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How Russia Can (And Will?) De-NATO-size Europe
In a video published yesterday Gonzalo Lire, currently under house arrest in Karkov, is asking a very interesting question:
What Happens To Europe When Russia Wins? (vid)
Lira states, and I agree with him, that Russia will win the war in the Ukraine, take the south and east to likely create a new country and leave the rest of the cadaver for Poland, Hungary, Romania, Lithuania and others to feast on.
But then what?
The U.S. controlled NATO will still be there. It is practically guaranteed that the U.S. will use it to push for revenge for the loss of Ukraine. This will be done by a steady buildup of troops and long range missile capabilities along Russia's Nordic and Baltic borders and additional naval threats in the northern Arctic as well as the southern Black Sea. Some ten years from now the U.S. would be able to again try to wage a big (proxy) war against Russia. Then with a decent chance to win.
No negotiations or peace agreements will prevent that. The U.S. is famously non-agreement-capable (недоговороспособны). It has broken ALL promises and agreements it has ever made with Russia.
Dozens of U.S. and European luminaries had promised to Russia that NATO would expand 'not one inch' towards Russia. Look where its borders are now. The U.S. and the EU have confiscated huge amounts of Russian state owned money. They have even taken, in contradiction to their own constitutions, the properties of private Russian citizens just because those persons happen to be Russian.
In 2014 Germany and France signed on to guarantee elections for a peaceful regime change in Kiev. A day later the fascists stormed the Ukrainian parliament and those guarantees turned out to be totally worthless. The U.S. simply said fuck the EU. It does not give shit about European interests. Germany and France later negotiated and signed the Minsk-1 and Minsk-2 agreements. They continued to feed billions of EU money into Ukraine even as the Ukrainian government, controlled by the U.S., did nothing to fulfill them. Yes, they were that stupid.
The U.S. has installed 'missile defense' systems in Poland and Romania which are in fact designed to lob Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM) onto Moscow. These are a serious danger to Russia.
Even after Ukraine is finished, NATO and its EU proxies will continue to be a danger to Russia. Both have proven to be unable to keep promises. Russia in consequence will have to rearrange them.
Russia could do that by force. But there will be no march towards Riga, Warsaw, Berlin or Paris. (Remember that Russia has been there and done that which every time has led to major changes in Europe.)
Russia has announced its strategic aims. In December 2021 Russia set forth two agreements which the U.S. and NATO. They included demands for a future arrangement in Europe that would guarantee indivisible security for all. On January 21 2022 the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was to meet Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in Geneva to talk about Russia's proposals. Just minutes before that meeting the Foreign Ministry of Russia held a news conference to answer media questions:
Question: What will Russia’s demand that NATO return to the 1997 framework mean for Bulgaria and Romania? Will they have to leave NATO, remove US bases from their territory, or something else?
Answer: You mentioned one of the cornerstones of Russia’s initiatives. It was deliberately set forth with utmost clarity to avoid any ambiguity. We are talking about the withdrawal of foreign forces, equipment, and weapons, as well as taking other steps to return to the set-up we had in 1997 in non-NATO countries. This includes Bulgaria and Romania.
Reuters reported:
MOSCOW (Reuters) – The security guarantees that Russia seeks from the West include provisions requiring NATO forces to leave Romania and Bulgaria, the Russian foreign ministry said on Friday.
Moscow has demanded legally binding guarantees from NATO that the bloc will stop its expansion and return to its 1997 borders.
Replying to a question about what that would mean for Bulgaria and Romania, which joined NATO after 1997, the ministry said Russia wanted all foreign troops, weapons and other military hardware withdrawn from those countries.
After more than 20 years of watching Lavrov and Putin everyone should know that they do not publicly set out aims if they have no way to achieve them. They always have well thought out plans before announcing their goals.
So how can Russia actually achieve a retreat of NATO back to its 1997 borders?
Sanctions. The U.S. has used its economic and military powers to sanction this or that country that did not do as it was told to do by Washington. Unless enacted by the UN Security Council such sanctions have no basis in international law. Despite that the U.S. even used secondary sanctions. It threatened sanctions against Europe, and everyone else, as it ordered them to not deal with Iran or Venezuela.
Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod – 22:45 UTC · Jun 5, 2022
The US is thinking about "allowing" Europe and Venezuela to trade together. Think about what this story tells us about global power relations and who is in charge.
