iran and much of Central Asia and the roads involved with China’s Belt and Road initiative. The goal is for Eurasia no longer to have to rely on Europe or North America.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld often referred to “Old Europe” as a shrinking dead zone. It failed to follow its plans a century ago to evolve into an increasingly socialized economy with government subsidy of rising living standards and labor productivity, science and industry. Europe rejected not only Marxism but the basis of Marxist analysis in the classical economics of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and their contemporaries. That path has been followed in Eurasia, while the right-wing anti-government liberalism of the Austrian and Chicago Schools has destroyed the NATO economies from within.

As the locus of industrial and technological leadership moves eastward, European investment and labor probably will follow.

The Eurasian countries will still visit Europe as tourists, as Americans like to visit England as a kind of theme park of post-feudal gentry, the posting of the palace guards and other quaint memories of the days of knights and dragons. European countries will look more like that of Jamaica and the Caribbean, with hotels and hospitality becoming the main growth sectors, with Frenchmen and German waiters dressed in their quaint quasi-Hollywood costumes. Museums will do a thriving business as Europe itself turns into a kind of museum of post-industrialism.

(8.) Currently we saw the collapse and bankruptcy of the crypto exchange FXT. The management of this company seems to be highly criminal. How do you judge that?

MH: Crime is what made crypto a growth sector for the past few years. Investors bought crypto because it is a vehicle for the fortunes being made in international drug dealing, the arms trade, other crime and tax evasion. These are the great post-industrial growth sectors in Western economies.

Ponzi schemes often are good investment vehicles in their take-off stage – the pump-and-dump stage. It was inevitable that criminals would not only use crypto to transfer funds, but actually set up their own currencies “free of oppressive government regulation.” Criminals are the ultimate Chicago School free market libertarians.

Anyone can create their own currency, much as U.S. wild-west banks did in the mid-19^th century, printing currency at will. When one went shopping in the early 20^th century, the stores still had lists of the shifting valuations of various bank notes. The best designed ones tended to be the most successful.

(9.) Do you have any knowledge about business relations between FTX and Ukraine, the government in Kyiv? There were some rumours and press articles in the alternative media about it?

MH: The IMF and Congress have paid large amounts of money to the Ukraine government and its kleptocrats in charge. Newspapers report that much of this money has been turned over to FTX – which has become the second largest funder of the Democratic Party (behind George Soros, who also is said to be trying to buy up Ukrainian assets). So a circular flow seems to be at work: U.S. Congress votes for funding for Ukraine, which puts some of this money in FTX crypto to pay or the political campaign of pro-Ukrainian politicians.

(10.) Some months ago there were articles in the US press about plans by the FED: They are planning to establish a digital Dollar, a Central Bank Digitcal Currency (CBDC). Also in Europe ECB president Madame Lagarde and the German minister for finance, Lindner, talk about an introduction of the digital Euro.

Here in Germany some critical experts are warning this will only push the total surveillance of the population and customers.

What is your take on digital currencies?

MH: It’s not my department. All banking is electronic, so what does “digital” mean? To libertarians, it means no government oversight, but in government hands, the government will have a record of everything that anyone spends.

(11.) What is your view on the current weakness or strength of the US dollar, the Euro, the British Pound, Gold and Silver?

MH: The dollar will remain in demand, thanks to its success in making the Eurozone dependent on it. The British pound has little means of support, and little reason for foreigners to invest in it. The euro is a junior satellite currency to the dollar.

Without a dollar or other currency to hold their monetary reserves in, governments will continue to increase the proportion held in gold, because it doesn’t have government liabilities attached to it – so U.S. officials can’t simply grab it, as they did with Russia’s foreign reserves. Eurozone countries cannot be trusted not to follow U.S. orders to grab foreign countries’ reserves, so it will be shunned.

As the euro’s exchange rate declines against the dollar, foreign investment will decline, because investors will not want to invest in (1) a shrinking market, and (2) companies that earn domestic euros that are worth fewer and fewer dollars or other hard currency for head offices.

Of course, gold will have to be kept at home, so that it can’t simply be grabbed, as the Bank of England grabbed Venezuela’s gold and gave it to the right-wing U.S. proxy. Germany would be wise to accelerate its airlift of its own gold supply from the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank vaults in New York City.

(12.) What is your current analysis of the energy and financial crises in the world?

MH: No real crisis as much as a slow crash. Rising prices paid for what America exports: oil, food and IT monopoly goods, with living costs for consumers rising faster than wages. So there will be a tightening squeeze or most families. The middle class will discover that it really is the wage-earning class after all, and will go deeper into debt – especially if it tries to protect itself by taking out a mortgage to buy a home.

I’ve been studying the 11^th and 12^th centuries for my history of debt, and I came across a story that may have relevance to the questions that you’ve asked. NATO keeps claiming that it is a defensive alliance. But Russia has no desire to invade Europe. The reason is obvious: No army can invade a major country. More important, Russia does not even have a motive to destroy Europe as a U.S.-puppet adversary. Europe already is self-destructing.

I am reminded of the battle of Manzikert in 1071, when the Byzantine Empire lost to the Seljuk Turks (largely because its general on whom the emperor had depended, Andronikos Doukas, defected, and then overthrew the Emperor. Crusade of Kings, a game supplement, covers the battle extensively, and claims the following conversation took place between Alp Arslan and Romanos:^[52]

Alp Arslan: “What would you do if I were brought before you as a prisoner?”

Romanos: “Perhaps I’d kill you, or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople.”

Alp Arslan: “My punishment is far heavier. I forgive you, and set you free.”

That is the punishment that Europe will receive from Eurasia. Its leaders have made their choice: to be a U.S. satellite.

محاضر من «أستانا 18»: الحلّ السوري بعيد وتركيا لن تنسحب | تقاطع مصالح تركي ــ روسي ــ إيراني ضدّ «قسد»

الجمعة 25 تشرين الثاني 2022

موقفا الدولتين يبدوان اليوم أقلّ حدّة، وهو ما يمكن أن يُعزى إلى أسباب مختلفة خاصّة بكلّ من الدولتَين (ا ف ب)

حسين الأمين  

تُظهر المواقف الإيرانية والروسية من التهديد التركي المتجدّد بعملية عسكرية برّية في سوريا، نوعاً من الليونة التي يمكن تفسيرها بجملة ظروف مستجدّة، جعلت الأطراف الثلاثة الضامنة لـ«مسار أستانا» متقاطِعةً عند العداء للقوّات الكردية في الشمال السوري. ليونةٌ لم تكن إلى ما قبل أشهر حاضِرة كما اليوم، وفق ما تُظهره وثائق سرّية عائدة إلى الجولة ما قبل الأخيرة من اجتماعات «أستانا»، اطّلعت عليها «الأخبار»، يسجّل فيها الروس والإيرانيون حزماً حيال أيّ عملية تركية من النوع المذكور، لم تَعُد مستبعدة، في ظلّ شبه تقبّل موسكو وطهران للمحاججات التركية، ودخول الاتصالات مرحلة الحديث عن حدود التوغّل والأثمان السياسية المطلوبة لقاءه

تحت سطح الهدوء الذي عاشه الميدان السوري طوال الشهور السابقة، كانت تعتمل عوامل ضاغطة عديدة على أكثر من طرف فاعل في الملفّ، يبدو أن بعضها وصل اليوم إلى لحظة الانفجار. هذا ما ينطبق مثلاً على الهجمات الجوّية التي تنفّذها تركيا ضدّ «قوات سوريا الديمقراطية» في شمال سوريا تحت عنوان عملية «المخلب – السيف»، والتلويح باقتراب لحظة وقوع العملية البرّية، والتي سيسيطر خلالها الجيش التركي على مزيد من الأراضي السورية الحدودية. ولطالما كانت هذه الخطوة محطّ تداول طوال الفترة الماضية، خصوصاً في جولة محادثات أستانا التي عُقدت في حزيران الماضي، وتالِيَتها التي التأمت قبل يومَين على وقْع القصف التركي على مواقع «قسد»، على مسمع ومرأى من القوات الروسية والأميركية المنتشرة في المنطقة. وبينما لا تزال روسيا على موقفها المعلَن الرافض للتحرّك البرّي التركي ـــ مع بروز تبدّلات ملحوظة في الميدان لناحية السماح للطائرات التركية باختراق «المجال الجوّي الروسي» في سوريا ـــ تُبدي إيران هذه الأيام تفهّماً أكبر لهذا التحرّك.

في وثائق سرّية حصلت عليها «الأخبار»، تتكشّف المواقف غير المعلَنة وبعض خلفيّاتها، للدول الفاعلة في الملفّ السوري، وذلك على ألسنة مسؤولي هذا الملفّ في كلّ منها، في محادثات ثنائية خاصة، من أيّ عملية عسكرية تركية جديدة في سوريا. ففي حزيران الماضي، انعقدت في العاصمة الكازاخية نور سلطان الجولة الـ18 من «مسار أستانا» التفاوضي، عندما كان الميدان يعيش هدوءاً نسبياً، باستثناء بعض التوتّر بين تركيا والفصائل المسلّحة الموالية لها من جهة، و«قسد» من جهة أخرى، وفي وقت كانت فيه أنقرة تلوّح بنيّتها شنّ عملية عسكرية في ريف حلب الشمالي، وتحديداً على محور عين العرب – منبج – تل رفعت. ممثّل تركيا في «أستانا» حينها، ومسؤول الشؤون السورية في الخارجية التركية، سلجوق أونال، أشار إلى أن «بعض الدول تُعارض العملية، لكنّ هذه الدول في الوقت عينه تتفهّم المخاوف الأمنية لتركيا»، مُدافِعاً بأنه يتوجّب «على تركيا أن تقوم بهذه العملية بسبب مخاطر الإرهاب والانفصاليين، وهذا ما لا تحتمله». وانتقد أونال موقف موسكو، معتبراً أن «ما يقوله الروس بأن العملية ستزعزع استقرار سوريا غير صحيح، لأن لا استقرار أصلاً في سوريا، كما ليس هنالك من ستاتيكو حقيقي ستزعزعه هذه العملية. لا بل إن العملية ستمنع زعزعة الاستقرار بسبب الأجندة الإرهابية والانفصالية لـ»PKK» (حزب العمال الكردستاني)». واستعرض أونال، في حديث خاصّ مع دبلوماسيين، مسار الهجمات العسكرية التي نفّذتها تركيا سابقاً في سوريا، حيث إن «شركاءنا (روسيا وإيران) اعترضوا سابقاً على عملية نبع السلام، ثمّ ما لبثوا أن رفعوا العوائق من أمام تركيا»، في إشارة إلى قبولهم الوقائع التي فرضتْها تلك الهجمات. وافترض أن «الروس ربّما يَعتبرون أن طرد القوات الكردية (من المناطق الحدودية) سيدفعها باتجاه المناطق السورية الداخلية، وهذا قد يجدّد النزاع»، مبيّناً أنه «في هذه الحالة، هُم (الأكراد) سيهاجمون الجيش السوري وليس تركيا». وختم المسؤول التركي حديثه بالتأكيد أن «المسار السياسي بطيء (…) أستانا يبقى المسار الوحيد الذي لا يزال على قيد الحياة»، مشيراً إلى أنه «سبق أن أنشئت المجموعة المصغّرة حول سوريا وانتهت، وكذلك انتهى مسار جنيف».

يَظهر أن مصلحة الدول الثلاث الضامنة لـ«مسار أستانا» تلتقي عند العداء للقوات الكردية في الشمال السوري

وفي وثيقة أخرى، تحدّث سفير تركيا لدى روسيا، محمد سامسار، في اجتماع خاص داخل مكتبه عُقد في تموز الفائت، حول العملية العسكرية المرتقبة، قائلاً إنه «بالنسبة إلى تركيا، فإنه لا أطماع لديها في سوريا، وهدف أنقرة كان ولا يزال إبعاد المنظمات الإرهابية الكردية عن حدودها لمسافة 30 كم على الأقل، وهو الأمر الذي كان الأميركيون قد وافقوا عليه، وأيضاً الروس، الذين كانوا قد تعهّدوا بالمساعدة على تحقيقه منذ عام 2019، دون أن ينجحوا حتى الآن، ما دفع القيادة التركية أخيراً للإعلان عن عملية عسكرية قد تكون قريبة لتحقيق الهدف المذكور، بالرغم من معارضة موسكو وواشنطن، التي تقوم بحماية بعض الفصائل الإرهابية شرق الفرات». من جهة أخرى، استبعد سامسار «إمكانية التوصّل إلى حلول في المدى المنظور، خاصة في ظلّ توتر العلاقات بين موسكو من جهة، وواشنطن والغرب من جهة أخرى»، لافتاً إلى أن «الوضع السوري في غاية التعقيد، مع وجود دول كثيرة تتصارع على الأرض السورية لحفظ مصالحها المتعارضة في كثير من الأحيان»، مُهاجِماً «الدور الإيراني الطامح إلى بقاء طويل الأمد في سوريا، ومحاولة إحداث تغيير ديمغرافي في بعض المناطق السورية، ومنها دمشق العاصمة، وذلك خدمة لأهداف بعيدة المدى تؤذي الشعب السوري بلا شكّ، وتهدّد بشدّة وحدة البلاد واستقرارها على المدى البعيد».

بدوره، رأى المبعوث الروسي الخاص إلى سوريا، ألكسندر لافرنتييف، أنه «سيكون من الخطير إن أقامت تركيا منطقة عازلة، وهذه ستخلق تهديدات جديدة»، لافتاً إلى «(أننا) نصحنا العراقيين وجيران سوريا، أن يتواصلوا مع إيران والدول العربية لمطالبة تركيا بشكل جماعي بعدم تنفيذ عمليّتها». وأشار لافرنتييف إلى أن «تركيا دائماً تؤكّد أنها لا تريد تقسيم سوريا، وأنها مع المحافظة على وحدة وسيادة سوريا، لكنهم يضيفون أنهم سيتركون سوريا عندما تسمح لهم الظروف بذلك، وهذا لا يبدو لنا مشجّعاً. إذا دخلَت لن تنسحب»، مشدّداً على أنه «من الضروري أن نعمل معاً، وأن لا نترك ذلك يحدث (…) (تركيا تريد) احتلال أراضي سوريا، وتشكيل حكومة موالية لها». ولدى سؤاله عن الانتشار الميداني الروسي في سوريا، مع احتدام الحرب في أوكرانيا، أكد «(أننا) لن ننسحب من سوريا. أجرينا إعادة انتشار لقوّاتنا، بسبب بعض الصعوبات اللوجستية المتأتّية من تركيا». وختم حديثه بالقول إن «علينا أن نعيش مع نزاع طويل الأمد» في سوريا. من جهته، رأى مساعد وزير الخارجية الإيراني، علي أصغر حاجي، أن «كلّ ما يحدث متأثّر بالحرب الأوكرانية، التي تُضاعف من خطورة الحالة في الشرق الأوسط»، معتبراً أن «ما تقوم به روسيا في أوكرانيا، تحاول تركيا مقابلته في سوريا»، في إشارة إلى المخاوف الأمنية الروسية في أوكرانيا، والتي دفعتْ موسكو إلى تنفيذ عمليتها العسكرية هناك. وأضاف حاجي: «نقول لأصدقائنا الأتراك إن مخاوفكم الأمنية لا يمكن حلّها بالوسائل العسكرية، وإلّا لكانت حُلّت مُسبقاً. نقول لهم، ساعدوا الجيش السوري للانتشار على الحدود تطبيقاً للاتفاقيات بينكما». أما ممثّل الأمم المتحدة في محادثات أستانا، مدير مكتب المبعوث الدولي الخاص إلى سوريا غير بيدرسون، روبرت دان، فرأى أن «كلّ الأطراف حقّقت أكثر ما تستطيعه»، متابعاً أن «اليوم هنالك تركيا، ينبغي انتظار ردّة فعل الأطراف الباقين على عمليّتها العسكرية، وما سينشأ عنها».

