A very interesting piece on the possible breaking up of US hegemony in Europe by Bernhard at MoA
Interested to hear other 5F folks’ thoughts
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/06/how-russia-can-and-will-de-nato-size-europe.html
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Hi PP,
Snap - sort of.
I was just about to post Gonzalo Lira’s video What Happens To Europe When Russia Wins from the Saker blog but you beat me to it with MOA. Very interesting line of thought from GL and one I agree with. BTW, I noticed a BTL comment (Saker version of the vid) that asked how come the SBU has allowed GF to continue blogging from Kharkiv since his arrest?
Here’s another video from GL (which was posted on the same day, 5th June) that people might find interesting:
Gonzalo Lira: There Will Be No Peace Agreement
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Hi folks, b is always worth reading imo, here his opinion is certainly a possibility but it assumes the US will behave like a responsible international state whereas it is run by lunatics who would have no problem with threatening or instigating a nuclear exchange!
cheers
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I think I’ll let this marinade for a bit, but a few questions I’d mull, plus a good general approach to strategic thinking, follow. Although conceived with commercial organisations in mind this seems wholly relevant to me.
As for questions, a few at random.
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Is seeming American befuddlement a real reflection of several generations of nepotism crowding out genuine talent? Or is it a ploy?
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If America spends exponentially more on defence (ha!) and accelerates this to try and catch up on missile tech will that achieve the aim or merely pour yet more cash into the pockets of the companies that charge $40 for a screw and hundreds for a toilet seat etc? The US boasts about spending way more than everyone else but that’s not really a very reliable yardstick given all the rent taking.
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Is Ukraine being used as a giant scrapyard?
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If the US can’t procure microprocessors for their smart tech they cannot catch up. Will the penny drop and will they play nice or will they steal the raw materials from regime-changed African nations?
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Is the vast and well equipped US Navy simply a large collection of huge floating targets?
It’s difficult to separate what I’d like to see from what is actually likely, so that’s another reason to mull for a bit.
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To your last question, K, I’d answer an unequivocal “Yes!” Recent Russian technological developments have finally rendered aircraft carriers - and all the lesser ships which accompany them - floating white elephants. Already castrated, and now nothing more than easy targets. As overwhelming harbingers of imperial pressure, menacing countries all over the world when they appear off their coasts, they’re finished.
The US no longer dares to send its carriers too frequently into the Persian Gulf, having seen the retaliatory missile strikes which Iran made on US bases in the region, after the murder of Soleimani, and realising that now all their ‘assets’ there are undefendable sitting-ducks.
How typical of good ‘governance’ (stupid fad word!) in Britain that ‘our leaders’ have just now lumbered Britain with two more carriers; just at the moment that they became obsolete. And that’s to say nothing about their current ineffectual status, being unable even to do reliably what they’re supposed to be able to do. Farcical!
Britons need to start longing for a new era when all this post-imperial delusional nostalgia of ‘our leaders’ stops; and then we need to take action to stop it, and to accept finally what Britain is now: a small West European country and nothing more; and destined like all the rest of Europe, to scrape up good relations with Russia, because of absolutely needing various vital commodities which are only going to come - affordably - from there.
What with Bozo being on the skids, soon, if not right now, and Russia/China steadily changing the global scene and hastening on the final eclipse of the unlamented Anglozionist empire, we can hope that this sort of sober awakening to reality might make some progress in Britain fairly soon. Just a few more Suez-like, Pearl Harbour-like existential shocks in the near future, and we might actually start to see it happening…
In his novel, ‘Twilight’s Last Gleaming’, JMGreer describes the haunting, illusion-shattering image of a US aircraft-carrier as a derelict hulk, lying at a heavy list on an East African sand-bank, wrecked by Chinese hypersonic missiles. That’s the sort of shock which changes the collective minds of entire nations, pronto.
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There will be no break away from the US here in the UK.
We shall have folks without food or power on Christmas night and the average Brit will believe their position is causing VVP problems. It’s going to take something rather special to break the spell here.
That said, I can definitely see mainland Europe pivoting away from the yanks. A lot depends on how the rising fascism is dealt with though
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Morning K. I just clicked your link on strategy and it looks really interesting. I’m putting it aside for a deeper dive later.
