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Western Hegemony's Collapse

Misguided Foreign Policies Against Russia

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via Moon of Alabama

Political corruption, a lack of knowledge, and irrational foreign policies have brought the U.S. to a point where it is loosing its primacy in the world.

In response to the 2014 U.S. coup in Kiev the Russian Federation supported ethnic Russian rebels in the Donbas region to resist that anti-Russian progroms with which the Nazi-controlled Kiev regime threatened them. This blocked U.S. plans to move Ukraine into NATO and to station U.S. missiles directly at the Russian border.

In 2016 the Democrats sought revenge by pushing fake claims of Russian interference in U.S. elections. To justify her loss in the presidential election Hillary Clinton created ‘Russiagate’, the false claim the Trump was somehow directed by Russia. She was supported by high ranking officials throughout the deep state and especially within the FBI. In hindsight their behavior was beyond belief:

An FBI supervisor repeatedly testified Tuesday that agents did not corroborate an explosive allegation from a former British spy of a “well-developed conspiracy” between the Kremlin and Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign before citing the claim as a reason to initiate surveillance of a former Trump campaign official.
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The FBI used the unconfirmed report, Auten testified, to seek court approval of a secret surveillance warrant to monitor Carter Page, a Trump campaign adviser, and then successfully got that warrant reauthorized on three occasions, based in part on the same, uncorroborated claim.
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Auten told the jury that shortly after receiving the first batch of Steele documents in the fall of 2016, a group of FBI officials met with Steele and offered him “anywhere up to $1 million” for information that would corroborate the claims in his reports. But Steele never did provide corroboration, Auten said in response to Durham.
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Steele had been hired to produce reports by research firm Fusion GPS, which had been retained by a law firm that represented Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee.

‘Russiagate’ created a feverish anti-Russian atmosphere especially within the Democrats and their followers.

Adding to this was a serious ignorance of Russia economic and technological capabilities. U.S. politicians rely on biased media which created a false picture of Russia. I did my best to debunk that as often as I could:

The rest of the NYT piece is not any better than its very first paragraph. It simply repeats false stereotypes about Putin as an “autocratic leader” or about the non-existing Russian influence on U.S. elections.Nearly thirty years ago when the Soviet Union broke apart Russia had a deep fall. The liberalization of its economy had catastrophic consequences. But it has since reformed itself. It is now back to its traditional position in the world. A large Eurasian power which is in nearly all aspects independent from the rest of the world and able to protect itself. It must therefore be taken into account when one thinks of global polices. That is simply a fact and not the effect of a “mindgame” that Russia allegedly plays with the “west”.

That the U.S. still has problems to understand that is not Russia’s fault but the result of the skewed descriptions of it.

I wrote the above in December 2019(!). Ten month later I revisited the issue:

Over the last years the U.S. and its EU puppies have ratcheted up their pressure on Russia. They seem to believe that they can compel Russia to follow their diktat. They can’t. But the illusion that Russia will finally snap, if only a few more sanctions ar applied or a few more houses in Russia’s neighborhood are set on fire, never goes away.
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Russia does not accept the fidgety ‘rules of the liberal international order’. Russia sticks to the law which is, in my view, a much stronger position. Yes, international law often gets broken. But as Lavrov said elsewhere, one does not abandon traffic rules only because of road accidents.Russia stays calm, no matter what outrageous nonsense the U.S. and EU come up with. It can do that because it knows that it not only has moral superiority by sticking to the law but it also has the capability to win a fight.
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Russia is militarily secure and the ‘west’ knows that. It is one reason for the anti-Russian frenzy. Russia does not need to bother with the unprecedented hostility coming from Brussels and Washington. It can ignore it while taking care of its interests.

As this is so obvious one must ask what the real reason for the anti-Russian pressure campaign is. What do those who argue for it foresee as its endpoint?

The answer to my question was revealed in mid of last year when the U.S. and the EU threatened Russia with ‘crushing sanctions’. The idea was to destroy Russia’s economy to then breakup the country. It was a very stupid one:

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.To use the Ukraine to gaud Russia into some aggression to then apply sanctions was likewise a rather lunatic attempt.
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Instead of splitting Russia from China the U.S. has unintentionally done its best to push them into a deeper alliance. It was the most severe strategic error the U.S. could make.

Instead of a taking a new strategic posture that would support a pivot to Asia strategy the U.S. is now moving troops back to Europe.

The narrow-minded bigotry of U.S. decision makers, fed by a belief in U.S. exceptionalism while lacking any conception of real power, has led to this defeat.

