Germany and the United States along with other Western powers are continuing deep-seated historical crimes by way of their proxy war against Russia.
The repeating of history might seem tragic, even farcical. One may wonder how such apparent madness can be repeated. But the explanation is straightforward when it is understood that the motive force is the same.
The charge against Germany at the International Court of Justice this week of aiding genocide in Gaza is truly shameful. Germany was brought to court by Nicaragua for facilitating Israel’s genocide in Gaza in breach of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
That convention was created in the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s mass murder of six million Jews during World War Two. Only 79 years after the end of that war, the German state is again in the dock for complicity in an ongoing genocide in Gaza committed by a self-declared Jewish state of Israel.
It seems a shocking and deplorable twist in history. Within living memory, Germany stands accused again of abominable crimes against humanity.
What is even more disgraceful, the German authorities are denying that Israel is committing genocide and that Germany is nobly defending Israel’s security out of a special obligation owing to its heinous World War Two holocaust.
Germany’s supposed rationale for supporting Israel is an astounding perversion of history.
The case against Germany this week is incontestable as was the earlier case brought against Israel by South Africa in January before the same United Nations court at The Hague. A definitive ruling by the court on both cases is pending.
Nevertheless, already world public opinion is in concurrence with numerous international legal and human rights experts that Israel’s military siege of the Gaza Strip amounts to genocide and incorporates multiple violations of international law. Ergo, Germany’s culpability.
Over the past six months, Israel’s wanton destruction of the Palestinian territory has resulted in over 33,000 deaths, including more than 14,000 children and 10,000 women among the victims. The actual death toll is probably more than 46,000 given that 13,000 people are missing under rubble or buried in unmarked graves. It is feared that there will be up to 100,000 dead in the coming months as famine and disease intensify.
Germany is the second biggest supplier of weapons to Israel after the United States. Germany accounts for nearly one-third of all Israeli arms imports.
Israel’s murderous, indiscriminate siege of Gaza involving a deliberate policy of mass starvation of more than two million people would not be happening if it were not for crucial military support from the United States and Germany.
But just as important as the killing machines and ammunition is the unwavering political support provided by Germany, the United States, and all of their Western allies. Unbelievably, Berlin, Washington, London, Paris, and other Western capitals continue to assert that Israel is not committing genocide. Like U.S. President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz repeats the cynical and mendacious mantra about Israel’s right to self-defense.
What is going on in Gaza is a bloodbath enabled by Western imperialist powers. The U.S. and all its Western allies are accomplices in egregious war crimes. Live on television every day, and yet the contemptible Western media assiduously sanitize and mitigate the horror. In any sane world, the Western governments and their corporate-controlled “news media” should be irredeemably condemned for their complicity.
However, Germany’s culpability takes on a profoundly disturbing and disgraceful significance, as does the Zionist regime’s. In the name of millions of victims of Nazi Germany, the genocide in Gaza is being perpetrated with a truculence and self-righteousness that is despicable beyond words. It is utterly diabolical that the historic mass murder of Jews by Germany is now being repeated on others by a state that claims to be Jewish – and enabled by Germany. You could hardly make this obscenity up.
It should be understood too that the horror being perpetrated in Gaza is but one element in a toxic eruption of imperialist crimes currently underway across the globe.
In Ukraine, the Western imperialists in the NATO axis are waging a proxy war against Russia utilizing a corrupt NeoNazi regime headed up by a nominally Jewish puppet president who is up to his eyes in money laundering, fraud, and swindling. Germany is the second biggest supplier of weapons to the Ukrainian regime after the United States.
Eight decades ago, Nazi Germany deployed Ukrainian fascists to exterminate Jews and Slavs with a death toll of up to 30 million Soviet citizens. The contemporary Ukrainian regime glorifies these Nazi collaborators. The United States deployed the same Ukrainian fascists after the Second World War to wage covert war against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Thus, Germany and the United States along with other Western powers are continuing deep-seated historical crimes by way of their proxy war against Russia.
The same imperialist rogue states are enabling Israeli aggression against Iran, Syria and Lebanon. Israel’s deadly bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus earlier this month was a particularly brazen violation of international law. The barbarity of the Israeli fascist regime is fully enabled and incentivized by its Western patrons. The bitter irony is Washington and Berlin remonstrating with Iran to exercise “maximum restraint” while Israel openly attacks its sovereignty and assassinates its citizens.
Meanwhile, the United States, Australia and Britain are cajoling Japan to join their military alliance to provoke China. Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was feted in Washington this week where he signed bellicose new military measures aimed at China and Russia. Kishida linked Ukraine with Asia, claiming that if Russia were to win the war in Ukraine, then China would take over East Asia. The Japanese minion gets its half right. The regions are indeed linked, not by alleged Russian and Chinese misconduct, but by the U.S.-led imperialism that Japan is cravenly serving.
Western imperialism and fascism have come full circle in a staggeringly short span of history. Nearly 80 years after Japan was defeated in the Pacific War in which it was responsible for up to 20 million deaths in China, Tokyo is at the forefront of new plans to wage a potential nuclear war on China. The perversion of Japan joining with the United States in this venture after the latter dropped two atomic bombs on its people in 1945 is yet another sickening twist in history.
The monstrous crimes of Nazi Germany and fascist Japan are today rehabilitated because the same forces serve the imperialist geopolitical interests of today.
The twists and contradictions of history are, however, crystallized in one historical force. All the crimes, barbarity, bloodshed and danger of catastrophic world war are the cause of imperialist powers – chief among them the United States and its insatiable quest for hegemonic domination.
Historic failure and systemic collapse of Western capitalism is the motive engine driving the world to war again, as it was in previous periods of the modern age. Colonialist genocide, World War One, World War Two, and now the abyss of World War Three.
Germany in the dock for genocide with Israel is not as incongruous as it might seem. Because imperialism and fascism are on the rampage again across the world. Both Germany and Israel are gang members in the crime syndicate, each with their specific justifying myths and alibis.
Russia and China are arguably the two nations that suffered the most in history from fascism. It is entirely consistent – if not lamentable – that Russia and China today are once again confronted by the same forces.
Germany is once again on the wrong side of history. And so too are the United States and all its Western vassals. Eternal shame on them.
By Chay Bowes, journalist and geopolitical analyst, MA in Strategic Studies, RT correspondent
As the West’s proxy war in Ukraine slips inexorably towards utter failure, the neocons behind the debacle are faced with dwindling avenues of retreat.
Early confidence that Russia, in its current form, would collapse under the pressure of the harshest sanctions regime in history failed to materialize. Early Russian miscalculations on the battlefield were not followed by a military meltdown, but by a pragmatic display of strategic adaptability, which is begrudgingly admired in the military war rooms of the West. The Russian army, far from falling apart, has steeled itself into making bold decisions to retreat when prudent and advance when required, both of which have proven devastating for their Ukrainian opponents. It follows that, as the Western political elites that cultivated this conflict peer into another winter of political, military, and potentially economic discontent, it is now that we potentially face the most dangerous period in Europe since the outbreak of WWII.
The catalyst for a wider war in Europe isn’t, in fact, a limited conflict in Ukraine in itself, one that started in 2014 and, notably, had been largely ignored by Western powers for almost a decade. The real issue is that NATO, which is currently engaged in a proxy War with Russia, is facing a ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ scenario regarding its growing military involvement in Ukraine. If the US-led bloc escalates further as defeat looms, it could likely lead to direct confrontation with Russia. If it doesn’t, its proxy will collapse and leave Russia victorious, a fate once utterly unthinkable in Brussels, Washington, and London, but now becoming a nightmarish reality.
Such a defeat would be devastating and potentially terminal for the prestige and reputation of the whole NATO brand. After all, despite the Soviet Union having long ceased to exist, the bloc still markets itself as an indispensable bulwark against imagined Russian expansionism. In the event of an increasingly likely Ukrainian defeat, that ‘essential partner’ in ‘countering Russia’ will have been proven utterly impotent and largely irrelevant. More cynically, the vast US arms industry would also be denied a huge and lucrative market. So, how does a multi billion-dollar machine that has prophesied absolute victory against Russia even begin to contemplate defeat? And how do senior EU bureaucrats like Ursula Von der Leyen climb down from their quasi-religious devotion to the ‘cause’ of utterly defeating Russia, which she has shamelessly evangelized for over a year and a half? Lastly, how does the American administration, which has gone politically, morally, and economically ‘all in’ against Russia in Ukraine, contemplate what amounts to an increasingly inevitable European version of Afghanistan 2.0?
They will need to do two things: Firstly, find someone to blame for their defeat and secondly, find a new enemy to deflect public opinion onto. The ‘someone to blame’ will be quite easy to identify – the narrative will be flush with attacks on states like Hungary, China, and to some extent India, who will be accused of “undermining the unified effort needed to isolate and defeat Russia.”
Blaming Ukraine itself will also be central to this narrative. Western media will insure it’s singled out as incapable of ‘taking the medicine’ proffered by NATO and therefore suffering the consequences, not listening to Western military advice, failing to utilize Western aid correctly and, of course – given that little has been done by Zelensky to tackle the endemic corruption in Ukraine – this fact will be easily weaponized against him and used to lubricate a slick narrative of ‘we tried to help them, but they simply couldn’t be saved from themselves’.
The ‘shift focus to another enemy’ narrative is the simplest and most obvious – that will be China. NATO is already trying to expand its influence in Asia, including via a planned ‘liaison office’ in Japan. The ‘China is the real threat’ narrative is bubbling steadily to the surface in Western media.
And, most worryingly, should Western powers fail to make their case for ‘plausible deniability’ around the culpability for this war, there is always the option of further escalating it. Such an escalation could rapidly lead to direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, an outcome no lucid observer on either side of the debate could or should be contemplating. The problem is, rational assessment and negotiation seem to have become so rare in Washington and Kiev that a devastating escalation could, quite remarkably, be considered an option by the deluded neocon think-tank advisers wielding disproportionate influence over an increasingly desperate political class in Washington and Brussels. In the event that NATO does indeed sanction a direct intervention into Ukraine, it will, of course, be justified as a ‘peacekeeping’ or humanitarian intervention by Polish or Romanian troops, but the categorization of the ‘mission’ will become gloriously irrelevant when the first clashes with Russian forces occur, followed by a potentially rapid spiral into all-out war between Russia and NATO.
It could be argued that the process to disassociate from Ukraine has already started, beginning with the embarrassment Zelensky faced at the recent NATO summit and progressing with the open spats between Western ‘partners’ over whether to give Ukraine ever deadlier weapons to essentially insure its self-destruction.
From here on out one thing is abundantly clear, nothing will happen by accident when it comes to the EU and NATO’s interaction with the Zelensky regime. Whatever comes next may need to be spun both ways, to either pull out or to escalate. A case in point is the blame game being openly acted out around the obvious failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, with open finger-pointing in the Western media by Ukrainian officials like the ambassador to Germany, Aleksey Makeev. Kiev’s top man in Germany recently blamed the West for the bloody failure of the ill-fated project, suggesting it was solely due to European and American delays in shipping weapons and cash to Kiev. According to the ambassador, it was this Western failure that apparently allowed the Russians to build their defenses in eastern Ukraine, where tens of thousands of unfortunate Ukrainian conscripts have met their fate in the past three months.
In the real world, the counteroffensive, which has now become a slow-motion calamity, had been telegraphed to the Russians and the wider world for almost a year and will surely be recalled as one of the greatest military misadventures in history. The fact that the Ukrainian regime openly advertised its intentions, even loudly pointing out the avenue of assault and strategic goals, is conveniently ignored by the likes of Makeev. It now seems apparent that Kiev believed that its overt saber-rattling would stimulate faster and larger weapons shipments from its increasingly concerned partners – it didn’t, and by the time those very same sponsors’ patience ran out with Kiev’s lack of progress on the battlefield, it was glaringly obvious any offensive against long-prepared Russian defenses was doomed to fail. Yet, because of Kiev’s PR need and demands from Western political elites, the counteroffensive began, wiping out entire battalions of Ukrainian troops and burning through a huge portion of the Western heavy weapons previously provided.
The situation evokes a kind of tragic romantic folly, with Ukraine desperate to woo NATO and the EU to the point of suicide, NATO and the EU playing the aloof lover; never having really considered marriage but willing to allow its admirer to throw itself onto the spears of the real object of their attention – Russia. Of course, the real concern now preoccupying the EU-NATO cabal is how to survive this tawdry affair and move on. While the hapless Jens Stoltenberg would have us believe NATO has never been stronger, the reality is far less rosy for the ‘defensive alliance’ that has bombed its way across Europe and the Middle East, and now seeks to expand to the Pacific. The reality is that the Ukraine conflict could destroy NATO. It has become something of a modern day League of Nations, adept at admonishing small fish, but utterly incapable of standing toe to toe with any peer adversary, a failed political institution, posing as a military alliance, that in reality would collapse in the face of a direct challenge from either Russia or China. Of course, it seems that NATO has also willfully fallen under the spell of its own propaganda.
The big question now is whether the bloc would in reality contemplate a direct confrontation with Russia in Ukraine? Or will the Western political elites who built the scaffold the Ukrainian conflict is now blazing on choose to reverse through blame or escalate through desperation?
One thing is indisputable: The fate of NATO and its credibility as a ‘defensive alliance’ is irrevocably intertwined with the outcome of the Ukrainian conflict, yet because NATO is, in reality, a political rather than military institution, these crucial issues will never be debated openly, as the answers would be akin to a priest announcing the nonexistence of God from the pulpit.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
In his famous anti-Vietnam War speech, the late senator from South Dakota George McGovern told fellow Congressional leaders, “This chamber reeks of blood.”
On Saturday, journalist Max Blumenthal opened a hard-hitting talk at the Ron Paul Institute’s “Which Way America…?” conference in D.C.by quoting those words, but applied them to the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
Blumenthal said that in Ukraine, Washington continues “wasting the lives and bodies of over 150,000 men, and that’s according to the Pentagon.” Citing recent studies on the immense numbers of Ukrainians who have lost limbs after a year-and-a-half of fighting (which could be surpassing WWI rates), he said the true Ukraine casualty count could be closer to 500,000 – which marks a monumental tragedy and disaster.
The GrayZone journalist then said of today’s Congress that “this chamber” not only “reeks of blood” but.. “they have wasted Ukrainian society on the mantle of anti-Russia hysteria” – as lawmakers in lockstep with the Biden administration continue to sink billions into Kiev.
Beltway liberal elites, Blumenthal asserted, still think Russia must be punished given they see Moscow as having brought the “bad orange man” to power in 2016. This is a big ideological aspect to what motivates the hawks, he said.
Further, Blumenthal explained that what’s happening here is that the US ruling class has “militarized the culture wars while depicting Ukraine as the ‘woke side’ vs. Russia as backwards and oppressive.”
But more importantly, the real “victors” are the major US defense contractors and their appendages like the K street neocon lobbying firms. Blumenthal highlighted that these, and the Biden administration, are operating with the bigger vision in mind of turning Ukraine into Europe’s “big Israel”.
By this is meant a permanently militarized ‘Spartan’ wartime state, which is funded and weaponized by Washington in perpetuity, and possesses all the latest cutting edge Western defense tech. But like with the state of things long evident inside Israel (in particular oppression of both Palestinians and Israeli political dissenters), democracy must be eroded at home for this to happen. Still, the defense tech peddlers in the military-industrial complex will ‘win’ no matter how much Ukrainian society and its people are sacrificed.
“In order to defend democracy in Ukraine, democracy must be curtailed at home,” Blumenthal emphasized, drawing lessons from current examples of oppression of free speech in the West, particularly related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
He noted here that his own investigative media outlet, The GrayZone, has had the bulk of its funding frozen by the popular platform GoFundMe. The outlet explained days ago [emphasis ZH]:
By this point, we had raised over $90,000 from over 1100 contributors. The generous contributions from our audience were accompanied by hundreds of messages of effusive support for our factual journalism holding imperial power to account.
