Europe Is Walking On the Edge of Nuclear Abyss: it still has time and agency to avoid a catastrophe, but not too much

Europe Is Walking On the Edge of Nuclear Abyss: it still has time and agency to avoid a catastrophe, but not too much.

I keep hearing many people asking similar questions about the nuclear escalation between Russia and the US. Some people, and even academic scholars consider only Ukraine as the focal point of the possible nuclear escalation on the part of Russia.

Again and again I see more and more evidence that many of these people are completely missing the context and trying to find nuclear risks in the wrong spot, in my view.

Just to capture lots of similar questions, I will share my humble view on the subject of nuclear escalation and I hasten to add that it is only my view, it can be partially wrong, or only partially correct.

Well, be it Russia or the US, or China for that matter - all of them aren’t so irrational as to self-destroyingly start a world apocalypse in a situation where clearly it can be avoided.

A nuclear attack from Russia on America or from America on Russia does predictably lead to a result whereby everybody loses, existentially loses..

But EUROPE - that’s a completely different matter. Europe with its involvement in the NATO adventurism of waging a proxy-war with Russia is really (sleep-) walking on the edge of an abyss - nuclear abyss. The main reason behind it is because Russia actually doesn't run too much existential risk to itself in the scenario of launching a "limited" nuclear attack on Europe for military objectives only.

It is not surprising that this subject may make one sick to one's stomach even to think about, and that's why Europeans may have lost sight of what really their governments do or don't do in the international affairs. But it is really important for Europe to delve into this subject to avoid most terrible consequences and avoid being led down the primrose path by the Anglo-West.

If European involvement, especially countries like Poland in the transfer of arms and other resources to Ukraine, in the eyes of Moscow can put at risk the outcome of its war with Ukraine or just exact too high a price to win, Russia can hit Europe with tactical or not-so-tactical nuclear weapons (GOD FORBID!!): for example it could hit Poland after issuing an ultimatum calling for it to stop any supplies to Ukraine. Everything should be done by Europe, especially Germany, to prevent this sickening outcome.

Moscow knows that Washington knows that Moscow knows etc.. that Moscow’s nuclear strikes against military capabilities and infrastructure in Europe wouldn't be aimed at the US and wouldn’t pose any direct threat to the US. The US, in its turn, is not going to self-destroy by launching a global nuclear apocalypse in a situation when the US knows that Russia’s nuclear motivations, targets and objectives have nothing whatsoever to do with the US militarily.

On the other hand Europe just doesn’t have any symmetrical response - that simple.
So when, in this terrible sickening, but none the less realistic for that, scenario radioactive dust settles and smoke clears, the response from the US is gonna be.. yes CRICKETS. Well, of course there will be lots of howl of condemnation and lots of theatricals to show how firmly the US stands in solidarity, but all of those, of course, aren’t going to magically resurrect thousands of lives in Europe and restore the economic and political consequences of a century inflicted on Europe.

In my view this terrible risk to Europe is so clear and self-evident that it is not against logic at all to ask a question if this outcome - the economic destruction and geo-political weakening of Europe for decades to come - may be exactly one of the outcomes that the US WANTS, condones and approves at least in some of its planning scenarios and its spectrum of wider geo-political goals.

As I said in one of my previous articles, the whole goal in preconditioning, triggering and supporting the Russo-Ukrainian war was the Anglo-West, especially the US, deliberately leading the European West down the primrose path, weakening it, making it totally obedient and politico-economically dependent on the US for decades ahead (about the fundamental causes and US motivations behind the Russo-Ukrainian war see my views more in depth here: My little politics: US Goal In Designing And Fueling the Russo-Ukrainian War: IT IS ALL ABOUT EUROPE! (dr-world.blogspot.com )

All these considerations are no less applicable to Ukraine, but Ukraine’s agency in the present circumstances is really doubtful: in many ways the Ukrainian State, alas, is doing what it is expected to do by the collective West, mostly the Anglo-West.

Europe on the other hand still has both time and power and its own agency in actions and decisions to come to its senses and move away from this nuclear abyss, take a firm stance aimed at putting a PEACEFUL END through negotiations to the Ukrainian war, and refrain from its open participation in the proxy war against Russia (it’s not secret that there are two wars going on at once, one of which is the Russo-Ukrainian war and another one is the NATO proxy war with Russia).

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Making Spanish the Lingua Franca in China Can Be a Smart Move for the Chinese Dragon

 One of smart moves for China in the present transition to the multipolar world can be to make Spanish its second language in the same way as English in countries like Sweden. In this scenario a new generation of Chinese will be totally bilingual, with the second language being Spanish.

For China in its competition race to win the global markets, and global economic and cultural influence the most important part of the world, arguably, is going to be Latin America, or, even more broadly, the Spanish-speaking world.

To make the trade, technological and economic cooperation, tourism and cultural interaction with the Latin world easier and create a good counterbalance to the hegemony of the English language it will probably make sense for China to learn Spanish. But not just learn, but learn well - just like Sweden did English in the past. This is totally achievable within one generation, which is not a really long term by the time by Chinese standards. As with English, there are pretty powerful Spanish study courses created to be adopted in schools.

This may be especially true considering that the Chinese system is based on a very strong State, where institutionalization of teaching a language in all the Chinese schools from grade one and integrating the language in many institutions can be much easier and faster than in many other countries.

In the 21st century Chinese technical giants will have to court hundreds of millions of Spanish-speaking consumers and the task of better understanding their needs and doing business better in their mother-countries is inevitably going to be very important and critical in competition with the big tech counterparts from the Anglo-West.

The same goes for industrial standards that China is going to have to establish, make acceptable and attractive for the Latin World if China wants to become a driving force in industrialization of the Latin World on the one hand and achieve a deep industrial interpenetration between their own industrial base and that of the Latin World, not unlike the industrial interpenetration that took place in the West and that contributed a lot to gluing the collective West together economically, hence, politically.

Cultural aspect is no less important, and not because it stands alone aside from the economic one, but, on the contrary, because it goes hand in hand with the deep mutual economic development based on mutual interdependence in the industrial and technological standards and industry itself. The deep economic relations that generate trust and influence the cultural and diplomatic trust in a profound feedback loop are impossible without a deep industrial and technological interdependence - partnerships "joint at the hip" at the level of standards and sharing the industrial complex.

Language is the MOTHER OF ALL STANDARDS.

Just as millions of people from the Latin World are able to visit and do business in the United States, the same millions of people, from the Chinese perspective, should be able and motivated to visit and do business in China. And the opposite is true, in my view: the millions of the Chinese should have a much lower cultural barrier that restricts them from coming to the Latin countries, doing business there, interacting and cooperating with the Latino businesses, specialists and people in general.

Nothing can lower those barriers so efficiently as speaking the same language.

Language matters in globalization. Since the previous globalization most likely has died with the death of the unipolar word and the previous world order, designed and built in many ways by the Anglo-West, the locomotives of the new globalization will be born out of the countries/blocks that can offer the best models of catalyzing and facilitating cultural and business interaction, building trust and connections between the cultural and economic bases of their own country and that of other parts of the world.

I have no doubt that introduction of Spanish as a second language in China - a market with 18% of the whole global population - will qualitatively add to the competitiveness of both China and the whole Spanish-speaking world in its competition with the Anglo-West in a new globalization race.

Language matters in globalization, and the English, in my view, is a bright example of that.

Since the chances of Chinese being adopted and spread in other parts of the world - at least in those parts that are of significance in the context of the new economic order and globalization - are close to zero, the Spanish, in my view, can be the best choice for China in a win-win situation for both China and the Spanish-speaking world.

The perception, reputation, image of China and a boost in general trust in China can be too very important and instrumental corollaries of such a move.

To put it shortly, it may be time for China to drop this "linguistic bomb" and create a powerful counterbalance to English as one of the strongest contributors to the cultural, diplomatic and economic dominance of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Technically and institutionally it is totally possible as far as China is concerned. Whether such a move is realistic in other respects is hard to say.

Politics of Smear: Former Finnish PM, Masquerading As "a Purely Academic Opponent", Fumes About John Mearsheimer's Analysis of Russo-Ukrainian Conflict

This is just my notes about this "staged theatrical", masked as "just academic debate", that Alexander Stubb did in order, as I see it, to discredit the views and the name of one of the towering academic figures in America, John Mearsheimer. (see the original of Stubb's "sermon", masquerading as "honest academic debate", here: (2) Why Mearsheimer is wrong about Russia and the war in Ukraine. Five arguments from Alexander Stubb. - YouTube) 

Below I give some of the points or "psychologemes" that Mr Stub uses in the above video in order to, under the disguise of "honest neutral academic debate", not only to cast a shadow on the honest academic analysis by John Mearsheimer, but on his character - a very typical example, in my view, nowadays where politicians directly attack usual citizens (and John is not a politician and doesn't have any political goals or affiliations) and even go so far as try to attack the most prominent academics and smear them.

1. Stub says that according to Mearsheimer the war was driven by the 'aggressive behavior' of the US - this is simply untrue, if not an outright lie. Mearsheimer didn't operate in the categories of "behaviors", nor did he frame the cause in such categories.

2. Stubb: "As somebody who met Lavrov, Putin.. etc I'd like to take issues with what Mearsheimer claims".. "Today with my academic and political background I will try to give 5 reasons why Mearsheimer is wrong". Such statements have nothing but rhetorical "value".