The U.S., through NATO, had build up the Ukrainian army with the intent to use it against Russia. As NATO General Secretary Stoltenberg proudly claimed:

As you know, NATO Allies provide unprecedented levels of military support to Ukraine. Actually NATO Allies and NATO have been there since 2014 – trained, equipped and supported the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

The recent war was launched by Ukraine on February 17 with artillery barrages against the Donbas republics. Massive sanctions against Russia were introduced. The Russia army finally marched into Ukraine.

It took only a few weeks to recognize that the sanctions, as I had expected, utterly failed. In the first days the Rubel fell only to come back much stronger. There were no shortages for Russian consumers. Russia’s industries kept buzzing along.

But the sanctions did crush the ‘west’ and especially its consumers.

Over the years the U.S. and the EU have held up sanctions against the oil producers Iran, Venezuela and Russia. They also destroyed parts of Libya’s oil industry. In total the sanctions have kept some 20% of global oil production either off the markets or made them more difficult to buy and sell. On top of this U.S. relations with major Middle East producers, especially Saudi Arabia, have cooled down.

In late 2021 consumer prices for hydrocarbon products exploded. When they threatened to derail the Democrat’s chances in the mid terms President Biden used tax payer money, in form of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, to subsidize gasoline prices:

The United States and five other world powers announced a coordinated effort to tap into their national oil stockpiles on Tuesday, attempting to drive down rising gas prices that have angered consumers around the world.The move appeared to underwhelm oil traders, who had been expecting President Biden to announce a larger release from America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is the biggest in the world with 620 million barrels.
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The concerted effort, the largest ever for a release of strategic reserves across multiple countries, is meant to address fluctuations in supply and demand for oil, administration officials said. And it was a shot across the bow of OPEC Plus, the name for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries as well as Russia and other countries. Mr. Biden has pushed those countries to increase production, but has been rebuffed.

The move could bring a response next week when the group holds its monthly meeting. While it could prompt those countries to increase production, it could just as easily push the cartel to restrict supply further and push global prices higher.

The SPR voter bribe has since continued:

Since 2021, the nation’s SPR has diminished by about 35%, with 2021 starting with 638 million barrels in inventory. By the end of the year, that figure had dropped to 594 million barrels. Today, there are 416 million barrels—and even more are set to be released.

The U.S. has not only sanctioned major oil producers, it also instigated a war against the third largest (Russia) and pissed of the second largest one (Saudi Arabia).

The peak of such stupidity was the idea to limit the price ‘allowed’ to be paid for Russian oil:

A sane actor would conclude that the sanctions were a mistake and that lifting them would help Europe more than it would help Russia. But no, the U.S. and European pseudo elites are no longer able to act in a sane manner. They are instead doubling down with the most crazy sanction scheme one has ever heard of:

[T]he European Union pushed ahead on Wednesday with an ambitious but untested plan to limit Russia’s oil revenue.
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Under the plan, a committee including representatives of the European Union, the Group of 7 nations and others that agree to the price cap would meet regularly to decide on the price at which Russian oil should be sold, and that it would change based on the market price.

How do you make a big producer of a rare commodity sell those goods below the general market price? Unless you have a very strong buyers cartel that can also buy the product from elsewhere you can not do this successfully. It is an economic impossibility.
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Russia has declared that it will not sell any oil to any party that supports the G7 price fixing regime. That is why neither China nor India nor any other country besides the EU and U.S. will agree to adhere to it.

A month ago OPEC+ finally fired back by decreasing its output aim by 2 million barrels per day. To some of them a price of oil around $80 per barrel is simply a budget requirement:

The quiet understanding emerging from [Biden’s] trip was that Saudi Arabia would increase its production by about 750,000 barrels a day, and that the United Arab Emirates would follow suit with an additional 500,000, pushing down gas prices and worsening President Vladimir V. Putin’s ability to fund a war that was stretching much longer — and with much higher casualties — than Mr. Biden had expected.But the production increases were fleeting. While Saudi Arabia boosted production significantly in July and August, it backed away from their promise to sustain those levels over the rest of 2022. Its leaders, and all of OPEC, worried that the specter of global recession was driving prices down, from $120 a barrel over the summer to below $80. Below that level, they fear, budgets have to be cut and social stability is threatened. So the Saudis decided they had to act.

