That appears to be the emerging reality in the wake of Zhou’s shambolic trip to the Middle East, and further disasters upon his return (does he have cancer, or is it just his dementia? Who knows—does it matter?). But to frame this in positive rather than negative terms, what we are seeing is a seemingly unstoppable process of Eurasian integration on both the energy/commercial level as well as on the international security level. And Russia is the driver in this process that is marginalizing Europe, which is descending into continuing rounds of regime change under the tutelage of Davos.
Turning to Zhou’s recent trip, in terms of humiliation for the US, the most obvious example was the Saudis clearly telling the US to pound sand regarding any increase in Saudi oil supplies. That was clearly a declaration of independence on the part of the Saudis, a clear indication that the Saudis will be following their own interests in future, and those future interests will involve Russia. There was no mistaking the meaning of the Saudi reference to consulting with OPEC and other major producers before making any changes in production.
But another key moment came after Zhou announced that the US would “never” allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. The Iranian response was to immediately state that it already has the capability, but hasn’t yet decided whether to activate that capability. That seems to me to be a clear flip of the bird to Zhou and his regime. The reality behind all this public posturing is actually far worse for the Neocon/Globalist construct. To set the stage for further discussion, commenter Cassander wrote this morning, framing the issues that all serious commentators are raising:
It seems to me extraordinary that recent events raise the possibility that our decades-long ally, Saudi Arabia, is not in Biden and Blinken’s pocket.
This has been building for some time and is now well past the stage of possibility. More below, but it’s a total game changer.
This leads to the increasingly possible conclusion that Middle East ‘peace’ will further unravel under Biden’s ‘leadership’.
I was struck to read a few days ago that Biden’s chief energy security adviser is an Israeli/American named Amos Hochman. It is hard to imagine that the Saudis would not suspect an Israeli/American energy adviser of having mixed motivations regarding the Middle East status quo, especially the toxic and existential relationship between Israel and Iran.
Now we see evidence that Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia are increasingly discussing cooperation on energy matters. Together, these three energy producing countries far exceed the US and its Western allies in terms of carbon energy production. https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-production-by-country/.
Reread Cassander’s first sentence regarding ongoing discussions between the KSA, the RF and Iran. These discussions are a fact in the real world—not an ideological construct. They could not be going on if Saudi - Iranian hostility were totally baked into geopolitical reality. Observers of Russian diplomacy will not be surprised at Russia’s role in bringing peace to such a situation, as opposed to the American version of “diplomacy”: Blinken and Nuland yanking chains around the world with bullying threats. Clearly the Saudis see Russian diplomacy and Eurasian influence as key to Saudi security going forward.
In terms of global energy security matters, these three countries have enormous power.
And, to what extent do Saudi Arabia and Iran (and Russia) exert control over the production policies of the rest of OPEC? How much additional strength does this give these three countries? How much additional strength does this give Iran in the Middle East? It is hard to imagine that Israel could be happy with this development.
Further, it seems that alliances (in respect of energy production and distribution…and otherwise) between Russia, China and India are strengthening. And Turkey (a NATO member!) is apparently actively discussing stabilization in Syria with Russia.
These global developments and their potential consequences are not being well explained in US media. What should we make of a world which is being reshaped with Russia, China, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and OPEC and the rest of the BRICS on one side, and the US, the rest of NATO, Ukraine and Israel on the other? Where does this leave us in Ukraine?
What is the likely outcome?
Yesterday was a very busy day for me, but I spent a great deal of time reading and listening about these issues. Moon of Alabama addressed the all important Iranian angle to Eurasian integration yesterday:
In The Multipolar World Iran Will No Longer Fear U.S. Sanctions
I say “all important” advisedly, because none other than Zbigniew Brzezinksi enunciated Iran’s fundamental importance—as quoted by Moon:
Washington has yet to understand that it has lost its mono-polar position that made the international sanctions which led to the nuclear deal with Iran possible. In the multi-polar world that exists now Iran can develop as it likes. Others will now ignore U.S. or EU sanctions and the threat of them is no longer useful. ...
In his book The Great Chessboard the former National Security Advisor of the United States Zbigniew Brzeziński wrote:
“Potentially, the most dangerous scenario [for America] would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.”
Joe Biden has finally managed to create that.
Complementary grievances? Another way to look at such a potential coalition, which we will do with the help of Tom Luongo and Alex Krainer, is: Complementary interests. The Neocon conceit has been that such a coalition of interests could be prevented by military muscling and economic sanctions. That era is coming to an end, and while this development has been years in the making, the spark has been Ukraine and the war on Russia.
