Natylie Baldwin's Blog, page 46

Daniel Davis: Donald Trump’s Ukraine ‘One Day’ Peace Plan Just Smashed Into Reality

By Daniel Davis, 1945, 12/31/24

Daniel L. Davis is a four-time combat veteran, retired Army Lt.Col. at Defense Priorities and host of the Daniel Davis Deep Dive show on YouTube.

Donald Trump has been clear since the early part of his presidential campaign that he would end the Ukraine war “in one day.”

He has been even more emphatic about seeking a negotiated settlement since winning the election.

But now, barely three weeks before assuming office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has publicly put the kibosh on the plan advocated by Trump’s Special Envoy to Ukraine and Russia, retired General Kieth Kellogg.

What does that rejection signal for the likely ending of the Russia-Ukraine War?

The Ukraine War Headed Into 2025: What Happens Now?

Short answer: it’s not suitable for Kyiv – but even that ‘ugly’ deal is better than the alternative: continuing to fight until the Ukrainian Army suffers an outright military defeat in the field.

Here’s the sober truth: too few in the West (and especially in Washington) are still unable or unwilling to contemplate: the war is already lost for Ukraine, and there is nothing militarily that can be done to avert that outcome now. The best that can be done for the Ukrainian side is to conclude the war on the best of the ugly terms Trump can muster for Ukraine.

It is crucial Gen. Kellogg and Trump, along with his entire national security team, understand the ground-truth realities of this war before entering negotiations. 

Thus far, they have not.

According to an analysis of the Kellogg Plan, Trump would seek to force Russia to the negotiation table by a series of carrots and sticks, starting with a ceasefire and then negotiations to end the fighting.

Key to the Kellogg plan is to postpone the thorny issue of NATO membership for Ukraine by a decade or more and the “concession” of allowing Russia to keep the territories it possesses upon the assumption of negotiations.

It would also offer a series of bilateral security guarantees for Ukraine and keep pressure on Russia by continuing to provide military aid to Ukraine until a deal is reached. British advocates have also offered U.K. troops as possible peacekeepers to patrol the final deal.

However, there is a significant problem with these plans: they assume the Russians would submit to such pressures and agree to the concessions.

They will almost certainly do neither.

Russia Response to the Ukraine Peace Plan: Bad News

On Monday, Lavrov rejected some of the key provisions, saying the Russians “are certainly not satisfied with the proposals sounding on behalf of representatives of the president-elect’s team.”

Last week, Lavrov said any talk of a ceasefire was a “path to nowhere” and that the Russian side would not consider one. What they would consider, he said, is what Putin declared on June 14th when he said the war could end if several key conditions were met.

These include the complete surrender of the four oblasts Russia annexed in 2022, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, the declaration of no NATO membership ever for Ukraine, and security guarantees for Russia. Putin has said he is not interested in a ceasefire because he claims NATO would merely use the time to re-arm and retrain Ukraine’s Army and resume the fighting.

Further, an examination of the battle map shows significant portions of those four oblasts still under Ukrainian control. To reach a deal under Russia’s position, Ukraine would have to give up significant swaths of its territory that it had not lost to Russia.

That means to end the war on diplomatic terms the Russians say they would accept, Trump would have to agree to a deal that surrenders even more Ukrainian territory and publicly state Ukraine will never be admitted to NATO – both highly emotional issues that presently no one in the West or Ukraine will contemplate. Here’s the massive problem for Trump and Ukraine: these aren’t ‘maximalist’ desires on Russia’s part; they’re entry points for discussions.

Suppose Trump doesn’t agree to these terms. In that case, the Russians will simply continue the war, slowly destroying the Ukrainian Armed Forces, until eventually they capture by force of arms what they’re seeking to obtain by negotiations. Russia can militarily accomplish these objectives, even if at a very high price. And that’s what the Trump team must understand. Putin doesn’t have to negotiate. He can seize what they want by force, and there’s nothing Trump or Zelensky can do to stop them.

Glenn Diesen: Russia’s Pursuit of Technological Sovereignty

By Glenn Diesen, Substack, 12/13/24

The global economy, including capitalism itself, is currently being transformed by a new industrial revolution, as the digital and technological world start to merge with the physical one. Russia’s ability to remain a great power and even to survive as a state will depend on the extent to which it can develop technological sovereignty in the new age.

Technological sovereignty refers to the ability of a nation to have control over its own technological infrastructure. As digital giants increasingly transform and take over crucial parts of the economy, a state must have a solid national digital ecosystem to enjoy industrial and political sovereignty. The objective of technological sovereignty is to enhance the competitiveness of the production process, to elevate the standard of living for citizens, and to reduce dependency on foreign powers to the extent it diminishes political sovereignty.

Russia’s strength is its maturing national digital ecosystem, although its weakness is the apparent absence of a clear technological and economic strategy as it moves forward. Because of this, Russia is unlikely to take a leading innovating role in the world, although a follower strategy would be ideal.

Russia switched from a Marxist economy to a neoliberal economic model in the 1990s and has since pursued course correction towards a not clearly defined strategy policy of technological sovereignty. While Russia has made great progress in advancing technological sovereignty, one often gets the impression that Russia’s economic model is ad hoc and largely reactive in response to Western economic coercion. What appears to be missing is a wider debate and clearly formulated strategies about Russia’s technological sovereignty as the most important component of its economic and political future.

This article argues that since the Industrial Revolution and the birth of capitalism, there have been concerns over the concentration of economic power domestically, as well as concerns over excessive dependency on foreign actors. The ability of a state to resolve these issues depends on the strength of its technological sovereignty.

The Domestic Economy: The Distribution of Wealth and Competitiveness

With each new technology that increases productivity, the subsequent increased income will be concentrated in the hands of the capital owners. If left unresolved, this may eventually lead to economic hardship, societal fragmentation and political instability. This challenge posed by technological innovations were also acknowledged by liberal economists, such as David Ricardo:

“My mistake arose from the supposition, that whenever the net income of a society increased, its gross income would also increase; I now, however, see reason to be satisfied that the one fund, from which landlords and capitalists derive their revenue, may increase, while the other, that upon which the labouring class mainly depend, may diminish”.[1]

This trend is exacerbated by rent-seeking, in which actors who hold existing resources or favourable market conditions can extract wealth without adding reciprocal value to production. In the age of economic neoliberalism, it is worth remembering that liberal economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill all recognised the need to limit the power of the rentier class in order for capitalism to function.

An ideal and stable capitalist system would aim to reduce the concentration of wealth, improve the standard of living for people, and increase economic competitiveness by taxing rent-seekers and use the funds to develop infrastructure. During the rise of America’s version of industrial capitalism in the 19th century, government-funded infrastructure and education development improved the standard of living for many and made industries more competitive in international markets, which ideally could have been funded by taxing the rentier class.

Landlords, banks, and monopolies are the most common examples of rent-seekers, which lay the foundation for an oligarchic class that diminishes economic competitiveness by extracting wealth from the production process. Digital giants can fall within all three categories as digital platforms provide the “land” for digital services, they increasingly become providers of banking and financial services, and digital giants have a proclivity for monopolies.

Digital giants naturally form monopolies due to limited ability for diversification and the convenience of having one platform as a shared marketplace. Capital-intensive monopolies emerge due to high fixed costs and low variable costs of establishing and expanding digital platforms, which resembles the economic thinking that led to the creation of 19th-century railway monopolies. The high fixed cost includes the high processing power and access to an abundance of data, while the variable cost of operating in the digital realm is minimal. Subsequently, digital monopolies emerge due to the high entry barrier for competitors and the incentivise for predatory pricing by the dominant company.

Digital giants represent the key infrastructure that can either function as a public utility to increase the standard of living and increase competitiveness, or as rent-seeking monopolies that undermine capitalism. Amazon as a digital platform made over $50 billion in sales in the EU in 2022 and paid zero tax, just like it had the year before. Similarly, Uber is a platform that connects providers (drivers) and consumers (passengers), which results in a large profit for the company that derives from the platform. Furthermore, the data that acts as the lifeblood for the development of AI, is also extracted and sent across the Atlantic.

Digital giants have become the largest companies in the world, with an immense concentration of wealth as there is no need for a large workforce. Furthermore, programming jobs are often outsourced to a global pool of freelancers or replaced with temporary and contract jobs. The “gig economy” is ushering in an era of neo-feudalism in which today’s labourers become the new serfs. As new technology intensifies the concentration of wealth, some national control over the tech giants is becoming much needed. All the largest digital platforms in Europe are American, which is why Europe’s economic future and ambitions for political autonomy will deteriorate over the next few years.

Tech giants will adopt even greater monopolistic tendencies and subsequent rent-seeking abilities due to their economic scope; leadership in one industry provide a competitive advantage in seemingly unrelated industries. Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage is turned on its head as it becomes a competitive advantage to do everything in today’s day and age. Digital giants are more capable of using shared technological infrastructure, common development and design processes, complementary data analytics, and overall synergy effects. A new economy is emerging in which digital companies begin to absorb entire industries. Case in point, in both China and Russia: domestic digital companies have launched self-driving cars, taken over large parts of the taxi industry, food delivery and even launched their own payment systems.

