What is really behind the Ukraine crisis

Russia's reaction to the move to overthrow Ukraine's government, take it into the EU and from there, probably into NATO was the most predictable thing in the world, just the sort of thing that George H.W. Bush, Kohl, Mitterrand and yes, even Margaret Thatcher wanted to avoid. In American terms imagine Washington's reaction if a Panamanian Hugo Chavez allied Panama with Cuba, filled the Canal Zone with Cuban advisers and threatened to close it... the marines would be there the next day. That is more or less what the Ukraine means to Russia. So Putin reacted in a totally predictable way. History is full of great wars that began with less cause. It is logical to think that the result we have before was calculated to benefit someone. Why deliberately take the risk of cornering a major atomic power in its traditional space?

Why would anyone else but Russia take such enormous risks for such a broken, corrupt, mess as Ukraine?

When you want to understand a major international crisis, or almost anything else for that matter, one of the first things to do is to take a step back and try to fit it into the "big picture". 

In international affairs, that is best done by reading history and studying maps.

The Ukrainian crisis is splitting Europe apart and turning Russia into an "enemy" again.

When I step back and look at maps and history, I come to the conclusion that Ukraine is merely a handy tool in a much larger operation, which is to interrupt and foil any and all efforts by the Chinese, Russians and the Europeans to create a Euro-Asian "prosperity sphere", bringing fluid movement of goods to and from China, by land from Europe across Russia and Asia. Think of all the synergies of European added value, brands and know how, combined with Russia's natural resources and technology all plugged into China's enormous markets and efficient mass, low-cost manufacturing.

The only real obstacles to this flow, Asia/Europe/Asia are political and even during the Cold War it went on quite a bit. For example, in the 1960s, before cheap flights, many Japanese students who wanted to visit Europe, used to take the boat from Japan to Vladivostok, from there the Tran-Siberian Express to Moscow, thence to Warsaw and finally Paris. In those same years a Canadian friend of mine made his first trip to India in a Volkswagen minibus.

It worked like this: a German fellow used to buy second hand minibuses in Stuttgart, load them up with hippies to pay the gas and then drive all the way to India, sell the bus (it was illegal to import them into India and he sold them for an enormous profit) and then he'd fly back to Germany and start the process all over again. 

The bus full of hippies drove through the Shah's Iran, from there though Afghanistan, where, before the CIA invented the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Kabul was filled with girls in miniskirts and cheap opium and hashish (hippy paradise) and from there across Pakistan and into India.

Off and on going back to Marco Polo and beyond, that is how the world more or less worked; interrupted by an occasional crusade now and then: caravans buying and selling across frontiers, languages and cultures, for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Analyzing how and why that is no longer possible would teach you volumes about modern history and its mechanisms.  The idea of fluid communication and trade Europe/Asia/Europe is nothing new, it is like the law of gravity... What is abnormal are the obstacles: they are all political.

With that in mind let us look at China's "New Silk Road" initiative, which, with all the hoohah in Ukraine, is getting very little coverage in the press these days. Some of my readers will only know "Silk Road" as a website where drugs can be acquired  anonymously, but the original Silk Road story is a bit more interesting than that. You can read up on the original version in Wikipedia.

Below you'll find Xinhua's map of China's "New Silk Road" project.

The new "Silk Road"

Before going on it would be well to remember that the World Bank expects China to become the world's largest economy sometime in 2014:

Many economists expect China to eclipse the U.S. as the world's largest economy sometime in the next few decades, but new World Bank data suggests that the transition could come much sooner. Is China ready now to assume its spot as the world's No. 1 economy? If so, what does it mean for the U.S., investors, and you? Motley Fool

With that in mind read the following:

The maps of the two Silk Roads drive home the enormous scale of the project: the Silk Road and Maritime Silk Road combined will create a massive loop linking three continents. If any single image conveys China’s ambitions to reclaim its place as the “Middle Kingdom,” linked to the world by trade and cultural exchanges, the Xinhua map is it. Even the name of the project, the Silk Road, is inextricably linked to China’s past as a source of goods and information for the rest of the world. The Diplomat