This looks like the kind of thinking that MBA trained GICS are likely to be familiar with, so we should probably be at least as familiar…
I’m pretty worried (so what else is new?) about the current sitch. The reason I’m worried is that, as far as I can see, there are two possibilities at play here
- the US planners (and the EU puppets) are truly incompetent, to a degree that is literally breathtaking
Or
- they aren’t.
To be honest, neither option gives me the warm fuzzies, but I’m more scared of option 2 than 1.
If they aren’t incompetents then the only explanation is that they are pursuing a plan that is not the one publicly stated. I see no way that this doesn’t end up with a mighty (indeed fiery) conflict between EUUSSAUK and Russia+China.
I kind of hope that it is option 1 as then the grown ups (Russia in this case) can lean in and take our ball away, so to speak.
I don’t know… There’s a hell of a lot of chaos afloat right now.
Cheers
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You underestimate the Brits, L.
Bismarck’s famous remark about Russia - “The Russians are slow to harness, but swift to ride” - holds here too: highly civility-minded Brits restrain their feelings and actions during lots of provocations; but we are just as prone to cutting up decisively rough, once roused. Witness, for just one example, the Poll Tax riots, which saw off that execrable idea, and ultimately sealed Thatcher’s fate.
And that was just about a thoroughly unjust imposition which that garish political tool of the English-raj class was trying to push on us: The “Community Charge” as the silly cow insisted on euphemising it.
Think how it would - will? - be if we were really unable to afford food and petrol prices and unable to keep warm in Winter. Notice how, even with the pocket-pols’ current Tory/Torylite (Woodentop tendency) steam-rollerish Paedominster majority, we’ve just had a fatally-damaging no-confidence vote against Bozo. Even such a set of creeps as the Paedominsteroids can be spurred to revolt when alarmed enough by the trajectory of events (‘Ancestral voices prophesying… loss of seat’ 
).
I suggest that in fact those like me who wish to see our homeland finally have its tongue torn away from the super-glued-to-the-Swampies-arse situation that it’s endured so ignominiously since 1956 may well get to see some progress in that direction now.
Probably I personally will need to get reborn to witness the full play-out. What little time I have left in this incarnation may well not be enough for these events to play out at the usual pace of history. But even that estimate may be too pessimistic. There is - clearly - a historic change in hand right now: The Anglozionist empire has never been more tottery; it’s metropolitan state has clearly begun its own end-of-USSR period already, and is now scheduled to undergo a time of chaotic decline and severe chastening before the eyes of the world - self-inflicted, of course. And to cap it all, grossly over-populated, over-‘entitled’ Britain has nowhere left to turn to repair its disastrous current situation, other than to the newly-rising empires, Russian and Chinese, with which it will have to make peace, make nice, and make some life-saving trade agreements soon enough.
Can’t you imagine a situation where the rajistas (via their political wing in Paedominster) will feel simply compelled to get on with this? Some up and coming Attlee-like, mildly-socialist younger political leader could easily be allowed to appear and rise to prominence, committed to this historic rapprochement, under the pressure of serious civil unrest amongst we plebs; just as the raj were forced to do in 1945, to avoid an all-out revolutionary uprising by the homecoming victorious people’s army.
This kind of mixed, moderately social-democratic society, taking its cue from precisely that approach that’s keeping the Russian and Chinese populations quiet and supportive, can work perfectly well here. It’s what a large majority, cutting across party lines, of we common citizens of Britain want, after all. (Btw: a large majority of the Chinese commons consider that they live in a democracy, according to opinion polling…)
In a time - like Attlee’s - when the rajistas are in retreat because the proles are threatening to become revolutionary, that’s entirely thinkable. Just as well, too, because it’s the only visible way out of the Shit Creek where Britain is struggling currently - paddle-less and ‘lead’ by a useless buffoon with his coterie of ballsless nest-featherers in tow: History not exactly repeating, but rhyming: first as tragedy (for the rajistas) under Churchill; then as squalid black farce under his would-be Mini-Me. Cheers, L! 
Interesting post. I’m familiar with the saddle phrase. It’s apt too. I heard another Russian phrase the other day;
“The only revolution in Britain will be in Gardening” Marx.