In the Fourth Industrial Revolution, digital giants are becoming even more powerful rent-seekers. The Fourth Industrial Revolution can largely be defined by the digital world manipulating the physical world with self-driving cars, automation, robotics, the Internet of Things, Virtual Reality, additive manufacturing, drones, smart cities, smart infrastructure, blockchain, digital farming, biotechnology and digital health solutions. With artificial intelligence, every aspect of the economy and society will be revolutionised, and the failure to establish a domestic digital ecosystem will result in technological colonisation by foreign powers.

The International Economy: Technological Sovereignty and Political Independence

Industrial capitalism of the 19th century linked industrialisation to nation-building as excessive dependence on foreign technology and manufactured goods undermined political sovereignty. Economic interdependence is required to increase economic efficiency and prosperity, yet the political consequence of interdependence is some loss of autonomy and some gain of political influence. States subsequently seek to manipulate the symmetry of interdependence by reducing one’s own dependence on others and increasing the reliance of others on one’s own economy.

Geoeconomics is largely about manipulating the symmetry of economic interdependence as it enables a state to increase both its autonomy and influence. Advanced technology is at the core of strategic industries, given the reduced ability to diversify, which implies higher revenue and dependence. Friedrich List aptly argued that the logic of economic liberalism for market efficiency must be balanced by the political realism of the world being divided into sovereign states: “As long as the division of the human race into independent nations exists, the political economy will as often be at variance with cosmopolitan principles”.[2]

Britain’s hegemonic strategy of the 19th century was, to a larger extent, dependent on a monopolistic position in manufacturing, which produced high revenues and political influence. Barriers to entry, intellectual property rights protection, and anti-competitive practices can be considered rent-seeking activities in which the technological hegemon’s activities result in income. Furthermore, technological hegemony creates asymmetrical interdependence in which access to vital technology can be converted into political influence.

Britain repealed its Corn Laws in 1846, as free trade was instrumental in cementing technological and industrial leadership. Under free trade, Britain’s mature industries (high quality, low cost) could outcompete the infant industries (low quality, high cost) of other countries. Free trade was thus seen as a policy to saturate foreign markets with its manufactured goods and thus obstruct their industrialisation. As argued in the British parliament, with free trade “foreign nations would become valuable Colonies to us, without imposing on us the responsibility of governing them”.[3] David Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage similarly envisioned that the technological competency of manufacturing would be concentrated in Britain, while the rest of the world could compete for the export of agricultural produce: “It is this principle [comparative advantage] which determines that wine shall be made in France and Portugal, that corn shall be grown in America and Poland, and that hardware and other goods shall be manufactured in England”.[4]

Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufacturers laid the foundation for the American System in which the government used protectionist means to industrialise as excessive dependence on Britain would undermine America’s political independence. The lessons learned from the American system were also found in Germany, largely through the work of Friedrich List, who warned against becoming Britain’s technological colony by failing to industrialise: “The mother nation supplies the colonies with manufactured goods and obtains in return their surplus produce of agricultural products and raw materials.[5]

Following the destruction of China in the Opium Wars, Japan also realized that technological sovereignty and industrialisation were required conditions for political independence. Erasmus Peshine Smith, a second-generation economic nationalist supporting the American system, served as an advisor to the Japanese Emperor in the 1870s following the Meiji restoration to assist with the development of a Japanese version of the American system to preserve Japan’s sovereignty.[6]

Russia learned a similar lesson after its defeat in the Crimean War in 1856, largely due to its lack of industrialisation. The subsequent Great Reforms starting in the 1860s eventually led to the industrial policies of Sergey Witte in the 1890s that were inspired by Friedrich List. The lessons of the past were seemingly forgotten as Russia succumbed to neoliberal economic practices in the 1990s. Under Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage, Russia de-industrialised by exporting its natural resources and importing industrial goods. Making matters worse, the revenue fuelled a rent-seeking oligarchic class that reflected growing corruption within the country, which could be cultivated by foreign powers.

Russia gradually began to rediscover economic statecraft and reverse the energy curse by instead using its revenue from energy to temporarily subsidize infant industries until they became competitive in international markets. However, many of these policies were a response to economic sanctions and its increasingly problematic relationship with the West.

A Russian Strategy of Technological Preparedness

Russia should not embrace a policy of economic and technological autarchy that would render its industries uncompetitive, yet it should also avoid excessive dependence on foreign technologies. The overarching goal must be to balance technological sovereignty with economic liberalism.

Russia’s leading digital platforms are already Russian, and the objective should be to pursue technological preparedness. While Russia can pursue innovative leadership in certain areas, Russia should pursue a follower strategy of “technological preparedness” in other areas. Technological preparedness entails the capability to replicate and adapt foreign innovations rapidly into its domestic digital ecosystem and control its own data. Imitation is essential because it is unnecessary for every company and country to reinvent the wheel. Technological preparedness requires the technological know-how, domestic technological ecosystems, skilled workforce, and government support required to rapidly adopt new technologies and implement spin-offs.

A follower strategy has certain advantages as more resources can be devoted to implementation. A technological hegemon will seek to slow down technological diffusion and extend the first-mover advantage, while technological followers will seek to encourage faster technology proliferation. The emergence of a multipolar international system subsequently improves Russia’s position.

The guiding objective should be to develop a domestic digital ecosystem in which Russia controls a majority share of the dominant platforms. China is evidently the most important partner for Russia, although technological partnerships with other rising powers such as India would enable Russia to diversify and thus avoid excessive dependence on a more powerful actor. Case in point, Russian digital giants such as Yandex developed a partnership with foreign partners such as Uber in the self-driving car and taxi industry, which even enabled Yandex to eventually buy out Uber’s share.

Throughout history, states have sought to establish a certain degree of national control over strategic industries such as shipping, energy and agriculture due to national security. National control over digital giants is evidently an issue of national security as they transform all areas of the economy and society, concentrate wealth, and create dependencies at an unprecedented level. China is building its superpower status based on technological sovereignty, while Europe discusses digital industrial policies and nationalising AI due to its disruptive impact. The prevailing argument in Washington is that what is good for Silicon Valley must be good for America. Russia should formulate a similar policy to strengthen technological sovereignty.

Lord Robert Skidelsky: Why Is the UK So Invested in the Russia–Ukraine War?

By Lord Robert Skidelsky, The American Conservative, 1/1/25

Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election of November 2024 has shredded the liberal script about the Ukraine war. That script was to offer unconditional moral and material support for a Ukrainian victory, defined minimally as recovery of the invaded territories of Crimea and Donbass. In Britain, it was considered almost treasonable to suggest otherwise.

Even before Trump’s election, the script had subtly changed into “doing what it takes” to put Ukraine in the best possible bargaining position in peace talks with Russia. This shift recognized that, unless the level of Western support were massively beefed up, Ukraine faced imminent military defeat. In the face of military reverses and with no expectation of further military aid from the Biden administration, President Volodymyr Zelensky too has abandoned his maximalist position and now pins his hopes on diplomatic pressure to induce Russia to negotiate. 

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 22, 2022, I have been one of a handful of advocates in the UK of a negotiated peace.  On March 3, 2022, I co-signed a letter to the Financial Times with the former British Foreign Secretary David Owen which urged NATO to put forward detailed proposals for a new security pact with Russia. On May 19, 2022, I called for the resumption of the “Ankara peace process” in the same paper.  I didn’t then know that bilateral peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, hosted by the Turkish government, had been aborted by the visit of Britain’s then–prime minister, Boris Johnson, to Kyiv on April 6, promising Ukraine all the help it needed to go on fighting. There were several further peace calls by myself, sometimes in good company, in the next two and half years, with increasing emphasis on the danger of escalation unless peace were quickly secured. But the only front-line British politician who agreed with this line was Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform Party. From the non-NATO world came peace initiatives from China and Brazil. 

Trump’s second coming will bring about a shift from a passive war policy to an active peace policy. This is bound to bring about a ceasefire, possibly by the spring. That the peace terms remain vague is less important than that the killing will stop. Once stopped it will not easily be restarted. The question is why it has taken so many hundreds of thousands of lives, killed and wounded on both sides, to reach this moment. And what lessons can we learn? 

The most obvious lesson is the importance of diplomacy. All nations have their own story to tell. The clash of their stories can cause or inflame wars.  It is the traditional task of diplomacy to reconcile conflicting stories so that like can live in peace with unlike. The Ukraine war resulted from the catastrophic failure of diplomacy—in fact the disappearance of the global class of diplomats—leaving the leaders of belligerent countries free to pursue their ambitions without accurate knowledge of others’ reactions. In the run up to the invasion of 2022, Putin’s pronouncements looked too much like sabre-rattling; the United States and its NATO allies made little effort to try to settle the security issue which lay at the heart of the conflict with Russia. After Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, there was a complete breakdown of trust. Chancellor Angela Merkel is reported to have said to Vladimir Putin: Can you guarantee that you will not attempt to make further changes of borders? To which the Russian president is said to have replied: Can you guarantee that NATO will not expand further?

