While China and Russia solidify their economic and political
alliance, the U.S. is missing an historic chance to join a multilateral world,
instead clinging to military empire...
We should
know by now that the heart of the 21stCentury Great Game is the myriad layers of the battle between the
United States and the partnership of Russia and China.
Even the
U.S. National Defense Strategy says so:
“The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of
long-term, strategic competition by … revisionist powers.” The recently
published assessment on U.S. defense implications of China’s global expansionsays so
too.
The clash will frame the emergence of a possibly new,
post-ideological, strategic world order amidst an extremely volatile
unpredictability in which peace is war and an accident may spark a nuclear
confrontation.
The U.S. vs. Russia and China will keep challenging the West’s
obsession in deriding “illiberalism,” a fearful, rhetorical exercise that
equates Russian democracy with China’s one party rule, Iran’s demo-theocracy
and Turkey’s neo-Ottoman revival.
It’s immaterial that Russia’s economy is one-tenth of China’s.
From boosting trade that bypasses the U.S. dollar, to increasing joint
military exercises, the Russia-China symbiosis is poised to advance beyond
political and ideological affinities.
China badly needs Russian know-how in its military industry.
Beijing will turn this knowledge into plenty of dual use, civilian-military
innovations.
The long game indicates Russia
and China will break down language and cultural barriers to lead Eurasian
integration against American economic hegemony backed by military might.
One could say the Eurasian
century is already upon us. The era of the West shaping the
world at will (a mere blip of history) is already over. This is despite Western
elite denials and fulminations against the so-called “morally reprehensible,”
“forces of instability” and “existential threats.”
Standard Chartered, the British financial services company,
using a mix of purchasing power exchange rates and GDP growth, has projected
that the top five economies in 2030 will be China, the U.S., India, Japan and
Russia. These will be followed by Germany, Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey and the
UK. Asia will extend its middle class as they are slowly killed off across the
West.
Hop on the Trans-Eurasia Express
A case can be made that Beijing’s elites are fascinated at how
Russia, in less than two decades, has returned to semi-superpower status after
the devastation of the Yeltsin years.
That
happened to a large extent due to science and technology. The most graphic example
is the unmatched, state-of-the-art weaponry unveiled by President Vladimir
Putin in his March 1, 2018speech.
In practice, Russia and China
will be advancing the alignment of China’s New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI), with Russia’s Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).
There’s
ample potential for a Trans-Eurasia Express network of land and maritime
transport corridors to be up and running by the middle of next decade,
including, for instance, road and railway bridges connecting China with Russia
across the Heilongjiang River.
Heilongjiang or Amur River
separating China and Russia. (Wikimedia)
Following serious trilateral talks involving Russia, India and
Iran last November, closer attention is being paid to the International
North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), a 7,200-km long lane mixing sea
and rail routes essentially linking the Indian Ocean with the Persian Gulf
through Iran and Russia and further on down the road, to Europe.
Imagine cargo transiting from all over India to the Iranian port
of Bandar Abbas, then overland to Bandar Anzali, an Iranian port on the Caspian
Sea, and then on to the Russian southern port of Astrakhan, and after that to
Europe by rail. From New Delhi’s point of view, that means shipping costs
reduced by up to 40 percent, and Mumbai-to-Moscow in only 20 days.
Down the line, INSTC will merge
with BRI – as in Chinese-led corridors linked with the India-Iran-Russia route
into a global transport network.
This is
happening just as Japan is looking at the Trans-Siberian Railway – which will
be upgraded throughout the next decade – to improve its connections with
Russia, China and the Koreas. Japan is now a top investor in Russia and at the
same time very much interested in a Korea peace deal. That would free Tokyo from
massive defense spending conditioned by Washington’s rules. The EAEU free trade agreements with ASEAN can be added to
that.
Especially over these past four
years, Russia has also learned how to attract Chinese investment and wealth,
aware that Beijing’s system mass-produces virtually everything and knows how to
market it globally, while Moscow needs to fight every block in the book dreamed
up by Washington.
The Huawei-Venezuela “Axis of Evil”
Metal Truss Railroad Bridge
(Kama River, near Perm city). Early color photograph from Russia, created by
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the
Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915. (Wikimedia)
While Washington remains a
bipartisan prisoner to the Russophobic Platonic cave – where Cold War shadows
on the wall are taken as reality – MAGA is missing the train to Eurasia.
