It's a Purge, and a Tell!

By Rich Kozlovich

This is a May 20, 2024 FREE article by George Friedman at Geopolitical Futures (I recommend subscribing) , A Government Shakeup in Moscow saying;

The Russian government announced last week a massive shakeup of its senior staff. Several ministers in civilian sectors such as energy, agriculture, industry and trade, and transportation were relieved of their positions, but the most notable departure was Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who was replaced by Andrei Belousov, a former assistant to Vladimir Putin and a former minister of economic development............Putin has made every effort to dismiss the idea that the team that managed the war failed............[yet] one senior Defense Ministry official was arrested and charged with corruption. Whether this is a single event or the beginning of more arrests (or worse) is yet unknown.........  But after two years and limited advances, you don’t need a diversion of weakness. It’s already there.

 

It's being emphasized this isn't a Stalinist style purge, but lets not lose sight of the fact Putin is a vile murderous monster, corrupt to the core, and ex-KGB Colonel who surrounded himself with incompetent sycophants, both in the military and in the domestic arenas.  To understand what's going on we really do need to get that, and this really is a purge. 

 

I've said for some time there's a Claus von Stauffenberg cabal within Putin's military, and truth be told, I think there's Stauffenberg style cabal within their domestic leadership also.   And while this isn't a Stalinist purge, it's a purge nonetheless. 

 

Ukraine is running out of people, their government officials are still corrupt, and clearly corrupt beyond the pale.  Furthermore, they really are now a fascist regime, and from reports they've lost the confidence of Ukrainian people, who are avoiding conscription by fleeing the country and saying they're not planning on returning....ever.

 

Update 5/21/24, 4:51 PM - I guess Zelenskyy (correct spelling by the way) Hasn't stolen enough yet, so,  Zelensky now ruling under martial law after suspending elections until after war

 

Putin will not give up, no matter the economic or military costs, because if he stops, he's out.  And just like Stalin, it's not "the plan" that's at fault, it's the failure to implement "the plan" properly, and so those who've failed "the plan" have to suffer the consequences, and it's a purge.

 

As they say in poker, it's also a "tell".  Tells are noticing small behaviors and/or demeanor when the pressure is on, and this is a tell he's losing confidence, and he's scared.  If NATO countries engage in this mess with boots on the ground, it's over for Putin, since the demographics will change dramatically, and that's his only real advantage.   Here's a map provided in George's article.

 

 

 

After two years of failure, with massive losses in equipment and man power, they're launching a new offensive, but he can't fund or train his military properly, his military leadership is incompetent, and he can't even manufacture his military needs, and what he has is substandard.   He's being forced to buy military hardware from N. Korea and Iran, can you imagine that!  Seeing that does not give credence to Russia's industrial abilities, or the competence of those dealing with the nations domestic/economic issues, after all, they're still commie central planners and Putin sycophants.  Will this push also stall and add more failure? 

 

He has on a number of occasions threatened using nukes, but I don't think his military will allow him to do that, and if he tries, I think they're overthrow him.  The Soviets overthrew Khrushchev for a whole lot less, but Khrushchev wasn't feared as the monster  as Stalin was, and Putin isn't Khrushchev, who didn't execute people who tried to overthrown him at one time.  Putin will execute anyone who attempts a coup. 

 

One writer described Washington as high school with paychecks, it's even worse in Putin's regime.  He's surrounded by incompetent sycophants with no solutions in sight!  This really is a purge, and he's scared.

Can Fracking Fix the World?

By Rich Kozlovich

One of my favorite geopolitical analysts is Allison Fedirka who published this subscriber piece on May 1, 2024, Don't Expect Too Much From Venezuela's Elections, saying: 

The Venezuelan opposition has unexpectedly united around a single candidate: Edmundo Gonzalez. And though this is good news for a movement that has long been hindered by its inability to set aside its differences, much remains in the way of true regime change, which should still be seen as a long-term goal rather than a plausible outcome of the July 28 elections.

I've kept a running file on Venezuela, and written quite a lot about it in the past predicting Maduro's downfall.  And while I got a lot right, every one of my predictions of his downfall was wrong.  There was a lady who wrote a piece saying they were not going to be toppled and cited a lot of historical precedents, which I foolishly ignored, and unfortunately, I very stupidly didn't save her article, and she was right.

I don't see any real improvement in Venezuela for a number of reasons.  First, there’s no way Maduro and his band of thugs are going to give up power, it will have to be taken, and no one as far as I can tell is funding such an effort or supplying arms.  Secondly, there doesn’t seem to be a rebel movement in Venezuela.  I think there are and two reasons for that.  Their population has dwindled seriously, and the nation is as much under control of crime lords as it is the government.  The remaining population is scared, powerless, and just want to keep from starving for another day.

Everything else is maskirovka, a masquerade.  After Biden is gone…hopefully…. any deals between Venezuela and the United States will be toast.

Fracking oil isn’t just sweet, it’s super sweet making refinement less expensive or time consuming.    Venezuela’s oil is seriously contaminated and at one point it was predicted Venezuela was an oil rich nation that might not have a market, and there were few refineries that could handle their oil, and they were all in the United States.  

Well, it goes to show, there are no boundaries on stupid, and the Biden administration has done everything in it's power to destroy the use of traditional, reliable, easily available energy sources.   

Energy is fundamental, and he who has the most energy, is the boss, and America is massively energy rich, but it must be exploited or it's meaningless.

If Biden is gone America will return to fracking and drilling, and that will be a worldwide game changer.  That will disrupt all that’s going on in the EU, the Middle East, the Russo/Ukrainian War, China and South East Asia, and I believe the death kneel for BRICS.

Here are my seven rules of geopolitics

1. First Rule of Geopolitics: All geopolitics is about four factors, geographics, demographics, economics, and that most elusive factor of all, the happiness factor.  
   
2. Second Rule of Geopolitics:  Everything is about the basics.  You have to be able to see issues at their foundational root levels in order to understand and fix complex problems.
   
3. Third Rule of Geopolitics:  History is everything since historical events lay the foundation for the social paradigms of nations, which have been in effect for centuries in most areas of the world.
   
4. Fourth Rule of Geopolitics:  People are like nations, and will act in their own best interests, unless they don't.  
5. Fifth Rule of Geopolitics: Nothing is ever as it appears.  Look behind the curtain, there's always something hidden. 
6. Sixth Rule of Geopolitics:  The patterns of life keep repeating over and over again. 
   
7. Seventh Rule of Geopolitics:  Everyone lies.    
   

Can fracking fix the world?  No, as an overall concept, the world's unfixable, there are entirely too many nutrolls in powerful positions.  But it can go a long way to stabilizing the world.  Everyone wants perfection, but the best we can hope for is the most acceptable imperfection, and stable is the most acceptable imperfection we will have to accept.

Peter Zeihan: Japan's Navy Gets Teeth

By Rich Kozlovich 

China has been playing the bully boy big kid on the block in South East Asia, demanding the world buckle under to their claim they own the South China Sea, and just about everything else within their "nine dash line".  Well, all this economic bully boy stuff has generated a backlash, and that includes Japan, and realizing they needed to alter their concept of national defense.

,

 

I read recently that China's military expenditures have now reached the level of the United States, and there's a lot of sack cloth and ashes over that.  I also believe that's being used to get more DOD dollars out of the Congress.  But I also like the fact they're spending all that money because it's money they don't have, and just like competing militarily with the United States bankrupted the Soviet Union, China's on the way down the economic drain. 