It is generally believed in the West that Putin’s stated fear of NATO’s eastward expansion was simply an excuse for Russia to try to regain lands it had lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is too simple. For centuries Russia had seen these “lost lands”—the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia—as part of its empire’s shield against foreign invaders. Putin’s story is not just propaganda. Its roots are to be found in the mixture of 19th-century Russian nationalism and the geographic vulnerability of the Tsarist empire. 

Most of us in the West simply cannot recognize in NATO the “encircling claws” of Borodin’s Prince Igor, or the “insidious enemy” of Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace. NATO, we insist, is a purely defensive organization; countries join to defend themselves against Russia, not to attack it. This, however, is not the general view of NATO in the world outside the alliance, where its extension is largely, though not universally, viewed as an extension of Western imperialism.  The Russian Federation’s hostility to the eastward expansion of NATO has been the most consistent thread in its foreign policy in the quarter century since the collapse of the Soviet Union. How could we in the West, with the notable exception of diplomats like George Kennan and Henry Kissinger, not have understood that when Russia had regained strength this was one wrong it would seek to put right?  

We have here two opposing stories, each with some claim to truth, and no diplomatic mechanism for reconciling them. 

Britain has been Biden’s cheerleader in stoking the Russia–Ukraine war. We must turn to history to understand why. Modern Britain has never been truly “isolationist” because, until well into the 20th century, it had a world empire that needed defending. Outlining the principles of British foreign policy in 1852, the Foreign Secretary Lord Granville wrote that “it is the duty and the interest of this country, having possessions scattered over the whole world, and priding itself on its advanced state of civilization, to encourage moral, intellectual and physical progress among all other nations.” This self-image of Britain as both global policeman and mentor bred a conflict between the muscular and pacifist wings of British liberalism, with non-interventionists like John Bright and Richard Cobden arguing that it was free trade which would civilize the world and the interventionists saying that free trade was only possible in a world made civil by British power and British values. What is striking today is the collapse of that pacifist tradition

So, when Tony Blair, Britain’s Prime Minister said in Chicago in 1999 that “the spread of our values makes us more secure,” he was proclaiming a continuing mission of British foreign policy. The claim to the higher moral ground of democracy and human rights would justify attempts to spread western values to those areas that remained mired in dictatorship and autocracy. Arguably Britain’s most successful export was the export of its moral evangelism  to the United States as America emerged from its isolationism.

Nevertheless, this historical story does not exhaust the causes of Britain’s exceptional belligerence.

One needs to add the shame of the British establishment over the Munich Agreement of 1938, by which Britain ceded the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to Hitler and thereby helped unleash the Second World War. One can hardly overstate the strength of Britain’s Munich reflex. Thus, when the Egyptian leader Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, both Prime Minister Anthony Eden and the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell were quick to compare him to Hitler. And the Tory MP Sir Robert Boothby provided the rationale for a military response, which reasoning also underlies the current British reaction to Putin: “If we were to allow him [Nasser] to get away with it, it would be a damaging blow to the whole concept of international law.” Where does the devil stop?

The comparison of Putin with Hitler comes from a sweeping generalization that sees democracy as the peaceful form of the state and autocracy as its warlike form. Against this we should counterpose the notably “realist” summary of historian A.J.P. Taylor: “Bismarck fought ‘necessary’ wars and killed thousands; the idealists of the twentieth century fought ‘just’ wars and killed millions.” It’s the idealists who are more likely to want to win at all costs, the autocrats who want to stop wars before their thrones crumble. 

At some point genuine western admiration for Ukraine’s struggle for its independence has morphed into a proxy war against Russia, with only a tacit bow to Ukraine’s own best interests. The West’s promise of unconditional support for a Ukrainian victory undoubtedly prolonged the war by blinding Ukrainians to the realistic prospect of a limited victory which nevertheless secured genuine independence Unforgivable is the British and American promise to give Ukraine “all it takes” for victory, when they had no intention whatsoever of doing so, Ukraine was sold a pup by Boris Johnson in 2022 and has been bleeding ever since.

Which brings us back to Trump. Both those who applaud and those who attack his approach to international relations describe it as “transactional.” Supporters argue that it will enable Trump to “do deals” with dictators in America’s interest; opponents deplore precisely its lack of a moral dimension. What both sides miss is that peace itself is a moral objective—in Christian teaching, it is the highest good. Pope Francis has frequently called for negotiations to end the Ukraine war, most recently in his Christmas message.  It is the refusal of our hawks and their passive camp-followers to recognize the paramount claims of peace which is the biggest danger facing the world today; Trump offers the most promising escape from an increasingly dangerous future. 

Robert Jacob Alexander Skidelsky is an independent peer of Britain’s House of Lords, and a renowned scholar on Keynesianism.

Alastair Crooke: The “King-Makers” Pull the Rug from Syria, Yet Again… A “Greek Tragedy” Begins

By Alastair Crooke, Strategic Culture Foundation, 12/23/24

Syria has been disintegrated and pillaged in the name of ‘liberating’ Syrians from the threat of ISIS, which they – Washington – had installed in the first place.

James Jeffrey, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and Turkey, in a March 2021 interview with PBS Frontline, laid out very plainly the template for what has just happened in Syria this month:

“Syria, given its size, its strategic location, its historical importance, is the pivot point for whether [there can be] an American-managed security system in the region … And so you’ve got this general alliance that is locked in with us. But … the stress point is greatest in Syria”.

Jeffrey explained (in the 2021 interview) why the U.S. shifted its to support to Jolani and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS):

“We got Mike Pompeo to issue a waiver to allow us to give aid to HTS – I received and sent messages to HTS” -The messages coming back from HTS were: “We [HTS] want to be your friend. We’re not terrorists. We’re just fighting Assad””.

The PBS Frontline interviewer asks: The U.S. was “supporting indirectly the armed opposition”? To which Jeffrey responds:

“It was important to us that HTS not disintegrate … our policy was … was to leave HTS alone … And the fact that we haven’t targeted [HTS] ever, the fact that we have never raised our voice to the Turks about their cohabitation with them — in fact, I used this example the last time I was talking to very senior Turks – when they started bitching about this relationship we [the U.S.] have with the SDF [in eastern Syria]”.

“I said to them, “Look, Turkey has always maintained that you want us in northeast Syria, which they do. But you don’t understand. We can’t be in northeast Syria without the platform, because we only have hundreds of troops there”; … I said: “It’s just like you in Idlib …”.

“We want you to be in Idlib, but you can’t be in Idlib without having a platform, and that platform is largely HTS. Now, unlike the SDF, HTS is a UN-designated official terrorist organisation. Have I ever, or has any American official ever, complained to you about what you’re doing there with HTS? No …”.

David Miller, a British academic, has noted that in 2015, prominent Syrian Sunni Muslim scholar, Shaykh al-Yaqoubi (who is anti-Assad), was unconvinced by Jolani’s efforts to rebrand Al Qa’ida as Jabhat al-Nusra. Jolani, in his al-2013 Al-Jazeera interview twice confirmed his allegiance to al-Qa’ida, saying that he received orders from its leader, Dr Ayman [al-Zawahiri] … and those were to not target the West. He confirmed his own position as being that of hardline intolerance toward those who practiced a ‘heretical’ Islam.

Miller comments:

“While ISIS put on suits; allowed Syria to be carved up by the U.S.; preach peace with the Zionist state; want free markets; and cut gas deals with their regional patrons – their ‘true-believers’… in the Sunni identitarian diaspora haven’t yet clocked that they’ve been sold out – as was always the plan”.

“In private, the planners of this war in NATO states laugh about sending young Salafi cannon fodder from around the world into a meat grinder. The $2000 salaries are a mere speck of sand compared to the gas and construction wealth that is expected to be returned to Turkish, Qatari, Israeli and American coffers. They killed Palestine for this, and they’ll spend the next 30 years justifying it, based on whatever line the very expensive PR firms hired by the NATO and Gulf states shill to them…The Syrian regime change operation is the rug pull of the century”.

Of course, James Jeffrey’s account was nothing new. Between 1979 and 1992, the CIA spent billions of dollars funding, arming, and training Afghan Mujahideen militia (like Osama bin Laden) in an attempt to bleed the USSR dry by pulling it into a quagmire. It was from the ranks of the Mujahideen that al-Qa’eda emerged.

“And yet, by the 2010s, even as the U.S. was ostensibly at war with al-Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan – it was secretly working with it – in Syria on a plan to overthrow Assad. The CIA spent around $1 billion per year training and arming a wide network of rebel groups to this end. As Jake Sullivan, told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a leaked 2012 email, “AQ [al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria”, as Alan Macleod observes in Consortium News.

Turkish press accounts largely confirm this Jeffrey scenario was the current gameplan: Ömer Önhon, former senior Ambassador and Deputy Under-Secretary in charge of Middle East and Asia at the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, writes that:

“the operation to overthrow Assad’s regime in Syria was meticulously planned for over a year, with coordinated involvement from Turkey, the United States, and several other nations. Through various statements it has become clear that Assad’s departure resulted from an intricate web of agreements between virtually all stakeholders. Whilst HTS is actively working to rebrand itself – this transformation remains to be proven.”