And now, Gofundme is holding the donations hostage, refusing to transfer them to us, while failing to inform donors that it has effectively seized their money. The for-profit site has similarly refused to explain its freezing of their donations, issuing nothing more than a vague allusion – “some external concerns” – to pressure from powerful outside forces.
Gofundme’s financial sabotage follows the de facto sanctions imposed by Venmo and Paypal on our managing editor, Wyatt Reed, after he reported on the Ukrainian military’s targeting of civilians from the separatist side of the Donbas region.
Again, this is why Blumenthal could draw on recent personal experience in telling the Ron Paul conference audience that “democracy must be curtailed” in America in order to keep unlimited taxpayer dollars flowing into the Zelensky government’s coffers.
Blumenthal continued… but “now Russia has no incentive to negotiate” given they have the clear military momentum amid a failing Ukraine counteroffensive. The US and UK likely had a window of opportunity in the initial months of the war to more easily open up serious diplomatic peace negotiations, but this was actively thwarted.
“We cannot have peace negotiations while war is being incentivized [by Washington interests] to this point,” he continued while also referencing neocons like Bill Kristol, who has been leading a charge to silence any dissenting views from among Republican nominees and politicians on Ukraine.
“These operatives need constant opportunities” which a permanent proxy war in Europe enables, Blumenthal continued – just like with the constant and historic billions in aid flowing to Israel, which serves to cyclically fuel the accompanying global reach and outsized influence of the Israel lobby.
On this question of whether negotiations are possible even from Kiev’s perspective, Zero Hedge asked Blumenthal what he thinks would happen in the unlikely scenario that Zelensky himself suddenly pursued peace talks with the Russians. Blumenthal responded as follows:
“If Zelensky were to pursue peace talks now before he’s re-elected… due to the kind of social forces that have been unleashed by Maidan, he will face a far-right Nazi insurgency in his own country, and he will become public enemy number one among some of the most violent and militarized forces.
…Which is why he went and met with Andriy Biletsky, the founder of Azov. Zelensky was elected on a platform of peace by 73% of the population because you still had the ethnic Russian population participating in Ukrainian society. They have been completely driven out and the constituency he’s working with is completely different now.”
Below: Last month, Ukrainian President Zelensky held court with one of the most notorious neo-Nazis in modern Ukrainian history, Azov Battalion founder Andriy Biletsky.
Turning Ukraine into “a big Israel” will involve long-term funding to shape and place “America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier not in the Middle East but in Europe,” Blumenthal said.
But as Ukrainians continue to be slaughtered, it won’t be a happy situation for a country to become a “big Israel”, Blumenthal concluded.
Former US Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro (from 2011 to 2017) is helping to push this Ukraine as “big Israel” concept forward, Blumenthal pointed out.
A partial list of key elements of Shapiro’s road map for Ukraine was previously published by The Atlantic Council as follows:
Security first: Every Israeli government promises, first and foremost, that it will deliver security—and knows it will be judged on this pledge. Ordinary citizens, not just politicians, pay close attention to security threats—both from across borders and from internal sources— and much of the public chooses who to elect by that metric alone.
The whole population plays a role: The Israeli model goes further than Zelenskyy’s vision of security services deployed to civilian spaces: Most young Israeli adults serve in the military, and many are employed in security-related professions following their service. A common purpose unites the citizenry, making them ready to endure shared sacrifice. Civilians recognize their responsibility to follow security protocols and contribute to the cause. Some even arm themselves (though under strict supervision) to do so. The widespread mobilization of Ukrainian society in collective defense suggests that the country has this potential. In his comments, Zelenskyy reflected this reality when he said security would “come from the strength of every house, every building, every person.”
Self-defense is the only way: If there’s any single principle that animates Israel’s security doctrine, it’s that Israel will defend itself, by itself—and rely on no other country to fight its battles. The tragedies of Jewish history have embedded that lesson deep in the nation’s soul. Ukraine’s own trauma, forced to fight alone against a larger aggressor, reinforces a similar conclusion: Don’t depend on the guarantees of others.
But maintain active defense partnerships: Self-defense doesn’t mean total isolation. Israel maintains active defense partnerships, chiefly with the United States, which provides generous military assistance, but also with other nations with whom it shares intelligence, technology, and training. While Ukraine will probably not join NATO any time soon, it can deepen security partnerships with Alliance members and receive aid, weaponry, intelligence, and training to bolster its self-defense.
Intelligence dominance: From its earliest days, Israel has invested deeply in its intelligence capabilities to ensure that it has the means to detect and deter its enemies—and, when needed, act proactively to strike them. Ukraine will need to upgrade its intelligence services to compete against Russian capabilities and ensure that it’s prepared to prevent and repulse Russian attacks.
Technology is key: Although it relies on US assistance, Israel also chooses homegrown technology solutions for many of its greatest challenges. Multi-layer rocket and missile defenses, counter-drone systems, and tunnel detection technology are just recent examples. Ukraine—already home to bright technological minds—will know what threats it faces more than any partner; investing in its own solutions will allow it to be most responsive and adapt to new threats.
The US decision to provide cluster bombs to Ukraine means it is assuming the responsibility for the future casualties, senior Russian lawmaker Konstantin Kosachev said.
“The US has essentially done this: a) acknowledged Kiev’s inability to achieve anything without using the most-condemned weapons, b) reiterated its readiness to kill civilians to continue military operations at any cost, c) assumed full responsibility for all future victims of these monstrous weapons,” the lawmaker, who is a deputy speaker of the upper house of the Russian parliament, said on Telegram.
“To be honest, it is no longer of any interest what the so-called civilized community will think about this. That is, a herd of accomplices of all the past crimes of the West, who are frightened by an imminent collapse of the unipolar world,” Kosachev continued.
Senior Russian lawmaker Leonid Slutsky on Friday said the US decision to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine showed Washington is more concerned about stopping Russia from winning than keeping civilians out of harm’s way.
“The White House’s reasoning behind the decision to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine is the height of cynicism and simply monstrous. The war unleashed by the West against Russia will indeed go on until the last Ukrainian,” said the lawmaker, who is the chairman of the Committee on International Affairs at the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament.
He also said, “Washington is more concerned about preventing Russia from winning the Ukrainian conflict than it is about the damage to civilians in Ukraine from cluster bombs and shells, which is imminent but yet only collateral for the US.”
Slutsky went on to say that the issue should be raised at the UN Security Council.
US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on Friday said that the United States had decided to transfer to Ukraine cluster munitions, even as the United Nations opposes the use of them. He also said that Kiev had provided Washington with written guarantees that US cluster munitions will be used with minimal risks to civilians.
Farhan Haq, a deputy spokesperson for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, earlier said that the UN chief supports the Convention on Cluster Munitions and opposes the use of this type of weapons on the battlefield
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova posted to social media a video of former White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying the use of cluster munitions is a war crime.
Zakharova brought up the issue in connection with the US move to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine. The video posted to Telegram shows Psaki hitting out at cluster bombs on February 28, 2022.
“A year and a half later, Jake Sullivan, a national security advisor to US President [Joe] Biden told a news conference at the White House about plans to give Ukraine cluster munitions. Waiting for an appearance by Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre,” Zakharova said on Telegram.
Maria Zakharova, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, giving press briefing in Moscow (February 2022).
The following video, prepared by Al-Manar English Website, shows the US double standards in dealing with a critical issue like the cluster bombs.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki says that the Russian use of cluster bombs is a war crime. Then, the US national security advisor Jake Sullivan justifies the US decision to provide Ukraine with cluster bombs.
The US decided to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine out of despair, but the move won’t affect Russia’s determination to achieve the goals of its special military operation, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov said on Friday.
“Cluster munitions are a desperate gesture. This measure tells the story that the US and its satellites have realized they are powerless. However, they do not want to admit their own failures and the failure of the attempts of Ukrainian forces to conduct an offensive against Russian regions. Hence this latest madness on their part,” he said.
The diplomat said he believes that by raising the stakes in the Ukrainian conflict, Washington is bringing humanity closer to a global conflict.
“The current level of American provocations is indeed off the charts, bringing humanity closer to a new world war. The United States is so obsessed with the idea of defeating Russia that it does not realize the gravity of its actions. They are only increasing the number of victims and prolonging the agony of the Kiev regime,” he went on to say.
The ambassador stated that Washington turned a blind eye to civilian casualties, paid no regard to the concerns of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and shrugged of the objections from its allies.
“The cruelty and cynicism with which Washington has approached the issue of transferring lethal weapons to Kiev is astounding. The administration completely ignored experts, human rights activists, and lawmakers that voiced the theses that the move would be inhumane. It turned a blind eye to civilian casualties. Now there is a risk that the submunitions will be blowing up innocent civilians for many years ahead because of what the US is doing,” Antonov said.
He said he believes that the funneling of Western weapons into Ukraine will not be able to affect Russia’s efforts to achieve the goals of its special military operation, “which aims to eradicate threats to the security of the Russian Federation, including Nazism that has been nurtured in Ukraine.”
Cluster munitions
Cluster bombs can contain hundreds of submunitions. When the bomb is detonated in the air, the submunitions are scattered over an area of tens of square meters. Some of them do not explode immediately and remain on the ground, posing a threat to civilians long after the conflict has ended. The Convention on Cluster Munitions, which was adopted in 2008, has been joined by 111 countries, and another 12 have signed but not yet ratified it.
According to the international human rights organization Human Rights Watch, the proportion of unexploded submunitions is usually significantly higher than stated.
Russian air defenses down another Ukrainian Su-27 jet in Kherson Region
Russian air defense forces shot down a Ukrainian Su-27 fighter in the Donetsk Peoples’ Republic (DPR) and intercepted six HIMARS rockets over the past day during the special military operation in Ukraine, Defense Ministry Spokesman Lieutenant-General Igor Konashenkov reported on Saturday.
“Air defense capabilities shot down a Ukrainian Air Force Su-27 plane near the settlement of Novogrigorovka in the Kherson Region. During the last 24-hour period, they intercepted six rockets of the HIMARS multiple launch rocket system,” the spokesman said.
In addition, Russian air defense systems destroyed 17 Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles in areas near the settlements of Verkhnekamenka (Lugansk People’s Republic), Maryinka, Volodino (in the Donetsk People’s Republic), Ostrikovka, Shirokoye, Mirnoye (in Zaporozhye), Novaya Mayachka, Novaya Kakhovka, Malokakhovka, Ulyanovka (Kherson Region) and Volfino (the Suma Region).
The glee that greeted the news that Yevgeny Prigozhin, Russian oligarch and the titular head of the Wagner Group, had gone rogue might have been unseemly if the American political establishment were capable of shame. It isn’t. That alleged adults would hope for the dissolution of Russia, and the catastrophic social consequences that would follow, requires an ignorance of history that would be heroic if it were consciously chosen. The truism that people don’t know what they don’t know has particular relevance for the US in the current political moment.
The details of the story are reasonably well known by now and won’t be restated here except where relevant. Missing from Western press accounts since Russia launched its SMO (Special Military Operation) is the actual history that led to the conflict. On his way to Rostov-on-Don Prigozhin stepped into this absence with a series of anti-historical claims regarding the start of the war, all while asserting his allegiance to Vladimir Putin. Knowing nothing about the war outside of the talking points handed it by the Biden administration, the American press had a collective wargasm at the sight of a Russian channeling CIA talking points.
As fresh as current events may ‘feel,’ the US has been interfering in the internal affairs of Russia for well over a century. Racist crank and Progressive fascist Woodrow Wilson created the Committee on Public Information to sell WWI to the American people. As the war was winding down, Wilson deployed the American Expeditionary Force to Russia to reverse the Bolshevik Revolution. Ironically (not), the Brits and French also sent Expeditionary Forces toward this same end. The point: most of the anti-Russian West currently supporting the NATO proxy war in Ukraine has been at it since the early twentieth century.
Graph: in this simplified hypothetical based on current differences between US and Russian military spending, the ratio of US to Russian spending in Year 1 is 10:1, while the dollar amount of the difference is $90 ($100 – $10) . By Year 10, the ratio remains the same (10:1), while the cumulative dollar difference has risen to $900. The US spent $1,000 on its military while the Russians spent $100. Applying market logic (value = expenditure), the US has produced ten times as much ordinance and materiel as the Russian have. And yet Russia is a military threat? Source: Urie.
The political posturing around Prigozhin’s tour of Rostov-on-Don has largely been a restatement of the national-security-state-informed views of the regular consumers of American state propaganda. As evidenced by Prigozhin’s now well-censored statements on the internet, he spouted Biden administration talking points regarding the causes of the war (‘unprovoked’), interspersed with claims that the Russian military leadership is more interested in earning medals than with winning wars.
“Just before World War I ended, in 1918, an American force of seven thousand landed at Vladivostok as part of an Allied intervention in Russia and remained until early 1920. Five thousand more troops were landed at Archangel, another Russian port, also as part of an Allied expeditionary force, and stayed for almost a year. The State Department told Congress: “All these operations were to offset effects of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.”” Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
The video of Prigozhin contradicting the historical events that Russian President Vladimir Putin cited as the proximate cause for Russia’s SMO (Special Military Operation) appears to have been disappeared from the internet. In opposition to OSCE maps of Ukrainian forces amassed at the border of Donbas in January 2022 as they shelled ethnic Russian Ukrainians, Prigozhin instead stated that Mr. Putin, whose claims were supported by the maps, was lying. To be clear, the OSCE is an EU institution with no ties to the Russian state.
News that ‘US spy agencies’ had briefed Congress on Prigozhin’s plans well before he stumbled back into Russia indicates foreknowledge. With US President Joe Biden stating that the US played no role in the rebellion, his audience has been reduced to the rapidly shrinking number of citizens of the world who find his views interesting, plausible, or relevant. Recent (alleged) leaks of Pentagon, DoD, and intelligence agency documents by Jack Teixeira put a lie to the Biden administration’s happy talk regarding Ukrainian military prowess.
Teixeira’s leaks revealed a much grimmer view of the war up to the present, as well as raising substantive questions regarding Ukraine’s prospects for the Spring / Summer ‘surge.’ In fact, the surge was halted immediately prior to Prigozhin’s holiday in Russia. Whether this represents abject failure on the part of the Ukrainians, the pause that refreshes, or anticipation of Prigozhin’s rebellion, has not been disclosed.
Described as an attempted ‘coup’ in the American press, Prigozhin subsequently claimed that that wasn’t the motive for his actions. Whether this is true, or he got cold feet when the leading institutions of the Russian state rallied around Vladimir Putin, is a question for the history books. That US intelligence agencies had foreknowledge of Prigozhin’s actions gives them a ‘Maidan’ feel. That most Americans have no knowledge that the US ousted the duly elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in a US-led coup in 2013 – 2014, helps explain American support for the war.
Retired US Colonel Douglas MacGregor, a frequent and insightful commentator on events in Ukraine, is convinced that Prigozhin’s motives had little to do with a coup attempt. MacGregor’s theory is that the Russian military leadership, including Prigozhin, is frustrated with the slow pace of the war, particularly following the apparent implosion of the Ukrainian ‘surge.’ However, foreknowledge by US intelligence agencies, combined with the specifics of Prigozhin’s rant regarding the American starting point for the war, suggests that there is more to the story.
Prigozhin challenged the history of the war in terms that came straight from CIA talking points. The Russian explanation since the winter of 2021 has been 1) the war started with the American-led coup in Ukraine in 2013 – 2014, that in turn led to 2) and eight-year civil war in Ukraine in which 3) tens of thousands of ethnic Russian Ukrainians were slaughtered by the Banderite right (a.k.a. Nazis) supported by the US. Using maps from the OSCE, the Russians concluded that the Ukrainians were about to launch a major offensive against ethnic Russian Ukrainians in Donbass.
