Sino-Russian currency war on Atlantic powers gets a Ukrainian stimulus (The Sunday Guardian)

 

Both Russia and China have been working on alternatives to SWIFT, with China’s CIPS at the top of the scale, with Russia close behind.

 

New Delhi & New York:  The declaration of a financial war against Russia by the US, EU, UK and Switzerland after the invasion of parts of Ukraine by Russian forces on 24 February 2022 was predicated on a rapid climbdown by the Kremlin in the face of the financial firepower it was subjected to. After more than three weeks of conflict, such a retreat still seems distant. The backwash of the rapidly cobbled together list of sanctions on the economies of the sanctioning countries is increasing, and will soon begin to do so exponentially. The rest of the world, of course, is irrelevant, given that the “International Community” comprises solely of the entities mentioned above, the US, EU, UK and of course Switzerland. Should NATO succeed in prolonging the agony now being endured by the Ukrainian population by a few months, the resulting economic downturn would dwarf not just the Great Depression of the previous century. This is the risk that the world is facing as a consequence of tactical plans mapped out less through use of the brain than of the glandular instincts of the many venerable thinkers within the Atlanticist military machine. Given NATO’s obsession with Russia, it is unsurprising that so much attention has been paid to Ukraine, the country which has as its capital the Jerusalem of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kyiv. Once (if ever) Ukraine falls as firmly into NATO’s overall grip as firmly as on the Czech Republic or Slovenia, the country and its capital would be invaluable at engineering a regime change not merely in the Kremlin but in the Russian Orthodox Church, the leadership of which backs the deeply religious Vladimir V. Putin in his “righteous” war on “Ukrainian apostates”. Ensuring that the Russian Federation under Putin (who has proved a great disappointment to the Atlantic Alliance in comparison to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin), loses its war in Ukraine is critical to the geopolitical success of the post-1992 project of converting Moscow into a compliant and complicit partner of the US-UK-EU partnership. This still formidable alliance has been joined by Switzerland, which did not feel any moral impulse to move away from its neutrality during the Nazi occupation and brutalisation of Europe that began in the 1930s and ended in 1945, but which has now finally found its moral compass. The once neutral country has joined explicitly with the US, UK and the EU in its (so far non-kinetic) war on the Russian Federation. International institutions that have been headquartered in Switzerland because of its presumed neutrality need to re-evaluate their locations and move to more impartial shores, such as India. Switzerland can no longer be described as neutral, despite choosing to remain so during the two previous World Wars that took place in the 20th century. Apart from promoting a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine by transferring billions of dollars and weapons to the (largely irregular) Ukrainian forces, NATO through its key members has launched a financial war on Russia that it hopes would prove fatal to the present regime in Moscow and once again bring into office a replacement that (as in Ukraine since 2014) is a reliable accessory to the interests of NATO. This is an alliance that remains fixated on what it was set up for, dealing with Russia as The Enemy, much to the delight of the Chinese Communist Party.

Bureaucracies routinely find new reasons to perpetuate themselves and grow, and after its disastrous kinetic efforts in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, NATO has retreated to the only cause that the organisation and the band of academics and think tanks nourished by it know, which is to contain Russia. The problem is that the US-UK-EU strategists who have scripted the campaign against Russia since shifting focus to Ukraine in 2009, while acknowledging that Putin is no Gorbachev or Yeltsin, fail to understand that he is no Khrushchev or Brezhnev either. It was the fear of kinetic conflict with the US in particular that prevented military escalation by the USSR even in the matter of moving to take over the whole of Berlin in the days when the Vozd (Stalin) was still around in the Kremlin or the nearby Dacha. Or in not daring to expand the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s to the country that needed to be attacked the hardest from the air and seas by Soviet forces, Pakistan under General Zia. After going through the battlefield experiences of NATO in the Muslim countries mentioned above, Vladimir Putin has indicated that he would not blink in the manner that Nikita Khrushchev did in 1962 over Cuba, but play any game of chicken until the other side either destroyed itself and the rest of the world or chickened out. This is not the insanity or thuggishness diagnosed in Putin by psychologists of eminence such as Joe Biden or Boris Johnson, but cold strategic logic based on a study of available data on the actual 21st century combat operations of the Atlanticist alliance. The Sino-Russian alliance has become the cornerstone of the strategic ambitions of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping, who early on saw the need to dethrone the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world, and who has been working together with Putin to succeed in this effort. Beginning with George W. Bush, continuing with Barack Obama and now Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, the oft-used but since then turbocharged weaponization of the US dollar has been affecting global confidence in USD as a safe and stable reserve currency, not in the “International Community” as defined by Washington, London or Brussels but in the rest of the world, which are by implication therefore not part of the “international community”.

 

CHINA AND RUSSIA ACTIVE IN DE-DOLLARISATION

Along with Xi Jinping on a parallel track, President Putin has quietly been working on a de facto de-dollarisation, a process the acceleration of which US-EU-UK-Switzerland financial sanctions has made imperative. From at least 2013 (trigger: sanctions on Iran) and ramping up in 2014 (trigger: Crimea). This is being achieved through boosting stocks of gold, such that Russia and China now have possibly the highest gold reserves of any country in the world. In short, both Russia and China have been preparing for a post-SWIFT world for some time. Once Prime Minister Narendra Modi took charge in 2014, so has India, with the consequence that Indo-Russian trade can be shielded from US and other Western financial sanctions involving the use of their currencies in such trade. As for the de-dollarisation that has been forced on Russia by President Biden from last month, even before the Biden sanctions, the share of USD in Russia’s trades was below 56% before February 2022. This may be compared to 90% in 2014. Both Russia and China have been working on alternative to SWIFT, with China’s CIPS at the top of the scale, with Russia close behind. Now that sanctions that would have the (presumably unintended) effect of scaring away the Rest (as distinct from the West) from the US dollar, the euro, the Swiss franc and the UK pound, swap trades between the Rest using their own currencies are certain to accelerate, so that currencies with a high geopolitical risk factor are bypassed. Among the last pillars holding up USD as the global reserve currency is the pricing of international oil trade in USD. Now that petroproducts have been sanctioned by NATO, it is unlikely that a situation that has persisted since 1971 would last for much longer. Another USD pillar is crypto, where the dominant Bitcoin is still priced in USD, although recent curbs on that crypto asset by the sanctioning countries may change that situation. Saudi Arabia and other OPEC producers are in talks to arrange payment in non-NATO (or Swiss) currencies, while purchasers of Russian oil and gas in the Rest would need to use alternative currencies, given that sales in USD have been banned by the White House. How such self-defeating steps by the US, Switzerland, UK and EU are being carried out is clear. Why all this is happening is another question. Bringing Ukraine into the grip of the West would not seem worth a global loss of confidence in Western currencies within the Rest. Worse, should Russia re-price its abundant natural resources in currencies other than the Big Four mentioned above, that would have an immediate consequence on the viability of any of these currencies as a reserve for the Rest. If yesterday the target was Iran and today Russia, tomorrow it could be any of the Rest, for whatever imaginary or actual reason proffered by the West for its actions.

 

REAL RESOURCES COUNT FOR MORE

Ironically, it is not so much Russia that has abandoned the USD, it is the USD that has abandoned Russia. It is not Putin who forced Western brands to shut down in his country, but the leaders of those countries themselves. Given the dynamic of the escalatory steps taking place, it seems only a matter of time before Russia’s debt to the West gets repudiated rather than repaid, and assets of the departed companies seized. If (as in the case of several countries) more than half or even two-thirds of the currency reserves of a country within the Rest can be eliminated at the stroke of a pen, the concept of a neutral currency goes out of the window. Before Biden and Johnson began a process that may lead to the death dance of the US dollar and the UK pound, the self-advertised “liberal” Prime Minister of Canada confiscated the bank accounts of several of his citizens who had been (in Trudeau’s view) unpatriotic enough to send even as little as $5 for the truckers’ protest against not the continuance of Canada as a unified country but the Justin Trudeau Vaccine Mandate. Confidence in a bank or currency is not so much rational as it is psychological. It is not based on currency that is presently being created limitlessly in the West, but on resources. Once India gains access to Russian resources and monetizes them in its own currency, it would be on a much stronger financial footing than West-biased “rating agencies” endlessly warn about. For them, it is not inherent soundness of an economy but fealty to the shifting sands of Western global interests that determine rankings that are still surprisingly being taken seriously in India, especially by financial institutions. What any economy in the Rest needs are not so much dollars, pounds, euro or francs that are capable of being rendered worthless by actions outside the sovereign boundaries of non-Western countries but the real resources that they gain access to and use. Russia may have a policy-driven famine of currencies of the West but has real resources in abundance. These are what a modernising India needs, which is why Prime Minister Modi has ignored the condescending warnings of Western leaders to shoot the economy in the foot in the same way as they are doing by some of their measures.

