15 Comments

Thanks for the report and opinions! Greetings from Germany, with the same blue sky, same lack of snow, and same high gas prices.

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Are you following Samo Burja? I think he's offered some of the best analysis of what's going on in Russia/Ukraine at the moment. Some key points of his:

(1) Russian air force isn't very strong, but the land forces are very strong and able to occupy and annex territory. If you keep this in mind, it appears that Russian forces are making far more progress in Ukraine than the Western sources (baffled by the non-use of air force) would have you believe.

(2) Russia will most likely annex Eastern and perhaps Southern Ukraine, and try to turn the rest into a puppet state.

In other news... There are Ukrainian flags all over Prague, and a non-trivial number of my colleagues are wearing them. I was going to suggest to them that they wear a Chinese flag instead, since they're de facto strengthening China, while cheering on the total destruction of the Ukraine, but I decided to bite my tongue. As for China: Xi Jinping must be salivating. Just imagine. The West is forcing Russia to turn increasingly to China, both for energy export, and for financial transactions and such (now that SWIFT/PayPal/Via/Mastercard have withdrawn from Russia; although I believe SWIFT hasn't withdrawn completely). And yeah, if our elites don't suddenly sprout a brain, those of us in Europe might end up shivering in the dark in the not too distant future...

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BTW, it's best to follow Samo Burja on Twitter, where he posts short analyses and links to his podcast appearances. He does write in-depth analyses, too, but they're paywalled (and very expensive), so I haven't read any of those...

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Thanks for the suggestion, I shall certainly have a look!

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Maybe not. How has this damaged or threatened the US? A probable scenario in 6 months is a conservative (Republican) super-majority in Washington, that sidelines the President and resumes net petroleum exports. The end of climate hysteria (lessons from the German experience) will boost the US economy. The 45 yr. cold war, AKA Pax Americana, was great for the US. The West need only wait for China's corruption and impending demographic nightmare to bear its awful fruit.

Russia can't afford to withhold oil and Europe must buy. Ukraine will be split and a new iron curtain established.

Furthermore, Russia has shown its weakness. It's a second rate power that requires months to subdue an under-equipped neighbor state like Ukraine. Russia is no real threat to NATO nations in conventional war. NATO would gain total air superiority in days, and Russia knows it. Russia's total GDP is that of Tokyo.

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Good point about more nuance: yes, the situation calls for a differentiation between the swamp masters in DC and the (il-) loyal EUropean vassals.

Essentailly, Europeans are caught between a rock (US domination) and a hard place (a reckoning with Russia): they cannot move in any direction, for if they much closer to the US, the Russians might balk (as in: withhold energy exports or the like), if they move even an inch towards Russia, the US might withdraw from NATO.

Both 'threats' are, essentially, quite empty--neither can the US do much about anything EU-wise (other than huff and puff), nor can or will Russia occupy much of (Eastern) Europe. Trouble is, I reckon', that the EUrocrats are too timid to look at their shadows.

I suppose that the US is going to (meme-) 'fight' the Russians to the last Ukrainian, provided the EUropeans are stupid enought to pay the bill. As of now, I can sense that this might be the US 'strategy', and it's working.

What might change this? Well, perhaps the EUropeans notice that this is a fundamentally stupid course of action and try to come to some kind of arrangement with Russia that leaves out the US. If (when) that happens, and if Mr. Putin is really as smart as his admirers say he is, he'll make the EUropeans an offer they cannot refuse, but he shall have his pound of flesh.

It doesn't pay to try to 'get along' without sovereignty.

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For Europe, the main danger of a NATO dissolution might not be that Russia would suddenly be emboldened to attack Europe, but that, without the DC overlord, European countries would go back to doing what they did so well for centuries: waging war against each other. Civil wars are very much a possibility in a number of European countries, too. (Both of these - wars between European states, and civil wars within European states - would become more likely if, in addition, Russia turned off gas, which it very well might do as it reorients itself toward China.) As for Russia, it might indeed decide to invade the Baltics, partly to better secure Saint Petersburg, and partly as a vanity project (to show how well it can look after "oppressed Russians" in other countries). Maybe. Invading something like Poland (let alone Germany) seems far less likely. It's not like Russia needs more territory than it already has.

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Agree. NATO was formed to contain both Moscow and Berlin.

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Yep, but think about it this way: NATO can no longer contain Russia ('keep the Russians out'), and it's hard to see it will continue to play a big role in Germany ('keep the Germans down'), so the 64m $ question may very well be: will NATO keep the US engaged ('keep the Americans in')? And if so, at what price--to both the US (quite lower than =>>>) and Germany (much higher).

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One caveat: Russia is not fighting Ukraine in Ukraine, its essentially fighting all of NATO in what is a typical military-industrial complex proxy war. Ukraine has been pumped with lethal weapons for years. Oh, and the US citizen is definitely feeling the pain at the pump.

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True. Ukraine is not Russia's enemy. It is the prize.

Gas prices are high here in the US. But owing to speculation.

US gov't could open the taps quickly by releasing the industry to go about its business.

The people will insist. It will happen.

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I would not even call Ukraine a prize, rather necessary condition to ensure its self-preservation. Russians are paranoid about another WWII-type invasion, and think that NATO has already achieved 70% of Hitler's goals (per what I read), and with NATO aggressively moving closer and closer to its borders and encircling it on all fronts, this fierce reaction was inevitable. And with what has been happening in Eastern Ukraine right next to Russia's borders since the US-led coup in 2014 the inevitable conclusion is that the same could easily spill over to Russia if not contained. The global elite sees Russia as the ultimate prize, after all, they are after resources, and Russia is full of them, and they use Ukraine (among others) to get closer to it.

As for the US gas prices, yes, it's the incompetence (at best) of the current administration.

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Spot-on, I'd say, still, there are two issues I'd like to learn about from you:

I mean, the Russians appear to be closer to objective reality than, say, most 'Western' elites, so…they would therefore know that a WW2-type invasion isn't actually possible (except, perhaps, by the Chinese, in terms of mass-army invasion along super-long front lines). What is very much possible is the 'Yugoslavia scenario' (also, that one kinda already played out in the 1990s), augmented by whatever lessons may be drawn from the 'Western' destruction of Libya.

Of course the Russians are concerned, and rightly so, but the bigger question, to my mind at least, is this: if the Russians know the above, why would they 'play along' the US-led plans to recreate the WW2 invasion narrative? It appears to me that the Russians and the US are looking at the world through the same prism, which I think is super-weird and begs a better explanation than…well, what exactly?

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I'm not sure about the 'open the taps' part, even though the rest appears plausible to me.

For comparisons, we turn to the early 1940s: essentially, all the US needed to do in 1941 was to promise to pay for petroleum prodution (whose capabilities were sitting idle due to reduced demand during the Great Depression). In other words: the US had enough spare capacity (and then some) to do so.

Fast-forward to 2022, and there's hardly any spare production capacity left. While I know about the entire 'peak oil' issue, the short-to-medium-term problem isn't declining reserves (which will, inevitably, convert into sinking production), but the entire financial system rests on future capacities, and if these don't look too good--amplified by the 'sanctions' vs. Russia--this will have consequences.

As oil prices therefore rise, so do gas prices (they are couple to oil), which will cause a number of 'ripple effects' througout the economy. Regular people like you and me will feel the pain at the pump and--in terms of food price hikes.

As always, historically speaking, these price hikes will hit the poorer segments of the (world) population well before the elites everywhere. It doesn't bode very well for the short-to-medium term, though, irrespective of what Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelensky may or may not do, I fear.

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Decline of the us empire. Thank you

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