I’ve got no faith. Previous events had community as a bedrock. It doesn’t exist today. And then, even if something akin to what you describe actually does happen, the middle class will shaft the lower classes to lift themselves (See LibDems for details). There’s also that addiction to doubling down whilst having no plans whatsoever.
Add in terms like over population and I struggle to be positive for my family. I am however pleased at the signs of change for humanity in general, and am willing to take the pain involved in that transition personally.
From what I’ve seen in China so far, I think many Brits would enjoy life there. I know I would. Good luck convincing them though.
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Two more random questions to add to your list K.
a) Is the US (and perhaps USUK) position all just part of the UN2030 agenda game plan?
b) What will Russia do to the gun runners in Europe once the Ukrainian nazis are no more. By gun runners I mean those NATO members allowing weapons that seriously threaten Russian forces into Ukraine via their own territory, particularly Poland
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My somewhat scattershot response to Moon of A’s article linked to above:
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As already noted by others, this Gonzolo Lira ‘character’ sure seems to have a charmed life in Ukraine. Shouldn’t our knee jerk reaction to this guy be one of complete suspicion? Where did he come from anyway? How can he get away with generating such effective agiprop shared widely among everyone interested in the issue? And note, he took the time to diss completely proven credible sceptic Scott Ritter. Why do Saker and MoA promote such a dodgy source? I find that odd.
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MoA repeats the old canard about ‘promises not to expand NATO’ “Dozens of U.S. and European luminaries had promised to Russia that NATO would expand ‘not one inch’ towards Russia.”
Why in the world should USA/NATO be expected to honor verbal agreements? Why should Russia expect that a verbal agreement was enough? Russia/Soviet Union had just been through the Cold War. Are we to feel sorry for them that they were, apparently, for those who promote this canard, too stupid, too naive (naive!!!) to demand written agreements, rock solid treaties? How can serious analysts continue repeating this story as if it has any meaning or bearing on international diplomacy. The heart of serious international diplomacy is NOT verbal agreements!
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“Russia can do similar. But as it always follows international law, it will have to do it in a slightly different way.” Does Russia indeed always follow international law? I find it hard to accept the story that the Dombass republics ‘declared independence’, that they asked for protection, that Russia recognized them, and thus justified under international law the immediate advance on Kiev…and all that was ‘legal’ under international law. Note, I’m not saying Russia was waging ‘aggressive war’ but neither do I think they were following international law. Some noted analysts, Craig Murray for example and Noam Chomsky, agree with me, so it’s not that far fetched of an opinion. And, why should Russia follow international law?
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The key concept in MoA’s analysis:
Russia can achieve this at any time. It simply has to stop supplying gas and oil to Europe.
The obvious question is this: if Russia indeed can ‘achieve’ this at any time, why don’t they do it now? Clearly there is something we don’t really understand about the situation. Why accept the loss of so many soldiers, on both sides (remember, Putin supposedly want all the Russian rooted peoples under the Russian flag, well, how many of those 200 plus dying in the Uke trenches Russian speaking Russian rooted young men?)
So, for this reason, MoA’s analysis doesn’t make sense to me.
5 Immediately after he says
Despite six European ‘sanction packages’ against Russia there has yet to be a reciprocal response from Russia. It may still hope that European leaders will recognized the deadly game the U.S. is playing with them.
Why hasn’t there been a reciprocal response from Russia? Bernard doesn’t answer this question, or not in a way I find convincing.
Are we to suppose European elites (I’m not talking about the puppets in office) are somehow fooled by what Bernhard calls a USA ‘deadly game’??? Why should we think they are that stupid?
Something doesn’t add up. Bernard, like Orlov, is going in the prophetic direction, talking about the future, when clearly we don’t really know what is happening behind the scenes in the present. I don’t think European elites are as stupid as he implies. And I don’t think USA is as powerless as he implies. As Philip Giraldi wrote recently, the USA is seeming intent on staying put in Syria. That’s not a sign of weakness.
Something doesn’t add up with MoA’s/Lira’s/Orlov’s analysis. However I have no alt analysis to offer. My assumption is that all the criminals work together behind the scenes and things are not at all what they seem.
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Here’s another point of view from Ian Davis, who also tends after his analysis to indulge in the prophetic mode, rather long winded in its preamble, the key concept is this:
As we shall see, this war has been meticulously planned for decades. It is a key step toward establishing global governance—an objective that has been relentlessly pursued for generations. No matter how the war develops, its ramifications are already global.