This HTS story has a precedent: In the summer following Israel’s 2006 (unsuccessful) war on Hizbullah, Dick Cheney sat in his office loudly bemoaning Hizbullah’s continuing strength; and worse still, that it seemed to him that Iran had been the primary beneficiary from the U.S. 2003 Iraq war.

Cheney’s guest – the then Saudi Intelligence Chief, Prince Bandar – vigorously concurred (as chronicled by John Hannah, who participated in the meeting) and, to general surprise, Prince Bandar proclaimed that Iran yet could be cut to size: Syria was the ‘weak’ link that could be collapsed via an Islamist insurgency. Cheney’s initial scepticism turned to elation as Bandar said that U.S. involvement might be unnecessary. He – Bandar – would orchestrate and manage the project: ‘Leave it to me’, he said. Bandar separately told John Hannah: “The King knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria”.

Well … that first effort did not succeed. It led to bloody civil war, but ultimately President Assad’s government survived.

So, Jeffrey was simply reiterating in 202 its sequel: the original Wahabbi-led ‘rug pull’ on Syria by the Gulf was simply to be reverse engineered into a HTS hit by a rebranded amalgam of various militia made up primarily of former fighters (many not Syrian) from al-Qaeda/al-Nusra and ISIS, directed – in this second iteration – by Turkish Intelligence and financed by Qatar.

Syria thus has been disintegrated and pillaged in the name of ‘liberating’ Syrians from the threat of ISIS, which they – Washington – had installed in the first place, and which the U.S. then used to justify the north-east of Syria’s occupation by U.S. forces. In the same mode, the unspoken part of this plan is to make secular Syria – with its legal system taken from France – ‘Islamic’ (“we will implement Islamic law”) to justify the Israeli attacks and land grabs, which are being presented as ‘defensive measures against jihadists’.

Of course, it is correct that there is likely money to be made from these events. It was never proven, but seismic surveys before the first Syria war began in 2011, seemed to show that there may well be substrata deposits of oil or gas in Syria, beyond the relatively small fields in the north-east. And yes, re-construction will be a bonanza for Turkey’s languishing construction sector.

Syria’s ailing military was no direct military threat to Israel per se. So you may wonder, why are they tearing the place apart? “Israel’s goal here is to basically wreck Syria”, Professor Mearsheimer opines. “It’s not in large part because of Israel, by the way. I think the Americans and the Turks played a much more important role than Israel did – in wrecking Syria”. “The country is wrecked and I don’t know anybody who thinks that the rebels who are now in control in Damascus are going to be able to restore order in that country … From Israel’s point of view, this is a perfectly fine situation”, Mearsheimer adds.

U.S. anti-Russia hawks also hoped that Russia might take the bait of a wrecked Syria to get enmired into a widening Middle East quagmire.

All of which takes us directly back to Jeffrey’s statement: “Syria, given its size, its strategic location, its historical importance, is the pivot point for whether [there can be] an American-managed security system in the region …”.

Syria has been from the outset – from 1949 – ‘the balancer’ to Israel in the region. That is now over, leaving only Iran to balance the Israeli thrust to a ‘Greater Israel’. It is no surprise then that the Israelis are agitating for the Americans to join with them in another orgy of destruction – this time to be visited on Iran.

Did Russia have foreknowledge of what was afoot in Idlib, and the orchestration of a transition of power? Of course! The very effective Russian services must have known, as this Syria project has been ongoing since the mid 1970s (through the Hudson Institute and Senator Scoop Jackson).

Assad had been signalling over the last four years, his desperate plan with Saudi, UAE and Egypt to a move towards a more pro-Israeli/pro-Western stance, in the hope of normalising with Washington and thereby gaining some sanctions relief.

Assad’s ploy failed – and Syria likely will emerge as ‘Greek tragedy’ whereby tragedy evolves as actors play out their own natures. Quiescent ethnic and sectarian tensions likely will re-kindle; wildfires will catch. The lid is off. And Russia was never going to take the bait of plunging in.

The U.S.-Israeli alliance has long wanted Syria. And now, they have got it. Any concomitant mayhem is down to them. Yes, the U.S. – in theory – may applaud itself for achieving more of “an American managed security [and energy dominant flow] system”.

But the U.S. ruling strata, however, were never going to let Europe be energy independent. The U.S. needs West Asia’s energy assets for itself – to collateralise its debt-overload. European states are left to tumble, as the fiscal crunch bites and European growth tails away.

Others may see a collateral scenario – that a conflicted and possibly re-radicalised Middle East will inflict further strain onto the already ‘livid’ domestic social tensions in Europe.

Israel nonetheless is relishing its ‘win’. Winning what? Former IDF Chief of Staff and Defence Minister ‘Bogie’ Ya’alon puts it this way:

“The current Israeli government’s path is to conquer, annex, commit ethnic cleansing … and to establish Jewish settlements. Polls show some 70% of Israelis, sometimes more, support this – AND for Israel to be a liberal democracy”.

“This [contradictory] path will lead us to destruction”, he concludes.

What other can be the final end to this Zionist project? There are more than seven million Palestinians between the ‘River and the Sea’. Are they all to vanish from the map?

Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.

Dmitry Trenin: What Will Happen to Ukraine after the Special Military Operation

By Dmitry Trenin, Profil, 12/18/24 (Translated by karlof1)

There is a rule: in peacetime, prepare for war, and in wartime, think about organizing peace. Now, while the conflict in Ukraine is not over, our thoughts are about victory. We are sure it will come. But it is time now to start thinking about the world that will follow. Paraphrasing Stalin’s famous statement, we can say: Bandera come and go, but the Ukrainian people remain.

Ukraine within the borders of December 31, 1991 has not existed for a long time. Part of the territories of the former Ukrainian SSR—Crimea, Donbass and Novorossiya—became part of the Russian Federation through referendums. It is possible that over time, some other regions will follow this path. Perhaps Odessa with Nikolaev, perhaps Kharkov with Dnepropetrovsk. Perhaps something else. But definitely not all. It is worth attaching only what can be really integrated and, if necessary, retained.

Some part of today’s Ukrainian territories will remain outside the Russian Federation. What will this Ukraine be like? The future of Russia depends on the answer to this question–-and in fact it is a very serious challenge. In the recent example of Syria, we received a clear confirmation of the military maxim of the great Alexander Suvorov: an undercut forest grows.

In civilizational, cultural, historical, and ethnic relations, Ukraine–-or at least most of it–-is an integral part of the Russian world. However, today this territory is at the mercy of forces desperately fighting the Russian world. It is impossible not to notice that even these forces themselves and the West standing behind them are fighting us with the hands, in fact, of Russian people fighting in the Russian way— stubbornly, inventively and evilly, despite huge losses.

The liberation mission of Russia–-its historical task–-does not end with the liberation of the cities and villages of Donbass and Novorossiya. It is aimed at liberating the whole of Ukraine from the anti-Russian Bandera regime, its neo-Nazi ideology, as well as from the influence of external forces hostile to the Russian world.

Like any other country, Ukraine belongs first and foremost to the people living on its territory. Russia, however, is closely and inextricably linked with this people and the land on which they live. After the end of the war, we owe it to ourselves, first of all, to help our neighbors build a new Ukraine–-initially a reconciled and then a peaceful neighbor, in the medium term–-a partner, and in the long term–-an ally.

Russia has historical experience in turning military opponents into friends or reliable fellow citizens. Suffice it to recall the revival of the Chechen Republic, which became a stronghold of stability in the North Caucasus; the alliance of former mujahideen with the Afghan “northern alliance” or the example of the GDR and a number of other satellite countries of Nazi Germany after World War II.

In the Russian expert community, there are different visions of post-war Ukraine.

The most radical option is for Russia to take control of the entire territory of Ukraine, up to Lviv, and access to the borders with NATO countries. Logically, this military success is followed by a political continuation–-the second “reunification of Ukraine with Russia”, which actually means the abolition of Ukrainian statehood. We will not discuss the realism of such an outcome of the NWO [SMO] from a military point of view. But we can say for sure: there are reasonable doubts about the ability to keep all of Ukraine under Moscow’s control and then integrate it entirely into the Russian Federation, as well as about the material cost for Russia of such a solution to the issue.

The opposite, least acceptable and most dangerous option for us is an embittered Bandera pro-Western Ukraine with slightly reduced borders compared to 2022. It is a fiercely anti-Russian state, an instrument of the West to constantly put pressure on Russia and provoke it, and then, at an opportune moment, a springboard for a new war for the “liberation of the occupied territories.” The main idea of this “undefeated” Ukraine will be revenge. Such an option should be completely excluded.

There is one option—a weakened Ukraine, a kind of large “gulyai-pole”, an entity abandoned by the West as unnecessary and dependent on Russia. In this incarnation of the Makhnovshchina, the various interest groups and criminal gangs will fight each other incessantly and tirelessly. It is assumed that Moscow will be able, by manipulating local elements, to turn such a Ukraine into a safe buffer for Russia in the southwestern direction. In this option, two things are doubtful. First, the fact that the West will “retreat” from the Ukrainian “gulyai-pole” and will not use its “heroes” to fight Russia, which will not stop after the end of hostilities in Ukraine. Secondly, that Moscow will be able to control this Makhnovshchina.