Here is how it connects to Europe:

DUSSELDORF, Germany, March 29 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping Saturday called on China and Germany to work together to build the Silk Road economic belt. Xi made the remarks during a visit to Port of Duisburg, the world's biggest inland harbor and a transport and logistics hub of Europe. He said China's proposal of building the Silk Road economic belt, based on the idea of common development and prosperity, aims to better connect the Asian and European markets, will enrich the idea of the Silk Road with a new meaning, and benefit all the people along the belt. China and Germany, at the opposite ends of the belt, are two major economies that serve as the driving engines for economic growth respectively in Asia and Europe, Xi noted.

How does Russia fit into this? Now look at this map:

What or who is missing in all these maps and snippets?

The United States of America, that's what. 

The USA is nowhere in this picture... out of the loop... We can't have that can we?

What to do?

Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn, and caldron bubble. That's what. DS

How isolated is Russia?

With Russia facing sanctions from the US and some other countries after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine, India on Wednesday made it clear that it will not support any "unilateral measures" against Russian government. Times of India

Based on the fact that Russia and Ukraine have deep cultural, historical and economic connections, it is time for Western powers to abandon their Cold War thinking, stop trying to exclude Russia from the political crisis they failed to mediate, and respect Russia's unique role in mapping out the future of Ukraine. Xinhua

I have very little time for carefully constructed posts at the moment, so just a few lines hastily put together. 

Reading the news about American and EU sanctions against Russia, I am beginning to suspect that there is something more cooking here than the "story" we are being fed by the MSM. 

It might be noted that in his big speech, Putin thanked both China and India for their support... Can we say that Russia is "isolated" from the "international community" with 1/2 of humanity on their side?... DS

Dear God, will it ever end?

Abbie has nailed it.... If anything defines the period we live in, it is the sight of a nation of over 300M people, with historically unsurpassed military and economic power in a state of sluggish political and social paralysis... and managing to make such a crisis, one so objectively earth shaking and transcendental, mendacious, mediocre and boring to boot. DS

Hegemony, when it goes... "be a long time gone"

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The definitive importance of what has been lost in Iraq is only just beginning to sink in. We are experiencing, at this very moment, the end of an era that began in 1945.

Western leaders feeling 'orphaned' gather and rally to Washington looking for leadership that no longer exists.

This vacuum will not be solved when a new president is elected, the vacuum is structural not personal. Bush is only a symptom, not a true cause, a symbol not the reality, the bad smell, not the mess itself.

Living so many years in Spain and studying its history has made me especially aware of the mechanisms of 'decline and fall'. Fewer people are better equipped by their history than the Spanish to understand how a brave, talented, energetic people can be led to ruin by a decadent, ruling elite. Spain also offers the example of how, even at great cost and at great pain, it is possible for a great country to finally leave aside prideful narcissism and learn the lessons that history happily teaches to those who attend her. DS

Philip Stephens: America is still indispensable but it must work with others - Financial Times
Abstract: Early next week George W. Bush will be greeting Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, at the White House. A day or so later France’s Nicolas Sarkozy will pitch up in Washington. By the weekend, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, will be sharing a hamburger with the US president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Lame-duck president he may be but Mr Bush does not lack for foreign visitors.(...) If American power is still indispensable, it is no longer sufficient. America’s choices condition, often decisively, the decisions of others. But their assent cannot be taken for granted.(...) During Mr Bush’s unilateralist first term, one US official told me a little while ago, the assumption had been that “first we decide and then we tell the rest of the world”. During the second term there had been a genuine attempt to “listen before we decide”. Crucially, though, the bit that had not changed was “we decide”.(...) The common thread that runs through both sets of campaigns, though, is an assumption that the US can somehow turn back the clock to the world before Iraq. Thus Mrs Clinton tells readers of Foreign Affairs that though American leadership has been “wanting”, it is still “wanted” by the rest of the world. Mr Obama has written in the same journal that: “The American moment is not over but it must be seized anew.” To the extent that the US will remain the pre-eminent power for some decades yet, they are right. But two things are missing: recognition that the rise of other powers – notably China and India – is already diminishing America’s relative strength, and anything more than the vaguest of senses of how the US might shape this landscape. There lies the purpose for American leadership: to begin to design, as it did for the west after the second world war, an international system that puts great power co-operation rather than competition at its core. Many will say that is too much to ask of today’s candidates for the White House. They may be right. But in that case we should prepare for the new global disorder. READ IT ALL