 

THE WAR COMES TO THE WEST

Given that he has lived off the exchequer for more than four decades as Senator, Vice-President and now President of the US, Joe Biden can be forgiven for not being able to factor in the effect that the commodity inflation caused by the Biden-Johnson sanctions on the Putin regime. Although the West has among the least prepared monetary regimes in history, with debt to GDP ratio having already exceeded World War II levels, with interest rates close to zero, although the Federal Reserve Chairman seems to have reflexively raised interest rates in a Pavlovian manner. Such a rise in rates will not affect commodity-driven hikes caused by geopolitical factors, but reduce the rate of recovery of the US economy in time for the Republican Party to garner the consequences during the 2022 midterms. Now that the USD is getting priced loose from its status as the currency used for petroproduct sales, and prices of resources abundant in Russia and Ukraine are soaring, the costs of the war to Putin (and Xi, assuming he does not commit hara-kiri of his career by obeying Biden’s command to decouple from Russia) are already much lower than the geopolitical benefits being caused to the West by the blowback caused by the NATO war on Russia. Not that Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman can be faulted for his pivot from the West, given the demonisation of him by that construct, on a scale now being matched by the abuse being hurled by the West on Putin. Now that the previous biggest customer (the US) has become your biggest competitor, it makes sense to not destroy OPEC by agreeing to throw Russia out. And to get closer to your biggest customer since the past few years, China. As for USD, a currency incapable of buying anything in a spreading geographical zone is en route to becoming valueless. As and when sense prevails within NATO and a sanctions rollback begins despite large tracts of formerly Ukrainian land going to Russia (in the way much of Mexico went to the US in the 19th century), the costs of this war to the West and the benefits to China and Russia (in descending order) will become apparent. In the 1990s, financial sanctions may have been effective. In the 2020s, they may end up doing more harm to the sanctioning countries than to the countries sanctioned. The bad news is that such a realisation may come about when it is too late to avoid damage, not only to the West, but to large swathes of the Rest as well.

Sino-Russian currency war on Atlantic powers gets a Ukrainian stimulus

Sino-Russian currency war on Atlantic powers gets a Ukrainian stimulus (The Sunday Guardian)

 

Both Russia and China have been working on alternatives to SWIFT, with China’s CIPS at the top of the scale, with Russia close behind.

 

New Delhi & New York:  The declaration of a financial war against Russia by the US, EU, UK and Switzerland after the invasion of parts of Ukraine by Russian forces on 24 February 2022 was predicated on a rapid climbdown by the Kremlin in the face of the financial firepower it was subjected to. After more than three weeks of conflict, such a retreat still seems distant. The backwash of the rapidly cobbled together list of sanctions on the economies of the sanctioning countries is increasing, and will soon begin to do so exponentially. The rest of the world, of course, is irrelevant, given that the “International Community” comprises solely of the entities mentioned above, the US, EU, UK and of course Switzerland. Should NATO succeed in prolonging the agony now being endured by the Ukrainian population by a few months, the resulting economic downturn would dwarf not just the Great Depression of the previous century. This is the risk that the world is facing as a consequence of tactical plans mapped out less through use of the brain than of the glandular instincts of the many venerable thinkers within the Atlanticist military machine. Given NATO’s obsession with Russia, it is unsurprising that so much attention has been paid to Ukraine, the country which has as its capital the Jerusalem of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kyiv. Once (if ever) Ukraine falls as firmly into NATO’s overall grip as firmly as on the Czech Republic or Slovenia, the country and its capital would be invaluable at engineering a regime change not merely in the Kremlin but in the Russian Orthodox Church, the leadership of which backs the deeply religious Vladimir V. Putin in his “righteous” war on “Ukrainian apostates”. Ensuring that the Russian Federation under Putin (who has proved a great disappointment to the Atlantic Alliance in comparison to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin), loses its war in Ukraine is critical to the geopolitical success of the post-1992 project of converting Moscow into a compliant and complicit partner of the US-UK-EU partnership. This still formidable alliance has been joined by Switzerland, which did not feel any moral impulse to move away from its neutrality during the Nazi occupation and brutalisation of Europe that began in the 1930s and ended in 1945, but which has now finally found its moral compass. The once neutral country has joined explicitly with the US, UK and the EU in its (so far non-kinetic) war on the Russian Federation. International institutions that have been headquartered in Switzerland because of its presumed neutrality need to re-evaluate their locations and move to more impartial shores, such as India. Switzerland can no longer be described as neutral, despite choosing to remain so during the two previous World Wars that took place in the 20th century. Apart from promoting a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine by transferring billions of dollars and weapons to the (largely irregular) Ukrainian forces, NATO through its key members has launched a financial war on Russia that it hopes would prove fatal to the present regime in Moscow and once again bring into office a replacement that (as in Ukraine since 2014) is a reliable accessory to the interests of NATO. This is an alliance that remains fixated on what it was set up for, dealing with Russia as The Enemy, much to the delight of the Chinese Communist Party.

Bureaucracies routinely find new reasons to perpetuate themselves and grow, and after its disastrous kinetic efforts in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, NATO has retreated to the only cause that the organisation and the band of academics and think tanks nourished by it know, which is to contain Russia. The problem is that the US-UK-EU strategists who have scripted the campaign against Russia since shifting focus to Ukraine in 2009, while acknowledging that Putin is no Gorbachev or Yeltsin, fail to understand that he is no Khrushchev or Brezhnev either. It was the fear of kinetic conflict with the US in particular that prevented military escalation by the USSR even in the matter of moving to take over the whole of Berlin in the days when the Vozd (Stalin) was still around in the Kremlin or the nearby Dacha. Or in not daring to expand the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s to the country that needed to be attacked the hardest from the air and seas by Soviet forces, Pakistan under General Zia. After going through the battlefield experiences of NATO in the Muslim countries mentioned above, Vladimir Putin has indicated that he would not blink in the manner that Nikita Khrushchev did in 1962 over Cuba, but play any game of chicken until the other side either destroyed itself and the rest of the world or chickened out. This is not the insanity or thuggishness diagnosed in Putin by psychologists of eminence such as Joe Biden or Boris Johnson, but cold strategic logic based on a study of available data on the actual 21st century combat operations of the Atlanticist alliance. The Sino-Russian alliance has become the cornerstone of the strategic ambitions of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping, who early on saw the need to dethrone the US dollar as the reserve currency of the world, and who has been working together with Putin to succeed in this effort. Beginning with George W. Bush, continuing with Barack Obama and now Joseph Robinette Biden Jr, the oft-used but since then turbocharged weaponization of the US dollar has been affecting global confidence in USD as a safe and stable reserve currency, not in the “International Community” as defined by Washington, London or Brussels but in the rest of the world, which are by implication therefore not part of the “international community”.

 

CHINA AND RUSSIA ACTIVE IN DE-DOLLARISATION

Along with Xi Jinping on a parallel track, President Putin has quietly been working on a de facto de-dollarisation, a process the acceleration of which US-EU-UK-Switzerland financial sanctions has made imperative. From at least 2013 (trigger: sanctions on Iran) and ramping up in 2014 (trigger: Crimea). This is being achieved through boosting stocks of gold, such that Russia and China now have possibly the highest gold reserves of any country in the world. In short, both Russia and China have been preparing for a post-SWIFT world for some time. Once Prime Minister Narendra Modi took charge in 2014, so has India, with the consequence that Indo-Russian trade can be shielded from US and other Western financial sanctions involving the use of their currencies in such trade. As for the de-dollarisation that has been forced on Russia by President Biden from last month, even before the Biden sanctions, the share of USD in Russia’s trades was below 56% before February 2022. This may be compared to 90% in 2014. Both Russia and China have been working on alternative to SWIFT, with China’s CIPS at the top of the scale, with Russia close behind. Now that sanctions that would have the (presumably unintended) effect of scaring away the Rest (as distinct from the West) from the US dollar, the euro, the Swiss franc and the UK pound, swap trades between the Rest using their own currencies are certain to accelerate, so that currencies with a high geopolitical risk factor are bypassed. Among the last pillars holding up USD as the global reserve currency is the pricing of international oil trade in USD. Now that petroproducts have been sanctioned by NATO, it is unlikely that a situation that has persisted since 1971 would last for much longer. Another USD pillar is crypto, where the dominant Bitcoin is still priced in USD, although recent curbs on that crypto asset by the sanctioning countries may change that situation. Saudi Arabia and other OPEC producers are in talks to arrange payment in non-NATO (or Swiss) currencies, while purchasers of Russian oil and gas in the Rest would need to use alternative currencies, given that sales in USD have been banned by the White House. How such self-defeating steps by the US, Switzerland, UK and EU are being carried out is clear. Why all this is happening is another question. Bringing Ukraine into the grip of the West would not seem worth a global loss of confidence in Western currencies within the Rest. Worse, should Russia re-price its abundant natural resources in currencies other than the Big Four mentioned above, that would have an immediate consequence on the viability of any of these currencies as a reserve for the Rest. If yesterday the target was Iran and today Russia, tomorrow it could be any of the Rest, for whatever imaginary or actual reason proffered by the West for its actions.