3. "Russia is imperial because it has always been like that" I doubt that this purely rhetorical passage, because it is not an argument, Mr Stubb would with a straight face use in any academic debate or written work this purely political passage. But even if he did - because we see lots of gaps and lisons nowadays in the academic environment being - too bad and no value to that.

4. Stubb asserts that the theoretical views of Mearsheimer, among other things, boil down to``Russia bona fide defended itself against Ukraine". It's not only a lie, but a ridiculous one, and Mr Stubb is educated well enough to know and understand that (but obviously he may rely on his audience not knowing it). From the standpoint of the foundations of the school of realism, these categories "defense in bona fide" are NON-existent and absolutely meaningless, even less so for the regional powers. Not only didn't Mearsheimer never said any such silly thing, but hardly could have. Nor did Mearsheimer ever claim something that that "Russia defended itself against Ukraine"! (even Moscow didn't make that claim) - it is a pure fruit of Mr Stubb's imagination, or, much worse still, it is a deliberate attempt to misinform the public.

5. Though the explanation of the geopolitical nature of what happened either from Mearsheimer or from realism, doesn't make lots of sense of the "can't or can help itself", Mr Stubb somehow puts that into Mearsheimer's mouth and then makes a claim based on these false premises that Russia ``absolutely CAN help itself and not attack Ukraine" and doesn't provide any evidence in favor of that claim (even though pretty distant from debates with Mearsheimer)

6. For some reasons known better to himself, Mr Stubb asserts that somehow the "rejuvenation of NATO" (which we all know about now POST-FACTUM) based on that "Finland and Sweden" join NATO (which they still haven't) is a "argument" against the explanations and predictions of Mearsheimer, because it means that "Moscow's choice and the premises and motives were not "rational", obviously Mr Stubb either equates the term "rational" with the term "correct" or "fruitful" because he doesn't know the difference between those things - this is hard to believe indeed - or it is because the very motive behind his explanation is not an academic debate but rhetorical political message to the audience, which to me seems much more plausible. This is a textbook example of "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" logical fallacy.

7. Mr Stubb goes into a whole litany of advice about "who you NEED to read" among some previous leaders of Russia in order "to understand Putin". Though Mr Stubb not only fails but actually doesn't even try to provide any argument whatsoever why "you need to read" all these specific leaders to understand Putin, but he doesn't even bother to shed any light on the question of how and why "understanding Putin" would help understand the geo-political reasons and drivers behind this war. The implicit rhetorical claim of that, for lack of anything else, is that somehow the personal motivations of Putin and his personal views explain the reason behind the war, which in itself requires lots of evidence.

8. Later Mr Stubb makes a self-referential rhetorical, if not outright demagogic, claim - the so called fallacy of argument from anecdote - that he "met personally Putin" and "he knows from his conversations with Putin" that he "hates" the West etc. Not only that, but all this irrelevant rhetorical garbage in the view of Mr Stubb, somehow bears a relation to the causes of war and is real evidence against the views of Mearsheimer.

9. Stubb "Putin rejected the liberal democracy in Chechnya and in Syria.." My foot - liberal democracy in Syria! What a new "well-accepted fact" that needs any rejection! It's really surprising - the mastery with which politicians can deadpan such level of absurdities with a straight face. Let there be no confusion, insofar as such ridiculous rhetoric is concerned Mr Stubb is just a politician masquerading for a better perception of the validity of his narrative as an "academic" (don't get confused, he does have an academic education, it just doesn't have anything to do with the rhetorical fantastical things he presents as "arguments", most likely not believing himself a bit of what he is saying)

10. Mr Stubb regurgitated the same sentiments as many other populist orators, instead of valid and sound arguments, about the "agency of a Ukraine as a sovereign state" and some "transcendental moral argument" according to which countries should or should not do this or that. This is exactly the type of fallacy that Mearsheimer himself mentioned so many times in his lectures as a frequent reaction to his analysis. This "supernatural", for lack of better word, "argument" about the "agency" and some absolute moral obligations - the verb "SHOULD" - has no place in realist rational analysis in geopolitical motives and forces, especially so in geopolitics of great regional and planetary powers within the context of their spheres of influence and existential fears.

In the same breath Mr Stubb preaches what the world "NEEDS to be" (obviously at some abstract time in future, because "needs" already presupposes that it IS NOT now). It is really hard to see how this sentiment and desire has anything whatsoever to do with disproving or correcting the arguments and views of Mearsheimer that are dealing with what IS, not what SHOULD. Not only that, but if anything, recent history 20-21 cent demonstrate overwhelmingly how these views of some "universal absolute rules" are far from reality.

11. "The only thing that Russia understands is power and that is exactly why Ukraine is doing the right thing trying to stave off [militarily] Russia". Another example of an absolutely unsubstantiated thesis. Wherefrom it follows that Ukraine is "doing the right thing trying to stave off Russia militarily" and how it stems from the proposed (but not substantiated) premise that Russia "understands only power" Mr Stubb didn't disclose in his lecture, or rather "sermon". 

12. A whole bouquet of totally unsubstantiated claims that "NATO changed its role to crisis management and peacekeeping" is a specially amusing "stream of fantasies" that doesn't find its confirmation neither in any changes in the NATO documents nor in reality of the 21st century, nor in the fact that the debate of "what is NATO and why we need it" was an active debate that never came to any conclusive answer in the 21st century.

Another fantastical statement by Mr Stubb is that "NATO never attacked a different country".. This gives probably more information not about what Mr Stubb really thinks about NATO but what he thinks about his audience.

13. A rare case when Mr Stub really tries to resort to some history and some fact-based evidence, instead of "stream of consciousness" and "flight of fantasy": he specifically refers to Georgian war, that took place several months after the NATO summit in Bucharest, and unexpectedly makes another cyclical argument that somehow this war is evidence to support Putin's (which Mr Stub continues to identify with Russia and its geopolitical decision-making) expansionist policy. Indeed, it wasn't hard for Russia to capture the whole of Georgia and even annex it. As a minimum, it was even easier and cheaper to set a pro-Russian government in Tbilisi, none of which Moscow did and for none of which Moscow has even demonstrated the slightest intentions up to this day since 2008. If anything, the Georgian war and how Russia dealt with Georgia after all the US military bases have left together with any hope to joining NATO, provide evidence in favor of what Mearsheimer was saying, and in favor of what the West excellently have known, namely Russia's attitude towards NATO expansion.

14. "Putin THOUGHT [in 2014] that the reaction of the West would be the same [as in 2008 with Georgia]" One of those many many "Putin thought" that Mr Stub peppers his narrative with but which has not more in common with valid argumentation as the multiple theological claims about what God or devil want or think..

15. All the "argumentation", posed by Mr Stubb, from logical point of view, is nothing more than an exercise in circular argument in an effort to persuade (not prove or logically support) certain set of sentiments and views towards this war projected by Stubb (not necessarily shared by him) - it's not even an attempt to somehow disprove or critically look into the arguments of Mearsheimer.

16. At the end of the debate Mr Stubb goes to do something that is completely unethical from an academic debate perspective and academic ethical standards, namely implicitly smear Mearsheimer for the "false claims". Leaving aside that none of those claims were really disproved or even ADDRESSED through rational valid arguments by Mr Stub, those very claims, as Stub himself in word and in deed recognizes with his "lecture" were open to debate and a matter of debate, and aren't claims of some absolute fact, and even can't be in such a discipline as geo-political analysis and history. Nor were they posed by Mearsheimer as some claims of facts, but as conclusions and propositions that follow from his theory. This is a very good indicator of the true "moral" standards of Mr Stubb when it comes to the academic debate, and it really shows how much sincerity and truth in Stub's introductory statement about his ostensible respect and acceptance of academic freedom..

After these implicit smear and discreditation attempts, Mr Stub proceeds to give whole list of names that "you need to read" to understand why Mearsheimer is wrong - it is not references, it is not quotations, it has nothing to do with a bona-fide attempt to debate and critically review or correct Mearsheimer's theory - no. It is a purely political action aimed at forming the opinion of the audience but veiled under the stated "honest wish" to debate "respected Mearsheimer ''. This is just a BAD ACT, that simple, done in bad faith. Not a very big surprise when it comes from any politician these days.

And last, but not least, as much as I would like to see a face-to-face ACADEMIC debate between John and this Mr Stubb taking place in a good academic institution (for example in the University of Chicago, or University of Helsinki), I really doubt that Mr Stubb would ever express such a desire or agreement to do this debate, seeing as the purpose of his reactions to Mearsheimer have, to all appearances, very little to do with a bona-fide academic debate, and everything to do with preservation of the audience of a certain narrative and a certain set of rationally unverified stereotypes regarding the nature, causes and consequences of this enormously tragic war. It is rather the elimination of debate than the participation in debate that seems to drive such individuals from the political milieu as Mr Stubb (and there are plenty of them. indeed there is hardly anything original or unique in the stream of rhetorical unsubstantiated claims and reactions that I heard from Mr Stubb in this video - this is pretty synthetic set of rhetorical reactions circulating like food in the digestive tract of a cow, with multiple regurgitations and re-chewings).  