The Americans have maintained that the Russian offensive in Ukraine was ‘unprovoked,’ as in bearing no relation to the 2013 – 2014 US led coup there, the subsequent civil war, or the three-plus decades of the US moving NATO troops and weapons up to Russia’s border against repeated requests from the Russians not to do so. This Western anti-history is what Yevgeny Prigozhin was shouting when he announced his move of Wagner Group troops into Russia. Facts that were widely considered true before the SMO was launched are now verboten in the US.
Colonel MacGregor’s view that Prigozhin is frustrated with the restrained pace of the Russian military offensive in Ukraine doesn’t seem a complete explanation of recent events. Firstly, most Americans have no idea that the Russian pace has been restrained. To the extent there has been opposition to the war inside Russia, a substantial portion of it comes from the fact that the Ukrainian military and political leadership still exist in any incarnate form. ‘Shock and awe’ are how the Americans destroy a nation.
Unless Prigozhin is claiming that the OSCE is serving Russia’s war propaganda interests with its maps— a low probability endeavor, then he was giving a pledge of allegiance to the US / NATO / Ukraine war effort with his shouted announcement of the Wagner Group’s move into Russia. This would help explain the foreknowledge of his actions by Western intelligence agencies. It also contradicts US President Joe Biden’s wide-eyed insistence that the US was not in league with Prigozhin.
However, the Russians aren’t the intended audience for Biden’s rambling incoherence. ‘The world,’ meaning the governments that in theory represent the interests of 80% of the world’s population, supported Russia when Prigozhin went on summer holiday, and they still do today. This puts the incoherence of the American liberal conceit that they (liberals) represent the interests of the world’s downtrodden into perspective. The Global South supports Russia, not the US. Why would this be the case if Americans are regarded as liberators abroad?
Parallels between Joe Biden and Woodrow Wilson are mounting. Both are / were liberal technocrats who institutionalized racist and fascist / repressive policies while proclaiming themselves to be the saviors of humanity through ill-advised wars. WWI lit the world on fire. Colonel MacGregor argues, with some justification, that there wouldn’t have been a Bolshevik Revolution without massive Russian losses in WWI. Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin’ brings some of these tensions to light.
“Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.” George Orwell, 1984
So again, concern inside Russia over the slow pace of the war contradicts everything that Americans have been told about it. While recent leaks of DoD and intelligence agency documents suggest that the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian conscripts have been lost to date, CNN and the New York Times have gone full-Orwell. American development economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was invited by the State Department to visit Ukraine during the Maidan ‘uprising,’ explains why and how it was a US sponsored coup here.
More to the point, a large contingent of American liberals have argued for eighteen months that the war in Ukraine should continue until Ukraine is victorious. This argument means one thing if the Ukrainians are winning the war, and quite another if they aren’t. The (alleged) Teixeira leaks reveal 1) that what American officials have been saying publicly about the progress of the war is contradicted by what they say about it in private, and 2) that the official assessment has it that things are going quite poorly for Ukraine.
This puts American supporters of the war in the position of volunteering Ukrainians to die for a war that they (the Americans) don’t understand. And yet there is no accountability. The proverbial ‘you’ had your facts wrong and large numbers of Ukrainian conscripts died as a result. But this is America. ‘You’ get promoted for having your facts wrong. A lot of people died as a result. However, as word from the Global South has it, the Lilliputians are rebelling.
An institutional problem in the US is that the domestic forces that instigated and continue to support the war risk losing power if the public turns against it. With Joe Biden representing the interests of the MIC (Military-Industrial Complex), Wall Street, the technology industry, and US-based oil and gas industry, the fear is that fake anti-war Republicans can pull a Nixon and shift the war, and with it, donor support, from Democrat to Republican hands. Unfortunately for both the self-styled heroes and villains in this scenario, Ukraine is losing the war.
What should put the fear of Buddha, Yahweh, God, into actual Americans, as opposed to the American political class, is the sanguine discourse being used to assert that nuclear wars are winnable. Go back and read the logic of American nuclear arms production from the 1950s – 1970s and you find talk of nuclear weapons being ‘cheap’ to produce relative to the cost of conventional military ordnance. That low stocks of non-nuclear ordnance could create a choice between surrendering or using nuclear weapons when adverse conditions arise suggests that, with NATO stocks running low, the adult children in the Biden administration could roll-the-dice by using nukes.
Moreover, with the MIC running US foreign policy, the temptation to use the war to sell newer ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons to an international clientele by demonstrating them on the battlefield is likely strong. The same Alfred E. Neumanesque mindset that claimed that Americans would be greeted as liberators when they invaded Iraq in 2003 imagines that the Russians aren’t serious about their nuclear red lines. The fake history of the Cuban Missile Crisis that Americans have been fed represents the MIC standard. By 1962 the Americans had installed first-strike nuclear weapons within miles of Russia (USSR) as they pretended to be shocked that the Soviets would do the same.
Likewise, much of the violence attributed to the Bolsheviks following the Bolshevik Revolution was spillover from WWI sweeping Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. WWI lasted from 1914 – 1918, while the Bolshevik Revolution took place in 1917, but wasn’t settled until 1922, when the (Soviet) Civil War ended. Again, the Americans, Brits, and French sent standing armies to reverse the Bolshevik victory in order to install a liberal, Western-friendly, government that would guarantee the property of Western investors in the USSR following the Revolution.
The Americans lost 117,000 troops in WWI while the Russians lost five and one-half million. The extreme brutality of WWII was a product of residual animosities from WWI. The Holocaust, for which German Nazis were blamed, was replicated across Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. To be clear, these other Holocausts were contemporaneous with the Nazi Holocaust, not inspired by it. While pogroms inspired by European anti-Semitism existed prior to the rise of the Nazis, conflation of Bolshevism with Judaism tied WWII to capitalist imperialism.
“Thousands of Nazis—from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich—came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. They had little trouble getting in. With scant scrutiny, many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees,” their pasts easily disguised and their war crimes soon forgotten. But some had help and protection: from the United States government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories.” Eric Lichtblau, The New York Times.
Forgotten today is that many Westerners at the time, particularly amongst the elites, were virulently anti-Semitic. Former New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau, the author of The Nazis Next Door, details the casual anti-Semitism that informed US General George Patton’s worldview here. In contemporaneous political and public policy circles inside the US, the Nazis were viewed more as anti-communist fellow-travelers than the genocidal maniacs they are viewed as today. Once selective history is set to the side, fellow-travelers seems the more plausible interpretation.
The neo-Realist ‘Great Powers’ nonsense that is popular again since the launch of the Russian SMO is a ‘political’ exposition of ideas and events that found their basis in imperial economic competition. Consider: Joe Biden’s explanation of the US interest in Ukraine is first and foremost economic— to prevent Russia from controlling Europe through European dependence on Russian oil and gas. To be clear, Biden has no problem with the idea of economic dependence. His problem is with a Russian role in it.
Consider: economic dependence is an unexplained phenomenon in capitalist economics because it implies coercive power. Before the launch of Russia’s SMO, Russia was selling its oil and gas to Europe at a subsidized price, making it more attractive to European industry, while consigning said industries to the vagaries of Russian national interests. Paying a market price for oil and gas would raise costs for European industry, either crimping profits or making European products more expensive on world markets (also crimping profits). This gave the Russian state coercive power over European states through ‘their’ industries.
Recent US Presidents understood this, hence the unity of Donald Trump and Joe Biden acting to prevent the Russians from supplying Europe with Russian oil and gas. But what happened to the ‘freedom’ to purchase goods and services, including Russian oil and gas, from whomever one cares to? In American liberal logic, Ukraine has the ‘right’ to associate with NATO if it cares to, just like the Germans and French have (had) the ‘right’ to buy discounted oil and gas from Russia. The ‘fascist’ response was to blow up the pipeline— a.k.a. Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II.
While this isn’t the place for a full-blown exposition of the hypocrisies and paradoxes of capitalism, what the US is doing abroad isn’t capitalism as it is explained by its theoreticians. But it is capitalism as explained by Marxists. Capitalist imperialism is a corporate-state amalgam that exists to send state resources abroad for the benefit of nominally capitalist enterprises at home. An alternative name for this capitalist imperialism is fascism. The political-theoretical difference between state-capitalism and fascism lies in who it is that controls the state.
This Marxist view of capitalism placed the Germans as imperial competitors of the US in both World Wars. This is quite different from the current moral view of the Nazis as reprehensible human beings. From Eric Lichtblau’s reporting (above), moral clarity regarding the Nazis emerged for the Americans in proportion to the number of anti-Semitic Americans from the WWII era who have died off. That Joe Biden represents the moral vanguard of the American liberal class would be ironic if it weren’t so pathetic.
With the most expensive military in the world by a factor of ten, one might imagine that the US would be well-supplied with armaments. According to Colonel MacGregor, this isn’t the case. MacGregor laid out some fair portion of the path from an insufficient supply of conventional weapons to the use of nuclear weapons by the Americans. The obvious question of where the world’s most expensive military is spending its money seems relevant here. While speculation can go far in developing an explanation, the threat of nuclear annihilation is the more pressing result.
With the Americans having refused to implement multiple peace agreements that have been signed between the Ukrainians and the Russians, the NATO proxy war in Ukraine is now an American war. And while the American liberals who support the war deserve whatever consequences might come their way, the rest of the world doesn’t. End the war now.
Rob Urie is an artist and political economist. His book Zen Economics is published by CounterPunch Books.
The question is inevitable: what’s the point of this phone call? Very simple: just business.
The Beijing leadership is fully aware the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is the un-dissociable double of an American direct war against the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Until recently, and since 2019, Beijing was the top trade partner for Kiev (14.4% of imports, 15.3% of exports). China essentially exported machinery, equipment, cars and chemical products, importing food products, metals and also some machinery.
Very few in the West know that Ukraine joined BRI way back in 2014, and a BRI trade and investment center was operating in Kiev since 2018. BRI projects include a 2017 drive to build the fourth line of the Kiev metro system as well as 4G installed by Huawei. Everything is stalled since 2022.
Noble Agri, a subsidiary of COFCO (China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation), invested in a sunflower seed processing complex in Mariupol and the recently built Mykolaiv grain port terminal. The next step will necessarily feature cooperation between Donbass authorities and the Chinese when it comes to rebuilding their assets that may have been damaged during the war.
Beijing also tried to become heavily involved in the Ukraine defense sector and even buy Motor Sich; that was blocked by Kiev.
Watch that neon
So what we have in Ukraine, from the Chinese point of view, is a trade/investment cocktail of BRI, railways, military supplies, 4G and construction jobs. And then, the key vector: neon.
Roughly half of neon used in the production of semiconductors was supplied, until recently, by two Ukrainian companies; Ingas in Mariupol, and Cryoin, in Odessa. There’s no business going on since the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO). That directly affects the Chinese production of semiconductors. Bets can be made that the Hegemon is not exactly losing sleep over this predicament.
Ukraine does represent value for China as a BRI crossroads. The war is interrupting not only business but, in the bigger picture, one of the trade and connectivity corridors linking Western China to Eastern Europe. BRI conditions all key decisions in Beijing – as it is the overarching concept of Chinese foreign policy way into mid-century.
And that explains Xi’s phone call, debunking any NATOstan nonsense on China finally paying attention to the warmongering actor.
As relevant as BRI is the overarching bilateral relationship dictating Beijing’s geopolitics: the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership.
So let’s transition to the meeting of Defense Ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) earlier this week in Delhi.
The key meeting in India was between Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and his Chinese colleague Li Shangfu. Li was recently in Moscow, and was received by Putin in person for a special conversation. This time he invited Shoigu to visit Beijing, and that was promptly accepted.
Needless to add that every single player in the SCO and beyond, including nations that are for the moment just observers or dialogue partners as well as others itching to become full members, such as Saudi Arabia, paid very close attention to the Shoigu-Shangfu camaraderie.
When it comes to the profoundly strategic Central Asian “stans”, that represents the six feet under treatment for the Hegemon wishful thinking of using them in a Divide and Rule scheme pitting Russia against China.
Shoigu-Shangfu also sent a subtle message to SCO members India and Pakistan – stop bickering and in the case of Delhi, hedging your bets – and to full member (in 2023) Iran and near future member Saudi Arabia: here’s where’s it at, this the table that matters.
All of the above also points to the increasing interconnection between BRI and SCO, both under Russia-China leadership.
BRICS is essentially an economic club – complete with its own bank, the NDB – and focused on trade. It’s mostly about soft power. The SCO is focused on security. It’s about hard power. Together, these are the two key organizations that will be paving the multilateral way.
As for what will be left of Ukraine, it is already being bought by Western mega-players such as BlackRock, Cargill and Monsanto. Yet Beijing certainly does not count on being left high and dry. Stranger things have happened than a future rump Ukraine positioned as a functioning trade and connectivity BRI partner.
The single Iranian-Saudi handshake buried trillions of dollars of western divide-and-rule investments across West Asia, and has global leaders rushing to Beijing for global solutions.
Photo Credit: The Cradle
Pepe Escobar is a columnist at The Cradle, editor-at-large at Asia Times and an independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia. Since the mid-1980s he has lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore and Bangkok. He is the author of countless books; his latest one is Raging Twenties.
The idea that History has an endpoint, as promoted by clueless neoconservatives in the unipolar 1990s, is flawed, as it is in an endless process of renewal. The recent official meeting between Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud and Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian in Beijing marks a territory that was previously deemed unthinkable and which has undoubtedly caused grief for the War Inc. machine.
This single handshake signifies the burial of trillions of dollars that were spent on dividing and ruling West Asia for over four decades. Additionally, the Global War on Terror (GWOT), the fabricated reality of the new millennium, featured as prime collateral damage in Beijing.
Beijing’s optics as the capital of peace have been imprinted throughout the Global South, as evidenced by a subsequent sideshow where a couple of European leaders, a president, and a Eurocrat, arrived as supplicants to Xi Jinping, asking him to join the NATO line on the war in Ukraine. They were politely dismissed.
Still, the optics were sealed: Beijing had presented a 12-point peace plan for Ukraine that was branded “irrational” by the Washington beltway neocons. The Europeans – hostages of a proxy war imposed by Washington – at least understood that anyone remotely interested in peace needs to go through the ritual of bowing to the new boss in Beijing.
The irrelevance of the JCPOA
Tehran-Riyadh relations, of course, will have a long, rocky way ahead – from activating previous cooperation deals signed in 1998 and 2001 to respecting, in practice, their mutual sovereignty and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.
Everything is far from solved – from the Saudi-led war on Yemen to the frontal clash of Persian Gulf Arab monarchies with Hezbollah and other resistance movements in the Levant. Yet that handshake is the first step leading, for instance, to the Saudi foreign minister’s upcoming trip to Damascus to formally invite President Bashar al-Assad to the Arab League summit in Riyadh next month.
It’s crucial to stress that this Chinese diplomatic coup started way back with Moscow brokering negotiations in Baghdad and Oman; that was a natural development of Russia stepping in to help Iran save Syria from a crossover NATO-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) coalition of vultures.
Then the baton was passed to Beijing, in total diplomatic sync. The drive to permanently bury GWOT and the myriad, nasty ramifications of the US war of terror was an essential part of the calculation; but even more pressing was the necessity to demonstrate how the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or Iran nuclear deal, had become irrelevant.
Both Russia and China have experienced, inside and out, how the US always manages to torpedo a return to the JCPOA, as it was conceived and signed in 2015. Their task became to convince Riyadh and GCC states that Tehran has no interest in weaponizing nuclear power – and will remain a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Then it was up to Chinese diplomatic finesse to make it quite clear that the Persian Gulf monarchies’ fear of revolutionary Shi’ism is now as counter-productive as Tehran’s dread of being harassed and/or encircled by Salafi-jihadis. It’s as if Beijing had coined a motto: drop these hazy ideologies, and let’s do business.
And business it is, and will be: better yet, mediated by Beijing and implicitly guaranteed by both nuclear superpowers Russia and China.