 

REAL RESOURCES COUNT FOR MORE

Ironically, it is not so much Russia that has abandoned the USD, it is the USD that has abandoned Russia. It is not Putin who forced Western brands to shut down in his country, but the leaders of those countries themselves. Given the dynamic of the escalatory steps taking place, it seems only a matter of time before Russia’s debt to the West gets repudiated rather than repaid, and assets of the departed companies seized. If (as in the case of several countries) more than half or even two-thirds of the currency reserves of a country within the Rest can be eliminated at the stroke of a pen, the concept of a neutral currency goes out of the window. Before Biden and Johnson began a process that may lead to the death dance of the US dollar and the UK pound, the self-advertised “liberal” Prime Minister of Canada confiscated the bank accounts of several of his citizens who had been (in Trudeau’s view) unpatriotic enough to send even as little as $5 for the truckers’ protest against not the continuance of Canada as a unified country but the Justin Trudeau Vaccine Mandate. Confidence in a bank or currency is not so much rational as it is psychological. It is not based on currency that is presently being created limitlessly in the West, but on resources. Once India gains access to Russian resources and monetizes them in its own currency, it would be on a much stronger financial footing than West-biased “rating agencies” endlessly warn about. For them, it is not inherent soundness of an economy but fealty to the shifting sands of Western global interests that determine rankings that are still surprisingly being taken seriously in India, especially by financial institutions. What any economy in the Rest needs are not so much dollars, pounds, euro or francs that are capable of being rendered worthless by actions outside the sovereign boundaries of non-Western countries but the real resources that they gain access to and use. Russia may have a policy-driven famine of currencies of the West but has real resources in abundance. These are what a modernising India needs, which is why Prime Minister Modi has ignored the condescending warnings of Western leaders to shoot the economy in the foot in the same way as they are doing by some of their measures.

 

THE WAR COMES TO THE WEST

Given that he has lived off the exchequer for more than four decades as Senator, Vice-President and now President of the US, Joe Biden can be forgiven for not being able to factor in the effect that the commodity inflation caused by the Biden-Johnson sanctions on the Putin regime. Although the West has among the least prepared monetary regimes in history, with debt to GDP ratio having already exceeded World War II levels, with interest rates close to zero, although the Federal Reserve Chairman seems to have reflexively raised interest rates in a Pavlovian manner. Such a rise in rates will not affect commodity-driven hikes caused by geopolitical factors, but reduce the rate of recovery of the US economy in time for the Republican Party to garner the consequences during the 2022 midterms. Now that the USD is getting priced loose from its status as the currency used for petroproduct sales, and prices of resources abundant in Russia and Ukraine are soaring, the costs of the war to Putin (and Xi, assuming he does not commit hara-kiri of his career by obeying Biden’s command to decouple from Russia) are already much lower than the geopolitical benefits being caused to the West by the blowback caused by the NATO war on Russia. Not that Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman can be faulted for his pivot from the West, given the demonisation of him by that construct, on a scale now being matched by the abuse being hurled by the West on Putin. Now that the previous biggest customer (the US) has become your biggest competitor, it makes sense to not destroy OPEC by agreeing to throw Russia out. And to get closer to your biggest customer since the past few years, China. As for USD, a currency incapable of buying anything in a spreading geographical zone is en route to becoming valueless. As and when sense prevails within NATO and a sanctions rollback begins despite large tracts of formerly Ukrainian land going to Russia (in the way much of Mexico went to the US in the 19th century), the costs of this war to the West and the benefits to China and Russia (in descending order) will become apparent. In the 1990s, financial sanctions may have been effective. In the 2020s, they may end up doing more harm to the sanctioning countries than to the countries sanctioned. The bad news is that such a realisation may come about when it is too late to avoid damage, not only to the West, but to large swathes of the Rest as well.

Sino-Russian currency war on Atlantic powers gets a Ukrainian stimulus

US media resembling Pravda (The Sunday Guardian)

 “Pravda” (truth) was the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the “truth” detailed in its columns was reality as defined by the CPSU. The clearly capable White House Press Secretary has ensured that not just the mainstream media but leading social media influencers reflect the conflict with Russia as defined by the White House. Jen Psaki deserves a raise. There is no need any more for the followers of mainstream media or influencers to access their favourites. All that they need to do is view clips on YouTube of Jen Psaki, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and other officials who present the “truth” in the manner that the White House regards as advantageous for the Democratic Party in the 2020 midterms. It has not been a secret that media in the Russian Federation is overall respectful of President Putin. They apparently do not share the view, couched in terms that these days passes for diplomacy in the NATO bloc, that Putin is at best insane and at worst, an incarnation of Adolf Hitler. NATO channels endlessly repeated the clip of a charming lady holding a placard against the war and state propaganda in a Russian news channel. The young lady has apparently been persuaded by her VPN access to NATO channels that it is only a matter of weeks if not days before Putin gets toppled in Moscow in the manner that President Viktor Yanukovich was toppled by street violence in Kyiv in 2014. When that happy event occurs, she expects that Putin’s successor Alexei Navalny will appoint her as Information & Culture Minister. This would win the support of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, both of whom have become ardent admirers of the comely media personality after her 15 seconds of fame on a Russian television channel. Should Putin not oblige those predicting his imminent doom, the young lady is likely to earn the ire of ordinary Russians for embracing the views of western media so publicly. Following the same rulebook, prominent voices in the US who are talking truth to power such as Tulsi Gabbard or Tucker Carlson are being branded as traitors. Exactly the way those who protested against the US rush to disaster in Vietnam initially were. Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard need to be in the US Senate, which appears to be sinking in credibility as an independent wing of governance because of being programmed to follow the narrative presented by the White House and mainstream media. The rising blood lust against Russia has risen to such a pitch that voters are calling for yet more escalatory steps than the many carried out rather than favouring the path towards an outcome that would protect the world from the damage that the present course would cause just a few months from now.

Decades ago, after the Iraq invasion of 2003 against Saddam Hussein, this writer had the privilege of meeting Andrew Marshall, one of the finest strategic minds of the 20th century. In the Pentagon, when presented with the view by an ordinary Indian professor that US troops in uniform should leave Iraq’s population centres alone and concentrate on border security (or that having a US Administrator rather than a lifelong citizen of Iraq was certain to create public resentment at such alien domination), Marshall was attentive, while others were dismissive of such conclusions at the early stage of the US-UK (aka the former colonial power) occupation of Iraq. Media in the US and in other countries active in the post-invasion occupation of Iraq uniformly bought the NATO narrative, much as they are doing now in the case of the war in Ukraine. Labelling dissenting voices as treason and adopting the same degree of objectivity as Pravda in its heyday are certain steps towards disaster. During the Vietnam War, when it became clear that metrics of success such as body counts were giving a misleading impression of the conflict’s trajectory, Senator J. William Fulbright held hearings in which he brought to account the White House for the war. It is difficult to imagine Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell showing similar moral courage. If the McConnell was the lapdog of President Trump, Shumer has accepted that role under President Biden. Their absence of moral courage fused with a paucity of common sense is ensuring that the US lead NATO towards a disaster that may scar the remainder of this century. Were Biden as fortunate as Clinton, he may in time leave the White House in the hands of a Republican successor and escape responsibility for the catastrophe begun under his watch, in the manner Bill Clinton dodged the responsibility for nurturing terrorism in Afghanistan and in turbocharging the PRC economy through generous unilateral trade concessions that caused the trade deficit between China and the US to soar. Clinton left the White House in the nick of time, although Biden and his party may not be so lucky. Latest around the time last year that Biden re-installed the Taliban in power in Afghanistan last year, the folly of his policy on Afghanistan and Russia will become inescapable to voters. There seems no longer any point in trying to get across even a mildly alternative view than NATO “truth” to the Guardian, the New York Times or too many other publications. They claim to print “all the news that’s fit to print”, when what is meant by that is “all the news that NATO leaders considers fit to print”. Poor world.