The best and not entirely fantastic option for us would be to oust anti-Russian, revanchist elements to the western regions of Ukraine. There they could create their own “free Ukraine” under the protectorate of the West or become a zone of influence of neighboring states—Poland, Hungary and Romania. The West could console itself with the fact that part of the country has avoided falling under Moscow’s control, and speculate that Western Ukraine, consisting of five or seven regions, will become an analogue of the Federal Republic of Germany during the Cold War. Let [Пусть]. It is not scary to give up what is not only expensive for us, but also dangerous to have. The mistake of Stalin, who annexed Galicia and Volhynia and thereby infected Soviet Ukraine with the virus of nationalism, cannot be repeated.

The main thing is that “Galicia”, taking into account all possible assistance to it from the West, does not pose a danger to Russia, that is, it would have a subcritical mass. The rest of Ukraine–-isolated from the hotbed of ultranationalism, and without regions that have already joined or may yet join the Russian Federation–-would become a new sovereign Ukrainian state. At the same time, by a state that is not under our occupation. It makes sense to offer such a prospect to the Ukrainians, explaining how beneficial it is to them.

The new Ukraine would be much more Ukrainian than the Ukrainian SSR or even Ukraine without Crimea and the four regions that voted to join Russia in 2022. The Ukrainian economy would gain access to the market of Russia and the EAEU countries. At the same time, the New Ukraine would be rigidly separated from the alien Bandera element, which was historically formed in isolation from Russia and on an anti-Russian basis. Kiev would have freed itself from those who flooded and desecrated it after the Maidan coup of 2014.

A new Ukraine as a state and society would be created on a broad all-Russian–-or, if you like, East Slavic–-basis. Such a Ukraine would inherit Kievan Rus and the Zaporozhian Cossacks; it would be proud of the contribution of its people to the strengthening and prosperity of the Russian Tsardom and the Russian Empire, as well as the Soviet Union, of which the Little Russian lands were an important component. Finally, it would embody the historical dream of several generations of Ukrainians about independence.

In the realities of the modern world, the true sovereignty of Ukraine–-as well as other neighboring states of the former USSR–-is possible only in conditions of close cooperation with Russia. At the same time, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church would remain the spiritual basis of society.

The “New Ukraine” project does not have to wait for Victory Day. You can start planning now. There are many Ukrainians in Russia who are not indifferent to the fate of their homeland. Many of them have the necessary competencies to join the work on state, economic and cultural building of the future Ukrainian statehood. At the same time, it should be emphasized that this work is aimed precisely at creating a new statehood, and not at restoring the Ukraine that was swept away by the Maidan almost 11 years ago.

We are not talking only about those who have moved. After our victory, there is work to be done to separate war criminals, criminal figures, ideological opponents and incorrigible Russophobes from the bulk of the population of Ukraine. From its ranks, the New Ukraine could attract patriots–-officers, public and cultural figures, businessmen—who are ready to rebuild their country in cooperation with Russia. We, in turn, will have to give these people an initial credit of trust and treat their “Ukrainianness” with respect. They are not “khokhly”, “ukrops” who speak “language”, and not just neighbors, but a part of the Russian world that we have to return. Not for their sake, but first of all for the sake of ourselves, our safe (in this direction) future.

In our work with the Ukrainians, it is already necessary to emphasize that for the West, Ukraine and its population are only a tool, an expendable material in weakening Russia. That for the West, Ukrainians (who were massively “discovered” there only three years ago) are strangers, second- or third-class people. That the wonderful Ukrainian folk values are destined to be buried under the avalanche of Western mass culture and all the latest innovations in the field of gender policy. That the Ukrainian language is experiencing increasing pressure from English. That Ukrainian wealth – black soil, subsoil – was bought up by American and Western companies and in fact for the most part no longer belongs to Ukraine. That a hypothetical attempt by Ukraine to protect its identity will be met with the same wave of arrogant pressure from the West as the actions of the current Georgian authorities.

So, to sum up: we need to be ready for war, but we also need to be ready for peace. We will expect that all the goals of the NWO will be achieved, and hope at least for the optimal option for ending the war described above. In other words, for our victory. But this will be a victory, first of all, over the attempt of the collective West to restrain our development and weaken us. This will be a victory over the Ukrainian Bandera followers—enemies of both Russians and Ukrainians. For ordinary citizens of the New Ukraine, the day of our victory will be the day of their liberation. This was the name of Victory Day in the GDR.

Overwhelming Evidence of US Pushing Ukraine Into War With Russia: Ted Snider Interview

YouTube link here.

Ben Aris: EU under intense pressure to confiscate Russia’s frozen $300bn

By Ben Aris, Substack, 12/18/24

The EU is under intense pressure to seize Russia’s frozen $300bn of reserves, as crises in funding the war in Ukraine and finding the funds to pay for reconstruction loom.

The US has made it clear that it doesn’t want to pay for the Ukraine war anymore. It ran out of money for Ukraine completely at the start of 2023, then struggled to get an emergence $61bn aid package through in April, but according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy only 10% of these funds and supplies have actually arrived in Ukraine since, with the rest caught up in committee in the US – a problem confirmed last week by US National Security Advisor of Jake Sullivan.

Washington has already passed laws making seizing the $5bn of Russian assets still on American territory legal. Now it wants Europe to do the same.

The confiscation would be unprecedented. Central bank reserves have been frozen many times, and indeed, the US continues to hold the reserves of Iraq and Afghanistan, but technically they remain the property of the country’s central bank and should eventually be returned after the wars are over. Central bank reserves of another country have never been confiscated before.

In May, the EU approved the use of profits from the frozen assets—approximately €3bn annually—with 90% allocated to military aid for Ukraine and the rest reserved for humanitarian purposes. This compromise ensured the participation of neutral EU countries.

What is driving the renewed debate to seize the principal assets as well is Western officials are increasingly unable to fund Ukraine. At the same time as US funding dries up, the EU has also been slacking on fulfilling its commitments. Europe has pledged a total of €241bn in support of Ukraine since the start of the war in 2022, but it has only delivered half of this amount (€125bn), according to monitoring agencies, and there are no concrete plans to send the rest.

With Europe sinking into recession it has reached the point where EU governments have run out of money to pay for an expensive war that is consuming some $100bn a year, according to Timothy Ash, the senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management in London.

Germany has been in a budget crisis all year, and cut its allocation for Ukraine in half from €8bn to €4bn in 2024, with commitments falling to €500mn in the following two years. Likewise, France, which is also suffering from a government debt crisis, cut its allocation for Ukraine from €4bn to €3bn in October and will struggle even to meet that. Finally, the G7 $50bn loan to Ukraine, approved on June 13 at a G7 summit in Italy, has also got snarled up in red tape and was supposed to be distributed this month, but now it has been split into three tranches paid out over three years, with the first tranche of $22bn due in the first quarter of next year.

Ukraine needs about $40bn a year in international funding to make the budget work and keep the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) supplied, but even the Ministry of Finance (MinFin) anticipates this halving to some $22bn a year over the next two years, according to the most recent version of the three-year budget.

And all these problems are made worse by the anticipation that President-elect Donald Trump will cut US funding for Ukraine entirely. In a precursor to the new Trump policy, US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson just shot down a US President Joe Biden proposal to add a fresh $24bn of funding for Ukraine to a congressional spending bill for 2025.

With the sources of funding for Ukraine rapidly evaporating the calculus is changing.

Brussels remains committed to supporting Ukraine, even if several member states are more hesitant. One of the big changes in recent months is the appointment of former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas as the EU foreign policy chief, who is an outspoken Russia hawk. The discussion about seizing the CBR’s money was tabled at a meeting of EU foreign ministers that was chaired by Kallas, who inevitably put the issue back on the agenda. As an Estonian, that sits cheek by jowl with Russia and was occupied by the Soviet Union for 48 years, she is fully focused on holding Russia to account and cares little about the economic or financial consequences.

The Estonians have a particular hatred of Russia following the mass deportations in 1941 and 1949 when thousands were sent to Siberia overnight. Every family in Estonia lost a family member to the deportations, which are marked by a Remembrance Day every year on June 14 that keeps the tragedy fresh in everyone’s memory.

Kallas argued that the assets could be appropriated within a legal framework. “I won’t use the word ‘confiscation’ because it’s actually using assets in a legal way,” she said at the meeting.

Kallas has little power to force the confiscations policy through. The European Commission (EC) has the mandate to set EU trade policy, but foreign policy remains the prerogative of the member states. Several EU countries are not keen on the idea, led by the conservative Germany and Belgium, which would find themselves in the front line. Given all EU decisions have to be unanimous, getting permission to confiscate the CBR’s money will be very hard.

In the meantime, many EU members remain resolutely against a confiscation. Valerie Urbain, CEO of Belgium-based Euroclear, which holds €190bn of the assets, has been particularly outspoken: “We cannot end up in a situation where assets are confiscated and then a few years later Russia comes and demands them back, when the assets are no longer there. If assets are confiscated, then liabilities must also be transferred,” she said in a recent interview with Bloomberg.

