Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Russia and Eastern Europe Page 15 of 17

If China is with you, you are not isolated in the world

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On July 21, 2014

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The shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH17 has led to a vituperative barrage in the Western media (and social media), blaming Russia.  This barrage has been fomented, in large part, by the White House, which has been relentless.

Many act as if Russia is horribly in the wrong, isolated, and alone.

China’s Xinhua wrote this:

The one-sided accusation is not surprising in light of their long-time stance on the crisis in eastern Ukraine, and their attitude towards Russia’s absorption of Crimea in March. But without convincing evidence, jumping to a conclusion will only heighten regional tension and is not conducive to finding out the truth.

Russian President Vladimir Putin late Thursday said it is Ukraine that bears the responsibility as the tragedy occurred over its territory. The tragedy, Putin said, could have been avoided should Ukraine’s eastern regions be in peace.

If China is with you, you are not alone.  The shooting down of MH17 is a tragedy, as when the US shot down an Iranian jetliner, and it may well have been done by Ukrainian rebels.  But it doesn’t mean Russia is isolated.

And perhaps, when the rebels were known to have SAMs with the distance to shoot down airliners, airliners should not still have been allowed to travel over the conflict region?  That decision is Ukraine’s, by the way.

There can be no defending the targeting of civilians and if this is not a false flag operation, it will turn out to have been a mistake, it is in no one’s interest to be blamed for such an attack.

The conflict in the Ukraine is a conflict of choice: the West’s choice in helping overthrow a democratically elected government, Russia’s choice in at least tolerating and most likely encouraging the separatists (and possibly giving them the BUK, though they also captured at least one system from the Ukrainian army), and Ukraine’s choice, for refusing any negotiations with those of its citizens who want federalization, a not unreasonable requrest when Ukraine has signed up for IMF austerity.

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Fighting in the Ukraine

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On June 6, 2014

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Putin continues to outsmart his opponents, and has been smarter than I expected.  I thought he’d invade, but what he did was better (for Russia’s interests, not for Ukraine.)

Supporting the rebels, and freely allowing supplies and “volunteers” across the  Russian border, which is what appears to be happening means that Eastern Ukraine will stay in chaos as long as Putin wants it to. Even if Ukrainian forces defeat the rebels in the field, they will not be able to stop guerrilla and terrorist actions in the future.

“Sure, you can ignore Russia’s demands: but not without a price.”

And the shelling by the Ukrainian army of civilians means that support for the rebels and for Russia will rise in the East.

The cost of this sort of intervention is low, and it can keep a country tied in knots for years.

Maybe the West, instead of haranguing Putin about a country which was part of Russia or the USSR for ages, should come to some sort of agreement with him?

On the other hand, why bother?  Eastern Ukraine has nothing the West needs either, so let it devolve into a semi-permanent failed state region.

Too bad for the Ukrainians, I guess.

The Russia China Axis continues to form

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On May 23, 2014

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So, the Russians and Chinese, after 10 years of haggling, have signed a gas deal worth 400 billion or so.

The timing is not coincidental, of course: Russia needs to diversify who it sell to.  The next major step, which will be years in coming, is arranging how to supply India.

The US has been pivoting against China, reassuring its allies in the Pacific, that US ocean, that it is on their side against a China which is pushing territorial claims aggressively.  China knows that many in the US consider it the real enemy: the real threat, because of its burgeoning economy and its massive industrial base (shipped to it by American capitalists, selling China the rope to hang the American Empire with.)

As I have noted before, the price of the Ukraine is a firm alignment of Russia with China.  Russia needs China’s goods, money and political support; China will also be happy to have a security council ally and buy all those Russian commodities.

Japan is a firm American ally, and likely to remain so. It will increase the size of its military, but Japan’s long stagnation has now turned into actual decline, with regular trade deficits with no end in sight, since it has been shipping much of its industry offshore, and not creating the new generations of the best or cheapest goods.  Demographic decline, likewise, continues, and Japanese xenophobia makes it impossible for them to use immigration as a cure, while the declining economy and tight pressed quarters means there’s no reason to expect the Japanese themselves to start breeding.

Europe has firmly aligned with America, indicating willingness to cut its own throat with trade sanctions against Russia, if necessary.  South America and central America is unlikely to align en-masse with America for obvious historical reasons: America has been the enemy of most states there for over a century, with its willingness to attempt to overthrow any government it doesn’t like.