MDN

US media resembling Pravda 

President Biden needs a reality check on Ukraine (The Sunday Guardian)

 

The strategy being urged on the Ukrainians by NATO of fighting to the death against Russian forces will inevitably lead to Ukraine falling into a morass.

India is a country in which attacks on sovereignty and grabbing of territory by Pakistan and later China have spanned 75 years and counting. Barring a few statements of concern on recent incidents and a still insufficient level of weapons sales, Washington under Joe Biden has done nothing. What is taking place to the Ukrainian people is horrible, although the causes of that may differ from the accounts retailed in most US or European newspapers. There is an obvious frenzy in the Atlanticist media, as report after report gives details of what the Ukrainians say are Russian atrocities. Each such report is followed by calls from discussants on television and contributors in print and online media to accelerate the supply of still more deadly weapons to Ukrainian forces, which from the period of the western-backed Regime Change Movement in 2014 has mostly consisted of militias who are not exactly admirers of Russian-speaking individuals, including in Ukraine. There is a cry for even the S-300 and other Russian weapons platforms to get transferred from former Warsaw Pact partners to Ukraine. And yet it is evident that Biden, Johnson and Stoltenberg do not believe that transferring such supplies would provide a reason for Putin to expand the war into the former Warsaw Pact zone, so that such transfers cease. Why countries such as the US, France, Britain and Germany are directing petrol instead of water into the cauldron that Ukraine has become is beyond logical understanding. World wars, it is said, begin by accident. This is not true. Germany under its clueless Kaiser launched World War I by its overconfidence in the abilities of Hindenburg and Ludendorff to prevail over even France. That country, assisted by Britain and belatedly by the US, held its own and at great cost in lives and treasure, held the Kaiser’s minions to a stalemate that proved fatal to the survival of the Hohenzollerns and to the country that the last Kaiser Wilhelm led to disaster. After taking over France while allowing the British military to escape to safety by the stupidity of the former corporal turned Fuehrer, who was the Supreme Warlord of Germany during World War II, Hitler regarded the takeover of the USSR as child’s play, as apparently did their generals until they were held up outside the gates of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad (whose names that were steeped in Russian history were changed in the 1990s by another disastrous leader, Boris Yeltsin) after less than six months of what seemed to the rest of the world a one-sided conflict. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill disagreed with this view, and that fateful initial stalemate of the Wehrmacht proved them to be right. By 1943, helped by weapons mostly from the US and by intelligence on German capabilities secretly transferred from the UK to the USSR through a network of Soviet agents of British nationality, it was clear except to a psychotic or psychedelic mind that the Wehrmacht was facing the prospect of doom at the hands of the Soviet armies. Hitler was aware of the fate that Stalin had reserved for him if captured by Soviet forces, so he decided to pre-empt such an outcome by first killing himself, his Alsatian dog Blondi and his wife Eva, in decreasing order of importance to Der Fuehrer.
The Russian Federation is not the country that the largely Russian Soviet forces fought during WWII, Nazi Germany. Nor is Vladimir Putin the Hitler of the 21st century, although Biden confidante and Regime Change Specialist, Victoria Nuland, may believe otherwise. The problem facing the global community is that the collective leadership of NATO seems intoxicated by the idea of rendering Russia helpless in the face of the alliance that, when last heard of in Asia, had exited in Afghanistan after handing control back to the Taliban. This is the government that since the NATO withdrawal has faded from Atlanticist attention in their collective hysteria about Putin and in effect the whole of Russia. The NYT, Washington Post, CNN, BBC and other repositories of truth as seen from the perspective of the “international community” aka the members of NATO seem unaware that as these words are being written, the Taliban is carrying out house to house searches in Kabul and other cities to identify and execute those who had been unwise enough to assist NATO in its 2001-2021 operations in Afghanistan against the Taliban. As a consequence, several times more Afghans lost their lives or limbs during that period than troops from the NATO countries that had earlier assured them protection. Of course, Afghans are not Ukrainians, but what is so different about Ukrainians that make them in the eyes of the Atlanticists different from those populations that saw NATO military involvement and which have all been in an indescribable way since then? Of course, it must be added that the strategy now being urged on the Ukrainians by NATO, of not cutting their losses and moving on, but fighting to the death against Russian forces will inevitably lead to Ukraine falling into the same morass that the North African and West Asian countries find themselves in, a morass that has disappeared from the pages of NATO media despite its continuing consequences on innocent lives. It is without a trace of incongruity that those who favour the incarceration of Julian Assange, the blocking of Russia Television and the condemnation of contrarian voices such as Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard lecture the world on freedom of speech. Biden has flagged the conflict between NATO and Russia as a battle between authoritarian and democratic forces. Clearly, China is in the latter category, for otherwise it would not be getting courted by the US President and his European counterparts. The good news for the EU is that Boris Johnson has returned to the fold in all but name. The bad news is that the sanctions screw that is being steadily tightened against Russia is making it more likely that Putin will not stop at Ukraine but continue until the Russians reach a point where kinetic conflict erupts between NATO and Russia. This would not be over Moldova or Georgia, that will meet the fate of Ukraine, but because of the Baltic states and more and more likely, Poland. From then to the use of tactical nuclear weapons and the subsequent chain reaction of escalation would not be an impossible step. It is a testimony to his disconnect from geopolitical reality that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is ­importuning NATO members to carry out actions that would lead to the catastrophe he is anxious to prevent. Rather than bringing him into reality in accepting the situation and cutting a deal with Moscow, it is inexplicable why Biden, Johnson and Stoltenberg are encouraging him in his disastrous fantasy of defeating Russia. Both Napoleon and Hitler had similar fantasies. President Zelenskyy,
unlike such despots, is a liberal ­democrat and a Ukrainian patriot, which makes his escalatory demands
on lawmakers in the US,
UK and EU so tragic for Ukraine.

 President Biden needs a reality check on Ukraine 

Double Engine power succeeds (The Sunday Guardian)

 It has been a long time since this writer went to a cocktail party, even during the days before he discovered the health benefits of an occasional glass of red wine. Even more delicious than the food, which was usually of Michelin standard, was the gossip. There would always be some guest who talked seemingly endlessly about various subjects. Much of the discussion was about politics or politicians. The action or inaction of leading political players was sketched out in enormous detail, so much so that those telling such stories must have been intimate friends of the politicians they were mentioning, although even nosy newspaper journalists covering the activities of such politicians seemed unaware of such close contact between the cocktail party guest and the politician she or he was rambling on about. Unlike some others in the journalistic profession, such revelations were never taken seriously by the writer. Almost since the time Yogi Adityanath was chosen by Prime Minister Modi to become the Chief Minister of UP, gossip has flowed as endlessly as the whisky served in such parties. The central focus, indeed fixation, of such gossip was that the new UP CM was actually regarded with disfavour by PM Modi, who, in the view of the regulars in cocktail parties, wanted to remove and thereby replace Yogi Adityanath with another CM. Meetings between the writer and Modi have been, to put it mildly, infrequent, especially after he took charge as Prime Minister in 2014. This writer has studied the trajectory of Narendra Modi since he was a national office-bearer of the BJP. This has made it impossible to believe that PM Modi would appoint an individual as CM of any state, much less UP, unless he had complete trust in him and was prepared to give complete backing to the choice. As Chief Minister, Adityanath has shown himself to be an able administrator, rejecting for example the call of language zealots to ban English from curricula. Instead, the new CM understood the importance of knowledge of the international link language to the youth of the state, and this has been reflected in changes in school curricula. Nor has Adityanath, despite being a yogi, followed the vote-killing example of Saint Nitish of Patna and sought to enforce Prohibition. Nowhere in the country where this 1920-1933 fad in the US of Prohibition has been followed is there any absence of alcohol. Instead, regular alcohol has become more expensive, driving millions of citizens to buy bootleg stuff that often kills them or permanently damages their health. Saint Nitish has made himself responsible for every such death in Bihar, and whether voters would approve or disapprove of this remains to be seen. CM Nitish Kumar is wont to give ambiguous statements about BJP leaders, sometimes straying into alliance with specifically not just anti-BJP political formations but those viscerally anti-Modi, unlike CM Adityanath, who has always been forthright about his regard for PM Modi. Yet in gossip parlours, it is Adityanath and not Nitish who is held up as being a secret adversary of the PM, a “secret” that habitues of cocktail parties have miraculously discovered. There is no doubt that Modi would have removed Adityanath had he doubted his loyalty to the BJP and his competence, just as the CMs of Gujarat and Uttarakhand were removed in 2021, just as three state heads of the BJP were by PM Modi that very year. Had CM Adityanath been on uncooperative terms with PM Modi, he would not have been able to accomplish the good work that has ensured a second term for him on 10 March. During his third term, this writer believes that PM Modi will decide on a change of position, just as CM Modi did in 2014 after leading the BJP to victory in the Lok Sabha polls. However, it is much too early to zero in on potential replacements, except to point out that any such replacement would be an individual whom Modi trusts with responsibility for the most consequential job in India. The CM of UP is the third most consequential job in the BJP, after the Union Home Minister and the National President of the BJP, and that this position continues to be held by Yogi Adityanath indicates the complete trust and understanding between not just the two but the four top voices in the BJP. The new CMs of Uttarakhand and Goa have shown by their victory in the Assembly polls that PM Modi was correct in replacing the earlier incumbents. From almost the beginning of his first term as CM Delhi, this writer has regarded Arvind Kejriwal as the most likely contender for the choice of PM for the 2029 polls. During the election period, he pointed out that the BJP was likely to do well in states where there was a known CM face, and this is what took place just days ago. Had Kejriwal not nominated Bhagwant Mann as his choice for CM Punjab, the AAP may not have got the sweeping mandate it did. Elections have become Presidential in India. The SP followed such a rule in the case of Akhilesh Yadav, while the Congress failed to do the same in the case of Priyanka Vadra. If the contrary decision had been taken, the tally of the SP would have been lower, and that of the Congress in UP higher. 

