Ian in his last post mentioned that our Asian allies are slipping away from us. While we pretend to strategically re-orient the Japanese are engaging in massive rearmament begun by Abe and being continued by the current government. Japan has lost confidence in the American security umbrella because of the deceit we’ve displayed in foreign relations. The Koreans? I lived in Korea. They’re simply apoplectic. Some are even at the point where they are willing to consider a loose confederation with the north, an entente of sorts so the South has the protection of the North’s nuclear umbrella and the North gains goods and services from the South.
This is simply unheard of. When I talked to one of my former students who now works in the foreign ministry and he told me this I was gobsmacked.
Ian’s correct. For 400 years the balance of payments from the rest of the world went to the Littoral seapower states. For the last 50 years the balance of payments has been reversed. All that gold is going back home. In one generation the United States has squandered all the goodwill and wealth it received during WWI and WWII. China in the last 50 years has lifted more people out of poverty than the rest of the world did during all of recorded history. Chew on that stat for a moment.
I will be visiting China and South Korea to do a 20 year retrospective tour and a 30 year retrospective tour on the former and the latter. I don’t know what to expect, but I remember China 20 years ago and being blown away.
The USA is in deep strategic shit. For 200+ years our power has been based on our complete hegemony of this hemisphere. For 75 of the last 100 years our main strategic goal has been the prevention of one power or an alliance of powers attaining hegemonic power over the Eurasian landmass. In the last six years we’ve abandoned that VITAL national interest for what? We’ve driven Russia into the arms of China. India lost all confidence in us. Now East Asia has.
If a single power or coalition of powers dominate the Eurasian landmass our two oceans will not protect us.
It appears I might have been wrong about the Israeli-Iran pissing contest being the opening act of WWIII. Good. What it really feels like is the first Balkan War in 1912. The calculus is being made in Beijing. And Tokyo. And Seoul. And Taipei. We lack the ability to protect our allies conventionally. And no one wants nukes.
I don’t have any smart quip to conclude with except a Spanish expletive, “la puebla es jodida.”
We committed an act of war against a sovereign state that had every right to peaceful nuclear power.
Tulsi Gabbard told Donald Trump in March that Iran had NO nuclear weapons program.
There is a huge difference between radio medcine and nuclear power, and a nuclear weapons program. Iran has the former by legal right under the NNPT and does not, nor has plans for the latter.
This war will spiral out of control, just like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in July 1914.
Prepare yourselves. We will all suffer before this is over.
That’s a brilliant PR and propaganda coup. It also has a very pragmatic, realistic purpose. He said this, damn well knowing Zhelensky and the Ukrainians and the Brits and the US have so many hurdles to get through until they can achieve a cease-fire that what Putin has ultimately done is give the Russian army carte blanche to continue capturing key territory for as long as it takes for the West to get its act together or the Ukrainian army collapses, whichever comes first. My money is on a mid-summer collapse.
Nota bene: Putin is making Trump look like a piker in just about every encounter, except, he lets Trump keep his ‘face.’ Putin is puting on a master class.
Germany honored U.S. President Joe Biden for his contribution to trans-Atlantic relations on Friday, ahead of his meetings with European allies on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.
Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms
The sheer delight the pathetic “Traffic Light” coalition government takes in abasing itself before the US hegemon is pornographic in its shameless indecency. Especially the same week that the Danes reported this:
Just days before the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022, warships belonging to the U.S. Navy were on the scene and ordered nearby officials to keep away.
That is according to John Anker Nielsen, who is harbour master at Christiansø, the easternmost part of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, northeast of the island of Bornholm and close to the sites of the Nord Stream explosions.
Map showing the route of Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the southern Baltic Sea and location of the leaks. AWZ=Exclusive Economic Zone
Map: AFP / Nadine EHRENBERG, adapted
Nielsen late last month told a reporter at Politiken, a major Danish daily, that he went out with a rescue team four or five days before the blast to check on nearby ships with switched-off radios, suspecting there might have been an accident, only to find U.S. warships, whose staff ordered the team to turn back immediately.
Biden: If Russia invades uh that means tanks or troops crossing the uh the border of Ukraine again then uh there will be uh we there will be no longer a Nordstream 2. We will bring an end to it.
Reporter: What? How would you how will you do that exactly since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?
Biden: We will. I promise you we’ll be able to do it.
and Nuland did it too. This video is still up on the State Department’s official Facebook page because they’re proud of it:
“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
And Never forget what Nuland said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on January 26, 2023:
“I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you [Ted Cruz] like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
“…ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity. It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs. That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…”
German industry increasingly struggles to compete on the world stage. Particularly hard hit are its mighty chemical and heavy industry sectors, which are now in rapid decline. One of the main drivers is policies that have made energy costs skyrocket, and there Germany serves as a canary in the coal mine for other leading industrial nations.
It’s kind of grimly amusing that Forbes’ use of the euphemism “policies that have made energy costs skyrocket” rather than say “self-defeating sanctions on cheap Russian gas combined with the biggest act of industrial sabotage in modern history” and it also doesn’t mention that it’s been America’s policies that have deindustrialized Germany.
It’s also so humiliating as an American that the neo-conservative cabal of psychopathic nitwits has been in sole control of US foreign policy since the Clinton administration and now they have a lock on US corporate media as well.
In the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right AfD received more than double as many votes as the three parties which make up the federal coalition government — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — combined. These parties’ results are each in the single digits. The Greens in Thuringia and the FDP in both states even failed to meet the 5% threshold to be represented in the state parliaments.
“Biden received the highest class of Germany’s Order of Merit, which was also bestowed on former U.S. President George H.W. Bush for his support of German reunification.”
Kind of fitting that the era of American unipolarity is framed this way. Bush at the beginning. Biden at the end. The Germans footing the bill for American foreign policy.
1. How many of you think the Atlantic Alliance (NATO) needs reformation in some way?
2. How many of you think it is just fine the way it is?
3. How many of you think it should just be abolished?
If you could please limit your answer in the comments to 1, 2 or 3 I would be very appreciative. There will be a long post for a full discussion of the issue soon. I want to get a sense of how everyone is thinking on this issue before I complete to essay.
Over at Responsible Statecraft there is a symposium on the Ukraine’s Kursk Incursion and what it means down the road. I read all the entries and there is a general consensus that in the long run the incursion is more likely than not a strategic mistake. And then every single one of the commenters (except one) adds their “but” to the conversation. Obviosuly, I tend to see the world as John Mearsheimer does, but found the symposium a useful tool to gauge the thoughts of International Relations scholars across the spectrum. As I said, there is a general consensus. Give it a read, it’ll only cost you 15 minutes, tops.