Hop on the de-dollarization train
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) may exhibit some Soprano-like traits, but he’s no fool: he instantly saw how this Chinese offer morphed beautifully into his domestic modernization plans. A Gulf source in Moscow, familiar with MbS’ rise and consolidation of power, details the crown prince’s drive to appeal to the younger Saudi generation who idolize him. Let girls drive their SUVs, go dancing, let their hair down, work hard, and be part of the “new” Saudi Arabia of Vision 2030: a global tourism and services hub, a sort of Dubai on steroids.
And, crucially, this will also be a Eurasia-integrated Saudi Arabia; future, inevitable member of both the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and BRICS+ – just like Iran, which will also be sitting at the same communal tables.
From Beijing’s point of view, this is all about its ambitious, multi-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). A key BRI connectivity corridor runs from Central Asia to Iran and then beyond, to the Caucasus and/or Turkey. Another one – in search of investment opportunities – runs through the Arabian Sea, the Sea of Oman, and the Persian Gulf, part of the Maritime Silk Road.
Beijing wants to develop BRI projects in both corridors: call it “peaceful modernization” applied to sustainable development. The Chinese always remember how the Ancient Silk Roads plied Persia and parts of Arabia: in this case, we have History Repeating Itself.
A geopolitical revolution
And then comes the Holy Grail: energy. Iran is a prime gas supplier to China, a matter of national security, inextricably linked to their $400 billion-plus strategic partnership deal. And Saudi Arabia is a prime oil supplier. Closer Sino-Saudi relations and interaction in key multipolar organizations such as the SCO and BRICS+ advance the fateful day when the petroyuan will be definitely enshrined.
China and the UAE have already clinched their first gas deal in yuan. The high-speed de-dollarization train has already left the station. ASEAN is already actively discussing how to bypass the dollar to privilege settlements in local currencies – something unthinkable even a few months ago. The US dollar has already been thrown into a death by a thousand cuts spiral.
And that will be the day when the game reaches a whole new unpredictable level.
The destructive agenda of the neocon leaders in charge of US foreign policy should never be underestimated. They exploited the 9/11 “new Pearl Harbor” pretext to launch a crusade against the lands of Islam in 2001, followed by a NATO proxy war against Russia in 2014. Their ultimate ambition is to wage war against China before 2025.
However, they are now facing a swift geopolitical and geoeconomic revolt of the World’s Heartland – from Russia and China to West Asia, and extrapolating to South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa and selected latitudes in Latin America.
The turning point came on 26 February, 2022, when Washington’s neocons – in a glaring display of their shallow intellects – decided to freeze and/or steal the reserves of the only nation on the planet equipped with all the commodities that really matter, and with the necessary nous to unleash a momentous shift to a monetary system not anchored in fiat money.
That was the fateful day when the cabal, identified by journalist Seymour Hersh as responsible for blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines, actually blew the whistle for the high-speed de-dollarization train to leave the station, led by Russia, China, and now – welcome on board – Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
The West has unleashed World War III, which is being waged by the Nazis in Ukraine in the format of a proxy war and by the hands of terrorists in Syria, but modern weapons, especially nuclear weapons, do not allow the confrontation to escalate into the traditional format of world war, Syrian President Bashar Assad told Sputnik.
“I believe that World War III is underway, but it differs in its form,” the Syrian president said. “What I mean is that world wars used to be conventional in the past. Armies of several states were fighting against each other.”
“This is also true when it comes to the current situation, but because of modern weaponry, especially nuclear, it is different from conventional war. That is why wars are now moving toward proxy wars,” he added.
Assad noted that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is now waging a war on behalf of the West, using “its army of Nazis.”
“The same goes for terrorists, they are the armies operating on behalf of the West in Syria and other regions,” the president continued.
Switching gears to the matter of the 2022 referendums held in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions and the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, the Syrian president told Sputnik that Damascus fully recognizes the new borders of Russia.
“Of course. I am saying that these are Russian territories,” Assad said when asked whether Damascus recognizes Russia’s new borders. “And even if the war had not happened, this is historically Russian land.”
The president recalled that Syria recognized the regions before they officially became part of Russia.
“This issue has been clear to us from the very beginning, and we will not hesitate in our position. Syria’s position is clear and firm, at the same time. We are convinced regarding this matter not only for the sake of friendship with Russia but also because these territories are Russia’s territories,” Assad said.
He added that Syria’s position is based on historical facts.
“They [the regions] were handed over to Ukraine probably around 100 years ago, I believe, [it happened] under Lenin. But Russian people live there, and facts on the ground show that this is Russia’s land. We are convinced in this position,” the president said.
The people of Syria support Russia in conducting the special military operation in Ukraine, Assad emphasized.
“Certainly, the Syrian people are very enthusiastic about supporting Russia for a number of reasons. On the one hand, it is solidarity since the Russian Federation has supported the Syrians in the fight against terrorism; on the other hand, there is a more global view of this war … When the Russian Federation wins this war, as most Syrians wish, a new world, a safer and more peaceful world will emerge. This is the real perception of the Syrians of this war,” Assad said.
On Russian Military Bases in Syria
Russian military bases in Syria should have the most advanced weapons to ensure effective deterrence of threats, President Assad also said.
“The difference is in the quality of weapons, but the principle is the same. Of course, if you are to build [military] bases, the goal is not to make these bases weak militarily. The bases are supposed to be capable of having a deterrent or counterbalancing effect, these must be armed with the best weapons, it is natural and logical. Whether it would be hypersonic missiles or any other more advanced weapons now and, in the future, the principle is, of course, the same as I said,” Assad said when asked about the possible deployment of hypersonic missiles in Syria.
The Syrian President believes that Russia’s military presence in Syria should not be temporary or be related to fighting terrorism only.
“As for the political aspect, the issue of military bases should not be linked to the issue of combating terrorism. The fight against terrorism is today’s topic, but it is temporary. The Russian military presence in any country should not be based on anything temporary. We are talking about international balance, and the presence of Russia in Syria has a meaning related to the balance of power in the world as a country located on the Mediterranean Sea,” the president said.
“Superpowers today cannot defend themselves or play their role by staying within their own borders,” Assad said, adding that “they must go beyond them through regional allies around the world or through bases.”
On Economic Cooperation With Russia
Russia and Syria will sign an agreement on economic cooperation, which will cover several projects that will be evaluated and approved individually, in the coming weeks, the Syrian president added.
“Projects are being considered now, and the agreement will be signed later, in a few weeks, but this item [on the agenda] was left for consideration by each company and each project. Each project will be evaluated individually later. This is a part of the mechanism to monitor the projects and their success,” Assad said.
The president added that a joint Syrian-Russian commission has been discussing a number of projects during talks in Moscow over the past several days.
“Once the agreement is signed, these projects will be announced, after which all interested companies will be able to apply to participate in these projects,” the president said, adding that the actual cost of the projects will be known at that time.
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President al-Assad’s interview with the Russian agency Sputnik
The national flags of China and Iran fly in Tiananmen Square during Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi’s visit to Beijing, China, February 14, 2023. (Photo by Reuters)
The key takeaway of President Ebrahim Raeisi’s state visit to Beijing goes way beyond the signing of 20 bilateral cooperation agreements.
This is a crucial inflexion point in an absorbing, complex, decades-long, ongoing historical process: Eurasia integration.
Little wonder that President Raeisi, welcomed by a standing ovation at Peking University before receiving an honorary academic title, stressed “a new world order is forming and taking the place of the older one”, characterized by “real multilateralism, maximum synergy, solidarity and dissociation from unilateralisms”.
And the epicenter of the new world order, he asserted, is Asia.
It was quite heartening to see the Iranian president eulogizing the Ancient Silk Road, not only in terms of trade but also as a “cultural bond” and “connecting different societies together throughout history”.
Raeisi could have been talking about Sassanid Persia, whose empire ranged from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, and was the great intermediary Silk Road trading power for centuries between China and Europe.
It’s as if he was corroborating Chinese President Xi Jinping’s famed notion of “people to people exchanges” applied to the New Silk Roads.
And then President Raeisi jump cut to the inescapable historical connection: he addressed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), of which Iran is a key partner.
All that spells out Iran’s full reconnection with Asia – after those arguably wasted years of trying an entente cordiale with the collective West. That was symbolized by the fate of the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal: negotiated, unilaterally buried and then, last year, all but condemned all over gain.
A case can be made that after the Islamic Revolution 44 years ago, a budding “pivot to the East” always lurked behind the official government strategy of “Neither East nor West”.
Starting in the 1990s that happened to progressively enter in full synch with China’s official “Open Door” policy.
After the start of the millennium, Beijing and Tehran have been getting even deeper in synch. BRI, the major geopolitical and geoeconomic breakthrough, was proposed in 2013, in Central Asia and Southeast Asia.
Then, in 2016, President Xi visited Iran, in West Asia, leading to the signing of several memoranda of understanding (MOU), and recently the wide-ranging 25-year comprehensive strategic agreement – consolidating Iran as a key BRI actor.
Accelerating all key vectors
In practice, Raeisi’s visit to Beijing was framed to accelerate all manner of vectors in Iran-China economic cooperation – from crucial investments in the energy sector (oil, gas, petrochemical industry, pipelines) to banking, with Beijing engaged in advancing modernizing reforms in Iran’s banking sector and Chinese banks opening branches across Iran.
Chinese companies may be about to enter the emerging Iranian commercial and private real estate markets, and will be investing in advanced technology, robotics and AI across the industrial spectrum.
Sophisticated strategies to bypass harsh, unilateral US sanctions will be a major focus every step of the way in Iran-China relations. Barter is certainly part of the picture when it comes to trading Iranian oil/gas contracts for Chinese industrial and infrastructure deals.
It’s quite possible that Iran’s sovereign wealth fund – the National Development Fund of Iran – with holdings at estimated $90 billion, may be able to finance strategic industrial and infrastructure projects.
Other international financial partners may come in the form of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank (AIIB) and the NDB – the BRICS bank, as soon as Iran is accepted as a member of BRICS+: that may be decided this coming August at the summit in South Africa.
The heart of the matter of the strategic partnership is energy. The China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) pulled out of a deal to develop Phase 11 of Iran’s South Pars gas field, adjacent to Qatar’s section.
Yet CNPC can always come back for other projects. Phase 11 is currently being developed by the Iranian energy company Petropars.
Energy deals – oil, gas, petrochemical industry, renewables – will boom across what I dubbed Pipelineistan in the early 2000s.
Chinese companies will certainly be part of new oil and gas pipelines connecting to the existing Iranian pipeline networks and configuring new pipeline corridors.
Already established Pipelineistan includes the Central Asia-China pipeline, which connects to China’s West-East pipeline grid, nearly 7,000 km from Turkmenistan to the eastern China seaboard; and the Tabriz-Ankara pipeline (2,577 km, from northwest Iran to the Turkish capital).
Then there’s one of the great sagas of Pipelineistan: the IP (Iran-Pakistan) gas pipeline, previously known as the Peace Pipeline, from South Pars to Karachi.
The Americans did everything in the book – and off the books – to stall it, delay it or even kill it. But IP refused to die; and the China-Iran strategic partnership could finally make it happen.
A new geostrategic architecture
Arguably, the central node of the China-Iran strategic partnership is the configuration of a complex geostrategic economic architecture: connecting the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the flagship of BRI, to a two-pronged Iran-centered corridor.
This will take the form of a China-Afghanistan-Iran corridor and a China-Central Asia-Iran corridor, thus forming what we may call a geostrategic China-Iran Economic Corridor.
Beijing and Tehran, now on overdrive and with no time to lose, may face all manner of challenges – and threats – from the Hegemon; but their 25-year strategic deal does honor historically powerful trading/ merchant civilizations now equipped with substantial manufacturing/ industrial bases and with a serious tradition in advanced scientific innovation.
The serious possibility of China-Iran finally configuring what will be a brand new, expanded strategic economic space, from East Asia to West Asia, central to 21st century multipolarity, is a geopolitical tour de force.
Not only that will completely nullify the US sanction obsession; it will direct Iran’s next stages of much needed economic development to the East, and it will boost the whole geoeconomic space from China to Iran and everyone in between.
This whole process – already happening – is in many aspects a direct consequence of the Empire’s “until the last Ukrainian” proxy war against Russia.
Ukraine as cannon fodder is rooted in Mackinder’s heartland theory: world control belongs to the nation that controls the Eurasian land mass.
This was behind World War I, where Germany knocking out Russia created fear among the Anglo-Saxons that should Germany knock out France it would control the Eurasian land mass.
WWII was conceived against Germany and Japan forming an axis to control Europe, Russia and China.
The present, potential WWIII was conceived by the Hegemon to break a friendly alliance between Germany, Russia and China – with Iran as a privileged West Asia partner.
Everything we are witnessing at this stage spells out the US trying to break up Eurasia integration.
So it’s no wonder that the three top existential “threats” to the American oligarchy which dictates the “rules-based international order” are The Three Sovereigns: China, Russia and Iran.
Does that matter? Not really. We have just seen that while the dogs (of war) bark, the Iran-China strategic caravan rolls on.
Pepe Escobar is a Eurasia-wide geopolitical analyst and author. His latest book is Raging Twenties.
(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:
Except, of course, in the parallel bubble of U.S. mainstream media, which has totally ignored it, or in a few select cases, decided to shoot the messenger, dismissing Hersh as a “discredited” journalist, a “blogger”, and a “conspiracy theorist”.
I have offered an initial approach, focused on the plentiful merits of a seemingly thorough report, but also noting some serious inconsistencies.
Old school Moscow-based foreign correspondent John Helmer has gone even further; and what he uncovered may be as incandescent as Sy Hersh’s own narrative.
The heart of the matter in Hersh’s report concerns attribution of responsibility for a de facto industrial terror attack. Surprisingly, no CIA; that falls straight on the toxic planning trio of Sullivan, Blinken and Nuland – neoliberal-cons part of the “Biden” combo. And the final green light comes from the Ultimate Decider: the senile, teleprompt-reading President himself. The Norwegians feature as minor helpers.
That poses the first serious problem: nowhere in his narrative Hersh refers to MI6, the Poles (government, Navy), the Danes, and even the German government.
There’s a mention that on January 2022, “after some wobbling”, Chancellor Scholz “was now firmly on the American team”. Well, by now the plan had been under discussion, according to Hersh’s source, for at least a few months. That also means that Scholz remained “on the American team” all the way to the terror attack, on September 2022.
As for the Brits, the Poles and all NATO games being played off Bornhom Island more than a year before the attack, that had been extensively reported by Russian media – from Kommersant to RIA Novosti.
The Special Military Operation (SMO) was launched on February 24, almost a year ago. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 blow up happened on September 26. Hersh assures there were “more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to ‘sabotage the pipelines’”.
So that confirms that the terror attack planning preceded, by months, not only the SMO but, crucially, the letters sent by Moscow to Washington on December 2022, requesting a serious discussion on “indivisibility of security” involving NATO, Russia and the post-Soviet space. The request was met by a dismissive American non-response response.
While he was writing the story of a terror response to a serious geopolitical issue, it does raise eyebrows that a first-rate pro like Hersh does not even bother to examine the complex geopolitical background.
In a nutshell: the ultimate Mackinderian anathema for the U.S. ruling classes – and that’s bipartisan – is a Germany-Russia alliance, extended to China: that would mean the U.S. expelled from Eurasia, and that conditions everything any American government thinks and does in terms of NATO and Russia.
Hersh should also have noticed that the timing of the preparation to “sabotage the pipelines” completely blows apart the official United States government narrative, according to which this a collective West effort to help Ukraine against “unprovoked Russian aggression”.
That elusive source
The narrative leaves no doubt that Hersh’s source – if not the journalist himself – supports what is considered a lawful U.S. policy: to fight Russia’s “threat to Western dominance [in Europe].”
