Posted on 08/22/2022 5:29:01 AM PDT by Cathi
There are multiple tough strategic realities for the United States to absorb.
Regardless of who wins the Ukrainian war, the United States will be the strategic loser. Russia will build closer relations with China and other countries on the Eurasian continent, including India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states. It will turn irrevocably away from European democracies and Washington. Just as President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger played the “China card” to isolate the Soviet Union during the Cold War, presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will play their cards in a bid to contain U.S. global leadership.
Knowing that it can no longer keep Europe as its top energy customer, Moscow has logically moved to grow its fossil fuels sales with Asia, notably China and India. Since the Ukraine invasion, Russia has become China’s top oil provider, replacing Saudi Arabia. It is true that in the short to medium term, transfer capacity will limit how much more fossil fuels Russia can sell to China. Russia currently has just one overland oil route to China, the ESPO pipeline. The only gas pipeline currently in operation is Power of Siberia. Pipeline sales of both oil and gas are supplemented by seaborne routes to mainland China. In the years ahead, China and Russia will doubtlessly make substantial investments to expand oil and gas transmission between the two countries, better enabling Russia to be the primary supplier of fossil fuels to China. The Chinese will likely be able to reduce their dependence on fossil fuel shipments from the Middle East which must pass through vulnerable naval choke points such as the Malacca Straits.
Closer energy relations between China and Russia will help to draw them closer as strategic allies with “no limits” on the Eurasian continent. By having a committed Russian energy supplier in its backyard, China will inevitably obtain more strategic flexibility for dealing with the United States and its Indo-Pacific regional allies, all to the detriment of Western democracies.
Russia has also greatly increased its energy business with India since the Ukraine invasion. According to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, “India has been the main buyer of the cargoes out of the Atlantic that Europe doesn’t want anymore.” Before invading Ukraine, India bought almost no oil from Russia. Now it is importing over 760,000 barrels a day. Increases in Russian fossil fuel sales to India will be detrimental to efforts by the United States, Australia, and Japan to continue to draw Delhi into a closer orbit with democratic countries in the Indo-Pacific region.
In fact, India—the world’s largest democracy—has taken a neutral stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At the United Nations, India abstained from votes that condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has refused to blame Russia for the attack. Besides a new and growing energy supply relationship, Russia has also been the long-time, primary supplier of weapons for the Indian armed forces. Importantly, Delhi remains appreciative, as well, of Russia’s longtime support on Kashmir. The Indian response to the Russo-Ukrainian War underscores the reality that India will likely not fully integrate into a Western Pacific alliance such as the Quad. If China is smart enough to avoid more border fights with India, momentum for India to become more involved with the Quad could well decline.
In more bad news for the West, India was not alone in abstaining from the UN General Assembly resolution that censured Russia for invading Ukraine. Thirty-four other countries declined to take the West’s side. Two-thirds of the global population live in countries that have refrained from denouncing Russia. Even neighboring Mexico refused to condemn Russia or join economic sanctions.
These are tough strategic realities for the United States to absorb. After the Russian invasion, the Western democracies swiftly coalesced, passing a broad array of sanctions against Moscow, including deadlines for ending fossil fuel purchases from Russia. The West’s energy sanctions have to an extent backfired, causing inflationary and supply disruptions so severe that Brussels now is struggling to cope with the economic consequences. The EU has even quietly announced steps to ease Russian energy sanctions to help stabilize energy markets. While the West complains that Russia weaponized its oil and gas exports, the reality is that it was Brussels and Washington that first raised the energy sword when they announced their intent to cut back Russian fossil fuel purchases immediately after the Ukraine invasion.