Bloomberg @business – 12:13 UTC · Jun 5, 2022
The US could allow Eni and Repsol to ship Venezuelan oil to Europe as soon as July to make up for Russian crude, Reuters reported trib.al/fQ10QlX
Russia can do similar. But as it always follows international law, it will have to do it in a slightly different way.
Russia is a superpower in that it produces all kinds of raw materials the world, and especially the 'west', needs. Europe, and especially Germany, is depending on natural gas and oil from Russia. Energy prices in Germany will at least triple if it is completely cut off from Russian supplies.
German industry leader have loudly announced that they will have to close shop if the current European policies of restricting Russian energy supplies continues. The chemical giants BASF and Bayer will have to move to some other country. Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW will have to stop all production in Europe. Steel production would fall to zero. Lack of fertilizer would lead to dependency on foreign agriculture.
Mass unemployment would follow. Millions will be in the street to protest against rolling blackouts, freezing apartments and hyperinflation.
Russia can achieve this at any time. It simply has to stop supplying gas and oil to Europe.
Despite six European 'sanction packages' against Russia there has yet to be a reciprocal response from Russia. It may still hope that European leaders will recognized the deadly game the U.S. is playing with them.
Unfortunately the leaders of Europe are dumb and compromised. The 'olive green' German Minister for Economic Destruction Robert Habeck still dreams of bringing Russia's economy to its knees even as the ruble rises and Germany's economy is falling apart. Chancellor Olaf Scholz was never the brightest bulb in the room. He is deeply compromised through his involvement in the Wireguard scandal. He was the Minister of Finance when reports of the company's billion dollar fraud were suppressed by his ministry. And don't get me going about Ursula van der Leyen who has been proven to be corrupt and incompetent ever since she took her first public office. U.S. secret services will know of many other crimes these people have been involved in.
The current ideological leaders of Europe will have to be replaced by clean ones who follow the German tradition of Realpolitik:
Realpolitik (German: [ʁeˈaːlpoliˌtiːk]; from German real 'realistic, practical, actual', and Politik 'politics'), refers to enacting or engaging in diplomatic or political policies based primarily on considerations of given circumstances and factors, rather than strictly binding itself to explicit ideological notions or moral and ethical premises. In this respect, it shares aspects of its philosophical approach with those of realism and pragmatism. It is often simply referred to as "pragmatism" in politics, e.g. "pursuing pragmatic policies" or "realistic policies".
Only with new and decent leaders will Europe come to its senses.
Russia can help to achieve that while at the same time solving its NATO problem.
It can publicly declare that:
THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER RUSSIAN SUPPLIES OF ANY KIND TO EUROPE UNTIL IT BREAKS WITH WASHINGTON.
What would follow?
Millions of discussions under candlelight would be held in freezing and hungry European households. Political opinions would change. Governments would be replaced with more pragmatic ones.
France and Germany would either have to leave NATO or become impoverished and irrelevant. U.S. troops on European grounds would be asked to leave or be attacked and thrown out by an enraged public. Germany would prohibit the U.S. military from using its airspace. The U.S would lose its grip over the continent.
That can't happen? Well, Gonzalo Lira disagrees and so do I. In early February, before the Russian intervention in Ukraine, I had warned of the consequences of current 'western' policies:
The U.S. strategy to 'fix' Russia in Europe by imposing 'crushing sanctions' on it to then attack China is failing. That is because it was completely misconceived.
Russia is the most autarkic country in the world. It produces nearly everything it needs and has highly desirable products that are in global demand and are especially needed in Europe. Russia also has huge financial reserves. A sanctions strategy against Russia can not work.
The consequences for Europe were obvious:
The U.S. and its proxies in the EU and elsewhere have put up very harsh sanctions on Russia to damage its economy.
The final intent of this economic war is regime change in Russia.
The likely consequence will be regime change in many other countries.
…
All energy consumption in the U.S. and EU will now come at a premium price. This will push the EU and the U.S. into a recession. As Russia will increase the prices for exports of goods in which it has market power – gas, oil, wheat, potassium, titanium, aluminum, palladium, neon etc – the rise in inflation all around the world will become significant.
…
[Russia and China] have spent more brain time on the issue than the U.S. has.
The Europeans should have acknowledged that instead of helping the U.S. to keep up its self-image of a unipolar power.
It will take some time for the new economic realities to settle in. They will likely change the current view of Europe's real strategic interests.
Europe is fortunate in that Russia, even before re-entering the Ukraine, has offered a very decent alternative to U.S. hegemony in Europe:
A man who has Putin's ear, Professor Sergey Karaganov who is the honorary chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, has written an op-ed that points to an alternative.
