"Lessons From Pearl Harbor"
by Jim Rickards
"Today’s the 80th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which thrust the U.S. into World War II. While the actual attack was a shock to many Americans, it was the culmination of a series of policy decisions years in the making.
The most immediate catalyst came when the U.S. froze Japanese assets and imposed an embargo on oil shipments to Japan in the summer of 1941, after Japan rejected U.S. demands that it withdraw from China. Japan received over 80% of its oil from the U.S., so the embargo backed Japan into a corner. It could either submit to the U.S. demands, or it could launch an attack to secure the oil-rich territories of the Dutch East Indies (presently Indonesia).
It chose the latter. But a move against the Dutch East Indies would be vulnerable to attack from the Philippines, which was a U.S. commonwealth with a U.S. military presence. That threat would have to be neutralized, so a Japanese invasion of the Dutch East Indies would inevitably mean war with the U.S. Most policy experts expected any Japanese attack on U.S. forces would take place in the Philippines. But they first attacked the naval base and airfields at Pearl Harbor.
Japan didn’t just wake up one day and decide it was a good idea to attack the U.S. It was faced with a limited set of policy options in the face of the U.S. embargo, and took what it believed was a necessary action. The point being, wars are the end result of policy decisions that take place long before the first shot is fired. If a nation believes its vital interests are severely threatened, it will often choose war, not necessarily because it wants war, but because it believes it has no recourse. Now fast forward to today…
Russia is massing troops and offensive mobility capabilities on its border with Eastern Ukraine. The U.S. is concerned that Russia will invade Ukraine to annex the Donbass region, which is populated with Russian ethnic citizens and pro-Russian militias.
The U.S. policy makers seem to forget that the entire fiasco in Ukraine began in 2014 when CIA and MI6 operatives launched a “color revolution” that led to the overthrow of a duly elected pro-Russian president. This was part of a larger effort to include Ukraine in NATO and the EU. It was also done in support of a lucrative kickback racket that supported Democratic politicians, including the Clintons and the Bidens.
The result was a de facto split of Ukraine into a pro-Western half centered in Kiev and a pro-Russian half in the Donbass and Luhansk regions. Western intervention in what was a somewhat neutral status quo ignored the fact that Ukraine is like a dagger aimed at the heart of Russia, and forms part of an arc from Ukraine to Estonia (which is a NATO member). This arc surrounds Moscow: parts of it lie east of Moscow. A NATO-member or even pro-Western Ukraine is an existential threat to Russia. Ukraine is a red line as far as Russia is concerned.
The U.S. should have realized this and left the status quo. Instead, people like Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan went too far under Obama. Now they’re back making the same mistake under Biden. Blinken says that if Russia intervenes, they will suffer enormous economic sanctions. But proposed sanctions include cutting off natural gas from Russia to Germany, which will hurt Germany worst of all. Besides, Russia has been under sanctions for over ten years, and it has not changed their behavior. Russia is not about to let Ukraine fall into the Western orbit over the threat of sanctions.
If a war breaks out, don’t just blame the Russians. Also blame Biden officials like Blinken and Sullivan, who should have left well enough alone. Don’t poke a bear in its own den. Below, I show you how elites derailed U.S.-Russian relations at a time when the U.S. needs Russia to help contain China. Let’s just hope it doesn’t lead to war. Read on."
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"Elites Have Destroyed a Possible
U.S. - Russia Alliance to Contain China"
By Jim Rickards
From Russia’s perspective, this was unacceptable. It may be true that most Americans cannot find Ukraine on a map, but a simple glance at a map reveals that much of Ukraine lies East of Moscow.
Putting Ukraine in a Western alliance such as NATO would create a crescent stretching from Luhansk in the South through Poland in the West and back around to Estonia in the North. There are almost no natural obstacles between that arc and Moscow; it’s mostly open steppe. Completion of this “NATO Crescent” would leave Moscow open to invasion in ways that Napoleon and Hitler could only dream. Of course, this situation was and is unacceptable to Moscow.
Ukraine itself is culturally divided along geographic lines. The Eastern and Southern provinces (Luhansk, Donetsk, Crimea and Dnipro) are ethnically Russian, follow the Orthodox Church and the Patriarch of Moscow, and welcome commercial relations with Russia. The Western provinces (Kiev, Lviv) are Slavic, adhere to the Catholic Church and the Pope in Rome, and look to the EU and U.S. for investment and aid.