The sanctions and the bad relations with Saudi Arabia mark a major failure of U.S. foreign policy writes M. K. Bhadrakumar:

The Biden Administration tempted Fate by underestimating the importance of oil in modern economic and political terms and ignoring that oil will remain the dominant energy source across the world for the foreseeable future, powering everything from cars and domestic heating to huge industry titans and manufacturing plants.
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The Western powers are far too naive to think that an energy superpower like Russia can be simply “erased” from the ecosystem. In an “energy war” with Russia, they are doomed to end up as losers.Historically, Western nations understood the imperative to maintain good diplomatic relations with oil-producing countries. But Biden threw caution into the wind by insulting Saudi Arabia calling it a “Pariah” state. Any improvement in the US-Saudi relations is not to be expected under Biden’s watch. The Saudis distrust American intentions.

The congruence of interests on the part of the OPEC to keep the prices high is essentially because they need the extra income for their expenditure budget and to maintain a healthy investment level in the oil industry. The International Monetary Fund in April projected Saudi Arabia’s breakeven oil price — the oil price at which it would balance its budget — at $79.20 a barrel.

The budget point is an obvious one. But more important is that all of OPEC+ recognize the new sanction scheme as a potential attack on each of them:

Meanwhile, a “systemic” crisis is brewing. It is only natural that the OPEC views with scepticism the recent moves by the US and the EU to push back Russia’s oil exports. The West rationalises these moves as aimed at drastically reducing Russia’s income from oil exports (which translates as its resilience to fight the war in Ukraine.) The latest G7 move to put a cap on the prices at which Russia can sell its oil is taking matters to an extreme.
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No doubt, the West’s move is precedent-setting — namely, to prescribe for geopolitical reasons the price at which an oil-producing country is entitled to export its oil. If it is Russia today, it can as well be Saudi Arabia or Iraq tomorrow. The G7 decision, if it gets implemented, will erode OPEC’s key role regulating the global oil market.Therefore, the OPEC is proactively pushing back. Its decision to cut down oil production by 2 million barrels per day and keep the oil price above $90 per barrel makes a mockery of the G7 decision. The OPEC estimates that Washington’s options to counter OPEC+ are limited. Unlike in the past energy history, the US does not have a single ally today inside the OPEC+ group.

Due to rising domestic demands for oil and gas, it is entirely conceivable that the US exports of both items may be curtailed. If that happens, Europe will be the worst sufferer. In an interview with FT last week, Belgium’s prime minister Alexander De Croo has warned that as winter approaches, if energy prices are not brought down, “we are risking a massive deindustrialisation of the European continent and the long-term consequences of that might actually be very deep.”

All this is the consequence of U.S. ‘Russiagate’ phobia, originally raised for purely domestic policy reasons. It is a consequence of misrepresenting and misjudging the size and importance of Russia’s economy. It is consequence of believing that Russian (and Saudi) interests can be ignored.

Russia’s aim is to de-NATO-size Europe. It will do this by using the sanctions against it to deprive Europe of cheap energy. Sustained over months or years it is all that is needed to make NATO fall apart.

The sanctions will finally split Europe from the U.S. and its failed foreign policy.

Some U.S. politicians still think they must continue to pile onto the mountain of failure that U.S. foreign policy has become:

The congressional backlash against Saudi Arabia escalated sharply on Monday as a powerful Democratic senator threatened to freeze weapons sales and security cooperation with the kingdom after its decision to support Russia over the interests of the US.Washington’s anger with its Saudi allies has intensified since last week’s Opec+ decision to cut oil production by 2m barrels, which was seen as a slight to the Biden administration weeks ahead of critical midterm elections, and an important boost to Russia.
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Hitting out at Mohammed bin Salman’s decision to “help underwrite Putin’s war through the OPEC+ cartel”, Menendez said there was “simply is no room to play both sides of this conflict”.

“I will not green-light any cooperation with Riyadh until the Kingdom reassesses its position with respect to the war in Ukraine. Enough is enough,” he said.

Another Democratic senator and a member of Congress – Richard Blumenthal and Ro Khanna – expressed similar sentiments in an opinion piece for Politico that also accused Saudi Arabia of undermining US efforts and helping to boost Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The senators want to block weapon sales to Saudi Arabia. Mohammed bin Salman will rather happily buy Russian air defense system. In contrast to U.S. systems they have the advantage of actually functioning. Saudi Arabia’s Intermediate Range Missiles are from China. It will be happy to add more of those too.

Pissing off Russia, China and the whole Middle East – all at the same time – while condemning its ‘allies’ to a systemic economic crash and utter poverty, is the result of an irrational U.S. foreign policy.

I find it unlikely that the Biden administration with its librul ideology will be able to correct its own errors. The failures and mistakes will stay uncorrected and their consequences will multiply. It will take a regime change in Washington, and a change in its deep state ideology, to find back to some realistic view on foreign policies.