For those who really want to continue to investigate the reasons and causes of this (undoubtedly very tragic) war, totally predicted by John Mearsheimer in 2015, it may be helpful and useful also to watch a very recent lecture by John in Budapest in Dec 2022. See John J. Mearsheimer: Great Power Politics in the 21st Century & The Implications for Hungary - YouTube

Why is Russia not getting weak economically despite sanctions? Simple: because these sanctions are stupid

At least a certain number of people in the West, despite megatons of the cheapest and most vulgar propaganda from the States, its security services and the "democratic independent media", has gotten wise to the fact that Russian economy is none the worse for all these sanctions, that were presented by the aforementioned class of institutional liars as the "silver bullet" against Russia.

Yet I keep hearing from many of those people the same question: "How come these sanctions have been like water off the duck's back for Russia?".

The short answer is: because these sanctions are stupid - that simple. They are “spherically stupid” which means from whatever angle you might look at the substance of these sanctions they are predictably and self-parodically stupid, let alone self-destructively directed at the authors of the sanctions themselves more than anybody else, especially this is true in regards to Europe.

Russia is not only not getting weak but actually is and will be getting economically stronger because of this.
A longer answer is in general sanctions haven’t been effective very often in modern history. But even when they are, they may work only with a country/region that cannot be AUTARCHY - like Cuba for example (where sanctions definitely created a problem for the people equal to the crime against humanity and didn’t create any problems for the regime, but they technically worked in terms of impact on the economy).

In other words, you direct your sanctions against the countries which in principle cannot be self-sufficient in either A) FOOD or B) ENERGY or C) WATER.
Russia is a classic example of a natural autarky - they don’t have any problems with FOOD, ENERGY AND WATER. They sit on a 1/7th of all the dry land of God's green Earth and they have so much mineral resource and energy to feed its industry that they don’t even quite know how much and what they have.
It doesn’t mean they are a real autarky now, but being a "natural autarky" means that they have all the natural conditions to be an real autarky, which means they have lots of room for development. Needless to say, that Europe, who, to the mixture of surprised disbelief and gleeful pleasure of Russia, decided to implement these suicidal "auto-sanctions",  cannot boast the above conditions, at least as far as energy and mineral resources are concerned (part of the food condition - they have problems with fertilizers, and Russia provides almost for half of the world export of those).

Hence, already in a period of energy and food crisis, it was predictable even for a first grade college student of economics that these “sanctions” if I may call them so, will only enrich Russia, stimulate its development and propel its self-sufficient techno-industrial complex, and hit twice as hard against the super-talented authors of these sanctions, who decided to starve their own people to get back at Russia. The biggest sufferer is going to be, of course, Europe. And it feels this way right now (they have problems with energy, not Russia).

The sanctions on shipping and oil trade boosted the oil and gas price - absolutely predictably during the crisis period - to such levels that Russia had to reconsider its budget due to unexpected high volumes of revenues.

Russian government has always tried to invent new ways how to curb the drain of the foreign currency out of the country due to excessive buying of consumer goods and it has never succeeded. Well, the Western sanctions helped on this front - again as predictably as the fate of an egg thrown off the roof the Empire State Building. The partial SWIFT sanctions and problems with the private currency exchange did precisely that, instantaneously boosting the position and development of the domestic producers of the consumer goods to replace the foreign ones.

When the war started, because of fear, millions of people would have naturally drained their capital our of Russia into the Western Banks - that's exactly what one would want to hit Russia's financial system and economy. But the Western sanctions came to aid and helped Moscow like nobody could help: the restrictions on banking transactions stopped millions of Russians both inside and outside Russia from draining tens of billions of dollars out of Russia. The West told them: "NO! Let that money work for Kremlin!". Hard to imagine how Kremlin was thankful to the West for this help.

Russian State has never been able to curb the ability of the Russian oligarchs to drain money out of the country and economically blackmail the regime. Yes Putin's regime was able to curb the direct political power of the Russian oligarchs but never economic. Because of that over the past tens of years hundreds of billions of dollars drained from Russia and oligarchs themselves had always had that freedom to flee Russia. It tied Moscow's hands in very many respects in terms of managing the economy, taxes etc.

But here again, the West jumps to the assistance and starts to arrest without any due process or the rule of law the accounts and property of Russian oligarchs. That really drew STANDING OVATIONS in Russia among both - the population and the elites. After that Putin's government immediately said what everyone would expect them to say to the oligarchs "Oh, you've been frightening us for decades that you can leave Russia any moment and take all the capitals with you to the West - well, go ahead! But remember now nobody gives a damn rusty penny for your life in the West. Only Moscow can give you guarantees. Sooo, now, you sit in your f..ing dacha next to Moscow and produce oil, aluminum, copper, nickel and PAY TAXES - as much as I tell you to, and you will be participating and investing in the industrial development projects cos anyways you can't invest in any Chelsea clubs any more cos the West helped with that!". And guess what? That's exactly what those oligarchs are now going to do, because they don't have any choice, and NOT because of some magic powers of Putin but due to courtesy of the West. Putin have always dreamt about that but could never have been able to do that. But the Western sanctions have helped.

One of the well known Achilles heels of Russia that has continued to undermine its development for the last 30 years has been corruption. But the Western sanctions are structured and fulfilled in such a way that they just make corruption pointless in the sense that the corruption beneficiaries can't evacuate their money, nor can they themselves feel safe in the West - the possibility to safely hold money in the West and live in the West was the one mega condition - absolutely critical - that made the corruption in Russia so pervasive in the highest echelons of administrative power, and so efficient in blocking any serious industrial and technological development.
But the Western sanctions came to the aid again, basically eliminating the must fundamental condition that supported all that mega-corruption in Russia, no matter how many uncorrupted people in power tried to fight it. 

Needless to say, that for the same reason a tremendous amount of money that would naturally have fled Russia due to oligarchs, safely stayed in Russia thanks to the Western sanctions.

The list goes on. These sanctions were so self-caricaturistic and self-mutulating that it is not totally unreasonable to say that the authors of these sanctions have been the biggest supporters of Putin and his regime and, indeed, by the same token, the biggest betrayers of the West (let alone Ukraine).

Another role of the sanctions is to delegitimize a govt in a country against which they are aimed. But these sanctions were outright structured and declared in such a way that it was obvious without any propaganda explanations that they were directed against large swaths of the Russian population - against the people. Thus, of course, they did the complete opposite: legitimized and justified the government and rallied the nation around the government and nationalism.

As I said at the beginning, these sanctions are SPHERICALLY stupid because no matter from which angle you look at them, they are equally self-damaging for the authors and helpful to the Russian economy and the present regime.  

On other topics about the true motives behind the US role in Russia/Ukraine war and Taiwan/China see My little politics: The US Doesn't Want a Hot War With China, It Wants Cold War II: the US provokes wars between China and Taiwan, Russia and Ukraine for same reason (dr-world.blogspot.com)

Is Russia likely to disintegrate like the Soviet Union? Emphatically No

It's not the first time that I encounter this question actively asked by various people in the West on the public discussion platforms as well as in usual discussions related to Russia: "Is Russia likely to disintegrate like the Soviet Union?"

It seems more than a few people want an answer to the question of stability of Russia in the 21st century, asking if disintegration of Russia is possible.

The short answer is emphatically no*.
Not only is such disintegration unlikely, but it’s practically impossible, and to put it into relative perspective, the likelihood of such a development - disintegration of Russia - is probably orders of magnitude lower than disintegration of the EU, the UK and even the US (which is by no means to say that the disintegration of the US is likely in absolute terms).

Yet this is not a senseless question, though, despite the fact that very often such kind of questions are asked under the influence of the geo-political & ideological confrontations/wars in an attempt to find some reasonable hope or confirmation for an expected result, not in search of certain scientific and historic truth.

Sometimes, I’d imagine, some people in the collective West, especially in the Anglo-West, irritated by the reality of Russia owning 1/7 of the dry land of the planet and the greatest chunk of Eurasia with all its infinite resources, try to extrapolate the disintegration of the USSR to the future and self-placatingly imagine that the collapse of the Soviet Union was just a point in the general trajectory that’s making Russia weaker and weaker, and this chunk of Eurasia more and more liable to the ownership by the West.

Yet other people ask this people in a very straightforward quest for historical truth and understanding. In short, the answer is Russia is as stable as stable can be, and the question about the stability of Belgium, the UK, even Spain and Italy, let alone the EU as a supranational block, could be reasonably asked much ahead of Russia in terms of topicality.

Why is Russia pretty darn stable? Well, if the Western academics in the 21st century hadn’t cowardly and "politically correctly" shrugged under the carpet studies of the phenomenon and forces of nationalism to the point of nihilism and infantilized "ostrich behavior", probably this question wouldn’t have popped up at all.

1. Russia is a natural autarky - probably the brightest text book example thereof. It doesn’t mean that Russia is an actual autarky, it means that it can be actual autarky if need be: it has unlimited resources of A) WATER B) ENERGY C) FOOD (this also explains why sanctions against Russia hit Europe much more than Russia, and actually stimulates Russian economic development even in the directions that were previously unreachable for the Russian State to stimulate).

On top of that, Russia not only doesn’t have any geo-trading problems, but have the best “match made in heaven” with countries like China and India, who are stumbling upon each other in their race to woo Russia for its resources/food and give Russia the fruits of their own manufacturing and technology.
This was also true of the USSR, but USSR collapsed not because of this condition, but for the other two below.

