Arabia Saudita,
Rusia, Brasil, China… Las noticias que nos llegan hablan de turbulencias,
virajes, agitación y tensiones crecientes. Es que el Imperio contraataca,
chicos. Cuanto más débil se ponga, más locura, caos y descontrol habrá en la
periferia. Muy a propósito del tema, la
nota que sigue es de Pepe Escobar para Sputnik News:
Título: The Calm
Before the Coming Global Storm
Epígrafe: Major
turbulence seems to be the name of the game in 2016. Yet the current turbulence
may be interpreted as the calm before the next, devastating
geopolitical/financial storm. Let’s review the current state of play via the
dilemmas afflicting the House of Saud, the EU and BRICS members Russia, Brazil
and China.
Texto:
Oil and the House
of Saud
Not many people
are familiar with the Baltic Dry Index. Yet the Index is key to track commodity
demand. Two months ago, it was trading to all-time lows. Since then, it has
increased over 130%. Precious metals prices have all moved higher in virtually
all currencies. Why is this important? Because it tells us that faith in fiat
currencies – the US dollar especially — is sharply declining.
The Baltic Index
rise portends a rise in oil demand in Asia – especially China. Falling supply
and rising demand for oil will likely drive up the price of the barrel of oil
in the second half of 2016.
That does not
mean that the House of Saud will win back the trust of both the US and Russia.
Deep sources keep confirming that as far as Washington and Moscow are
concerned, the House of Saud is expendable. Both are really energy independent
(should the US want to be). Powerful Washington factions blatantly accuse
Riyadh of “terror” – well, it’s way more complicated – while Moscow regards the
House of Saud as following US orders to destroy Russia in an oil price war.
Ailing – on the
way to dementia — King Salman and young Warrior Prince Mohammed would be
finished if those famous 28 pages about 9/11 were released and the Saudi
connection is incontrovertible. What next? Regime change. A CIA coup. A
“trusted” Saudi military CIA asset elevated to power.
What’s left for
the House of Saud is to play for time. High up in Riyadh the feeling is that
relations with Washington won’t improve while Obama is president; the next
president — whether Hillary or The Donald – will be a much better deal. So Plan
A for now is to keep posing as essential to Washington in the “war on terra”;
that means King Salman falling back on Mohammed bin Nayef, the Crown Prince,
way more adept at it than the Warrior Prince, the conductor of the disastrous
war on Yemen.
In parallel,
Turkey’s Sultan Erdogan keeps advancing his play to take over oil in Iraqi
Kurdistan, eventually diverting the whole supply to make Turkey energy
independent – and thus a regional superpower.
Moreover, in
Pipelineistan terms, Erdogan absolutely also needs the Qatar gas pipeline
through Saudi Arabia and Syria to gain energy independence from Russia. That
also happens to be a major US goal. And that also portends perennial trouble
for the Syria peace process.
Erdogan already
has the German superpower at his feet in the shape of a groveling, begging
Chancellor Merkel. Were Turkey on its way to become an energy power, Merkel
would prostrate herself on that Ankara palace golden ground non-stop. The CIA
intimates as much, when it analyzes how Turkey will keep “expanding its
influence” in Iraq through the militias they support, at the expense of Iraq’s
security and political unity.
Andrew Bacevich’s
America’s War for the Greater Middle East examines how Washington ruled that
“military preponderance” across the Middle East should be the strategic
objective in a war against the USSR — that was when Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard”
Brzezinski reigned as geopolitical supremo. This was always supposed to be an
endless war – now encompassing the “Greater Middle East” the neocons are so
fond of.
Russia, Brazil
and Hybrid War
Russia’s largest
commodity exchange is actively courting international oil traders to join its
emerging futures market. The goals are crystal clear; to disconnect the
price-setting mechanism from the Brent oil benchmark and, crucially, to move
away from the petrodollar. That also happens to be a key condition imposed by
Beijing to the House of Saud for continuing to buy their oil.
It’s easy to
forget that it was only 20 years ago that Moscow wanted to join the West as
Christians, and was treated like trash. Russia was perceived in the Beltway to
be weak under Yeltsin, who let in looters who ate up Russia as locusts, collapsing
Russia’s GDP by 40% as they drew out natural resources, absconding with at
least a trillion US dollars.
Now
Exceptionalistan keeps updating every trick in the book to destroy or at least
undermine Russia with Maidan in Ukraine, an oil price war, attacks on the
ruble, Syrian pipelines. Hybrid, unconventional warfare rules – and these will
only get nastier. The BRICS as a whole are under siege. The Brazilian color
revolution, set up as a soft regime change process, is just the first stage in
a new, sophisticated Hybrid War strategy bound to be studied in academia for
decades.
As oil demand
soars and supply contracts, Hybrid War practitioners across the spectrum will
have to create a recession to keep the chaos going. A possible scenario is to
let the embattled Italian banking system go down; that’s the next frontier in
the EU.