MDN

Double Engine power succeeds 

Biden’s folly: Recreating Afghanistan in Ukraine (The Sunday Guardian)

 

NATO has entered into the wrong war at the wrong time with the wrong country.

Regime change enthusiasts in the United States have persuaded President Biden what the future of Ukraine should be, should a Russophobic government not remain in control. President Zelenskyy is making unceasing appeals to Ukrainian citizens to “take to arms to fight Russia in every city, every street, every village”. He has ordered the distribution of weapons to any person who asks for such lollipops. This is similar to what NATO did in Syria and Libya, when it handed out weaponry to any local citizen who asked, without making any enquiries about their ideological preferences. Whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or Syria, the effects of such non-discrimination were clear from almost the start. Ukraine is next in line for that disastrous fate. Just as President George H.W. Bush with his CIA training understood how to destroy the USSR from within by dangling imaginary carrots before CPSU General Secretary Gorbachev, the KGB-trained Putin must be aware that Zelenskyy’s sudden acceptance of Russian claims on Crimea, Donetsk and Lugansk is intended to get Moscow to accept his continuance as President of Ukraine. After the sacrifices that Russia has made, Putin needs a leader in Kiev who would crush efforts at a Syrian, Libyan or Afghan-style “freedom struggle” in Ukraine, once his “Special Military Operations” (aka invasion) of Ukraine concludes. Were he to remain in charge, Zelenskyy would delight Biden›s  regime change enthusiasts in the US by promoting the cause that he has been exhorting them to adopt, which is to take up arms against any government that would get installed in Kiev that would avoid provoking another intervention by Russia. Such followers of the new Biden doctrine in the US are going forward with such a scenario. They regard as irrelevant what took place in Afghanistan after the 1980s, ending in the Trump-initiated surrender by Biden to the Taliban in 2021. Why Zelenskyy favours a path that is certain to cause immense misery to his people is unclear. Conspiracy theorists claim that it is because Zelenskyy «is a US citizen and is obeying President Biden despite the damage that such an insurgency would do to his native country». This is an absurd view, for however unrealistic may be his approach to NATO and to Russia. Zelensky is as much a patriot as Yanukovich was. The misery of Ukraine is substantially because of Poroshenko-Zelensky policies that prioritized the objectives of NATO over the needs of the Ukrainan people. Given its geography and history, stability in Ukraine is possible only when Kiev and Moscow have a close relationship. The opposite has been the case since the Russian-speaking President,Viktor Yanukovich, was driven out of his country through street violence. Just as Zelenskyy is not a CIA agent but a (somewhat clueless) patriot, Yanukovich was no FSB agent when he understood that joining the EU or NATO would be to cross a red line that would lead to conflict with Russia. Not just Putin but any leader after him would need to adopt the same policies that he has, given the history of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin period. The people of Ukraine have paid an increasing price since Yanukovich was deposed.by those Ukrainians who were under the spell of their country becoming part of NATO and the EU, and who believed that Washington, Berlin and Paris were strong enough to deter any effort by Moscow to prevent such a union. They may in future understand that such confidence was misplaced, but at an unbearable cost to a country that was a part of Russia for almost all of its existence.
It is apparent from their policies that neither Joe Biden nor Boris Johnson is allowing the carnage in Ukraine to affect their “Gung Ho” spirit. Both are vying with each other in slapping sanctions after sanctions on “Putin’s Russia”, just as they earlier did on “Saddam’s Iraq” or “Assad’s Syria”. As for the economic distress that such efforts will cause to US and UK voters as a consequence of the predictable reaction of Putin to such blows, it’s “all Putin’s fault”. Biden and Johnson are fortunate for now that their political opponents are singing from the Biden-Johnson playbook. It is this duo that has propelled  Volodymyr Zelensky into actions that have led to disaster for his people. Zelenskyy and much of his entourage are enthusiasts of the Afghan precedent from the 1980s, and display the same lack of judgment that President Biden did in the manner of his recent goodbye to Afghanistan, and the rollout of the red carpet to the Taliban. Former showman Zelenskyy and his entourage are in the performance of their lives, with the Ukrainian President cast as in the tragic hero of the Greek drama playing out in his country. Given the Gung Ho spirit of Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, few of the NATO member states have found the courage to explain the facts of life to this disastrous duo. Neither Emmanuelle Macron nor Olaf Scholz (both of whom seem aware of the situation into which the Biden-Johnson duo are taking them) could bring sense into the unreal deliberations within the EU. Both have refused to do so. As a consequence, NATO has entered into the wrong war at the wrong time with the wrong country. After having declared war on Russia by financial sanctions designed to destroy that economy, thereby causing the war and “Putin’s inflation”, those in authority in Asia will not forget that NATO is the very alliance that surrendered to the Taliban in Afghanistan after fighting that rag-tag force since 2001. The manner of the predicted  action-reaction cycle now playing out between NATO and Russia is heading towards a kinetic ending. The rest of the world would simply be collateral damage, and as such, clearly irrelevant to the policies that have for years been implemented towards Russia by NATO since 1992. As Nazi Germany found out during 1941-45, Russia is not a country that gives up easily. It seems clear that NATO expected Putin to fold under the sanctions barrage, in the manner that Hitler expected Stalin to surrender after the Wehrmacht during 1941 and 1942 had occupied much of European Russia, at the cost of more than two million Soviet soldiers killed or captured. The pain threshold in Russia, whether it be “Putin’s Russia” or the still more hardline leader who would assuredly take over from him should Putin do what NATO asks of him, is much more than it is for the US or the EU. There is little incentive, personal or strategic, for President Putin to blink first in the game of chicken that NATO is playing at such great risk to the future of Europe.

Biden’s folly: Recreating Afghanistan in Ukraine

President Biden, don’t confuse friends with foes (The Sunday Guardian)

 

The Atlantic is once more the primary focus of attention by the White House, no longer the Indo-Pacific.

