By Guest author Harry Glasbeek

When interviewed on Great Game on Russia’s state-run Channel One (8 Dec. 2022), Russia’s Foreign Minister, Secretary Lavrov, was given ample opportunity to set out Russia’s views on its role in the Ukraine and on the differences his country has with its many adversaries.

The interview is long and Lavrov is aided by presenters who formulate helpful and non-probing questions. The interviewers manifestly work within a framework of “Russia good, others not so good”. That said, the interview repays a visit because (a), it is a full, un-doctored, setting-out of the Russian position, one not adorned by disparaging adjectives or cynical, debate-foreclosing, remarks (b), the length and breadth of the interviewee’s responses challenge our repeated assertions that the Russian people are less informed by their (naturally self-serving) leaders than we are by our (not so self-serving) leaders and (c), Secretary Lavrov shows himself to be a man in full command of his brief, well-versed in the politics and history of international affairs.

We in the West (a peculiar expression as it includes nations like Australia and Japan) have become accustomed to see the Ukraine war as having started with the invasion, indeed the unprovoked and illegal invasion, by a wannabe imperialist Russia of sovereign Ukraine. The unsurprisingly alternative Russian perspective, as proffered by Lavrov, is that Russia is engaging in a special military operation. This operation was necessitated by conduct by Western nations, says Lavrov, conduct which Russia deemed inimical to the security promised to Russia by these very same nations and which presented a threat to Russian nationals for whose welfare Russia is responsible.

Lavrov acknowledges that, not only do the western nations not accept this justification for the invasion/special operation, they also have formed a vigorous bloc which positively rejects any assertion by Russia that it may have some meritorious concerns about its future. He points to the novelty of the legitimacy the western bloc claims for its stance. He observes that, after the demise of the Soviet, the same West, led by the US, saw an opportunity to co-opt resource-rich Russia into becoming a junior partner in the western nations’ agenda. They thought that Russia would be in the “billion’s pocket” (sic) and would internalise western values and norms (shades of what the US expected to happen in China?). Contemporary Russia rejects its assigned role as a lesser nation. No longer able to rely on economic sway, Lavrov argues, the western bloc is now forced to claim that, under threat of punishment, Russia should subject itself to a system of order by which all nation states are to abide, a rules-based international order. It is a system so well-established, avers the western bloc, that it has earned its own acronym: RBIO.

Secretary Lavrov asks: What rules? Whose rules? Mischievously, possibly with his forked tongue in both his cheeks, he tells his viewing audience that he has asked western leaders for a list of those rules but that they have never produced such a list.

Lavrov knew that rules could not be produced as RBIO is a conceptual framework, rather than a specific, unchanging set of rules and norms. Scholars (Lake, Martin, Risse) suggest that it first began to make its presence felt in the aftermath of World War II. A system of agreed-upon rules of conduct, embedded in relatively autonomous institutions, would govern conduct and thereby rein in the exercise of unjustifiable power, especially by the more powerful nations. From the beginning, the rules and institutions identified as the right ones were to be based on the principles of political and economic liberalism, the promotion of market economies, individualistic human rights. The institutions typically thought of as RBIO instruments included (and include) the UN, IMF, WTO, World Bank, and the like.

Unsurprisingly, as the battles for decolonisation raged and the Cold War was hot, these ideas did not meet with universal approval in emerging nations and in those spheres which were intent on the rejection of market capitalism. This is why some commentators, such as John Mearsheimer, said that it is more accurate to say that the system of RBIO only really took off after the Cold War ended. But it never got as total grip on the world’s imagination. It has always been contested, never more so than today.

Many of the nations freed from direct colonial oppression became newly subjugated by the practices of the IMF, the WTO, the World Bank; in Europe, too, the Troika, the main European instruments of the RBIO, bared its teeth during the financial crises of 2007-8 and several sovereign nations lost many of their democratic and self-governing rights. They suffered materially.

In addition, it has become abundantly clear to many peoples that core leaders of the RBIO club of nations (notably the US) have not felt themselves reined in by the rules they promote. There is no space to elaborate but consider: Vietnam, Iraq, Libya; Haiti, Nicaragua; drone attacks on suspected, but not proven, enemies of the state; the practice of exporting torture, called rendition; the use of economic sanctions on individuals, on countries whose regimes which offend the US (James Elmeraji writing in Investopedia jibed that “it’s not a good idea to get on the United States’ bad side)…

The RBIO is not seen as delivering economic welfare by many of the poorest countries and its chief promoters frequently undermine the legitimacy of the liberal political and economic principles of the RBIO system. It is probable that many sense that they can get more material assistance from nation states considered illiberal, maverick avoiders of the supposedly transcendent RBIO, such as China. As a corollary, they are not inclined to think of different political and economic regimes, those not devoted to the RBIO concepts, as inferior in any way. From such a vantage point, it makes sense for many nations and political actors to believe that the claim that countries should be held to account for not adhering to the rather malleable RBIO system to be a ploy by one bloc of competing nations to validate its claim to political and economic dominance. It is not a principled, globally shared, stance. It is more like sloganeering. This was, I believe, Lavrov’s point.