So what seems a U.S. Navy covert op, according to the narrative, may have been misguided not because of serious geopolitical reasons; but because the attack planning intentionally evaded U.S. law “requiring Congress to be informed”. That’s an extremely parochial interpretation of international relations. Or, to be blunt: that’s an apology of Exceptionalism.
And that brings us to what may be the Rosebud in this Orson Welles-worthy saga. Hersh refers to a “secure room on the top floor of the Old Executive Office Building …that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board”.
This was supposedly the place where the terror attack planning was being discussed.
Hersh’s source, according to his narrative, asserts, without a shadow of a doubt, that “Russian troops had been steadily and ominously building up on the borders of Ukraine” and that “alarm was growing in Washington”. It’s beggars belief that this supposedly well informed lot didn’t know about the massing of NATO-led Ukrainian troops across the line of contact, getting ready to launch a blitzkrieg against Donbass.
What everyone already knew by then – as the record shows even on YouTube – is that the combo behind “Biden” were dead set on terminating the Nord Streams by whatever means necessary. After the start of the SMO, the only thing missing was to find a mechanism for plausible deniability.
For all its meticulous reporting, the inescapable feeling remains that what Hersh’s narrative indicts is the Biden combo terror gambit, and never the overall U.S. plan to provoke Russia into a proxy war with NATO using Ukraine as cannon fodder.
Moreover, Hersh’s source may be eminently flawed. He – or she – said, according to Hersh, that Russia “failed to respond” to the pipeline terror attack because “maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did”.
In itself, this may prove that the source was not even a member of PIAB, and did not receive the classified PIAB report assessing Putin’s crucial speech of September 30, which identifies the “responsible” party. If that’s the case, the source is just connected (italics mine) to some PIAB member; was not invited to the months-long situation-room planning; and certainly is not aware of the finer details of this administration’s war in Ukraine.
Considering Sy Hersh’s stellar track record in investigative journalism, it would be quite refreshing for him to elucidate these inconsistencies. That would get rid of the fog of rumors depicting the report as a mere limited hangout.
Considering there are several “silos” of intel within the U.S. oligarchy, with their corresponding apparatuses, and Hersh has cultivated his contacts among nearly all of them for decades, there’s no question the allegedly privileged information on the Nord Stream saga came from a very precise address – with a very precise agenda.
So we should see who the story really indicts: certainly the Straussian neo-con/neoliberal-con combo behind “Biden”, and the wobbly President himself. As I pointed out in my initial analysis, the CIA gets away with flying colors.
And we should not forget that the Big Narrative is changing fast: the RAND report, the looming NATO humiliation in Ukraine, Balloon Hysteria, UFO psy op. The real “threat” is – who else – China. What’s left for all of us is to swim in a swamp crammed with derelict patsies, dodgy cover stories and intel debris. Knowing that those who really run the show never show their hand.
The war in Ukraine is not just about Ukraine and Russia with the U.S. and NATO acting as seemingly benevolent supporters of Ukraine, as the Western media portray.
Former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages
Finian Cunningham
The war in Ukraine is not just about Ukraine and Russia with the U.S. and NATO acting as seemingly benevolent supporters of Ukraine, as the Western media portray.
The United States and its NATO allies are deeply involved in the conflict. The military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 – after 20 years of futile occupation – was a calculated “reorganization of firepower” against Russia, says Pepe Escobar.
Ukraine is merely a proxy and ultimately cannon fodder for American imperial planners.
This war is part of a bigger geopolitical confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, China and other nations that are pushing for the emergence of a multipolar world. That is a multipolar world no longer under the hegemony of U.S.-dominated Western capitalism.
Pepe Escobar assesses the bigger picture and outlines how the U.S. imperial state is in “panic mode” to shore up the collapsing American-controlled global capitalist system, and in particular the privileged position of the U.S. dollar.
Going to war with Russia presently and in the longer term against China is part of the desperate dynamic to prolong the dominant position of Washington that was established after the Second World War. That postwar imperial order – euphemistically called the “rules-based order” – is increasingly falling into disrepute from unbridled imperialist wars and abuse of financial controls.
The vast majority of the planet wants liberation from the U.S./Western warmongering system that underpins capitalist exploitation that only enriches a global elite. The war in Ukraine is but the manifestation of the breakdown in U.S. global power and the desperation to preserve the systematic inequality that defines capitalism.
This year is fraught with extreme danger, says Pepe Escobar. But if the psychotic U.S. deep-state planners can be contained by Russia and China without an all-out catastrophic war erupting then there is a chance of a more hopeful, peaceful and just world order emerging.
Does US Secretary of State Antony Blinken think a Washington Post op-ed will move Russian Armed Forces Chief Valery Gerasimov to postpone his planned military offensive on Ukraine?
Realizing NATO’s war with Russia will likely end unfavorably, the US is test-driving an exit offer. But why should Moscow take indirect proposals seriously, especially on the eve of its new military advance and while it is in the winning seat?
Those behind the Throne are never more dangerous than when they have their backs against the wall.
Their power is slipping away, fast: Militarily, via NATO’s progressive humiliation in Ukraine; Financially, sooner rather than later, most of the Global South will want nothing to do with the currency of a bankrupt rogue giant; Politically, the global majority is taking decisive steps to stop obeying a rapacious, discredited, de facto minority.
So now those behind the Throne are plotting to at least try to stall the incoming disaster on the military front.
As confirmed by a high-level US establishment source, a new directive on NATO vs. Russia in Ukraine was relayed to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Blinken, in terms of actual power, is nothing but a messenger boy for the Straussian neocons and neoliberals who actually run US foreign policy.
The secretary of state was instructed to relay the new directive – a sort of message to the Kremlin – via mainstream print media, which was promptly published by the Washington Post.
In the elite US mainstream media division of labor, the New York Times is very close to the State Department. and the Washington Post to the CIA. In this case though the directive was too important, and needed to be relayed by the paper of record in the imperial capital. It was published as an Op-Ed (behind paywall).
The novelty here is that for the first time since the start of Russia’s February 2022 Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, the Americans are actually proposing a variation of the “offer you can’t refuse” classic, including some concessions which may satisfy Russia’s security imperatives.
Crucially, the US offer totally bypasses Kiev, once again certifying that this is a war against Russia conducted by Empire and its NATO minions – with the Ukrainians as mere expandable proxies.
‘Please don’t go on the offensive’
The Washington Post’s old school Moscow-based correspondent John Helmer has provided an important service, offering the full text of Blinken’s offer, of course extensively edited to include fantasist notions such as “US weapons help pulverize Putin’s invasion force” and a cringe-worthy explanation: “In other words, Russia should not be ready to rest, regroup and attack.”
The message from Washington may, at first glance, give the impression that the US would admit Russian control over Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhye, and Kherson – “the land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia” – as a fait accompli.
Ukraine would have a demilitarized status, and the deployment of HIMARS missiles and Leopard and Abrams tanks would be confined to western Ukraine, kept as a “deterrent against further Russian attacks.”
What may have been offered, in quite hazy terms, is in fact a partition of Ukraine, demilitarized zone included, in exchange for the Russian General Staff cancelling its yet-unknown 2023 offensive, which may be as devastating as cutting off Kiev’s access to the Black Sea and/or cutting off the supply of NATO weapons across the Polish border.
The US offer defines itself as the path towards a “just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine’s territorial integrity.” Well, not really. It just won’t be a rump Ukraine, and Kiev might even retain those western lands that Poland is dying to gobble up.
The possibility of a direct Washington-Moscow deal on “an eventual postwar military balance” is also evoked, including no Ukraine membership of NATO. As for Ukraine itself, the Americans seem to believe it will be a “strong, non-corrupt economy with membership in the European Union.”
Whatever remains of value in Ukraine has already been swallowed not only by its monumentally corrupt oligarchy, but most of all, investors and speculators of the BlackRock variety. Assorted corporate vultures simply cannot afford to lose Ukraine’s grain export ports, as well as the trade deal terms agreed with the EU before the war. And they’re terrified that the Russian offensive may capture Odessa, the major seaport and transportation hub on the Black Sea – which would leave Ukraine landlocked.
There’s no evidence whatsoever that Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the entire Russian Security Council – including its Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev – have reason to believe anything coming from the US establishment, especially via mere minions such as Blinken and the Washington Post. After all the stavka – a moniker for the high command of the Russian armed forces – regard the Americans as “non-agreement capable,” even when an offer is in writing.
This walks and talks like a desperate US gambit to stall and present some carrots to Moscow in the hope of delaying or even cancelling the planned offensive of the next few months.
Even old school, dissident Washington operatives – not beholden to the Straussian neocon galaxy – bet that the gambit will be a nothing burger: in classic “strategic ambiguity” mode, the Russians will continue on their stated drive of demilitarization, denazification and de-electrification, and will “stop” anytime and anywhere they see fit east of the Dnieper. Or beyond.
What the Deep State really wants
Washington’s ambitions in this essentially NATO vs. Russia war go well beyond Ukraine. And we’re not even talking about preventing a Russia-China-Germany Eurasian union or a peer competitor nightmare; let’s stick with prosaic issues on the Ukrainian battleground.
The key “recommendations” – military, economic, political, diplomatic – were detailed in an Atlantic Council strategy paper late last year.
And in another one, under “War scenario 1: The war continues in its current tempo,” we find the Straussian neocon policy fully spelled out.
It’s all here: from “marshaling support and military-assistance transfers to Kyiv sufficient to enable it to win” to “increase the lethality of military assistance transferred to include fighter aircraft that would enable Ukraine to control its airspace and attack Russian forces therein; and missile technology with range sufficient to reach into Russian territory.”
From training the Ukrainian military “to use Western weapons, electronic warfare, and offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, and to seamlessly integrate new recruits in the service” to buttressing “defenses on the front lines, near the Donbass region,” including “combat training focusing on irregular warfare.”
Added to “imposing secondary sanctions on all entities doing business with the Kremlin,” we reach of course the Mother of All Plunders: “Confiscate the $300 billion that the Russian state holds in overseas accounts in the United States and EU and use seized monies to fund reconstruction.”
The reorganization of the SMO, with Putin, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, and General Armageddon in their new, enhanced roles is derailing all these elaborate plans.
The Straussians are now in deep panic. Even Blinken’s number two, Russophobic warmonger Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland, has admitted to the US Senate there will be no Abrams tanks on the battlefield before Spring (realistically, only in 2024). She also promised to “ease sanctions” if Moscow “returns to negotiations.” Those negotiations were scotched by the Americans themselves in Istanbul in the Spring of 2022.
Nuland also called the Russians to “withdraw their troops.” Well, that at least offers some comic relief compared with the panic oozing from Blinken’s “offer you can’t refuse.” Stay tuned for Russia’s non-response response.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
The leader of Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement has severely censured the desecration of the Holy Quran by a far-right Swedish-Danish politician in Stockholm and Copenhagen, terming the sacrilegious move as a declaration of war against the Muslim world.
Addressing a ceremony in the Yemeni capital city of Sanaa on Friday evening, Sayyed Abdul-Malik al-Houthi stated that the spread of Islam in European and Western societies has been a source of constant worry for enemies of Islam, and prompted anti-Islam individuals to set fire to the copies of the Muslim holy book in a show of desperation.
He stressed that the burning of the Holy Quran in European countries falls within the framework of their hostile war on human societies, and their efforts to distance societies from Quran, and create animosity towards Islam.
On Friday, Swedish-Danish right-wing extremist Rasmus Paludan torched copies of the Holy Quran near a mosque and outside the premises of the Turkish Embassy in the Danish capital Copenhagen.
Paludan had already infuriated the Muslim world by staging a Quran-burning protest in Sweden’s capital Stockholm on Jan. 21. The right-wing extremist has vowed to continue the stunt every Friday until Sweden is admitted into the US-led NATO.
“The burning of the Holy Quran is not justifiable by any means. It is considered a hostile, criminal and profane action against all holy books,” Houthi said.
The Ansarullah chief noted, “Oppressors are trying to put up a barrier between world nations and the Quran, because they view it as the biggest danger for themselves and the biggest savior for human beings.”
“Burning of the Holy Quran and declaring enmity towards it and Islam amount to a blatant disrespect for all Muslims. Such an approach also attests to the extent of satanic forces’ anger towards Quran and their weakness in the face of the sacred book,” he noted.
Houthi went on to condemn the burning of the Holy Quran as the gravest act of hostility against Islam and Muslims, emphasizing that the pro-Zionist lobby stands at the forefront of the aggressive campaign against Islam, Quran and Muslims.
“Satanic forces try to perpetrate grievous sins and despicable crimes in the name of freedom of thought and speech, and enlist political and legal support for them,” the leader of the Ansarullah movement said.
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The Doomsday Clock, set by the US-based magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has been moved to 90 seconds to midnight.
That’s the closest ever to total nuclear doom, the global catastrophe.
The Clock had been set at 100 seconds since 2020. The Bulletin’s Science and Security Board and a group of sponsors – which includes 10 Nobel laureates – have focused on “Russia’s war on Ukraine” (their terminology) as the main reason.
Yet they did not bother to explain non-stop American rhetoric (the US is the only nation that adopts “first strike” in a nuclear confrontation) and the fact that this is a US proxy war against Russia with Ukraine used as cannon fodder.
The Bulletin also attributes malignant designs to China, Iran and North Korea, while mentioning, only in passing, that “the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the United States, New START, stands in jeopardy”.
“Unless the two parties resume negotiations and find a basis for further reductions, the treaty will expire in February 2026.”
As it stands, the prospects of a US-Russia negotiation on New START are less than zero.
Now cue to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov making it very clear that war against Russia is not hybrid anymore, it’s “almost” real.
“Almost” in fact means “90 seconds.”
So why is this all happening?
The Mother of All Intel Failures
Former British diplomat Alastair Crooke has concisely explained how Russian resilience – much in the spirit of Iranian resilience past four decades – completely smashed the assumptions of Anglo-American intelligence.
Talk about the Mother of All Intel Failures – in fact even more astonishing than the non-existent Iraqi WMDs (in the run-up to Shock and Awe in 2003, anyone with a brain knew Baghdad had discontinued its weapons program already in the 1990s.)
Now the collective West “committed the entire weight of its financial resources to crushing Russia (…) in every conceivable way – via financial, cultural and psychological war, and with real military war as the follow-through.”
And yet Russia held its ground. And now reality-based developments prevail over fiction. The Global South “is peeling away into a separate economic model, no longer dependent on the dollar for its trading needs.”
And the accelerated collapse of the US dollar increasingly plunges the Empire into a real existential crisis.
All that hangs over a South Vietnam scenario evolving in Ukraine after a rash government-led political and military purge. The coke comedian – whose only role is to beg non-stop for bags of cash and loads of weapons – is being progressively sidelined by the Americans (beware of traveling CIA directors).
The game in Kiev, according to Russian sources, seems to be that the Americans are taking over the Brits as handlers of the whole operation.
The coke comedian remains – for now – as a sock puppet while military control over what is left of Ukraine is entirely NATO’s.
Well, it already was – but now, formally, Ukraine is the world’s first de facto NATO member without being an actual member, enjoying less than zero national sovereignty, and complete with NATO-Nazi Storm troopers weaponized with American and German tanks in the name of “democracy”.
The meeting last week of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group – totally controlled by the US – at the US Air Force base in Ramstein solidified a sort of tawdry remix of Operation Barbarossa.
Here we go again, with German Panzers sent to Ukraine to fight Russia.
Yet the tank coalition seems to have tanked even before it starts. Germany will send 14, Portugal 2, Belgium 0 (sorry, don’t have them). Then there’s Lithuania, whose Defense Minister observed, “Yes, we don’t have tanks, but we have an opinion about tanks.”
No one ever accused German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock of being brighter than a light bulb. She finally gave the game away, at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg:
“The crucial part is that we do it together and that we do not do the blame game in Europe because we are fighting a war against Russia.”
So Baerbock agrees with Lavrov. Just don’t ask her what Doomsday Clock means. Or what happened after Operation Barbarossa failed.