وعلى رغم الحزم الذي تتّسم به المواقف الإيرانية والروسية حيال العملية العسكرية التركية في سوريا، وفق ما تُظهره الوثائق، إلّا أن هذه المواقف تبدو اليوم أقلّ حدّة، وهو ما يمكن أن يُعزى إلى أسباب مختلفة خاصّة بكلّ من الدولتَين. بالنسبة إلى روسيا، فإن التعاون الروسي – التركي بلغ أوْجه خلال الأشهر الأخيرة مع احتدام الحرب في أوكرانيا، في ظلّ موقف أنقرة الذي حافظ على حياده نوعاً ما. وإذ تُدرك روسيا أن تركيا اليوم هي أحد معابرها الأساسية إلى العالم في ظلّ الحصار الغربي المستمرّ على الأولى، فإن الدولتَين تُظهران تعاوناً واسعاً في منطقة القوقاز، أسفر حتى اليوم عن تجنُّب أزمات كبرى، وربّما معارك متجدّدة، وخصوصاً بين أرمينيا وأذربيجان. والأهمّ من كلّ ما سبق، سياقان مغايران للتعاون: الأوّل متعلّق باتفاقية تصدير الحبوب من الموانئ الأوكرانية عبر البحر الأسود إلى تركيا ثمّ البحر الأبيض المتوسط؛ والثاني متّصل بتصدير الغاز الروسي، حيث اتفق الرئيسان الروسي والتركي، الشهر الماضي، على البدء بإنشاء مركز لتوزيع الغاز الروسي من تركيا إلى دول جنوب وشرق أوروبا، عبر أنابيب ناقلة تمرّ من البحر الأسود وعبر الأراضي التركية. وانطلاقاً ممّا سبق، تبدو مفهومةً المرونة التي طرأت على موقف موسكو، والتي تُعزّزها أيضاً المُحاججة التركية بأن الظروف التي دفعت روسيا إلى تنفيذ عملية عسكرية في أوكرانيا، تنطبق إلى حدّ بعيد على تلك القائمة عند الحدود السورية – التركية، وبالتالي فإن ما شرّعته روسيا لنفسها، لا بدّ أن تشرّعه لشريكتها تركيا.
أمّا بالنسبة إلى إيران، التي تعاني اليوم اضطرابات داخلية، فهي تتّهم الأحزاب الكردية – الإيرانية المعارِضة المتمركزة في إقليم كردستان شمالي العراق، بالمسؤولية عن إرسال وتدريب وتجهيز مجموعات مسلّحة لتنفيذ أعمال «إرهابية» على أراضيها. وهي استجابت سريعاً لهذا التهديد باستهداف مواقع تلك الأحزاب، ملوّحةً أيضاً بإمكانية شنّ عملية عسكرية برّية لإبعادها عن الحدود. ومن هنا، يُحاجج «الديبلوماسيون الأتراك، أمام نظرائهم الإيرانيين، وكذلك أمام نظرائهم في دول المنطقة، بسياق تشكُّل الموقف الإيراني المستجدّ تجاه الأحزاب الكردية المسلّحة، ويقارنونه بالموقف التركي السابق والحالي، للقول إن عمليات بلادهم العسكرية السابقة والمرتقَبة في سوريا شرعيّة ومبرّرة، ولا يجب الاعتراض عليها، خصوصاً من قِبَل الإيرانيين»، بحسب ما تَكشفه مصادر ديبلوماسية إقليمية. وفي مقابل هذه المحاججة، يُبدي المسؤولون الإيرانيون تفهّماً للمخاوف الأمنية التركية، إلّا أنهم «يحثّون نظراءهم الأتراك على التعاون مع الحكومة السورية، لضمان انتشار الجيش السوري على الحدود بين البلدين، ومنْع وقوع عمليات أمنية أو عسكرية داخل الأراضي التركية، كما ذلك الذي تسعى إليه طهران مع بغداد»، والذي تجلّت أولى ثماره في إعلان الحكومة العراقية نشْر قوّاتها على الحدود بين إيران وإقليم كردستان.

هكذا، يَظهر أن مصلحة الدول الثلاث الضامنة لـ«مسار أستانا» تلتقي عند العداء للقوات الكردية في الشمال السوري. فهذه الأخيرة وضعت كامل بيضها في السلّة الأميركية، ما يزعج الروس إلى حدّ بعيد، واشتبكت مع تركيا التي تحافظ على موقفها العدائي منها، وفشلت في إنجاح أيّ محاولة حوارية مع دمشق، وذهبت إلى حدّ الاشتباك مع القوات السورية غير مرّة، كما تناقض بتحالفها الوثيق مع الأميركيين الموقف الإيراني المُساند لدمشق، فضلاً عن كوْن نظرائها في أربيل باتوا يشكّلون تهديداً متزايداً للأمن القومي الإيراني. لكن كلّ ما سبق لا يعني أن هذه الأطراف اتّفقت تماماً على السماح بتنفيذ عملية عسكرية تركية جديدة في سوريا، بل يبدو أن ما جرى حتى الآن هو إبداء تفهّم متزايد للمخاوف التركية، في وقت تتسارع فيه الاتصالات البينيّة لرسم حدود الطموح التركي، والتوافق على التفاصيل الميدانية والأثمان السياسية.

من ملف : روسيا – تركيا – إيران: تقاطع ضدّ «قسد»

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Germany’s position in America’s New World Order

November 02, 2022

Source

by Michael Hudson

Germany has become an economic satellite of America’s New Cold War with Russia, China and the rest of Eurasia. Germany and other NATO countries have been told to impose trade and investment sanctions upon themselves that will outlast today’s proxy war in Ukraine. U.S. President Biden and his State Department spokesmen have explained that Ukraine is just the opening arena in a much broader dynamic that is splitting the world into two opposing sets of economic alliances. This global fracture promises to be a ten- or twenty-year struggle to determine whether the world economy will be a unipolar U.S.-centered dollarized economy, or a multipolar, multi-currency world centered on the Eurasian heartland with mixed public/private economies.

President Biden has characterized this split as being between democracies and autocracies. The terminology is typical Orwellian double-speak. By “democracies” he means the U.S. and allied Western financial oligarchies. Their aim is to shift economic planning out of the hands of elected governments to Wall Street and other financial centers under U.S. control. U.S. diplomats use the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to demand privatization of the world’s infrastructure and dependency on U.S. technology, oil and food exports.

By “autocracy,” Biden means countries resisting this financialization and privatization takeover. In practice, U.S. rhettoric means promoting its own economic growth and living standards, keeping finance and banking as public utilities. What basically is at issue is whether economies will be planned by banking centers to create financial wealth – by privatizing basic infrastructure, public utilities and social services such as health care into monopolies – or by raising living standards and prosperity by keeping banking and money creation, public health, education, transportation and communications in public hands.

The country suffering the most “collateral damage” in this global fracture is Germany. As Europe’s most advanced industrial economy, German steel, chemicals, machinery, automotives and other consumer goods are the most highly dependent on imports of Russian gas, oil and metals from aluminum to titanium and palladium. Yet despite two Nord Stream pipelines built to provide Germany with low-priced energy, Germany has been told to cut itself off from Russian gas and de-industrialize. This means the end of its economic preeminence. The key to GDP growth in Germany, as in other countries, is energy consumption per worker.

These anti-Russian sanctions make today’s New Cold War inherently anti-German. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has said that Germany should replace low-priced Russian pipeline gas with high-priced U.S. LNG gas. To import this gas, Germany will have to spend over $5 billion quickly to build port capacity to handle LNG tankers. The effect will be to make German industry uncompetitive. Bankruptcies will spread, employment will decline, and Germany’s pro-NATO leaders will impose a chronic depression and falling living standards.

Most political theory assumes that nations will act in their own self-interest. Otherwise they are satellite countries, not in control of their own fate. Germany is subordinating its industry and living standards to the dictates of U.S. diplomacy and the self-interest of America’s oil and gas sector. It is doing this voluntarily – not because of military force but out of an ideological belief that the world economy should be run by U.S. Cold War planners.

Sometimes it is easier to understand today’s dynamics by stepping away from one’s own immediate situation to look at historical examples of the kind of political diplomacy that one sees splitting today’s world. The closest parallel that I can find is medieval Europe’s fight by the Roman papacy against German kings – the Holy Roman Emperors – in the 13^th century. That conflict split Europe along lines much like those of today. A series of popes excommunicated Frederick II and other German kings and mobilized allies to fight against Germany and its control of southern Italy and Sicily.

Western antagonism against the East was incited by the Crusades (1095-1291), just as today’s Cold War is a crusade against economies threatening U.S. dominance of the world. The medieval war against Germany was over who should control Christian Europe: the papacy, with the popes becoming worldly emperors, or secular rulers of individual kingdoms by claiming the power to morally legitimize and accept them.

Medieval Europe’s analogue to America’s New Cold War against China and Russia was the Great Schism in 1054. Demanding unipolar control over Christendom, Leo IX excommunicated the Orthodox Church centered in Constantinople and the entire Christian population that belonged to it. A single bishopric, Rome, cut itself off from the entire Christian world of the time, including the ancient Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Jerusalem.

This break-away created a political problem for Roman diplomacy: How to hold all the Western European kingdoms under its control and claim the right for financial subsidy from them. That aim required subordinating secular kings to papal religious authority. In 1074, Gregory VII, Hildebrand, announced 27 Papal Dictates outlining the administrative strategy for Rome to lock in its power over Europe.

These papal demands are strikingly parallel to today’s U.S. diplomacy. In both cases military and worldly interests require a sublimation in the form of an ideological crusading spirit to cement the sense of solidarity that any system of imperial domination requires. The logic is timeless and universal.

The Papal Dictates were radical in two major ways. First of all, they elevated the bishop of Rome above all other bishoprics, creating the modern papacy. Clause 3 ruled that the pope alone had the power of investiture to appoint bishops or to depose or reinstate them. Reinforcing this, Clause 25 gave the right of appointing (or deposing) bishops to the pope, not to local rulers. And Clause 12 gave the pope the right to depose emperors, following Clause 9, obliging “all princes to kiss the feet of the Pope alone” in order to be deemed legitimate rulers.

Likewise today, U.S. diplomats claim the right to name who should be recognized as a nation’s head of state. In 1953 they overthrew Iran’s elected leader and replaced him with the Shah’s military dictatorship. That principle gives U.S. diplomats the right to sponsor “color revolutions” for regime-change, such as their sponsorship of Latin American military dictatorships creating client oligarchies to serve U.S. corporate and financial interests. The 2014 coup in Ukraine is just the latest exercise of this U.S. right to appoint and depose leaders.

More recently, U.S. diplomats have appointed Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s head of state instead of its elected president, and turned over that country’s gold reserves to him. President Biden has insisted that Russia must remove Putin and put a more pro-U.S. leader in his place. This “right” to select heads of state has been a constant in U.S. policy spanning its long history of political meddling in European political affairs since World War II.

The second radical feature of the Papal Dictates was their exclusion of all ideology and policy that diverged from papal authority. Clause 2 stated that only the Pope could be called “Universal.” Any disagreement was, by definition, heretical. Clause 17 stated that no chapter or book could be considered canonical without papal authority.

A similar demand as is being made by today’s U.S.-sponsored ideology of financialized and privatized “free markets,” meaning deregulation of government power to shape economies in interests other than those of U.S.-centered financial and corporate elites.

The demand for universality in today’s New Cold War is cloaked in the language of “democracy.” But the definition of democracy in today’s New Cold War is simply “pro-U.S.,” and specifically neoliberal privatization as the U.S.-sponsored new economic religion. This ethic is deemed to be “science,” as in the quasi-Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences. That is the modern euphemism for neoliberal Chicago-School junk economics, IMF austerity programs and tax favoritism for the wealthy.

The Papal Dictates spelt out a strategy for locking in unipolar control over secular realms. They asserted papal precedence over worldly kings, above all over Germany’s Holy Roman Emperors. Clause 26 gave popes authority to excommunicate whomever was “not at peace with the Roman Church.” That principle implied the concluding Claus 27, enabling the pope to “absolve subjects from their fealty to wicked men.” This encouraged the medieval version of “color revolutions” to bring about regime change.

What united countries in this solidarity was an antagonism to societies not subject to centralized papal control – the Moslem Infidels who held Jerusalem, and also the French Cathars and anyone else deemed to be a heretic. Above all there was hostility toward regions strong enough to resist papal demands for financial tribute.

Today’s counterpart to such ideological power to excommunicate heretics resisting demands for obedience and tribute would be the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF dictating economic practices and setting “conditionalities” for all member governments to follow, on pain of U.S. sanctions – the modern version of excommunication of countries not accepting U.S. suzerainty. Clause 19 of the Dictates ruled that the pope could be judged by no one – just as today, the United States refuses to subject its actions to rulings by the World Court. Likewise today, U.S. dictates via NATO and other arms (such as the IMF and World Bank) are expected to be followed by U.S. satellites without question. As Margaret Thatcher said of her neoliberal privatization that destroyed Britain’s public sector, There Is No Alternative (TINA).

My point is to emphasize the analogy with today’s U.S. sanctions against all countries not following its own diplomatic demands. Trade sanctions are a form of excommunication. They reverse the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia’s principle that made each country and its rulers independent from foreign meddling. President Biden characterizes U.S. interference as ensuring his new antithesis between “democracy” and “autocracy.” By democracy he means a client oligarchy under U.S. control, creating financial wealth by reducing living standards for labor, as opposed to mixed public/private economies aiming at promoting living standards and social solidarity.

As I have mentioned, by excommunicating the Orthodox Church centered in Constantinople and its Christian population, the Great Schism created the fateful religious dividing line that has split “the West” from the East for the past millennium. That split was so important that Vladimir Putin cited it as part of his September 30, 2022 speech describing today’s break away from the U.S. and NATO centered Western economies.

The 12^th and 13^th centuries saw Norman conquerors of England, France and other countries, along with German kings, protest repeatedly, be excommunicated repeatedly, yet ultimately succumb to papal demands. It took until the 16^th century for Martin Luther, Zwingli and Henry VIII finally to create a Protestant alternative to Rome, making Western Christianity multi-polar.

Why did it take so long? The answer is that the Crusades provided an organizing ideological gravity. That was the medieval analogy to today’s New Cold War between East and West. The Crusades created a spiritual focus of “moral reform” by mobilizing hatred against “the other” – the Moslem East, and increasingly Jews and European Christian dissenters from Roman control. That was the medieval analogy to today’s neoliberal “free market” doctrines of America’s financial oligarchy and its hostility to China, Russia and other nations not following that ideology. In today’s New Cold War, the West’s neoliberal ideology is mobilizing fear and hatred of “the other,” demonizing nations that follow an independent path as “autocratic regimes.” Outright racism is fostered toward entire peoples, as evident in the Russophobia and Cancel Culture currently sweeping the West.