 

Loss Of U.S. Moral Authority Undermines Democracy Around The World

 Francis Menton March 28, 024 @ Manhattan Contrarian

Around the world today, lots of countries claim to be “democracies”; but then the state thugs use various ploys to assure that no opposition can ever prevail. Among such ploys, the tactic currently in vogue is to gin up some collection of flimsy criminal charges to get the opposition leader and/or his/her supporters arrested or otherwise sidelined.

If you haven’t been following the subject closely in recent months, you may not realize how pervasive the use of this tactic has become. Sure, imprisoning the opposition leaders has long been part of the playbook of the worst thugocracies. It’s what you would expect of a small-time African dictatorship or of a Central American banana republic, not to mention the likes of Russia or China. But recently the tactic has been spreading like a case of poison ivy to countries otherwise pretending to grown-up, or semi-grown-up, status. Countries like India, Bangladesh, and Brazil. And, did I mention, the United States — once known for claiming to be the shining exemplar for the world of good governance, and for seeking to use its moral authority to induce others to follow its lead. Today, governing cliques in other countries are greatly emboldened by the brazen abuse of power orchestrated by Biden and the gaggle of Democratic prosecutors pursuing Trump. Hey, we’re just conducting business the same way you Americans do in your own country! You have no standing to criticize us!

We’ll start with a couple of the worst — Russia and Venezuela. In Russia, Vladimir Putin, either personally or through his stand-in Medvedev, has been in power continuously since 1999. In three prior re-elections, to keep the opposition from getting traction, Putin has used a standard playbook of the autocrat — control of the press and television, suppression of demonstrations and rallies, control of the vote-counting process. But the most recent election, held March 15, is the first time Putin felt emboldened to have the opposition leader (Navalny) imprisoned. The charge was “extremism,” (whatever that means) for which Navalny was convicted by a compliant court and sentenced to a term of 19 years (!). And then Navalny mysteriously died in prison in February, just weeks before the election. Putin claims to have won some 87% of the vote in the election.

In Venezuela, the next election is expected in July. Current dictator Maduro (along with predecessor Chavez) has totally run the country into the ground. Likely, he would lose any fair election badly; but he’s taking no chances. The opposition has united around a candidate named Maria Corina Machado, who announced her candidacy in June 2023. According to this January 26, 2024 piece in the AP, shortly after Machado announced her candidacy in June, the Venezuelan government imposed a 15-year ban on her running for office. The supposed grounds are “fraud and tax violations and . . . seeking the economic sanctions the U.S. imposed on Venezuela last decade.” Machado says she was never notified of the supposed ban, and she proceeded to run in a primary conducted independently of the government in October by the opposition groups, winning some 90% of the votes. Thereafter, the government told her of the ban, so she challenged it in court. But in December, Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice, totally in control of Maduro’s forces, upheld the ban. In the latest development, according to this piece from Reuters, on March 20 Madura’s henchmen arrested, and/or issued warrants for the arrest of, nine top members of Machado’s campaign team including her “right hand,” (campaign manager) Magalli Meda. As of today, Machado herself apparently remains out of prison, although I doubt that will last. She has also been prevented from registering as a candidate for the upcoming election.

Meanwhile, over in Bangladesh, there was an election on January 7, 2024. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasami, head of the Awami League party, ran for her fifth term in office, against main opposition party Bangladesh Nationalist Party. Here is what happened in the run-up to the election, according to a January 8 piece in the Guardian:

In the months leading up to the election, tens of thousands of BNP leaders and rank and file members had been arrested en masse and kept in terrible conditions in overcrowded prisons, while opposition protests were met with heavy police violence. At least nine BNP leaders and supporters have died in jail in the past three months, according to the opposition.

In these circumstances, BNP made the strategic decision to call for a boycott of the election. The result was a very low turnout election, where the ruling party won an overwhelming victory. From the Guardian:

Tarique Rahman, the BNP chairman who lives in exile in London due to corruption allegations against him that he denies as politically motivated, said: “What unfolded was not an election, but rather a disgrace to the democratic aspirations of Bangladesh.”. . . Rumeen Farhana, one of the few BNP MPs who has not been jailed, called it a “dummy election”, adding: . . . “Bangladesh will be a de facto one party state after this election.”

In India, there is an election scheduled for April 19. The LA Times reports on March 22 that one of the main opposition leaders, a guy named Arvind Kejriwal, was just arrested. The LA Times identifies Kejriwal as the “top elected official” (analogous to mayor?) of New Delhi. Despite the fact that his claim to fame is crusading against corruption, Kejriwal has been charged with taking some $12 million in bribes. From the LA Times:

Arvind Kejriwal, who is New Delhi’s top elected official, was arrested Thursday night by the federal Enforcement Directorate, which is controlled by Modi’s Hindu nationalist government. The agency accused Kejriwal’s party and ministers of accepting $12 million in bribes from liquor contractors nearly two years ago. Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party, or Common People’s Party, said the accusations were fabricated. The party said Kejriwal will remain New Delhi’s chief minister while it fights the accusations in court.

And then there’s Brazil. Brazil is a country of nearly 220 million people, and with a GDP of over $2 trillion. It should be joining the ranks of the most important countries of the world. But it currently is in the grip of a far left-wing government, headed by Luis Ignacio (“Lula”) da Silva, who ousted former President Jair Bolsonaro in a close election in 2022. The next election is in 2026.

Bolsonaro is a somewhat Trumpian figure in Brazil, with analogies including that he has a very committed populist following, that he holds large and boisterous rallies, and that his supporters conducted a riot protesting the last election at the time of the transfer of power to Lula in January 2023. (Bolsonaro in fact left office and transferred power.). Not surprisingly, Bolsonaro is getting the full Trump lawfare treatment from the current government and essentially all elite institutions in Brazil. It’s as if the Brazilians were following the news from the U.S. and trying to imitate every move that the state actors take against Trump. The New York Times on March 19 has a piece that includes a rundown of some of the initiatives seeking to take down Bolsonaro:

• “Brazil’s electoral court has already ruled Mr. Bolsonaro ineligible for public office until 2030 for spreading false information about Brazil’s voting systems on state television, forcing him to sit out the next presidential contest in 2026.”

So in Brazil a politician of the right can be disqualified from running for “spreading false information about . . . voting systems.” It’s surprising that Colorado didn’t think of that one.

• Mr. Bolsonaro has been subject to questioning and searches as part of several inquiries, including into the selling of watches and jewels he received as presidential gifts from Saudi Arabia and other countries, as well as accusations that he worked with top government officials to hatch a plan to try to hold onto power after his 2022 election loss.

It does seem a bit tacky for the President of a big country like Brazil to get gifts like watches and jewels from foreign governments and then sell them to obtain personal funds. On the other hand, it’s also not clear that these were bribes, or otherwise illegal. Bribes require a quid pro quo, and what is it exactly that Bolsonaro could have done for Saudi Arabia as the quid pro quo to make these gifts into bribes? (Unlike Biden, who could withhold or release a billion dollars of aid to Ukraine depending on how much the oligarch paid his son for a fake directorship job.). Recall that former Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia was initially convicted of taking multi-hundred thousand dollar gifts, but his conviction was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on the basis that he was not alleged to have done anything in return other than set up some meetings. So unless Brazil has some law prohibiting a President from taking gifts, it’s not clear what Bolsonaro may have done that is improper.

And then there’s the latest bit of lawfare against Bolsonaro:

• Brazil’s federal police recommended that former President Jair Bolsonaro be criminally charged in a scheme to falsify his Covid-19 vaccine card, partly to travel to the United States during the pandemic, in the latest sign of criminal investigations closing in on the former president.

