Eurasia note #62 - Nuclear Threat Follows Bombing Of Pipeline

Logic of 'progress' would raise the toll of world wars in exponential fashion

Russia focuses on defence of newly-incorporated regions of Donbas.
Two-decade strategy of peace with Germany lies in tatters, EU abandons raison d’etre.
Risk of escalation could progressively eclipse WW1 & 2.

War is not happenstance but an objective, the question is whose.
Zelenskiy and Biden tout Armageddon, NATO’s Stoltenberg agrees.
Psychopathy in place of competence: the desperation becomes evident.

Neoliberals are the useful idiot arm of the neoconservative Messianics.
They deny the risks they are taking, seemingly invincible or wishing their own eclipse.
A rules-based international order faces collapse into a new, powerless Dark Age.

Related:
Great Game Over: Did The Investors just give Afghanistan to China? (Aug 17, 2021)
Afghan Squid (Aug 28, 2021)
China and Israel, The New Silk Road (Apr 14, 2022)
U.S. Initiates State Control Of Food Supply (May 20, 2022)
When The Skies Were Free - Clouds, currency and carbon (Jun 12, 2022)
Russia Turns Off Gas (Sep 6, 2022)
Not Enough Minerals For Green Energy (Sep 8, 2022)
Europe Reels From Germany’s Impending Decline (Sep 29, 2022)
Europe, Gas And The Endgame (Sep 30, 2022)
Nuclear Threat Follows Bombing Of Pipeline (Oct 26, 2022)

(2,000 words, or 10 minutes of your attention.)

Tbilisi, Oct 26, 2022

Russia is building defences along the contact line of the four newly-embraced regions bordering Ukraine. Germany is remilitarizing while, economically and socially, Europe implodes. The U.S. once again stands to profit as the old continent descends into war — or whatever bedlam its monarchs and nobles plan to unleash this time.

Was it not Putin’s strategy to build an economic alliance with Germany that would make another war impossible, by yoking Germany’s industrial innovation to Russia’s energy and resources? How was that nefarious?

Isn’t alliance the same cause the European Union claims to espouse, to tie countries economically so that they had nothing to gain from war — it was supposedly created to ensure that the nations never again waged hell.

It has failed, with a little help from its friends. Peace has been sabotaged to the very depths of the Baltic Sea, with the bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline and the self-abnegation of Europe’s governments.

In the authorized version, 15 to 22 million people died in the war of 1914-1918, called the “war to end all wars” on account of the slaughter. Just over two decades passed before WW2, when an estimated 70–85 million people died, or three per cent of the world’s population.

The progressive elites are on course to ensure that “progress” will raise the toll in exponential fashion. Although military analysts claim it’s new, war has always been hybrid. There are casualties at home and abroad — it’s just that today Western governments openly brand their population as the enemy.

If you seek predictions look to Popular Mechanics or Rand Corporation; the toll will be determined by governments’ pre-emptive actions such as medical interventions, energy and food policy, as much as the impact of war itself.

The EU has thrown itself into war with barely a blink: it made no effort to hold Ukraine to the Minsk Agreement. More ominously, it pursues an economic scorched earth policy upon its own territory that will make central control and a wartime economy the only viable path to recovery: a path that repeat the worst errors of the 20th Century.

War, one must conclude, is not something that just happens — except on rare occasions like the Football War of 1969, between El Salvador and Honduras, when post-match violence ignited volatile tensions between the two countries.

Nuclear brinkmanship

To begin with the current volatility, in Jan 2022 the five nuclear-weapon states met and agreed: “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

In the first week of October, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy called for NATO to launch a decapitation strike against Russia. The same day, president Joe Biden told a fundraising event that the world faced the “prospect of Armageddon” for the first time since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

He said, in reference to Russia, “if the motherland is threatened, they’ll use whatever force they need, including nuclear weapons.” Instead of walking back the comments, NATO sec gen Jens Stoltenberg said Russia's victory in the war against Ukraine would mean the defeat of NATO. “This cannot be allowed.”

The level of incompetence and apparent psychopathy among Western politicians is astounding — and sane people are alarmed. [1]

As war is contrary to nature, who is driving it? Although the U.S. stands to benefit from Europe’s implosion it is not capable of this kind of strategic malevolence, according to former weapons inspector and intelligence analyst Scott Ritter. He prefers the greater fool theory. On the other hand, China specializes in exactly this kind of long-term planning. It has invested $10 trillion in infrastructure in its Belt and Road Initiative, a supra-national trade alliance that dwarfs the European Union.

The rules-based international order, as constituted by the post-WW2 settlement — Bretton Woods and the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the latest iteration of the League of Nations — is toppling.

The G7, EU and NATO are the additional pillars of that rules-based international order. The EU’s single currency is at risk of collapse because the economies that made it possible are failing: Germany is crippled by the loss of Russian gas, Italy's bond market is blowing out, France faces protests more broad based than the Yellow Vests.

Despite Brexit, Britain is only semi-detached from the EU, which wants the region’s biggest banking sector to keep the euro from drowning. The British people don't realise that the English central bank, like that of Germany, is on the hook for cost of propping up the Brussels bureaucracy.

Look at the rules-based international order through another lens: faltering Britain is part of the G7 and its economy is Germany without the industry. The only reason Britain faces (perhaps) less of an energy crunch is that it has fewer factories to power.

Only in the postmodern (post-rational?) neoliberal world is that an advantage — neoliberals, I have concluded, are simply the useful idiot arm of the neoconservatives, who at least know they need factories to make bombs.

With France, Germany, Italy and Britain down, that leaves questionable Canada and Japan, whose currency is falling — while the United States is last man standing, against China and the BRICS.

Who are the BRICS? Constituting Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, soon to be joined by Saudi Arabia, Argentina and even Turkey, they account for more than 40 per cent of the global economy and its biggest consumer markets.

The rules based international order represented by the postwar Atlantic Bridge has committed suicide. There is no need to debate the arrival of a multipolar world or the failure of the Peace of Westphalia.

Why you lack gas, fuel and energy is explained by what follows. If you are European, it’s to be nationalised. While the Russia of Tchaikovsky and Dovstoevky is demonized by bankers in order to collapse Europe. Lemmings to the barricades.

This is not the opinion of Moneycircus but the view of the International Energy Agency and economists of the orthodox stature of Jeffrey Sachs.