Just as Western Christianity’s multi-polar transition required the 16^th century’s Protestant alternative, the Eurasian heartland’s break from the bank-centered NATO West must be consolidated by an alternative ideology regarding how to organize mixed public/private economies and their financial infrastructure.

Medieval churches in the West were drained of their alms and endowments to contribute Peter’s Pence and other subsidy to the papacy for the wars it was fighting against rulers who resisted papal demands. England played the role of major victim that Germany plays today. Enormous English taxes were levied ostensibly to finance the Crusades were diverted to fight Frederick II, Conrad and Manfred in Sicily. That diversion was financed by papal bankers from northern Italy (Lombards and Cahorsins), and became royal debts passed down throughout the economy. England’s barons waged a civil war against Henry II in the 1260s, ending his complicity in sacrificing the economy to papal demands.

What ended the papacy’s power over other countries was the ending of its war against the East. When the Crusaders lost Acre, the capital of Jerusalem in 1291, the papacy lost its control over Christendom. There was no more “evil” to fight, and the “good” had lost its center of gravity and coherence. In 1307, France’s Philip IV (“the Fair”) seized the Church’s great military banking order’s wealth, that of the Templars in the Paris Temple. Other rulers also nationalized the Templars, and monetary systems were taken out of the hands of the Church. Without a common enemy defined and mobilized by Rome, the papacy lost its unipolar ideological power over Western Europe.

The modern equivalent to the rejection of the Templars and papal finance would be for countries to withdraw from America’s New Cold War. They would reject the dollar standard and the U.S. banking and financial system. that is happening as more and more countries see Russia and China not as adversaries but as presenting great opportunities for mutual economic advantage.

The broken promise of mutual gain between Germany and Russia

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 promised an end to the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was disbanded, Germany was reunified, and American diplomats promised an end to NATO, because a Soviet military threat no longer existed. Russian leaders indulged in the hope that, as President Putin expressed it, a new pan-European economy would be created from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Germany in particular was expected to take the lead in investing in Russia and restructuring its industry along more efficient lines. Russia would pay for this technology transfer by supplying gas and oil, along with nickel, aluminum, titanium and palladium.

There was no anticipation that NATO would be expanded to threaten a New Cold War, much less that it would back Ukraine, recognized as the most corrupt kleptocracy in Europe, into being led by extremist parties identifying themselves by German Nazi insignia.

How do we explain why the seemingly logical potential of mutual gain between Western Europe and the former Soviet economies turned into a sponsorship of oligarchic kleptocracies. The Nord Stream pipeline’s destruction capsulizes the dynamics in a nutshell. For almost a decade a constant U.S. demand has been for Germany to reject its reliance on Russian energy. These demands were opposed by Gerhardt Schroeder, Angela Merkel and German business leaders. They pointed to the obvious economic logic of mutual trade of German manufactures for Russian raw materials.

The U.S. problem was how to stop Germany from approving the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Victoria Nuland, President Biden and other U.S. diplomats demonstrated that the way to do that was to incite a hatred of Russia. The New Cold War was framed as a new Crusade. That was how George W. Bush had described America’s attack on Iraq to seize its oil wells. The U.S.-sponsored 2014 coup created a puppet Ukrainian regime that has spent eight years bombing of the Russian-speaking Eastern provinces. NATO thus incited a Russian military response. The incitement was successful, and the desired Russian response was duly labeled an unprovoked atrocity. Its protection of civilians was depicted in the NATO-sponsored media as being so offensive as to deserve the trade and investment sanctions that have been imposed since February. That is what a Crusade means.

The result is that the world is splitting in two camps: the U.S.-centered NATO, and the emerging Eurasian coalition. One byproduct of this dynamic has been to leave Germany unable to pursue the economic policy of mutually advantageous trade and investment relations with Russia (and perhaps also China). German Chancellor Olaf Sholz is going to China this week to demand that it dismantle is public sector and stops subsidizing its economy, or else Germany and Europe will impose sanctions on trade with China. There is no way that China could meet this ridiculous demand, any more than the United States or any other industrial economy would stop subsidizing their own computer-chip and other key sectors.^[1] The German Council on Foreign Relations is a neoliberal “libertarian” arm of NATO demanding German de-industrialization and dependency on the United States for its trade, excluding China, Russia and their allies. This promises to be the final nail in Germany’s economic coffin.

Another byproduct of America’s New Cold War has been to end any international plan to stem global warming. A keystone of U.S. economic diplomacy is for its oil companies and those of its NATO allies to control the world’s oil and gas supply – that is, to reduce dependence on carbon-based fuels. That is what the NATO war in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine was about. It is not as abstract as “Democracies vs. Autocracies.” It is about the U.S. ability to harm other countries by disrupting their access to energy and other basic needs.

Without the New Cold War’s “good vs. evil” narrative, U.S. sanctions will lose their raison d’etre in this U.S. attack on environmental protection, and on mutual trade between Western Europe and Russia and China. That is the context for today’s fight in Ukraine, which is to be merely the first step in the anticipated 20 year fight by the US to prevent the world from becoming multipolar. This process, will lock Germany and Europe into dependence on the U.S. supplies of LNG.

The trick is to try and convince Germany that it is dependent on the United States for its military security. What Germany really needs protection from is the U.S. war against China and Russia that is marginalizing and “Ukrainianizing” Europe.

There have been no calls by Western governments for a negotiated end to this war, because no war has been declared in Ukraine. The United States does not declare war anywhere, because that would require a Congressional declaration under the U.S. Constitution. So U.S. and NATO armies bomb, organize color revolutions, meddle in domestic politics (rendering the 1648 Westphalia agreements obsolete), and impose the sanctions that are tearing Germany and its European neighbors apart.

How can negotiations “end” a war that either has no declaration of war, and is a long-term strategy of total unipolar world domination?

The answer is that no ending can come until an alternative to the present U.S.-centered set of international institutions is replaced. That requires the creation of new institutions reflecting an alternative to the neoliberal bank-centered view that economies should be privatized with central planning by financial centers. Rosa Luxemburg characterized the choice as being between socialism and barbarism. I have sketched out the political dynamics of an alternative in my recent book, The Destiny of Civilization.

This paper was presented on November 1, 2022. on the German e-site
https://braveneweurope.com/michael-hudson-germanys-position-in-americas-new-world-order. A video of my talk will be available on YouTube in about ten days.

1. See Guntram Wolff, “Sholz should send an explicit message on his visit to Beijing,” Financial Times, October 31, 2022. Wolff is the director and CE of the German Council on Foreign Relations. ↑

The ‘War of Terror’ may be about to hit Europe

Monday, 24 October 2022 1:40 PM  [ Last Update: Monday, 24 October 2022 1:43 PM ]

By Pepe Escobar

Never underestimate a wounded and decaying Empire collapsing in real time.

Imperial functionaries, even in a “diplomatic” capacity, continue to brazenly declare that their exceptionalist control over the world is mandatory.

If that’s not the case, competitors may emerge and steal the limelight – monopolized by US oligarchies. That, of course, is absolute anathema.   

The imperial modus operandi against geopolitical and geoeconomic competitors remains the same: avalanche of sanctions, embargos, economic blockades, protectionist measures, cancel culture, military uptick in neighboring nations, and assorted threats. But most of all, warmongering rhetoric – currently elevated to fever pitch.

The hegemon may be “transparent” at least in this domain because it still controls a massive international network of institutions, financial bodies, politicos, CEOs, propaganda agencies and the pop culture industry. Hence this supposed invulnerability breeding insolence. 

Panic in the “garden”

The blowing up of Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) – everybody knows who did it, but the suspect cannot be named – took to the next level the two-pronged imperial project of cutting off cheap Russian energy from Europe and destroying the German economy.

From the imperial perspective, the ideal subplot is the emergence of a US-controlled Intermarium – from the Baltic and the Adriatic to the Black Sea – led by Poland, exercising some sort of new hegemony in Europe, on the heels of the Three Seas Initiative.

But as it stands, that remains a wet dream.  

On the dodgy “investigation” of what really happened to NS and NS2, Sweden was cast as The Cleaner, as if this was a sequel of Quentin Tarantino’s crime thriller Pulp Fiction.

That’s why the results of the “investigation” cannot be shared with Russia. The Cleaner was there to erase any incriminating evidence.

As for the Germans, they willingly accepted the role of patsies. Berlin claimed it was sabotage, but would not dare to say by whom. 

This is actually as sinister as it gets, because Sweden, Denmark and Germany, and the whole EU, know that if you really confront the Empire, in public, the Empire will strike back, manufacturing a war on European soil. This is about fear – and not fear of Russia.

The Empire simply cannot afford to lose the “garden.” And the “garden” elites with an IQ over room temperature know they are dealing with a psychopathic serial killer entity which simply cannot be appeased. 

Meanwhile, the arrival of General Winter in Europe portends a socio-economic descent into a maelstrom of darkness – unimaginable only a few months ago in the supposedly “garden” of humanity, so far away from the rumbles across the “jungle.”

Well, from now on barbarism begins at home. And Europeans should thank the American “ally” for it, skillfully manipulating fearful, vassalized EU elites.

Way more dangerous though is a specter that very few are able to identify: the imminent Syrianization of Europe. That will be a direct consequence of the NATO debacle in Ukraine.

From an imperial perspective, the prospects in the Ukrainian battlefield are gloomy. Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) has seamlessly morphed into a Counter-Terror Operation (CTO): Moscow now openly characterizes Kiev as a terrorist regime.

The pain dial is incrementally going up, with surgical strikes against Ukrainian power/electricity infrastructure about to totally cripple Kiev’s economy and its military. And by December, there’s the arrival on the front lines and in the rear of a properly trained and highly motivated partial mobilization contingent.

The only question concerns the timetable. Moscow is now in the process of slowly but surely decapitating the Kiev proxy, and ultimately smashing NATO “unity.”

The process of torturing the EU economy is relentless. And the real world outside of the collective West – the Global South – is with Russia, from Africa and Latin America to West Asia and even sections of the EU.

It is Moscow – and significantly not Beijing – that is tearing apart the hegemon-coined “rules-based international order,” supported by its natural resources, the provision of food and reliable security.

And in coordination with China, Iran and major Eurasian players, Russia is working to eventually decommission all those US-controlled international organizations – as the Global South becomes virtually immune to the spread of NATO psyops.

The Syrianization of Europe

In the Ukrainian battlefield, NATO’s crusade against Russia is doomed – even as in several nodes as much as 80 percent of the fighting forces feature NATO personnel. Wunderwaffen such as HIMARS are few and far between. And depending on the result of the US mid-term elections, weaponization will dry out in 2023. 

Ukraine, by the spring of 2023, may be reduced to no more than an impoverished, rump black hole. The imperial Plan A remains  Afghanization: to operate an army of mercenaries capable of targeted destabilization and or/terrorist incursions into the Russian Federation.  

In parallel, Europe is peppered with American military bases.

All those bases may play the role of major terror bases – very much like in Syria, in al-Tanf and the Eastern Euphrates. The US lost the long proxy war in Syria – where it instrumentalized jihadis – but still has not been expelled.   

In this process of Syrianization of Europe, US military bases may become ideal centers to regiment and/or “train” squads of Eastern Europe émigrés, whose only job opportunity, apart from the drug business and organ trafficking, will be as – what else – imperial mercenaries, fighting whatever focus of civil disobedience emerges across an impoverished EU.

It goes without saying that this New Model Army will be fully sanctioned by the Brussels EUrocracy – which is merely the public relations arm of NATO.

A de-industrialized EU enmeshed into several layers of toxic intra-war, where NATO plays its time-tested role of Robocop, is the perfect Mad Max scenario juxtaposed to what would be, at least in the reveries of American Straussians/neo-cons, an island of prosperity: the US economy, the ideal destination for Global Capital, including European Capital.

The Empire will “lose” its pet project, Ukraine. But it will never accept losing the European “garden.”

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:

www.presstv.ir

www.presstv.co.uk

Global finance vs global energy: who will come out on top?

October 13 2022

Photo Credit: The Cradle

In the war between global finance and energy, one fact remains clear: You can print money but you can’t print oil

There is more to the current struggle between the oil-consuming west and the oil-producing nations than meets the eye and it runs far deeper than the war in Ukraine

By Karin Kneissl

On 6 October, when the European Union (EU) agreed to impose a Russian oil price cap as part of a new package of sanctions against Moscow, 23 oil ministers from the OPEC+ group of oil-producing countries spoke out in favor of a sharp cut in their joint production quota.

Their collective decision to decrease output by about two million barrels of oil per day elicited strong reactions in the US in particular, and there was even talk of “declarations of war.” The EU feels duped, as the OPEC+ production cuts could drive up fuel prices and dampen their eight sanctions packages. Despite the narrative of the world edging toward a “post-oil era,” it seems there’s life in the old dog yet, as OPEC remains the talk of the town.

OPEC is as relevant as ever

OPEC and ten non-OPEC energy producers – including Russia – have been coordinating their production policy since December 2016. At the time, analysts gave this “OPEC-plus” format little chance of having an impact.

Back then, I recall the mockery of many who scorned the announcement in the press room of the OPEC General Secretariat in Vienna. But OPEC has weathered the storm of the global oil market in recent years, and has emerged as a key player.

Recall the exceptional situation in the spring of 2020 during the global COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, when futures trading for US oil grades were even quoted at negative prices at times, only to rise again to new heights in April 2021.

In contrast to the escapades in the oil market between 1973 and 1985, when there was little consensus among OPEC’s members and many had already written the organization’s obituary – today, former rivals such as Saudi Arabia and Russia are managing to converge their interests into powerful cards.

In those days, it was normal practice for Riyadh to take into account and execute Washington’s interests within OPEC: A single phone call from the US capital was enough. When the US oil company ARAMCO – which acted like an extended arm of the US in the kingdom – was nationalized by Saudi Arabia in the early 1970s as part of the sweeping nationalization trends around the world, compensation was promised to the US on a mere handshake.

The era of the “Seven Sisters,” a cartel of oil companies that divided up the oil market, came to an end then. However, for US policymakers – at least, psychologically – this era still persists. “It’s our oil,” is an expression I often hear uttered in Washington. Those voices were particularly loud during the illegal US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Financial market versus the energy market

To really understand the core of the conflict in Ukraine – where a proxy war rages – one must break down the confrontation thus: The US and its European allies, who represent and back the global financial sector, are essentially engaged in a battle against the world’s energy sector.

In the past 22 years, we have seen how easy it is for governments to print paper currency. In just 2022, the US dollar has printed more paper money than in its combined history. Energy, on the other hand, cannot be printed. And therein lies a fundamental problem for Washington: The commodity sector can outbid the financial industry.

When I wrote my book “The Energy Poker” in 2005, I also dealt with the currency question, i.e. whether oil will be traded in US dollars in the long term. At the time, my interlocutors from the Arab OPEC countries unanimously said that the US dollar would not be changed. Yet, 17 years later, that view has devolved starkly.

