The world is in a mess, and it looks like getting a lot messier sometime soon.
Faced with the potential rise of economic rivals and the existential threat of the loss of its currency’s global reserve status, the US Empire has pulled out all the stops.
In Europe, the risk of post-Soviet Russia integrating economically with Europe and forming a rival bloc has been met with an effective counter through the Ukraine provocation and the rapid expansion of the Empire’s Cold War military apparatus. At the very least, Russia will be crushed and contained. At the most, the new provocation in NATO-member Lithuania might provide the pretext for an overt military confrontation, a full-scale hot war and the complete subjugation of Russia into the Empire.
Either way Russia’s ability to buttress its ally China will be restricted or removed, and the Empire will be able to concentrate more fully on eliminating the risk of China threatening its hegemon. New and enhanced military alliances and deployments against China have been under way for some time and potential opportunities for an opening of direct hostilities have been identified in Taiwan and the South China Sea. China knows its turn is coming, no matter what happens with Russia.
Signs of global recession
Meanwhile, as the Empire fights to preserve its dollar’s role as the global reserve currency and thus maintain its supremacy of force over the world, its own internal and colonial economies are cracking up. Years of profound corruption, monetary and economic abuse and political misdirection are culminating in global chain reactions of collapse, inflation, unemployment, hunger and social unrest. Politically, the USA is moving towards overt corporate fascism, just as global indicators point towards a major recession. Worldwide manufacturing inventories have hit record levels as consumer demand fades in the face of rising interest rates and tightened credit. Sanctions aimed at Russia are causing significant collateral damage in hungry nations that need Russian grain and fertiliser. Some smaller nations are defaulting on debt and receiving lectures on austerity from Empire finance managers.
As the Empire’s component nations commit record resources to weapons and war-planning, corresponding resources are being pulled from social programs just as inventory overhang, price inflation, energy shocks and fading demand usher in recession. Perhaps, as in the 1930s, many will look towards war as a relief. As the 1940s proved, war unlocks national spending like no other force and provides opportunities for economic resets.
At the same time, long-expected environmental crises are converging, exacerbating all the problems listed above. Droughts and floods are gripping many food-producing areas, fresh water is running short for entire cities and regions and global weather systems are running amok.
It is, as I said before, a mess. And there appears to be no sign of leadership at any level capable of derailing the seemingly inevitable process of recession, depression, fascism and war.
Noose tightening around Russia
In Europe, the noose is tightening around Russia. Knowing it was in the Empire’s cross-hairs, Russia spent years planning ways to survive an expected full-scale economic attack. But since this necessarily involved disentangling itself from the US-dollar world trade system and devising new methods using other means of exchange, it actually increased the danger to itself, since any threat to the dollar’s world exchange currency status is an existential one for the Empire. Without global reserve status the dollar would rapidly devalue and the Empire’s ability to maintain its iron grip on global resources would be drastically curtailed. Faced with that reality, Empire rulers would regard no measure to defend the global dollar as too extreme or costly.
Hence the deliberate provocation by the US/NATO in the Ukraine, the expected Russian reaction and the set-piece plays now being enacted against Russia and its only potential ally and saviour – China.
I surmise that most of the international “news events” of the past several years have been connected to this now-unfolding Empire campaign. Perhaps even Brexit was a preparatory move designed to shield key ally England from some of the negative fallout from whatever was/is being planned for Europe.
Undoubtedly, the Ukraine coup was part of a plan, the script of which was revealed in this 2015 Rand Corporation report, commissioned by the US Army. In that context we can see a plan, presumably “war-gamed” dozens of times in the Pentagon and the offices of the arms-dealing corporations so close to the Empire’s heart.
Hence the provoked and expected Russian invasion of Ukraine, the pan-Empire propaganda storm that painted the invasion as unprovoked, the economic sanctions and confiscations of Russian funds held in overseas banks, the keenly sought cancellation of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Europe and the flooding of Ukraine with weapons.
Lithuanian provocation
All this followed by Lithuania’s ban on the movement of supplies to Russia’s vulnerable and isolated Baltic naval base enclave of Kaliningrad and the simultaneous announced planned induction of Finland and Sweden into NATO, turning the Baltic into a NATO lake, with the potential to lock down one of Russia’s key gateways to the oceans. Then military preparations on the Swedish island of Gotland, just 300km from Kaliningrad, the entry of US warships into the Baltic and the conduct of large-scale joint military exercises there. US missile-carrying vessels can now use the Baltic with much greater freedom than before, while Russia’s ability to move there can now be severely curtailed.
This massive reinforcement of NATO capabilities in the Baltic, accompanied by the needling provocation by Lithuania, again echoes a report by the Rand Corporation, this time in 2014, which argued that NATO needed to prepare for conflict in that zone.
What next? The placement of tens of thousands of NATO troops on a high-alert war footing and rhetoric from Empire player England about a new war on European soil. The recent two-day NATO summit in Madrid made it very clear that immense resources are to be deployed against both Russia and China in the coming days and years. NATO’s rapid reaction force will increase from 40,000 to 300,000 soldiers, just for a start, along with a massive increase in weapons and a ramping up of military exercises aimed at the nominated enemies.
Notably, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand were represented at the summit, making it clear that increasingly overt warfare against China – cold or hot – is next on the agenda. Whether China goes down without a fight or comes out swinging is anybody’s guess, at this stage.