La Resistance - One by One

Jeffrey Sachs – The Unraveling of the WEF Narrative

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by Ron Unz via Unz Review

Excerpt

Until just a few months ago, I doubt there were many American academics more solidly situated in the topmost ranks of our elite mainstream establishment than Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University.

In 1983 he gained Harvard University tenure at the remarkably young age of 28, then spent the next 19 years as a professor at that august academic institution; by the early 1990s the New York Times was already hailing him as the world’s most important figure in his field. Lured to Columbia University in 2002, he has spent the last couple of decades teaching there and also directing a couple of its research organizations, most recently the Center for Sustainable Development. TIME Magazinehas twice ranked him among the world’s 100 most influential individuals, and for nearly twenty years he served as Special Advisor to several Secretary-Generals of the United Nations, while publishing many hundreds of articles and op-eds on a wide variety of subjects in our most influential media outlets.

It would be difficult to construct a more illustrious and establishmentarian curriculum vitae for an international academic figure, so in 2020 he was a natural choice to serve as chairman of the Lancet‘s Covid Commission, established to investigate all aspects of the deadly worldwide pandemic.

Yet as he has subsequently explained in his interviews, over the course of the last couple of years he became increasingly suspicious that the true origins of the viral disease were being concealed. More than eighteen million people have died worldwide including over a million Americans, and rather than acquiescing in what he came to believe was an ongoing official cover-up, he broke with the establishment and made the courageous decision to bring the true facts to widespread public attention.

Although he has retained the subdued manner and careful phraseology of a mild academic, in recent months the incendiary content of his published articles and his public statements have exploded across the global landscape, reaching many millions who might otherwise never have questioned what they were so uniformly being told by all our mainstream media organs. His critics defending that orthodoxy must surely believe that he has gone dangerously rogue, and given the enormous weight of his past credibility, I suspect that the phrase “rogue elephant” has sometimes entered their thoughts.

 

From the earliest days of the Covid epidemic, an official narrative was promoted that the virus was natural and editors of the leading scientific journals closed their pages to any submissions that suggested otherwise. With no reputable academic papers challenging their perspective, the natural origins advocates were able to cite this silence as proof that their position represented the overwhelming scientific consensus, thereby intimidating most mainstream journalists into toeing that same line. A massive propaganda-bubble had been inflated and maintained by such administrative means.

However, as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof. Sachs had publication privileges in the prestigious PNAS journal, so in May he and a co-author published an important article documenting the highly suspicious characteristics of the Covid virus and calling for further investigation. This constituted a breakthrough, becoming the first and only paper published in a major journal that presented the very strong evidence of Covid bioengineering.

Given his role as chairman of the Covid Commission, Sachs’ paper should have been treated as a bombshell, reaching the headlines of all our leading newspapers. But instead, it was almost totally ignored, as was the author’s public statements on the subject. However, the following month, Sachs attended a small Spanish thinktank gathering, whose proceedings were soon made available on Youtube. Russia’s RTeventually ran a brief item highlighting Sachs’ presentation, and a short clip of his remarks soon went super-viral, retweeted out almost 11,000 times and accumulating over a million views.

A video clip that is viewed a million times has attracted an audience of cable news proportions, and Britain’s muck-raking Daily Mail could not resist covering the explosive story, though harshly slanting it against the suddenly controversial academic. Top Russian generals soon began citing Sachs as an authority in their public Defense Ministry briefings.

Although nearly all Western media outlets maintained their strict boycott of Sachs and his explosive accusations, a couple of prominent alternative journalists were willing to offer him a platform. During August, he began describing the outrageous Covid cover-up in interviews with Nathan Robinson of the Current Affairs webzine and on the popular podcast of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

I was very impressed with Sachs’ forthright statements, and I summarized the developments in a column of my own.

 

No sooner had the reverberations of Sachs’ Covid accusations died down than his remarkable candor engulfed him in an entirely different and even more immediate media controversy.

Having publicly broken ranks with the political establishment over Covid, he soon began doing the same on other important issues. During July and August he published a couple of opinion columns condemning our reckless policies towards Russia and China, with the former having already provoked a bloody and dangerous war in Ukraine and the latter periodically threatening to do the same over Taiwan.

In recent years our once-independent NATO allies have increasingly been treated as American vassals, with their seemingly-compromised political leadership regularly sacrificing their own national interests to support our demands, including our extremely aggressive policies against Russia. Such European subservience became most obvious in their wholehearted support of the severe anti-Russian economic sanctions imposed after the beginning of the Ukraine war, sanctions that have resulted in the devastating loss of the inexpensive Russian energy supplies so necessary to their industries.