Riyadh is warming up to the idea of trading oil in other currencies, as indicated this year in discussions with the Chinese to trade in yuan. The Saudis also continue to purchase Russian like other West Asian and Global South states, they have opted to ignore western sanctions on Moscow, and are increasingly preparing for the new international condition of multipolarity.

Washington, thus, no longer maintains its ability to exert absolute leverage on OPEC, which is now repositioning itself geopolitically as the enlarged OPEC+.

US reacts: Between defiance and anger

The OPEC+ ministerial meeting on 6 October was a clear foreshadowing of these new circumstances. The inherent tensions between two world views unfolded immediately in the post-meeting press room where a Saudi oil minister put the western news agency Reuters in its place, and where US journalists fiercely attacked OPEC for “holding the world economy hostage.”

The next day, a tough policy was grudgingly announced by the White House. The OPEC+ production cuts has Washington vacillating between sulking and seeking revenge – against the once-compliant Saudis, in particular. In a few weeks US midterm elections will be held, and the ramifications of spiking fuel prices will no doubt unfold at the ballot box.

For almost a year, President Joe Biden has been expanding US fuel supply via the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but has been unable to calibrate either the price of oil or runaway inflation. The US Congress is threatening to use the so-called “NOPEC” bill – under the legal pretext of banning cartels – to seize the assets of OPEC governments.

The concept has been floating around for decades on Capitol Hill, but this time new irrational emotions may own the momentum. But hostile or threatening US actions are likely to backfire and even accelerate the geopolitical shifts taking place in West Asia, which has been edging out of the US orbit in recent years. Many Arab capitals have not forgotten the unseating of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and how quickly the US abandoned its longterm ally.

“It’s the economy, stupid”

The price of oil is a seismograph of the world economy and also of global geopolitics. With the production cuts, OPEC+ is simply planning in anticipation of upcoming recessionary consequences. Moreover, some producing countries are failing to create new capacities in view of the investment gap that has persisted since 2014: a low price of oil simply cannot be sustained if there is no major capital investment in its sector.

The energy supply situation is expected to further worsen as of 5 December, when the oil embargo imposed by the EU comes into force.

The fundamental laws of supply and demand will ultimately determine the many distortions in the commodity markets. The anti-Russian sanctions created by the EU and other states (a total of 42 states) have disrupted global supply, and that has man-made supply and pricing consequences.

The two major global financial crises – real estate and banks in 2008, and the pandemic in 2020 – led to the excessive printing of paper money. Ironically, it was China that moved the paralyzed global economy out of the first crisis: Beijing stabilized the entire commodity market in 2009/10 by serving as the global locomotive and bringing the yuan into the trading schemes.

China, the well-oiled machine

Until the early 1990s, China satisfied its domestic oil consumption with domestic oil production, ranging from 3-4 million barrels per day. But fifteen years and a rapidly-expanded economy later, China had turned into the world’s number one oil importer.

This status reveals the crucial role of Beijing in the global oil market.  While Saudi Arabia and Angola are important oil providers, Russia is the main gas supplier for China. As former Premier Wen Jiabao once aptly observed: “any small problem multiplied by 1.3 billion will end up being a very big problem.”

For the past 20 years, I have argued that pipelines and airlines were moving east not west. Arguably, one of Russia’s biggest mistakes was to invest in infrastructure and contracts for a promising but ungrateful European market. The cancellation of the South Stream project in 2014 should have served as a lesson to Moscow not to enlarge Nord Stream as of 2017.  Times, nerves, and money could have been better spent on expanding the grid heading east.

It’s never been about Ukraine

Ever since the start of Ukraine’s military conflict in February 2022, we have essentially been watching the western-led financial industry waging its war against the eastern-dominated energy economy. The momentum will always be with the latter, because as stated above, in contrast to money, energy cannot be printed.

The oil and gas volumes needed to replace Russian energy sources cannot be found on the world market within a year. And no commodity is more global than oil. Any changes in the oil market will always influence the world’s economy.

“Oil makes and breaks nations.” It is a quote that epitomizes the importance of oil in shaping global and regional orders, as was the case in West Asia in the post-World War I era: First came the pipelines, then came the borders.

The late former Saudi oil minister Zaki Yamani once described oil alliances as being stronger than Catholic marriages. If that is the case, then the old US-Saudi marriage is currently undergoing estrangement and Russia has filed for divorce from Europe.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

WHODUNNIT? A Pipeline Mystery (not really)

October 10, 2022

Source

by Eric Arthur Blair

There have been several excellent articles (none in the mainstream media however), forensically examining who was responsible for the sabotage of Nordstream 1 & 2.

Pepe Escobar was first off the bat with his usual brilliant analysis https://thecradle.co/Article/Columns/16307

Ben Norton conducted meticulous research and employed flawless logic

https://multipolarista.com/2022/10/06/sabotage-nord-stream-pipelines-us-russia-cia/

Bryce Greene described how the MSM, with virtually all their sewer outlets acting in unison, immediately accused Russia in mindless knee-jerk fashion

US Media’s Intellectual No-Fly-Zone on US Culpability in Nord Stream Attack

Here is a paraphrased example of one of the most bat shit crazy absurd MSM declarations: “Look how wild and unpredictable Putin is to shoot himself in the foot! Maybe he will shoot you next! Therefore we need to regime change him!”

My aim here is not to rehash all previous information, but to re-organize the main points in a more digestible, coherent summary. It is best to use the well established method of considering Motive, Means and Opportunity to make the optimal judgment:

Motive: The aphorisms of cui bono? and follow the money apply here. The USA from even before Nordstream 2 was built, repeatedly voiced and demonstrated their rabid opposition to it (Obama, Trump, Sleepy Joe, Ned Price, Stinkin’ Blinken, Droolin’ Nuland etc). The crash-test-dummy-in-chief himself is on the record of saying with a smirk that no matter what (even though it was a Russian-German project which had nothing to do with the USA), one way or another it would be stopped…nudge, nudge, wink, wink. The West forced Russia to invade Ukraine in February 2022 (in response to the massive buildup of Ukronazi forces on the border and the >30x ramp-up of Ukronazi shelling of Donbass), just before Nordstream 2 was due to come online. This gave the new oafish Scholz sin-cojones government (possessing less balls than the previous Merkel government) the excuse to refuse pipeline certification. Hardly coincidental timing. In September, just prior to the pipeline explosions, there were widespread public protests in numerous German cities demanding that sanctions against Russia be revoked and that cheap pipeline gas again be bought from Russia. The pipeline explosions seemed to eliminate such a future option. The USA has defacto received a massive financial windfall from the pipeline sabotage (witness Stinkin’ Blinken’s nauseous crowing about this “tremendous opportunity”). Such despicable skulduggery was the ONLY way that super expensive US LNG could be EVER be exported to Europe, because it could NEVER be economically (nor environmentally) competitive with super cheap Russian gas. So much for the USA’s much vaunted practice of “free market” competition, another Orwellian term spewed out like projectile vomitus by them, which is better translated as “rigged Mafioso thuggery” or as Putin called it, “terrorism”.

Russia had zero motive to bomb the pipelines. On the contrary, it was hugely detrimental to their interests, representing the multi-billion dollar loss of built infrastructure, the several hundred million dollar loss of natural gas and the loss of a future bargaining chip which could entice Europe to overturn the anti-Russia sanctions and buy cheap Russian gas again. The fact that the Russians offered to repair the pipes proves that it continues to be in their interest to keep them. Any pundits who claim that Russians had any motive whatsoever to destroy the pipelines are stupid and insane and mendacious beyond belief.

Means: Ukraine probably did not have the means or ability to conduct such an elaborate operation. The USA and Russia both possess the means and expertise to conduct such technically demanding sabotage of an extremely robust pipeline.

Opportunity: Pepe Escobar’s article on this was extremely useful. The explosions occurred in shallow water (~60m) near a Baltic narrow geopolitical “choke point”, a location which probably has the greatest density of sophisticated underwater electronic surveillance sensors anywhere in the world. The idea that any Russian drones or subs could be deployed there without the knowledge of the Danes and Swedes (both being US allies, who are now preventing both the Nordstream AG company and Russia from inspecting the site) is not credible. The US however had ample prior opportunity, including previous underwater military “exercises” conducted nearby, in which drones were deployed supposedly for mine detection practice (can obviously also be used for mine deployment). Even if the Russians did have the opportunity, why would they bother to pursue such a politically risky and expensive and complex task, if all they had to do to stop the gas flowing was to turn off the taps, which they in fact had already done? Blaming Russia makes no sense at all, however far be it from me to accuse the AngloEuroZionist Mainstream Media of making any sense, nor the dumbass consumers of the AEZ MSM of having any sense.

Conclusion: the USA had massive motive, means and opportunity to do the dirty, much more so than any other party under consideration (although collusion with the Danes and Swedes to turn a blind eye was likely, as was possible Polish cooperation). Bombing the pipelines was completely and utterly AGAINST Russia’s interest.

We will never obtain hard evidence regarding this matter, because preventing the Russians from inspecting the site for the first 20 days (at least) post-explosion gives USA/NATO ample opportunity to remove any incriminating hard evidence and to plant false evidence blaming the Russians. Shades of MH17 !!!

Can a proper legal verdict be arrived at based on circumstantial evidence alone? Certainly it can if the evidence is consistent, strong and overwhelming. In any impartial court of law, it would be a slam dunk to conclude that the USA was guilty beyond any shadow of a doubt. The Anglo establishment have themselves not hesitated to condemn and imprison people based on flimsy or no evidence whatsoever, as in the case of Julian Assange. We have overwhelming robust objective evidence to condemn the USA for the pipeline sabotage. Only the most irredeemably stupid and deceitful moron could conclude otherwise (unfortunately the AEZ MSM is full of them – they are called supine presstitute stenographers). Any fake “evidence” planted post hoc by the USA/NATO on site, to try to incriminate Russia, should be thrown out of court.

After the gas had settled, so to speak, it turned out that Nordstream 2B was undamaged and can still potentially be used to deliver some gas to Germany. Furthermore the other three pipes may be potentially fixable, which Russia has offered to do. Needless to say the Euro-lapdogs of the USA are refusing those options.

Perhaps we may soon witness yet another mysterious pipeline explosion of NS2B by “parties unknown”…nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

EAB

EU Pushes For More Sanctions Which Will Come Back To Bite It

October 5, 2022

On February 22, two days before Russian troops entered the Ukraine, the U.S. and the EU put reams of sanctions onto Russia. They also confiscated some $300 billion of Russia’s reserves that were invested in the ‘west’. The sanctions had been negotiated between the EU and the U.S. and prepared for over several months.

The idea was to bankrupt Russia within a few weeks. The deluded people behind those sanctions had no idea how big and sanctions proved Russia’s economy really is. The sanctions failed to influence Russia in any way but their consequences led to a shortfall of energy in Europe and increased the already high inflation rates. Inflation in Russia is sinking and its general economic numbers are good. The now higher energy prices generate sufficient additional income to completely finance its war efforts.

A sane actor would conclude that the sanctions were a mistake and that lifting them would help Europe more than it would help Russia. But no, the U.S. and European pseudo elites are no longer able to act in a sane manner. They are instead doubling down with the most crazy sanction scheme one has ever heard of:

[T]he European Union pushed ahead on Wednesday with an ambitious but untested plan to limit Russia’s oil revenue.
…
If the global price of oil remains high, it would complicate the European Union’s effort to impose a price cap on Russian oil that was expected to gain final approval on Thursday, after E.U. negotiators reached an agreement on the measure as part of a fresh package of sanctions against Moscow.

Under the plan, a committee including representatives of the European Union, the Group of 7 nations and others that agree to the price cap would meet regularly to decide on the price at which Russian oil should be sold, and that it would change based on the market price.

Several diplomats involved in the E.U. talks said that Greece, Malta and Cyprus — maritime nations that would be most affected by the price cap — received assurances that their business interests would be preserved, the diplomats said.

The countries had been holding up what would be the eighth sanctions package the European Union has adopted since the Russian invasion of Ukraine because of worries that a price cap on Russian oil exported outside the bloc would affect their shipping, insurance and other industries, the diplomats said.

With oil prices at a high, Russia is raking in billions of dollars in revenue, even as it sells smaller quantities. The cap — part of a broad plan pushed by the Biden administration that the G7 agreed to last month — is intended to set the price of Russian oil lower than where it is today, but still above cost. The U.S. Treasury calculates that the cap would deprive the Kremlin of tens of billions of dollars annually.

How do you make a big producer of a rare commodity sell those goods below the general market price? Unless you have a very strong buyers cartel that can also that product from elsewhere you can not do this successfully. It is an economic impossibility.

To make the measure effective, and cut Russian revenue, the United States, Europe and their allies would need to convince India and China, which buy substantial quantities of Russian oil, to purchase it only at the agreed upon price. Experts say that even with willing partners, the cap could be hard to implement.

Russia has declared that it will not sell any oil to any party that supports the G7 price fixing regime. That is why neither China nor India nor any other country besides the EU and U.S. will agree to adhere to it.

The whole idea is crazy and way too complicate to achieve anything:

Under the new rules, companies involved in the shipping of Russian oil — including shipowners, insurers and underwriters — would be on the hook for ensuring that the oil they are helping to transport is being sold at or below the price cap. If they are caught helping Russia sell at a higher price, they could face lawsuits in their home countries for violating sanctions.

Russian crude will come under an embargo in most of the European Union on Dec. 5, and petroleum products will follow in February. The price cap on shipments to non-E.U. countries has been championed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as a necessary complement to the European oil embargo.

Under the E.U. deal, Greece, Malta and Cyprus will be permitted to continue shipping Russian oil. Had they not agreed to place their companies at the forefront of applying the price cap, they would have been forbidden from shipping or insuring Russian oil cargo outside the European Union, a huge hit for major industries.

More than half of the tankers now shipping Russia’s oil are Greek-owned. And the financial services that underpin that trade — including insurance, reinsurance and letters of credit — are overwhelmingly based in the European Union and Britain.

This is of course an open invitation to other countries to enter the oil shipping and related financial services businesses at the cost of European companies.

China and India will both it to increase their market shares in those fields. Their ships will transport Russian oil to whoever wants to buy it for the market price minus the always negotiable Russian rebate. Greek ships will sit idle or will be sold off while Indian and Chinese and other Asian tankers will be very, very busy. China’s big insurance companies will happily join that new global services business.

That European bureaucrats agreed to his stupid U.S. idea, which will foremost hurt European businesses, is another sign that Brussels has given up on having any agency.

Today OPEC+ countries, the seller cartel for oil, reacted to the crazy sanctions idea and the upcoming global depression by agreeing to decrease their daily output by 2 million barrels. This was not done out of Saudi solidarity with Russia. Saudi Arabia needs oil at above $80/bl to finance its budget.

Brent Crude, which had fallen to $83/bl on September 26, has since risen to $93/bl.

The global demand for oil is around 100 million barrels per day. Should the demand stay up the 2% reduction in OPEC+ production will have significant price effects and $100 per barrel will be in easy reach.

