Briefly Noted: Negotiations? Nyet! And More
Did you hear the one about the Peace Commission? It turned out to be some sort of Ukrainian joke. The punchline was that Russia wouldn’t be allowed to participate until its leaders had been put on trial for war crimes. Get it?
The reality, of course, is that this war in Ukraine is only one front in a global conflict that has multiple fronts: military, economic, financial, cultural, political, etc. Putin made Russia’s demands perfectly clear in his draft treaties that he offered to the collective West before the Special Military Operation began. The key then, as now, is for NATO to pull back to its pre-1997 positions—that means, before expansion into Poland and other former Soviet Bloc areas of Europe. That means that there can be no compromise over or partition of Ukraine in which NATO plays a role. That would represent a defeat for Russia so, while Russia continues to say that it’s open to a negotiated settlement, we already know what the terms will be. Russia knows that the long term goal of the collective West is the dismemberment of Russia and that it’s only option is to defeat NATO.
As an indication that Russia is committed to those draft treaty terms we can point to the recent appointment of Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president and Prime Minister, as First Deputy Chairman of the newly created Military Industrial Commission. Medvedev was already serving as Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia. The creation of this new Commission is a clear sign that Russia sees itself involved in a war with the collective West for the long haul, and thus will need to coordinate the nation’s industry to serve the paramount interest of providing the military with needed resources.
Interestingly, Russia is continuing its efforts to open fissures within NATO. For example, Russia is dangling the possibility of opening up pipeline gas supplies to Europe—Russia Willing To Resume Gas Supplies To Europe Via Yamal Pipeline—and is also exploring the possibility of repairing the Nordstream 2 pipeline that the US sabotaged. Both initiatives appear aimed at breaking Germany off from NATO, as can be seen from this map of the Yamal Pipeline:
Finally, to conclude this section, I want to draw attention to a thoughtful article by Francis Sempa on the subject of Great Power competition:
The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers – 35 Years Later
Authored by Francis Sempa va RealClearDefense.com,
Thirty-five years ago, Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was released to widespread acclaim.
It was (and is) riveting history, explaining the interaction of economics, geopolitics, and social momentum in international relations since the 16th century. One of the main themes of Kennedy’s history was the concept of imperial overstretch – that the relative decline of great powers often resulted from an imbalance between a nation’s resources and commitments. And Kennedy opined that the United States needed to worry about its own imperial overstretch.
Kennedy summarized his historical findings with a passage that has great relevance to 21st century global politics:
[I]t has been a common dilemma facing previous “number one” countries that even as their economic strength is ebbing, the growing foreign challenges to their position have compelled them to allocate more and more of their resources into the military sector, which in turn squeezes our productive investment and, over time, leads to the downward spiral of slower growth, heavier taxes, deepening domestic splits over spending priorities, and a weakening capacity to bear the burdens of defense.
The timing of Kennedy’s book was bad. It appeared in 1987, yet two years later the United States won its long Cold War victory over the Soviet Union.
How could the U.S. be in decline when it just won an historic victory in what President John F. Kennedy called the “long twilight struggle?” But Paul Kennedy’s history was sound. …
It’s been a long time since I’ve read Kennedy. Obviously, it’s highly unlikely that he could have foreseen the direction that the US has developed in. Nevertheless, it’s true that the American ruling class wantonly divested the nation of its manufacturing base in favor of a financialized economy that promised them great wealth—at the cost of beggaring the rest of the nation.
Sempa’s article examines various signs of decline—including Korea and Vietnam—in the light of Kennedy’s book. Here I’d just like to highlight two paragraphs that describe the blindness of American foreign policy in the wake of the end of the Cold War. Rather than conducting a realistic analysis of what had transpired, the US ruling class essentially declared total victory and embarked on several decades of global victory laps, leaving the nation in a far more precarious strategic position than most Americans are aware of:
… And “decline” in international politics is a relative term – a great power declines usually in relation to other powers. Decline does not mean collapse – though that sometimes happened–but it does signal a shift in the global balance of power.
And great power statesmen rarely appreciate that decline. President George H. W. Bush declared a “new world order” after the fall of the Soviet empire. His son, President George W. Bush, after the September 11, 2001, attacks made it U.S. policy to spread democracy throughout the world. He launched the Global War on Terror and the United States fought two long wars that in the end accomplished very little. In the meantime, China was rising economically and militarily, and soon would begin to flex its geopolitical muscles in the western Pacific and across Eurasia.
…
Toward the end of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Kennedy expressed the then-controversial belief that great power wars were not a thing of the past. “Those who assume that mankind would not be so foolish as to become involved in another ruinously expensive Great Power war perhaps need reminding that that belief was also widely held for much of the nineteenth century.” For three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the United States thought and acted as if great power wars were behind us. It took the Trump administration’s national security strategists – especially Elbridge Colby – to redirect our national defense strategy toward great power competition. Our sleepwalk through history ended with the simultaneous challenges of China and Russia. Paul Kennedy’s great book deserves to be remembered as a warning that the “end of history” is a dream.
Turning to the domestic front, we have a sort of mixtum gatherum of items—all worth noting.
First, I want to highlight an article that commenter Brother Ass linked to. The article is by Igor Chudov, a mathematician who has devoted his substack to the Covid phenomenon. In this article Chudov provides a brilliant, well written and organized, summary of the new study on “immune tolerance” that we examined yesterday. It’s highly recommended:
Booster-Caused IgG4 Immune Tolerance Explains Excess Mortality and "Chronic Covid"
Perhaps Giving Unproven Vaccines to Billions was a Bad Idea, After All
Of course, just as is the case with the Twitter Files, we can expect this to be ignored by the regime media, but as we’ve been seeing, the news somehow leaks out to the public in spite of regime censorship. This appears to be a very important development.
In a general way, it seems appropriate to quote Elon Musk at this point and in this regard. In this tweet, “Matt” is, of course Matt Taibbi:
Regarding Google, since Musk points directly at that company:
Which makes sense of this:
Here’s something else that Malone retweeted—there IS a cultural front to this global war:
And finally, on the HOME front:
Are Americans ready for this war on Russia with the Home Front imploding? So much going wrong.
Rising interest rates, so congress passes an inflationary monstrosity with even more borrowing.
And meanwhile the Biden Administration continues its war on fossil fuels, resulting in blackouts by the TVA, among others.
Are Americans ready for this war on Russia with the Home Front imploding? Are Americans ready for this war our government is conducting on us on the Home Front ? That would be the more pertinent question.