Day: June 14, 2024

The Russians accused the Ukrainian services of being involved in the terrorist attack in Moscow – Free Press  Слободен печат

EU agrees on start of accession talks with Ukraine, Moldova  Reuters

EU agrees on starting membership talks with Ukraine, Moldova  DW (English)

Американским спецслужбам всегда не нравилась активность посольства России.

Эти инициативы способны задать новые направления для диалога.

Iran Update, June 12, 2024  Institute for the Study of War

Armenia will leave the military alliance led by Russia, Pashinyan accused of planning a conspiracy with Azerbaijan  Vijesti.me

I have been writing for some time that Europe (and the U.S.) are in a period of alternate revolution and civil war. History warns us that such conflicts tend to be extended, with peak episodes which are revolutionary (as the prevailing paradigm first cracks); yet which, in reality, are but alternate modes of the same – a ‘toggling’ between revolutionary peaks and the slow ‘slog’ of intense cultural war.

We are, I believe, in such an era.

I also have suggested that a nascent counter-revolution was slowly gathering – one defiantly unwilling to recant traditionalist moral values, nor prepared to submit to an oppressive;illiberal;international order posing as;liberal.

What I had not expected was that the ‘first shoe to drop’ would occur in Europe – that it would be France that would be the first to break the illiberal mould. (I had thought that it would break first in the U.S.)

The European MEP election outcome may come to be viewed as the ‘first swallow’ signalling a substantive change in the weather. There are to be snap elections in Britain and France, and Germany (and well as much of Europe) is in a state of political disarray.

Have no illusions though! The cold reality is that western ‘Power Structures’ own the wealth, the key institutions in society and the levers of enforcement. To be plain: they hold the ‘commanding heights’. How will they manage a West edging towards moral, political and possibly financial collapse? Most likely by doubling-down, with no compromise.

And that predictable ‘doubling down’ will not necessarily be confined to fights within the ‘Colosseum’ arena. It will certainly impinge into high-risk geo-politics.

Undoubtedly, U.S. ‘structures’ will have been deeply disconcerted by the European election portent. What does the European anti-Establishment mutiny imply for those Ruling Structures in Washington, especially at a time when all the world sees Joe Biden visibly wobbling?

How will they distract ‘us’ from this first crack to their international Structural Edifice?

Already, there is U.S.-led military escalation – ostensibly connected to Ukraine – but whose objective clearly is to provoke Russia into retaliation. By incrementally escalating NATO violations of Russia’s strategic ‘red lines’, it seems that the U.S. hawks seek to gain the escalatory advantage over Moscow, leaving to Moscow the dilemma of how far to retaliate. The western élites;do not fully believe;the warnings from Moscow.

This provocation ploy might conceivably offer either a crafted image of the U.S. ‘winning’ (‘staring down Putin’), or alternatively, come to provide a pretext to postpone U.S. Presidential elections (as global tensions spike) – thereby giving the permanent state time to get its ‘ducks in lined up’ to manage an early Biden succession.

This calculus however, is contingent on how soon Ukraine implodes either militarily, or politically.

An earlier than expected Ukraine implosion might become the staging for a U.S. pivot to the Taiwan ‘front’ – a contingency that already is being prepared.

Why is Europe in mutiny?

The mutiny has arisen because many in the West now see only too clearly that the western ruling structure is no liberal project;per se, but rather is an avowedly illiberal mechanical ‘control system’ (managerial technocracy) – that fraudulently poses as liberalism.

Clearly many in Europe are alienated from the Establishment. The causes may be multiple – Ukraine, immigration or falling living standards – yet all Europeans are versed in the narrative that history has bent to the long arc of liberalism (in the post-Cold War period).

Yet that has proved illusory. The reality has been control, surveillance, censorship, technocracy, lockdowns and climate emergency. Illiberalism, even quasi totalitarianism, in short. (von der Leyen took things further recently,;arguing;that;“If you think of information manipulation as a virus, instead of treating an infection once it has taken hold;… it is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated”).