This does not mean, of course, that Lavrov’s justification for Russia’s special military operation is acceptable. He and Russia have an agenda and, while his interviewers did not test them, he also asks the world to accept a series of assumptions which are eminently challengeable. The understanding that the Western bloc’s rigid insistence on a set of unshared principles is not justifiable should not let us turn a blind eye to others’ inexcusable behaviours and arguments.

Lavrov’s contribution is that he alerts us to the fact that we should not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the blandishments of a universal of the RBIO’s rightful reign. We should add that like-minded critics should also interrogate similar vague and unsatisfying self-serving mantras offered by opponents of the RBIO. Sloganeering of any kind, ours and theirs, is intended to gull us into unthinking support for one stance over all others. It makes compromise unattainable. People are dying; lives and livelihoods destroyed.

Sloganeering is war-mongering; we need more peace-mongering.

READ MORE:

https://johnmenadue.com/rules-based-international-order-what-rules-whose-rules/

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GUSNOTE: PUTIN IS NOT A THUG, A THIEF OR A WHATEVER GANGSTER. THIS IMAGE WRONGLY PORTRAYED BY DECENT BUT UNINFORMED JOURNALISTS IS THE MIRROR OF OUR OWN WESTERN ATTITUDE WHICH HAS AT ITS CORE THE WILL TO DOMINATE THE ENTIRE PLANET. SEE: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/1947 AND 

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The China-Russia axis are lighting the fires of a structural insurrection against the West across much of the Rest of World. Its fires are aimed at ‘boiling the frog slowly’

A top US Marine General, James Bierman, in a recent interview with the Financial Times, explained in a moment of candour how the US is “setting the theatre” for possible war with China, whilst casually admitting as an aside, how US defence planners had been busy inside Ukraine years ago, “earnestly preparing” for war with Russia — even down to the “pre-positioning of supplies”, identifying sites from which the US might operate support, and sustain operations. Simply put, they were there,readying the battle space for years.

No surprise really, as such military responses flow directly from the core US strategic decision to actuate the 1992 ‘WolfowitzDoctrine’ that the US must plan and preemptively act, to disable any potential Great Power — well before it reaches the point at which it can rival or impair US hegemony.

NATO today has progressed to war with Russia in a battlespace, which in 2023, may or may not stay limited to Ukraine. Simply put the point is that the shift to ‘War’ (whether incremental or not) marks a fundamental transition from which there is no going back to ab initio — ‘war economies’ in essence, are structurally different to the ‘normal’ from which the West began, and to which it has grown accustomed over recent decades. A war society — even if only partly mobilised — thinks and acts structurally differently from peacetime society.

War is not about gentlemanly conduct… either. Empathy for others is its first casualty — the latter being a requirement for sustaining a fighting spirit.

Yet, the carefully curated fiction in Europe and the US continues that nothing really has, or will ‘change’: we are in a temporary ‘blip’. That’s all.

Zoltan Pozsar, the influential finance ‘oracle’ at Credit Suisse, has already made the point in his latest War and Peace essay (subscription only) that War is well underway – by simply listing the events of 2022:

• The G7’s financial blockade of Russia (The West setting the battle space)
• Russia’s energy blockade of the EU (Russia begins setting its theatre)
• The U.S.’s technology blockade of China (America pre-positioning of sites to sustain operations)
• China’s naval blockade of Taiwan, (China demonstrating preparedness)
• The U.S.’s “blockade” of the EU’s EV sector with the Inflation Reduction Act. (The US defence planners preparing for future ‘supply-lines)
• China’s “pincer movement” around all of OPEC+ with the growing trend of invoicing oil and gas sales in renminbi. (The Russia-China ‘Commodity Battlespace’).

This list amounts to one major geo-political ‘upset’ occurring, on average, every two months — moving the world decisively away from the so-called ‘normal’ (for which so many in the Consuming Class ardently yearn) to an intermediate state of War.

Pozsar’s list shows that the tectonic plates of geo-politics are seriously ‘on the move’ — shifts, which are accelerating and becoming ever more intertwined, yet that still remain far from arriving at any settled place. ‘War’ will likely be a major disruptor (at the very least), until some equilibrium is established. And that may take some years.