The piece was requested by and supposed to be published in the Financial Times, which means that it is directed at the European leadership. But the FT has now rejected it for unstated reasons. It was then published in the Russia in Global Affairs journal and has now been re-published by RT.
…
[Karaganov] states:
The security system in Europe, built largely by the West after the 1990s, without a peace treaty having been signed after the end of the previous Cold War, is dangerously unsustainable.
There are a few ways to solve the narrow Ukrainian problem, such as its return to permanent neutrality, or legal guarantees from several key NATO countries not to ever vote for further expansion of the bloc. Diplomats, I assume, have a few others up their sleeves. We do not want to humiliate Brussels by insisting on repudiating its erroneous plea for the open-ended expansion of NATO. We all know the end of the Versailles humiliation. And, of course, the implementation of the Minsk agreements.
But the task is wider: to build a viable system on the ruins of the present. And without resorting to arms, of course. Probably in the wider Greater Eurasian framework. Russia needs a safe and friendly Western flank in the competition of the future. Europe without Russia or even against it has been rapidly losing its international clout. That was predicted by many people in the 1990s, when Russia offered to integrate with, not in, the continent’s systems. We are too big and proud to be absorbed. Our pitch was rejected then, but there is always a chance it won’t be this time.
That last paragraph is the gist of Russia's real strategic aims. They require to destroy the current system of U.S. hegemony over Europe. Europe will have to be de-NATO-sized. Regime changes in European countries will probably be necessary to see to that.
Russia's leaders now have a once in a century chance to achieve those aims. They will be condemned by their compatriots if the refrain from doing so. The U.S. has no way to prevent or counter a Russian sales boycott and its consequences.
When will European politicians, or those behind them, finally wake up to those facts?
Update (11:45 UTC):
A soundbite from a press conference Lavrov is currently holding:
Russian Embassy, UK @RussianEmbassy – 11:41 UTC · Jun 6, 2022
FM #Lavrov: To all appearances, no one is going to even reform #NATO. They are going to turn this “defensive alliance” into a global alliance claiming global military dominance. This is a dangerous path that is definitely doomed to failure.
About heating and other energy consuming activities. Natural gas has many direct uses, like heating, making fertilizers and plastics, and it provides 40% of electricity in USA. It used to be unprofitable byproduct of extracting oil from the ground: as someone with experience is fracking industry explained me ca. 10 years ago, fracking is not profitable on the basis of natural was, only with oil it can give profit. That was 10 years ago, and perhaps a year ago.
Compared with prices one year ago, commodity exchange price of natural gas in USA tripled. It does not immediately reflect on electricity prices because of (a) long term contracts (b) regulations, price changes undergo a review process.
Domestic demand in USA is inflexible, theoretically one could switch from gas to coal or oil, but the first is limited, the second is not feasible: perhaps because of profitability of this switch in Europe, the refining capacity for making heavy fuels, jet fuel, diesel, heating oil, bunker oil (all probably almost equivalent for a refinery) got maxed. Export demand is increasing because Europe strives for “independence”. So natural gas price in USA shot up from 3, for a month it zigzagged between 8 and 9 and Monday trading ended with 9.30. Perhaps a good moment to bet on price decrease, given the aforementioned zigzagging, but “don’t do it at home”.
The inflation will stay for a while, with assorted consequences. In USA, It will cause GOP taking “both houses” in the Fall, and given “bipartisan agreement” covering “important issues like war”, no happy consequences for Russia, but perhaps an end of the access to abortion for most if not all Americans. In a short run, political stasis is assured in most of the West, discontent channeled into elections that do not change anything “important”.
The biggest cipher for me is Germany. The trade surplus is almost gone, and may vanish this year. Germany and “northern EU” is obliged to subsidize ungrateful loudmouths in Baltics, Poland and Ukraine, increase defense spending a lot, invest in “sustainable non-carbon non-nuclear economy”, AND balance the budget within 3% straightjacket. And Germany should not be so easy to intimidate like, say, Bulgaria or Slovakia. Industrialists are aware of the problem, and the country is ostensibly capitalist. But at some point it became a theocracy — sacrifices are needed on the altars of “EU solidarity”, “NATO solidarity”, “Sustainable development” (or whatever Green theologians require), and if the outcomes are not pretty, this only means that Germans sinned and/or sacrificed too little and too grumpily.