Walking Dead
Europe, meanwhile, subcontracted and/or externalized a policy of refugee
repression, thus unleashing the largest mass deportation since WWII, complete
with camps financed by EU taxpayers and managed by the Great Democrat Erdogan.
The missing link is now in the open; everything is proceeding under control of
NATO-linked think tanks.
As appalling as
it may be, this is hardly new. It was already inbuilt in agreements that the EU
imposes on African nations, “upgrading” their status to border Cerberuses.
That’s the key mission of the Frontex agency, which is progressively
delocalizing the external borders of the EU – to the east and to the south – to
better repel migrants. Not a dot connected to NATO’s neo-imperial wars of
choice, of course.
No wonder Noam
Chomsky has noted that support for formal democracy in the West is dwindling,
because they are not real democracies. All major decisions affecting the EU are
taken by unelected eurocrats in Brussels. In a groundbreaking book published in
Spain, Mercado-Estado-Carcel en la Democracia Neoliberal Espanola (Anthropos),
Daniel Jimenez, doctor in Juridical Sociology at the University of Zaragoza,
details how the new institutional local order is about de-democratization,
denationalization and dependency; NATO, IMF, World Bank, the Paris club, BCE,
the European Commission, the Fed, they are part of a global web of
institutions, private but self-described as public or public but managed by
private interests (such as the Fed). Michael Hudson, among others, has detailed
how the EU never developed sustained mechanisms of transfer of capital from the
wealthier economies towards poorer members.
I’m a mess
without my China fix
Sophisticated
Hybrid War-derived techniques may have been deployed full blast against Russia
and Brazil. But against China, everything fizzles.
Exceptionalistan’s
spin is that China is not as economically secure as it seems. So global public
opinion is bombarded by the usual litany of “convulsions in its financial
markets”, “investor risk aversion”, “volatility”, or an inevitable crash.
Nonsense. The
leadership in Beijing has its strategic imperatives fully delineated in the
latest Five-Year-Plan. It will pump whatever amount of credit into the system
whenever it takes. It won’t depreciate the yuan – no matter how loud
Washington/New York complain.
A yuan
devaluation would sink an array of Chinese firms loaded up on US dollar debt.
Moreover, Beijing is tweaking its system, a carefully calibrated transition
from an export-driven model to one geared toward consumption by the internal
market. A strong yuan preserves the purchasing power of tens of millions of
members of the New Chinese Middle Class – all of them upwardly mobile, and all
of them asset owners.
According to the
US Treasury, only about $1.2 trillion in liquid securities is in Chinese hands.
And that will keep diminishing, fast – as China keeps buying gold. And to top
it off, China has already turned its economy around. That brings us back to
that dramatic increase in the Baltic Index. Oil prices are rising. And China is
buying the whole lot.
Beijing is
advancing on all fronts; spreading influence/commercial deals all across Eurasia,
which the New Silk Roads will shape into a mass emporium; modernizing its
military; buying strategic foreign assets; building up global trust in the yuan
as a stable reserve currency; allowing Chinese elites to diversify their
enormous wealth by buying foreign assets, from vineyards in Bordeaux to the odd
football giant, such as AC Milan.
No wonder the
astonishing spread of Chinese economic power has left assorted Exceptionalists
– from neocons to neoliberalcons — totally deranged. Washington has absolutely
nothing to offer to nations across Asia, Africa and Latin America – to the
whole Global South for that matter. They have all seen how Beijing is not in
the market demanding Mob-style compound interest on sovereign debt; “support”
for neo-imperial moves by NATO or the UN; one more extra-territorial hub for
the US Empire of Bases; or total domination of their central banks.
On the other
hand, they have seen what Washington does offer; endless war; the progressive
smashing of the nation state; democracy blasted to smithereens; and
technocratic governance by the 0.00001%.
Yet all this is
just the calm before the storm. The Empire is already striking back. There’s
serious blood on the tracks ahead.
La verdad, no veo a la calma.
ResponderEliminarDespués de la visita de Obama a Merkel, Alemania se pliega, con soldados y maquinaria militar, a la campaña de la OTAN en las fronteras de Rusia y contra ella.
Siguen agudizando las provocaciones a China en forma descarada en el Mar del Sur de China.
El núcleo duro del Imperio angloamericano, esto es las oligarquías que dominan en los Estados del sector transatlántico Nor Occidental, quiere "salir" del desastre económico y financiero en que se encuentra intentando provocar e inducir una guerra general contra Rusia y China.
Por supuesto que hay fuerzas contrarrestantes pero, mientras prosiga Obama convalidando tras bambalinas tal geopolítica de guerra, la humanidad corre un peligro mortal, solo mitigado por la notable capacidad estratégica que están mostrando hasta ahora los líderes de Rusia y China.
Pero tales líderes no son eternos mientras que el Imperio aparenta que sí.
Tal vez el autor de la nota quiso decir que hay una calma relativa (comparando con lo que podría ocurrir en unos meses). Lo de Alemania es increíble, sí. Cordiales saludos,
ResponderEliminarAstroboy