With more than half of all German businesses fearful that they might be forced to permanently shut down, massive political pressure was mounting on that country’s leadership to reopen the Nord Stream pipelines with Russia. There were reports of secret negotiations under way to do exactly that, which would have produced a severe political defeat for NATO. However, that possibility was suddenly foreclosed after a series of underwater explosions severely damaged the Russian pipelines, a blow seemingly intended to render them completely inoperable. As I discussed in a recent column, America almost certainly played the central role in those attacks, which possibly represented the greatest peacetime military destruction of civilian infrastructure in the history of the world.

But although the evidence of American culpability was immediate and overwhelming, much of our lick-spittle Western media illogically blamed the Russians for the destruction of their own pipelines, and the story anyway never received a fraction of the coverage it warranted, with even much of the supposedly fearless alternative media avoiding the topic. An excellent segment on Tucker Carlson’s show set forth the crucial facts, but aside from his particular slice of the FoxNews audience, I suspect that the vast majority of Americans either remained largely unaware of the massive pipeline attacks or even vaguely blamed them on Vladimir Putin.

Then a few days later, Bloomberg TV invited Sachs to share his concerns over the Ukraine war. His hosts were flabbergasted when he flatly declared that America had probably destroyed the Russian pipelines, even mentioning that top journalists had privately told him the same thing, although none of those vital facts could ever appear in their own newspapers.

As a consequence of Sachs’ candor, the interview was cut short—with Sachs “yanked off air” in the words of the hostile New York Post—but the entire segment was watched at least a couple of hundred thousand times on Youtube and the short clip of Sachs’ Nord Stream remarks soon went super-viral on Twitter, viewed more than 4 million times in one Tweet and another million times across a couple of others.

Ironically enough, Bloomberg TV may have been prompted to interview Sachs because the latter had suffered a ferocious attack a few days earlier in the Atlantic. Neocon writer James Kirchick had bitterly denounced Sachs for being a member of the “Anti-war Camp,” grouping him together with a long list of other prominent figures across the ideological spectrum—ranging from Ron Paul to John Mearsheimer to Noam Chomsky—all of whom had become very concerned about our growing military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.

A perfect example of the bizarre state of the American media landscape was that although Kirchick himself possessed no serious foreign policy expertise, being primarily focused upon Gay Rights activism, he was provided a major platform to revile and ridicule individuals whose distinguished careers in that field had begun before he was even born. More than a dozen years earlier, Kirchick had similarly flagellated leading critics of George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War.

Although the bulk of the Atlantic hit-piece was aimed at demonizing the prominent academics, journalists, and public policy experts fearful of war with Russia, a couple of paragraphs of opprobrium were also heaped upon the Grayzone, a left-leaning alternative media website and Youtube channel run by Max Blumenthal and focused upon foreign policy issues. Although quite popular, the Grayzone appears to operate on a tiny shoestring budget, relying upon the small donations of its viewers, so it was quite churlish for Kirchick to smear it as “opaquely financed,” given that he was leveling that insinuation from a media platform under tight Neocon control but owned and lavishly funded by the multi-billionaire widow of Steve Jobs.

  • How the Anti-war Camp Went Intellectually Bankrupt
    Critics of U.S. foreign policy from both ends of the ideological spectrum have found common cause in supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
    James Kirchick • The Atlantic • September 29, 2022 • 2,500 Words

 

The scurrilous Atlantic denunciation may have helped get Sachs invited onto Bloomberg TV, ultimately allowing millions to discover the true facts of the Nord Stream pipeline attacks. There may have been another unforeseen consequence of its simultaneous attacks against both the Grayzone and Sachs, with the former soon arranging an interview of the latter. On Sunday morning, the media outlet released two outstanding segments with the Columbia professor, separately focused on the Ukraine war and the Covid origins controversy, and these have already accumulated more than 100,000 views after less than a day. The Grayzone possesses a great deal of influence and credibility in alternative media circles, and I would hope that these interviews lead to an avalanche of additional coverage for Sachs in other outlets, many of which seem to have previously shied away from the explosive charges he had been making.

The first Grayzone segment was descriptively entitled “End Ukraine Proxy War or Face Armageddon,” and some of Sachs’ crucial points may have surprised his listeners. As he emphasized, America is actually already at war with nuclear-armed Russia in Ukraine, given that we are providing all the funding, military equipment, and command and control facilities for the forces fighting and killing Russian troops on Russia’s own border, as well as supplying unknown numbers of direct combat participants. This is an extraordinarily dangerous situation that would have been considered almost unimaginable during the days of our original Cold War, and our recent destruction of Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines was merely the latest manifestation of this undeclared but very real conflict.