Ultimately, ‘War’ does make its impact on the conventional public mindset — albeit slowly. It seems to be fear of the impact on an unprepared mindset that is behind the decision to prolong Ukraine’s suffering, and thus trigger the War of 2023: An admission of failure in Ukraine is seen to risk spooking volatile western markets (i.e. higher interest rates for longer). And frank-talking represents a hard option for a western world — used to ‘easy decisions’, and ‘can kicking’ — to take.

Pozsar, being a finance guru, understandably is focussed in his essay on finance. But conceivably, the reference to Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics and Crashes is therefore not whimsical, but included as a hint to the possible ‘hit’ to the conventional psyche.

In any event, Pozsar leaves us four key economic takeaways (with brief comments added):

1. War is history’s principle driver of inflation, and the bankruptcy for states. (Comment: war-driven inflation and Quantitative Tightening (QT) enacted to fight inflation, are policies working in radical opposition to each other. Central Banks’ role attenuates to supporting war needs — at the expense of other variables – in wartime.
2. War implies an effective and expandable industrial capacity for producing weapons (rapidly), which, in itself, requires secure supply-lines to feed that capacity. (A quality which the West no longer possesses, and which is costly to recreate);
3. Commodities which often serve as collateral to loans become scarce – and with that scarcity, show up as commodity ‘inflation’;
4. And finally, War cuts new financial channels i.e. “the m-CBDC Bridge project” (see here).

The point needs underlining again: War creates different financial dynamics and shapes a different psyche. More importantly, ‘War’ is not a stable phenomenon. It can start with petty tit-for-tat strikes on a rival’s infrastructure and then — with every incremental ‘mission creep’ — slip along the curve towards full war. NATO is not just mission creeping in its war on Russia, it is mission jogging — fearing a Ukraine humiliation in the wake of the earlier Afghanistan débacle.

The EU hopes to halt that slide well short of full war. It is nonetheless a very slippery slope. The point of War is to inflict pain and attrit your enemy. To this extent it is open to mutation. Formal sanctions and caps on energy quickly metamorphose into the sabotage of pipelines or the seizure of tankers.

Russia and China however, are certainly not naïve, and have been busy setting their own theatre, ahead of a potential wider clash with NATO.

China and Russia can now claim to have built a strategic relationship, not only with OPEC+, but with Iran and key gas producers.

Russia, Iran, and Venezuela account for about 40% of the world’s proven oil reserves, and each of them are currently selling oil to China for renminbi at a steep discount. GCC countries account for another 40% of proven oil reserves — and are being courted by China to accept renminbi for their oil — in exchange for transformative investments.

This is a significant new battlespace being readied — ending Dollar hegemony through boiling the frog slowly.

The contesting party made the initial strike, sanctioning half of OPEC with those 40% of the world’s oil reserves. That thrust failed: the Russian economy survived — and unsurprisingly — the sanctions ‘lost’ those states to Europe, ‘handing them’ over instead to China.

China meanwhile is courting the other half of OPEC with an offer that is hard to refuse: “Over the next “three to five years”, China will not only pay for more oil in renminbi – but more significantly, ‘will pay’ with new investments in downstream petrochemical industries in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the GCC more broadly. It will, in other words, build out the successor generation economy” for these fossil fuel exporters whose energy sell-by date approaches.

The key point here is that in the future, much more ‘value-added’ (in the course of production) will be captured locally — at the expense of industries in the West. Pozsar cheekily calls this: “Our commodity, your problem… Our commodity, our emancipation”. Or, in other words, the China-Russia axis are lighting the fires of a structural insurrection against the West across much of the Rest of World.

Its fires are aimed at ‘boiling the frog slowly’ — not just that of the dollar hegemony, but also that of a now uncompetitive western economy.

Emancipation? Yes! Here is the crux: China is receiving Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan energy at a big 30% discount.Meanwhile, Europe still gets energy for its industry — but only at a big mark-up. In short, more, and occasionally all, product added-value will be captured by cheap-energy ‘friendly’ states, at the expense of the uncompetitive ‘unfriendlies’.

“China – the nemesis – paradoxically has been a big exporter of high mark-up Russian LNG to Europe, and India a big exporter of high mark-up Russian oil and refined products such as diesel – to Europe. We should expect more [of this in the future] across more products – and invoiced not just in euros and dollars, but also renminbi, dirhams, and rupees’ ‘, Poszar suggests.

It may not look so obvious, but it is a financial war. If the EU is content to take the ‘easy way’ out of its fall into uncompetitiveness (via subsidies to allow for high-mark-up imports), then as Napoleon once remarked when observing an enemy making a mistake: Observe silence!