Prior to 2014, an uneasy truce existed between Washington and Moscow that allowed a pro-Russian President while at the same time permitting increasing contact with the EU. Then the U.S. and UK overreached by allowing the CIA and MI6 to foment a “color revolution” in Kiev called the “Euromaidan Revolution.” Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych resigned and fled to Moscow. Pro-EU protestors took over the government and signed an EU Association Agreement. In response, Putin annexed Crimea and declared it part of Russia. He also infiltrated Donetsk and Luhansk and helped establish de facto pro-Russian regional governments. The U.S. and EU responded with harsh economic sanctions on Russia.
Ukraine has been in turmoil (with increasing corruption) ever since. U.S.-Russia relations have been ice-cold, exactly as the globalists intended. The U.S- induced fiasco in Ukraine not only upset U.S.-Russia relations, it derailed a cozy money laundering operation involving Ukrainian oligarchs and Democratic politicians. The Obama administration flooded Ukraine with non-lethal financial assistance.
This aid was amplified by a four-year, $17.5 billion loan program to Ukraine from the IMF, approved in March 2015. Interestingly, this loan program was pushed by Obama at a time when Ukraine did not meet the IMF’s usual borrowing criteria. Some of this money was used for intended purposes, some was skimmed by the oligarchs, and the rest was recycled to Democratic politicians in the form of consulting contracts, advisory fees, director’s fees, contributions to foundations and NGOs and other channels.
Hunter Biden and the Clinton Foundations were major recipients of this corrupt recycling. Other beneficiaries included George Soros-backed “open society” organizations, which further directed the money to progressive left-wing groups in the U.S. This cozy wheel-of-fortune was threatened when Donald Trump became president. Trump genuinely desired improved relations with Russia and was not on the receiving end of laundered aid to Ukraine.
Hillary Clinton was supposed to continue the Obama policies, but she failed in the general election. Trump was a threat to everything the globalists, Democrats and pro-NATO elites had constructed in the 2010s. The globalists wanted China and the U.S. to team up against Russia. Trump understood correctly that China was the main enemy and therefore a closer union between the U.S. and Russia was essential.
The elites’ efforts to derail Trump gave rise to the “Russia collusion” hoax. While no one disputes that Russia sought to sow confusion in the U.S. election in 2016, that’s something the Russians and their Soviet predecessors had been doing since 1917. By itself, little harm was done. Yet, the elites seized on this to concoct a story of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The real collusion was among Democrats, Ukrainians and Russians to discredit Trump.
It took the Robert Mueller investigation two years finally to conclude there was no collusion between Trump and the Russians. By then, the damage was done. It was politically toxic for Trump to reach out to the Russians. That would be spun by the media as more evidence of “collusion.”
It represents an enormous lost opportunity. When future historians look back on the 2010s, they will be baffled by the lost opportunity for the U.S. to mend fences with Russia, develop economic relations and create a win-win relationship between the world’s greatest technology innovator and the world’s greatest natural resources provider.
It will seem a great loss for the world. Here’s the reality: Russia, China and the U.S. are the only true superpowers and the only three countries that ultimately matter in geopolitics. That’s not a slight against any other power. But all others are secondary powers (the U.K., France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc.) or tertiary powers (Iran, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.). This means that the ideal posture for the U.S. is to ally with Russia (to marginalize China) or ally with China (to marginalize Russia), depending on overall geopolitical conditions. The U.S. conducted this kind of triangulation successfully from the 1970s until the early 2000s.
One of the keys to U.S. foreign policy in the last 50 or 60 years has been to make sure that Russia and China never form an alliance. Keeping them separated was key. In 1972, Nixon pivoted to China to put pressure on Russia. In 1991, the U.S. pivoted to Russia to put pressure on China after the Tiananmen Square massacre. Unfortunately, the U.S. has lost sight of this basic rule of international relations. It is now Russia and China that have formed a strong alliance, to the disadvantage of the United States.
Ultimately, this two-against-one strategic alignment of China and Russia against the U.S. is a strategic blunder by the U.S. Russia is the nation that the U.S. should have tried to court and should still be courting. That’s because China is the greatest geopolitical threat to the U.S. because of its economic and technological advances and its ambition to push the U.S. out of the Western Pacific sphere of influence.
Russia may be a threat to some of its neighbors, but it is far less of a threat to U.S. strategic interests. Therefore, a logical balance of power in the world would be for the U.S. and Russia to find common ground in the containment of China and to jointly pursue the reduction of Chinese power. But thanks to the elites’ political games, it hasn’t happened. Let’s just hope their malfeasance doesn’t drag us into an unnecessary war."
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