The NATO-EU “garden”
The EU-NATO combo takes matters to a whole new level. The EU essentially has been reduced to the status of P.R. arm of NATO.
The NATO-EU joint mission consists in using all economic, political and military means to make sure the “jungle” always behaves according to the “rules-based international order” and accepts to be plundered ad infinitum by the “blooming garden”.
Looking at The Big Picture, absolutely nothing changed in the US military/intel apparatus since 9/11: it’s a bipartisan thing, and it means Full Spectrum Dominance of both the US and NATO. No dissent whatsoever is allowed. And no thinking outside the box.
Plan A is subdivided into two sections.
1. Military intervention in a hollowed-out proxy state shell (see Afghanistan and Ukraine).
2. Inevitable, humiliating military defeat (see Afghanistan and soon Ukraine). Variations include building a wasteland and calling it “peace” (Libya) and extended proxy war leading to future humiliating expulsion (Syria).
There’s no Plan B.
Or is there? 90 seconds to midnight?
Obsessed by Mackinder, the Empire fought for control of the Eurasian landmass in World War I and World War II because that represented control of the world.
Later, Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski had warned: “Potentially the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition between Russia, China and Iran.”
Jump cut to the Raging Twenties when the US forced the end of Russian natural gas exports to Germany (and the EU) via Nord Stream 1 and 2.
Once again, Mackinderian opposition to a grand alliance on the Eurasian landmass consisting of Germany, Russia and China.
The Straussian neo-con and neoliberal-con psychos in charge of US foreign policy could even absorb a strategic alliance between Russia and China – as painful as it may be. But never Russia, China and Germany.
With the collapse of the JCPOA, Iran is now being re-targeted with maximum hostility. Yet were Tehran to play hardball, the US Navy or military could never keep the Strait of Hormuz open – by the admission of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Oil price in this case would rise to possibly thousands of dollars a barrel according to Goldman Sachs oil derivative experts – and that would crash the entire world economy.
This is arguably the foremost NATO Achilles Heel. Almost without firing a shot a Russia-Iran alliance could smash NATO to bits and bring down assorted EU governments as socio-economic chaos runs rampant across the collective West.
Meanwhile, to quote Dylan, darkness keeps dawning at the break of noon. Straussian neo-con and neoliberal-con psychos will keep pushing the Doomsday Clock closer and closer to midnight.
Pepe Escobar is a Eurasia-wide geopolitical analyst and author. His latest book is Raging Twenties.
(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:
في هذه المحاولة الاستشرافية في مطلع 2023 قراءة وتساؤلات لمرحلة ما بعد الحرب في أوكرانيا. ننطلق في هذه القراءة من فرضية نناقشها في ما بعد أنّ روسيا ستحسم المعركة العسكرية في أوكرانيا ما قبل نهاية ربيع 2023. لكن هذا لا يعني انّ الصراع مع الحلف الأطلسي بشكل عام والولايات المتحدة بشكل خاص قد ينتهي. فالسؤال يصبح كيف سيتعامل الحلف الأطلسي وخاصة الولايات المتحدة مع الحقائق الميدانية التي تكون قد تحقّقت في الميدان؟
هناك عدة حالات ممكنة ولكن باحتمالات متباينة مبنية على قراءة في ذهنية القيادات الغربية والإمكانيات المتوفرة ضمن ميزان قوّة مختلّ لصالح روسيا بشكل عام وخاصة لصالح المحور العالمي الرافض للهيمنة الأميركية و/ أو الأطلسية. وما يُعقّد المشهد هو اعتبار الطرفين المتخاصمين أيّ روسيا والحلف الأطلسي أنّ الحرب في أوكرانيا حرب وجودية وبالتالي لا يمكن لأيّ طرف أن يتصوّر مخرجاً إلاّ النصر القاطع. وبما أنّ فرضية هذه القراءة تتبنّى حتمية النصر الروسي ما يبقى علينا هو تصوّر ما يمكن أن يقدِم عليه الأطلسي. وعندما نتكلّم عن الأطلسي نقصد بالدرجة الأولى الولايات المتحدة، ثم الاتحاد الأوروبي كمؤسسة، ثم الدول الأوروبية التي تماهت مع سياسات الولايات المتحدة وأخيراً بيروقراطية الحلف الأطلسي كمؤسسة قائمة بحدّ ذاتها. غير أنّ الحلقة الأساسية هي الولايات المتحدة لأنّ ما يمكن أن تقدم عليه سينجرّ بشكل أو بآخر على مؤسسة الحلف الأطلسي والاتحاد الأوروبي.
أما الحلقة الأضعف فهي الدول الأوروبية التي ستتعرّض إلى اضطرابات اجتماعية وسياسية بسبب التراجع الاقتصادي الناتج عن سياسة العقوبات المفروضة على روسيا وخاصة في قطاع الطاقة التي كانت تستوردها بشكل رخيص من روسيا دون أن تجد البديل الاقتصادي الذي يحرّرها من الاتكال على روسيا. والنتائج البنيوية على الاقتصاد الأوروبي هي تفكيك البنية الصناعية التي كانت ركيزة الطبقة الوسطى والاستقرار الاجتماعي. ليس هناك من آفاق إيجابية للاقتصاد الأوروبي في ظلّ ذلك التحوّل البنيوي خاصة مع صعود دول الجنوب الإجمالي وفي مقدّمته الصين والهند والبرازيل الذين سيتقاسمون الناتج الصناعي العالمي. دول أوروبا قد تكون دول متاحف التاريخ وللسياحة والترفيه وليس أكثر. فتصبح دولاً لا وزن لها في إدارة شؤون العالم. وهذا الهبوط لن يكون سهلاً بل ترافقه توترات اجتماعية وانتفاضات سياسية تعيد النظر في البنى السياسة والاقتصادية والاجتماعية لهذه الدول. وما سيساهم في ذلك الانحدار الكارثي هو الرداءة غير المسبوقة للقيادات السياسية سواء كانت في الحكم أو في المعارضة. المشهد البريطاني يتلاقى مع المشهد الألماني والمشهد الفرنسي، تلك الدول التي كانت تتصدّر المشهد الأوروبي. فأما دول الأطراف في أوروبا فقد تغرق أيضاً في حروب عرقية ودينية دون أن تكون لها ركيزة تستند إليها. فعلى سبيل المثال وليس الحصر اسبانيا تواجه حركة انفصالية في منطقة كتالونيا، وإيرلندا الشمالية قد تنفصل عن المملكة المتحدة لتلتحق بالجمهورية الإيرلندية، واسكتلندا قد تستقلّ عن المملكة المتحدة، وكورسيكا عن فرنسا، وبلجيكا تنقسم إلى قسم فرنسي وقسم فلمنكي. وما تبقّى من أوكرانيا خارج القبضة الروسية قد يذهب قسم منه إلى بولندا، والقسم الآخر إلى رومانيا ومولدوفيا. خارطة أوروبا مُعرّضة لتغيير جذري أسوة بما نتج في الحروب الأوروبية في القرون الماضية. كما هناك كلام عن انشطار إيطاليا بين جنوب فقير وشمال ثري. أما النعرات الطائفية في منطقة البلقان فمن السهل إشعالها مجدّداً مع سقوط الحكومات المركزية في حقبة الضيق الاقتصادي. تصدّعات أوروبا
أما الاتحاد الأوروبي كمؤسسة فيشهد تصدّعات داخلية عززتها الإجراءات العبثية بحق روسيا وارتداداتها على الاقتصادات الأوروبية. فالزمرة الحاكمة في مؤسسة الاتحاد الأوروبي ملتزمة عقائدياً بمقرّرات دافوس لإعادة التعيين للاقتصادات القائمة نحو اقتصادات أكثر «لطفاً بالبيئة» على حدّ زعمهم. وهذا التوجه إلى مصادر طاقة نظيفة ومتجدّدة بشكل قسري وسريع سيؤدّي حتماً إلى تفكيك البنية الصناعية القائمة ما يوقع دول الاتحاد في حالة فقر وتراجع حضاري شبيه بالقرون الوسطى. فالطاقة هي مصدر الحضارة والعبث فيها له ارتدادات خطيرة على سكّان هذه الدول. لكن عدداً من حكومات دول الاتحاد يتململ من طغيان الزمرة المسيطرة على الاتحاد خاصة أنها لا تخضع لمساءلة ومحاسبة. وحكومة فيكتور اروبان المجرية تقود حملة التمرّد ضدّ الاتحاد قد تتبعها حكومة صربيا. من جهة أخرى أبدت بعض الدول الأوروبية كألمانيا وفرنسا امتعاضها من استغلال الولايات المتحدة للشحّ في قطاع الطاقة لفرض أسعار اضعاف ما كانت تدفعه لروسيا. ونعتت هذه الدول الولايات المتحدة بالتصرّف «غير الصديق» مع الحليف!
أما الدول الأوروبية فالتصدّعات التي أحدثتها الحرب الأوكرانية تتفاقم خاصة أنّ النموذج الاقتصادي النيوليبرالي المسيطر بعد سقوط الاتحاد السوفياتي وصل إلى طريق مسدود. كما أنّ النظام النيوليبرالي حوّل السلطة الفعلية للشركات الكبرى وخاصة بيوت المال التي لا تكترث لحال المواطنين. وهذه القوى المسيطرة على القرار السياسي والاقتصادي والثقافي في تلك الدول تستولد نخباً وقيادات من المستوى الرديء على صعيد العلم، والفهم، والأخلاق. وبالتالي ليس في الأفق المنظور إمكانية بروز قيادات أوروبية تضع مصلحة دولها فوق أيّ اعتبار وخاصة تلك الاعتبارات التي تريد إعادة الهندسة الاجتماعية وفقاً لمقرّرات منتدى دافوس. لذلك لا يمكن أن نتوقع خلال السنة الجديدة أيّ تغيير جذري في المشهد الأوروبي إلاّ ربما المزيد من التوترات والفوضى الأمنية والاقتصادية والاجتماعية ما يجعل أوروبا تفقد دوراً كانت تقوم به على الصعيد العالمي. فكيف يمكن وصف سلوك القيادات الأوروبية التي حوّلت أوروبا من ثاني كتلة اقتصادية في العالم، وربما في بعض الأحيان الأولى، إلى مجموعة دول مترهّلة. هذا انتحار جماعي أقدمت عليه قيادات حمقاء بكلّ معنى الكلمة.
تبقى الولايات المتحدة العنصر الأساسي في الحلف الأطلسي. والمشهد الأميركي معقّد حيث الخطاب السياسي السائد لدى المؤسسة الحاكمة وخاصة عند المحافظين الجدد الذين قبضوا على القرار السياسة الخارجية لا يسمح بأيّ تراجع أمام روسيا. لقد أصبحت الطبقة الحاكمة والمحافظون الجدد أسرى الخطاب السياسي حيث الانتصار على روسيا بات شرط ضرورة للبقاء. فلا يتصوّر المحافظون الجدد عالماً وروسيا موجودة على الأقلّ بشكلها الحالي. فلا بدّ من قلب النظام القائم في روسيا والإتيان بنخب سياسية تساهم في تقسيم روسيا إلى عدّة ولايات أو دول ضعيفة تحول دون إمكانية نهوض لدولة لها وزن على الصعيد الدولي. والمحافظون الجدد يحرصون على إجهاض أيّ محاولة للتفاهم مع روسيا تفادياً لحرب قد تخسرها حتماً الولايات المتحدة مهما كانت الكلفة عالية على روسيا. فعلى سبيل المثال وليس الحصر تسبّب المحافظون الجدود تسريب خبر لقاء بين مدير وكالة المخابرات المركزية وليم بيرنز ونظيره الروسي في أنقرة لإجهاض أيّ محاولة لمنع التصعيد في أوكرانيا الذي إذا ما استمرّ سيضع الجيش الروسي في مواجهة مباشرة مع الجيش الأميركي. وهذا الأمر لا يريده الطرفان سواء كان الرئيس الروسي بوتين أو الأميركي بايدن. لكن المحافظين الجدد لهم أجندة مختلفة ولا يكترثون لنتائج حتمية عن مواجهة عسكرية مباشرة بين الدولتين.
أجندة المحافظين الجدد!
السؤال المطروح هو هل يستطيع المحافظون الجدد تجاوز التحفّظات داخل الإدارة الأميركية التي لا تريد المواجهة المباشرة مع روسيا؟ ليس من السهل الإجابة خاصة أنّ المرحلة السابقة شهدت نصر المحافظين الجدد في توريط الولايات المتحدة في الصراع الذي كان بالإمكان تجنّبه مع روسيا. فهم من رفضوا التعامل مع العروض الروسية لحلّ الأزمة في أوكرانيا، وهم بالأساس من قام بالانقلاب على الحكومة المنتخبة شرعيا في أوكرانيا في 2014 وفي مقدمتهم فيكتوريا نيولند زوجة روبرت كاغان كبير المنظرين للمحافظين الجدد. وهم من استعمل اتفاقات منسك في 2015 للمراوغة لتمكين القوّات الأوكرانية لمواجهة روسيا. وهم من أجهضوا الاتفاق الذي تمّ الوصول إليه في أنقرة بين روسيا وحكومة زيلينسكي في نيسان/ ابريل 2022 بعد 3 أشهر من بدء العملية العسكرية الروسية في أوكرانيا. وهم من يدفعون إلى تفريغ ترسانات الدول التي كانت في كنف حلف وارسو وإرسال السلاح والذخائر لأوكرانيا. وهم من يدفعون البنتاغون لتفريع ترسانة الولايات المتحدة من الأسلحة المتطوّرة وإرسالها إلى أوكرانيا. النتيجة لكلّ ذلك هو تدمير كلّ السلاح المتوفر لأوكرانيا وقتل الجنود ودون تحقيق أيّ تقدّم على الأرض. فسجل المحافظين الجدد هو تراكم هائل من الفشل ولكن لا يوجد من يُسائل ويحاسب. ولذلك ستستمرّ إدارة بايدن في ارتكاب الحماقات تلو الحماقات دون تحقيق أي نتيجة لصالح الولايات المتحدة حتى يصبح تحطّم أوكرانيا أمراً واقعا لا يمكن الهروب منه.
المحافظون الجدد لهم أجندة من بند واحد وهي فرض هيمنة الولايات المتحدة على العالم وإنْ أدّى ذلك إلى تدمير الحلفاء وتهديد العالم بحرب نووية لن ينج منها أحد. فهم لا يكترثون لآثار سياساتهم طالما كانوا متمسكين بمفاصل صنع القرار في الولايات المتحدة سواء في الإدارة أو مراكز الأبحاث أو الجامعات أو الإعلام المرئي والمكتوب. وشبكة علاقات المحافظين الجدد لا تقتصر على الولايات المتحدة بل امتدّت إلى دوائر القرار في مكوّنات الحلف الأطلسي وإنْ كانت سياساتهم تدمّر تلك المكوّنات.
استطاع المحافظون الجدد أن يفرضوا سردية بين النخب الحاكمة في الولايات المتحدة والدول الأوروبية المتحالفة معها مفادها أنّ الصراع مع روسيا هو صراع بقاء بينما في الحقيقة هو صراع لتدمير روسيا والاستيلاء على ثرواتها الهائلة من المواد الخام، والطاقة، والمعادن الثمينة والنادرة. كما أنّ حجم روسيا الجغرافي يهدّد مصالح الولايات المتحدة فلا بدّ من تفكيك الدولة الاتحادية. وتعمّ مراكز الأبحاث في الولايات المتحدة عن خرائط محتملة لروسيا المفككة. وبالنسبة للولايات المتحدة فإنّ الهدف الحقيقي هو الحفاظ على هيمنتها وخاصة هيمنة الدولار الذي يواجه تحدّيات من اقتصادات ترفض تلك الهيمنة. والطابع الوجودي لهذا الصراع مبني على ثقافة الفكر الرأس المالي أن التوسّع هو الوسيلة الوحيدة للبقاء. وتاريخ الولايات المتحدة مبني على التوسّع الجغرافي، في البداية تجاه الغرب حتى الوصول إلى المحيط الهادي ومن ثمّ القفز إلى الجزر في ذلك المحيط وصولاً إلى الفليبين والشاطئ الشرقي للصين.