Well, that one will surely bring him down! It’s almost as bad as paying hush money to a woman accusing you of a sexual impropriety.

And finally, there’s the news from the West African country of Senegal. There, main opposition presidential candidate Bassirou Diomaye Faye was arrested and detained in advance of the election held over the past weekend (March 23-24). The charges included “incitement to insurrection” (sound familiar?), and “defamation of a constitutional body.” However, he was released 10 days in advance of the election on orders of Senegal’s constitutional court. And it appears that he has won the election! Mark Steyn has a brief report on the events, and links to multiple articles from the West African press about the event.

Credit goes to Senegal in this collection for the closest thing to untampered elections.

What do Politics, Cognitive Dissonance, and Eusapia Palladino Have in Common?

Truth is the sublime convergence of history and reality.

By Rich Kozlovich  

Recently I came across this article, When Marie and Pierre Curie Investigated a Psychic Medium, which I found interesting because I knew about this embrace of Spiritism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a very real phenomenon.   I also knew it was embraced by many very prominent people, including scientists, most of whom were likely adherents of Darwin's evolutionary theories, which he published in his book Origin of Species in 1859, which I brilliantly refute here. 

First, I don't believe there really are true atheists.  There are intellectual atheists, but underneath all that is a foundational/emotional belief in something larger and more powerful than just the physical world.  Why? Because we're designed to believe!  It's part of our genetic core.  Does everyone really find this to be all that extraordinary? Anthropologists have noted that in every culture in the world, and in all of human history, religion, the belief in higher powers, has played an important role in people’s lives.  And it's clear this embrace of Spiritism by scientists proves that.   They, just like everyone else, fear finality!

There was one prominent atheist, Antony Flew, who claimed at the end of his life he was now a believer. Why?  Could it be "there are no atheists in foxholes"? Of course the explanation by atheists was he had lost his mind.  Yet even Albert Einstein, who was not a religious person in any sense, and absolutely rejected the idea of a personal God, also rejected the idea of atheism.   He felt it defied logic.

For the believers among my readers the explanation is simple.  We're designed to believe. For the non-believers among my readers the explanation is simple also. There is no other logical explanation!

One of the most successful mediums of that era was a lady named Eusapia Palladino, and she was impressive.  However, she was caught and exposed over and over again as a fraud.

 "Magicians such as Harry Houdini and Joseph Rinn have claimed all her feats were conjuring tricks. According to Houdini "Palladino cheated at Cambridge, she cheated in l'Aguélas, and she cheated in New York and yet each time that she was caught cheating the Spiritualists upheld her, excused her, and forgave her. Truly their logic sometimes borders on the humorous."

Okay, so what does this have to do with politics, and more importantly geopolitics? Everything!  I'll tell you what, we'll come back to that.

On our domestic scene we're expected to believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected President of the United States, irrespective of the massive amount of evidence he was elected via voter fraud, and those of us who stated that from the beginning were called Flat Earther conspiracy nuts.   But time and truth are on the same side, and more states are having to admit to massive levels of voter fraud are showing up.  And the reaction from leftists and those in the media who arrogantly and smugly laughed and ridiculed those who challenged the validity of that election are now silent as church mice on the subject.

And yet in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, they still "believe" in Biden's presidency, which means they're now forced to believe diametrically opposing things, believing they're both "truth".   "Truly their logic sometimes borders on the humorous."

We have an administration that's tyrannically imposed fascist policies on America.  Whether it involved covid, immigration, spending, energy dictates, domestic policies, foreign relation, and yet they call Trump a fascist, and he must be defeated to "save our democracy".  Yet, The Biden-Harris Regime’s Coup Against Constitutional America Is Leading to Civil War. And we not only see leftists embracing Biden, we're seeing the media and RINO's embrace an abject rejection of Donald Trump for a second term.  "Truly their logic sometimes borders on the humorous."

One of my pet peeves is this idiotic rationale Russia had to attack Ukraine because they were afraid of NATO, and was in dire need of creating "defensive depth".  How laughable is that?   NATO without America couldn't fight it's way out of a wet paper bag let alone attack Russia, and America certainly had no desire or intention of attacking Russia. 

•  Russia Was Scared, So They Had to Attack Ukraine! Part I
•  Russia Was Scared So They Had to Attack Ukraine, Part II

All the political chicanery that went on that's thrown up as an argument in favor of Putin's actions is a load of horsepucky.  That kind of stuff has always gone on by all the parties involved, but the fact remains Russia before this war of aggression against Ukraine was safer than it's ever been in it's entire history.    "Truly their logic sometimes borders on the humorous."

I have seven rules of geopolitics: 

1. First Rule of Geopolitics: All geopolitics is about four factors, geographics, demographics, economics, and that most elusive factor of all, the happiness factor.  
   
2. Second Rule of Geopolitics:  Everything is about the basics.  You have to be able to see issues at their foundational root levels in order to understand and fix complex problems.
   
3. Third Rule of Geopolitics:  History is everything since historical events lay the foundation for the social paradigms of nations, which have been in effect for centuries in most areas of the world.
   
4. Fourth Rule of Geopolitics:  People are like nations, and will act in their own best interests, unless they don't.  
5. Fifth Rule of Geopolitics: Nothing is ever as it appears.  Look behind the curtain, there's always something hidden. 
6. Sixth Rule of Geopolitics:  The patterns of life keep repeating over and over again. 
   
7. Seventh Rule of Geopolitics:  Everyone lies.    
   

I have a particular fondness for rules number two and three, as those lead to clarity as to the intention of world leaders.  

America is stunningly unique in all of world history.  We don't have the same type of foundational social paradigms as does the rest of the world.  We really don't understand theirs, at least as a surface understanding.  I can understand that lack of depth of understanding when it comes to the general population, but that's inexcusable for geopolitical analysts and world leaders.  

And understand, they absolutely don't understand American democracy, personal rights, and capitalism.  It's alien to them.  We really need to get that if we're to understand why they do the things the do, and the things we should and shouldn't do.  History is everything, and the founding fathers admonition of staying out of foreign conflicts was more prescient than we realized!  

These nations all had monarchs, absolute rulers, many of whom were empire builders, and that foundational social paradigm impacts the thinking of those nations and their leaders today, including Putin.  He loves Russia, Russian history, and make no mistake about it, he absolutely loves and desires the return of Russian imperialism.  However, his schemes are backfiring on him.  

Finland and Sweden have joined NATO, and not because they wish to attack Putin, but because they're afraid Putin will attack them, and I think their concern is justified.  Here's a history lesson for you:

The Great Northern War (1700–1721) was a conflict in which a coalition led by the Tsardom of Russia successfully contested the supremacy of the Swedish Empire in Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. The initial leaders of the anti-Swedish alliance were Peter I of Russia, Frederick IV of Denmark–Norway and Augustus II the Strong of Saxony–Poland–Lithuania. 

Frederick IV and Augustus II were defeated by Sweden, under Charles XII, and forced out of the alliance in 1700 and 1706 respectively, but rejoined it in 1709 after the defeat of Charles XII at the Battle of Poltava. George I of Great Britain and the Electorate of Hanover joined the coalition in 1714 for Hanover and in 1717 for Britain, and Frederick William I of Brandenburg-Prussia joined it in 1715.

Now Putin has deployed troops along Finland's border.  In spite of Russia's huge population, he's relying on mercenary troops, Ukraine has devastated Russia's Black Sea fleet with mass drone attacks, "and Russian forces continue to trade heavy losses for minimal gains on the Ukrainian battlefield."