2. Russia is by and large ethnically cohesive country it is a Nation-State, with one Nation.

Yes, this is true that within the territory of Russia there are many various nationalities/ethnic communities, and that the streams of immigration from Central Asia into Russia are relatively high. However, by and large, this 1/7th of the planet's dry land is dominated by far mostly by Russian ethnical identity, Russian language and mainstream Russian culture.

Not only that, most of the minority ethnic groups/territories that exist in Russia, have been living within Russia for a very long time, and most of them and ethnic Russians have accumulated centuries of experience of living together, and a “semi-assimilation” or “quasi-assimilation" (including linguistic assimilation) has taken place pretty successfully in the majority of cases.

To put it short, Russia knows these ethnic groups and these ethnic groups know Russia and co-own Russia, and they have had centuries of experience of learning to live with each other and culturally intertwine with each other and include each other partially in the body of their respective cultural identities. Actually there’s more than meets the eye for the West to learn from Russia in terms of multiethnicity and successful co-existence of different religious and ethnic groups.
Yes, Russia has inside its body nationalities different from that of Russians, but NOT NATIONS, and there is a big difference between these two. By and large, Russia is culturally cohesive and monolithic enough (not totally, but sufficiently), so is its national identity.

This WAS NOT the case in the USSR. USSR was a classic EMPIRE, that included different nations of their own, with their history and with their separate histories and identities vastly different from the national identity of Russia proper. It’s important to remember that the USSR has cracked up and fell apart mostly along the national borders and fault lines within the USSR itself (formally, the final nail into the coffin of the USSR was driven by the split of Ukraine, that is definitely a different nation).

Our Western narratives mostly don’t pay to much attention to this fact - that USSR collapsed along the geographical fault lines between different nations within its territory - as if it had been just an accidental corollary and hadn't had anything to do with the cause of the USSR instability. But in fact it had everything to do with the critical instability of USSR, just like it had everything to do with the collapse of so many other empires before, including, not least, the Roman Empire.

3. Russia is a market economy, it is capitalism and in many ways it’s more of capitalism than the US (for those who want to compare, check Russian taxes, including taxes on gains the property market, income taxes, their business regulations and the proportion of the State budget expenses to the total volume of the Russian economy - GDP - it’s pretty self-explanatory, nowadays the US in many ways is much more “socialistic” than Russia). This is a BIG difference from the USSR, because apart from the previous item, this was another fundamental cause that made possible the collapse of the USSR - the total absence of market economy. That’s far from being the case in the modern Russia. On top of that it’s worthy of note that not only is Russia a market economy, but it’s pretty much integrated in the system of market type of relations globally with other regions, blocks and countries. This has nothing to do with sanctions (that, as I mentioned, create the greatest damage to their authors, but it’s about Russia knowing how to use and using the market relations with other economies.

4. The external military force. Russia is more than well protected by its nuclear shield and conventional weapons against any forces that would have liked to lay claim to this huge chunk of the planet and Eurasia if Russia hadn’t taken care of protecting itself. And there is reasonable confidence that there wouldn't be any lack of such forces and attempts had Russia not had its military shield.

To recap, now Russia ain’t going anywhere, whether we like it or not in the West, and seeing as Russia is not a neighbor of the US, but it is the neighbor of Europe, the latter should learn how to live with and build sustainable and secure relationship with Russia. It's not Washington that should do it for Europe. This is especially so taking into account, that, unlike Russia, Europe is not a “natural autarky” in the sense that it has long lacked natural mineral and energy resources to feed its economy, and, on the other hand, Russia has all of these in unlimited plenty.

*All the expressed statements, conclusions represent the views of the author, except, of course, those statements that reflect what is common knowledge at this point of time.
See also:

The US Doesn't Want a Hot War With China, It Wants Cold War II: the US provokes wars between China and Taiwan, Russia and Ukraine for same reason https://dr-world.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-us-doesnt-want-hot-war-with-china.html 

THE GOAL OF RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR FOR THE US: IT IS ALL ABOUT EUROPE! https://dr-world.blogspot.com/2022/05/goal-of-russian-ukrainian-war-for-us-it.html

The US Doesn't Want a Hot War With China, It Wants Cold War II: the US provokes wars between China and Taiwan, Russia and Ukraine for same reason

In my previous post The war between Russia & Ukraine: It's all about Europe & the US effort to impose its Cold War II agenda on it I wrote about the main motivations, that, in my view, drove the US to create the conditions for and make possible the war between Ukraine and Russia.

Here I'd only like to add to the above post the Taiwan/China aspect, so that the effort of the US State to trigger a war between China and Taiwan shouldn't be seen as a separate development, but just another facet of the same agenda: the US effort to design and realize its imperative project of a new Cold War - Cold War II.

In order to clarify that the US provocation of China/Taiwan military conflict is the other side of the same coin as its design and provocation of Ukraine/Russia war, here I give my recent letter addressed to a friend of mine where I touch upon this subject:

This is a political question, and not a simple one. Very often the reactions are based on the assumption that the US somehow wants and NEEDS Ukraine to win (or at least not totally to lose). But this premise in itself is not closed to debate at all - what the US wants or doesn't want.
One (and probably most common) view among those few honest observers who try to dissect what's going on in Ukraine and motives behind it posit that the US of course knows that the biblical tale about David vs Goliath isn't going to work in reality, and that the US wanted just to wear out Russia, hoping that the economic toll in conjunction with the sanctions (for which this war was programmed to be a surefire excuse) would wear out Russia economically and weaken it, together with the regime in the long term.

I myself am not jumping even to this conclusion. In my view the US is interested in a new Cold War, in which Europe should be maximally de-coupled and set against both Russia and China, and where the US can again become a supreme protector of the old granny Europe who, in its turn, would become as politically dependent on the US as it was in 1970s (the question why, in my view, the US needs a new Cold war is a separate very deep topic - see my post https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/3040887270479783144/1881800849427537371).

From this point of view, we can easily imagine that Washington does expect and, more importantly, might have expected from the get-go that Russia will win, that Ukraine may be tragically destroyed in the process and even cease to exist in the form and shape it's been known, and that Russia MAY NOT even suffer economically because of that.

But if that happens what would the the played-out "lesson"  - the demonstration - to the rest of Europe? Well, quite possibly it will demonstrate to Europe (the EU in particular) that they should fear Russia ALL THE MORE because of that, feel their own weakness and helplessness even more because of that, and rely on Uncle Sam and do what he says even more.

The situation we see in Taiwan. The US has no desire to wage a kinetic war with China, nor does it likely believe that Taiwan stands a cat in hell's chance of winning China or retaining its independence. No is the US too worried that China may not suffer any serious economic or human price from taking over Taiwan - this is something that's completely missed even by what few are left independent observers and analysts.

The US, creating a military action in the region, wants to strike fear in the Asian neighbors of China, distrust to China, more alienation from China, and more reliance on and obedience to the United States, so that they all can be reliable subservient allies in the Cold War II with China. And the Cold War, unlike the hot one, is an economic war, with economic methods, waged by economic means and for economic ends. The US wants to disrupt the development of China.

And on the other hand, the Chinese possible military action towards Taiwan, provoked by the US, will also impact Europe - on top of what the Russian/Ukrainian war did. So that Europe, who under usual circumstance would have been extremely reluctant to be the US partner in an economic war against China, would have little choice but obediently side with the US, even though it will cost it its own economic development on top of the huge burden Europe is already paying for its support of the American policy on Russia.

The US doesn't want and isn't going to pay anything - it is Europe and its Asian allies who are going to pay for this US project - the World War II, which is the only chance, however small but still the only one, for the US to preserve itself in the form of neo-Empire a bit longer.

By the way, economic weakening of Europe in this process may not necessarily be considered as something negative by Washington either, to whom economically Europe may present much more of a competitor than an ally in the 21st century. That is to say, if as a result of the Cold War II not only China will suffer an economic breakdown/setback, but also the American ally Europe  - so much the better it might be in the American calculus!

As I said many times, this whole story about Ukraine and Russia, in my view, has very little to do directly with Ukraine and Russia, and has everything to do with EUROPE and what the US wants Europe to be and to do...
The Uncle Sam, in my view, is fucking Europe w/o any foreplay, and, by the way, I should say it's been doing it for quite a while starting with Iraq war and continuing non-stop throughout the first two decades of the 21st century. Who is the stupidest party in all this story? It's not the US, it is EUROPE!

US Goal In Designing And Fueling the Russo-Ukrainian War: IT IS ALL ABOUT EUROPE!

By Phil Mirzoev, May 17/2022

Please, if you like this article, twit or post via Facebook the link to it: https://dr-world.blogspot.com/2022/05/goal-of-russian-ukrainian-war-for-us-it.html

 THE GOAL OF RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR FOR THE US: IT IS ALL ABOUT EUROPE!

Amidst all the emotional razzle-dazzle going on around the war in Ukraine, whipped up by propaganda on all sides of this conflict, even for those, who manage to keep a clear mind and good rational understanding of what is really going on in terms of the parties to, motivations behind and scale of this Russian-Ukrainian war, it's easy to forget or miss some of the most important questions in all this tragic story.

Before anything else, I have to clarify that all the inferred parts of the article present my personal opinions, apart from those that explicitly refer to some other persons or common knowledge or widely held prevailing assumptions.