When then, did traditional liberalism (in the loosest definition) turn illiberal?

The ‘about-face’ came in the 1970s.

In 1970, Zbig Brzezinski (who was to become National Security Adviser to President Carter) published a book entitled:;Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. In it, Brzezinski argued:

“The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society…dominated by an élite, unrestrained by traditional values…[and practicing] continuous surveillance over every citizen;…;[together with] manipulation of the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all people;… [would become the new norm].”

Elsewhere he argued that “the nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organised life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state”.;(i.e. Business cosmopolitanism as the future.)

David Rockefeller and the power brokers around him – together with his Bilderberg grouping – seized on Brzezinski’s insight to represent the third leg to ensuring that the 21^st;century would indeed be the ‘American Century’. The other two legs were control of oil resources and dollar hegemony.

Then followed a key report,;Limits to Growth, (1971, Club of Rome (again a Rockefeller creation), which provided the deeply flawed ‘scientific’ underpinning to Brzezinski: It predicted an end to civilization, owing to population growth, combined with depleting resources (including, and especially, depleting energy resources).

This dire prediction was imputed to say that only economic experts, tech experts, leaders of multinational corporations and banks had the foresight and technological understanding to manage society – subject to the complexity of;Limits to Growth.

Limits to Growth;was a mistake. It was flawed, yet that did not matter: President Clinton’s adviser to the UN Rio Conference, Tim Wirth, admitted the error, yet cheerfully added:;“We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory is wrong, we will be doing the ‘right thing’ in terms of economic policy”.

The proposition was wrong – but the policy was right! Economic policy was upended, based on faulty analysis.

The ‘godfather’ to the further pivot to totalitarianism (apart from David Rockefeller), was his protégé (and later, Klaus Schwab’s ‘indispensable adviser’), Maurice Strong. William Engdahl has;written;how;“circles directly tied to David Rockefeller and Strong in the 1970s birthed a dazzling array of élite (private-invitation) organizations and think tanks”.;

“These included the neo-Malthusian Club of Rome; the MIT-authored study: ‘Limits to Growth’,;and the Trilateral Commission”.

The Trilateral Commission however, was the secretive heart to the matrix.;“When Carter took office in January 1976, his Cabinet was drawn almost entirely from the ranks of Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission – to such an astonishing degree that some Washington insiders called it the ‘Rockefeller Presidency’”, Engdahl writes.

Craig Karpel, in 1977, also wrote:

“The presidency of the U.S. and the key cabinet departments of the federal government have been taken over by a private organization dedicated to the subordination of the domestic interests of the United States to the international interests of the multi-national banks and corporations. It would be unfair to say that the Trilateral Commission dominates the Carter Administration.;The Trilateral Commission;is;the Carter Administration”.

“Every key U.S. Government foreign and economic policy post, since Carter, has been held by a Trilateral”, Engdahl writes. And so it continues – a matrix of overlapping membership that is little visible to the public, and which very loosely may be said to have constituted the ‘permanent state’.

Did it exist in Europe? Yes, branches across Europe.

Here lies the root to last weekend’s European ‘mutiny’: Many Europeans refuse the concept of a controlled universe. Many are defiantly unwilling to recant their traditional ways of life or their national allegiances.

The Rockefeller Faustian bargain of the 1970s had one narrow segment of the American ruling cadre seceding from the American nation to occupy a separate reality in which they disassembled an organic economy to the benefit of the oligarchy, with ‘compensation’ coming only from their embrace of identity politics and the ‘just’ rotation of some diversity into corporate executive suites.

Looked at in this way, the Rockefeller deal can be viewed as a parallel to the South African ‘arrangement’ that ended Apartheid: the Anglo-élites held onto economic resources and power, whilst the ANC, on the other side of the equation, got a Potemkin façade of their taking political power.