•  Moscow’s Action in Ingushetia About Far More Than Counterterrorism
•  Russian Unity and Western Discord Converge in Putin’s Imagination

An article at Foreign Affairs entitled, The End of the Russian Idea, is a great history lesson and goes on to describe how Putin became a modern Russian Tsar, and why he's doing what he's doing, and his machinations that finally led to bringing total power into his hands alone.

Putin has merged the past to create his vision of the future.  By merging Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great with Joe Stalin, and the Russian Orthodox Church, which in the past was pretty much a organ of Tsarists governments, and had a strangle hold on Russian society in the past, all in order to create the same kind of relationship with Putin's government, with the same goal, a strangle hold on Russian society by persecuting all other Christian religions, all in violation of Article 18, Section 1 of the UN Charter on Human Rights.  

His goal is a vision of a return of Imperialist Russia.  He wants to pursue a policy of expansive Russian imperialism against all Russia's neighbors, including Poland, all of which Putin believes rightly belong to Russia based of past history, and has said so.  

Why Russia invaded Ukraine? .........This question continues to puzzle some Western analysts and scholars because of their inability to comprehend the true nature of Putin’s regime. The roots of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lie in the Kremlin leader seeking to carve out a place in Russian history as the “gatherer of Russian lands” (alongside Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Joseph Stalin). This notion is a return to the imperial-nationalist denial of Ukraine’s existence and the belief in a pan-Russian people composed of “great,” “little,” and “white” Russians (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, respectively) (TASS, July 12, 2021; RBC, June 9, 2022; see EDM, October 3, 2022). Many Kremlin leaders believed that “Little Russians” were deluded into thinking they were Ukrainians by the Austrians and Poles before 1914, by Vladimir Lenin when he gave them a Soviet republic, and by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) since 1991 (Kremlin.ru, July 12, 2021; Pravda.ru, November 22, 2022).

So, based on all Putin's done, is doing, and has stated what he wants to do, why would anyone still buy into this insane argument about "fear of NATO, depth of defense" rationale to justify Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine?  "Truly their logic sometimes borders on the humorous."

So, back to the foundational question: "What do Politics, Cognitive Dissonance, and Eusapia Palladino Have in Common?"  An irrational desire to believe the unbelievable. 

Hamas Consigns the Pax Americana to History Books

By Hal Brands October 09, 2023

Hamas’ surprise assault against Israel is tragic in its own right: The Israeli death toll, relative to population, is several times worse than 9/11 was for the US. Things could still get much nastier if Hezbollah — Iran’s Lebanese proxy — fully enters the fray, confronting Israel with a multifront fight and regionalizing the conflict.  Yet the war in the Levant is also part of a broader, intensifying crisis of global security.

Consider the Eurasian panorama. Europe is experiencing its worst insecurity in decades, thanks to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s barbaric war in Ukraine. The threat of war is also growing in the Balkans, where Serbian troop movements recently forced the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to bulk up its forces in Kosovo. In the Caucasus, Azerbaijan has exploited Russian distraction to seize control of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia, resulting in the flight of some 100,000 civilians. Along this arc of instability from Eastern Europe to Southwest Asia, conquest and ethnic cleansing are alive and well.

The Western Pacific is less violent but not less dangerous. The Taiwan Strait is a perpetual flashpoint, as China tries to coerce that island and force the US and its regional allies to prepare for a showdown. Tensions are rising in the South China Sea, as the Philippines — sick of years of Beijing’s bullying — begins asserting its rights with greater verve. On the Korean Peninsula, Pyongyang is steadily improving its nuclear weapons and missile programs, while also fueling Putin’s war by providing artillery ammunition and other resources.................. To Read More.

Calamity Joe: Geopolitical Catastrophes Multiply as American Power and Influence Crash to New Postwar Lows

March 19, 2023 By Thomas Lifson

In only two years, Joe Biden’s presidency has produced multiple catastrophes from which recovery will be difficult, if it is even possible. Domestically, we see the banking system teetering on insolvency, as the rapid escalation in interest rates has devalued long term Treasury notes that used to be considered a safe place for banks to park funds in excess of what could be safely lent. The reason for these Federal Reserve interest rate hikes is the inflation that was immediately triggered by Biden’s jihad against domestica oil, gas, and coal production, that triggered an inflationary spiral that continues today, devaluing the life savings of thrifty Americans, and pushing food and energy costs up so fast that many families have had to drastically reduce their standard of living.

Bad as these catastrophes are, the potential for serious damage to the welfare of the American people from the military and diplomatic policies of the Biden administration is much worse. Losing a war – or even just fighting a nuclear war – makes a mere Depression look like a day at the beach. And make no mistake, the Biden administration is flirting with a nuclear confrontation with Russia that China might well decide to join and eliminate for good the power of the United States to oppose its aims for dominance of the Asia/Pacific region (for starters). Meanwhile, as the potential for an ultimate confrontation increases, resources for America to counter the threat are rapidly diminishing............To  Read More.....

Under Joe Biden, our corruption is becoming Africanized, March 19, 2023 By Monica Showalter - This week, we learned from a House panel that Joe Biden and his family members took $1.3 million from a Chinese energy firm. According to this NBC report:

The Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee published a memo Thursday alleging that Hunter Biden and at least two relatives were paid $1.3 million from an associate of the president's son who had links to a Chinese energy company. They are alleged to have been paid after the associate, Rob Walker, was wired $3 million in March 2017 from a Chinese energy company affiliated with another company that Biden had been doing business with. The recipients of the $1.3 million in payments were Biden, his uncle James Biden and Hallie Biden, the widow of Hunter's brother Beau Biden, Comer said. "It is unclear what services were provided to obtain this exorbitant amount of money," Comer said.

Some of it was dolloped out in packets, as if they were paychecks, some went to people with no possible merit utility to China's giant energy company, and in every transaction, Joe Biden took his cut. He was, according to the emails found on son Hunter's abandoned laptop, "the big guy." Biden was asked about these payments, and in a reflexive way, claiming they never happened:  .But they did happen, and Congress has the receipts on it. He's convinced he can lie his way out of it, but the receipts don't lie. ......

 

CORTES: Welcome To Joe Biden's American Carnage.

August 17, 2021 by Steve Cortes

In his Inaugural Address, President Donald J. Trump promised that the  misery inflicted on everyday Americans by globalists, via constant war and economic abuse,  would end with a new America First agenda.   He pledged, "this American carnage stops right here and stops right now." And stop it did, as Trump ended senseless wars and ushered in record-setting wage growth in 2019  before the CCP virus hit America like an epidemiological Pearl Harbor.

But now, under Joe Biden, the carnage begins anew, with astounding swiftness and scale,  only months into his administration.  Biden's failures exceed even the most dire prognostications of his fiercest critics 

prior to him assuming the presidency under dubious electoral circumstances.  Presently, America's mood plunges, as evidenced by the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey  which is widely followed by economists and financial markets. ...........To Read More.....

 

Forget about Pompeo’s Dog, We Need to Be Watching China

By Jim Geraghty May 18, 2020

On the menu today: Many countries head into the World Health Assembly wanting the World Health Organization to investigate the origins of SARS-CoV-2; China makes a power grab in Hong Kong; a strange report about the World Military Games held in October of last year in Wuhan; and outbreaks in northern China that are inconvenient for Beijing’s preferred narrative.