But OPEC+ is committed to stable prices, not to significant price increases. During the OPEC+ session today the Saudi Prince Abdulazis showed this table:
bigger

Since the beginning of the year the prices for all forms of carbon based energy except crude oil have increased considerably. Abdulazis argued that the chart shows that OPEC+ is managing oil prices responsibly. The EU is certainly not doing similar.

The Biden administration has meanwhile nearly halved the content of the U.S Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This to keep U.S. pump prices down and the Democrats in power.
bigger

Neither is a responsible step to take.

Posted by b on October 5, 2022 at 16:48 UTC | Permalink

”Biden” Fulfilled a Promise on Nord Stream 2

October 01, 2022

For those who haven’t seen this footage being reposted the past few days, ”Biden” promised to put an end to Nord Stream 2 on February 7, 2022.

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Who profits from Pipeline Terror?

Secret talks between Russia and Germany to resolve their Nord Stream 1 and 2 issues had to be averted at any cost

September 29 2022

By Pepe Escobar

The War of Economic Corridors has entered incandescent, uncharted territory: Pipeline Terror.

A sophisticated military operation – that required exhaustive planning, possibly involving several actors – blew up four separate sections of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) gas pipelines this week in the shallow waters of the Danish straits, in the Baltic Sea, near the island of Bornholm.

Swedish seismologists estimated that the power of the explosions may have reached the equivalent of up to 700 kg of TNT. Both NS and NS2, near the strong currents around Borholm, are placed at the bottom of the sea at a depth of 60 meters.

The pipes are built with steel reinforced concrete, able to withstand impact from aircraft carrier anchors, and are basically indestructible without serious explosive charges. The operation – causing two leaks near Sweden and two near Denmark – would have to be carried out by modified underwater drones.

Every crime implies motive. The Russian government wanted – at least up to the sabotage – to sell oil and natural gas to the EU. The notion that Russian intel would destroy Gazprom pipelines is beyond ludicrous. All they had to do was to turn off the valves. NS2 was not even operational, based on a political decision from Berlin. The gas flow in NS was hampered by western sanctions. Moreover, such an act would imply Moscow losing key strategic leverage over the EU.

Diplomatic sources confirm that Berlin and Moscow were involved in a secret negotiation to solve both the NS and NS2 issues. So they had to be stopped – no holds barred. Geopolitically, the entity that had the motive to halt a deal holds anathema a possible alliance in the horizon between Germany, Russia, and China.

Whodunnit?

The possibility of an “impartial” investigation of such a monumental act of sabotage – coordinated by NATO, no less – is negligible. Fragments of the explosives/underwater drones used for the operation will certainly be found, but the evidence may be tampered with. Atlanticist fingers are already blaming Russia. That leaves us with plausible working hypotheses.

This hypothesis is eminently sound and looks to be based on information from Russian intelligence sources. Of course, Moscow already has a pretty good idea of what happened (satellites and electronic monitoring working 24/7), but they won’t make it public.

The hypothesis focuses on the Polish Navy and Special Forces as the physical perpetrators (quite plausible; the report offers very good internal details), American planning and technical support (extra plausible), and aid by the Danish and Swedish militaries (inevitable, considering this was very close to their territorial waters, even if it took place in international waters).

The hypothesis perfectly ties in with a conversation with a top German intelligence source, who told The Cradle that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND or German intelligence) was “furious” because “they were not in the loop.” 

Of course not. If the hypothesis is correct, this was a glaringly anti-German operation, carrying the potential of metastasizing into an intra-NATO war.

The much-quoted NATO Article 5 – ‘an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us’ – obviously does not say anything about a NATO-on-NATO attack. After the pipeline punctures, NATO issued a meek statement “believing” what happened was sabotage and will “respond” to any deliberate attack on its critical infrastructure. NS and NS2, incidentally, are not part of NATO’s infrastructure.

The whole operation had to be approved by Americans, and deployed under their Divide and Rule trademark. “Americans” in this case means the Neo-conservatives and Neo-liberals running the government machinery in Washington, behind the senile teleprompter reader.

This is a declaration of war against Germany and against businesses and citizens of the EU – not against the Kafkaesque Eurocrat machine in Brussels. Don’t be mistaken: NATO runs Brussels, not European Commission (EC) head and rabid Russophobe Ursula von der Leyen, who’s just a lowly handmaiden for finance capitalism.

It’s no wonder the Germans are absolutely mum; no one from the German government, so far, has said anything substantial.

The Polish corridor

By now, assorted chattering classes are aware of former Polish Defense Minister and current MEP Radek Sirkorski’s tweet: “Thank you, USA.” But why would puny Poland be on the forefront? There’s atavic Russophobia, a number of very convoluted internal political reasons, but most of all, a concerted plan to attack Germany built on pent up resentment – including new demands for WWII reparations.

The Poles, moreover, are terrified that with Russia’s partial mobilization, and the new phase of the Special Military Operation (SMO) – soon to be transformed into a Counter-Terrorism Operation (CTO) – the Ukrainian battlefield will move westward. Ukrainian electric light and heating will most certainly be smashed. Millions of new refugees in western Ukraine will attempt to cross to Poland.

At the same time there’s a sense of “victory” represented by the partial opening of the Baltic Pipe in northwest Poland – almost simultaneously with the sabotage.

Talk about timing. Baltic Pipe will carry gas from Norway to Poland via Denmark. The maximum capacity is only 10 billion cubic meters, which happens to be ten times less than the volume supplied by NS and NS2. So Baltic Pipe may be enough for Poland, but carries no value for other EU customers.

Meanwhile, the fog of war gets thicker by the minute. It has already been documented that US helicopters were overflying the sabotage nodes only a few days ago; that a UK “research” vessel was loitering in Danish waters since mid-September; that NATO tweeted about the testing of “new unmanned systems at sea” on the same day of the sabotage. Not to mention that Der Spiegel published a startling report headlined “CIA warned German government against attacks on Baltic Sea pipelines,” possibly a clever play for plausible deniability.

The Russian Foreign Ministry was sharp as a razor: “The incident took place in an area controlled by American intelligence.” The White House was forced to “clarify” that President Joe Biden – in a February video that has gone viral – did not promise to destroy NS2; he promised to “not allow” it to work. The US State Department declared that the idea the US was involved is “preposterous.”

Pres. Biden: "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."

Reporter: "But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany's control?"

Biden: "I promise you, we will be able to do that." https://t.co/uruQ4F4zM9 pic.twitter.com/4ksDaaU0YC

— ABC News (@ABC) February 7, 2022

It was up to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to offer a good dose of reality: the damage to the pipelines posed a “big problem” for Russia, essentially losing its gas supply routes to Europe. Both NS2 lines had been pumped full of gas and – crucially – were prepared to deliver it to Europe; this is Peskov cryptically admitting negotiations with Germany were ongoing.

Peskov added, “this gas is very expensive and now it is all going up in the air.” He stressed again that neither Russia nor Europe had anything to gain from the sabotage, especially Germany. This Friday, there will be a special UN Security Council session on the sabotage, called by Russia.

The attack of the Straussians

Now for the Big Picture. Pipeline Terror is part of a Straussian offensive, taking the splitting up of Russia and Germany to the ultimate level (as they see it). Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America: A Critical Appraisal, by Paul E. Gottfried (Cambridge University Press, 2011) is required reading to understand this phenomenon.

Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago, is at the root of what later, in a very twisted way, became the Wolfowitz Doctrine, written in 1992 as the Defense Planning Guidance, which defined “America’s mission in the post-Cold War era.”

The Wolfowitz Doctrine goes straight to the point: any potential competitor to US hegemony, especially “advanced industrial nations” such as Germany and Japan, must be smashed. Europe should never exercise sovereignty: “We must be careful to prevent the emergence of a purely European security system that would undermine NATO, and particularly its integrated military command structure.”

Fast-forward to the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act, adopted only five months ago. It establishes that Kiev has a free lunch when it comes to all arms control mechanisms. All these expensive weapons are leased by the US to the EU to be sent to Ukraine. The problem is that whatever happens in the battlefield, in the end, it is the EU that will have to pay the bills.

US Secretary of State Blinken and his underling, Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland, are Straussians, now totally unleashed, having taken advantage of the black void in the White House. As it stands, there are at least three different “silos” of power in a fractured Washington. For all Straussians, a tight bipartisan op, uniting several high-profile usual suspects, destroying Germany is paramount.

One serious working hypothesis places them behind the orders to conduct Pipeline Terror. The Pentagon forcefully denied any involvement in the sabotage. There are secret back channels between Russia’s Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.

And dissident Beltway sources swear that the CIA is also not part of this game; Langley’s agenda would be to force the Straussians to back off on Russia reincorporating Novorossiya and allow Poland and Hungary to gobble up whatever they want in Western Ukraine before the entire US government falls into a black void.

Come see me in the Citadel

On the Grand Chessboard, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan two weeks ago dictated the framework of the multipolar world ahead. Couple it with the independence referendums in DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye, which Russian President Vladimir Putin will formally incorporate into Russia, possibly as early as Friday.

With the window of opportunity closing fast for a Kiev breakthrough before the first stirrings of a cold winter, and Russia’s partial mobilization soon to enter the revamped SMO and add to generalized western panic, Pipeline Terror at least would carry the “merit” of solidifying a Straussian tactical victory: Germany and Russia fatally separated.

Yet blowback will be inevitable – in unexpected ways – even as Europe becomes increasingly Ukrainized and even Polandized: an intrinsically neo-fascist, unabashed puppet of the US as predator, not partner. Vey few across the EU are not brainwashed enough to understand how Europe is being set up for the ultimate fall.

The war, by those Straussians ensconced in the Deep State – neocons and neoliberals alike – won’t relent. It is a war against Russia, China, Germany and assorted Eurasian powers. Germany has just been felled. China is currently observing, carefully. And Russia – nuclear and hypersonic – won’t be bullied.

Poetry grandmaster C.P. Cavafy, in Waiting for the Barbarians, wrote “And now what will become of us, without any barbarians? Those people were some kind of a solution.” The barbarians are not at the gates, not anymore. They are inside their golden Citadel.

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.

Keywords

Underwater explosions reported prior to Nord Steam gas leaks

Sep 27 2022 17:34

Source: Agencies

By Al Mayadeen English 

The Swedish National Seismic Network (SNSN) confirms powerful underwater explosions in the area of gas leaks from the Nord Stream pipeline.

Gas leak at Nord Stream 2 as seen from the Danish F-16 interceptor on Bornholm, Denmark, Sept. 27, 2022 (Reuters)

The Swedish National Seismic Network (SNSN) reported powerful underwater explosions in the area of gas leaks from the Nord Stream pipeline on Tuesday.

SNSN Director Bjorn Lund said as quoted by SVT that “there are no doubts that these were explosions.”

“One explosion had a magnitude of 2.3 and was registered by dozens of monitoring stations in southern Sweden,” he stated.

“You can clearly see the waves bounce from the bottom to the surface,” Lund added.

On his part, Peter Schmidt, an Uppsala University seismologist, said the Swedish National Seismic Network recorded two “massive releases of energy” shortly prior to, and near the location of, the gas leaks off the coast of the Danish island of Bornholm.

“The first happened at 2:03 am (0003 GMT) just southeast of Bornholm with a magnitude of 1.9. Then we also saw one at 7:04 pm on Monday night, another event a little further north and that seems to have been a bit bigger. Our calculations show a magnitude of 2.3,” Schmidt said.

The Norwegian Seismic Array (NORSAR) also confirmed it had registered “a smaller explosion” in the early hours of Monday, “followed by a more powerful one on Monday evening.”

Photos taken by the Danish military on Tuesday showed large masses of bubbles on the surface of the water emanating from the three leaks located in Sweden’s and Denmark’s economic zones, spreading from 200 to 1,000 meters (656 feet to 0.62 miles) in diameter.

Earlier today, Denmark’s maritime traffic agency and Sweden’s Maritime Authority on Monday reported a “dangerous” gas leak in the Baltic Sea close to the route of the inactive Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which experienced an unexplained drop in pressure.

The leak, southeast of the Danish island of Bornholm, “is dangerous for maritime traffic” and “navigation is prohibited within a five nautical mile radius of the reported position,” the agency warned in a notice to ships.

Authorities in Germany, where the undersea pipeline from Russia makes land, said the energy link had experienced a drop in pressure, while its operator suggested that a leak may be the reason.

A spokeswoman for the German Ministry of Economy indicated in a statement that there was “no clarity” over the cause of the pressure change.

The pipeline operator confirmed in a statement that the drop had been registered “overnight” into Monday and reported to national marine authorities.

Nord Stream 2’s operator mentioned pressure in the pipeline dropped from 105 to seven bars overnight.

“It is relatively likely that there’s a leak” in the underwater pipeline, Nord Stream 2 spokesperson Ulrich Lissek told AFP.

He noted that “the pipeline was never in use, just prepared for technical operation, and therefore filled with gas.”

Read more: Gazprom: Launch of Nord Stream 2 could resolve EU energy crisis

Berlin suspects a “targeted attack”: German newspaper

Following the incident, German newspaper Tagesspiegel claimed Monday that Berlin is convinced that the loss of pressure in the three natural gas pipelines between Russia and Germany was not a coincidence and suspects a “targeted attack”.

The German newspaper quoted an informed source as saying that the German government and agencies investigating the incident “can’t imagine a scenario that isn’t a targeted attack.”

“Everything speaks against a coincidence,” the source said.

Tagesspiegel indicated that for a deliberate attack on the bottom of the sea to happen, it has to involve special forces, navy divers, or a submarine, adding that German authorities are reportedly examining two possible explanations for the incident. The first suggests that “Ukraine-affiliated forces” could be behind the attack, while the second suggests that Russia carried out the attack as a “false flag” to blame Ukraine.

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which runs parallel to Nord Stream 1 and was intended to double the capacity for undersea gas imports from Russia, was blocked by Berlin in the days before the start of the war in Ukraine.

Russian energy giant Gazprom progressively reduced the volumes of gas being delivered via the Nord Stream 1 until it shut the pipeline completely at the end of August, blaming Western sanctions for the delay of necessary repairs to the pipeline. 

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who signed off on the first Nord Stream pipeline in his final days in office, has called on Berlin to reconsider its position on the blocked second link.

On Monday afternoon, Nord Stream 2 was reported to have depressurized. It is worth noting that the Nord Stream 1 pipeline was depressurized in the early evening, simulatnously after the second of the two spikes.

Related Stories

• Gazprom: Launch of Nord Stream 2 could resolve EU energy crisis
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Unicorns Are Real

September 02, 2022

Source

by Batiushka

Unicorns Are Real or It Must Be True, the Western Media Told Me So

An autumn chill is descending on every European country, though in each country in different ways.

Gas-dependent Germany and Italy are desperate for Russian gas. It is not just homes, but whole factories which face imminent closure in energy-intensive industries. The result of that will be mass unemployment. By ‘mass’, I mean 20% and more.

In France there is popular rejection of President Macron who has told his people that they (i.e. not him) must suffer so that the Ukraine can ‘win’. September is the first month of the annual strike-season in France. French people do not like being cold. Expect some headlines.

In Latvia the Russian minority are fearful for their future, but so is everyone else. Heating will not be an option this winter. With a pension of just over 100 euros a month, many pensioners are simply going to die of the cold.