For Europeans, this Faustian ‘arrangement’ degrades Humans down to identity units occupying the spaces between markets, rather than markets being the ancillary to an organic human-centred economy, as Karl Polanyi wrote some 80 years ago in;The Great Transformation.

He traced the turmoil of his era down to one cause: the belief that society can, and should, be organised through self-regulating markets. For him, this represented nothing less than an ontological break with much of human history. Prior to the 19th century, he insisted, the human economy had always been “embedded” in society: it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations.

The converse (Rockefeller’s technocratic illiberal cum identity paradigm) leads only to the attenuation of social bonds; the atomisation of community; to the lack of metaphysical content and thus to an absence of existential purpose and meaning.

Illiberalism is unfulfilling. It says: You don’t count. You don’t belong. Many Europeans evidently now get it.

Which somehow takes us back to the question of how the western strata will react to the nascent mutiny against the International Order that has been accelerating across the globe – and which has now surfaced in Europe, albeit with diverse colorations and some ideological baggage.

It is not likely – for now – that the Ruling Strata will compromise. Those who dominate tend to fear existentially: Either they keep dominating, or they lose all. They see only a zero sum game. Each side’s status becomes frozen. People increasingly meet only as ‘adversaries’. Co-citizens become dangerous threats, who must be opposed.

So, consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Leaders in the U.S. ruling strata comprise many zealous supporters of a Zionist Israel. As the International Order starts to crack, this segment of structural power in the U.S. is likely to be uncompromising too, fearing a zero-sum outcome.

There is an Israeli narrative to the war and a ‘rest of world narrative’ – and they don’t really meet. How to arrange things? The transformative effect of seeing ‘others’ differently – Israelis and Palestinians – presently is not on the table.

That conflict has the potential to get much worse – and for longer.

Might the ‘Ruling Strata’ – desperate for a certain outcome – seek to fold (and try to conceal) the horrors of this west-Asian struggle within a wider geo-strategic war? One in which greater multitudes become displaced (thus dwarfing a regional horror)?

• This article was published at Strategic Culture

By Aaron Sobczak

President George Washington famously warned against entangling alliances in his farewell address to Congress. However, now more than ever, it seems that escalations across the globe are tempting the United States to become increasingly involved in other countries’ dilemmas. American citizens and legislators must remember part of what made the American experiment so unique and resist those temptations. Here’s why.

The US defense budget is unjustifiable. In 2021, American;defense spending;totaled $801 billion—larger than the next nine countries combined. The Department of Defense (DOD) was recently given an;increased budget;of $858 billion, and to make matters worse, that money is being used inefficiently: the DOD recently failed its fifth consecutive audit, with about half of its;assets unaccounted for. The United States has among the highest;debt-to-GDP;ratios in the world and regularly runs massive budget deficits. This is currently possible because of America’s position as the world’s reserve currency, but that position isn’t a guarantee as the American dollar is being weakened by inflation and recession.

Let us not forget, either, the blatantly false narratives that brought American soldiers into an “endless war” in Iraq. US intelligence knew Iraq did not have so-called weapons of mass destruction, but the Bush administration pushed for a connection to be made. After all, a big bad villain is good for presidential approval ratings and reelection campaigns.

However, the downsides of that war—and of interventionism in general—have lasted long after the votes were counted. The so-called;war on terror;over the last twenty years has cost the American taxpayer upward of $3 trillion. For perspective, that’s around the yearly gross domestic product of France.

The debacle in Afghanistan was a similar story; only this time, the blowback was swifter and more direct. US agents funded mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in an effort to weaken the Soviet Union. Many of these fighters were able to organize and effectively train precisely because of American funding. It turned into one of history’s biggest backfires when, once the Soviets gave up in Afghanistan, factions of the mujahideen went on to form a new government organization called the Taliban.

The United States, of course, was stuck fighting against the Taliban for decades until President Joe Biden finally pulled American troops out. America’s hasty (though necessary) withdrawal left billions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded equipment that was either purposefully damaged by fleeing American soldiers or commandeered by Taliban soldiers.