If You’re Not Watching China Right Now, You Can’t Understand the World

I suspect that this morning, many other news sources will helpfully inform you that the president of the United States said or tweeted something outrageously controversial, that some Americans in a red state are not following social-distancing recommendations, and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants a “bipartisan” compromise after the House passed a $3 trillion wish-list stimulus bill on a near-party-line vote.

Right now on MSNBC, the top story is that the State Department inspector general was investigating whether Secretary of State Mike Pompeo required a department employee to walk his dog. Congress is almost certain to investigate........

There is good reason to believe that the Chinese government sees the global pandemic as an opportunity. With almost every government of every country in the world attempting to get a handle on the outbreak, China is free to make moves that otherwise would bring international rebukes. In Hong Kong, pro-Chinese lawmakers are having their rivals dragged out of the chamber:
....To Read More....

Climate Change -- Who Stands to Gain?

January 2, 2019 By Alexander G. Markovsky

As the ancient Romans asked: cui prodest? “Who stands to gain?”

The global cooling, warming, or climate change movement, whatever it is called nowadays, was not born as the result of immaculate conception. It was conceived in the early 1960s in Paris, France, as a sinister plot to contain American expansionism, as the Europeans called it at the time.

Undamaged by the war, America was the dominant economic and political power, producing more than 50 percent of the world’s output. France, on the other hand, defeated and humiliated in the Second World War, was in ruins. General Charles de Gaulle, then president of France, was obsessed with Napoleon’s greatness and the messianic vision of returning France to the status of great power.

So, when one of de Gaulle’s ministers came up with an idea that the more a country produces, the more it contributes to the world’s pollution, de Gaulle seized the opening. That was de Gaulle’s eureka moment -- France would compensate for its humiliation and indignities by asserting an important role in the international affairs. In 1968, France formed the French Federation of Nature Protection Societies (FFSPN) and assumed the role of the world leader of the environmental movement................The Soviets enthusiastically embraced the idea. They shared de Gaulle’s concern, but for different reasons. The Kremlin saw the United States as a formidable opponent in its quest to spread communism to Western Europe and other parts of the world and was eager to support anything that would undermine the United States economically and politically.............

Although from de Gaulle to Macron the political and economic landscape has changed, the strategy remains assertively consistent.........To Read More....

Clash of Civilizations—or Clash Within Civilizations?

As parlous as the clash of civilizations might be, the implosion of our own is much more to  be feared.

Seth Cropsey & Harry Halem, The American Interest September 4, 2018

 

The third in a series of three essays celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the publication of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. Other contributors include Francis Fukuyama and Daniel E. Burns.

Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” caused a stir when Foreign Affairs published it in the summer of 1993. Grand theoretical views by eminent thinkers deserve to cause stirs, whether they are right in the main or not—for being wrong grandly can start ultimately useful conversations in ways that being right trivially cannot. But Huntington’s “Clash” caused a stir for a special reason: He flew against prevailing zeitgeist, which had room for only a globalist versus nationalist conception, by proposing the concept of culture, and by extension civilization, as the organizing principle for global politics in the post-Cold War era. His attempt to determine where we, as a species, are in terms of political and social development arguably represents the pinnacle of Huntington’s work as a political thinker............

Huntington divided the world into nine distinct civilizational zones. Western civilization spans the Atlantic, encompassing the United States and Canada, Western Europe, parts of Central Europe, the Baltic States, Poland, and Australia.

Both Japanese and Latin American civilization can be considered loose affiliates of the West, although in Latin America cultural differences make that linkage highly variable.

Slavic-Orthodox, Central Asian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Sinic, and African civilizations encompass the rest of the world’s nations, generally breaking down along ethno-religious lines.........To Read More.....

Peter Zeihan on Geopolitics: Syria

 

             

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The Syrian War, 2.0

 

The Israeli Air Force announced April 21 that it would scale back participation in the Red Flag exercises in Alaska. The joint Red Flag drills are regular events hosted by the United States, with the upcoming April 26-May 11 exercises allowing the Israelis to train in an environment they rarely experience (non-coincidentally, Alaskan terrain is somewhat similar to the Persian highlands). IDF spokespersons attributed the decision to keep Israeli F-15s at home due to the changing situation assessment of tensions along its northern border that have left everyone holding their breath.  

We weren’t kept waiting long. In the early morning hours of April 30, the Israelis launched a series of significant strikes throughout western Syria, targeting infrastructure that supports weapons development and distribution. A rocket factory made for some particularly impressive fireballs.

The Israelis normally hold their cards much closer to their chest than this – particularly when it involves possible actions in their close-in neighborhood. But these are not normal times. The open secret is that the United States sees almost no role for itself in Syria going forward (at least, compared to what American engagement in the Middle East typically looks like). The Americans’ primary goal in Syria has been the eradication of ISIS. With the terror group’s holdings nearly obliterated, so too goes a compelling case for extending American involvement in Syria. This is compounded by the fact that a country as broken as Syria needs the kind of costly, involved, long-term occupation and rebuilding efforts the Americans pursued in Germany and Japan after World War II – a cost the Americans were unwilling to pay in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The pending American withdrawal evolves the Syrian War in a much fiercer direction. Initially, the primary players in the fight were domestic: the Assad government, ISIS, the Syrian Kurds, and the various collections of anti-regime elements who seemed to occupy every spot on the spectrum from wonky democrats to those who felt ISIS would have been more successful if it had just been a bit more brutal. Foreign powers used these factions as proxies to meet their tactical and strategic needs in the country without committing significant troops. It also created plausible deniability in a very volatile situation with many major actors. In exchange, these factions received intelligence, money, weapons and on-site support far superior to anything they could hope for otherwise, not to mention promises for their role in the future in Syria that may or may not be fulfilled. While those foreign players could certainly make their presence felt, using proxies inherently means the foreigners were rarely present in sufficient strength to dictate events on the ground. (The sole exception might be Iran’s proxy militant group in Lebanon, Hezbollah, which has apparently redirected nearly all its fighters into the Syrian theater to assist the Assad government. More on that exception in a moment.)

The presence of U.S. forces in Syria has limited what all the outside players could do, as well as the sorts of risks they were willing to take. The Americans may have never had more than a couple thousand troops in-country, but their vast array of naval firepower combined with the base at Incirlik, Turkey meant they could at a moment’s notice squeeze off missile and bomb barrages at any target they desired. There was no point in baiting the eagle (as Moscow discovered Feb 7 when the Americans obliterated a Russian probe attempt).

But take the Americans out of the equation, and the lid comes off the pot. And since everyone has different goals, Syria is about to get consistently lively:

Russia was an early participant in the Syrian conflict for a mix of reasons:

•Syria is one of the few of Russia’s Cold War-era proxies that is still of some use, so propping up Assad holds some slight strategic value all its own.  

•Politically, being involved where the Americans were not helped burnish Russia’s credentials as a player, guaranteed it a seat at any table that discussed Syrian issues, and was an easy propaganda win back home.  

•Being in Syria annoyed the crap out of the Turks, forcing Ankara to rivet its gaze to its south rather than to the north where more core Russian interests were in play.  

•Being able to twist the Syrian fighting this or that way enabled the Russians to generate scads of refugees on demand. A mix of geographic, climatic and infrastructure patterns meant that most of those refugees could only go north to Turkey and Europe, enabling Moscow to scramble European politics with nothing more than a few dozen bombs.  

•More recently, the Russians have turned Syria into a vast testing and training range for its forces. Russia’s military may be huge, but it hasn’t seen 1% of the sort of expeditionary combat American forces have seen since 1992. Syria let’s the Russians play catch up. What do all these reasons have in common? Russia has a vested interest in seeing the Syrian War never end.   