From Slovakia we have received the following:

‘Thanks for your email. Just to give you some idea of the current manufacturing costs here in Slovakia and to be brutally honest throughout the upside down world, We paid last year 85,000 euros for electricity, this year it’s going to be around 500,000 euros. As of 1 Jan2023 it’s going to be 1.2 million euros at best.

So that’s just the electricity, never mind the gas, the increase in raw materials, salaries and all other manufacturing costs, This is a hard way of saying it’s impossible to reduce and every customer of ours has to accept it or not. Surprisingly we have never ever been as busy! You cutting margins down low is of course difficult, but at least you have margins. We simply do not have anything to reduce’.

In Moldova the crisis is profound. As in Latvia and Lithuania up to half the population have fled their countries after they were pillaged by the EU (even though officially Moldova does not even belong to the EU!). Previously medicine came from the Ukraine. Now that is unobtainable, they have to use medicine from Germany. Only that costs ten times more. Quite simply, if you are very ill and you don’t have the money, this year you will die.

In Romania, which has lost a quarter of its population to emigration after the great EU pillage, and where a salary of 600 euros per month is considered very good, food prices are the same as in Western Europe, where average salaries are four to five times more, and diesel costs even more than elsewhere.

In Ireland restaurants are closing because they cannot afford their energy bills, which have increased by 1,000% (yes, one thousand per cent).

In London, the capital of the Brutish (sic) Empire, the Gauleiter Johnson finally admitted that, ‘British households will have to endure soaring energy bills as part of efforts to defeat Vladimir Putin….economic sanctions imposed on Russia have contributed to soaring global gas prices which have driven up household bills’. Analysts expect the UK’s energy price cap per household to rise from an already extremely high £1,971 today to £3,554 a year this October and to a completely unaffordable £6,089 in April 2023. A bill boycott is gathering momentum. Expect rioting and the looting of supermarkets by the hungry.

Did British people choose to endure this? No. Did British people plead to suffer so that they can defeat Putin in a local quarrel about a country most of them had never heard of until last February? No. Did British people refuse to pay for the abundant and cheap Russian oil and gas in roubles? No. Were they consulted about choosing the new Prime Minister? No. So much for ‘the mother of parliaments’….

In the oligarch-controlled UK there are now calls for Thatcher’s privatised utility companies, with their huge profits, generous payouts of dividends to shareholders, hopeless infrastructure, lack of investment and absence of government regulation, to be renationalised. Some have even commented that perhaps ‘the free market’ really meant the law of the jungle and that ‘privatisation simply meant Thatcher selling off public assets to her capitalist cronies and supporters’. Well, forty years late, but some people have finally got the message.

Enough. That is not what I wanted to tell you about.

In the last week of August I left France and went to Wiesbaden. There I visited the magnificent Russian church, built in the century before last. Going round the cemetery with the graves of old aristocrats with their masonic symbols on their headstones (now you know why the Russian Revolution took place), I saw the relatively new grave that I had been looking for.

This was the grave of a lovely old couple, whom I had long known. I won’t reveal their names, just to say that their story would make a film, only so romantic that you would not believe it. However, if you are past the age of forty, you should have realised by now that real life is far, far stranger and far, far more incredible than any fiction. All I will say is that he was born in Saint Petersburg in 1916, was taken by his fleeing parents to Finland after the rest of the family had been shot, that in 1943 he had become a monk and a priest in Nazi Germany, and that in late 1946 the family had fled ruined Berlin for Peronist Argentina as Russian Orthodox refugees. And there, in 1948, he met a desperately poor Argentinian street girl who had been born in Italy. It was love at first sight. I don’t think I have ever met such a devoted and exemplary couple or ever will. They died in great old age within hours of each other.

Enough. That is not what I wanted to tell you about.

After I had gone down from the high wooded churchlands into the town of Wiesbaden, I saw a middle-aged woman wearing a T-shirt which said: ‘Unicorns are Real’. The words were not in German, but in English (even though, no doubt the T-shirt was Made in China). I began to wonder.

Was it just infantilism? The sort of escapism that funded the UFO industry, or Star Wars, or Harry Potter? The irresponsible and immature who are running away from reality?

And I thought to myself that I could not imagine any middle-aged Russian, Chinese, Indian, Iranian, African, Cuban, Colombian or Brazilian woman wearing such a T-shirt (unless of course they were so futile that they had married oligarchs). And then there came to me the words written by the British author G.K. Chesterton in his short story of 1925, The Oracle of the Dog: ‘The first effect of not believing…is that you lose your common sense’.

In other words, to wear such a T-shirt simply shows a lack of faith – in anything. And I thought how significant it was that the words had been written in English, the language of the Hegemon. And I thought, yes, this really is the end of the Western world. Because if you want to advertise your belief that unicorns are real, you have quite simply lost your mind and that from now on you will believe anything the Western world tells you. After all, it is only one step from ‘Unicorns are Real’ to:

‘The great and noble Zelensky is winning the war in the Ukraine because our Western cause is just’.

Tucker Carlson: Things are falling apart every quickly

August 30, 2022

Yemen: “We Are the Terrorists.”

AUGUST 26, 2022

Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° 

Phil Butler
We are the terrorists. Americans are the terrorists creating tremendous suffering and tragedy around the world. And no, I am not the only one admitting to this. Deep down, all of my fellow citizens know what we are up to. A recent incident in Yemen drives home the hegemony my country has created, having looted, and still looting the whole.

I watched talk show host Jimmy Dore a few moments ago, laying out how the US, France, and other nations are robbing other people of this world to prop up failed super-capitalism. Dore, who has an uncanny ability to drive at the heart of matters, was interviewing Ethiopian-American Journalist Hermela Aregawi in a story about the French Foreign Legion securing Yemeni natural gas for sale to the EU. The story begins something like this from The New Arab:

“France could be gearing up to help protect a gas facility in Yemen to allow for exports in a bid to cut Europe’s reliance on Russia, according to an ex-Yemeni foreign minister.”

Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, told reporters the other day that the French Foreign Legion has arrived in Yemen’s Shabwah province to secure control of the Balhaf gas facility. He said the French are making “preparations being made to export gas from the Balhaf facility.”

Hermela Aregawi commented with Dore about how current American policies are building up massive resentment toward the United States, even in countries that were once highly favorable towards us. I know from my experience here in Greece too. As recently as three years ago, criticizing the US in any way at all brought about a look of shock among the Greek population. Today, many Greeks question our role not only in Greece but in Ukraine and other lands where proxy wars over resources burn.

The larger Yemen story also reveals the meaning of a July Paris – Abu Dhabi LNG cooperation that depends on securing Yemen’s gas resources via the Balhaf facility, owned by French multinational oil and gas company Total.

Abdulaziz Saleh bin Habtoor, Yemen’s Prime Minister, has called the world’s attention to the recent looting by the Saudi-led coalition under the watch of the United States. He says Washington is bent on getting control of the resources through Gulf proxies.

Yemeni forces have been in deadly clashes with UAE-backed southern separatist forces in Shabwa province, where Balhaf is located. Looked at in the broader scope, the Yemen situation is just a facet of a much larger looting program underway. Syria, where U.S. forces have essentially taken over the eastern oil-producing region, and the Ukraine conflict reveal the larger canvas. Looking from outer space, the battle for Earth has been raging for decades. But now, the conflict and competition have reached a crisis stage. America and the Europeans are out of gas, literally. And no matter who has to suffer and die, the liberal order cannot let the big lie slip out. Worse, the people in the so-called west don’t want to know or admit our role in pirating the whole world.

Finally, On 22 August, Deputy Foreign Minister Hussein al-Ezzi warned that the presence of foreign forces in the Gulf of Aden or any part of Yemeni waters is illegal. The minister was speaking in response to US Fifth Fleet Admiral Charles Bradford Cooper’s announcement that the US will deploy unmanned drones in the Gulf of Aden. However, the entire Yemen situation is easier to break down by revealing what all these nations want there. And, of course, the answer is precious oil and gas. I’ve discussed this before and the nature of so-called “peak oil.”

To fully cordon off Russia, Europe needs oil, gas, and plenty of it. The US cannot supply enough. It’s too far away, and America has her own needs. Yemen, however, is a relatively untapped source. Only two of the 12 significant basins on and offshore have been developed. The other ten are what’s known as “frontier basins,” according to readily available data. I believe, however, that Total and other significant players know full well another bonanza is offshore of Yemen. This GEOExPro report hints at this. The information puts current Yemen recoverable oil reserves at 4.731 Bbo, and proven gas reserves at 18.6 Tcfg. But this is 2010 estimates.

We do not need to establish the oil and gas reserves the Yemeni people are entitled to benefit from. The fact the United States, France, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the EU have their militaries, bureaucrats, and energy corporations sinking their teeth in is proof enough that the blood of Yemen children will be spilled not for some high romantic future, but so that the same people bleeding Syria, Ukraine. So much of the rest of the world dry can thrive. The French Foreign Legion defending an oil depot in the middle of nowhere says it all. We, the collective “west,” are the real terrorists.

• ‘As long as siege is imposed, fighting will continue’: Ansarallah official

Why is Russia selling energy to her enemies? The answer in one picture

August 18, 2022

Folks, it ain’t Russia who is going bankrupt!

Europe hypnotized into war economy

July 29, 2022

By Jorge Vilches

Thirty two years ago Germans enthusiastically took down the Berlin wall. Now, captured by cunning Anglo-Saxon global elites, Germans are helping other European “useful idiots” to erect a much higher and thicker wall to cut themselves off from Russia leading them into a war economy. But as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has warned… “the approach has clearly failed — sanctions have backfired — and our car now has 4 four flat tires” … Question: vehicles don´t carry more than 2 spare tires on them, do they? So, one quick and innocent way to explain such unfathomable European miscalculation is to assume the EU leadership is immersed in a deep hypnotic trance and just blindly following US-UK instructions under Stoltenberg-Johnson war-mongering policies. Per “The Telegraph” Ref #1 https://www.rt.com/news/559682-johnson-uk-nato-ukriaine Ref #2 https://www.rt.com/news/559785-orban-eu-gas-war-economy/

suicidal non-supply

The supply lines that up to 2022 successfully linked Europe and Russia took decades of very hard work to develop. This now means that almost all of such over-abundant contracts necessarily have no effective substitute because (a) no other vendors have such high quality at low price plus decades of vetting and proven experience + (b) the un-replaceable short freight distance and shipping time from nearby Russia. So, by definition, both (a) + (b) mean that today no equivalent supply lines could ever be found no matter how much Europe tried simply because it would be either too soon or too far …and always too hard and too pricey. So short cuts will be taken and corners rounded-off…. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. The impact of the above cannot be overstated though as the now-broken Euro-Russian supply lines were essential for the Just-In-Time strategy that Europe and world markets still require and cannot wait years to develop and iron out. Logistics 101: proven experience and performance with excellent price plus quick delivery from nearby sources cannot be substituted fast enough, or possibly ever. On purpose, Europe´s worst enemies couldn´t have inflicted worse harm than what a US-UK mesmerized Europe (what else ?) is doing to itself.

So EU sanctions are now cutting off dozens of key and highly varied Russian produce without which Europe as we know it will cease to exist. This involves foodstuffs, minerals of every sort, energy re oil & gas & coal & refined products thereof, etc., etc., plus key technologies and products from space rocket engines to nuclear fuels. Even Roscosmos announced that Russia will withdraw from the International Space Station (ISS) project with the West after 2024 while by that time with an orbital station of its own. At any rate, the new European vendor problems for hundreds of products include each and every aspect of sales & procurement, sourcing & logistics, negotiations, pricing, contract terms, payment, banking procedures, sampling and testing, delivery pathway coordination, additional trucking, roads, vessels and inland waterways for shut down pipeline delivery, on-the-fly solutions for new problems, railroads, loading and unloading yards, ports, process alignment & upgrade, synchronization, scheduling, building and adapting key infrastructure, insurance, guarantees, new administrative matters, buffer storage, vendor vetting, multiple regulatory compliance, etc., etc. So the most efficient and swift Euro-Russian trade routines have today turned into logistical and management nightmares. Europe now and for the near future — in most unfavorable circumstances — needs to run unexpected risks to re-do all such hard work in a hurry and for every banned Russian product, not just coal & oil & nat-gas. And it is not a “plug & play” process either. It takes time. Tons of changes have to be made even after finding a trustworthy vendor. It is costly, cumbersome, and prone to project creep & fatigue. All fully unnecessary and chaotic.

No country in the EU is anywhere ready for any of the above, let alone all of Europe at the very same time with the very same deadline. Furthermore, an impaired Germany would mean a very different Europe something which at this late stage cannot be avoided even if Germans wanted to get their feet wet in a hurry. Jim Rickards now says that “Almost everything you heard about the war in Ukraine from U.S. media over the course of March, April, and May was a lie.” Furthermore, the Western news regarding the impact of the Ukraine war contained very few truths that can confuse just as much. Per Rickards “The economies of the U.S. and the EU are in or very near to recession. Inflation is out of control in the West and commodity shortages will lead quickly to food shortages and more empty shelves in supermarkets… as economic sanctions have backfired ”. And now labor unions add fuel to the fire fully knowing they have the leverage to worsen inflation which is the hottest political topic nowadays. So they now demand better working conditions “with protests turning up at all spots in the global supply chain, including railways, trucking, warehouses, and ports…” At any rate, today Russia is taking full control and will probably retain for itself what up until 2022 were Ukraine´s best assets. That includes its industrial core, its enormously large and specialized natural resources, a most fertile land reminiscent of the Argentine Pampas, and all the ports and the major rivers with Russian territory unscathed. No wonder Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán wants plain “out” of the current European non-strategy despite that Euroclear is raking in dozens of millions in profits from seized Russian bank accounts.

Ref #3 https://www.rt.com/russia/558846-us-uk-eu-sanctions/

Ref #4 https://news.antiwar.com/2022/07/24/hungarys-orban-says-us-russia-peace-talks-needed-to-end-ukraine-war/

Ref #5 https://dailyreckoning.com/needless-death-and-misery/

Ref #6 https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/labor-has-leverage-protesting-supply-chain-workers-threaten-worsen-worlds-inflation-crisis

Ref #7 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-24/world-s-key-workers-threaten-to-hit-economy-where-it-will-hurt?sref=6uww027M

Ref #8 https://www.rt.com/business/559647-eurozone-profits-frozen-russian-assets/

Ref #9 https://www.rt.com/russia/559598-jens-stoltenberg-calls-allies-pay/

add a low Rhine…

The Rhine River directly affects trade and industrial logistics of several key European countries namely, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France, and the Netherlands while indirectly affecting many others or, in some cases, all the others. In particular, the über-important German inland transportation system – and therefore its entire supply chains network – depends upon normal levels of Rhine River waters. Because it´s not only a matter of sourcing the right quality, quantity and price of any produce. It is just as important to receive it Just-In-Time at process destinations such as refineries or power plants as explained later. Simultaneously, all European stakeholders are competing with each other tooth and nail struggling to find, contract and retain exactly the same resources in order to solve the same unexpected problems all at once and by the same date. And it´s not only coal or oil or natural gas — and many other raw materials in and of themselves — but also for the means required to transport, deliver and process all of them.

