Little new on the eastern front

Little new on the eastern front

by Pierluigi Fagan

Source: Pierluigi Fagan & https://www.ariannaeditrice.it/articoli/poco-di-nuovo-sul-fronte-orientale

In the early days of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, just under a year and a half ago, we wrote our views on the question of American intentions. We believed that the conflict revolved around these since it was the Americans who had progressively affected the already precarious internal balances of the unfortunate Ukraine, already starting with Euromaidan in 2013.

They had continued with a slow and inexorable steady penetration in terms of military and financial advisers, think tanks and various tentacular offshoots that came to take the rabbit out of the hat Zelensky, in his time elected on a populist wave tired of corruption, malfeasance and continuous tension with Russia unwelcome to most of that country, at least the residents of the central-eastern part, turning him into Captain Ukraine. But that was not all. There was a broader strategy of pressure on Russia's eastern and Caucasian border and there had been several signs of withdrawal from international treaties on medium-range missiles and other atomic balancing. Already in December and then in January 1922, the Russians peremptorily demanded a round table in Geneva to clarify what represented the most threatening breakdown in the balance between the two planetary atomic powers since the end of the IIWW (to which was added a failed attempt at a coloured revolution in Kazakhstan in January), a balance that had held throughout the Cold War.

All this is strange to any analyst not enlisted in the ranks of Atlanticist propaganda, including the few American 'realists' who occasionally and in vain are posted by some to show their contacts that there is still someone with the glimmer of reason. The fact is that international politics or geopolitics (they are not the same thing, however much they deal with the same thing) is a field of study like any other, with its conventions, its schools, its methods, its history, a vast and complicated set of information that most are not familiar with at all. Most have been summoned before the events of February '22 as if the world began that day and was reduced to what the Western media (which are obviously instruments of the conflict) showed and did not show, said and did not say, according to first-rate logics (simplifying dichotomies) seasoned with emotion-provoking tones of anger and indignation that were impossible to resist.In those early days, we wrote several times what, in our view, was the rationale behind the American strategy. The United States of America was and is on a downward power curve, and with it the entire western world. It is enough to take the percentages of GDP value or demographic indices, rather than the map of influences and hegemonies of various levels over the 200-odd states of the world in 1950 (then there were little more than 60), those of today, the projections to 2050, and draw the curves.

Numbers certainly do not tell the whole story, in fact there are scholars who deal with these things on purpose, because in addition to quantities, there is a vast and complex discourse on qualities (technological, cultural, geographical proximity, social stability, etc.) to make a diagnosis. The diagnosis is unequivocal, wherever our heart beats emotionally, the US will have to deal with a contraction of power. It is just a matter of better defining the quantity (and quality) and timing.
Given this situation, it is now known that:

1) the (approximate and dynamic) planetary order transitions from a rigid system headed by the USA and the Western area on the one hand and a group of a few but bad guys on the other with a vast array of prey for occasional hegemonies to a more complex order in which a large number of subjects of different weight and interest appear, the so-called multipolar order, which according to some (generally, Americans) is not at all orderly as it fluctuates.

To understand this fluctuating order, there is no better subject to investigate than India. India has for a while now proclaimed its own style of international relations, namely multi-alignment, which is, in practice, the very rejection of the concept of 'alignment'. If one aims at becoming a 'pole' it goes without saying that one is only aligned to oneself. The Indians are BRICS and also SCO and AIIB but they also flirt with the American attempt to make an Indo-Pacific NATO (flirting does not imply sex), they do not want the new BRICS currency but promote their own rupee, they buy Russian arms as much as American ones, they buy energy from the Russians and open up new technological joint ventures with Washington, they are good friends of Iran and quietly penetrate Africa. Last year they increased their trade trading with the US, which now slightly exceeds that with China, while UAE-SA added together (the 3rd and 4th largest countries in terms of trade volumes) exceed each other. Today India is the 5th economic power, in two years it will be 4th, meanwhile they are dabbling in Moon trips, Chandrayaan-3 left on 11 July and will go in search of frozen water in the lunar south. The Indians are trying to become an autonomous pole and are doing in a smaller way what the Chinese have long been doing in a bigger way. So for many other players at various levels (excluding the European countries in vain stimulated by Macron who even wanted to be invited to the BRICS summit in August);