Her predecessor, Euroclear’s CEO Lieve Mostrey, similarly slammed the G7 plan to use Russia’s frozen assets to fund the war in Ukraine and finance its reconstruction in an interview with The Financial Times in February.

Bankers are also not keen on the idea as they anticipate years of very expensive lawsuits from Russian entities. The problem is that the decision to seize the CBR’s funds is political, however, its assets in Europe are protected by the same strong property rights as other assets in Europe and so are vulnerable to lawsuits. They want part of the funds, if they are seized, to be put aside to fund the anticipated wave of Russian lawsuits that will tie up the courts for years.

This is one of the objections to the confiscations: either Euroclear will lose in court and be on the hook to repay €190bn it no longer has, or the courts will be pushed to uphold a political decision and massively undermine trust in Europe’s financial system that could lead to massive capital flight. The share of the US dollar in sovereign reserve funds has already fallen to a 40 year low, thanks to the White House’s decision to weaponize its currency via sanctions that has undermined trust in the dollar.

Another problem is the Kremlin is threatening to launch cases in Russian courts and seize billions of dollars in Russian accounts that belong to Western firms. As bne IntelliNews reported, only 9% of western companies have left the Russian market and they still owned significant assets in Russia.

A decree signed by Vladimir Putin in May enables the use of foreign-owned assets in Russia to compensate for damages caused by Western sanctions. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov announced in October that Russia has initiated “mirror responses” against the West.

Reconstruction elephant

But the elephant in the room is where the money will come from to rebuild Ukraine after the fighting stops. Trump has famously promised to stop the war “in 24 hours” after taking over. With the Ukrainian defence in the Donbas slowly crumbling – military analysts predict the fall of the key logistics hub at Pokrovsk in the next 2-5 months that could lead to the collapse of Ukraine’s resistance – the war appears to be in its end game.

Estimates of the damage caused by Russia’s campaign start at just under $200bn for the physical damage and run up to between $500bn to $1 trillion, depending on what is included in the calculation. The Centre for European Policy Analysis released a detailed report analysing the damage sector by sector in April this year.

All the talk and funding plans so far have focused on funding the budget to keep the government and the AFU working, but as the end of the war looms thoughts are slowly turning to how to pay for reconstruction. Currently, there is no plan.

At the Ukraine Recovery Conference in London last year it was suggested that the private sector pays for the rebuild. However, fund managers told bne IntelliNews that was going to be a tough sell.

“Of course, Ukraine is a fantastic opportunity, but I would want to wait for at least a few years,” one famous veteran of Eastern Europe investment told bne IntelliNews. “We need to see the domestic political turmoil that will follow a ceasefire die down first and Bankova prove its commitment to a stable and predictable investment climate. And then there is the threat of a second Russian invasion that also needs to be abated.”

It’s a Catch-22 situation: the investment won’t come until the investment has already come and the post-war bounce-back-boom is well underway.

In the first year it will be up to the EU to prime the pump, however without the CBR’s $300bn budgets will be tight. According to another study by Elina Ribakova, non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, counting out the CBR money there is a total of some $75bn committed in the form of the EU’s Ukraine Facility and other International Financial Institutions (IFIs) commitments. That may or may not be enough. And even getting old of that money will be hard: pre-war Ukraine typically received about $3bn a year from the IMF – half of its three-year Extended Fund Facility commitments, reduced due to Kyiv’s foot-dragging on promised reforms and eventually downgraded to a one-year Stand By Facility.

All these problems are likely to resurface after the war is open as Ukraine remains one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. Ironically, Georgia is much further down the road to complying with the EU accession criteria thanks to the Saakashvili administration and the work of the late former-oligarch and reform major domo Kakha Bendukidze.

Damage is already done

In this context, confiscating the CBR’s money starts to look a lot more appealing. There is no other way to fund the investment needed to kick start Ukraine’s recovery and start that bounce-back-boom. And the investors are interested. In a long-forgotten story, there was a banking gold rush in 2006, when foreign investors rushed to Kyiv to snap up banks at crazy six-times book multiples after it appeared that Ukraine’s economy had finally turned the corner. But it all went wrong again in 2008 during the Great Financial Crisis and those same investors have been left licking their burnt fingers.

The biggest question left is what damage will seizing the CBR’s money do? The lawsuits are inevitable, but that problem can be coped with. However, in my personal opinion the damage to the EU’s reputation and the euro has already been done.

In the first week of the war European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen held a press conference where she announced both the seizure of the CBR’s reserves and the introduction of the SWIFT sanctions that effectively cut Russia off from using the dollar. Both sanctions were unprecedented. The SWIFT sanctions had been mentioned in the run up to the war, but ruled out by Berlin in particular. The CBR sanctions came completely out of left field.

Underlying the objections to confiscating the CBR’s money is the assumption that once the war ends things will go back to normal and so preserving the trust in the euro and European banks is paramount. But thanks to the sanctions that trust has already been undermined in the eyes of the Global South bankers and central banks. The dollar is so deeply ingrained as the currency of choice to settle international trade deals that it can probably cope with the dent in its reputation it has taken from its weaponization, but the euro is a lot more vulnerable. Moreover, the reputational damage the EU has taken from its unabridged support of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, versus its backing of a de facto proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has been significant.

Confiscating the CBR’s money will do a lot less damage than feared as the damage has already been done. Bottom line, there is no other way of funding Ukraine’s recovery other than seizing the CBR’s money.

Russia Matters: Russia Plans to Force Ukraine’s NPPs Offline as Its Army Captures Chicago-Sized Amount of Land

Russia Matters, 1/3/24

Russia has refrained from direct attacks on the three nuclear plants which are located on the territories controlled by Kyiv and which are now responsible for most of Ukraine’s electricity. Rather than target these NPPS in what could trigger a “catastrophic disaster,” Russian forces have recently focused on crippling these power plants’ abilities to transmit power by destroying the substations connecting them to the grid, according to NYT. In an effort to prevent such crippling, Ukraine has asked the IAEA to have its personnel stay at the substations, but the agency has only agreed to send periodic monitoring missions. Together, the three NPPs can provide 7.7 gigawatts of electricity, more than half of the country’s current generation capacity, according to DiXi Group. Thus, Ukraine is left dependent on three old Soviet nuclear reactors for as much as  two – thirds  of the country’s electricity generation. It is also highly unlikely that the IAEA will agree to have its personnel serve as human shields at Ukraine’s three NPPs.Russia gained 227 square miles of territory (589 square kilometers, roughly the size of Chicago) in the month preceding Dec. 31, 2024, according to The Economist. In the past two weeks alone, the Russian armed forces have captured Makarivka, Sukhi Yaly and Zelenivka, Ukrainka, Dachenske, Novyi Trud and Vovkove, according to Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT group. To compensate for being outgunned and outmanned, the Ukrainian armed forces have recently resorted to badly-needed innovations, such as the first attack relying solely on unmanned ground vehicles, which occurred north of Kharkiv City on Dec. 20. In another instance of innovation, on Dec. 31 a Ukrainian naval drone shot down a Russian military helicopter for the first time, according to Ukraine’s intelligence service cited by Bloomberg.  Ukrainian authorities have launched a criminal probe into mass desertions in the country’s 155th mechanized brigade named after Anne of Kyiv and trained in France, according to Kyiv Independent. At least 50 of the brigade’s servicemen disappeared while they were still being drilled in France, according to Telegraph. By the time the brigade entered battle for the first time, at least 1,700 of its troops had gone AWOL, according to this UK newspaper. Figures published by the Ukrainian general prosecutor’s office show that more than 90,000 cases have been opened into instances of soldiers going absent without leave or deserting since Russia invaded in 2022, according to AFP.The U.S. government has said it will allocate almost $6 billion in additional aid to Ukraine, as Biden rushes to provide Kyiv with fresh firepower before his presidency expires, FT reported. The transfer includes $1.25 billion in assistance from U.S. weapons and ammunition stockpiles, as well as $1.22 billion which allows Ukraine to purchase goods directly from the U.S. defense industry. The package includes ammunition for the high mobility artillery rocket system, air defense munitions and anti-tank missiles.Russia’s two top diplomats have signaled the pending end of what the Kremlin has claimed to be a self-imposed moratorium on the deployment of medium-range missiles that were once banned by the now-defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. First, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov accused the U.S. of deploying such missiles in Asia and Europe in an interview with Kommersant on Dec. 27. Then his boss, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov weighed in two days later, asserting that “it is obvious that, for example, our moratorium on the deployment of INF missiles is already practically unviable and will have to be abandoned.”In the waning days of 2024, Vladimir Putin expressed readiness to  meet   Donald Trump  in the new year to discuss ending the Russian-Ukrainian war, but the Russian leadership was also quick to reject some of the key elements of a hypothetical peace deal proposed by Trump’s aides and his Western European counterparts. Among the rejected elements were immediate unconditional ceasefire, the stationing of a European peacekeeping force in Ukraine and the deferral of Ukraine’s membership in NATO for 20 years. In fact, “nothing from the incoming U.S. administration suggests anything of interest to us,” Russia’s envoy to the U.N., Vasily Nebenzya said of the Trump team’s proposals.A most paradoxical feature of Russian-Ukrainian interaction throughout the course of the war has been that, in spite of the hostilities, Ukraine has continued to allow the transit of Russian gas through its territory. Not anymore. At 8 a.m. on Jan. 1, Russian gas supplies to Europe through Ukraine stopped, following the expiration of the transit contract. The route through Ukraine was one of the last two routes still carrying Russian gas to Europe. Its closure means EU countries will lose about 5% of gas imports in the middle of winter, according to FT.