For Europe, this means much less domestic production – and more inflation — as price inflating alternatives are imported from the East. The West taking the ‘easy decision’ (since its renewable strategy has not been well thought through), likely will find the arrangement to be at the expense of growth in the West — a course prefiguring a weaker West, in the near future.

The EU will be particularly hard-hit. It has elected to become dependent on US LNG, just at the moment that production from US shale fields has peaked, with what output there is likely ear-marked to the US domestic market.

Thus, as general Bierman outlined how the US prepared the battlespace in Ukraine, Russia and China and the BRICS planners have been busy setting their own ‘theater’.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be like it ‘is’: Europe’s stumble towards calamity reflects an embedded psychology of the Western ruling élite. There is no strategic reasoning, nor ‘hard-decisions’ being taken in the West at all. It is all narcissistic Merkelism (hard decisions postponed, and then ‘fudged’ through subsidy handouts). Merkelism is so called after Angela Merkel’s reign at the EU, where fundamental reform was invariably postponed.

There is no need for thinking-things-through, or for hard decisions, when leaders are held by the unshakable conviction that the West IS the centre of the Universe. It is sufficient to postpone, awaiting the inexorable to unfold itself.

The recent history of US-led forever-wars is further evidence of this western lacuna: These zombie wars drag on for years with no plausible justification, only to be unceremoniously dropped. The strategic dynamics were easier suppressed and forgotten however, when fighting insurgency wars — as opposed to fighting two well-armed, peer competitor-states.

The same dysfunctionality has been apparent in many slow-rolling western crises: Nevertheless, we persist… because protecting the fragile psychology of our leaders — and an influential sector of the public — takes precedence. The inability to countenance losing drives our élites to prefer sacrifice by their own people, rather than see their delusions exposed.

Hence, reality has to be abjured. So, we live a nebulous between-times — so much happening, but so little movement. Only when the outbreak of crisis can no longer be ignored — by even the MSM and Tech censors — might some real effort be made to address root causes.

This conundrum however, places a huge burden on the shoulders of Moscow and Beijing to manage the War escalation in a careful fashion — in face of a West for whom losing is intolerable.

READ MORE:

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2023/01/13/the-2023-war-setting-the-theatre

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23_Y9mez87k

United Nations spokesman Farhan Haq recently faced a puzzling question from Chinese journalist Edward Xu, who asked Haq to explain the difference between the Russian occupation of a part of Ukraine with the United States’ military occupation of a third of Syria. Haq’s response went viral, as he actually asserted that the United States has no troops stationed in Syria. Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss the UN representative’s epic level of misinformation.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9VEllBAMsQ

Jeffrey Sachs Interivew - US Views China as a Potential Threat #jeffsachs #jeffreysachs

Jeffrey Sachs is a well-known American economist, academic, and public policy analyst who has made significant contributions to the fields of sustainable development and economic development. He has held various prestigious positions throughout his career, including serving as the director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and as a special advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals. Sachs has authored numerous books and articles on topics related to economics, poverty reduction, and sustainable development.

Website: jeffsachs.org

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfSS-dzucsU

How to Stop WORLD WAR III...

[GUS SAYS: DISMANTLE NATO AND KISS]....

The original goal of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), according to its first Secretary General, was "to keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Today, the Soviet Union is gone, the United States is dominant, and Germany is de-industrializing. Has NATO achieved its goals? If so, why does it still exist? And why did Fidel Castro call it “the most perfidious instrument of repression known to mankind”?

For Episode 6 of “The International,” a world-spanning video series brought to you by Jacobin and the @ProgIntl, journalist Abby Martin examines NATO’s global footprint and explains why this “defensive alliance” might end up causing World War III.

Subscribe to the channel, hit the like button and notification bell to stay up to date with upcoming episodes of “The International.”

Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. Find out more at https://jacobin.com/ and https://twitter.com/jacobin.

The Progressive International unites, organizes, and mobilizes progressive forces around the world. Find out more at https://progressive.international/ and https://twitter.com/progintl.

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MAKE A DEAL PRONTO BEFORE THE SHIT HITS THE FAN:

NO NATO IN "UKRAINE" (WHAT'S LEFT OF IT)

THE DONBASS REPUBLICS ARE NOW BACK IN THE RUSSIAN FOLD — AS THEY USED TO BE PRIOR 1922. THE RUSSIANS WON'T ABANDON THESE AGAIN.

THESE WILL ALSO INCLUDE ODESSA, KHERSON AND KHARKIV.....

CRIMEA IS RUSSIAN — AS IT USED TO BE PRIOR 1954

A MEMORANDUM OF NON-AGGRESSION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND THE USA.

EASY.

THE WEST KNOWS IT.

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