One positive byproduct of the Russo-Ukrainian War has been the rejuvenation of NATO, which has rallied to support Ukraine. The alliance will become even stronger when Finland and Sweden join. On the negative side, the United States is carrying more than its pro rata share of the burden to support Ukraine compared to other alliance partners except for Baltic states and Poland. Through May 20, 2022, the United States supplied or committed $54 billion in military aid to Kyiv. The United Kingdom was a distant second at $2.50 billion, followed by Poland at $1.62 billion and Germany at $1.49 billion. As of May 20, the United States had committed more than three times as much aid to Kyiv as all other European Union countries combined. The United States is the largest supplier of military aid notwithstanding that Russia’s invasion is far more of an immediate threat for European allies than for the United States, which is 5,700 miles away from the war, across the Atlantic Ocean. Ukraine shows again how dangerously dependent Western Europe is on American leadership and its military. That will not change until the U.S. foreign policy establishment can shake off the conviction, firmly cemented over seven decades, that only the United States can lead NATO, providing the military backbone for the alliance.
The United States must adapt, particularly as an even more jarring, ugly reality is the fact that NATO’s Article V defense commitments are limited by treaty to the Atlantic region. Were Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, or Guam attacked by China, North Korea or Russia, NATO’s collective defense commitments would not apply. Nonetheless, even though there is no chance that the NATO treaty will ever be amended to help the United States in the Pacific, Washington should not and cannot abandon NATO. Instead, the U.S. foreign policy establishment must work harder to enable European allies to pick up more, even if not the lion’s share, of the burden on their side of the Eurasian continent. If the United States continues to keep its head buried in the historical assumptions that prompted the creation of NATO in 1949, things are going to get steadily worse for over-stretched United States military resources and capabilities. The United States is no longer the world’s sole dominant power. More burden sharing in the U.S. alliance system will have to happen sooner or later to deal with the reality of an increasingly multipolar world.
Ramon Marks is a retired, New York international lawyer.
The last paragraph is never going to happen. NATO is a bunch of broken screwed up countries that have ruined their economies by joining the WEF/NWO.
Trump got them to divvy up a little more NATO funding, but that was then, this is now.
NATO needs to be eliminated. It is no longer a source for good.
When the US State Department chose to disrupt Minsk II and use Ukraine as a launching pad for weapons aimed at Russia, directly on it’s border, the fate of America was sealed.
This cannot be undone.
Always the plan.
After WWII, with a few exceptions, most of the world both loved America and feared America.
Today, most of them hate us - our own political elite hate us - and no one fears us. The Globalists want us subjugated.
Nations hostile to US➡️Soros/Clintons/Obama➡️Democrat Party➡️Government employees
Nations hostile to The United States are using the Democrat Party to destroy The United States.
US "global leadership" has been dead for ten years at least.
And for the last 30 years, it has meant using occupied Germany to influence former colonial powers to join the globohomo ruling system, to the point that their former colonies are turning to the East.
America funded the Russians to attack Ukraine. When Biden, Obozo and Soros shut down the American Energy Business and gave European Oil Sales to Putin for Russia to earn one Billion dollars per day, Putin’s war on the Ukraine was paid for.
The US is becoming irrelevant on the world stage.
Does anyone here think Russia and the Chicoms can have each other? How did the Hitler/Stalin Pact work out? The Japanese didn’t trust their German ally. Think of the China/USSR border skirmish in ‘69 and the same with India in ‘62.
Sometimes we’d be better off letting these things play out. Nukes just might keep people in check.
It’s like watching two mob families fight in Europe, and we take sides to support one of them to get kickbacks. This “philosopher” whose daughter was killed is a piece of work. Just freaking evil everywhere.
India has always been a lost cause. First, it thinks of itself as being, or should be, a regional hegemonist, the equal of China, Russia, and the US, so it will make fluid dalliances rather than alliances. Second, it has an equal disdain for the East and the West, since its history before 1948 was to be colonized by first the Mughals and then the Brits, so it doesn’t care for either Tartars or Tartans.
Our future is with non-Chinese east Asia, and eventually with our own hemisphere when our neighbors to the south come to their senses and decide it is better to be with us than against us. Africa will always drag down whoever controls it, and China, Russia, India, and Europe all have machinations of their own. When we rid ourselves of the socialists, which will take a generation and a lot of pain, we can regain our position in the world as the self-sufficient nation that treats its allies better than any of the above.