Coming up empty

"I'm very sad to say that for very many people in the world, the symbol of America today is not the Statue of Liberty, which is one of the first things I saw as a child when approaching the shores of the U.S, but (the U.S. detention facility at) Guantanamo (Cuba). That legacy will take time to undo." Zbigniew Brzezinski - VOA

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This is the first time since the pre-Voltaire/Rousseau days that the world is without any utopia at all... Let that sink in for a moment. What an immense and incalculable loss!

The Soviet Union stopped being a model or path to utopia, long before the Berlin wall came down. Most observers date its fall from grace back to 1956, a year that marked Khruschev's exposure of Stalin's crimes against humanity and the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolution. Certainly by the "Prague Spring" of 1968 the Soviet Union had ceased to be any one's idea of a desirable future. Now it is America's turn to let humanity down.

For better or worse, what distinguishes the USA from such dull, but user friendly countries like Canada and Australia, is its explosive mixture of the puritan ethic with the French ideas of the enlightenment. You could make an allegorical monument to the intellectual foundation of the United States of America by erecting a huge sculptural group with John Calvin embracing Jean Jacques Rousseau over the cadaver of an American Indian, with a prostrate African slave embracing their feet... on a ground littered with tools.

If you amputate this intellectual legacy and stomp upon it as heavily as the Bush administration has done, you are committing a gross cultural crime and depriving humanity, including the Chinese and the Indians, of something that belongs to all of us... Just like Michelangelo's Pietá, Hiroshige's wood cuts or Bach's fugues... or clean air.

Having a prison which violates every norm of international law and every ancient tradition of English common law, precisely on a piece of land, Guantánamo, stolen from Cuba and then lecturing the Cubans as Bush has done on, I quote, "the importance for Cuba to be a free society, a society that respects human rights and human dignity, a society that honors the rule of law." is like taking a hammer and breaking off the marble noses of Jesus and the Virigin of La Pietá.

The problem with the USA at this moment is that, because of its power, it is still the belly button of the world... and everybody is staring at it, but America just can't seem to produce, can't cut the mustard... This decadence has worldwide repercussions, because Europe seems completely neutered intellectually by now and the rising powers like India and China don't seem to have any ideological content or any project for the future other than raising the levels of carbon dioxide.

I find it a clear symptom of this emptiness, how little music, how few good films, books, paintings and essays are coming out of either Europe or the States at this point.... Compare the situation today to the fertility of 1960s and 70s.

There is a famous bird, whose name I have forgotten, that flies in ever decreasing, concentric circles, till at last it disappears up its own rectum... Is this the "black hole" we are facing? DS

Barack Obama: too much, too soon... much too soon

David Seaton's News Links

Barack Obama says all the right things. I even believe he believes what he says; in other words he seems to be a real liberal and not a "brown Blair". It also appears that he has got the brains and even the "world view" necessary to be fabulous President of the United States... but not yet. Just like in boxing, in government, bringing along a hot, young prospect too quickly can ruin them. If elected in 2008 he would become president having even less administrative experience in government then George W. Bush did in the year 2000. Bush, after all, had been the governor of complex, major state. It would be better for Obama to finish his term in the US Senate, which establishes his voting record on all the major national issues and then get elected governor of Illinois and to run that complex state, with its mixture of urban and rural problems and huge budget successfully for two terms. Then Obamamania would not be some self-indulgent, American, "feel good" fad, but a serious, transformational political movement. He might actually make a great president. Running him now would be like taking the young Muhammad Ali straight from his gold medal win in the 1960 Rome Olympics and feeding him directly to Sonny Liston. George Will, an extraordinarily intelligent, well read, paleo-conservative pundit, who opposes everything Obama stands for and has everything to fear if he succeeds, is urging him to run. Obviously Will finds Obama a liberal nightmare and wants him to fail and to disappear. That should be a clear enough signal. DS