A many-headed hydra, MAGA, stripped to the bone, could be read
as a non-ideological antidote to the Empire’s global adventurism. Trump, in his
non-strategic, shambolic way, proposed at least in theory the return to a social
contract in the U.S. MAGA in theory would translate into jobs, opportunities
for small businesses, low taxes and no more foreign wars.
It’s nostalgia for the 1950s and 60s before the Vietnam quagmire
and before “Made in the USA” was slowly and deliberately dismantled. What’s
left are tens of trillions of national debt; a quadrillion in derivatives; the
Deep State running amok; and a lot of pumped up fear of evil Russians, devious
Chinese, Persian mullahs, the troika of tyranny, the Belt and Road, Huawei, and
illegal aliens.
More than a Hobbesian “war of
all against all” or carping about the “Western rules-based system” being under
attack, the fear is actually of the strategic challenge posed by Russia and
China, which seeks a return to rule by international law.
MAGA would thrive if hitched to
a ride on the Eurasia integration train: more jobs and more business
opportunities instead of more foreign wars. Yet MAGA won’t happen – to a
large extent because what really makes Trump tick is his policy of energy dominance to decisively interfere with Russia and
China’s development.
The Pentagon and the “intel community” pushed the Trump
administration to go after Huawei, branded as a nest of spies, while pressuring
key allies Germany, Japan and Italy to follow. Germany and Japan permit the
U.S. to control the key nodes in the extremities of Eurasia. Italy is
essentially a large NATO base.
The U.S.
Department of Justice requested the extradition of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou from
Canada last Tuesday, adding a notch to the Trump administration’s geopolitical
tactic of “blunt force trauma.”
Add to it
that Huawei – based in Shenzhen and owned by its workers as shareholders – is
killing Apple across Asia and in most latitudes across the Global South. The
real the battle is over 5G, in which China aims to upstage the U.S., while
upgrading capacity and production quality.
The digital economy in China is already larger than the GDP of
France or the UK. It’s based on the BATX companies (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent,
Xiaomi), Didi (the Chinese Uber), e-commerce giant JD.com and Huawei. These Big
Seven are a state within a civilization – an ecosystem they’ve constructed
themselves, investing fortunes in big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and
the internet. American giants – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google – are
absent from this enormous market.
Moreover, Huawei’s
sophisticated encryption system in telecom equipment prevents interception by
the NSA. That helps account for its extreme popularity all across the Global
South, in contrast to the Five Eyes (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand)
electronic espionage network.
The economic war on Huawei is also directly connected to the
expansion of BRI across 70 Asian, European and African nations, constituting a
Eurasia-wide network of commerce, investment and infrastructure able to turn
geopolitical and geo-economic relations, as we know them, upside down.
Greater Eurasia Beckons
Whatever China does won’t alter
the Deep State’s obsession about “an aggression against our vital interests,”
as stated by the National Defense Strategy. The
dominant Pentagon narrative in years to come will be about China “intending to
impose, in the short term, its hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region, and catch
the United States off-guard in order to achieve future global pre-eminence.” This is mixed with a belief that Russia wants
to “crush NATO” and “sabotage the democratic process in Crimea and Eastern
Ukraine.”
The Karakoram Highway
connecting China and Pakistan, sometimes referred to as the Eighth Wonder of
the World.(Wikimedia)
During my
recent travels along the northern part of the China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor (CPEC), I saw once again how China is upgrading highways,
building dams, railways and bridges that are useful not only for its own
economic expansion but also for its neighbors’ development. Compare it to U.S.
wars – as in Iraq and Libya – where dams, railways and bridges are destroyed.
Russian
diplomacy is all but winning the New Cold War — as diagnosed by Prof. Stephen Cohen in his latest book, War with Russia: From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate.
Moscow mixes serious warnings with diverse strategies, such as
resurrecting the South Stream gas pipeline to supply Europe as an
extension of Turk Stream after the Trump administration also furiously
opposed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline with sanctions on Russia.
Meanwhile, Moscow ramps up energy exports to China.
The advance of the Belt and
Road Initiative is linked to Russian security and energy exports, including the
Northern Sea Route, as an alternative future transportation corridor to Central
Asia. Russia emerges then as the top security guarantee for Eurasian trade and
economic integration.
Last month
in Moscow, I discussed Greater Eurasia– by now established as the overarching concept
of Russian foreign policy – with top Russian analysts. They told me Putin is on
board. He referred to Eurasia recently as “not a chessboard or a geopolitical
playground, but our peaceful and prosperous home.”