There ought not to have been any surprise in the White House that the Heads of Government of Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar (the latest US “major non-NATO ally”) chose to ignore President Joe Biden’s call for a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics and be present besides Presidents Putin and Xi at the opening ceremony. The very capable Royal Family of Qatar, risking its own safety, remains the only GCC power that still backs the Wahhabi International. Perhaps this is why those close to the White House have spared it the criticisms that have been levelled against Al Sisi in Egypt and Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia in particular. Military transfers have been blocked to Egypt and Indonesia, both countries that are seeking to hold at bay extremist groups from entering into positions of responsibility. The UAE cannot therefore be faulted for hedging its bets by joining others in the pilgrimage to Beijing to watch the Winter Olympics taking place in that sprawling city. Given the spasms of disapproval directed at long-term allies of the US, and after the US handover of Afghanistan back to the Taliban in August 2021, relying on Washington’s support in a crisis seems to be too risky a policy to follow. Biden has retrogressed to the past, seeking to return the US to the past, when Cold War 1.0 between Washington and Moscow was ongoing. The Atlantic is once more the primary focus of attention by the White House, no longer the Indo-Pacific. The threat from China? The real enemy is Russia, and remains so within the Biden administration three decades after the demise of the USSR. This when large parts of the former USSR broke off and became independent, with some even getting admitted into NATO, and more eager to. The residual power, Russia, wanted to be an integral part of Europe, despite the bulk of its territory being located within Asia. Other European powers were reluctant to admit Russia into their fold, wary that they would be eclipsed by it. France and Germany had worked out an alliance of convenience between themselves that enabled them to be the most influential force in Europe. Such a bonding was assisted by memories of the fact that during 1940-44, almost until the final months of the war, the co-existence of the German occupiers and the Vichy regime had been a pleasant enough experience, at least for the German side. Besides the Jews and Communists, the rest of French society was treated with friendly condescension by their occupiers. If the German occupation of parts of the USSR had followed the French example, the ferocious resistance by Russian “Partisans” to the barbarous occupation of their land by German forces may not have been as incandescent as it turned out to be. The most important war to the Nazis was that waged against the Jewish community. The atrocities Hitler committed failed to generate enough revulsion among the generals and colonels in Germany. It was the shock and disgrace of looming defeat and occupation by a foreign force that resulted in some of the Wehrmacht officer corps seeking in 1944 to make an end of the Nazi regime. The Japanese military remained obedient to its superior officers to the end of the 1937-45 war.
During wartime Germany, rising privation and imminent defeat failed to spark a popular revolt against Hitler. The reason in the minds of several was fear. Fear of the regime and the cruelties it was capable of inflicting on them. Elsewhere, whether it was Stalin or Saddam Hussein later, the Russian and Iraqi people did not pose an existential challenge to such a duo’s brutal rule, in large part because fear of the regime had become an inseparable companion in the lives of the population. Had it been Hafez rather than Bashar Assad who ran Syria in 2011, it is doubtful that so many citizens of that country would have joined in the NATO-GCC effort to remove him from power. Bashar did not carry with him the penumbra of fear that his father had, although to everyone’s surprise, the Syrian leader showed remarkable spine and staying power during 2013-16, years when it seemed certain that his regime would go the way Muammar Gaddafi’s had in Libya. President Bashar Assad remained in power, and with help from Tehran and Moscow recovered much of the territory that had earlier been lost to fighters backed by the GCC and NATO. In China, the CCP leadership believed that it was not accidental that the dissolution of the USSR gathered irresistible force only after Mikhail Gorbachev sought to fashion a kinder, softer CPSU and a Gandhian version of the Warsaw Pact. Non-violence was the rule in the Russian army, even when there were mass manifestations within Warsaw Pact countries geared towards regime change. Had Viktor Yanukovich been the despot he was depicted as being by the US and allies eager to drive out of office the Russia-leaning President of Ukraine, he may have retained power rather than having to flee his own country. Xi Jinping displays the same ruthlessness against his opponents as Deng Xiaoping did at Tiananmen in 1989. Vladimir Putin, who has seen several US Presidents come and go during his tenure at the Kremlin, has serially imprisoned potential challengers, whether these be in politics or business. As with Xi, Putin would like to deal with past, present and likely future foes in a manner that is devoid of ambiguity, and the opinion of self-professed defenders of democracy be damned. In such a world, friends are carefully kept separate from foes. And within the former, the most consequential get the most attention, a lesson that President Biden still has to learn. President Abdul Al Sisi has sought to keep Egypt secular in the manner intended by a predecessor who too was in the military, Anwar Sadat. In Indonesia, President Joko Widodo has even shown the courage to set up a Holocaust Museum commemorating the massacre of the Jewish people by Adolf Hitler, the first Muslim-majority country to do so. And it would have been a friendly nod from Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman that encouraged some of the Middle Eastern countries to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, yet he faces negative attention both in the US Congress and the Biden administration. After Biden took office, the world has yet to see another Middle Eastern country establish formal ties with Israel. When, as seems the case with the US, a country does distinguish its friends from its foes and conciliates the latter while chastising the former, it is heading for trouble at the hands of its foes, once it has forfeited the support of its friends through clumsy diplomacy.

President Biden, don’t confuse friends with foes 

Roots of the Ukrainian problem (The Sunday Guardian)

 The media may be freer in the US or across the Atlantic than in the PRC, but that does not stop uniformity of reportage of disputatious issues in a monochromal manner. There seems very little daylight between the expressed views of 10 Downing Street or the White House and the position taken by the major newspapers and television channels in the UK or the US on Ukraine. There are quite possibly nearly a hundred thousand troops on the Russian side of the border with Ukraine, but they have been there in that number for years. The objective has from the start been to serve as a deterrent to possible efforts by the Russophobic Ukrainian military to impose their own control over those parts of Ukraine that are Russian-speaking, and which in effect have been treated as alien enclaves by Kyiv. Although they are citizens of Ukraine, governments in Kyiv have denuded them of the assistance that gets extended to the almost fully Ukrainian-speaking parts of the country. There have been credible reports that President Volodymyr Zelensky would like to re-establish the control that the central government had over the Russian-speaking eastern parts of Ukraine before Vladimir Putin intervened to prevent such an expansion of authority by Kyiv. It is obvious that both MI6 and CIA would be aware of this Russian objective, and that the only trigger for another invasion from the east of Ukraine would be the marching of Ukrainian troops into the towns and villages of the Russian-speaking regions, or indications that such an advance was likely to commence. The purpose of the diplomacy of the US, UK and France is to somehow browbeat Putin into promising not to interfere, should Ukrainian forces enter territories where local populations are terrified of such an occupation. The discrimination shown by Kyiv to the Russian-speaking regions has resulted in their having much lower levels of development than other parts of Ukraine. The condition of the population is getting so desperate that the majority of the population may welcome military intervention by Russia. The limited supply of offensive weaponry gifted to Kyiv by many countries in the Atlantic Alliance cannot close the gap between Russian and Ukrainian military capabilities, especially considering that the Ukrainian military would have to fight Russian soldiers in territory that is hostile to those in Ukrainian military uniforms, bringing back in them memories of the discrimination that the Russian-speaking segment of the Ukrainian population has endured since the breakup of the USSR that formally took place in 1991 and continued on the ground into the next year. Just as the unceasing barrage of false information about Saddam Hussein having WMD stockpiles was accepted and amplified by US media in the period prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the portrayal of Putin as a war monger continues even as supplies of petroleum products from the US head towards Europe in the expectation that President Biden will succeed in so twisting the hands of Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany that he will shut down Nord Stream I, not to mention decline to operationalise Nord Stream II, thereby destroying the political future of his party. President Biden has in effect promised to reduce South, Southeast and East Asia’s supply of petroleum products from the Middle East by 40% in order to divert supplies to Europe. An unlikely, indeed fanciful, prospect except apparently to the White House. After having witnessed serial trashing by the Atlanticist powers of agreements entered into by the US and its NATO allies, it is no surprise that President Emmanuel Macron of France had little success in efforts at ensuring that President Putin refuse to intervene in the “internal affairs of Ukraine”, including if the Ukrainian military marches into the Donbas and other eastern territories that are being protected by Russia from such an intervention. Even were he ready to obey Biden’s diktat and surrender the benefits of the Nord Stream pipelines, it is unlikely that the German Chancellor will succeed in persuading Putin to accept conditions that would place him in the same bracket as his predecessors Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who made concessions to the US and its allies that was reciprocated only by more concessions being demanded. Just as the Falklands intervention gave Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a boost or the taking out of Saddam Hussein made President George W. Bush additional votes, Biden may be calculating that forcing Russia to accept the condition of non-intervention no matter what the Ukrainian military does within its own country may ensure that the Democrats take back the Senate and retain control of the House in the 2022 Congressional races. The good news for him is that President Zelensky seems to have prevailed over the hotheads who sought military assisted central control of the eastern regions up to the borders of Russia, and as long as this is the case, there will not be a war. Unless Putin decides that he has had enough of pinpricks, and marches into the Ukraine to create independent enclaves on the Georgia model. Neither Russian roulette or playing a game of chicken makes sense, yet this seems to be the strategy of those who seek a return to Cold War 1.0 despite Cold War 2.0 already in full swing.MDN

Roots of the Ukrainian problem 

Young India can surpass Middle Income status (The Sunday Guardian)

 

In the Xi-Putin joint statement, much was made of any country’s moves towards security not impinging on those of other countries. This when every day the security interests of India and several members of ASEAN are under threat by the actions of Beijing.