Phil Weiss over at New York Observer has some very perceptive things to say about the 'Obama fever', which I've taken the liberty to underline:

"The Obama boom is the American way of turning the corner. The hero-worship Barack Obama experienced in N.H. and the endless references to JFK are, as the senator said, not about him, they're about us. It's a spiritual reclamation. Americans like to think of themselves as idealists, yet our country has been dragged in the moral mud for years by this filthy war. The neocons can talk forever about the necessity to knock off Middle East heads of state as a sniper takes out a hostage-taker (Perle & Frum); but Americans don't like to think of themselves as the authors of assassination, devastation, disease, emigration, etc. They want to think of the world in more hopeful ways. That's what Obama is all about, reimagining the U.S. as a country that embraces progress and idealism. More power to him. READ IT ALL

Russia sells Iran sophisticated missile systems - Debka

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Debka is somehow connected to Israeli intelligence. It is reliable to the extent that it reflects that mentality and its hope and fears. Read with that filter it is often interesting. In this case what appears here is the same as the press agency's reports, but with a bit more background and more "flavor". The bottom line for Debka is that when the Tor anti-aircraft system is fully deployed in six months time Iran, will be invulnerable to US and Israeli attack. So that gives us some sort of objective time-line. I always return to my old saw: it could have been different with Russia. The Clinton administration made grave, historical errors in treating such an important country so shabbily and so frivolously at its darkest hour. If handled with the care that post-war Germany received, Russia might have become a positive and fundamental player in that "New World Order" that people bandied about in the early 90s. Stripping Russia's assets, economic, historical and geopolitical; kicking them when they were down, has led to this. DS

LINK TO DEBKA: The first of 29 Tor-M1 systems in the $700m deal have been delivered to Iran by Moscow despite US opposition to their sale of a weapon widely regarded as the most advanced of its kind in the world. Some Iranian and Russian air defense experts say its full deployment at Iran’s nuclear installations will make them virtually invulnerable to American or Israeli attack in the foreseeable future. Therefore, no more than six months remain, until the Russian Tor-M1 systems are in place, for any attempt to knock out Iran’s nuclear weapons industry. DEBKAfile’s military sources disclose that Iran’s military and Revolutionary Guards units are on top war alert for the second month. Their fighters and bombers are parked on the runways ready for takeoff, their surface missiles including Shehab are a button’s push away from firing and their war ships and submarines cruise out at sea in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. Tehran is determined not to be caught napping by any surprise attacks. The fact that officials in Moscow, albeit unidentified, announced the Tor-M1 missile’s delivery to Iran indicates the Russian president Vladimir Putin has decided to shrug off US objections, including a request put to him in person by President George W. Bush when they talked in Moscow and Hanoi earlier this month. DEBKAfile adds some information about this super-missile: The first batteries to be delivered come ready with Iranian crews trained at Russian air defense corps facilities. The advantages of the Tor-M1 system are principally its ability to simultaneously destroy two targets traveling at up to 700km/h in any weather by day or night; its powerful, jamming-resistant radar with electronic beam control, and its vertically-launched missiles’ ability to maintain high speed and maneuverability throughout their operation. According to military experts, the 3D pulse Doppler electronically beam-steered E/F-band surveillance radar feeds to a digital fire control computer range, azimuth, elevation and automatic threat evaluation data on up to 48 targets. The 10 most dangerous targets are automatically tracked and prioritized for engagement. The maximum radar range is billed as 25 kilometers but may be more. On the lower right side of the tracking radar, which is located at the front of the turret, is an automatic TV tracking system with a range of 20 km that enables the system to work in a heavy ECM environment. Last spring, the United States called on all countries to stop all arms exports to Iran.