I also have to clarify that neither the object of my analysis nor the motives have anything to do with trying to make any moral justifications for Russia or Ukraine or anyone else for that matter. Nor do I in anyway diminish the horrible depth of suffering that the Ukrainian people are going through because of this proxy-war, and personally I hope and pray that this war will end as soon as possible with as few lives lost as possible. This war in theory was preventable many times during the past decade, and can be stopped even now, if it wasn't for the fact that all the parties who have conditioned and triggered this war seem to have very little desire to do so.

I myself have always been and am a big proponent of strong, independent, secure and democratic Ukraine and this wish of mine for the Ukraine can only be matched by my confidence that the membership in or informal alliance with NATO was and is (and will be) the most disastrous thing that could only happen to Ukraine and the most effective recipe of how to prevent Ukraine from achieving all of those.

But these topics don't really belong in the present discussion and analysis.

First, the bottom line upfront, and after that I will try to explain the situation more in detail.

1. The kinetic war between Russia and Ukraine is a secondary proxy-war for the war that has been started between the West and Russia, and this main war has been started by the collective West where the collective West is represented, guided and involved into this war specifically by the Anglo-West, mostly the US and the UK. The proxy war between Russia and Ukraine was as an enabler of the war.

2. The incremental preparation and conditioning of Ukraine and its internal and external policies to make the Russian-Ukrainian war possible was started around 10 years ago, but entered the most intensive development phase in 2013-2014. As is mentioned about, it this whole project was built in steps mostly by the US in order to be able to start the war between the whole collective West and Russia.

3. The immediate aim of this war, in the US calculus, has nothing to do directly with Russia or Ukraine for that matter, but it has everything to do with Europe. This war has nothing to do with Ukraine or Russia and everything to do with Europe within the context of its relationship with and role within the US empire. The US aim is to “reboot” its relationship with Europe and return the latter to the same status of obedience and dependence to the requirements of the US international policies as the one Europe observed during the Cold War. The US wants to turn time back and return to the sweet seventies in its relationship with and power over Europe.

4. The only way how US it could do in our day and age is to start a war within Europe, right on the borders of the EU, stirring all the old fears and collective mental trauma of Europe, scaring Europe into the old pliant, dependent and obedient state like during the Cold War.

5. The US critically wanted this “reboot” of its relations with Europe because the more fundamental geopolitical goal of the US is to start the project Cold War II, but not with Russia, which is not a major geopolitical or economic competitor of the US, but with China. This Cold War II is a global imperial project. The biggest problem for the US was impossibility to start a new Cold War without getting on board Europe, and there was no way how Europe would agree to get involved in Cold War II with China out of its own free will if things hadn't changed. To solve this, the US needed a war in Europe, and the “reboot” of its relationship format with Europe first.

6. The possible price for that is that the US and the West (involved by the US into its imperial project Cold War II) will have to fight this war on two fronts, which is against both China and Russia as allies, but the US is ready to pay this premium, for there aren't many alternatives from its perspective.

7. The US, unlike the rest of the world, needs Cold War II because the US is a global empire and as a global empire it cannot exist without a war, not just a war, but a global war, since empires in their very genesis, in their pulse and breath, cannot exist without war – the inner mechanics of empires are based on war. The moment war stops empires fall into decay and die internally and externally. The US started to feel this existential threat as a empire (not as a nation or a country but as an empire) in the 21^st century, and very serious symptoms appeared of its dilapidation and regression on economic, political, social front, and in the form of the runaway corruption and moral crisis inside the US. This was because the project of global “war on terror” never succeeded in the replacement of Cold War, which ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The vacuum that formed after the end of Cold War started to erode the US empire both from the inside and outside, and the “reboot” of the US as an empire seemed to be emphatically impossible without an equivalent replacement of the Cold War I with the Cold War II, where the America's pursuit of the latter imperatively required to use China as the main global “enemy”. For that the US had to try to “reboot” Europe.

Now I will try to address all the above points in detail.

One of those questions, and, in my opinion, the most impost important one is: “WHY did the US need a war with Russia when it's most important strategic competitor is China and when it's obvious that a war with Russia would create what goes against all common sense and all the precepts of the American geopolitical textbooks and experience, namely the rule of never allowing Russia and China to combine, form a real economic and political union that could control most of Eurasia?”

By war hereinafter is meant not just a narrow type of kinetic war but geopolitical war which usually includes informational/propaganda war, trade war, technological war, economic war, political war etc., proxy military war, and, only in some cases, direct military war (something that still very many people mean by war – a stereotype from those old days when direct military action was a method much more common and effective to wage wars between countries and blocks than the methods used today).

Before giving my answer to the above key question, which I dare to think is overall correct or close to the truth, I have to make a couple points/premises and caveats in order not to distract with all these questions those to whom at this stage this whole discussion and context will not make any sense and wouldn't help in the least bit even in starting to understand what's going on.

1. What is going on around the situation between Russia and Ukraine right now is a WAR between the collective West and Russia. The collective West in the context of this war is “collective” to the extent that the West here is geopolitically represented and guided by the leadership of the United States, or, a bit broader, by the Anglo-West with its core consisting of the US/UK alliance. So is the NATO which is the main organizational, technical and political vehicle of this US leadership.

This is not to mean that the “collective” West may not stop being collective at a certain point in future in relation to this war and geopolitical motives, after which the US or Anglo-West may still continue to collectively wage this war and support the agenda behind it, but it is to mean that at the start of this war and at the time of writing the whole West acts collectively, even though the European West acts as a dependent submissive party to its leader Anglo-West, and even more narrowly the United States.

The kinetic war going on in Ukraine is a proxy war in military terms between the collective West and Russia, thus it doesn't include direct confrontation between the NATO military contingents and those of Russia. The main reason for that is the mutually assured nuclear destruction of both parties – West and Russia – and some other high risks making such a kinetic war an undertaking not worth it for both. This proxy war is supported by direct supplies of arms, military advice, intelligence, economic support for military needs and so on and so forth. This is a proxy war.

The other part of the war is the economic war (the so called “sanctions” which are of course nothing to do with the usual “sanctions” as a certain type of relationship, moral and political stance and demonstration, but a full scale package of measures designed and directed at the destruction of Russian economy to the level causing stagnation and regression of the whole country, its key institutions and its State), propaganda and ideological war, political war (war of alliances), technological war.

Those who still don't understand and haven't started to understand this part of the reality – that what is going has very little to do with Ukraine and Russia and everything to do with the US and Russia – had better not spent any more of their time reading this and many other works trying to identify some underlying causes of the ongoing global crisis, the monumental collision of the tectonic plates of the geopolitical and economic global order one of the visible stress points of which has manifested itself in Ukraine.

2. This war hasn't been something unexpected but the countdown to it started as early as 2008 (some would argue even earlier) and shifted into the top gear in 2014. For those who want to understand the geopolitical context and intermediate causes of this countdown from the real academic perspective, nothing can be better than spending 1 hour on this brilliant lecture given in 2015 at the University of Chicago by one of the most brilliant American scholars of our times in geopolitical history Dr. John Mearsheimer, where he predicted the military invasion of Ukraine by Russia with the accuracy of a Swiss watch – predicted it without even any intention of doing so because this prediction wasn't even the main goal of his lecture but flowed naturally from his acute analysis of the Western policies in relation to Russia and their obvious and inevitable expected consequences were those policies here to stay (and they did).

For those who are not acquainted with the history of the question it saves a lot of time in basically digging into the historical process and understanding the reality of what has really been going on since at least 2008 between the West and Russia if one goes and acquaint oneself with all these realities through listening to the aforementioned lecture for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4&t=2s

In the interest of time, most of the premises and iron-clad perquisites of this war that Mearsheimer mentioned in that lecture (but also of course in his more fundamental academic works on this topic for those who are interested), and that made this war inevitable, I will mention with direct reference to his name, even though, of course, he is not the only scholar and academic who clearly understood and explained all those realities.

Dr. Mearsheimer and many other academic thinkers do not answer the question of why would the West, specifically the US, would need a war with Russia ahead of many other things that could obviously suffer from this war against its own interests. Mearsheimer explains with lucid clarity what exactly the US has been doing and why what it has been doing has led to what it's led to, but he doesn't explain why the US has been doing it in the first place from the motivational perspective.

Mearsheimer clearly showed more than 7 years ago that the long-term policies of the US vis-a-vis Russia, realized through using Ukraine, would inevitably lead to Russia's military invasion of Ukraine with huge negative consequences for the latter, Europe and, possibly, a pretty heavy price for the US itself.

Yet Mearsheimer basically was a critic of those Western policies who explicitly considered them a mistake, a self-damaging mistaken strategy. At the same time Mearsheimer, at least implicitly, posited that this “mistake” came out of either lack of understanding by Washington of what it was doing (that Washington didn't expect that its policy would lead to a war) or because Washington somehow didn't understand full well what was good and what was bad geopolitically to the US in the 21^st century, and what were the main challenges to the US in this day and age (e.g. that this war would make one more unnecessary enemy and make China an enemy on steroids because of its alliance with Russia due to the US policies). Neither of these assumptions look tenable to me.