Although American leaders may seek to hide their responsibility behind the supposedly independent decisions of the Ukrainian government, this is a transparent fig-leaf. Ukraine’s political leadership is merely our puppet regime, totally financed and controlled by our own government, and pretending otherwise is simply a propaganda-ruse aimed at deceiving our gullible public.

The second, slightly shorter Grayzone segment focused on the Covid origins issue, and provided Sachs the best opportunity he has yet had to present the important facts he uncovered while running the Covid commission. Just a couple of days earlier, he had also been interviewed on physicist Steve Hsu’s podcast discussing the same subject. I would highly recommend both these interviews to anyone interested in understanding the true origins of the viral epidemic that killed more than a million Americans and disrupted the lives of many billions around the world during the last couple of years.


When I’d previously discussed Sachs’ remarkable Covid disclosures back in August, I’d closed with a few paragraphs summarizing the role he seems to be playing in the public discussion and how his positions related to my own.

Western Hegemony's Collapse

Ex-Aussie PM: The Era of US “Supremacy” Has Already Passed

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via Sputnik


The Quad was officially launched in 2007 but suspended in 2008 after Australia pulled out of the US-led grouping over concerns expressed by China. The grouping was revived in 2017, a year after the US announced its ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’. Beijing has labelled the Quad ‘Asian NATO’, accusing Washington of inciting tensions in the region.

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating has slammed the US-led Quad grouping as “illegitimate” and a “strategic piece of nonsense,” as he advised Canberra to not be a part of the US-led efforts to “ring-fence” China.

The Quad, which comprises Australia, India, Japan and the US, says that its official goal is to maintain a “free and open Indo-Pacific region”.

“We shouldn’t be stringing together the US, Japan, India and Australia to try to contain China,” Keating, a senior party colleague of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, said on Wednesday.

Keating argued that that Beijing’s “ambitions are in the west, not the east,” as he underlined the inroads made by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in regions outside Asia. “Everywhere between Wuhan and Istanbul, in the next 30 years, will have a huge Chinese influence.”

Keating pointed out that the BRI has already financed infrastructure projects in the Baltic states as well as in former Soviet countries.

The multi-trillion-dollar BRI initiative was launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 and strives to connect east Asia with Europe and beyond through connectivity and infrastructure projects. As of March 2022, a total of 147 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, South America as well as North America have been members of the Beijing-backed global initiative.

Keating also reckoned that the era of US “supremacy” as the pre-eminent global power has already passed.

“This idea that the US is an exceptional power… they have God’s ear and proselytizing democracy was fine in the 20th century. The 20th century was owned by the US. The 21st century belongs to someone else,” stated Keating.

He also expressed doubts whether the US would come to the help of Taiwan if Beijing went ahead with the re-unification of the island with the mainland through military means.

Beijing has doubled down on its commitment to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland following the visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei in August. Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that reunifying Taiwan is part of China’s goal to achieve “national rejuvenation”.

“China would see every amphibious vessel coming towards the United States, whether it is San Diego or Honolulu. They would see them and sink them,” the former Australian PM claimed, suggesting that the chances of an American “victory” in such a scenario would be “nil”.

Keating advised the Australian government not to get involved in the “geopolitical conflict” around Taiwan.

“We should be no more interested in the political system of Taiwan than Vietnam and Kazakhstan,” argued Keating.

Eastern Europe Awakening

A View from the Quintessential Washington Insider

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Jeffrey Sachs caused a stir on social media last week with a Bloomberg TV interview in which he speculated that the US could be behind the blasts that damaged the Nord Stream natural-gas pipelines from Russia to Germany. As the analyst began to explain his theory about the attack, a Bloomberg anchor interjected and suggested that he had no evidence. When Sachs then began to lay out his reasoning, the other anchor tried to cut him off and said she didn’t want to get into a “tit-for-tat” in the absence of evidence.

Jeffrey Sachs told Grayzone’s hosts that Biden has failed to defuse the crisis, essentially going to war with Russia rather than agreeing to keep Ukraine out of NATO. “It’s the job of the president of the United States to put on the brakes because this country is a war machine at the top… The main job of the president of the United States is to stop the war machine from making wars, and we are now in an escalation, heading toward Armageddon.”

The analyst suggested that Ukraine is a key “geographical pivot” under America’s neoconservative policy of being the world’s only superpower. “The game plan is, control the Black Sea. It is Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Georgia – all surrounding Russia, where their naval fleet is.”

