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Ukraine: Major “Western” Think Tank Admits Defeat
There is simply no viable alternative for Ukraine than to cooperate with Russia and to pay the price that is necessary to do so. That is why Russia is just sitting back and waiting for that simple truth to become evident.
Back in February we said:
Putin will now sit back and let the "west" squabble about who will throw tons of money into the bottomless pit that Ukraine is going to become. … Putin now just has to wait for the apple to fall from the tree.
In March:
To the growing unrest one can add the likely economic collapse that will come rather sooner than later. Any "western" help will be conditioned on austerity and impoverishing the people as well as on political reform that the oligarchs and the current politicians will not allow to happen. Under such condition further unrest is a given while Ukraine falls apart and there is no need at all for Russia to intervene to achieve such.
Russia will do nothing nefarious, it will do just nothing. Russia will not help, neither economically nor politically, unless Kiev and the "west" are willing to pay its price: A federalized Ukraine with strong regions and a weak central government.
Two month later this truth finally dawns to the mediocre thinkers in those "western" misnomed tanks. The Brookings Institute, which in general supports Obama policies, finally admits that a Ukraine without Russia is impossible and therefore cooperation with Russia on Ukraine is the Only viable way forward. It all comes back to money. The loss of access to Russian markets is already hitting and will kill Ukraine's heavy and weapon industry in east Ukraine. That will be expensive:
[A] minimum estimate is $276 billion to buy off the east. It is unthinkable that the West would pay this amount.
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The key point here is that there can be no viable Ukraine without serious contributions from both Russia and the West. Of all the options for Ukraine’s future, a Ukraine exclusively in the West is the least feasible. A Ukraine fully under Russian control and with severed links to the West is, unfortunately, possible.
A Ukraine in the "west" is impossible. A Ukraine within the Russian Federation is possible but would somewhat hurt Russia at lest in the short term. A finlandized Unkraine, in which Russia has a major say is the best possible outcome for all sides.
The upcoming sham elections of the chocolate king Poroshenko over which Russia has major sway -his markets and some of his factories are in Russia- is now just a fig leaf for the "west" to disengage. Poroshenko will be send eastward to pledge allegiance to Russia and to sign the unconditional surrender treaty. He has to:
[H]ving normal relations with Russia is a natural position for Ukraine which fits her strategic interests. For this basic reason, Ukrainian politicians haven’t the slightest chance of ignoring their past, present, or future ties with Russia, regardless of the fact that they are talking about it.
He will then have to suppress the nazis in the west Ukraine. The political part of the EU Association Agreement, which the coup government signed, will be revoked and the economic part will not be signed at all.
All this now seems to turn into a major defeat for the neo-cons who completely misjudged the situation:
Strategists in the US may not have foreseen that, because of the very delicate domestic equilibrium of so many difference forces and actors, the Ukrainian state may have simply disintegrated in the face of a drastic geopolitical turn, as it is indeed happening.
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The US finds itself once again in the awkward position of having decisively contributed to the insurgence of a certain critical phase […] where however the partners and allies on the ground […] are successively abandoned at the decisive moment ..
The neocons had planned this attack on Russia via Ukraine and Crimea and they, again, failed. That does not mean that the issue is over. In sight of defeat the neocons love to "surge" and to escalate the situation. But as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan such "surges" are unlikely to change the inevitable outcomes.
The great advantage people like ourselves, sceptics, critics of capitalism, enemies of imperialism (for such I take most of us who gather here to be) have, over those who defend the system, the think tankers, MSM pundits and the plump whores of Academic life, is that we think for ourselves. We base our opinions on observation.
We look at the world and analyse what we see.
The conformists, who defend the system not out of conviction but in order to live prosperously, win promotion and the respect of the powerful, are not encouraged to think beyond the narrow parameters of what is permitted. Thus it is that, hidebound by ideology, they tend to drift further and further away from reality until their policy prescriptions become suicidal and the Empire that they worship, for fun and profit, collapses ignominiously into puddles of blood soaked, worthless paper.
To be specific: the neo-cons, reviving the policies of the old British empire, using gunboat diplomacy (which is no diplomacy at all) to keep the natives in order, policing the sea lanes and controlling international trade and finance, employing modern equivalents of the Royal Navy and the City of London, are a century out of date. The world that they excelled in understanding, Admiral Mahan’s world, the world of maritime empires based on sea power and international trade across the oceans, is rapidly passing.
No wonder they double up-also at the behest of the billionaire oligarchs whose arses they lick-as climate change deniers. The rapid disappearance of polar ice presages a rise in sea levels which will put most modern ports out of business. And reduce the power of navies to nothing more than that of expensive, unstable rusting platforms for missiles pointed inland. The days of gunboat diplomacy are disappearing however not because of global warming but because, as the recent Sino-Russian gas deal showed, the main trading routes are no longer sea lanes but cross continental roads.
The old Empire, which became powerful because it stood astride the sea routes, and maintained its power by controlling trade and finance, is becoming peripheral. Islands, such as Britain and America are no longer secure but out of the way.
But such things, simple enough for us who have no investment in the Empire and therefore see it without illusions, are beyond the understanding of the conventional, the conformists, the Brookings Institution and the high foreheads who labour in the ideology factories of the Universities and the media. In their world the Great White Father or Queen Victoria always rules and nothing really changes.
If the US State Department wishes to take over Ukraine it will do so. Because it always prevails in the end. If the US Department of Finance wishes to bring Russia to heel, it will do so because it always does.
Or so at least it tells us: in fact it rarely does. It failed to make Iran submit. Its writs are still ignored in North Korea. China, where politeness in an ancient art, finds it harder every week to stifle a yawn or suppress a laugh when the US issues another threat. Successive and ruinously expensive military expeditions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, across south east Asia, throughout Africa have left mountains of corpses and piles of rust and rubble, cancer wards full of victims and generations of implacable disdain for their authors but nothing tangible. Nothing in the way of reward, just long term expenses only sustainable so long as the dollar maintains its reserve status. And that is wholly dependent on the goodwill and self interest of Asian banks.
As the US has fought wars, since 1945, China has elevated itself, entirely by its own efforts, from the depths of poverty and defeat. It is, once more, as it was until the 1880s and had been for the previous two millennia, the most powerful economy in the world, lacking only those armaments necessary to gunboat diplomacy, in which the US swims, vast stocks of weapons without purpose, obsolete since the H bomb was invented and useful only to destroy capital. Which China has no desire to do, because it has a perspective of future life, development and coming to grips with real problems.
Whereas the Empire is dying, blind and deluded, drugged by self regard and hypnotised by a past which it never understood because it used to be powerful enough to ignore reality and comfort itself with its racist myths.
If the real issue of the future is that of the 1% against the 99%, the issue of the present is to dispose of the nonsense that the 6% of the world’s who are the United States can continue to insist that the 94%, the masses of Asia, Africa and what was called the Third World-including the hundreds of millions newly recruited by shock therapists trained in Harvard, from the Second World-live lives which are nasty brutish and short simply in order to keep the “west” in the style to which it has grown accustomed.
The importance of “b”’s post is that it reminds us how weak the Empire is and how vulnerable it is to sustained criticism. It is not just that it can no longer control events in the world-in which it has only the power to destroy and kill- but that this is becoming so evident that its own subjects, on whose support, loyal patriotism and, ultimately, apathetic resignation it relies for continued existence, are getting very close to revolting, as the bargains that they made, as the price of their loyalty- rising living standards, full employment, old age security, educational opportunities to social mobility and access to healthcare and other social services- are dishonoured in this age of Detroit.
Posted by: bevin | May 24 2014 22:30 utc | 56
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