There is little ground to believe that Washington didn't understand most of those realities that Mearsheimer clarified, and there's every reason to believe that Washington had a very clear picture of what its policies meant in terms of triggering war between West and Russia throwing Russia into the open arms of China and quite likely creating a gigantic monster – the alliance of those two – controlling most of Eurasia.

The question is: WHY did the US continue with such “maniacal perseverance” to stick to the policy that potentially augmented both: the number of its enemies and their strength, pushing Russia and China into the open arms of each other, and start a war in a region that is of zero strategic interest to the US but not a free ride in terms of the costs?!

This means uniting the two neighboring giants that are in so many regards look like a match made in heaven as it is, even without any external effort to marry them: one is a production powerhouse of the world and the other – Russia – is the resource and energy powerhouse of the world to feed all the mega-industrial (and military) machine of the first one.

It is especially true seeing as Russia's turn to the East and tremendous reorientation of its foreign policy and economy towards China started as early as in 2014, after the first Ukrainian crisis and Ukraine's loss of land to Russia; yet Russia's pivoting to the East wasn't totally irreversible, giving plenty of time to the West to correct its policies.

Mearsheimer doesn't answer this question – why the US needs a war with Russia – he just explicitly assumes that Washington was so silly and blind in its analysis and policies that it couldn't understand those truths, which, in my view, cannot be reasonably taken as the most likely scenario.

These are the premises rightly outlined by Dr. Mearsheimer that lead to this war as inevitably as day follows night:

A) NATO started to expand eastward towards Russian borders in the 21^st century (Baltic countries, Poland), and then in 2008 year the promise was given to Georgia and Ukraine to be included in NATO.

B) Not only didn't Russia like these NATO expansion steps but it perceived them as an existential threat. Russian attitude to the idea of NATO expansion have been reiterated by Russia since as early as 2007 in the clearest form and multiple times.

C) Russia, because of the political and economic inertia caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, had to digest the first wave of NATO expansion (Poland and the Baltic States), especially taking into account the small population and economy size of the Baltic countries and that Poland isn't a country directly bordering on Russia.

But Russia drew the absolute red line on any further NATO expansion towards its borders in 2007, and the potential admission of Georgia, and even more so, Ukraine, was seen by Russia as an absolute existential threat. After both those countries were given the promise of becoming members of NATO in April 2008, in August 2008 Georgia was invaded by Russia.

A NATO friendly and US friendly leadership of Georgia at that time coupled with the active process of the preparation and integration of Georgia militarily into the NATO format before formally admitting it was more than enough make Russia deal with Georgia militarily: after the Russian invasion in August 2008 rarely does anybody even mention nowadays Georgia as a NATO candidate or even ally (it's worthy of note that Georgia before the Russian invasion actually hosted an American military base and contingent in its territory which wasn't there just for some side ancillary purposes of the US).

At the same time, Georgian example only adds hard evidence to the fact that politically Russia had never been motivated to occupy or directly control Georgia or create any puppet loyal regime there. In fact, none of the administrations that have been in power in Georgia since the Russian invasion in 2008 have been pro-Russian, no has Russia ever exhibited any anxiety about it.

In short, Moscow's position was very straightforward and supported by its actions: “We don't care how you govern yourself inside, what you think of us, what your international policies are – you are a totally free and sovereign country and can do whatever you please. The only thing that we do care about is your potential membership in NATO as a supranational entity that can determine the presence of non-Georgian military force and weapons far beyond the boundaries of Georgia as its own independent nation-state, far beyond its sovereignty.

D) Mearsheimer, as a prominent champion of the realist school of thought, said that it is irrelevant whether NATO, as could be measured by some imaginary absolute yard-stick of truth, really posed or could pose any existential danger to Russia and its State. Suffice it to say that Russia believed so and there's all the evidence to see that this belief wasn't something artificial or insincere or unexpected in Russia's frame of reference.

In its turn, the frame of reference of the US and its perceptions aren't so different from those of Russia in regard to the presence of any non-friendly military alliances close to the US borders haven't changed either: it is indeed absolutely unthinkable up to this day that any remote power should dare to co-opt any of the US neighbors into a significant military alliance and supply that neighbor with sophisticated military infrastructure, equipment and weaponry right on the US border without the immediate interference of the US – military one if need be – to eliminate this intrusion into what the US considers to be its sphere of influence and regional security (which happens to be the whole Western hemisphere and spreads much further than just the national borders of the US, by the way, as per the Monroe doctrine, which continues to be active).

E) On top of what Dr. Mearsheimer said regarding the legitimacy of Russian concerns vis-a-vis NATO, I'd add that the “perceptions” of Russia are more than justified on the objective side too.

Indeed, there has been lots of really silly rhetoric to the effect that “NATO is a defensive alliance” - this, of course, can't be asserted in any serious rational discussion.

Apart from the fact that starting with Yugoslavia then getting involved in Afghanistan, Libya etc NATO, even from a purely formal standpoint, has multiple times broken its own “defensive” doctrine in the last three decades, specifically in the context of Russia, NATO by definition cannot be considered as only a “defensive” and non-threatening entity, taking into consideration the prevalent ownership of NATO by the US and UK and the nuclear missiles of the the both countries being “defensively” aimed at all the Russian cities day and night – the context of nuclear antagonism has never formally gone away after the collapse of the Soviet Union, those missiles have never been re-aimed in any other direction, and the nuclear antagonistic relationship has never been and is not based on any meaningful notion of “defensiveness”, but on the notion of the balance of power and mutually guaranteed destruction.

In this sense, the approach of the NATO infrastructure to the Russian borders is nothing more than a predictable shift of this balance of nuclear power away from the point of equilibrium, giving all the rational grounds to the party more exposed (Russia in this case) to worry about its own defense.

It's worth mentioning too that the aforesaid outright breaches by NATO of its own declared creed of being a “purely defensive” alliance in various parts of the world not only demonstrate once more that this supranational military entity cannot be considered by Russia as “defensive” or safe and “innocuous”, but that on the whole it cannot be rationally posited to be such by the rest of the world insofar as those countries are concerned that aren't formal or informal affiliates of NATO.

F). The West, the US in particular, continued to support the NATO partnership, liaison and cooperation with the Ukraine regime (formal and/or informal) after the coup d'état in 2014 supported by the US – the regime change. Moreover, within the context of the regime change and the nature of the new regime in terms of its relationship with Russia and ethnically Russian regions of Ukraine (which collectively can be called Donbas) the US politically and economically supported the creation and sustainable development of the conditions that predictably led to the arising of ethnic conflict and then, basically, a civil war inside Ukraine (this civil war started in 2014 and has never stopped until this moment).

The US, as well as anybody else, knew full well, that such an ethnic conflict in its own right wouldn't leave too much choice to Russia, just as it wouldn't to any other European country in a similar situation (especially within ethnic aspect of Europe's history, its borders, relations, conflicts and sensibilities), other than to intervene militarily, and if need be, directly.

The inevitability of intervening directly on the part of Russia from the point of view of protecting Donbas – the region with the population majority of ethnic Russian – continued to grow by the day as of 2014, in direct proportion to the US effort of molding, training and arming the Ukrainian army and some paramilitary forces, like the so called “Azov” structure, and supporting the Ukrainian regime in its effort to conquest Donbas and take its territory back in the course of the civil war, in which the ethnically Russian Donbas was a defending party.

It is absolutely obvious, be it from a purely military or political viewpoint, that had Russia really desired to invade Ukraine for any motives other than the above ones (i.d. protection of the ethnically Russian region of Donbas and Ukraine's further military alliance with NATO) it would have done so much earlier, in fact, it would have done so as far back as in 2014, for it clearly would have been much less costly to Moscow at that time as opposed to waiting for 8 years for Ukraine to build up, train and fortify its army with the real battle experience in Donbas.

E) The last, but not least, aspect that must be mentioned regarding the genesis of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine is something that Mearsheimer doesn't discuss in depth, namely the rationale of democracy. This should be clarified: Ukraine has never been a true democracy after gaining its independence in 1991, it had been an oligarchy all along before 2014, something that, it seems, wasn't denied by Ukrainian elites and thinkers themselves.

The situation got only worse after 2014 when the character of the Ukrainian oligarchy started to become less and less tolerable and more and more radical towards the political opponents (be it MPs or journalists or activists) of those oligarchs who held the power and who stuck to the nationalist militant agenda in regard to the possible normalization of the Donbas conflict – the nationalist agenda that was totally supported by the US.

In simple words, the US has never cared about democracy or any human rights aspects of Ukraine, and in fact both of those aspects of the Ukrainian regime – a regime that had evolved with the total support and influence of the US – has deteriorated abysmally even as compared to what the state of affairs was before the events of 2014.

Nor has the US cared one iota about the corruption in Ukraine. If anything, the corruption went from strength to strength after 2014, and the weakness of the state institutions and elites that was an expected product of this corruption meant only one thing to the US: more easiness to influence Ukraine's policies and a more straight course of Ukraine towards creating conditions for Moscow's direct interference: Ukraine's NATO-related militarization on the one hand and its effort to conquest Donbas militarily on the other hand.

It follows pretty clearly from all the above realities that the US wanted this war to happen and deliberately created and promoted conditions for this war to happen, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy, human rights or the sovereignty of Ukraine for that matter, which, ironically, vanished after the events of 2014 supported and desired by the US so much, for after the regime change in 2014 the political dependence of the Ukraine on the external actors in the questions of Ukraine's external relations and policies became much higher than ever before in the 21^st century – the main defining force behind Ukrainian foreign policies and aspiration started to be not the Ukrainian sovereign decisions and choices but those made across the Atlantic.