The two examples of Iraq and Afghanistan are recent—and some of the worst—but are far from the only instances of the US government’s wasteful use of tax dollars to pursue unrealistic or dishonest goals overseas. Foreign aid programs are notorious for their ineffectiveness and inefficiency. In the long run, countries that rely on large amounts of American foreign aid are reluctant to wean off it, which can disincentivize them from diversifying their economies, providing incentives for investment, and respecting property rights.

Those countries ultimately find it difficult to modernize and sustain growth. With few measures to hold them accountable, corrupt regimes regularly misallocate foreign aid, leading to large amounts of money given in bribes or pocketed by government officials.

Most global events that affect the United States do so because American policymakers want it that way. America has strategic alliances all over the world because it has made them for itself; they didn’t just fall into America’s lap. However, the “America as the world’s policeman” narrative is outdated and unrealistic. Europe has a sufficient economy to take care of itself. The same can be said for South Korea and Japan. Most conflicts in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are self-contained and do not directly affect the United States.

While some might wish for a large American empire, thinking it will be able to keep evil forces at bay around the globe, the cost of such a policy is not justified—morally or monetarily—from America’s perspective, or from the rest of the world’s. If the United States wants to avoid continuous overextension and dangerous blowback, it would be smart to reevaluate its designs on world primacy.

• About the author: Aaron Sobczak holds an M.A. in Public Policy with an emphasis on International Policy. He has written for various outlets, and especially enjoys researching topics related to international law, American History, and public choice. He is currently part of the Mises Institute’s apprenticeship program. Aaron lives in Lynchburg, Virginia with his wife.
• Source: This article was published by the Mises Institute

The Deep State should have been alert five years ago when Candidate Joe Biden announced that he, if elected as president, was determined to make the Saudi rulers “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.”

Biden was blunt to the point of being brutal about the Saudi royal family, saying there was “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia” under King Salman’s rule.;;

But, instead, the Deep State felt delighted that Biden was just the man to succeed Donald Trump and reverse the Trump-era practice of forgiving Saudi human rights violations in order to preserve jobs in the American arms industry.

Biden probably knew by then that the American intelligence had concluded about the role of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince and the de facto leader of the country, in the killing of the dissident-journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was a ‘strategic asset’ of the CIA for navigating the next Saudi succession and the ensuing regime change to a happy ending.;Khashoggi’s decapitation crippled Washington’s game plan to instal a pliable ruler in Riyadh.;

Today, all that is history. But unlike the Bourbons, the Saudi royals never forget or forgive. They also have infinite patience and their own concept of time and space. And last Sunday, June 9, they struck.;

In great royal style, last Sunday, Riyadh simply let the 50-year-old petrodollar agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia to expire.;

To recap, the term “petrodollar” refers to the US dollar’s pivotal role as the currency used for crude oil transactions on the world market per the US-Saudi deal dating back to 1974 shortly after the US went off the gold standard.;

In the history of global finance, few agreements have wielded as many benefits as the petrodollar pact did for the US economy. At its core, the agreement stipulated that Saudi Arabia would price its oil exports exclusively in US dollars and invest its surplus oil revenues in US Treasury bonds — and, in a quid pro quo, the US would provide military support and protection to the kingdom.;;

The ‘win-win’ deal ensured that the US gained a stable source of oil and a captive market for its debt, while Saudi Arabia secured its economic and overall security.;In turn, the denomination of oil in dollar elevated the dollar’s status as the world’s ‘reserve currency’.;

Since then, the global demand for dollars to purchase oil has helped to keep the currency strong, not only made imports relatively cheap for American consumers but in systemic terms, the influx of foreign capital into US Treasury bonds supported low interest rates and a robust bond market.