James Carden: The Untold Story of Carter’s Fateful Foreign Policy

By James Carden, The American Conservative, 12/30/24

The former President Jimmy Carter passed away on Sunday at the age of 100. Carter was elected by a convincing margin over the Republican incumbent Gerald Ford in 1976 and served one term. His wife of 77 years, Rosalynn, passed away in November 2023.

His presidency is perhaps among the most misunderstood in recent American history.

==

Unique among presidents, Carter’s post-presidential years will likely be the focus of much of the forthcoming commentary on his life. If we agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum that “greatness is the perception that virtue is good enough,” then on that basis, Carter’s post-presidential life was indeed great.

The caricature that emerged of Carter’s presidency—one that has been lodged in the popular imagination for some 40 years—has always been misleading. Carter, so we are told, was idealistic but weak. The truth is far more interesting—though ultimately the direction his foreign policy took does not redound to Carter’s credit.

No real discussion of U.S. foreign policy under Carter is possible without an in-depth consideration of Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who broke into Carter’s inner circle early on. Like his fellow emigre Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski was ambitious to the point of shamelessness. During the ’76 campaign, Brzezinski, according to the former Council on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb, also made himself available to a number of Carter’s opponents including Senators Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, Edward Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Birch Bayh.

Some saw trouble brewing early on. Robert Lovett, one of Washington’s legendary “Wise Men” and Harry Truman’s fourth and final secretary of defense, sniped, “We really shouldn’t have a national security advisor like that who isn’t really an American.”

Lovett was righter than he knew. In the decades that followed, the U.S. foreign policy establishment was flooded with Brzezinski proteges, including Bill Clinton’s foreign-born secretary of state, Madeleine Korbel Albright. The parochial concerns of bureaucrats, operatives and think-tank fixtures with competing national loyalties have had an undue influence on American foreign policy in the decades since—even resulting in the impeachment of a sitting president in December 2019 on the grounds that these people did not like what their ostensible boss, the president, was saying to a foreign leader.

The importance of a new president choosing the right people or the right combination of people cannot be overstated. Carter fumbled early on when, under pressure from the growing caucus of neocons (who were still, in late 1976 and early 1977, mainly Democrats, before jumping ship for Reagan four years later) led by Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, he decided not to go with his first choice for secretary of state, the former under secretary of state George Ball.

In a conversation with the historian Douglas Brinkley in 2002, Carter recalled his concerns over whether Ball could win Senate confirmation; after all, “he had the courage to question aspects of America’s attachment to Israel.” And Ball’s “outspokenness on the Middle East would have made it difficult for him to pass confirmation hearings. So I chose Cyrus Vance.”

Brzezinski would likely have had a harder time besting Ball, whose lonely, principled, and prescient opposition to the war in Vietnam as a member of Lyndon Johnson’s inner circle is too often forgotten. Carter’s first mistake, then, was to hand the Israel lobby a scalp without so much as a fight. The second mistake was making Brzezinski primus inter pares among his advisers.

After the election, Carter’s campaign manager Hamilton Jordan was quoted as saying, “If after the inauguration you find Cy Vance as secretary of state and Zbigniew Brzezinski as head of national security, then I would say we failed. And I’d quit.” But as Brinkley wryly notes, “Both men, as it turned out, were selected for those posts, and Jordan never quit.”

Brzezinski’s scholarly work on the Soviet Union should have been a red flag. He was a leading proponent of what was known as the “totalitarian school,” which posited that the internal dynamics of the Soviet system largely explained its behavior abroad. Scholars like Brzezinski drew a straight line from Lenin to Stalin to Khrushchev and Brezhnev; no allowances were made for the vagaries of succeeding Soviet regimes. The late professor of Russian politics at Princeton, Stephen F. Cohen, who was a leading theorist of the rival “revisionist school,” had crossed paths with Brzezinski at Columbia in the 1960s. Cohen was critical of what he saw as the “deterministic quality” of the scholarship produced by high profile members of the “totalitarian school” such as Brzezinski and Harvard’s Adam B. Ulam, who, like Brzezinski, was a Polish immigrant.

Brzezinski, drawing that straight line, had posited that, “Perhaps the most enduring achievement of Leninism was the dogmatization of the party, thereby in effect both preparing and causing the next stage, that of Stalinism.”

Yet, as Cohen later noted,

‘the totalitarianism school became consensus Sovietology on the basis of generalizations that claimed to explain the Soviet past, present and future. It turned out to be wrong, or seriously misleading, on all counts.”

The myopia that characterized Brzezinski’s approach to U.S.–Soviet relations was perhaps to be expected from the son of a Polish diplomat. Under Brzezinski, Kissinger and Nixon’s detente (a policy they borrowed from France’s Charles de Gaulle) never stood a chance. And his misreading of Soviet history led, quite naturally, to mistakes down the line.

The power that Brzezinski wielded on behalf of “the Captive Nations” lobby (i.e. emigres from the nations comprising the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact) led Carter into some perilous cul-de-sacs. And nowhere was this more so than in Afghanistan, which ranks among the Carter administration’s most serious foreign policy bungles.

What happened in Afghanistan in 1979–1980 was essentially a Soviet overreaction to American meddling that was met with a subsequent American overreaction. The sequence—if not the interpretation—was confirmed by Brzezinski himself in a 1998 interview with the French paper Le Nouvel Observateur.

“According to the official version of history,” said Brzezinski,

“CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”

Once the Soviets intervened to protect the regime of their client, the Afghan President Nur Muhammad Taraki, the Carter administration, at Brzezinski’s urging, convinced itself that Moscow’s ultimate aim was to dominate the Persian Gulf. Carter melodramatically pronounced the invasion as “the most serious threat to world peace since the Second World War.” Yet, as the distinguished Cold War scholar John Lamberton Harper notes, “to consider such a move plausible meant assuming Moscow believed it could overcome the combined resistance of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Once again, it required doubting not only the Russians’ declarations but their sanity as well.”

The Carter Doctrine, authored by Brzezinski, was the formal policy response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the same way the Truman Doctrine committed the U.S. to a perpetual role in Europe, the Carter Doctrine transformed the Persian Gulf into a U.S. protectorate in all but name. Carter’s policy was unveiled during his final State of the Union address in January 1980 in which he declared that “an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Our decades-long misadventure in the Greater Middle East had begun in earnest.

Brzezinski passed away in 2017 at the age of 89, yet his approach to foreign affairs remains broadly influential. For years, he served as a professor at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and as a fellow at the Center for International and Strategic Studies. He helped spawn generations of imitators who staff the think tanks, graduate schools of international relations, and the national-security bureaucracy today. While a number of his later books correctly castigated the errors of the Bush administration and eloquently warned of the increasing fragility of the American social order, it would be hard to argue with the withering judgement of Hodding Carter, a journalist who served as State Department spokesman under Cyrus Vance. He condemned Brzezinski as “a second-rate thinker in a field infested with poseurs and careerists [who] never let consistency get in the way of self-promotion or old theories impede new policy acrobatics.”

No account of Carter’s foreign policy would be complete without a consideration of his administration’s policy toward Iran.

By the late 1970s, the regime of the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a stalwart U.S. ally since the CIA-engineered overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, was teetering on the precipice of collapse. In November 1978, George Ball was summoned back to Washington at the request of the president in order to provide an objective analysis of the unfolding situation in Tehran.

Ball had long experience in dealing with Iran, going back to his days as under secretary of state under Kennedy and Johnson; from his perch as a partner at Lehman Brothers, he had kept in intermittent contact with the shah in the ensuing years.

What Ball saw upon returning to Washington did not encourage him. Assigned to an office in the NSC, Ball witnessed the dysfunction that plagued the policymaking process under Brzezinski, who, as Ball recalls, “was systematically excluding the State Department from the shaping or conduct of our Iranian policy. To ensure the Department’s insulation, he admonished me, immediately on my arrival, that I should not talk to the State Department’s Iranian desk officer, because he ‘leaked’—an instruction I, of course, immediately disregarded.”

Ball handed his report on the situation to the president and the NSC just over a year later, December 1979. He recommended that Washington help the shah accept the reality of his “precarious power position and help him face it.” Carter should, Ball advised, make clear that the only chance he had to “retain our support is for him to transfer his power to a government responsible to the people.”

But Carter and Brzezinski wouldn’t budge.

As Princeton’s Richard Falk observed at the time, “when most others in Washington had given up on the shah, Brzezinski continued his plot for survival.”

The seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the taking of 66 American hostages was a direct consequence of the decision by Carter (with the support of, among others, Kissinger, Vice President Walter Mondale, and Brzezinski) to admit the shah into the United States for medical treatment in October 1979. The decision was made over the objections of the State Department’s man in Tehran, chargé d’affaires L. Bruce Laingen, who opined in a memo that “with the power of the mullahs growing, admission of the shah, even on humanitarian grounds, might provoke a severe disturbance.”

By April 1980, Vance felt he had no choice but to resign. He was and remains only the third secretary of state to do so. The proximate cause was Vance’s opposition to Carter’s decision to send in American forces to rescue the hostages.

The deeper issue was the betrayal and unprofessionalism of Carter and his national security team, led by Brzezinski, which called a meeting of the National Security Council to approve the ultimately ill-fated hostage rescue plan while Vance was on vacation in California. In this, Vance was also betrayed by his deputy, Warren Christopher, later to become Bill Clinton’s first secretary of state, who declined to inform Vance of the meeting until after Vance had returned to Washington. The mission failed. On April 24 one of the eight rescue helicopters collided with a parked C-130 transport plane in the Iranian desert. The doomed mission likely also doomed Carter’s prospects for reelection.

Carter’s reputation as a peacemaker rests largely on his successful brokering of the Camp David Accords and his post-presidential diplomacy. His reputation also benefited thanks to his elevation of “human rights” as a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy which has often been the object of praise by scholars and foreign policy practitioners. Indeed, the moralizing that has become a defining feature of American foreign policy in recent decades has it roots in the Carter years.

The problem, as we have come to see, is that such sentiments are too easily appropriated by those who wish to see the U.S. forever embroiled in far-off sectarian conflicts in the Middle East. It was, of course, under the cover of such “humanitarian” concerns that Brzezinski’s heirs in the Obama national security apparatus, including Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and, above all, Hillary Clinton, fought tooth and nail for the disastrous policies of regime change in Libya and covert war in Syria.

By the end of his presidency he had come around to fully embracing Brzezinski’s worldview. The decision to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the USSR’s blundering military campaign in Afghanistan was a deeply unserious way for a great power to conduct itself—not least because it was the actions of the Carter administration that precipitated the Soviet invasion.

None of this was lost on a sizable number of Democrats who, by the time Carter ran for reelection, had urged Ted Kennedy to challenge him in the Democratic primary. Perhaps foremost among Carter’s critics within the Democratic establishment was the historian and former Kennedy adviser, Arthur M. Schlesinger. He denounced Carter in the pages of the New Republic, writing, “1980 has been his banner year for blunders; and what is finally destroying his immunity is less his confusion in grand strategy, impressive as this has been, than his incorrigible incompetence in detail.”

Carter, who had easily bested Schlesinger’s friend in the primaries, owed his resurrection in the polls to, in Schlesinger’s words, “two international crises—Iran and Afghanistan—that he himself helped bring about.”

Still worse, with the passage of time, Carter’s presidency more and more resembles that of a more recent vintage—that of another inexperienced Southern governor who campaigned on cleaning up a sordid mess left by his predecessor. Like Carter, that president was captured by hardline neoconservative advisers and schemers put in place around him. His experienced and moderate secretary of state got frozen out—indeed, had circles run around him by the fanatical hardliners within the national security bureaucracy. The president, on the advice of these hardliners, stumbled and overreached and committed the U.S. to a series of objectives it could not possibly, even plausibly, fulfill.

The big difference, of course, is that George W. Bush got elected to a second term. But the policies—particularly in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf— adopted by Carter on the advice of Brzezinski paved the way for what was tragically to come some two decades later, in the autumn of 2001.

Anatol Lieven: Keep Ukraine Out of Talks to End Its War

By Anatol Lieven, Foreign Policy, 12/16/24

The incoming Trump administration seems genuinely committed to finding peace in Ukraine. Whether it’s capable of the extremely complicated diplomacy required is a very different question. One issue that will have to be decided at the very start of the process is at what stage, and on what issues, Ukraine should be involved in the process. The issue is more fraught than has generally been acknowledged.

The first and most fundamental goal of the talks (as in all such negotiations) will be for each side to clearly establish, on the one hand, its vital interests and absolute and nonnegotiable conditions and, on the other hand, what points it is prepared, in principle, to compromise on. It may be, of course, that the nonnegotiable positions of the three sides are fundamentally opposed and incompatible. If so, peace negotiations will inevitably fail, but we will not know this until these issues have been explored.

The three parties involved are Ukraine, Russia and the United States. The initial stages of the negotiations, however, should be between the United States and Russia. It goes without saying that certain aspects of an eventual agreement will require Ukraine’s full assent, and that without this assent a settlement isn’t possible. These aspects include the terms of a ceasefire, the nature and extent of any demilitarized zones, and any constitutional amendments guaranteeing the linguistic and cultural rights of Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine. U.S. negotiators will have to be fully cognizant and respectful of Kyiv’s views on Ukraine’s vital interests.

Given certain categorical—and entirely legitimate—Ukrainian positions, a number of key issues seem to be a priori off the table, and if Russia insists on them, no agreement will be possible. The most important initial task of Gen. Kellogg and his team will therefore be to discover whether the Russian government regards these conditions as nonnegotiable, or whether Moscow is prepared to compromise on them if the Trump administration is prepared to compromise on wider issues.

The first nonnegotiable issue from Ukraine’s and the U.S.’ point of view is Ukrainian and Western legal recognition of Russia’s claimed annexations, as opposed to an acceptance of the fact (already accepted in public by President Zelenskyy) that Ukraine cannot recover these territories on the battlefield and therefore has to accept the reality of Russian possession, pending future negotiations.

Russian experts have suggested to me that Moscow will not, in fact, insist on this in talks, because in addition to Ukraine and the West, China, India, and other key Russian partners would also refuse the very suggestion. They said that Moscow hopes for a situation like that on the island of Cyprus, where no country but Turkey has recognized the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, but talks have lasted 50 years with no result.

The second nonnegotiable issue is Putin’s demand that Ukraine withdraw from the territory it still holds in the four provinces of Ukraine that Russia claims to have annexed. This is absolutely unacceptable to Kyiv, and should be to Washington, too. Ukraine should not be encouraged and helped by Washington to batter itself to pieces in a hopeless effort to drive Russia from the territory it controls, but it cannot be asked by Washington to give up more territory without a fight. The Ukrainian government will doubtless make this clear to the Trump administration, and its view must be accepted as definitive by the United States as well.

However, certain other basic questions are not up to Ukraine to decide. They are chiefly up to the United States, and it is the U.S. administration that will have to negotiate them. Central Russian proposals in the ultimatum issued before the war were for new agreements with the United States and NATO not relating to Ukraine.

Today, key aspects of the Russian demand for limits on the Ukrainian armed forces depend on the United States, since it is only the United States that can provide Ukraine with long-range missiles and the intelligence to guide them. The question of which Western sanctions to lift or suspend as part of a deal with Moscow is also up to the United States and EU.

Ukraine can, of course, ask to join NATO, but the decision of whether to accept a new member lies not with that country but with the existing members—and each of them has a veto on the issue. A U.S. administration could take the lead, but it will be up to Washington to decide how much influence to use with, and pressure to put on, other members, and it cannot simply override the likely vetoes of Hungary and Turkey—or perhaps of France, if Marine Le Pen is the next president.

The question of what Western security guarantees can and should be given to Ukraine as part of a settlement is also not up to Ukraine to answer. President Zelenskyy has suggested the deployment of troops from European NATO members, which has been echoed by certain Western officials and commentators and is reportedly being discussed between President Macron of France and the Polish government.

However, everything that I have heard from Russians tells me that this is just as unacceptable to Moscow as NATO membership itself and would therefore make agreement impossible. Moreover, European countries would agree to send their troops only if they had an ironclad guarantee from Washington that the United States would intervene if they were attacked. This, in effect, punts the decision back to Washington—not Kyiv, and not Brussels, Warsaw or Paris.

Above all, Russia’s motives for launching this war extend beyond Ukraine to the whole security relationship between Russia and the West, led by the United States. They include the demand for military force restrictions (which would have to be reciprocated on the Russian side) and some form of European security architecture in which vital Russian interests would be taken into account and future clashes avoided.

It may be that either the Putin administration or the Trump administration—or both—will refuse to compromise and that talks will accordingly collapse. Testing this, however, will be an extremely complex and difficult process, requiring patience and diplomatic sophistication on both sides. It would be extremely foolish to expect either Russia or the United States to put all their cards on the table at once.

Because this process will be so difficult, the sad but unavoidable truth may be that if Ukraine takes part in the talks from the start, progress toward a settlement will become completely impossible. Every prospective compromise will immediately be leaked and will cause a firestorm of protest in Europe, in Ukraine, in the U.S. Congress, in the U.S. media, and perhaps even from Russian hardliners.

The United States has been the essential and irreplaceable supporter of Ukraine in this war, not only because of the aid that it has given but because European countries would not have given their aid without U.S. encouragement and backing. American citizens have, in consequence, been faced with great costs and considerable risks, and wider U.S. interests have been endangered. This gives U.S. citizens the right to expect their government to take the lead in trying to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war—especially since it is the only government that can.