Moon spends much of his post discussing Iran’s growing—by leaps and bounds—integration into the emerging Eurasian bloc. We covered the new North South Transport Corridor previously, as well as the future Arctic route that Russia is pioneering. As we have also discussed, and will see again, these developments may well integrate parts of Eastern Europe into this bloc. Here is Moon’s summary of positive developments for Iranian integration into the Eurasia bloc, minus details:
Iran will benefit from the new multi-polar world. It has been seeking to ally itself with the Russia and China block with added relations to a neutral India. Last year Iran became a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This year it applied for membership in BRICS.
Last month Iran's foreign minister visited India:
Amir-Abdollahian also called on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a privilege not accorded to all visiting foreign ministers. Tweeting on the meeting, Modi highlighted how “relations have mutually benefitted both the countries and have promoted regional security and prosperity.”
The official statement released by the Ministry of External Affairs highlighted the exchange of views on important issues like the Iran nuclear deal, the Ukraine conflict, and the situation in Afghanistan. …
A few months ago Iran signed a new transport agreement with its northern neighbor Azerbaijan. It will be good for both sides:
Azerbaijan is an important player in the energy field, in the energy rich Caspian Sea, and a key transit point for all axes: North - South but also East West from energy rich Central Asia.…
The better relations with Azerbaijan will also open a rail corridor towards Russia.
Another new trade route was finally opened to connect India via Iran with Russia.
This project has been on and off for many years but this month it was finally activated:
It should be noted that China will also benefit from this North - South Transport Corridor. This corridor, in which Iran is the linchpin, will fall under a Russian - Indian - Chinese security umbrella. US threats will not stop this.
It gets better—for Iran. And not just Iran. The new energy regime will likely embrace Iraq and the entire Arabian peninsula as well—that’s what the Saudi - Iranian discussions are about, all happening with Russia’s blessings and support:
But the greatest news for Iran is a new deal with Russia's Gazprom that was signed today:
...
The deal was signed during an online ceremony by the CEOs of both companies on the day Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Tehran for a summit with his Iranian and Turkish counterparts.
Gazprom will help NIOC in the development of the Kish and North Pars gas fields and also six oil fields, according to SHANA. Gazprom will also be involved in the completion of liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects and construction of gas export pipelines.
Iran sits on the world’s second-largest gas reserves after Russia, but US sanctions have hindered access to technology and slowed development of gas exports.
Gazprom is a strong partner and can not be hindered by U.S. sanctions. Iran will finally be able export more of its plentiful gas. Russia will also have a chance to work with Iran to keep the prices at a certain level. With such a large deal will also come protection. Iran will be able to call on Russia should someone start hostilities against it.
This hugely creative development was announced in the immediate aftermath of Zhou’s disastrous and humiliating trip to the Middle East. And please note that Putin met in Tehran with the head of the Axis of Evil, Iran, and … a key member of NATO, with enormous geopolitical significance—Turkiye. NATO is disintegrating as a projecting global force.
When Iran produces enough gas it can also revive the old project of a pipeline to India. This could either go through Pakistan or, as India would probably prefer, through an undersea pipeline:
A 1,300-km undersea pipeline from Iran, avoiding Pakistani waters, can bring natural gas from the Persian Gulf to India at rates less than the price of Liquefied Natural Gas available in the spot market, proponents of the pipeline said on Tuesday.
...
Despite U.S. sanctions Iran is again becoming fully integrated into its region. It is a great success and the gas and transit deals will help its economy to make some gains even as the U.S. adds new sanctions. Russia, India and China are partners who can and will ignore those.
Now, yesterday I spent hours doing a summary-cum-transcript of a discussion between Tom Luongo and Alex Krainer: Alex Krainer and the First Casualty in the New War for Oil. I use a lot of their words, but also summarize and clarify. Still there are areas in which I have reservations or disagreements, but I’ll leave that to readers. One area that I admit that I don’t fully understand what is being said concerns Israeli politics. Obviously, all these regional developments will strongly effect Israel, but Luongo’s remark is brief and, to me, opaque. Still, overall, the discussion ties regional developments, as above, to the Ukraine conflict and the larger civil war in the West between Davos led globalists and non-globalists—it’s all tied together. As you’ll see, the focus shifts to internal US matters as the discussion continues:
L: In my mind it's very clear--the Saudis have jumped ship. They're no longer under US control. They're in the process of becoming a Russian ally. Rosatom is signing nuclear power deals with the Saudis--the Saudis know what's coming. They'll have to become brokers and not just exporters.
K: In that scheme it makes no sense for the Saudis to help the US bring the price of oil down. The Saudis have every reason to cooperate with Russia and China to strengthen their bilateral ties with Iran, because Iran is the new sheriff in town there. There really isn't a very important reason for the Saudis and Iranians to be enemies. Going forward, the Saudis are probably going to be leaning more and more toward the Eurasian integration side and away from the West, which is imploding. Russia and the Saudis share the same interest.