Suffice to say, the expiration of the 1974 US-Saudi ‘oil-for-security’ deal has far-reaching implications. At the most obvious level, it highlights the shifting power dynamics in the oil market with the emergence of alternative energy sources (eg., renewables and natural gas) and new oil-producing countries (eg., Brazil and Canada) challenging the traditional dominance of West Asia. But this is more the optics of it.;

Crucially, the petrodollar’s expiration could weaken the US dollar and, by extension, the US financial markets. If oil were to be priced in a currency other than the dollar, it could lead to a decline in global demand for the greenback, which, in turn, could result in higher inflation, higher interest rates, and a weaker bond market in the US.

Suffice to say, going forward we may expect a significant shift in global power dynamics with the growing influence of emerging economies, the changing energy landscape and a tectonic shift in the global financial order as it enters a “post-American” era.;The bottom line is that the US dollar’s dominance is no longer guaranteed.;

There is no question that Saudi Arabia has a roadmap worked out. Four days before the expiration of the oil-for-security deal,;Reuters reportedthat Saudi Arabia has joined a China-dominated central bank digital currency cross-border trial, “in what could be another step towards less of the world’s oil trade being done in U.S. dollars.”;

The announcement on June 4 came from the Switzerland-based Bank for International Settlements [BIS], an international financial institution owned by member central banks. It means that Saudi;;central bank has become a “full participant” of Project mBridge, a collaboration launched in 2021 between the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates.;

The BIS announcement took note that mBridge had reached “minimum viable product” stage — that is, it is ready to move beyond the prototype phase. By the way, 135;countries;and currency unions, representing 98% of global GDP, are currently exploring central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs.;;

The entry of Saudi Arabia, a major G20 economy and the largest oil exporter in the world, signals a scaling up of commodity settlement on a platform outside of dollars in a near term scenario, with a new technology behind it. Interestingly, the mBridge transactions can use the code China’s e-yuan is built on!;

The intention is to modernise payments with new functionality and provide an alternative to physical cash, which seems in terminal decline anyway. China dominates the mBridge project and is carrying out the world’s largest domestic CBDC pilot which now reaches 260 million people and covers 200 scenarios from e-commerce to government stimulus payments.;

Indeed, other big emerging economies, including India, Brazil and Russia, also plan to launch digital currencies in the next 1-2 years while the European Central Bank has begun work on a digital euro pilot ahead of a possible launch in 2028.

Now, add to this Russia’s master plan to create a new BRICS payments system bypassing the dollar altogether. Moscow stock exchange announced on Wednesday that it will stop trading dollars and euros from Thursday, June 13.;;

Thus, the expiration of the US-Saudi deal last weekend is emblematic of a cascading challenge from various quarters to the dollar’s pre-eminence as ‘reserve currency.’ In particular, the end is nearing for the unfettered freedom America enjoyed to print dollar currency at will and living it up far beyond its means and imposing the US’ global hegemony.;

There is growing unease among US elites that good life may be ending as the crushing debt burden sinks the American economy. In a CNBC interview yesterday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that high interest rates are also adding to the burden as the US manages its massive $34.7 trillion debt load.;;

Of course, there are no clear alternatives yet to the US dollar as the world’s leading reserve currency but the writing on the wall is that global trade strains and increased use of tariffs or sanctions could undermine its role sooner than later, as foreign investors’ concerns are rising about America’s public debt sustainability.;

The FitchRatings noted yesterday that “Large primary deficits and higher interest service costs will keep the U.S. sovereign debt burden increasing after November’s elections, regardless of who wins.”;

In sum, what seemed hitherto a geopolitical rivalry over NATO expansion and Taiwan — or setting trade/technology standards in the Fourth Industrial Revolution — is taking on an existential dimension for Washington as the future of dollar is at stake. There are enough hints testifying to coordinated moves by Moscow and Beijing to accelerate the “de-dollarisation” process.

On the one hand, Russia is pulling all stops to present to the world at the forthcoming BRICS summit in October a non-dollar payment system to settle trade, while, on the other hand, China is systematically dumping its holdings of US treasury bonds that will give it a freer hand when the crunch time comes.

• This article was published at Indian Punchline