The Ukraine cheerleaders will pay no attention to this, because they cannot see beyond the obvious, that being Russia invading Ukraine. Sadly, their lack of critical thinking skills limits their ability to see anything beyond that fact, to the detriment of their own nation.
Russia is Communist and is trying to rebuild the Soviet Union. Now with that out of the way, the West is doing far too little to actually stop Russia in Ukraine, and there are signs of deals being signed by Russia behind closed doors, specifically to benefit Hunter Biden and other American democrat politicians from oil monies.
Biden has recently said that the US should "lead" the "liberal world order." Tallying the waste of treasure and men lost to recent wars, one asks, did we win in Vietnam? Kosovo? Iraq? Afghanistan? Libya? Sudan? Yemen? And are we "winning" in Ukraine after so many tens of billions expended?
A multi-polar world has been the reality throughout these last decades, in spite of the sales pitch from the "liberal world order" that Biden dreams we "lead." Or Obama dreamed of "leading from behind." We have won tens of trillions in debt, as a prize, to be sure. Doesn't feel like "leading" nor like "winning."
Contracts come and go. Is it in our best interest to continue wasting our blood and treasure for the world. No. Instead of talking about welfare in America, the welfare for Europe should be the concern.
Article V was used for 9/11, and during the Gulf War in 1991. So NATO would have to help us if our territory was directly attacked by China and/or Russia out of the European theatre.
Immediate but ultimately shallow commercial interests aside, Russia has a deep and well-founded fear of Chinese encroachment in the East. Russia's demographic and industrial decline, dismal civic life, and the emmigration of educated young people point toward a weakening Russia that must look to the West for support against China.
Interesting as “National Interest” is about as Neocon as any organization can get and they’re now talking as if this war is NOT in the bag for Ukraine, and therefore Ukraine might actually lose.
And they are stating that what was obvious from the start for those of us who actually followed events in Russia for the past 20 years, which was that Russia was (and is) far more than a “Third World Gas Station”. Instead these ‘experts’ hated Russia so much, that they refused to believe what was OBVIOUS to others, which was that Russia is a formidable country, not burdened by the wokeness and incredible division that now pervades the US (Russia had divisions, but they’re mostly gone after the people there, particularly the younger ones, realized how much they’re also despised by the West).
So, now the Neocons are admitting to failure here, which, to their credit keeps their PERFECT failure streak alive, but this one has real CONSEQUENCES to all Americans in that our chance of bringing Russia and associated countries (including ALL of Ukraine for that matter) into our fold is now gone, and we’ll have to deal with a world that both hates us and controls a huge percentage of the planet’s resources.
And to think...if we had simply said something like - “Russia is protecting Russian interests in its backyard” (as we did implicitly regarding South Ossetia), we’d still be a world power, with the currency (US dollar) used throughout the world, rather than a despised, has-been country, with a bunch of nukes lying around.
Russia’s decline, means the rise of Turkey and a new Ottoman Empire. Think of the whole muslim world united. Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Northern Africa, probably also aligned with China, and Russia, with its significant Muslim population.
“This “philosopher” whose daughter was killed is a piece of work. Just freaking evil everywhere.”
But irrelevant in Russia. Putin was educated as a lawyer, and in Russia, at least, that means learning the HISTORY of the country, so he didn’t need any help from that clown, which was why the clown had no security around him.
But listening to the West, you’d think that he did all of the thinking for Putin. But then that fits a pattern regarding leaders that the Western Media hates, as they were all “Controlled” by others, be it Reagan, who was a dunce, Bush Sr., who was ‘out of touch’ and needed others think for him, Bush Jr. who was a ‘monkey’ controlled by Cheney, and Trump, who was controlled by the Russians.
The killing is still a big deal, considering who they ended taking out, and who did it. And that why people are fleeing Kiev as I type.
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