 

New Delhi: Recent actions of the Atlantic Alliance, which construct has once again become the centrepiece of US policy and been embraced by President Biden after effectively downgrading the Indo-Pacific Alliance, have given two choices to President Vladimir Putin. The first is to go the way of his predecessors, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, who made concession after unilateral concession to demands public and secret from the United States and its European partners. The other is to prevent terminal damage to the Russian economy by further cementing ties with China. CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping is (apparently unlike President Joe Biden) clear about his objectives and what steps are needed stage by stage to achieve them, Xi has eagerly grasped the opportunity to ensure that any US-EU sanctions would in effect have a limited effect on Russia and which would finally bite back the EU and the US in not just economic but in broader geopolitical terms. More US-EU sanctions would further drive Moscow closer to Beijing. Beyond a point, they may present the risk that Putin would believe that there is no longer any point in waiting for better sense to dawn in Washington, London and other European capitals, and go ahead with military measures designed to remove any threat that a Ukraine that joins NATO would pose. The taking back of the Crimea from Ukraine was only the first step. Others would include the securing of de facto independence by those parts of Ukraine that directly impinge on Russian security interests. In their obsession to make kinetically helpless (at least in the conventional sense) Russia, Bill Clinton and his successors in the White House carried out policies that were demonstrably hostile to the overall Russian interest, especially in matters of global influence and security. Barack Obama found out how potent a threatened Russia could be, when the Kremlin sent aircraft and spetsnaz forces to Syria to ensure that GCC and NATO-backed groups were driven back from taking over the country as they earlier had in Libya. A fortunate outcome for NATO, that it lost the game to Russia and Iran, for only in the regions still kept free by NATO of control by the Kurds and the Assad regime do terrorists breed. It was not accidental that the ISIS chief taken out under President Joe Biden lived in that “free zone”, as it is called by the US and the EU. It is indeed a “free zone”, free for Al Qaeda and ISIS terrorists, that is. Or earlier, when overreach on the part of a Georgian President confident of substantive rather than just verbal US-EU backing led to substantial chunks of its territory being torn away from its control by Russia. Given the present trajectory of global events, it may be that in the next decade at most, Kosovo may be at risk of takeover by a joint Serbian-Russian military operation, on the lines of Crimea. Such an outcome would be contrary to the calculations of the same “experts” who have led Biden into the Sino-Wahhabi trap of shifting US focus back to Russia from China. Such a reversal has consequences for Australia, India and Japan, and when Antony Blinken meets his counterparts from these Quad members soon, perhaps they may be straightforward enough to warn him against Biden’s return to the past.

Despite their tough talk of countermeasures and fresh sanctions, not to mention rushing troops to some  newer members, will the major powers in NATO take the unprecedented step of actually going to war with Russia ( assisted by its ally, the PRC) not just in Ukraine, but in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania ? Putin and Xi may decide otherwise. After all, in the 1930s, promises by Paris and London of an immediate and lethal response (including by invading Germany from the west) gave a false sense of security to Poland, giving Warsaw enough confidence to object to a security partnership between Russia, France and the UK that CPSU General Secretary Stalin had understood from the start was necessary to deter another war in Europe on the lines of 1914-19. Of course, such logic was beyond the capacity of the leaders of France and Russia to understand, although there were a few such as De Gaulle and Churchill who did. The people of Poland paid a very heavy price for such a miscalculation by their leaders, and those capitals that were once part of the USSR or the Warsaw Pact, but which are now in NATO, need to factor in the extent of willingness of some of their tough talking partners to actually risk a kinetic war on European soil with Russia, unless they themselves were invaded. And Beijing would want that such a conflict should end in humiliation for the Atlantic Alliance even at great cost to Russia. Such an outcome would be far more preferable to Beijing than any humiliation of Moscow, something that envoy after envoy landing in Moscow forgets while suggesting Gorbachev-Yeltsin models of concessions to the Kremlin.

Aware that the possibility of US-EU sanctions is close to zero, no matter how much Russia is helped by the PRC to stay in the contest, the CCP under Xi Jinping Thought has thrived by adopting policies that suit their interests, even those followed by countries that they regard as obstacles to the path to global primacy. Much of what Xi Jinping Thought carries out in practice (although not always in the words made public) by either the CCP General Secretary or his subordinates is almost identical to the path taken during the 20th century by the US to actualise the same objectives as China is seeking for itself in the 21st. “International rules of the game” were what Washington declared them to be, and in the case of any such restriction, the US exempted itself. This is precisely the course followed by Xi, a day ago in the joint statement that was released after the Xi-Putin meeting, who are the leaders of the two most powerful Eurasian powers, Russia and China. Much was made that any country’s moves towards security not impinging on those of other countries. This when every day, the security interests of India and several members of ASEAN are under threat by the actions of Beijing, while all the while, the claim gets made that “every action (including by the PLA) is intended only for China’s own security”. The CCP is in essence a Han party, which is why the founder of the PRC, Chairman Mao Zedong, backed away from any kinetic action other than token steps against Taiwan throughout his tenure. While Mao’s three immediate successors as CCP bosses continued with the policy of not giving emphasis to the Big Stick, focusing instead on winning over enough hearts and minds in Taiwan such that there would be a voluntary unification with China. Based on the success that Hong Kong was having under Deng’s “One Country Two Systems”, elements of a “One Country Three Systems” solution were being talked about. Soon after coming to power in 2012, Xi abandoned the policy of “One Country Two Systems for the next fifty years”, much to the shock of those in Hong Kong such as Jimmy Lai, who sought greater freedom from CCP modes of governance than had been the case since 1997. In Xi Jinping Thought, there is “One Country, One System”, thereby leaving no scope for anything other than kinetic methods in any effort at capturing Taiwan. This would be a battle of Han versus Han, given that the overwhelming majority of the Taiwanese population is Han, as is the case with the majority of the population of Singapore, both countries that are far ahead of China in per capita terms. Such a superiority in economic achievement goes contrary to Xi Jinping Thought, which holds that the only system of governance suited to the Han people  is that followed under his direction in China. As for “mutual respect and non-interference” in matters relating to foreign countries, the less said about actual practice the better.

International rules of the game were in the past laid down by Washington. Today, they are being increasingly prescribed by Beijing. India refused to accept as a given the first set of rules, and will not accept the second. In the case of first the US and now China, rules that are meant to be followed only by others and never by themselves. Lessons have been learnt by PM Modi and EAM Jaishankar from the behaviour of  the PRC not only since 2017 but since the 1950s. This was the period when Aksai Chin was taken over. The failure of earlier governments to act resulted in great cost in territory and in other ways to India, a fate that the government is eager not to replicate.

 Young India can surpass Middle Income status

White House may cost Democrats US Congress (The Sunday Guardian)

 

The only way out for the US President would be for him to show less caution and more conviction that he means what he says.