The Middle East grows less important as solar and alternative sources for oil come on line, and as their own reserves deteriorate.  To be sure, it will matter for decades yet, but it is no longer the most important region on the earth.  Sub-Saharan Africa, sadly, is largely irrelevant: they will sell their resources to whoever pays for them.

This leaves India s the last major country in play.  But for them, the smart play is to stay out of it, keep good relations with both sides, and let China and the US slag each other, coming up the middle to be the next hegemonic power.

To be sure, many will say that China and the US can never seriously fight: they need each other too much.  Such people are fools: American consumers grow weaker, US treasuries are a sunk asset, and China will have to move to a domestic consumer society at some point: raising the income of their own citizens and selling the goods to Chinese.

The game of empire never ends, it only changes.  The Russians are now aligned with the Chinese because of European and American stupidity: Putin and the Russians, for many years, longed to be Europeans and it would have required only a little respect to keep bring them into the Western camp.

Such strategic mistakes often seal the fate of Empires.

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And the Ukraine Sanctions heat up

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On May 14, 2014

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Russia supplies the engines used to boost to the International Space Station: and will now stop doing so unless the US agrees to not use them on military rockets.  NASA hopes to restore service to the ISS by 2017.  The Russians note, sardonically, that they will still be able to use the ISS, but the US won’t.

Russia wants GPS sites in the US, and if the US doesn’t agree, they will shut down GPS sites in Russia.

And, most interestingly, the Russians are moving ahead on replacements to Visa and Mastercard, whom they do not trust not to cut them off at DCs behest (I think the Wikileaks cut-off was the warning that the credit card companies were instruments of US policy.)  This is the first step to creating their own domestic payments system.  China has a national payments system, and were they to link up with the Russian one and export that to other countries, there could finally be a real alternative to the SWIFT system controlled by the West.

Russia will be hurt worst in any sanctions tiff, of course, but this isn’t cost free for the US and West, even in the short term, and in the long term it teaches the rest of the world that they can’t use Western systems and must have their own alternatives.  That reduces Western profits and power faster than it would have been reduced otherwise.

And, over the Ukraine?  This is worth it?

That said, every since Visa, Mastercard and Paypal misused their power in the Wikileaks case, I have been itching to see them taken down, so I consider this a good thing.  The US and the West have terribly abused their power over the payments system (ask the Iranians about that) and it’s time for that power to be taken away.

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Does Russia invade the Ukraine?

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On May 4, 2014

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It really comes down to the balance between these two factors:

For every advance that the Ukrainian government made, it seemed to lose ground elsewhere. Angry pro-Russian crowds seized control of more government buildings in Donetsk, and pro-Russian forces in Luhansk, a city just 15 miles from the Russian frontier, vowed war on Kiev, declaring a curfew and seizing weapons inside a military recruitment center.

Which is to say, does Russia need to intervene or can the rebels, its proxies, win without it?  The massacre of pro-Russian protesters in Odessa has likely hardened the lines: I’m betting that more and more of those who wanted to stay in the Ukraine but a federalist Ukraine, will want to just join Russia.

Meanwhile, the US and Germany have promised energy sanctions on Russia if Russia does invade.  If real, those will throw Europe back into a full blown economic crisis, but US commercial interests desperately want those sanctions, even if they don’t have the ability to fill European natural gas demand right now.  Not only is a future market, but the fracking boom requires higher natural gas prices than they have right now to make much of it profitable.

If Putin is to invade, it seems more likely he’ll invade before the election, though, of course, with fighting spreading across Ukraine, he could simply say that no fair, representative election was possible. Still, for him, before seems better.

And as the deaths mount, Putin can simply claim that he is acting on a responsibility-to-protect (R2P) those who are being killed by Ukrainian military and pro-Ukrainian mobs.  R2P is a Western doctrine, used to justify Western invasions; it must amuse Putin to no end to throw it back in the West’s face, not that the West has the grace to blush at its own hypocrisy, or even notice its own hypocrisy.