2) from the American point of view, the most fearsome players in this world rearrangement are China for demo-economic reasons and Russia for geo-military reasons;

3) normally, a strategist would advise the US to split the two competitors as Trump was planning to do, the neo-con area that holds the levers of the current Biden presidency's strategy, on the other hand, thinks that first Russia must be depowered by making it a low-priced wreck, and then turn its attention to China;

4) parallel and fundamental, the tight amalgamation in terms of semi-imperial hegemony of all the western splinters, the one already orbiting at the natural level (the Anglo-Saxon Brotherhood CAN-AUS-NZ-UK) and the one to be put in order i.e. Europe and the eastern peaceful allies such as Japan and others (South Korea, the Philippines and more ambiguously others to be contended with China).

It is therefore clear what was moving the Americans towards the Russian border:

a) to provoke the invasion of Ukraine (which the Russians could not evade even if they wanted to, as Putin himself has tried to do in recent years, although he has been pushed by insiders, who are the same ones who now accuse him of fighting with his hand tied behind his back, while others do not want a conflict with the West at all, since they are dedicated to economics - above all personal - and not geopolitics);

b) force Europe to sever all ties (energy, trade, tourism and even culture) with Russia, using Eastern Europe against Western Europe;

c) re-launch NATO and European military spending (they will be the direct beneficiaries at first, since the Europeans have no military industry and in any case distrust each other for atavistic reasons)

d) bring home new pawns useful for the forthcoming and strategic Arctic conflict (Sweden and Finland);

e) establish on this quadrant the two imaginary paradigms (i.e. which are valid at the level of 'values' in world images) of their new global strategy: democracies vs autocracies, order based on rules (decided by them, controlled by them, sanctioned by them and also valid for the reformulation of ex-WTO globalisation).

Towards Russia specifically, their goal is consumption, i.e. involving it in a long, onerous, exhausting, internally contradictory conflict in Ukraine. The only post-war conflict the US won 'without ifs and buts' was the Cold War, which was based precisely on this long-term strategy.

We wrote about this a year and a half ago and see no reason to change our analysis.

Recent events have brought us to the NATO summit in Vilnius. It is amazing how unreflective the public discourse is. Did Zelensky feel sorry for not being admitted to NATO? But only a swashbuckling journalist writing for the unreflective goldfish in his bubble could believe it realistic for the warring Ukraine to accede to an Article V alliance. Ukraine, says Biden, will enter when the war is over which is, from the Russian point of view, the best reason for it never to end which is what the Americans want.

Maybe then one day it will end and the peace treaty, of course, will include a promise not to merge it into the Atlantic Alliance, but we are far from that day because the American interest is to make that war last as long as possible. Now they are giving more and more long-range missiles (first disdainfully excluded so as not to 'provoke escalation'), then cluster bombs (which are an excellent tool for freezing temporary borders as, in practice, neighbouring territories become mined, those in Russian Ukraine and those in Ukrainian Ukraine as Shoygu has obviously announced reciprocity). Beyond the war of words in the media and on social media, in deed, the provisional borders of the dispute are those and have not shifted decisively for months.

The freezing of the conflict long enough for the American elections is actively negotiated behind the scenes. Probably also at the request of Europe, which is actually running out of weapons to send to the front. Incidentally, the polls register a certain weariness of public opinion towards the little man in the green overalls and the whole issue that is beginning to reek of an organised rip-off. But perhaps there is also a concern looming on the horizon to which a nice article in the Economist has given voice. What happens if Trump wins next November? Trump has announced that with him president a second later the conflict would cease, what to do? Wait ...

In between then there should be the Russian elections, the Ukrainian elections (which, at the forefront of the democratic front, will not take place, since the Constitution has been suspended for a year and a half and all is well, the 'people' are with Zelensky and woe betide those who object), and the European elections in which new balances are announced; therefore, putting everything in PAUSE is in everyone's interest.

After initially joining in the western outrage against Russia, the Swiss have now returned to the window by rediscovering their neutrality, they are not supplying weapons to the Ukrainians, they have resumed hosting Russian capital. As the poet said, 'The Swiss know more than your philosophy dreams, Horace...'.