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Jun 6 2022 21:54 utc | 205
part 1
The First World War signalled the end to a mercantilist order that had evolved under the aegis of European powers. One hundred years later, a very different economic order was in place (neoliberal cosmopolitanism). Believed by its architects to be universal and everlasting, globalisation transfixed the world for an extended moment, but then started the subsidence from its zenith – precisely at the moment the West was giving vent to its triumphalism at the fall of the Berlin Wall. NATO – as the order’s regulatory system – addressed its attendant ‘identity crisis’ by pushing for eastward expansion toward Russia’s western borders, disregarding the guarantees it had given, and Moscow’s virulent objections.
This radical alienation of Russia triggered its pivot to China. Europe and the U.S. however, declined to consider issues of due ‘balance’ within global structures, and simply glossed over the realities of a world order in momentous metamorphosis: with the steady decline of the U.S. already apparent; with a European faux ‘unity’ that masked its own inherent imbalances; and in the context of a hyper-financialised economic structure which lethally sucked out the juice from the real economy.
The present war in Ukraine therefore simply is an adjunct – the accelerant to this existing process of ‘liberal order’ decomposition. It is not its centre. Fundamentally geo-strategic in their origin, the explosive dynamics to today’s disintegration can be seen as blowback from the mismatch from diverse peoples’ looking now to solutions tailored to suit their non-western civilisations, and from the western insistence on its ‘one size fits all’ Order. Ukraine thus is a symptom, but is not per se, the deeper disorder itself.
Tom Luongo has remarked – in connection with the ‘messy’, confusing events of today – that that which he fears most, is so many people analysing the intersection of geopolitics, markets and ideology, and doing so with such striking complacency. “There is a stunning amount of normalcy bias in the punditocracy, too much ‘cooler heads will prevail’ and not enough ‘everyone’s got a plan until they’re punched in the mouth’”.
What Luongo’s retort doesn’t fully explain is the shrillness, the outrage, with which any doubting of the accredited ‘punditocracy’ of the moment is met. Plainly, there is a deeper fear stalking the lower depths of western psyche that is not being made fully explicit.
Wolfgang Münchau, formerly at the Financial Times, now authoring EuroIntelligence, describes how such a canonised Zeitgeist implicitly has imprisoned Europe in a cage of adverse dynamics which threaten its economy, its autonomy, its globalism and its being.
Münchau relates how both the pandemic and Ukraine had taught him that it was one thing to proclaim an interconnected globalism ‘as cliché’, but “It is quite another to observe what actually happens on the ground when those connections get torn apart … Western sanctions were based on a formally correct, but misleading premise – one that I believed myself – at least up to a point: That Russia is more dependent on us than we are on Russia … Russia however is a provider of primary and secondary commodities, on which the world has become dependent. But when the largest exporter of those commodities disappears, the rest of the world experiences physical shortages and rising prices”. He continues:
“Did we think this through? Did the foreign ministries that drew up the sanctions discuss at any point what we would do if Russia were to blockade the Black Sea and not allow Ukrainian wheat to leave the ports?… Or, did we think we can adequately address a global starvation crisis by pointing the finger at Putin”?
“The lockdown taught us a lot about our vulnerability to supply chain shocks. It has reminded Europeans that there have only two routes to ship goods en masse to Asia and back: either by container, or by rail through Russia. We had no plan for a pandemic, no plan for a war, and no plan for when both are happening at the same time. The containers are stuck in Shanghai. The railways closed because of the war …
“I am not sure the west is ready to confront the consequences of its actions: persistent inflation, reduced industrial output, lower growth, and higher unemployment. To me, economic sanctions look like the last hurrah of a dysfunctional concept known as The West. The Ukraine war is a catalyst of massive de-globalisation”.
Münchau’s response is that unless we cut a deal with Putin, with the removal of sanctions as a component, he sees “a danger of the world becoming subject to two trading blocs: the west and the rest. Supply chains will be reorganised to stay within them. Russia’s energy, wheat, metals, and rare earths will still be consumed, but not here – We [just] keep with the Big Macs”.
Posted by: james | Jun 6 2022 22:38 utc | 217
part 3
How the World Works
James Fallows
Americans persist in thinking that Adam Smith’s rules for free trade are the only legitimate ones. But today’s f…
“To make this more specific: Today’s Anglo-American world view rests on the shoulders of three men. One is Isaac Newton, the father of modern science. One is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of liberal political theory. (If we want to keep this purely Anglo-American, John Locke can serve in his place.) And one is Adam Smith, the father of laissez-faire economics.