So everybody and his sister would now in Europe be modifying the same things at the same time with the same resources by the same date. For example, looking for the very first – and certainly bad – resource, namely trucking fleets of every size and type and humongous amounts of EU-certified drivers thereof. This additional heavy truck traffic would require upgrading newer roads and building new ones. Also, the different processes required for these different commodities also require all-around modifications at refineries, new-feedstock power plants, petrochemical plants, etc., etc., etc. Furthermore, there were no plans for any of this nor for the abundant technical human resources required and/or vetted management staff. Managerially speaking, this is not a contingency. It is a fully unexpected European-wide revolution with a terribly demanding time frame and critical failures as the most probable result. This involves strategic value-chain upstream items with EU captive consumers cascading into multiple supply chain failures thru lack of nat-gas, rare earths, inert gases, potash, sulfur, uranium, palladium, vanadium, cobalt, coke, titanium, nickel, lithium, plastics, glass, ceramics, pharmaceuticals, ships, inks, airplanes, polymers, medical and industrial gases, sealing rings & membranes, power transmission, transformer and lube oils, neon gas for microchip etching, etc., etc.

Thousands of yet unknown people are needed to execute all of these projects with yet to be defined job descriptions, yet to be interviewed, hired, trained, teams put together, deployed, etc. Many oldies will be called back from retirement

For many good reasons – mostly obvious — roads & trucks many times cannot compete with seaborne or internal water-ways freight either by volumes shipped or final destination delivery requirements. Furthermore, the supply lines/production system is already set up in a given way and any change introduced to previous logistics is fully unforeseen. For instance, high-load storage facilities and high-consuming processing plants, refineries, power stations and the like are conveniently located for vessel access or pipelines or railways, not trucks. So, now with everyone scrambling for ultra-hard-to-find solutions, EU products will require higher transportation costs by, for instance, having to replace sintering ores with concentrates or pellets. And it is unlikely for higher costs to be absorbed by the market under current conditions of falling demand. So profit margins will get yet narrower – or negative – as already under heavy pressure from high energy prices and labor costs in an inflationary vicious cycle. Sooner or later this leads to either very high inflation, or recession… or even depression. Also, a tremendous food problem has arisen as a consequence of the EU sanctions, involving final produce and intermediate outcomes such as fertilizers which in turn affect yields.

hypnotized food

EU sanctions have prevented operations with Russian grain, including insurance and the admission of Russian ships to foreign ports and entry of foreign ships to Russian ports. Russia cannot solve that nor contribute to solving that in any way, shape, or form. Only the EU can solve that problem. What Russia can and will do is to develop its economy by counting on reliable partners instead of Western countries not willing or able to comply with the agreed terms of trade. No (Russian) gas no fertilizers, less (Russian) gas less fertilizers for everyone including Third World economies.

Higher oil prices – or no oil – mean more expensive distillates such as diesel oil required for farming food produce.

In view of less Russian gas, BASF has slashed ammonia production which is an essential component for fertilizers.

Ref #10 https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/basf-prepares-slash-ammonia-production-germany-amid-worsening-natgas-crunch

hypnotized energy

Up until Jan. 2022, coal (“brown” coal, the dirtiest of them all) was only responsible for 33% of power generation in Germany… but not anymore (more on that later). Let alone the case of oil & gas with ultra simplified door-to-door delivery of excellent, cheap products through quick and clean pipelines. BTW, the case of now badly-needed coal is probably the worst of all, as its complete phase-out was planned for 2030 but now fully reverted with de-commissioned coal-fired power stations most probably returning as Germany´s first line energy suppliers. Less Russian natural gas means less heating, less hot water, less power and less fertilizer among other important things. And the EU cannot print natural gas or Rubles.

“ Despite the aggressive Western sanctions… Russia has been very restrained as far as counter-measures are concerned. So after loudly saying that the EU wants nothing to do with Russian energy or Russian pipelines, the EU should hardly be upset if Russia is tired of laboring not to give them what they asked for, an economic divorce. The problem is Europe is now upset that it’s getting what it acted like it wanted.” – Yves Smith – “Naked Capitalism”

Ref # 11 https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/07/the-end-of-cheap-russian-gas-turning-the-lights-out-in-europe.html

On a recent press conference Russia´s President Vladimir Putin explained that the EU energy security problem is definetly not Russia nor Gazprom. Very simply put: with long winters, less sun, low winds, and EU banks that will not finance fossil fuels investments, plus insurance companies that do not insure them, and local governments that do not allocate land plots for new projects, so then pipelines are not built… while demand keeps growing. Then for political reasons the Ukraine government shuts down a pipeline station. Then the Siemens-Canada problem as, by contract, turbines require regular maintenance and repairs. In sum, the EU has shut-down — on its own — two Russian pipeline routes as Ukraine and Poland effectively cut off the Yamal-Europe pipeline. Ukraine overtly, Poland by refusing to pay under the new gas for roubles scheme. The EU has also sanctioned one turbine while not commissioning North Stream 2, thus completely tying down Gazprom´s hands. Furthermore, the documentation that Gazprom received from Canada and Siemens did not respond to the turbine sanctions-waiver questions. Also, Gazprom is unable to fully use another route as Ukraine has been rejecting its transit applications. In sum, Europe does not have a strategy. Add to that the shut-down of nuclear power stations. And as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said, Russia no longer cares to relate to Europe – or the West at large — as it is not “agreement-capable”.

As if all of the above were not enough, many EU members now have to deploy the DE-conversion from natural gas and the RE-conversion into polluting coal. This back-to-coal ´solution´ is (a) very dirty and against Europe´s Green Plan plus other climate pledges and regulations (b) ultra-expensive (c) a major industrial, logistical and social upheaval that would not make it by this coming winter soon knocking on the European doors, and probably not even for next winter 2023-2024. This separate – yet overlapping – set of major madhouse back-to-coal projects also imply enormous logistics risks and major modifications and tight schedules all around, bids, bidders, contract oversight, certification, commissioning, etc., etc., etc for which nobody involved is prepared, neither regulators, nor vendors, nor consultants or engineering firms, nor end users, nor households, nor labor unions, nor the industry at large.

hypnotized renewables

Renewables have various serious problems including their variable power generation limitations. For example, in low wind or low sun seasons such as 2021-2022 which Europe suffers today. Renewables also have very poor optics – “not in my back yard” — plus impact upon bird life with unavoidable and undesirable consequences. And although there is more to be said, let´s conclude with the all-important de-commissioning problem in view of their rather shortish life-span. Furthermore — in order to see the light of day — manufacture of renewables requires humongous loads of nat-gas, oil, coal, minerals and commodities, all of them necessarily sourced in Russia not anywhere else. Unless the problem were to be compounded and worsened on purpose something quite in fashion today in Europe. For instance, manufacturing of wind turbines requires thousands of tons of nickel and rare earth minerals. Also, any such large structures and components thereof are to be transported to temporary and final destinations — and erected — with Russian fossil-powered equipment. Such is also required for the inevitable regular maintenance and end-of-life decommissioning. Solar photovoltaic energy requires humongous amounts of silver beyond belief, a process which also consumes (Russian) fossil fuels in enormous quantities, including the manufacture of the mining equipment required. Furthermore, as soon as renewables in large quantities are added to any electrical grid, costs go up – not down — as they have to be backstopped by fossil-fueled thermal plants that today should also run on Russian fuels. Please understand and accept that the more renewables added, the more natural gas that is needed. People do not accept rolling brown-outs let alone black-outs, so fossil fuel backstops are mandatory. With current existing technologies, promoting fully counter-productive and subsidized renewables expansion as Germany has and continues to do is reckless. EV lithium batteries require lithium mining which in turn has a whole new set of problems to be resolved Ref #12 https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/lighting-gas-under-european-feet-how-politicians-journalists-get-energy-so-wrong

hypnotized toilet paper

Per “Zeit On-Line” the new European hygiene status is now ready to deploy forces into rolling brown-out territory.

Is this another bad result of the hypnotic spell ? Ref #13 https://www.rt.com/business/559698-germans-warned-toilet-paper-shortage/

hypnotized fish´n´chips

Russian sanctions would leave British pubs without fish’n’chips.

Ref # 14 https://www.rt.com/news/559748-fish-chips-uk-sanctions/

bottom line

Rachel Marsden at RT has summarized it very precisely as follows: “The conflict in Ukraine risks creating the ultimate nightmare for Western elites: an alternative group of allies over which the West has no control, but with the capacity to offer opportunities that are competitive with what their own governments or countries are offering… Western elites are doubling down in Ukraine to save the world order that protects their own selfish interests, thinking that it’s the way to prevent a parallel option from emerging. It’s as simple as that. And they don’t care if it’s the average citizen who has to pay the price”. Ref #15 https://www.rt.com/russia/558490-liberal-world-order-explained/

By banning Russian produce, the EU will bring the European sourcing matrix down on its knees, something which by now has already dawned on the average European also realizing that – at the very best and if not corrupted — their political class is just a bunch of ignorant fools. With these ´Russian sanctions´ EU politicians have unnecessarily set Europe up for hundreds of overlapping, cross-borders, gargantuan projects impossible to fulfill simultaneously, with absurd sequencing and scheduling coordination, plus peremptory timing limitations and deadlines, with countless of well- synchronized engineering specialties and very risky, highly demanding logistics, plus overwhelming legal, political, and environmental aspects. Accordingly, this glorious mismanagement in a decisive decade has the whole EU economy fully at risk with the obvious additional pain of potentially making non-performing rushed and poorly designed modifications everywhere.

Furthermore, Europe will spend a fortune it cannot afford while probably deploying soon-to-fail and trouble full reconversion projects ending up with many half-finished facilities that will not be anywhere ready on time, or ever.

The EU strategy regarding Russian sanctions and arming Ukraine has failed miserably as Europeans are being un-relentlessly ashamed with EU leaders despicably cheating on them and everyone else among other things per non-compliance of the Minsk Accords. Ukraine cannot ever come anywhere close to winning this war, corruption is everywhere rampant and the more weapons Ukraine receives from the West the longer their war will last and the larger territory that Ukraine will lose.

Massive migrations to Club Med countries (mostly PIGS) are highly probable even starting during 2022

Per The Guardian, “…Come October, it’s going to get horrific, truly horrific…a scale beyond what we can deal with”.

Ref #15 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/19/energy-chiefs-fear-40-of-britons-could-fall-into-fuel-poverty-in-truly-horrific-winter

additional IMPORTANT references

https://www.dw.com/en/eu-prepares-for-russia-to-cut-off-gas-supply-over-sanctions/a-62493092

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_22_4608

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/amusing-tales-coal-bottleneck-germany-failure-plan

https://mishtalk.com/economics/amusing-tales-of-a-coal-bottleneck-in-germany-and-the-failure-to-plan

https://www.eurointelligence.com/

https://www.rt.com/business/559561-russia-sanctions-removal-lavrov/

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/21/ukraine-war-europe-turns-to-coal-as-russia-squeezes-gas-supplies.html

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220620-dutch-join-germany-austria-in-reverting-to-coal

https://www.rt.com/business/557503-austria-coal-green-energy/

https://www.theepochtimes.com/electric-vehicles-trading-one-form-of-hazardous-mining-for-another_4623801.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov : Member countries of the African Union

July 29, 2022

Editorial Comment: Mr Lavrov’s visits to Arab states, the Arab League, and African states can only be described as a stunning victory and a complete triumph for diplomacy. A short overview is included in the second part of this Operation Z situation report: http://thesaker.is/sitrep-operation-z-collapses-and-progress/
All of the various transcripts can be read at the MFA site: https://www.mid.ru/en/
Short comments and summaries can be found on the MFA Telegram Channel: https://t.me/MFARussia

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Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s statement and answers to the questions during a meeting with permanent representatives of the member countries of the African Union and the diplomatic corps, Addis Ababa, July 27, 2022

Your Excellencies,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Representatives of the media,

Thank you very much for coming here at our invitation. I believed that being in Addis Ababa, it is absolutely important to meet with the African Union members, like I did during all my previous visits. We could not do this at the headquarters for, as far as I understand, scheduling reasons. And I’m glad that you’ve accepted our invitation to come here to the Russian Embassy to discuss issues which are on the top of international agenda.

Many of our Western colleagues try to send the message that the key, if not the only, problem in international relations is the situation around Ukraine. I tend to disagree with such an assertion and during my visit here and  in my previous encounters with my foreign colleagues, I sense a broad understanding that the issue is much more complex and complicated.

What we witness now, especially as the West launches an unprecedented campaign of sanctions, accusations, threats, vis-à-vis Russia and anybody who dares to support Russia or even not to condemn Russia. This campaign indicates that we are living through a very important historical period, a period where we will all be deciding what kind of universe we are going to have and to leave for our children and grandchildren. The universe which is based on the United Nations Charter, which says that the United Nations is founded on the principle of sovereign equality of states, or we will have the world where the right of force, the right of the strongest dominates.

Actually, what it is all about can be described on the following example. Is it our choice to have the world where we have the so-called collective West, totally subordinated to the United States and feeling free, feeling that it has the right to decide when and how to promote its own interests without following the international law, without any respect to the sovereign equality of states?

When our American colleagues felt in the past that there was a threat to their interests, tens of thousands kilometers from the American coast, be it Yugoslavia in 1999, be it Iraq in 2003, be it Libya in 2011, and many other occasions, without any hesitation, without explaining anything to anybody, very often on false pretexts, they just started military operations levelling cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, like it happened in Iraq in the city of Mosul which was literally levelled. The same happened to Raqqa in Syria, where dozens and hundreds of corpses have been lying for weeks unattended and I don’t recall the progressive civilized community raising any big noise about that situation.

When the Russian Federation, not just overnight, but for the last ten long years has been drawing the attention of the United States and its allies to the unacceptable policy which they have been promoting on Ukraine, building Ukraine as a stronghold to contain Russia, pumping more and more modern arms in Ukraine, planning to build naval and military bases in that country and encouraging in all possible ways Russophobic policies of its leaders; when in 2014 we categorically protested to the West that in spite of its guarantees, the opposition in Ukraine staged a bloody coup and when they came to power, the first thing they did was to demand to cancel the status of the Russian language which has been the historical language of Ukraine from the very beginning. They also demanded the Russians to get out of Crimea. They sent armed groups to storm the Parliament of Crimea and then the eastern part of Ukraine protested against the coup.

The putchists called them separatists, terrorists and started a full-fledged military operation against them. And the West as I’ve said, which had guaranteed only a few days before that – guaranteed a peace deal between the former president and the opposition, the deal which provided for creation of a government of national unity and early elections, – this deal was disrupted overnight and the opposition bragged that they created the government of the winners.

See the difference: the government of national unity and the government of the winners. This was an invitation for the civil war because the opposition called part of its own citizens “losers” while the opposition became “winners”.

So when this all started we managed, together with some other countries, to stop it in February 2015 – Minsk Agreements were signed – keeping Ukraine one-piece.

The eastern territories of Ukraine that originally after the coup declared independence were persuaded not to insist on independence and to agree to stay inside Ukraine by these Minsk Agreements, provided they are given a special status. First of all, the right to use the Russian language.

This was endorsed by the Security Council and this was systemically and totally ignored and sabotaged by the Kiev regime with the encouragement of the West.

There was no direct dialogue between Kiev and those territories in spite of the fact that this was directly demanded from the Ukrainian regime by the Security Council.