Mearsheimer also points out the very obvious fact that neither Ukraine, nor even Russia per se, are of great economic significance to the US. To put it simply, Ukraine in itself doesn't present any interest to the United States, nor is Russia – they aren't big economies, they aren't technologically competitive, they aren't military threats, they aren't economic or significantly military inconveniences to the US interests in other regions of the world. However, as Mearsheimer rightly points out Russia per se, if considered separately, could potentially be useful to the US on many issues that actually are of significance to the US, including the confrontation with China, if the US befriended Russia.

It follows that in many respects what the US did in Ukraine looks like shooting itself in the foot if, as

Dr. Mearsheimer implicitly assumes, the US made a mistake in its understanding of the consequences of its policies or the unimportance of Ukraine or Russia per se to its real agenda in the world (China being the biggest item on the US plate). However, as I mentioned earlier, it's really unreasonable and arbitrary to assume that Washington didn't understand some rather trivial things that would lead to some none too trivial consequences to the US and Europe.

Mearsheimer clearly shows that the policies of the US predictably and obviously led to the escalation of tension between Russia and Ukraine, and the Russian invasion, which, in its turn, was just an excuse or a designed trigger to start a war on Russia – war between the West and Russia. The question Mearsheimer not only hasn't answered but never once asked is: “WHY DOES THE US NEED THIS WAR ON RUSSIA?”, especially if this war obviously brings to bear so many indirect costs on the US.

Well, the answer to this question lies in the nature of the US – of what the US became in the 20^th century. The US is an global EMPIRE, period. And this in itself is not something new or something argued even inside the US (at times it is actually bragged about or taken pride in among the US top politicians, scholars and other parts of the American elites).

Not only that, but the public discourse within this context often revolves around the question whether the US is an empire in decline, with many holding the view that it is.

Whether the US is a declining empire or not may bear on the question of the war with Russia but rather tangentially. A more important factor is that the US is not just an empire but it is a global empire.

Because the US is an empire, and as long as it is still an empire, it has some absolutely intrinsic and indelible mechanisms/forces natural to any empire, and without the work of which any empire just cease functioning and stops being an empire.

One of these mechanisms is empire's existential dependence on war and expansion. Again, war, as was mentioned before, in its broadest definition means war conducted by any methods: economic, informational war, ideological and political war etc.

The whole social moral tissue of an empire, morale and solidarity and social trust in its society, its economics, its politics and political culture, the relationship between different strata of the society, the most fundamental collective notion of “WE” as a society and its self-reflection existentially depends on war and expansion – a very strong externalization many socio-economic issues is necessary for an empire. The economy of an empire also structurally depends on war and expansion: it needs special privileged external export markets, external markets of labor force, external privileged import markets (especially for the privileged access to resources and energy). Empire is all about making the internal critically dependent the external, and because this dependence grows and real competitiveness drops, also grows the insatiable demand for even more external spheres of influence.

War is the main spring of the most vital social, political and economic processes in an empire, war is the bone and blood of any empire. War as a state, war as a process, war as an idea, war as a self-reflection of the collective consciousness of the society in the mirror of itself, war as a duty, war as a source of social trust, pride, value, self-esteem and solidarity.

One of the deepest features of any empire is that its most intimate and life-sustaining INTERNAL processes always critically depend on the EXTERNAL processes. The INSIDE of empires is always always hostage to the OUTSIDE of empires. In simple terms, they are like bubbles that start to collapse the moment they stop to expand (which is one of the main reasons why empires inevitably come to their natural death as empires relatively quickly by historical standards). The very dialectics of empires are such that they are condemned to their collapse the moment they are born because they are critically dependent on expansion which can never be eternal.

And the opposite is true, once the mechanism of the continuous expansion, feeding upon itself, starts spinning the wheels, and its gears start losing traction, all hell suddenly breaks loose in an empire's economy, society, ethical tissue and politics: humongous corruption starts devouring inside out the whole political system of the empire, social and economic institutions (both state and private and everything in between); the institution of citizenship, the civil loyalty and, more generally, the social solidarity and trust start going south precipitately; conflicts and feuds between different classes and layers of the society go rampant, leading to all kinds of “smoldering civil wars”, and, sometimes, leading to the real civil wars, which are the usual companions of the decay phase of any empire.

Because deep vacuum is formed when the main “glue” of the society and its solidarity – the war and expansion beyond the borders of the empire - starts to dry out, different classes and layers of the society start to fill this vacuum with all manner of various mutually conflicting ideas, identities and self-reflections of the collective “WE” (very often, but not always, based on ethnic, national and other characteristics), which leads to the rupture of the previously cohesive moral and social fabric, naturally giving rise to even higher levels of corruption and social strife in a positive feedback loop. Fragmentation takes place.

For a global empire, not least, it also leads to the weakening of the bondage between the core of the empire and its international allies, suzerains, client states, colonies and quasi-colonies – all of those external loyal countries and blocks that, on the one hand, are parts of the empire, and, on the other hand, its agents. Those external loyal parts start to lose any basis of duty and loyalty to the core part, the sense of common goal and interest, when they see that, by all appearances, the very need for war – be it cold or hot or warm – has dissipated. The weakening support of the empire by its external client-states starts to weaken, and, on the other hand, inside those client-states the focus starts to shift to their internal problems and their own new (or old-forgotten) basis for their collective identity and trust inside their own nations and societies.

Because of the above processes, THE RISE OF NATIONALISM is often, though not always, a typical harbinger and symptom of the decay of an empire – the rise of nationalism both in the core part of the empire and in its external parts and client-states.

War of expansion for an empire is a “magnetic field” that “artificially” stabilizes and directs all the elements of the society like particles of metal dust placed over a paper sheet over a magnet; war is a yard-stick and source of consolidating energy for the society of empire all in one, and the absence of expansion, when prolonged enough, is a death warrant to it.

When an empire collapses and ceases to exist, which in itself is always a very painful process in view of the aforementioned inevitable regression processes, a new social and political order appears with time, but before that a prolonged period of depression and dilapidation follows, because it takes a significant amount of time to form new basis for moral and societal, hence political and economical, cohesion. Sometimes collapses of empires lead to the geopolitical fragmentation of the core part of the former empire.

Now, to return to the US and its war on Russia, a serious problem arose for the US when the Cold War ended at the end of the 1980s: one of the main “fuel tanks” of the US war machine run empty. The Cold War was a global war – exactly what was needed to satisfy the core requirement of the US as a global empire in order for this empire to exist and function normally. It was a global war of ideologies, moral systems of values, economic models – of everything. That real global war ended.

After a series of various international, yet not global, wars, like the one in Yugoslavia, the first war in Iraq and suchlike in the 1990s, the US came up with a new project of the global war on terrorism in the beginning of 2000s as a replacement to fill the gap formed by the end of the Cold War. There was nothing really new about terrorism and its threats in the world, and nothing really existentially important on the security side for the US or the West on the whole for that matter.

Even less did this so-called war on terror deserve any global scale and status – to many of those who aren't into history and geopolitical mechanics this whole war on terror project may have appeared “artificial” and driven by some “special anxiety” of the US to seek and create a war in order to fight it, rather than fight a war in order to put an end to it. I wouldn't be surprised if many of my readers, even those living in the US, had this gut feeling at the start of the 21^st century – the artificiality of the so-called “global war on terror”.

If so, your gut feeling didn't deceive you. One of the biggest reasons, if not the single biggest one, behind the US project of “war on terror” was the need to fill the vacuum formed by the end of the Cold War and create some other type of global war in which not only the US but all its allies and loyal parties would be involved.

Unfortunately, from the standpoint of the imperial logic of the US, this “war on terror” didn't work for its intended purpose: it had never been an adequate replacement for a real global war, it had never inspired the same imperative feeling of support and solidarity neither in the American society nor in its European allies on a prolonged basis.

Apart from the fact that this “war on terror” wasn't perceived as a real war or any form of expansion, in fact it provoked in large swathes of the US and, even more so, European society distrust and even cynicism, for it gave to many people enough cause to perceive this “war” as a non-authentic “cartoon war” that had been organized or “orchestrated” for corrupt self-serving reasons that benefited a very narrow section of the elites. In simple words, it just didn't work for the purposes of global war in the sense of supporting the engine of the empire running normally; this “cartoon war” lacked authenticity and moral legitimacy in the eyes of both: the external clients of the US empire and the US society itself.

The vacuum formed after the end of the Cold War didn't away, and the forces that glue the US global empire together and that are dependent on a global war have started to weaken. Europe, who was an affiliated beneficiary and dependent part of the US empire in the time of Cold War, started to feel increasingly less bound by any debt to the US for anything, looking towards its own future and its own economic and diplomatic relations with other countries and parts of the world, including its eastern neighbor Russia and emerging economic giants like China. On the other hand, Afghanistan and Iraq wars, that were part of the war on terror, didn't do anything but predictably created a serious burden for Europe, at which point the latter just stopped being a beneficiary of the US imperial project, or at least a recipient of some form of compensation for its loyalty and involvment.

In the meantime all the aforementioned symptoms of decay of a global empire started to crop up like blisters on the skin of the American social and political body.