Needless to
say, U.S. think tanks dismiss the idea as “abortive”. They ignore Prof. Sergey Karaganov, who as early
as mid-2017 was arguing that Greater Eurasia could serve as a platform for “a
trilateral dialogue on global problems and international strategic stability
between Russia, the United States and China.”
As much as the Beltway may
refuse it, “The center of gravity of global trade is now
shifting from the high seas toward the vast continental interior of Eurasia.”
Beijing Skirts the Dollar
Beijing is realizing it can’t
meet its geo-economic goals on energy, security, and trade without bypassing
the U.S. dollar.
According to the IMF, 62 percent of global central bank reserves
were still held in U.S. dollars by the second quarter of 2018. Around 43 per
cent of international transactions on SWIFT are still in U.S. dollars. Even as
China, in 2018, was the single largest contributor to global GDP growth, at
27.2 percent, the yuan still only accounts for 1 percent of international
payments, and 1.8 per cent of all reserve assets held by central banks.
It takes time, but change is on the way. China’s cross-border
payment network for yuan transactions was launched less than four years ago.
Integration between the Russian Mir payment system and Chinese Union Pay
appears inevitable.
Bye Bye Drs. K and Zbig
Russia and China are developing
the ultimate nightmare for those former shamans of U.S. foreign policy, Henry
Kissinger and the late Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski.
Back in 1972
Kissinger was the mastermind – with logistical help from Pakistan – of the
Nixon moment in China. That was classic Divide and Rule, separating China from
the USSR. Two years ago, before Trump’s inauguration, Dr. K’s advice dispensed at Trump Tower meetings
consisted of a modified Divide and Rule: the seduction of Russia to contain
China.
The Kissinger doctrine rules
that, geopolitically, the U.S. is just “an island off the shores of the
large landmass of Eurasia.” Domination “by a single power of
either of Eurasia’s two principal spheres – Europe or Asia – remains a good
definition of strategic danger for America, Cold War or no Cold War,” as
Kissinger said. “For such a grouping would have the capacity to outstrip
America economically and, in the end, militarily.”
The Zbig doctrine ran along
similar lines. The objectives were to prevent collusion
and maintain security among the EU-NATO vassals; keep tributaries pliant; keep
the barbarians (a.k.a. Russians and allies) from coming together; most of all
prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition (as in today’s Russia-China
alliance) capable of challenging U.S. hegemony; and submit Germany, Russia,
Japan, Iran, and China to permanent Divide and Rule.
Thus the despair of the current
National Security Strategy, forecasting China displacing the United States
“to achieve global preeminence in the future,” through BRI’s supra-continental reach.
The “policy”
to counteract such “threats” is sanctions, sanctions, and more unilateral
sanctions, coupled with an inflation of absurd notions peddled across the
Beltway – such as that Russia is aiding and abetting the re-conquest of the
Arab world by Persia. Also that Beijing will ditch the “paper tiger” “Made in China 2025” plan for its major
upgrade in global, high-tech manufacturing just because Trump hates it.
Once in a blue moon a U.S.
report actually gets it right, such as in Beijing speeding up an array of BRI projects; as a
modified Sun Tzu tactic deployed by President Xi Jinping.
At the June
2016 Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Professor Xiang Lanxin,
director of the Centre of One Belt and One Road Studies at the China National Institute
for SCO International Exchange and Judicial Cooperation, defined BRI
as an avenue to a “post-Westphalian world.” The journey is just
beginning; a new geopolitical and economic era is at hand. And the U.S. is
being left behind at the station.
The trade war between the United States and China is proving to be a disaster for American farmers: the ones who grow and supply our food. This catastrophe is already smacking Americans in the wallets, but a bigger loss would be those who actually supply the food we pay for.
The trade war has had significant
effects on American agriculture and farmers throughout the last
year, ranging from soybeans,
beef, dairy, wheat, and more. Not to mention the added costs of the trade war
contributing to American farmers going bankrupt in
record numbers.
We hate to say we told you so, but
we told you so. The trade war was a bad idea and everyday
average Americans are footing the bill for this asinine policy of
tariffs. Now, the food supply could be in jeopardy because of political
posturing and that will not bode well for already cash-strapped American
families.