What’s happening in Ukraine is vastly important.  It will determine the shape of the blocs facing each other down during the end of America hegemony, and as it is playing out now, it ensures that China will have Russia’s support and likely moves up the timeline for creating an alternate, non-dollar payments system.  I expect future historians will scratch their heads in the same we do when looking back at the Kaiser’s mistakes isolating Germany in the run-up to World War I.

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If I were a Russian Strategist I’d say “invade the Ukraine”

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On April 26, 2014

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Really.  Too much talk about joining NATO, and that’s too close to Moscow, plus the West’s unremitting hostility to Russia pulling the sort of stunts that the US pulls frequently, indicates that the West is a real danger and that if they waste this opportunity, they won’t get another one.

I’d advise Putin to go.

(For the thick, I hope they don’t, and I’m not a Russian strategist.  Just saying that just as losing Sevastopol and Crimea was something Russia could NOT tolerate, that Ukraine joining NATO is an actual red line.)

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The Prelude to the End of the American Era

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On April 25, 2014

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And so it begins.  Russia is not restraining the separatists, the Kiev government is finally really sending in the troops, Barack Obama and EU leaders claim they will impose real sanctions and Russia and China are set to ink a deal to export Russian Gas to China, the world’s industrial heartland.

If the sanctions are imposed, for whatever reason (Russian invasion or not), they will force the creation of a second economic, non-dollar bloc.  Russia is not Iran, and China is not going to cut off Russia to please the West, rather the contrary.  The creation of a real non dollar bloc which can make almost anything people want, and which has access to essentially all key resources from oil to rare minerals, metals and food is an existential threat to the hegemony of the West and its allies like Japan and Korea.

Be clear, real sanctions will impose real costs on Russia, but they can bear them.  They do not need to borrow money from the West, they cannot be Troika-ized. They have key resources that someone will buy, even if they can’t buy in dollars, because Yuan or rubles can, actually, buy most of what most countries need to buy.

Absent China, Russia cannot be isolated.  Cannot.  China is unlikely to cooperate.  Sure, they could view eastern Russia near their borders as ripe, but Russia as a subordinate state in the Chinese sphere means they get everything they really need from the Russians anyway, plus backing in a military confrontation with the current developed world.

The Chinese are not stupid, they know that if a real war breaks out, it will be between them and America.  They are the rising power, the naturally most powerful and militarily powerful state in the world, recovering from a hiatus of a few centuries where they lost their status.  Russia has a lot to offer them, and the Chinese cannot be coerced by sanctions.  Sanctioning China would backfire so hard that the US was go into a real economic collapse: China makes the goods.  Sanction them, and they WILL break the patents and just make them anyway.  Reestablishing the manufacturing and distributing base back to the US and its allies under such circumstances would be unbelievably difficult, especially as Russia, China and its allies control certain key resources like rare earths (other people could mine them in quantity, but don’t, because Chinese rare earths are cheaper and we are stupid and greedy.)

Russia is already planning how to survive economic sanctions: how to sell its goods in rubles.  People will buy, Russia is too big a producer to ignore.  If Europe doesn’t want the growth which comes from using Russian gas and oil, well, China and others will be  happy to take it.

And once a second bloc is created, it will no longer be possible to pull stunts like breaking Iran with sanctions: the Chinese/Russian bloc will have a veto.

Over Ukraine?  I guarantee that if this is done in 50 years historians will look back on this like we do on WWI—what were they thinking?  The Balkans wasn’t worth WWI.  Ukraine isn’t worth destroying American: Western, hegemony.  Well, not for America.  Others might think this is more of a good thing than bad.

But it is also the potential glide path to war, real war.  WWIII.

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Clown College as the Ukrainian military effort “sputters”

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On April 16, 2014

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The Ukrainian military clearly doesn’t care enough to actually fight:

The day began inauspiciously for Ukrainian forces as they sought to establish an operating base in the city of Kramatorsk, moving in units from a nearby military air base. According to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and a witness who spoke by phone, a column of six armored vehicles was stopped by a mob of civilians and then commandeered by heavily armed men wearing military-style uniforms.

Not willing to kill civilians: that actually speaks well of the Ukrainian military.

The East is Putin’s if he wants it.  Also, take note of the sheer competence of Russian actions, both direct and through proxy forces, in both Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.  The Russians have a plan, and are executing it more than competently right down the line.  I would say that NATO and everyone else should take note.

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