“It took me quite a long time to grow up”, but at the age of 67 Jeffrey Sachs says that can see now the lies coming from Washington. Didn’t he see the same 30 years ago?

Currently director of the Center for Sustainable Development at New York’s Columbia University, Sachs gained notoriety among the Russians for his “shock therapy” reforms in 1991-1993. The overhaul of the entire Soviet economy ended up destroying the lives of millions of Russians and handing the country’s wealth over to a handful of oligarchs.

Military Affairs

The Crimean Bridge: NATO Appears Involved

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via South Front
Details Of Attack On Crimean Bridge Revealed. NATO Appears Involved

Based on data from military correspondent Alexander Kots and official Russian sources

Two trucks were involved in the terrorist attack on the Crimean bridge.

The head of the Russian Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, reported to Vladimir Putin that there is no doubt that the terrorist attack on the Crimean bridge was carried out by the Ukrainian special services. Russian and foreign citizens took part in it at various stages of preparation.

“We have already established the route of the truck, where the explosion took place. Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, North Ossetia, Krasnodar… The carriers have been identified. With the help of operatives of the FSB, we managed to identify suspects among those who might have been preparing a terrorist attack,” Bastrykin stressed.

Two heavy-duty trucks were involved in this operation. The cargo were 22 pallets of plastic food wraps, 9 rolls each (one pallet weighs about a ton), that arrived in the Georgian port of Poti from Bulgaria by sea. The ordering customer was a citizen of Ukraine. Then it was loaded onto a truck with foreign license numbers. The driver of the first truck communicated with the ordering customer via WhatsApp. Further, the truck went from Georgian port of Poti to Armenia, where the cargo was customs cleared according to the rules of the Eurasian Customs Union. This is a typical, unsuspicious route for truckers traveling to Russia.

Then the trucks entered Russian territory through the Verkhny Lars checkpoint. The same one through which several thousand neoliberal Russians or common parasites fled to Georgia, fearing mobilization. The truck’s final destination was the city of Armavir, where the pallets were reloaded onto another truck, which headed toward Crimea.

The explosives were placed in rolls of plastic food wraps. it was done in such a way that it was not visible on the X-ray control, because of the multi-layer plastic.

This was apparently done in Bulgaria. Because it seems unlikely that bales of tightly twisted plastic food wraps with explosive material inside could have been repacked on the way.

This indicates that, in addition to Ukraine, intelligence services of NATO countries are apparently involved in the organization of this terrorist attack.

The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation reports that the driver of the first truck is already testifying. Most likely, like the driver of the second truck, he was used blindly and didn’t know what he was carrying.

Democracy as Mob Rule

Flash Mob Democracy in Action

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Scamdemic - Corona Virus

CCTV Cams Reveal The Vaxed’s Strange Hallucinations Before Collapsing

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One America News reporter Pearson Sharp broadcast a report yesterday allegedly showing security camera feeds from around the world where people had strange hallucinations before collapsing with what looks like seizures, probably a result of the COVID-19 vaccines.

WARNING! Some of these images are very graphic and may not be suitable for younger audiences.

This is from Bitchute channel.

Western Hegemony's Collapse

What Does Russia Want?

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via RT

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to strike “a new grand bargain” with the West to erase the humiliations of the post-Cold War period, Turkish presidential adviser Ibrahim Kalin told CNN on Saturday.

In an interview with the American broadcaster, he said that the Ukraine conflict will inevitably end in a negotiated settlement, with the only question being when, “and how much damage will have been done by then?”

Such a settlement will be about more than the borders of Russia and Ukraine, he continued, arguing that what Putin really aims to do is renegotiate the balance of power between Moscow and the West, after a weakened Russia accepted several rounds of NATO expansion in the aftermath of the Cold War.

“Our understanding is that Mr. Putin wants to have a new grand bargain, a new deal, with the West,” Kalin said. The Turkish official referenced agreements signed by Moscow and NATO in the early 1990s – which included the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, which stated that the alliance would continue to expand, and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia agreed not to use force against its neighbors – as decisions Putin would like to re-do.

“The Russian perception is that the Russia of that day, that signed that agreement – that is, the Russia of the Gorbachevs and the Yeltsins – is over,” Kalin claimed. “There is a new Russia, there is a new world, there is a new reality, and they want to have a new bargain.”

Putin declared last week that “the ongoing collapse of Western hegemony is irreversible,”and that “things will never be the same.” A multipolar world, he said, will give non-Western nations “an opportunity to strengthen their sovereignty.”

According to Kalin, “This puts of course the entire global order, the liberal order, to a test.”He added: “So far the response has been war from both sides.”