Moscow, Russia

 

Iran is the closest to a strategic ally that the Assad regime has, and Syria has quite surprisingly – to Iran – become the lynchpin in Iran’s entire regional strategy. The most important tool Iran has is the militant group Hezbollah, which Iran uses not simply as a foothold in the Levant, but to threaten Israel and pressure the United States. When Saddam ran Iraq, the Iranians were able to shuttle support to Hezbollah via Iraq and Syria into Lebanon. Well, the Americans overthrew Saddam and now civil war threatens Syria. The Iranians didn’t just have no choice but to go all-in in Syria, but they are now the power seeking to maintain governments in the region rather than seeking overthrow them. That requires a degree of political, strategic, military and economic commitment that is downright… American.

Assad may have won the civil war, but now Iran has to hold the place together, and as the Americans learned in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the second phase is far more difficult. But unlike the Americans, the Iranians can’t just go home. An ongoing Assad victory is absolutely critical to maintaining Iran’s current sphere of influence from Mesopotamia to the eastern Mediterranean. In short, the Iranians can never go home.

Directly opposite the Iranians are a series of powers that seem to be somewhat confused about what’s going on in their neighborhood: the Gulf Arab states – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Their efforts in Syria are, in a word, messy.

•Part of this is due to geography: large swathes of desert terrain separate the Gulf Arabs and Syria. •Partly it’s a lack of experience: the Gulfies are among the most dependent countries on earth when it comes to relying on the American security blanket.

•Partly it’s ineptitude: Saudi and Emirati and Qatari-backed groups spend as much time fighting each other in Syria as they do Assad or anyone else.

•Partly it’s an issue of distraction: these same powers are also fighting a war in Yemen. It all adds up to a lot of ammunition backed by a lot of money that’s causing a lot of deaths. And that just might be the point. For decades the Americans’ took on the mantle of preserving countries in their current form; If your job is to maintain the global system, then you want stability. But with the Americans leaving, the only power that really wants a stable Syria is… Iran. And if there is one thing the Saudis do not want, it is an Iranian-dominated anything. Better to burn the whole place down than allow the dust to settle in an arrangement that doesn’t suit Saudi preferences.  

Which puts Israel and Saudi Arabia more or less on the same side, with Israel in the perfect strategic and political position. The regional powers with which the Israelis have passably good relations – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Egypt – are fighting against Assad and Iranian influence, which means Israel is free to strike targets according to its own national security prerogatives with little risk of even angry tweets from regional stakeholders.

The Syrian War has quietly ushered in a new era of Israeli security relations with its neighbors: rather than relying on the Americans, Israel is aggressively, proactively and decisively pursuing its national security interests and intervening in Muslim conflicts… and no one except Syria and Iran has anything to say about it. The Israeli Air Force has attacked over 100 targets within Syrian territory since 2012, from suspected missile and arms deliveries en route to southern Lebanon to high value Hezbollah and Iranian targets. With the Iranians now the force for order in the country, the Israelis will gleefully expand their target list to anything that will cost the Iranians lives, equipment or money.

It’ll be a long list.

Tehran, Iran

The role of Turkey in Syria has been… unmoored for a reinforcing pair of reasons.

•First, Turkey’s World War One defeat was so total and humiliating that Turkey in essence took a vacation from the world that lasted a century. The Turks are out of practice using the political, diplomatic, economic and military tools that are standard for pretty much everyone else. The learning curve is fairly steep, but it is still there and the Turks are starting from almost zero.

•Second is that the political situation within Turkey is flattening that learning curve. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has largely completed the process of purging the country of, well, everyone who opposes him. That has left this very Trumpian personality with zero competent allies, which means he is running Turkey’s $900 billion economy, 80-million citizens, and 900,000-strong military all by himself. Such concentration of power makes for erratic decision-making, with Erdogan highly vulnerable to bad intelligence, fake news, Russian manipulations, personal mental blocks, and a host of other issues that would routinely be filtered out in a more decentralized system.

At the end of the day the Turks’ primary concern in Syria is the military capacity and de facto independence of the Syrian Kurds. Ankara/Erdogan fear – with significant reason – that a Syrian Kurdish statelet will provide a template that could be reproduced within Turkey’s own Kurdish regions. To that end and despite Erdogan’s best efforts, the Turkish military/intelligence apparatus is steadily constructing effective networks of military groups throughout northern Syria. When the Turks do decide to move in force, they’ll be able to.  

And let’s not kid ourselves. Unlike the United States, Russia, Iran or Israel, Turkey can put troops on the ground in Syria in the hundreds of thousands if it wants to and the Turks have the motivation and staying power to see their strategy through in what will be a complex and bloody new stage in the war. It is ultimately Turkey that will decide what Syria will look like, and years from now we’ll all be looking back at the 2018 American withdrawal as the event that unleashed Turkish power in the region.

I’d like to end with one particularly dark thought. The primary reason the Americans were in Syria at all was because a militant group called ISIS was stupid enough to post the beheadings of a few American co-eds on social media. Expunging ISIS is pretty much done and so the Americans are now leaving. But look at what enabled ISIS to exist in the first place: local sectarian divisions, multiple competing power centers, an arid geography that complicates regional consolidation, meddling outside powers, and a metric butt-ton of easily attainable military-grade weapons. None of these factors have gone or are going to go away. Every power playing in the Syrian sandbox is creating, sponsoring and supporting their own constellations of mutually-antagonistic militias. It isn’t so much a petri dish from which will emerge the next ISIS as it is an ISIS factory.

Happy Monday.

Why Are Economists So Often Wrong?

Rich Kozlovich

Recently my friend Maury Siskle sent me an article entitled, Next Bear Market Will Be "Worst in Our Lifetime", saying:

 "This week's dramatic stock market sell-off has raised concerns of an impending bear market, which, according to legendary investor Jim Rogers, will be more catastrophic than any other market downturn that he has lived through."'

"When we have a bear market again, and we are going to have a bear market again, it will be the worst in our lifetime," Rogers told Bloomberg. According to the veteran investor, that will happen because even more debt has accumulated in the global economy since the financial crisis, especially in the US. "

Okay, that's probably as good a guess as any, but what I found interesting is his comment:

"He said he was light on US stocks due to expectations of a forming bubble, and that Japan, China and Russia offered better investment opportunities."

Well, for some time I've been predicting a worldwide economic downturn by or around 2020, and debt load is one of the primary reasons. The article is impressive until the writer tells everyone that Japan, China and Russia offered better investment opportunities.

At that point he went off the economic sanity grid. None of those countries are natural capital generators. Without a strong U.S. economy, they will drown in their debt and regulations, and they will not be able to recover from what I believe will turn into a depression for the rest of the world.

The only country that can feed itself, fuel itself, arm itself and defend itself without any assistance from anyone else in the world is the U.S.

If the world's economy plunges into a depression, Russia and China are going to collapse into anarchy and will Balkanize with war lords as leaders. Japan will be stunningly poor and people will be starving just as they were after WWI.

I don't know who wrote this article but he must be a college educated economist......and like most of them......they're just fancy bookkeepers and they're clueless. Ask 100 economists a question and you'll get 100 different answers.

Here's what economists do:

"Economists study how society distributes resources, such as land, labor, raw materials, and machinery, to produce goods and services. They conduct research, collect and analyze data, monitor economic trends, and develop forecasts on a wide variety of issues, including energy costs, inflation, interest rates, exchange rates, business cycles, taxes, and employment levels, among others."