And few weeks ago the former President of Ukraine P.Poroshenko who signed the Minsk Agreements, proudly stated to the media that “When I was signing it, I never intended to implement it. We just needed more time to get more weapons from the West in order to enable us to resolve the problem of Ukrainian East by the use of force.” Very honestly.

But this is totally neglected by the West. So we have been knocking on the door of our Western colleagues at least since 2013, telling them that this is absolutely a red line when you create a direct threat to the Russian Federation just on our borders. When you create a Russophobic state, which during all these years, managed to pass series of laws, prohibiting – physically, literally, – the use of Russian language in education, in culture, in media, and even in day-to-day life.

And at the same time, legislation was passed to legalize neo-Nazi theories and practices. Neo-Nazi battalions with swastikas and insignias of Waffen-SS, have been mushrooming in Ukraine and becoming the cornerstone of the Ukrainian Army.

It’s a very radicalized country. They glorify the collaborators of Hitler condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal and all this is being done with silent encouragement by the United States and the European Union. And the process which I’ve described was accompanied by the Western attempts, not attempts – policy – to pull Ukraine into NATO.

Dozens of military exercises of NATO with Ukraine were held on Ukrainian territory with an obvious anti-Russian dimension. The efforts of Russia during all these years – it was not just, you know, we say today that this is a threat and excuse us, but we need to remove this threat. It has been happening for at least ten years.

When we’ve told our Western colleagues, “Guys, why are you pulling Ukraine to NATO? You know that this is a hostile organization vis-a-vis Russia, they were telling us, ‘Don’t worry, it will not be detrimental to your security.’”

Russia, as any other self-respectful country has the right to determine itself what is good for its security and what is not. In that case, NATO members led by the United States, opted to decide for us what is good for the Russian Federation.

We reminded them that many years ago in 2010, they all signed up a declaration saying that the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe will be based on the principle of equal and indivisible security, which means that any country can choose alliances, but no country has the right in choosing alliances to increase its security at the expense of the security of other countries. And that no single organization in Europe can pretend to dominate the security space.

NATO is doing exactly this. And NATO, of course, is strengthening the security of its own at the expense of the security of the Russian Federation, because the borders of NATO have been moved just to the borders of Russia.

So we told them, “Guys, political commitments to which your presidents and prime ministers put the signatures don’t work. Let’s make this principle that the security is indivisible and must be equal for all, let’s make it legally binding.”

And we suggested to them respective treaties several times. First, back in 2009 and the last attempt was in December of 2021. And they told us, “Look gentlemen, first there would be no legally binding security guarantees except for NATO members. And second, as regards Ukraine, the relations between NATO and Ukraine are none of your business.” And that was the end of it.

And parallel with this absolute rejection of constructive efforts we have been undertaking for many, many years, parallel to this the Ukrainians, in violation of the Minsk Agreements, started to accumulate huge military force on the line of contact with the eastern part of the country where the two republics have been under siege, basically. They intensified radically the shelling and bombing of those territories.

When we understood that there would be no agreement on security guarantees in Europe which would be equal, when we understood that there would be no implementation of the Minsk Agreements because the Ukrainian leadership publicly renounced this, and when we understood that the only way to save the people in the east of Ukraine was to recognize these two republics, we did so.

We signed the Treaty on Mutual Assistance with them and at their request, we are now exercising a special military operation aimed at saving lives of the citizens of the Donbass and removing any possibility for Ukrainian territory to be used to threaten the security of the Russian Federation.

I am sure that you have been following the events. I know that the Western media presents the situation in a totally distorted manner. If only to mention the so-called food crisis, as if nothing was of concern before February this year.

If you read the reports of the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization, you will refresh your memory and establish the fact that the problems in the world food market started at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when in an attempt to fight this virus and the pandemic consequences the US, the EU and Japan have made an emission for eight trillion dollars’ worth without any economic substantiation, and they use this empty money to buy food and all other goods which they believe would be necessary in case pandemic takes long and there will be closure of countries.

Then there were, of course, increases, long ago, of the price of fertilizers because of the reckless policy of the Western countries on the so-called Green Transition, because the energy supplies, the classical energy resources were more or less discriminated and all this has brought the price of fertilizers high, which of course affected the price of food, and so on and so forth. And then there were not very conducive climate conditions for a couple of years.

And yes, the situation in Ukraine did affect, additionally, negatively affected food markets. But not because of the Russian special operation, rather due to the absolutely inadequate reaction of the West, which announced sanctions, undermining the availability of the food on the markets.

When we explain this to them, they say, “Food and fertilizers are not covered by sanctions”. Yes, but you know, half-truth is worse than a lie. And the truth is that the list of sanctions does not contain an item saying “food”, but what it does contain is prohibition for the Russian ships to call to the ports in the Mediterranean, prohibition for the foreign ships to call on the Russian ports, to pick up food and other cargo, prohibition to insure the Russian ships, because of which insurance prices quadrupled overnight. And of course, prohibition for the main Russian bank, Russian Agricultural Bank, which has always served the payments for Russian food exports – it was listed in the European Union sanctions.

So the latest attempt by our Turkish friends and the Secretary General of the United Nations resulted in a deal between Russia and the United Nations, whereby Secretary General Guterres committed himself to press the Western countries to lift those restrictions, which I just quoted. We’ll see whether he can succeed.

And the same deal as you know, provided for Ukraine an obligation to demine its coastal line for the ships which have been locked there, I think 70 ships from 16 countries since February, to allow them out of the Ukrainian territorial waters, after which Turkish and Russian fleet will ensure their safe travel to the straits and then to the Mediterranean.

So those were the agreements, which could have been announced long, long ago, if not for the Western stubbornness in insisting that they are always right, and all those who don’t agree with them, of course, are always wrong.

A similar situation is taking place with the energy markets. Many years ago, before February this year, the West started discriminating Russian energy projects. First, the project called Nord Stream 1 was limited by 50% of its capacity for no good reason at all. Europe deprived itself of 50% of Russian cheap, accessible gas.

Then Nord Stream 2 was blocked by absolutely illegal action when the legal committee of the European Union ruled that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline was built and financed and invested, fully aligned with the existing European norms.

But after that, the European Commission changed the rules retrospectively and applied the new rules to the investment which took place legally several years ago.

So Nord Stream 2 is also not available. Poland, several months ago, stopped taking gas from a direct pipeline from Russia. Ukraine stopped one of the two transit lines through its territory from Russia. And there was some hassle with that turbine which went for maintenance to Canada, then Canada didn’t want to bring it back.

I listed five or six factors which immediately negatively affected gas supplies to Europe volume-wise. And, of course, the less you buy from Russia through a pipeline, which is a price established for long-term, the more expensive prices on the spot.

It reached yesterday, I think, $2,200 for a thousand cubic meters. So the attempts to blame us for everything which goes wrong is an attempt with not very clean purposes and intentions.

What is my point? My point is that it’s a period of history where we will have to choose either to go down the current, which the West tries to move, saying that the world must be run not by international law, but by the rules.

They coined an expression “rules-based world order”. And if you analyze the behavior of our Western colleagues in the international arena, you will understand that these rules differ from case to case. There is no single criteria. There is no single principle, except one. If I want something, you have to obey. If you don’t obey, you would be punished.

This is the picture for the future offered to us by the rules-based world order promoted by the West. Basically, this is the unipolar world where the United States, which subordinated to its own will everybody else in the European Union and allies in Asia… This is the offer. Not even an offer, it is an ultimatum actually.

The alternative to this, and I’m sure that the overwhelming majority of the world countries do not want to live as if the colonial times came back, that the vast majority of the states want to be independent, want to rely on their own tradition, to rely on their own history, to rely on their old friends, don’t want to betray their old friends.

And this is basically evident from the fact that except two or three developing countries, no one else in Africa, Asia or Latin America joined the illegal American and European sanctions.

And back to the United Nations Charter. I believe, when we speak about more just, more democratic world order, we don’t need to invent anything. Once again, I quote the Charter which says that the United Nations is based on the principle of sovereign equality of states.

And to recognize that each state is independent, each state has the right to determine how it wants to live, what kind of economic, social, political system it wants to choose on the basis of the will of its people. And I have no slightest doubt that any normal state wants to be like this. Nobody wants to have enemies. This is also an absolute truth. Neither Russia nor any other country present in this hall – I have no doubt.

But if countries, like we witness now the behavior of the West, if they do want to have enemies, as they publicly declared in their doctrines, in the decisions of the latest NATO summit in Madrid – they do want enemies, they appoint enemies, they appoint the order in which they handle these enemies. Now Russia is the first, China is earmarked as the existential challenge for the long term. And all this manifests in renewed thinking about how the world economy and the world system operates.

If the US and the European Union – under the demand of the US – decided to freeze the Russian reserves – and now they seriously start a legal process to prepare the basis to confiscate the Russian money – who knows… If they become irritated by somebody else tomorrow or the day after, they might do the same.

In other words, the reliance on dollar as the instrument supporting the world economy is not very promising, frankly speaking. And it is not by incident that more and more countries are shifting to using alternative currencies, shifting to use national currencies more and more, and this process will be gaining momentum.

This is not to say that we are suggesting some kind of revolution against the dollar, against the United States – this is to state the obvious: the West created a system which was based on certain principles – free market, fair competition, sanctity of private property, presumption of innocence, and something else. All these principles have been thrown down the drain when they needed to do what they believe is to punish Russia.

And I don’t have the slightest doubt that, if need be, they will not hesitate to do the same in relation to any other country which would irritate them one way or another.

I mentioned China as the next target. It’s a very interesting example of how the Americans consider fair competition in practice. Actually, China developed into the number one world economy – everybody recognizes this – and China did so, China achieved those results, working and acting on the basis of the rules established by the West. The IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the rules to settle disputes, competition and the stuff. China accepted those rules in developing its own economy and China defeated the West, economically and trade-wise, investment-wise, on its own turf, on the basis of the rules invented by the West.

And what happened next? Already a couple of years ago, the Secretary of Treasury of the United States and some other officials started saying, “We need to reform the Bretton Woods Institutions, we need to reform the WTO and we need to organize this reform between the US and Europe not to allow anybody else to participate in developing new rules.”

Guys, it is absolutely obvious, how they want this world to be operated. And I believe, as long as it is not too late, we would be ready to talk to our Western friends when they come back to their senses about how they think they should live together with all of us in the future. But this conversation can only be made on full equality, with full respect to the legitimate interests of all of us.

If I took too long of your time, I apologize. And I understand there might be a couple of questions, right?

Question: Your Excellency, Sergey Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation,

On behalf of the people of South Sudan, the Government and on my own behalf, I wish to take this opportunity to express my personal gratitude to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Ethiopia for inviting me and my delegation here.

We are grateful that our two countries, the Russian Federation and the Republic of South Sudan enjoy cordial bilateral relations, dating back to the day of our declaration of independence, where the Russian people and their Government were among those who recognized our statehood on July 9, 2011. Since then Your Excellency, the people and the governments of two countries have stood with the people and the Government of South Sudan in many ways.

The people of South Sudan wish to express their gratitude for your immense support in the UNSC, the Human Rights Council in Geneva and other activities where you supported us. First of all, as you explained, Your Excellency, you outlined your view on sanctions. Now we know what’s really going on.

On the current political situation in my country I would like to inform Your Excellency the Minister that the signed revitalized peace agreement of 2018 is holding despite the challenges that you have mentioned. These include numerous sanctions by Western countries and their allies, and an arms embargo. Other factors of concern are natural disasters, such as heavy rains…

Sergey Lavrov: I apologize, can you pass on this text? Because it would be useful and more polite to the others. Ok? Please, pass it. Thank you!

Just one remark. We are against those sanctions which are intended to punish people. And don’t forget that the initiators of these sanctions against you are exactly the same countries who wanted to create South Sudan out of Sudan.

Question: Thank you very much for giving a very detailed and covering all important aspects in your briefing. A short question: How the hegemony of dollar can be controlled by international community because right now the countries like Pakistan and many developing countries are suffering from huge debt that continues to grow. The problem is getting worse. I would like you to clarify the situation.

Sergey Lavrov: I am not an expert in monetary affairs. What I said was it’s an obvious feeling by many countries that the dollar is not reliable, because the capricious behavior could be aimed at anyone in the future.

I know that you can feel this on yourself, if you compare the situation of 20-30 years ago and now. So, it’s life. It’s life. And nobody wants to go to war because of the dollar and I believe this is crazy.  But people want to have some insurance as regards the reliability of their economic and trade relations with their partners. And there are examples, including the use of national currencies, including barter, including clearing mechanisms. Some might say this is going back to the past instruments of conducting trade. But there would be digital currencies, I don’t have the slightest doubt, which are already being developed in China, for example, in Venezuela, in Iran.

We are thinking about this as well. It’s the beginning of a process. Now we have accumulated the elements of the problem and we know that it must be addressed.

Question: With an approach of winter during which gas importations increase. How does Russia going to export its gas and circumvent the sanctions imposed? 15 African countries import more than 50% of their grain from Russia. The situation also affected the exports from African countries to Russia. How does Russia intend to manage trade relations with Africa?

Sergey Lavrov: I think I addressed both issues in my remarks. I hope you listened to me. Antonio Guterres personally promised to make sure that the US and EU remove any obstacles to the export of Russian grain. If you add your noble voice to his efforts, I think it would be useful.

And on gas prices – I also explained how Europe systemically, during the last almost ten years, was creating barriers on the way of bringing to European countries cheap and accessible Russian gas.

I listed five or six specific decisions which were cutting more and more of Russian exports, vacating the room in Europe for much more expensive LNG from the United States, just like, you know, the US insists that Europe sends all its weapons to Ukraine, vacating the arms market in Europe for the import of American weapons. It’s “nothing personal, it’s business.”

As regards your country (Algeria), the Europeans are now thinking of alternative sources of supply. They have suffocated themselves with their own hands the pipeline routes from Russia. Now they are  looking for alternatives. And I know that the Mediterranean, including Algeria, is one of those sources.

They would be asking you to help, and it’s up to your companies to decide, it’s up to your government to decide.

In our case, according to our experiences that when we had long-term contracts with Europe, these long-term contracts protected our interests. But, a few years ago, Europe started cutting long-term contracts saying, “Let’s shift to the spot market”. And the spot market does not guarantee that you will have a long-term investment justified.

So, what we see now is not a scientific, not a responsible approach to the energy markets – it’s a hectic search for something which can save you this winter, with the green agenda shelved for the time being.

The coal is coming back, polluting the atmosphere – it’s a mess, if you take a look at the energy and environment policy that Europe is promoting. I am sorry to say this. We are not getting any happiness or joy from what Europe is experiencing, but they have been doing this to themselves for quite some time already.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have to apologize because the minister – my colleague from Ethiopia – is   waiting for me for the next event. Once again I want to thank you whole-heartedly for accepting our invitation. I hope it was not a waste of time. I tried to be as frank as I can, and we would be ready to promote dialogue with the African Union.

Unfortunately, we could not meet at the headquarters. And we would be ready for a dialogue on all these and any other issues of interest and of importance with you bilaterally. With all of you we have good relations and channels of communication.

I wish you all the best and keep healthy. Thank you very much.