Whether welcome or not, Democratic Party candidates for the US House and Senate in the November midterms will be glued to the coattails of President J.R. Biden. Judging by the way in which voters are reacting to the increasing number of missteps by the 46th President on matters of policy, the Biden White House may result in a disaster similar to that witnessed by Barack Obama during his stint in the Oval Office. As with Obama, Biden has sought to reach out “across the aisle”, and in the process convinced many that he has no convictions save the desire to protect his job. Obama chose Wall Street favourites to man key slots connected with the Street, forgetting that he was elected to “be the change that would make the change”. Less progress was made in the matter of racial equity in the US under the two terms of Barack Obama than has taken place just in the first year of a Biden term. Of course, his political instincts being attuned to the fraternity rules of the US Senate than to the scrimmage that democratic politics is, clumsy tactics have been plentiful. That an African-American woman jurist will be his choice for the US Supreme Court is unexceptionable. There are more than a few such individuals, all of whom have gone unrepresented during the entire existence of the US Supreme Court, which has overwhelmingly been a club comprising of males of European extraction. Clarence Thomas may be superficially black, but his judicial pronouncements appear to reflect a mind that may have been in agreement with past Justices such as Chief Justice Robert Taney. This is unlike Thurgood Marshall, who understood lack of privilege and opportunity and reflected that in his judicial pronouncements. A better grasp of politics would have led Biden to check on women jurists of every hue before announcing his pick, which, surprise, surprise, would turn out exactly the way he had promised during the 2020 campaign. Donald Trump erred in choosing the (admittedly capable) Amy Comey Barrett over her Latino rival Barbara Lago. Choosing the latter would have helped him and his party substantially where Latino votes are concerned, as was pointed out in these columns even before the 45th President’s final choice was made public. By publicly declaring that he would choose from only African-American women jurists, Biden’s pick will unfairly have the taint of ethno-based advantage in a context where ethnicity has played a role in so many nominations, including those made by President Trump. Telegraphing his preferences early has resulted in a flurry of condemnation. Some of these have been politically unwise for those who made them, as well as for the Republican Party, such as the unsavoury comments made by Senator Ted Cruz, who has on many issues shown great courage and foresight, including in the matter of dealing with the activities of the Chinese Communist Party. Senator Cruz been a contrast to Senator McConnell, who has sought to give China a free pass by asking for harsh sanctions to be imposed with immediate effect on Russia, thereby fulfilling Beijing’s push to ensure that NATO’s focus remains on Moscow rather than shift to the Indo-Pacific. The Senate Minority Leader joins US President Joe Biden, who seems to have regressed in his geopolitical understanding back to Cold War 1.0 (USSR-US) from the ongoing Cold War 2.0 (PRC-US).
Indications of such a shift towards a CCP-friendly narrative had been present from the start, when he retained Dr Anthony Fauci (of Gain of Function renown) as his principal adviser on the pandemic when it would have been cheaper to taxpayers to have secured similar CCP-prepared conclusions from the WHO. It was forecast by WHO and Dr Fauci that a full lockdown lasting about two weeks would “break the chain” of transmissions of SARS-Cov-2. Such unprecedented measures certainly broke a considerable amount of crockery around the world as a consequence of adopting WHO-recommended measures in efforts to stop the spread of a pathogen that, at its worst, killed less than 3% of known patients. It may be added that SARS-Cov-2 is an affliction where most of the cases are asymptomatic, and hence remain undetected, so that the actual number of patients are much more than what gets recorded. Those (such as this columnist) who gave the initial benefit of the doubt to Biden where the approach to Cold War 2.0 was concerned, seem on track to having their expectations unfulfilled, at least by the present occupant of the White House. The worst losers will be office-holders from the Democratic Party, who would suffer at the polls as a consequence of the unpopularity of their 2020 standard-bearer. The only way out for them, as for the US President, would be for him to show less caution and more conviction that he means what he says, and is willing to work towards actualisation of measures that he promotes in the media. Terrified of the “negative” reaction of the public to FDR’s threat to “pack the court”, in 1937, Biden has been cold to the imperative of raising the strength of the Supreme Court from 9 to 15. Instead, if he were point out to voters the way in which the Roberts court has rewarded money and privilege over the disadvantaged, and ask for a Democratic majority in the midterms sufficient to overturn Republican obstruction to his reforms, his party may not be gasping for breath, as is the case now. In the case of Roosevelt, his tactics worked, and the US Supreme Court ceased from 1937 onwards to remain an obstacle to his New Deal. In contrast, the Roberts court, aware of the lack of interest in change of the White House, is multiplying its one-sided verdicts in a manner that shows that partisanship is strong within the minds of at least five of the nine justices. Apparently tone deaf to political reality, President Biden (and his party) seem unconcerned about the boost that the Islamophobia bill is giving to the Republican Party by the manner in which it deals with only a single faith rather than the spectrum of faiths in the US. Toxic comments against Islam are indeed obnoxious, but so are similar comments against Christians, Sikhs or Hindus. Nor has he understood the importance of the ongoing battle within the Muslim Ummah in favour of moderation, and against Wahhabi radicalism. Hence Biden’s moves, such as the censure directed by Biden appointees towards the reformist regimes in Riyadh and Cairo, both of them also being US allies of long standing. Courage is usually a more potent magnet for votes than an excess of caution, something President Biden needs to consider as he approaches his midterms test.

White House may cost Democrats US Congress 

NEWSBUDGET 2022-23: LIGHT BRIGHTENS AT END OF LONG TUNNEL (The Daily Guardian)

 The 2022-23 Union Budget is among the most important components of the efforts at transformation being attempted by PM Modi, that too at a much brisker pace than was the case during Modi 1.0.

The 2022-23 Union Budget presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman follows on from her earlier budget. This is by carrying forward several of the changes that have made Modi 2.0 significantly more innovative than was the case during Modi 1.0. Almost as soon as then Chief Minister Narendra Modi spoke of “Minimum Government and Maximum Governance”, a chorus of cries went up, some in writing penned even by those regarded as being his supporters. Big Government had been a part of life in India over centuries, and P.V. Narasimha Rao paid a heavy political price for seeking to reduce that during his years as PM. The foundation of this budget was the philosophy that the Indian citizen is not a child or a criminal, but can be trusted in the manner PM Modi did early in his tenure, when he did away with the need to get documents authenticated by a Gazetted Officer. The problem he faced was the resistance of those steeped in the status quo to accept any dilution of their authority or changes in their procedures. Even in 2015, warnings were given by some that those who opposed the transformation that the PM sought to do while in office were (mostly quietly) active in (a) creating a negative perception of Modi as a divider and not a unifier. Such perceptions (b) were disseminated not so much in India as outside, so as to smudge Brand India and prevent its geopolitical ascent. Efforts were also on to (c) create conditions for panic in the stock markets, on the lines of those that had been engineered during the periods in office of Narasimha Rao and A.B. Vajpayee. The many within the system who favoured a return to the status quo ante before 26 May 2014 portrayed such warnings as “conspiracy theorists”. They were able to retain substantial influence in the governance mechanism even after Modi took charge, and managed to slow change down in several fields where change was essential to progress. This, combined with the popularity of Narendra Modi to prevent such Modi-phobic plans from reaching takeoff speed. During much of his first term, only 20% of his team were (in deed and thought) “Modivian”. About 40% reflected the

hues of the Vajpayee era, and another 40% that of the Manmohan Singh era. Several of those prominent in both these administrations found keystone positions within the Union Government, another reason why in so much of the reform effort of the Prime Minister, the brake was applied much more often across the system than the accelerator. It was a shock to Modi-phobic elements when the BJP improved its majority in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, and even wrested UP back from the Samajwadi Party in 2017 and installed Yogi Adityanath as CM, whose family lives as austere a life as does that of PM Modi. From that time, elements within the political and governance system that were opposed to the changes being attempted by Modi worked on overdrive, although not by enough to succeed in 2019. Their target is now the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, so expect more storms. At least the mountains of food grain that used to be fed to rats in previous times is now being used to give grain to hundreds of millions of citizens under PM Modi, a welcome change, as is the effort to build more storage space and route sale proceeds directly to farmers rather than through middlemen.

The 2022-23 Union Budget is among the most important components of the efforts at transformation being attempted by PM Modi, that too at a much brisker pace than was the case during Modi 1.0. Rather than just look at meeting the revenue targets for the financial year, as was the case with so many past budgets across the decades, it looks at what is needed to enable a glide path towards the status of a Middle Income economy by the close of this decade. The increasing takeover of the digital space over our lives and work has been acknowledged by the Finance Minister, rather than ignored in the manner that previous holders of her position did. More than anything else, it was the danger posed by corrupt elements in the bureaucracy that diminished compliance. The extension of time up to 2 years to ensure that I-T returns are correct is welcome, as are some of the tax concessions listed. Retirees, especially senior citizens, have less security than those still working, and this needs to get reflected in tax rates. Once again, I-T rates have been left untouched, even the surcharges. The rates were introduced during the 1996-97 Chidambaram budget, and inflation has made changes to the purchasing power of the rupee that ought to get better reflected, if not in rates, then in slabs. Perhaps a relook is needed at this. Efforts at assisting the informal sector are needed but in ways not designed to enforce “formality” at the point of a prosecution or penalty notice. Unlike so many budgets in the past that look in the rear-view mirror and not the windshield while fixing the route of travel, this is a budget that accepts that the world has changed, and that India needs to change. Rather than ban crypto currencies and exchanges, thereby driving the industry underground the way Prohibition has handed over the liquor trade to mafias, the proceeds are being taxed, although here as well, there ought to have been slabs based on income accrued, rather than a flat rate. Ease of compliance is half the battle in efforts at increasing the tax base, the other being rates that are not simply predictable, but which reflect purchasing power of rupee values at different points in time. While rates remain static, in other ways compliance is being sought to be eased, such that a time may come when the overwhelming majority of taxpayers do not need a lawyer or an accountant to comply with tax demands. Given the ease of detection through digital methods, a “saral” IT form needs to be the norm. What has been presented on 1 February 2022 is a step in the right direction and needs to go further during Modi 2.0. Too many innovations of PM Modi have been forgotten, such as his switching of the UK-oriented time for presenting the Indian budget rather than adopt a time for the presentation suited to the needs of India.

Whether it be the effort to rectify the inequality in educational access of the underprivileged, especially during the pandemic, or the spread of broadband, this is a budget that accepts the need to design the tax system in a way that reflects present-day conditions. Essential industries such as defence equipment ( now finally being exported in quantity) or semiconductors are being paid attention to. The East India Company complex that fears foreign competition needs to be replaced by steps that would make domestic companies go global, as Finance Minister Sitharaman, under the guidance of Prime Minister Modi, has done. There is finally light clearly visible at the end of the long, unlit tunnel of mass poverty that so many in India have traversed across centuries.

NEWSBUDGET 2022-23: LIGHT BRIGHTENS AT END OF LONG TUNNEL