Western leaders have not indicated that they intend to negotiate an end to the Ukraine conflict in the near future. Washington’s official line is that it will continue to funnel tens of billions of dollars’ worth of arms to Kiev “for as long as it takes,” and will allow Ukraine to dictate its terms for ending the conflict.

Amid the broader conflict between Russia and the West, Türkiye has positioned itself as a middleman, with Ankara hosting peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in March that ultimately broke down. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday called for both sides to return to negotiations, declaring that “even the worst peace will be better than war.”

Military Affairs

Ukraine SitRep – October 7

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via Moon of Alabama (Except)

The Russian army is leading globally in its abilities to wage electronic warfare. It can disable ground based radio traffic on any frequency. It has now found ways to also disable ground to satellite connections as used by the Starlink constellation.

At the beginning of the war the Ukrainian military was supplied with thousands of Starlink ground terminals that can connect to the swarms of small Starlink satellites, which were financed by the Pentagon, but managed by Elon Musk’s companies. They allowed for communication between Ukrainian ground units as well as for general command and control of larger operations. Without Starlink the Ukrainian command will depend on cable based field telephone, runners and couriers. All of which are extremely vulnerable in an artillery rich environment.

Since 2001 Russia developed the Tirada 2 electromagnetic system which can disable ground to satellite traffic in specific areas.

Russian military in the near future can get into service systems that can disable enemy communication satellites, an informed Interfax interlocutor in the military-industrial complex said 05 January 2018. “One of the projects is Tirada 2. Development work was started back in 2001,” he said. According to him, this complex will be able to disable communication satellites from the ground. “He acts by electronic suppression. This is a multi-million dollar project,” he said. The fact that the Russian Federation is working on the creation of weapons to suppress satellites was announced on November 30 last year by Oleg Achasov, deputy head of the Federal State Budgetary Institution “46 Central Scientific Research Institute”.
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In November 2018, the FSB called the “threat to national security” a project to cover the globe with high-speed satellite Internet.

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In 2019 an OSCE observer drone took pictures of a Tirada complex in the Donbas region.

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The disablement of the Starlink communication traffic was only a question of time. The traffic had to be analyzed to identify the frequencies and algorithms used by the transmitter and receiver. Software had to be written to implement a matching radio jamming pattern. The hardware of the Tirada system was likely already sufficient to emit the appropriate patterns on the identified frequencies.

As this system has now been proven to be effective in the field it will likely be made available on a wider scale. Russian electronic warfare equipment can already disable all ground radio traffic in specific areas. Soon all frontline communications of the Ukrainian forces will be disabled.

This is catastrophic for Ukrainian operations. Forward observers will no longer be able to correct artillery missions. Platoons and companies at the front will have no way to call for support. Higher command will have no way to coordinate larger operations in real time.

Scamdemic - Corona Virus

The FDA Misled the Public About Ivermectin

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TUCSON, Ariz., Sept. 30, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) filed its motion and amicus brief Thursday evening with the federal district court in Galveston urging it to allow the lawsuit to proceed against the FDA for its misleading statements against ivermectin. In Apter v. HHS, a group of physicians sued to hold the Food and Drug Administration, a federal agency within the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), accountable for its interference with physicians’ ability to treat Covid-19.

“Defendant FDA has improperly exploited misunderstandings about the legality and prevalence of off-label uses of medication, in order to mislead courts, state medical boards, and the public into thinking there is anything improper about off-label prescribing,” AAPS writes in its amicus brief to the court. “Not only is off-label prescribing fully proper, legal, and commonplace, but it is also absolutely necessary in order to give effective care to patients.”

Yet the FDA published multiple statements and sent letters to influential organizations to falsely disparage ivermectin, implying that it was not approved for treating Covid-19. Many, including courts and state medical boards, were misled by the FDA into thinking that its lack of approval for this treatment meant that ivermectin should not be used to treat Covid-19.

“It has never been proper for the FDA to interfere with that essential part of the practice of medicine, and the FDA knows it,” AAPS informed the court. The FDA “insisted and continues to insist on interfering with the prescription of this safe medication by physicians in treating Covid-19,” AAPS added.

AAPS General Counsel Andrew Schlafly pointed out to the court that the FDA “has engaged in a campaign of interference with the proper use by physicians of ivermectin, which has long been approved as fully safe for human use.” He alerted the court that once the FDA approves a medication as safe, then physicians have full authority to prescribe it to treat any illness, particularly a novel virus like Covid-19.

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a national organization representing physicians in all specialties since 1943. Its motto is omnia pro aegroto (everything for the patient).