L: The Saudis and the Iranians have been having high level talks behind the scenes almost like the day after Soleimani was killed. That's also the time that Davos started putting the screws to Israel to get Netanyahu out of power to keep the conflict going—and now Davos’ choice, Bennett, is on his way out. The Saudis and the Emirates and the whole Arabian peninsula have the same future ahead of them, which is to get on board with Eurasian integration, or try to hold out as Britain's bitches. They're setting up Dubai to be the new New York. Russia and Iran have just opened up bilateral currency trading. The Europeans and their oil sanctions--they're whistling past their own graveyard. The reality is that everything is changing. The Russians are now setting up their own oil shipping insurance. They'll take huge business from Lloyd's of London.
K: There aren't many ways for the West to derail Eurasian integration. The West has no cards left.
L: This is part of the reason why I believe that the Fed and the New York banks are off the dollar reservation and that they're actually the ones trying to liquidate Europe. You can see it in the way JPMorgan and Goldman and even Citigroup and Wells Fargo--not Morgan Stanley or BofA or New York Mellon, they're all Davos--but it's very clear to me that there's a major incentive for the American commercial banking system to split with what's going on.
The problem is that corruption in the US is so endemic that it'll take a decade to turn the ship around. But if you can get rid of the Biden junta--neutralize it for the next two and a half years--the markets will welcome the US setting a more sustainable fiscal policy. Hell, the Russians will be ecstatic! The long term play for Russia is to not become a Chinese satellite.
K: The mutual interests of Russia and America are very real and they're long term. The US needs to break out of its dependency on the UK--the vestige of the British Empire.
L: We need to break the stranglehold of the City of London and the Amsterdam-Rotterdam banking network. America has to finally declare independence. If that happens America and Russia can work out a logical relationship.
I’ve been talking with an Italian blogger, saying, You've got the Fed on one side and the Russians on the other. The Russians are destroying the Europeans on the energy front. Meanwhile the Fed is raising interest rates, forcing European debt to fall in price and rise in yield. And forcing the ECB to finally give up negative interest rates. Europe is like a rag doll caught between Russian and America. Are America and Russia coordinated? The Italian says, Absolutely they're coordinated. Putin and the Fed are actually coordinating policy to attack Davos.
It's like sitting at a big game of Risk and going, Yeah, I see what you're doing over there. The incentives are there, without actually speaking. You can't give your game away, but the confluence of interests is real.
K: Guys like JPMorgan know, if Davos prevails they're done. They won't exist much longer.
L: Take it a step further. Blackrock is obviously in charge of the current WH. Who was in charge of the Trump WH? Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. Mostly Goldman Sachs, but also a lot of JPMorgan guys in there. Who has been surprisingly on "our" side during "all of this" recently? I have to trade WITH Goldman now.
It's a weird thing that's going on here. When you think about four years of the Trump administration--Mnuchin was the Treasury Secretary for the ENTIRE Trump administration. There were a lot of high level talks between the Trump administration and the Russians. Multiple meetings.
K: Yeah, and did you know that the Russian top military brass and a group of American generals who had weekly conference calls? Throughout the war in Syria? I'm pretty sure that those talks are continuing in some way, maybe not on the official level. On the official level you have people like Antony Blinken who brags about pressing MBS on LGBT issues--I mean, what planet are you living on, man?
L: Blinken is in league with Davos and their goal is to engineer a dollar crisis. The Fed turned around and said: No. We're pulling the plug on the Eurodollar market.
K: I agree but I think it goes further. I think Davos actually wants to break up the US. They're pushing agendas that lead to partitioning the US. That would be a tragic mistake. I'd like people to picture where Russia was in the year 2000 when Putin became president. The most corrupt country on earth with a completely broken economy. Today, Russia is what Davos would call a worthy adversary. It's a global superpower--in just 22 years.
The US has much greater dynamism. Once this crisis blows over ... I think the Trump administration may have made a calculated step of vacating the WH in spite of the fraud, because this crisis was a mathematical certainty. It would either be a deflationary debt spiral with a depression or a hyper inflationary crisis. Maybe they decided--Let's have it on Biden's watch, on the Dems' watch because then we're gonna sweep them out. The reason I want to say this is because I believe Americans have a lot to look forward to. At the end of this crisis will come REAL independence and a reestablishment of the republic and a spectacular renaissance and rise in prosperity.
L: ... We have to give up Empire. I think Americans are ready to do that.
K: The Empire is the parasite on the US. The American people get no benefit from empire, only costs. The benefits accrue to Wall St. and the City of London. The American people pay in blood and treasure and get no benefit.
L: The only way to defeat the Left that wants to break the US up is to take away their wealth, bankrupt them, and that's why it's necessary to break the ECB.
I think the Saudis understand that.
K: The Saudis indubitably understand it, the Iranians understand it, the Indians understand it, the Chinese understand it, and the Russians understand it.