أما جنوباً، فكانت نظرية مونرو التي منعت الدول المستعمرة في القرن التاسع عشر من التواجد في أميركا اللاتينية وجعلها الحديقة الخلفية للولايات المتحدة. وتحفظ في أدراج الإدارات المتتالية خطط احتلال كندا إذا ما اقتضى الأمر! والآن تعمل الولايات المتحدة على التوسع في القطب الشمالي حيث توجد ثروات نفطية وغازية وشرقاً نحو القارة الآسيوية. وبالتالي لا بدّ من وضع اليد على روسيا.
المشروع الأميركي لوضع اليد على روسيا كان مكتوماً بعد سقوط حائط برلين. لكن سرعان ما تبدّدت الوعود المقطوعة للقيادات الروسية بعدم التوسّع شرقاً للحلف الأطلسي. وحجر الزاوية في مواجهة روسيا هو أوكرانيا وفقاً لنظرية زبغنيو بريجنسكي الذي اعتبر أوكرانيا ضرورة أساسية للقضاء على روسيا. المهمّ هنا أنّ التوسع الشرقي للحلف الأطلسي تجاه روسيا يشكّل خطراً وجودياً على روسيا لا يمكنها تجاهله خاصة إذا ما تمّ نشر الصواريخ البالستية النووية فيها كما يدعو إليه قادة النظام الانقلابي في أوكرانيا. حاولت القيادة الروسية إقناع الإدارات المتتالية بعدم التوسع شرقاً لكن العنجهية الأميركية لم تكترث للهواجس الروسية. لسنا هنا في إطار سرد تطوّر العلاقات الروسية الأطلسية/ الأميركية بل لنؤكّد أنّ صوغ الخطاب السياسي يدعو إلى المواجهة لدرء خطر وجودي يعني الوصول إلى الحرب لحلّ المشكلة. الحرب هنا لن تقتصر على الحرب بالوكالة كما هو الحال الآن في أوكرانيا أو ربما عبر بولندا في ما بعد بل في المواجهة المباشرة العسكرية مع روسيا.
ما يؤكّد عمق الأزمة بين النخب الأميركية مقال صدر يوم السبت في 7 كانون الثاني/ يناير 2023 في صحيفة «واشنطن بوست» والموقع من كوندوليزا رايس وزيرة الخارجية السابقة في ولاية بوش الابن وروبرت غيتس وزير الدفاع السابق في كلّ من ولايات بوش الابن وباراك أوباما. في المقال اعتراف واضح أنّ الوقت هو لصالح روسيا ولا بدّ من زيادة الجهود الأميركية (أيّ زيادة التمويل والإمداد لأنها مربحة للمجمّع العسكري الصناعي) وذلك لمنع النصر الروسي. فهذا الأمر سيكون له تداعيات كارثية بالنسبة للولايات المتحدة (خاصة للمجمّع العسكري الصناعي) وأنّ إمكانية تغيير تلك النتائج ستكون صعبة للغاية إنْ لم تكن مستحيلة. والهيمنة الأميركية على العالم أصبحت مطلباً «وجودياً» بالنسبة لتلك النخب التي لا تكترث لنتائج تلك الطموحات والتي لا تأخذ بعين الاعتبار التحوّلات التي حصلت في موازين القوّة. فمقال رايس وغيتس دعوة صريحة لاستمرار الحرب مهما كانت النتائج.
فما هي إمكانيات مواجهة مباشرة بين الحلف الأطلسي وروسيا، وبالأخصّ بين الولايات المتحدة وروسيا؟ حقيقة، إنّ المواجهة في أوكرانيا لها طابعان: الأول مع الحكومة الأوكرانية والثاني الذي تمّ إعلانه منذ بضعة أيام على لسان وزير الدفاع الاوكراني أنّ المواجهة هي بين روسيا والحلف الأطلسي. هدف العملية العسكرية الروسية في أوكرانيا هو تدمير الجيش الأوكراني وخلع النازيين من الحكم في أوكرانيا ومنع الحكومة من الالتحاق بالأطلسي. التطوّرات الميدانية أبرزت تدفق السلاح والذخيرة من مجمل دول الحلف الأطلسي دون أن يغيّر في ميزان القوّة في المعركة الذي كان ولا يزال لصالح روسيا. واليوم تعلن هذه الدول عن نفاذ سلاحها وذخيرتها لتزويد القوّات الأوكرانية بما كانت تملك من بقايا سلاح حلف وارسو. أما السلاح الغربي الذي يسيطر على معظم دول أوروبا الغربية فإنّ معرفة القوّات الأوكرانية بذلك السلاح ما زالت محدودة وتحتاج لوقت طويل للتتأقلم معها.
لكن هل تستطيع الولايات المتحدة الاستمرار بسياسة حرب رغم ضعف الجهوزية. ولا نقصد هنا الجهوزية العسكرية فحسب بل الجهوزية الاقتصادية. يشير الستير كروك وهو دبلوماسي سابق ومن أهمّ العقول السياسية المحلّلة للمشهد السياسي في آخر مقال له بتاريخ 13 كانون الثاني/ يناير 2023 على موقع «ستراتيجك كلتشار فوندشن» إلى أنّ الغرب يتجه تدريجياً لتحويل اقتصاداته لاقتصادات حرب وخاصة في ما يتعلّق بسلسلة التوريد في الإنتاج الصناعي. لكن في رأينا هذه عملية طويلة المدى خاصة بعد تفكيك البنية التحتية الصناعية في الولايات المتحدة والمملكة المتحدة وبالتالي القدرة على تحويل الطاقة الصناعية إلى طاقة إنتاجية حربية كما حصل في الحرب العالمية الثانية أمر مشكوك به في المدى المنظور. فاستبدال سلسلة التوريد التي اعتمدت خلال العقود الأربعة الماضية لتوطين مفاصل عديدة من القطاعات الصناعية في عالم الجنوب الإجمالي لا يمكن إنجازه بفترة قصيرة. فروسيا، ومعها الصين وسائر دول الجنوب الإجمالي لن يتركوا المجال لذلك التحويل.
لذلك نعتقد أنّ المعركة العسكرية الاستراتيجية بين روسيا وأوكرانيا قد حسمت في رأينا لصالح روسيا وأنّ ما تبقّى هو ترجمة الحسم الاستراتيجي إلى معالم مادية سواء في التقدّم الجغرافي أو في التغيير النظام السياسي في أوكرانيا وإنْ اقتضى الأمر دخول كييف لفرض نظام جديد. وقد يحصل ذلك خلال سنة 2023.
المواجهة مع الأطلسي طويلة
أما المواجهة مع الأطلسي فقد تطول خاصة أنّ الغرب يراهن على إطالة الحرب دون تدخّل مباشر للولايات المتحدة وسائر دول الحلف الأطلسي. ويعتمد المحافظون الجدد على سيطرتهم على الإعلام والسردية التي تقول بأنّ أوكرانيا «تنتصر» والقضية مسألة إمدادات فقط لا غير. لكن بدأت النخب الحاكمة تواجه معضلة تفسير انهيار خطوط الدفاع الأوكرانية وخاصة في منطقة سوليدار وباخوت. فهل ستتخذ الخطوة التالية بدخول جيوش الأطلسي بشكل مباشر في أوكرانيا؟
المزاج السياسي المعادي لروسيا في دول أوروبا غير مؤيّد للدخول في حرب مع روسيا. استطلاعات الرأي العام واضحة بهذا الشأن. فالمواطن الأوروبي بغضّ النظر عن رأيه في روسيا وحكّامها لا يريد ولا يتحمّل ثمن المواجهة. ولقد بدأت تظهر معالم «التعب» من أوكرانيا. ولكن المنحى الذي نشهده هو عدم اكتراث الحكومات الغربية للرأي العام الداخلي كما جاء على لسان وزيرة الخارجية الألمانية أنّ المانيا مستمرّة بدعم الجهود الحربية في أوكرانيا وأنها لا تكترث لآراء المواطنين وهذا بكلّ وضوح. لكن العديد من المؤشرات تفيد بأنّ الدول الأوروبية غير جاهزة وغير راغبة للدخول في حرب. أما الولايات المتحدة فهناك من يدفع إلى الدخول المباشر إلى أوكرانيا وإنْ كان الوجود العسكري الأميركي كـ «خبراء» و «مدرّبين» و «مستشارين» أصبح من المسلّمات. والمحافظون الجدد يدفعون إلى المواجهة المباشرة بعد استنفاذ الوكلاء علماً أنّ الجهوزية العسكرية الأميركية غير متوفّرة كما جاء على لسان رئيس هيئة الأركان المشتركة مارك ميلي في جلسة استجوابه في لجنة الدفاع في الكونغرس عند استلام مهامه. قال آنذاك في 2018 إنّ الجهوزية الأميركية لا تتجاوز 40 بالمائة وإنّ هدفه هو إيصال الجهوزية الأميركية إلى 60 بالمائة بحلول 2024.
وتأكيداً على ذلك يصدر معهد «أميركان هريتاج فونداشن» تقريراً سنوياً عن الجهوزية العسكرية الأميركية. وعلى مدى السنوات الخمس الماضية لم يتجاوز تقييم تلك الجهوزية مرحلة «الهامشية» أيّ لا تستطيع الحسم في أيّ مواجهة. وإذا أضفنا المحاكاة النظرية للمواجهة العسكرية مع أيّ من روسيا أو الصين أو إيران فكانت النتائج دائماً لصالح خصوم الولايات المتحدة. صحيح أنّ الولايات المتحدة تنفق أكثر من أيّ دولة في العالم لكن هذا الانفاق لا يعني تفوّقاً في الجودة كما تظهر التقارير حول فعّالية ركائز السلاح الجوّي أو البرّي الأميركي. وإذا أدخلنا في المعادلة السلاح المتفوّق الروسي خاصة في الصواريخ الفائقة لسرعة الصوت وغياب وسائل دفاع مضادة له فإنّ التفوّق التكتيكي والاستراتيجي للسلاح الروسي أصبح كاسراً.
وهناك خبراء عسكريون كـ اندري مرتيانوف يشكّكون بالقدرات البشرية لقيادة الأعمال العسكرية حيث خبرة القادة العسكريين الأميركيين في خوض حروب حقيقية ضدّ خصوم لديهم الحزم والعزم لا يُشجّع على إمكانية نصر عسكري. فتجربة الحرب الكورية والفيتنامية والعراقية والأفغانية تدلّ بوضوح إلى أنّ التفوّق الناري لا يعني بالضرورة النصر. لكن بعيداً عن هذه الاعتبارات ما نريد أن نقوله إنّ الولايات المتحدة غير جاهزة على الصعيد العسكري لخوض حرب طويلة مع دولة من طراز روسيا أو الصين على الأقلّ في المدى المنظور. لدى الولايات المتحدة قدرة نارية تدميرية هائلة تستطيع تدمير المعمورة آلاف المرّات ولكن ليس لديها كيف تترجمها في السياسة.
هناك عقول باردة خارج البنتاغون كدوغلاس مكغريغور او لاري جونسون أو فيليب جيرالدي أو راي مكغوفرن أو لاري ويلكرسون على سبيل المثال وليس الحصر تعي هذه الحقائق وتحاول ضبط إيقاع مسار السلطة السياسية. لكن المحافظين الجدد يتربّصون بها ويمنعون أن تصل تلك الآراء إلى مركز القرار. لذلك سيحتدم الصراع داخل الدولة العميقة بين من يؤيّد توجّهات المحافظين الجدد ومن يخشى من الوقوع في الهاوية. ولا نستبعد تكرار مشهد إنشاء لجنة بيكر ـ هاملتون جديدة التي كفّت يد المحافظين الجدد في إدارة بوش بعد الفشل في العراق. البديل عن كفّ يد المحافظين الجدد هو الحرب التي ستكون مدمّرة للولايات المتحدة وللعالم.
وهنا يكمن العامل الداخلي في الولايات المتحدة الذي قد يغيّر المعادلات بين الدولة العميقة والبيت الأبيض. مسلسل الفضائح التي تطال الرئيس الأميركي يتنامى ما يعني أنّ الدولة العميقة تريد التخلّص من إمكانية ترشّحه مجدّداً في 2024. فتعيين محقق خاص جمهوري الانتماء السياسي للكشف عن تفاصيل «الفضائح» يؤكّد أنّ المؤسسة الحاكمة بما فيها قيادة الحزب الديمقراطي تريد التخلّص من جوزيف بايدن والآتيان بـ كمالا هاريس في حال تنحّى بايدن عن منصبه، أو فتح الطريق لترشيح ميشال أوباما في 2024. في مطلق الأحوال فإنّ التطوّرات الداخلية قد تحوّل الأنظار عن الإخفاق في أوكرانيا ويتيح الفرصة لصوغ خطاب جديد يتجاهل الإخفاق في أوكرانيا. التغيير في السياسة التي تفرضه الوقائع يحتم تغيير في الأشخاص وهذا ما يمكن توقّعه في الأشهر المقبلة لمنع التدهور الذي الكارثي الذي يهدّد الجميع.
في الخلاصة نرى ما بعد الحرب في أوكرانيا الانتصار الكاسح لروسيا وتصدّع الاتحاد الأوروبي. كما سنرى تصاعد النقاش حول الدخول الأطلسي بشكل عام والولايات المتحدة بشكل خاص في حرب نووية محدودة بالنسبة للمحافظين الجدد. لكن في المقابل لا يستطيعون ضبط إيقاعها لأنّ روسيا لن تستجيب لرغبات المحافظين الجدد. فليس هناك من مواجهة نووية «محدودة»! لذلك لا نتوقع الوصول إلى تلك المرحلة بل ربما بداية تفكيك الحلف الأطلسي الذي فقد جدواه ومصداقيته. أما على صعيد الوضع الداخلي في الولايات المتحدة فتراكم الفشل في السياسة الخارجية سيظهر الحاجة للتغيير. من سيقود التغيير وكيف فهذا حديث ليوم آخر. الرهان هو على ما تبقّى من عقول باردة خاصة في أجواء التردّي لمستوى النخب السياسية في الغرب…
*باحث وكاتب اقتصادي سياسي والأمين العام السابق للمؤتمر القومي العربي وعضو منتدى سيف القدس
While America is prepared to pay for the last Ukrainian to die for America – the Western world is talking about something else: Harry Windsor has revealed the family secret. The family secret was that Harry is an idiot, whose strings are pulled by an American actress. Now the secret is out. Harry has himself told the whole world he is an idiot whose strings are pulled by an American actress.
And Game-Changing Tanks?
While Western Europe is prepared to pay for the last Ukrainian to die for Western Europe – Germany, France, Finland, the UK and some other countries are prepared to get rid of some more of their old armoured vehicles and even tanks, palming them off on the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime. Thus, the UK is thinking of sending 14 of its 25-year old Challenger 2 tanks. How the UK will train Ukrainians to operate them, how it will supply enough ammunition for them to fire, how they will supply the mechanics and spare parts to repair them, how – and when – they will deliver them to Poland and then get them to the Kiev front, over 1,000 kilometres further away, nobody can tell us. Meanwhile, the British Army Chief of General Staff, Sir Patrick Sanders, is complaining. ‘Giving Kiev tanks means we won’t have enough for ourselves’. After all they do cost £8 million each and there are only 227 of them in the much-underfunded British Army anyway.