Well, that certainly sounds impressive, but why then are they so often wrong? And the answer is simple. Economics is stunningly complex. There are approximately seven billion people living today, how do you factor in seven billion variables? So what does that make economics? Bad science!

The variables are so complex anyone who claims they can accurately predict future trends is lying to you, and many are paid to say what their employer wants them to say - including those paid by government. Actually - especially those paid by government. And of course there are the ideologues, and none of the stuff economists are supposed to be using for their evaluations mean anything to them.  Ideology makes smart people dumb.  

It seems to me there's another factor that's always left out of these equations. History! Every culture has an historical paradigm that acts as a driving force or a brake on what they do, or can do. It isn't all about bookkeeping. It's about people, and that makes prediction, especially about the future, really hard.

But historical patterns keep repeating within cultures, and economists don't ever seem to get that.  The United States is the only truly great capital generator in the world, and can generate that capital without the rest of the world if and when it becomes necessary. That's the social paradigm of America and it's history.   

Not Russia, not China and not Japan.  Their history, their social paradigm, their geography and their demography all work against them without the United States economy. 

As for my predictions? Take them for what they're worth or ignore them entirely if it pleases you, but I base my predictions on the four components already mentioned: history, societal paradigms, geography and demographics. I leave bookkeeping to the economists.

Geopolitics Europe: Observations From the Back Row

By Rich Kozlovich

One of the things everyone should easily be aware of - nothing is ever as it appears in politics, national or international. The only constant we can be assured of is - there will be change. Foundational systems for a stable world are crumbling, and although these structures continue to exist who can say for how long and what the outcome will be.

However, there are certain fundamentals that apply that allow for reasonable conclusions and anticipation of world events. One of them is - finances! Eventually everything has to be paid for! And that's not just a problem in the United States with over 20 trillion in outright debt, not to mention the financial obligations regarding Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. That might be a total debt load of over 100 trillion dollars.

Europe is a mess. There's talk of their era of harmony being over, but I say - there never really was any real harmony right from the beginning. The Brits have decided to leave the EU, causing a ton of anxiety on both sides of this issue, but I believe it's sending shivers down the backs of all the EU leadership and bureaucracy as they see this as the tip of the iceberg, and the harbinger of their doom.

Poland and Hungary are in revolt and simply refusing to adhere to EU demands, especially involving immigration, and the EU leadership is outraged and mostly helpless as the Eastern periphery of the EU revolts. Poland is moving toward what most western nation would view as undemocratic by taking control over what's seen on television and heard on the radio. They also planning on taking control over the judiciary. That really doesn't sit well with the EU. But we also have to understand all the EU countries have taken positions that could absolutely be construed as anti-democratic.

The center of the EU - Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands - along with Sweden, Norway and most likely Denmark want the Eastern bloc punished for their refusal to go along with the wishes of these dysfunctional leaders who've been leading Europe into an eventual oblivion of Muslim domination. Eastern Europe will not accept these suicidal EU policies and eventually the Center EU may be left to form their own coalition and continue the policies that's destroying Europe.

Map from Geopolitical Futures

But the Eastern EU countries, and I include the Czechs in this, are a far different breed from the center, or even Britain. They don't really like the idea of being a singular entity, they don't like Muslim immigration, and they like their individuality. Europe is a mismatch of different cultures and different languages. How do you unify that mix, especially when their citizens don't really want unification?

Did you know the United States is officially on the metric system? That became official decades ago. But no one wanted it, and we're still measuring in inches, feet, gallons, miles per hour, etc. Making something the law doesn't mean it will be reality.

Europe isn't a nation. Europe is nothing more than a geographical expression, as a result it's simply not possible for EU politicians to be effective and force their views on the whole. Politics is the art of the possible. The EU isn't possible, in spite of the fact the leadership wants and thinks in terms of being an entity that's in harmony - the rules imposed by the EU make that impossible.

In the meanwhile, Europe's economic growth has been meager and anti-immigration forces are garnering strength, all of which is tearing Europe apart. And that includes their financial wherewithal.

Europe is in deep debt and here's the reality. If there's a worldwide economic downturn the EU will cease to exist overnight instead of in five years - which is my prediction - the EU will cease to exist as we know it within five years.  And countries like Greece will cease to exist as independent nations within 15 years, and it may be far less. 

The United States is one of the few, and possibly the only nation, that can actually survive such a downturn as the US, being a natural capital generator due to many factors, has the ability to overcome the debt load we discussed at the beginning.  The US is also capable of feeding itself, fueling itself, arming itself and defending itself, irrespective of what's going on in the rest of the world.   Neither Europe, Russia, China or much of the rest of the world of international trade is capable of doing all four of those foundational things.

Geopolitics: Observations From the Back Row

By Rich Kozlovich

One of the things we really need to understand - there is no peace in the Middle East - anywhere!  It's a mess and that's not going to change so anything done by the government of the United States over Jerusalem isn't going to make it better or make it worse.  There may be a small blip on the peace radar for a nanosecond for propaganda purposes - but like flying saucers - that will quickly disappear.

The fact of the matter is these Muslim groups are just looking for some excuse to exacerbate their violent activity - ergo - any excuse will do.  So, let's stop worrying about the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the legitimate capital of Israel - after all - it is!  Any other view was pandering to the myth that if world governments ignored that fact it would keep the peace process in place.  What peace process?  I've been watching this for most of my life and nothing has changed.  There's not one iota of harmony in the views of any of the parties involved.  How can there be a peace process?  Answer:  There Can't!

Russia is now providing air support to the Syrian militias, and apparently that includes some of the Kurdish groups battling the Islamic State in Syria - and the Turks are silent on this, yet Turkey considers the Kurds a major risk to the security of their government.  So, can they be happy about this?  That seems unlikely to me, since their situation with the Kurds has "strained U.S. and Turkish relation", which I consider another myth.  There was no harmony with the Turks before, there's no harmony now, and there will be no harmony in the future.  The ideological foundation for modern Turkey was the idea of keeping Islam out of government.  That no longer exists!  So why are they silent?

The Middle East is a quagmire of Byzantine political intrigue.  Turkey has so many problems they're not going to challenge Russia (although demographically that may change in not too many years), which will make the Caucasus a problem area.

The Caucasus was taken over by the Russian Empire in nineteenth century as a buffer between Turkey and ethnic Russia, the same foreign policy being practiced by Russia today.  But Northern Caucasus regions are dominated by Muslim groups who've been conducting military action against the Russian government for centuries, hence the current instability.

The vast majority of those in Southern areas of the Caucasus are Christians adhering to the Orthodox religion, who seem to me to be caught in a vise of Muslims to the North and South.  The only advantage they have is the lack of harmony between these Muslim groups in those regions.  They will happily kill competing Muslims as they would Christians.  Maybe more so as they consider them corrupted heretics.

Also, there are agreements in place that's created areas of interest in Syria between Turkey, Russia and Iran, but the U.S. is involved with Russia in negotiations over that and Turkey can't start something with Russia and then be left out of any deal between the Russians and the U.S.  

Turkey is silent now, but they understand Russia desires a much-weakened Turkey over issues involving surrounding territory in the Caucasus, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, which also involves Iran, which borders the Southern Caucasus.  Russia wants to protect what they perceive as their interests, hence, they want to continue to play the "big dog" role in the region. With their demographic problems - this may be their last chance. Turkey surely sees this as threat, and they can't and won't remain silent forever, and Russia is no longer is the Soviet Union.