Its purpose is to propel a technocratic transformation that began with the pseudopandemic. Change will foster the further establishment of a global biosecurity state. The worldwide system, founded upon illegitimate claims of sovereignty, abolishing individual autonomy and rights and freedoms, is destined to promote the interests of a global “parasite class.”
This point of view is clearly at odds with the MoA/Saker/Orlov/Mike Whitney (the latter just penned an article available today at Unz) point of view that the stupid ‘western powers’ are shooting themselves in the foot.
So, who is right? Is the empire purposely using the Ukraine war as a way to bring on complete rule by Technocracy?
Off-G is suffering from a bad attack of Illuminatopathy. This mental aberration causes the sufferers to have nightmares about a shadowy caste of demigod-like super-humans, or possibly not even humans at all, who aim to control absolutely everything, and who are - always - dangerously close to achieving their aim.
They’re imagined to be supreme puppet-masters, manipulating not only political ‘elites’ and ‘leaders’ but also their other puppets the WEFoids, the Bellender Foundation, Musk, etc., plus Xi and VVP, and everyone else who - supposedly - just pretends to be in opposition to the Anglozionist empire. They’re all in cahoots, you see, under the overall management of the - fantasised - Illuminatis.
If you have a really bad dose of Illuminatopathy, you then tend to make the further step of saying that these master-manipulators are - obviously - ‘the Jooze’, aka ‘the Khazars’, or space-lizards. (Elizabeth Windsor, for example, is fondly imagined by these super-sufferers as being such a lizard, wearing a mask…!)
As you can see, E, from the pisstakey sketch above, I’m not a sufferer. I have no such nightmares. I see humankind - ALL of us, without any exceptions at all, in any place or time - as being much more little farties than demigods: fullashit with impossible dreams and delusions, and in our own time heavily under the abiding illusion that we - humans - have MUCH more techie-techie controlling agency over life, the universe and everything than we will ever actually possess.
Consequently, we stagger from cock-up to cock-up, barely grasping what’s happening to us, and absolutely never in comprehensive control of anything.
The idea of any coterie of humans planning anything at all sustainedly for centuries, or even just decades, sounds like a joke to me. Perhaps the Chinese come closest to that; but even they are only so-so at it. That level of dedication is simply beyond hom-sap. The best we can manage is spontaneous, uncoordinated dedication to persistent bad habits.
What I see happening in the world right now is a big chaotic shift away from an old dispensation which has now run its course, and is being edged out of existence by a new, different one. And no-one at all - literally no human agency anywhere - is in anything like control of this shift. Even the wisest of us barely understands it. It’s simply happening to us as fate, with groups of humans everywhere just trying to do their best to stay afloat through the chaos, and come out at the other side more or less intact. Best we little farties can do whilst the Times continue with their Interestingness; we’re simply not up to anything more bondian-supervillainy than that. By simple chaotic accident the future is now destined to be much less Anglo, much more Sino-Rus, with Western would-be manipulators getting their fingers seriously burned, right now. Kissinger, far from being a deceitful agent of these demigods, is just an ancient little-fartie who nevertheless can still see a plain emergent fact when it’s up against his nose, and is still capable of saying so… 
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It sounds, Rhis, as if you are accusing Iain Davis of being a confused conspiracy theorist.
Be that as it may, he does, if you read through the article, provide a lot of information that leads one to a conclusion that all is not as it seems concerning the war in Ukraine, the sanctions, the ruble payments, etc. Perhaps he errs in his conclusion but his work up to that point is accurate?
I tend to agree, as I’ve said in this and other threads, that there is something quite contradictory and inexplicable in the narrative we are getting.
However I agree with you in the sense that his build up does not justify his conclusions, which in my opinion were not proven.
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The Strategy Safari by Mintzberg explores these ideas in a lot of depth and yes it is absolutely an MBA set book in many institutions I would imagine. I’ve only skimmed it but the basics are not hard to grasp.
Neither 1. nor 2. exactly thrill me too 
but in a sense if their grip on power is tight it doesn’t matter all that much. Say black is white forcefully and often and people give in eventually c.f. Corbyn the antisemite.