“From these founding titans come the principles by which advanced society, in the Anglo-American view, is supposed to work … And it is supposed to recognize that the most prosperous future for the greatest number of people comes from the free workings of the market.
“In the non-Anglophone world, Adam Smith is merely one of several theorists who had important ideas about organizing economies. The Enlightenment philosophers however were not the only ones to think about how the world should be organized. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Germans were also active—to say nothing of the theorists at work in Tokugawa Japan, late imperial China, czarist Russia, and elsewhere.
“The Germans deserve emphasis—more than the Japanese, the Chinese, the Russians, and so on because many of their philosophies endure. These did not take root in England or America, but they were carefully studied, adapted, and applied in parts of Europe and Asia, notably Japan. In place of Rousseau and Locke the Germans offered Hegel. In place of Adam Smith… they had Friedrich List.”
The Anglo-American approach is founded on the hypothesis of the sheer unpredictability and unplannability of economics. Technologies change; tastes change; political and human circumstances change. And because life is so fluid, this means that any attempts at central planning are virtually doomed to fail. The best way to “plan” therefore, is to leave the adaptation to the people who have their own money at stake. If each individual does what is best for him or her, the result will be – serendipitously – what is best for the nation as a whole.
Although List did not use this term, the German school was sceptical about serendipity, and more concerned with ‘market failures’. These are the cases in which normal market forces produce a clearly undesirable result. List argued that societies did not automatically move from farming to small crafts to major industries just because millions of small merchants were making decisions for themselves. If every person put his money where the return was greatest, the money might not automatically go where it would do the nation the most good.
For it to do so required a plan, a push, an exercise of central power. List drew heavily on the history of his times—in which the British government deliberately encouraged British manufacturing and the fledgling American government deliberately discouraged foreign competitors.
The Anglo-American approach assumes that the ultimate measure of a society is its level of consumption. In the long run, List argued, a society’s well-being and its overall wealth are determined not by what the society can buy, but by what it can make (i.e. value coming from the real, self-sufficient economy). The German school argued that emphasizing consumption would eventually be self-defeating. It would bias the system away from wealth creation, and ultimately make it impossible to consume as much, or to employ so many.
List was prescient. He was right. This is the flaw now so clearly exposed in the Anglo model. One aggravated by subsequent massive financialisation that has led to a structure dominated by an ephemeral, derivative super-sphere that drained the West of its wealth-creating real economy, couriering its remains and its supply-lines ‘offshore’. Self-reliance has eroded, and the shrinking base of wealth creation supports an ever-smaller proportion of the population in adequately paid employment.
It is no longer ‘fit for purpose’ and is in crisis. That is widely understood at the upper reaches of the system. To acknowledge this however, would seem to go against the past two centuries of economics, narrated as one long progression toward Anglo-Saxon rationality and good sense. It lies at the root of the Anglo ‘story’.
Yet, financial crisis might upend that story entirely.
How so? Well, the liberal order rests on three pillars – on three interlocking, co-constituting pillars: Newton’s ‘laws’ were projected to lend the Anglo economic model its (dubious) claim to being founded in hard empirical laws – as if it were physics. Rousseau, Locke, and their followers elevated individualism as a political principle, and from Smith came the logic-core to the Anglo-American system: If each individual does what is best for him or her, the result will be what is best for the nation as a whole.
The most important thing about these pillars is their moral equivalence, as well as their interlocking connection. Knock out one pillar as invalid, and the whole edifice known as ‘European values’ comes adrift. Only through being locked together does it possess coherency.
And the unspoken fear amongst these western élites is that during this extended period of Anglo supremacy… there has always been an alternative school of thought to theirs. List was not concerned with the morality of consumption. Instead, he was interested in both strategic and material well-being. In strategic terms, nations ended up being dependent or sovereign according to their ability to make things for themselves.
And last week Putin told Scholtz and Macron that the crises (including food shortages) that they faced, stemmed from their own erroneous economic structures and policies. Putin might have quoted List’s amorphism:
The tree which bears the fruit is of greater value than the fruit itself… The prosperity of a nation is not… greater in the proportion in which it has amassed more wealth (i.e., values of exchange), but in the proportion in which it has more developed its powers of production.
Messrs Scholtz and Macron probably did not like the message one bit. They can see the pivot being yanked out from western neoliberal hegemony.
Posted by: james | Jun 6 2022 22:39 utc | 219
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