Corruption (not in the narrow legal sense, of course, but in its broadest definition) has started to spread like a wild fire in the US where the financial self-serving interests – private and collective – of the governmental, political and corporate (especially oligopolic) institutions and agencies, and their interest groups have started to be the main driving force behind the US policies, both internally and externally, as opposed to the collective interests of the country, its real security, social and economic prosperity.

The rapid decline in the conditions of really free and competitive market, suffocated by the rampant monopolization/oligopolization of the US economy in consequence of the increasing political lobbying power of the big corporations in financial, high tech, pharmaceutical, energy and transportation domains is a direct result of the above corruption caused by the empire-in-decline syndrome.

This along with other factors contributes massively to the loss of the overall competitiveness of the US economy and to the absolutely debilitating runaway income disparity growth, hence, inequality in the standard of living between different strata of the society, which is not explained or justified by any real free market conditions or by individual abilities and entrepreneurial talents of people. The latter consequence contributes massively to the demoralization and the social crisis of trust, morals and values in the US politics and society.

Another natural satellite of these empire decadence processes in the US is, for all to see, the aforementioned rupture of the social and cultural fabric and its cohesion: the unstoppable and accelerating crisis of social trust, of social moral values and fragmentation of identities of various strata of society manifesting itself par excellence in the so-called cultural wars that are increasingly taking form of a non-kinetic smoldering civil war (which hopefully isn't going to become a kinetic one).

The loss of the moral and political reputation, and trust by the US beyond its borders, both among its imperial dependent allies and developing countries, is yet another typical companion of the crumbling empire syndrome.

These and a number of other really bad signs have been known and felt, consciously or subconsciously, by the US elites, and a subconscious, or conscious and calculated search for a new A) legitimate and B) global war has been pursued by the US hectically at least for the past 15 years as a means to breathe new life into the sputtering and coughing engine of the American empire, with a view to rebooting its economy and social cohesion, unifying its collective moral values, interests and goals. War, since the end of the WWII, when arguably the US did transform into an empire, has become as indispensable as air for the US society and economy to be able to breathe, survive and thrive.

The project “Cold War II” was started as a replacement for “Cold War I” in order to save the US as an empire.

The war with Russia per se wasn't a suitable candidate for Cold War II because it lacked both globality and legitimacy among the dependent partners, let alone the developing countries, who, unlike the former, were the main empire-parasitized areas. A new Cold War couldn't be a totally artificial construct that would lack any credibility among other countries and the American society, gullible as it is sometimes.

Russia didn't pose any significant military threat to the US, its economy and economic influence on the US was less than that of any big European country after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor would Europe be interested in the economic price it would have to pay for a war with Russia, hence, it would be opposed to this project all the more for this reason; to add to that, Europe didn't have too much fear of Russia, with the exception of the Baltic states and Poland.

The above restriction only puts a second question mark over the question “Why did the US need to start a war with Russia?”

China, obviously, in the 21^st century presents, probably, the only one possible candidate for the American project of Cold War II due to the size of its economy, military and its increasing global influence. Despite the enormous corruption of the whole military-industrial-intelligence complex of the US, and, arguably, a very serious loss of the professionalism and competence of their top cadre since the end of the Cold War, there are no grounds to assume that Washington didn't understand that. In other words, Washington did appoint China as its main target in creating the Cold War II and excuses for it – it did it probably earlier than 2010.

In this context, as Dr Mearsheimer rightly said, Russia could actually be useful to Washington as an ally, and Washington at least could try to build some bridge of mild friendship to Moscow and play some cards of common interest. This is especially true taking into account that Russia itself used to harbor an unjustifiably leery attitude to China as short a time as 20 years ago – likely on the strength of the Soviet legacy of “bad blood” between those two countries. Only Mearsheimer seems to imply that this was something that Washington didn't understand as well as he – Mearsheimer – did, whereas, in my view, there are no grounds to make such an arbitrary assumption: Washington most likely did understand that, and pretty well too.

Then what was the problem to the US with proceeding to “appoint” China “the main enemy of the world and all its nations” and starting the new Cold War II around it? This is something that Dr. Mearsheimer doesn't ask.

Well, the problem was Europe! Europe had no desire to start or support any global wars with China. To begin with, Europe had no particular interest in any new Cold Wars, let alone hot ones, and even less enthusiasm did it nourish about the idea of spoiling its relationship with China that had become the biggest trading partner of Europe – Europe, which unlike the US, is a very export-oriented economy. Politically Europe didn't have any security concerns regarding China either for the simple reason of China's being a geographically remote power from Europe's perspective, and with the range of its own interests encompassing mostly the Asia Pacific.

On the other hand, for the US it was unthinkable – outright impossible – to create a Cold War II not only without having Europe on board, but actually with risking losing Europe as its dependent imperial ally, or, worse yet, turning it into a somewhat unfriendly competitor! The US could not fulfill its “American Dream” of creating a new Cold War without getting Europe on board.

Perfectly understanding that China is the only candidate for an “ideal scapegoat” to be used in creating the Cold War II, America saw that the whole conundrum was how to get Europe on board, for after the collapse of both the Soviet Union and its “war on terror” project, the US leverage over Europe was becoming weaker and weaker whereas the European economy, its independence and its trade connectivity to other regions, not least that very China, was becoming stronger and stronger.

“How to make a time machine, hop in it and go back in time into the sweet seventies when Europe was “a senile and helpless old granny barely” that was still loved by its strong and ever-so-kind granddaughter America, and, therefore, taken care of by America and protected against a terrible gangster – the Soviet Union – under the condition of granny's proper obedience in the questions of all the international politico-economic affairs and good behavior?” – that was the biggest question for the US.

Well, once the problem is outlined well enough the solution often seems to be almost obvious: the only way how the US could do this magic time travel is to reopen the old mental wounds and deepest fears of Europe and TERRORIZE her into the old state of being a weak helpless party seeking “protection” or the “protection racket” of the United States in exchange of her proper obedience and payment of the political and economic price of supporting the US empire in whatever the latter asks her for – turning Europe into a kind of Stockholm syndrome victim would voluntarily cater to the needs of its own kidnapper.

To make it possible, all that was needed is to create a REAL MILITARY WAR inside Europe right on the border of the EU, preferably a war that would involve Russia, who is a nuclear superpower, so that Europe alone a priori couldn't have any serious control over or means of resolution to this war, and so that the only source of some sense of protection could be given by the dominating protective role of the US under the condition of the submissive obedience of Europe on all other fronts of the international affairs, not least its position on China (!).

After properly conditioning Europe and its imperial relationship with it, the US has its hands untied to open the main act of its play “Cold War III” - the global war with China. Now, the US has reasonable confidence that if it needs to decouple China from the West in terms of trade, currency, the compatibility of the technical standards etc, Europe will be do as it's told to do by its big “friend”.

In other words, the “Russian-Ukrainian” war has very little to do with either Ukraine or Russia, but it is all about Europe (!): this war was created by the US for the sake of Europe in order to condition its behavior and loyalty for another, much bigger war – Cold War III, the main “antihero” of which is going to be China.

To cap it all off, one could ask a perfectly logical question: will this American plan of getting Europe on board for its project Cold War II actually work?

My short answer is: “Most likely NO”. The general reason for that, in my view, is that this horse has already bolted out of the stable and it's too late to shut the door. The economic and the internal political price for Europe is going to be unsustainably high to support the increasingly risky Cold War II endeavors of its transatlantic “friend” in view of an enormous increase in the production power of not only China but a number of other developing countries.

Tremendous underestimation by the Western elites of the forces of nationalism both inside the West and in the rest of the world is another reason. The present war – between Russia and the West – threatens to destroy the EU (tearing it apart with the growing forces of nationalism fertilized by the economic toll) much faster than it is going to really undermine Russia, and this development, if it comes to this point, is not going to meet the US objective of getting Europe's support on its global imperial projects, but rather the opposite is likely to happen.

This “proxy-proxy war” between the West and Russia (a proxy war for another proxy war with China in future), in my view, has already put an end to the globalization in the form and shape we've known it before, and awakens the hitherto dormant beast of nationalism.

But at any rate, this question – whether or not the US attempt to involve Europe into the orbit of its imperial projects and global wars once again will work – deserves its own chapter and analysis in depth, which goes beyond the scope of the present topic.

The last but not least, it has to be added that even though this terrible war between Russia and Ukraine, desired and designed by the US through a very well thought-out series of steps, may not eventually meet the purpose for which it's been created, it is hard to call it a “mistake of judgment” on the part of the US. This is because there are probably no other alternatives that would give a chance to the US to resurrect its dying empire like a phoenix from the ashes. Thus even if in the US calculus there is a 20% chance that it might work, the US has all the rational reason, within the ruthless context of its goals, to try this plan. Simply put, the US just doesn't have too much to lose (unlike Europe and Ukraine and millions of their people who are going to suffer enormously).

Since, as history teaches us, for the States of the usual countries, let alone empires, it may take only a reasonable chance of success and improvement to provoke and support the ugliest wars (which is another name for a state-sponsored mass murder), one could imagine how little moral qualm an empire would have in starting a new war if that war don't seem to put too much direct burden on it and if a failure of the plan doesn't present any significant risk either in its calculus.

By Phil Mirzoev, May 17/2022

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