We need to understand something else. Trump is far smarter than Obama and knows how to negotiate. He understands what he wants and will drop anyone not part of his solution. Make no mistake about this - this leftist clabber about how foreign leaders respected Obama more that Trump is nonsense.  Respect is a mixture of fear and affection.  They don't "respect" any American President. The only form of respect we get from these thugs is the fear we can and will exert American economic and military power in ways that will have a negative impact on them.

Obama's politics were confused, and confusing, creating mixed signals that actually enabled the lunatics in the region to become stronger. That's going to change now and make no mistake about this - the world's leaders believe that.

America will never have their affection, so the U.S. needs to have them fear what America may do - and has the will, the courage and tenacity to do it. Trump's actions in many ways reflect Teddy Roosevelt's comment - "Walk softly but carry a big stick".

They fear the "Big Stick" Trump is carrying. 

Can There Be Agreement With North Korea?

By Rich Kozlovich

Xander Snyder posted this article, North Korea Negotiations Aren’t Dead Yet on Aug 30, 2017 in Geopolitics | Geopolitical Futures, discussing the over flight of a N. Korean short range ballistic missile.

There were some interesting points made here including why Japan didn’t bother to shoot it down, as in they can’t or they’re not confident in their systems and didn’t want to appear vulnerable if they attempted to do so and failed. All good points.

They also sent one out far enough to demonstrate they could hit Alaska if they wanted to do so, and the author says this “was clearly an escalation, but it, too, must be considered in the context of ongoing negotiations”, as in “a regime expressing displeasure with a hang-up either in negotiations or in the direction they’re taking.” That’s really the point, isn’t it? Where is this going to go? What will everyone settle for? And what will the long-term consequences be?

The author explains this was done over Japan for a number of reasons. Japan once invaded and controlled Korea and they just imposed sanctions on N. Korea. N. Korea took a page right out of Chinese diplomacy. This was an “object lesson” aggression for future consideration.

Is there real room of legitimate compromise with N. Korea? I don’t think so, and as the author notes: whatever compromise they discuss would be extremely difficult to implement.

He goes on to note that the U.S. needs to “ensure that North Korea has not only abandoned its nuclear weapons program, but also that its ability to resume the program is removed. This would mean intrusive inspections that the North is unlikely to accept.”

N. Korea will want assurances they won’t be attacked by S. Korean or American forces, which is a red herring or the belief of a completely irrational paranoid regime, which is what they are, and the U.S. isn’t going to diminish it’s “presence in the Pacific”, which is what China would like in order for them to impose an economic hegemony over their neighbors through intimidation, which puts it at odds with the Phillipines and India, which want to become the dominent naval power in the region.

I agree with the author that this is the calm before the storm, because N. Korea is going to push this to the point it can’t be ignored militarily.  I can't see how there can be any agreement or compromise that will be acceptable to Kim, so that leaves two options.  His military has a coup and executes him or a military intervention, wherein N. Korea will cease to exist and the peninsula will be united under S. Korean control giving the people of N. Korea a chance for descent lives instead of the brutality they’ve experienced since 1948.

I also think Russia and China will benefit because this will open a much larger consumer market for them, if they will only grasp that obvious reality. 

Observations From the Back Row: My Take on Asia

By Rich Kozlovich

North Korea fired a medium range ballistic missile which landed in the East China Sea this week, but there are those who claim it was a failure, flying only 40 miles.  Not very far since it's supposed to have over a 600 mile range.  But no matter - it was good theater.  However, I wonder just what's going on in that Mini-Mao's mind. 

More importantly - what's going on in the minds of his military.  None of the news networks are talking and for good reason - they don't have a clue any better then do I.   Stratfor is under the impression all this posturing by will force a showdown between the U.S. and N. Korea, and it's up to China to do something about Kim Jong-un.  Okay......what exactly can, or I should say......what "will" China do? 

North Korea has stated no sanctions will prevent their actions, and if any are imposed it will merely speed up their activity.  That's a logical fallacy if I ever heard one.  They're going to do what they want to do no matter what the world says or wants and for good reason.  The only ones hurt are the peasants - they end up starving to death to pay for all this technology.  Since Kim Jong-un and his cut throats never have to suffer for their actions they don't care.

While it's true sanctions haven't stopped their nuclear adventurism we should remember - it was the Clintons who made this possible, and it was the foundation for the Iranian deal.  Does that give anyone pause? 

China's leading thug - they call him President Xi Jinping - is meeting with President Trump this week to deal with trade issues, and the fact of the matter is - he's in trouble economically and needs the U.S.  Will that have an impact?  With Obama it wouldn't mean a thing because he and his corrupt and incompetent cabal wouldn't dream of offending their commie ally.  But there's a lot of twists and turns here and Xi is not totally at a loss to make a deal he doesn't like

Rex Tillerson, U.S. Secretary of State is meeting with the U.N. about N. Korean nuclear proliferation in three weeks, and Nikki Haley stated  "The United States has seen China for 25-plus years say that they are concerned about North Korea, but we haven't seen them act like they're concerned about North Korea. This administration wants to see them act."

As for China, "North Korea is both an irritant and a benefit".   China likes the idea of that little pain in the butt disrupting any potential for a unified Korea or some sort of solid arrangement with the rest of the South China Sea community. 

But for some reason Washington is expecting China to work at making changes in N. Korea and even backing away from supporting N. Korea economically and possibly even Kim himself.  What does that mean?  Who knows since no one knows what's really going on in the political Byzantium of N. Korea.  And something we all need to remember about dealing with the Chinese.  Nothing is ever as it seems. 

So will the U.S. use the military?  If they do - It won't be in the way we've done in the past.  The U.S. is going to stop the big military campaigns and rely more on special operation missions, and the military budget is reflecting that.  They will - it seems to me - deploy anti-missile systems in Japan and Taiwan and even the Lockeed Martin advanced F-35 aircraft - whether China objects or not.

Back to sanctions.  What if China refuses to help.  There are layers of sanctions and economic sanctions especially.  First China's financial institutions could be targeted forcing them to shut down accounts with N. Korea in order to avoid being frozen out of the U.S. financial market. 

All that clabber we're hearing about China and Russia forgoing the dollar and creating their own financial foundation is baloney.  No one will accept that, and they know it.  It's just economic sabre rattling.  But there's one thing everyone has to agree on - N. Korea working toward a deliverable nuclear weapon is unacceptable, and this is what all U.S. and China relations will center around for some time, which is to China's benefit, since we have come to expect inexpensive products from China. 

Worrying about losing China's inexpensive cheaply made products is not such a grand way of doing things in my opinion.  Let them collapse on their own economic incompetence - it's going to happen anyway, let it happen now.  We can build anything they build in China and do it better. Even if it's more expensive we will create jobs here and that will generate capital and competition. 

However, all the members of the South China Sea community are also having issues with China.

Years ago China claimed it practically owned all of the South China Sea but was challenged by the Philippines and the UN backed the Philippines.  That hasn't dampened China's appetite for stealing what's not theirs.  "Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have also sparred with Beijing over territory in the disputed waterway."  The U.S. is firm on defending international waters there, but what will the give and take be after this week.  No one knows, but we will see Trump's ability to deal with these complicated issues. 

Finally, and it has nothing to do with China, Korea or any of the South China Sea community and in fact I'm posting this because I just love this guys name.  It would appear King Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun (Okay, say that five times fast. Okay, one time fast.  How about one time very, very slowly?) is bringing his nation under the rule of a new constitution and will hold elections in 2018. 

Best wishes to them.

One more thing.  All that's happening now will start to take a back seat to future economic problems, which I will address soon.