Nobody has told the British Army that after one Russian missile all 14 of these obsolescent ‘wonder-weapons’ will go up in smoke before they ever get to the front. £112 million gone. No wonder Ukrainian refugees are returning to Kiev to get proper medical treatment that the grossly underfunded and strikebound British Health System cannot provide them with. Nobody has told the British Army or any EU Army that Russia is fighting a war of attrition. Given Russian air superiority, far superior artillery, drones, missiles and its 15,000 tanks, the Kiev forces, their mercenaries and all their equipment are being wiped out. Worse still, none of the Western hack-journalists, presstitutes to the core, has yet explained why ‘the victorious Kiev forces’ need ever more Western armoured vehicles and tanks. You read it here first: It is because all the other ‘game-changing’ armoured vehicles, tanks and equipment have already been destroyed. Now at least astronomers know what a black hole looks like. It looks like the Kiev regime. Yes, black holes really are game-changing because you can get sucked into one.
The Score: Russia 27: Poland, Romania, Hungary 0
In the face of NATO (= US) aggression, surely there is only one choice left for Russia – to liberate all 27 Ukrainian regions (and maybe even elsewhere too). I have to confess that I was never in favour of Russia taking the far-west Galicia. ‘They can go to Poland’. I was thinking of the old Russian curse: ‘Go to hell – and take Galicia with you’. But, actually, I am now thinking that Russia should take the lot, Crimea and the four partially liberated ones nearly done, 22 to go. The fact is that as long as a single piece of the Ukraine is under Nazi control, it will be a threat to the Russian Federation.
A very reasonable but minimalist map of Russian options in the Ukraine I found on Big Serge thoughts on Substack. it shows all the regions which Batiushka suggests Russian might have to liberate.
A very reasonable but minimalist map of Russian options in the Ukraine I found on Big Serge thoughts on Substack. it shows all the regions which Batiushka suggests Russian might have to liberate.
On top of that a lot of the Nazi nasties have left anyway. Moreover, if Russia does liberate Galicia, the remaining Nazis will run away to Poland, so there will be none left and Russian forces can occupy the lot. It is a self-liberating process. Russia threatens and they go, all by themselves. In any case, why should Poland get anything out of it? What have they done to deserve it? Just like the Germans, we too have never believed in Greater Poland. Currently, the Poles are planning to build a wall along the border with the Russian Kaliningrad enclave. The Russians there are only too pleased and a local Russian company has offered to sell Poland the cement. Keeping the US-run ‘New Europe’ (as Rumsfeld called it) Poles out seems like an excellent idea. Especially if the Poles are going to do the job for us at their own expense.
Frankly, the same applies to Romania. Why should they get anything out of it? They allowed the Americans in. They claim North Bukovina, Chernovtsy, but that is mainly Ukrainian. Let it remain so. We do not believe in Greater Romania either. And why not liberate Moldova (minus Transdniestria) as well and make it an Autonomous Republic of the Russian Federation? Apart from the 15% in Moldova who are Russian and the 5% who are Gagauz and very pro-Russian, there are plenty of Moldovans who do not want to have anything to do with corrupt Romania and the corrupt EU and regret the old USSR. An Autonomous Republic of Moldova within the Russian Federation with cheap gas and oil sounds a lot more attractive than being a minor province of corrupt US-run Romania.
Then there is the case of ‘Zakarpatie’ – Transcarpathia, that extreme south-western province with its ridiculous Kievan imperialist name. There is only one place which is trans/across the Carpathians, and that is Kiev itself. Now the real name of Transcarpathia is Carpatho-Rus, though it has also been called Subcarpathian Rus and, in the West, Ruthenia, which is a corruption of ‘Rusinia’, the land of the Rusins (Ukrainians transliterate it as Rusyns), that is, the land of the Carpatho-Russians. The Rusins speak their own distinctive language, of which, arguably Slovak and Ukrainian are dialects. It is the historic cradle of Russian Orthodoxy, baptised a century before 988 and before Kiev. I have been to Carpatho-Rus, but on the Slovak side (the Polish side around Sanok was genocided or scattered by Fascist Poles in 1947), and there I have very good friends.
True, Hungary has been handing out Hungarian/EU passports there for some years (just as Romania sold virtually everyone in Moldova a Romanian/EU passport – cost $10 (1)). True, today’s Transcarpathia is basically run by the Balogh brothers and they are pro-Hungarian. Some say that Transcarpathia should return to Czechoslovakia, to which Woodrow Wilson attached it in 1919. However, the patronising and disliked Czechs ran it as a colony until 1938, when Hungary started running it again, as they had under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Czechoslovakia no longer exists anyway. As for Slovakia next-door, it appears to have no interest whatsoever in Carpatho-Russia, even though there is a Carpatho-Russian minority in Eastern Slovakia (2). Well, there are also quite a few people, like Fr Dmitry Sidor in Uzhgorod, who believe that Carpatho-Russia should be part of Russia, just as St Aleksij (Kabaljuk) pleaded it to be with Stalin in 1945.
However, apart from all this, there is another reason why the Russian Federation should take all the Ukraine. If it were to invade the Ukraine from the south-west, along the Black Sea coast west of Odessa, and from the north-western corner of the Belarussian border, Union forces could effectively cut the Ukraine off from the NATO/Nazi West permanently. Roll out the barbed wire along the border with Poland, Hungary and Romania. Letting the Nazis cross first, and then no Western armoured vehicles and tanks would have to be destroyed by the Russians. They would not even be able to get into the Ukraine and would remain stuck in Poland. Save your missiles! A strategic move like this would isolate Kiev from its Western puppeteers and all Russia would have to do is sit back until the cities of the Ukraine, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Kherson, Nikolaev, Vinnitsa, Poltava and the rest, voluntarily surrendered one by one, without any street fighting or bombardments required.
But what do I know? Rumours abound that the Russian Black Sea Fleet is preparing an amphibious landing in the south-west near Odessa in order to liberate and protect Russian Transdniestria. Rumours abound that a joint Russian-Belarussian Union force is set to liberate the Ukraine from the north-west. A pincer movement, cutting all the Ukraine off from the Nazi West, making the whole of the Ukraine into a giant cauldron? Tempting, surely. But they are only speculations. Who knows outside the President and the General Staff? Of course, if Russia were now minded to take all of the Ukraine as a result of Western aggressiveness, perhaps it ought to liberate Moldova and the three Neo-Nazi Baltic statelets as well? But again, who knows? I may well be wrong.
The Future of Russia
Let us leave Nazi fantasists to their virtual world, the video-game in which they take over the universe, in which Kiev rules Russia and Taiwan rules China, and Iran, Afghanistan and Syria voluntarily surrender to US neocons, whom they worship as cargo-cult saviours. Let us rather turn our attention to reality.
The fact is that after over 300 years of fawning Russian obsessions with the West, to the point of creating its own inferiority complex, Russia is now totally disillusioned with the lieing, thieving, backstabbing, slanderous, devious and treacherous West. This is an amazing turnaround. It means that the USA and its vassal-states in Western Europe and chimpanzee-imitators elsewhere are going to be forced to eat humble-pie and accept the new reality, that they are not exceptional at all, that they are completely outcivilised, outclassed, outpeopled, outgunned and outresourced by the Global East, South and North. In the dedollarised world the West is isolated. The West’s defeat in the Ukraine is simply the last nail in the coffin of the arrogant, ignorant, ethnocentric, colonialist, triumphalist and thoroughly corrupted West of the last 500 years and more.
The contours of the future Russia are still not clear. The Westernised Russia of Peter I, where the aristocrats spoke French or latterly English by preference, and the Sovietised Russia of Lenin and Stalin, who spoke with the language of the grandson of a German Jewish rabbi by preference, and of the old Western Putin, who spoke of joining the concert of the Western Nations and even NATO, is finished. The Illusions that we must be like the West, that the West is our model, are gone. The West contemptuously turned up its nose at primitive and barbaric Russia, so Russia embraced China and the rest of the Non-Western world, and liked it.
What is clear, however, is that Russians want some things to remain from the past. The first thing is that they do not want any treacherous oligarchs/ aristocrats, but want a meritocratic elite that patriotically serves the nation rather than itself. They also want a fair social contract, greater equality between rich and poor, with a political system that is accountable and not corrupt, they want social justice, free education and healthcare, decent pensions, a working infrastructure and reasonable housing.
And they want protection for Russians outside Russia, Belarus and Malorossija (the New Ukraine). The New Russia is the only country that is leading the struggle for liberation from the Western Yoke, its foreign policy is leading the global majority of Non-Western countries. Eventually, it will lead Western Europe too, though that must first liberate itself from US tyranny and all its perversions and come to adopt a realistic view of itself and its limitations in the real world of today. Then there will be a Common European Home, but one run from Moscow and Berlin, which is also an integral part of Eurasia, not Euramerica. Russian prophecies say that after Putin comes a new Tsar. We shall see.
17 January 2023
Notes:
1. A few years ago for a bet a Moldovan parishioner of mine paid the Romanians $10 for a passport in the name of Mickey Mouse. He duly got his passport and won his bet. So desperate were the Romanians to lay claim to Moldova.
لا يمرّ يوم منذ حرب الأطلسي على روسيا وبدء العملية العسكرية الروسية في أوكرانيا، إلا ونقرأ تقارير غربية ـ «إسرائيلية»، تشي بتحوّل معادلات الصراع التقليدية بين الغرب والشرق، وتحديداً من البوابة الإيرانية.
دخول مُسيّرات شاهد ١٣٦، وحرثها الأرض تحت أقدام الناتو، ومن ثم دخول صواريخ باليستية إيرانية الى الميدان هناك، وتموضع مستشارين إيرانيين في شبه جزيرة القرم، كلها تقارير متداولة، في الصحافة البريطانية والأميركية كانت مع الزمن تضاعف مزيداً من القلق لدى الدوائر الغربية بشكل عام، والصهيونية بشكل أخصّ.
لم تتمكن مصادر مستقلة حتى الآن على تأكيد كلّ ما سبق ذكره آنفاً، لكن القدر المتيقن والصحيح باعتراف الإيرانيين والروس حتى الآن، هو أمرين:
أولا ـ تزايد التقارب الاستراتيجي الروسي الإيراني بشكل واضح وملحوظ.
ثانيا ـ تزايد التعاون التسليحي بين موسكو وطهران بشكل استراتيجي ومكثف. المفاجأة الآن هو رواية وصول طائرات سوخوي ٣٥ الروسية المتطورة جداً الى يد الإيرانيين ـ والتي يمكن أن تحدث خللاً كبيراً في موازين القوى في الإقليم ـ كما يرد في التقرير الأميركي التالي: حيث نشر موقع صحيفة «ذي ناشيونال انتريست» الأميركي في 6/1/2023، على موقعه تحليلاً مفصلاً لأبعاد حصول إيران على صفقة طائرات: سوخوي ٣٥ الروسية المتطورة جداً. ولأهمية الموضوع فإننا نورد لكم هنا أهمّ ما جاء في المقال نصاً كما يلي:
اولا ـ انّ الموضوع أخطر بكثير مما يتصوّر المرء، إذ انّ اقتناء إيران لهذا النوع من الطائرات، المتقدّمة جداً والمتعدّدة المهمات (يمكنها القيام بعمليات القصف الجوي أو عمليات الاعتراض والاشتباك الجوي مع الطائرات والأهداف المعادية الأخرى وتقديم الدعم الناري للقوات البرية في ميادين المعارك. أما مصدر الخطورة، حسب الموقع فيتمثل في أنّ ذلك (اقتناء إيران لها) سوف يحدث خللاً في موازين القوى الجوية في الخليج، حيث سيعطي إيران مجالاً أكبر بكثير للسيطرة على أجواء الخليج.
ثانيا ـ والأخطر من ذلك أنّ عملية التبادل التجاري، بين روسيا وإيران، على قاعدة مُسيّرات وصواريخ باليستية إيرانية مقابل مقاتلات روسية، انّ مثل هذه العملية تشكل تطوّراً جيوسياسياً مهماً، إذ آنذاك يشي بقيام تحالف هجومي (بين إيران وروسيا) معادٍ للولايات المتحدة.
ثالثا ـ أما ما يزيد من خطورة هذه المقاتلة فهو: سرعتها العالية جداً، والتي تصل الى الفين وخمسمئة كيلو متر في الساعة، وقدرتها العالية جداً على المناورة، خاصة في المعارك الجوية. بالإضافة الى تجهيزها بأنظمة رادار متقدمة جداً، يصل مداها الى أربعمئة كيلو متر (باستطاعتها اكتشاف الطائرات المعادية على بعد أربعمئة كيلو متر، ما يمكنها من الاستعداد للانقضاض على العدو). كما أنّ تسلّحها بصواريخ: R 73، المخصصة للاشتباك الجوي، القادرة على ضرب الطائرات المعادية على بعد أربعين كيلو متراً، يزيد الى حد بعيد من خطورة هذه المقاتلة، المؤهلة لتأمين السيطرة الجوية، وهي القادرة على إطلاق صواريخها بعكس اتجاه طيرانها، معتمدة على تقنيات متطورة، سواءً في حجرة القيادة او تجهيزات الطيار نفسه (مجهز بأجهزة رؤية تسمح له بمشاهدة محيط الطائره على مدار ٣٦٠ درجة).
رابعا ـ وما يزيد من خطورة هذه المقاتلة هو تسلّحها بصواريخ جو/ جو، :، التي تحلق بسرعة تبلغ خمسة أضعاف سرعة الصوت وتحمل رأساً متفجراً يزن اثنين وعشرين كيلوغراماً ونصف الكيلوغرام وقادر على إصابة وتدمير ايّ هدف معادٍ (طائرة) على بعد ثمانين كيلو متراً. وهو الأمر الذي يعزز، الى حدّ بعيد، قدرة الردع الجوي الإيراني
وعلى الرغم من انّ هذا التطور (حصول إيران على مقاتلات سوخوي ٣٥) لن يقلب موازين القوى رأساً على عقب (في الخليج)، إلا انّ ذلك سيجعل العمل في الأجواء الإيرانية محفوفاً بالمخاطر.
كما انّ الأمر يفضي الى خلل في موازين القوى الجوية، بين إيران ودول الخليج، كما أنه يؤثر على احتمالات اي عملية استباقية اسرائيلية (في الأجواء الإيرانية). علماً انّ الموقع يقول بأنّ وسائل إعلام رسمية إيرانية قد أعلنت عن هذا الموضوع (الحصول على المقاتلات الروسية مقابل مُسيّرات وصواريخ إيرانية) بتاريخ ٢٨/١٢/٢٠٢٢، وقالت انّ الطيارين الإيرانيين يتدرّبون على قيادة هذه الطائرات منذ شهر ٥/٢٠٢٢.
الأمر إذن أخطر بكثير من مجرد صفقة طائرات وتعاون تسليحي بين قوتين إحداهما قوة عالمية عظمى تحارب مجموع دول الأطلسي انطلاقاً من أوكرانيا، والثانية قوة إقليمية عظمى تواجه القوة الرئيسية في التحالف الأطلسي منذ أكثر من أربعة عقود، دون هوادة، ولا يزيدها زمن المواجهة إلا إصراراً وقوةً واقتداراً.
لا بل أصبحت على رأس محور متجانس يتمثل في نحو ستة جيوش مركبة بين عمليات نظامية تقليدية وأخرى حرب غوار، استطاعت أن تهزم أميركا على بوابات عواصمها في دمشق وبغداد وصنعاء وبيروت والقدس وطهران.
ما سيثير الفزع الأكبر لدى محور الشر الأطلسي المقابل هو ما قاله قائد أحد الجيوش الأكثر اقتداراً بعد إيران وهو السيد حسن نصر الله قبل أيام: « على واشنطن كبح جماح حكومة الفاسدين والمجانين الجدد في تل أبيب، إذا ما أرادت أن تتجنّب، حرباً جديدة من طراز الحرب الأوكرانية».
هل اقتربت حرب يوم القيامة والصعود الى الجليل بشكل جماعي من قبل حلف المقاومة!؟
كلمة السر عند السيد والراسخين في علوم جغرافيا آخر الزمان.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 