L: The Pakistani people, Imran Khan, understand it, and Pakistan is so important in this.
Guess who's meeting this morning? Putin is meeting with Iran and Erdogan--IN TEHRAN. Do we need to know any more?
K: And they just inaugurated the new trade route that goes from Mumbai up to St. Petersburg. It completely replaces the Suez Canal, Suez loses strategic value. The transit time is going to be reduced from 46 days to 26 or 29 and the cost will fall by about 30%. That's massive.
L: I think Davos overplayed their hand with Covid and got the Indians on board with the trade route.
K: Once the US pulled out of Afghanistan the individual regional states can come to terms on the merit of the case, rather than worrying about how NATO will react.
L: Which is why not only Iran and Argentina but also Egypt is joining BRICS. The Danube river, once Russia controls Odessa, will allow former Warsaw Pact countries to leave the EU. The Danube route from Eastern and Central Europe will allow those countries to cross the Black Sea to the North-South corridor [Russia-Iran-India] or exit to the Mediterranean, where Russia already has a port at Tartus [Syria], and on to Suez. The Russians are going to take Odessa--it's more important than Kharkov. Odessa allows the Eastern Europeans to leave the EU and Russia will protect their trade.
K: From the day the Russian intervention in Ukraine started, it was clear the West had lost. If this had been a tennis game it would have been 6-0, 6-0.
L: But remember, if America falls then everything will be bad. America is not the Great Satan. There are aspects of America, of its government, that need to be gone. But Davos wouldn't be seeking to break up the US if doing that wouldn't work to their advantage.
K: The US has been infiltrated since about the beginning of the 20th century and its legitimate institutions have been subverted to the interests of the British Empire, which simply used the US for its military power and wealth. But the US still has healthy republican foundations that can be resurrected, but it has to remain a union. It must not allow itself to be broken up.
This is my point about the just ended SCOTUS term. Healthy republican foundations, which the SCOTUS is attempting—to the extent that it can do so as an institution—to nurture and strengthen.
L: The key for the Fed to establish US independence is to break the Eurodollar market by destroying LIBOR as the global benchmark for pricing debt. Once that happens and the Chinese give up the peg to the Hong Kong dollar, then the Fed can let the price of gold to go up. But first you have to destroy the ability to create "soft dollars" to buy influence. Then we can return to some sort of hard currency system.
Finally, I highly recommend this very long but fascinating video that covers similar issues and more—there’s just so much going on:
Great article, as usual, Mark. I'm European, so I guess I'll have to invest in a pair of brown trousers! There seems to be hope for everyone except us! I was intrigued by the statement that "the Trump administration may have made a calculated step of vacating the WH in spite of the fraud, because this crisis was a mathematical certainty." I've come round to thinking that too. Trump's econ figures were pretty good but the massive underlying problems meant that it couldn't last. Why not indeed left Biden and the evil Dems take the wrap? If this goes on (and it will), they won't be electable for decades. As for the Euros' actions against Putin, I say again: What. Were. They. Thinking?
Now you've gone and done it, Mark. You have pulled the curtain away to reveal the ugly realities we face. I would take issue with the implication that the parties calculated what has happened and would suggest one thing lead to another. Trump did not abandon the White House, and he would much rather the steal had never taken place. Knowing full well that certain excesses in our economy would have to be corrected and knowing full well that this would cause much pain to the American public, he would rather have managed this gradually to minimize the effects. Now he is sitting back awaiting the shambles when everything collapses, and is then ready to step in if the public so desires. The Uniparty, for their part, following their Global masters and being well paid in the process, saw an opportunity for a takeover of the American government, and now are becoming increasingly authoritarian both to solidify their control and to prevent any reckoning for their past misdeeds. Any legitimate American government would have prosecuted at least a handful of the egregious allegations of election fraud, and if they cleverly instigated a 'Reichstag fire' insurrection on January 6, they would have buried it and not be conducting sham one-sided 'trials', while denying habeas corpus and humane treatment to detainees who were invited into the Capitol by the police.
As for specific points I disagree on, it will not take a decade to root out the corruption. When we hit the iceberg and things collapse, a regime change exposes those currently in power to all sorts of criminal charges, and there will be a rush of those involved looking to plea bargain. Blackrock may be in charge of the current White House, but Trump was in charge of the Trump White House. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan profited by the triumph of real capitalism, as did the American public. It was not only Russian top military brass and American generals who had weekly conference calls, but diplomacy was carried on with even countries perceived as enemy, such as North Korea. Love your suggestion that "Davos actually wants to break up the US." Also "Davos overplayed their hand." SCOTUS and the Fed are starting to resist. So must we. AS you say, Americans have a lot to look forward to. Did any of us ever want Empire? We will have a place in a New World Order that does not include Davos or Democrats.