A total of 84 farms in the upper Midwest filed for bankruptcy
between July 2017 and June 2018, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. That’s more than
double the number of Chapter 12 filings during the same period in 2013 and 2014
in Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, reported Vox. –SHTFPlan
As the trade war and the tariffs
(taxation aka theft) that come with it remain stagnant in the minds of most,
it’s wholly escalating to those who are affected by it directly. “I hope
they’ll make strides on that,” Oklahoma-based wheat farmer Hope Pjesky said
recently according to Yahoo Finance. “But
we really don’t have any way of knowing what’s happening with those
negotiations now. And we need things to get back to normal.”
“We’re getting closer. …
Negotiations [with China] are going very well,” president Donald Trump stated
during a recent interview with the New York Times. But
that’s hardly comforting to those farmers stuck between a rock and a hard
place. And the tariffs on other goods are
still in effect, forcing prices higher for already cash strapped Americans
living paycheck to paycheck.
Although
China has promised to buy more soybeans from the United States, farmers are
worried that the damage done by the trade war is far from over and could be
permanent. “It’s a good movement,” said John Wesley Boyd, a mid-scale
farmer from southern Virginia producing on 375 acres of the soybean crop. “But
I don’t see the pendulum swinging back towards me as a producer in the
field,” he added according to the South China Morning Post.
Until 2018, the US was the largest
exporter of soybeans to China, averaging at 30 million to 35 million metrics
tonnes a year. That largely ended last summer when soybeans were caught in the
crossfire of the trade dispute. Boyd and his fellow soybean farmers have been
crushed under the weight of these trade policies and an
ever-expanding government.
As the seemingly never-ending trade
war soldiers on, farmers, who are directly in the crosshairs, are going to be
feeling the financial burden of this unnecessary political posturing for years
after it smoothes out…if it ever does.
Apocalyptic Debt Crisis In
America: 63 Of America’s Largest 75 Cities Are COMPLETELY BROKE
The
debt crisis in the United States of America has reached apocalyptic
proportions. A new and horrifying report out details the reason why 63 of
America’s largest cities are completely broke: debt and overspending.
According to a recent analysis of
the 75 most populous cities in the United States, 63 of them can’t pay their
bills and the total amount of unfunded debt among them is nearly $330
billion. Most of the
debt is due to unfunded retiree benefits such as pension and health care
costs. That means those depending on that money, likely won’t see a dime
of it.
“This year, pension debt accounts
for $189.1 billion, and other post-employment benefits (OPEB) – mainly retiree
health care liabilities – totaled $139.2 billion,” the third annual “Financial State of the Cities”
report produced by the Chicago-based research organization, Truth in Accounting (TIA), states. TIA is
a nonprofit, politically unaffiliated organization composed of business,
community, and academic leaders interested in improving government financial reporting.
“Many state and local governments are not in good shape,
despite the economic and financial market recovery since 2009,” Bill
Bergman, director of research at TIA, told Watchdog.org.
The top five cities in the worst
financial shape are New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Honolulu, and San
Francisco. These cities, in addition to Dallas, Oakland, and Portland, all
received “F” grades. In New York City, for example, only $4.7 billion has
been set aside to fund $100.6 billion of promised retiree health care benefits.
In Philadelphia, every taxpayer would have to pay $27,900 to cover the city’s
debt. In San Francisco, it would cost $22,600 per taxpayer.
By the end of Fiscal Year 2017, 63 cities did not have enough
money to pay all of their bills, the report states, meaning debts outweigh
revenue. In order to appear to balance budgets, TIA notes, elected officials
“have not included the true costs of the government in their budget
calculations and have pushed costs onto future taxpayers.” –Hartford
City News Times
To say that more simply: your
children have been sold into debt slavery and owned by the governments; both
local and federal. The government is officially punishing the unborn for their
inability to handle money. What a time to be alive…
One major problem area TIA
identifies is that city leaders are lying. (What a shock! A lying politician…)
These political masters have acquired massive debts despite the balanced budget
requirements imposed on them by scamming the public and enslaving them.
“Unfortunately, some elected officials
have used portions of the money that is owed to pension funds to keep taxes low
and pay for politically popular programs,” TIA states. “This is like charging
earned benefits to a credit card without having the money to pay off the debt.
Instead of funding promised benefits now, they have been charged to future
taxpayers. Shifting the payment of employee benefits to future taxpayers allows
the budget to appear balanced, while municipal debt is increasing.”
It’s only a matter of time until
this system built on debt and theft comes crashing to the ground. How
prepared are you?
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