I remain reasonably optimistic: control is only an illusion and it passes. Slowly at times, sure.
I agree re the aircraft carriers btw @RhisiartGwilym. We took the boys on the Portsmouth dockyard boat tour some years ago and I’m fairly sure the carrier docked quite near the Victory hasn’t moved once since then. At a guess 9 years ago, or longer.
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Oh I rate Iain rather highly, E. I don’t think he’s a severe sufferer of Illuminatopathy. Some of the folk at Off-G, both editors and beetles, lean quite strongly that way, though: Not yet clear about just how ineffectual we - hom-sap - are when it comes to super-humanly self- and collectively-disciplined, long-continued strategy.
Rhis, the above is what you said in response to the article from Iain Davis. Below is a quote of your opinion of Iain Davis.
I would describe the two together as ‘contradictory’, wouldn’t you?
Why not, instead of name calling, and then contradicting your own name calling, you look a bit at what Davis has written concerning the banking and sanctions shenanigans that apparently prove not ‘a new cold war’ but a ‘collusion of interests’ whose victims are western consumers and young Ukrainian and Russian men fighting and dying while the masters are colluding together?
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Iain doesn’t figure in my reckoning as one of the Off-G crew, so much as one of the UKColumn contributors. I admire his analytic ability, and I haven’t yet seen any clear indication that he’s a full-blown sufferer from Illuminatopathy. Maybe, maybe not. It’s others at Off-G who seem to have it bad.
PS: Note that an analyst saying that there are conspiratorial factions amongst the gics who are striving to manipulate us all into authoritarian control systems doesn’t necessarily identify him/her as an I-pathy sufferer, since that contention is obviously true anyway. Iain sees that, and he’s right.
What identifies a full-blown sufferer is the idea that these power-addict clowns are members of a multi-decade, even multi-century organised global conspiracy. That just doesn’t convince. Gics have been at their idiotic domination dreams forever; Alexandros of Macedon - commonly alleged to have been ‘the Great’ - set out, literally, to conquer the whole World Island; Chingis Khan and heirs actually got quite close to it, remember; the ambition isn’t at all new.
I just don’t believe that our current crop of psychopathic villains are organised to Illuminati levels. I don’t believe that any group of humans is actually capable of such super-human long-term discipline. We can dream it, and kid ourselves that some of us could do it. But I don’t believe that.
Otoh, Kit K has just today published a piece at Off-G, about clunkypox which, though generally entirely admirable, floats again at one point the idea that the ruling circles in Russia and China are also somehow involved in a global conspiracy to run a clunkyp racket along exactly the same lines as the covid swindle was run.
I’m much more inclined to suspect that all these captured-WHO swindles are run by factions within the Western-oriented gics, and that the leaders of Russia and China will prove to be serious - indeed fatal - stumbling blocks to the continued running of WHO-scams, as zone-B now takes over from zone A as the dominant faction within global realpolitik. All the large international outfits which have been dominated by the US - WHO, UN, IMF, World Bank, etc. - are now being targeted by the zone B leaders for replacement with new, actually honest international organisations. A successor to the gic-captured WHO might not be so easy to manipulate to float ‘pandemic’ swindles.
The hugely-profitable quaxine scams are basically a play by gics based in the West. Russia’s leaders want, I think, simply to monitor global health trends and to strive, genuinely, to protect their own populace, as appropriate. Conventional thinking in both states is still very much in line with the current viruses-and-vaccines scientific orthodoxy. And both Russian and Chinese rulers are acutely aware of the standing danger of biowarfare attacks coming - ultimately - from the DC Swamp, and are watching and governing matters in their countries with that caveat always in mind in their decisions.
That rather complex watchfulness can be spun as an ‘all in it together’ global conspiracy narrative by anyone susceptible to I-pathy. But their paranoia doesn’t make it true; not necessarily; could be, but I doubt it, simply on basic considerations of humankind’s quite limited real capabilities, beyond our delusional faustian narcissism.
Here you Rhis, an off guardian article which you perhaps will find ‘on’ rather than ‘off’, in terms of your own pov. Rather opposed to what Iain asserted concerning collusion.
In my opinion, dodgy, because of my allergic reaction to the ‘prophetic mode’, in myself as well as in others.
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