The Coup in Ukraine

This about Politics, tagged , , , , was written by for on February 6, 2014

In my last Sitrep I said that the West was trying to pull off a coup in Ukraine against the duly elected President.

We now have very strong evidence in the shape of an intercepted phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. They talk about how to arrange a new government and are not as supportive of the EU as they would be in public. Pretty hard to spin this as anything else but another “colour revolution”.

But, of course, such  alleged intercepts are often faked and by themselves aren’t necessarily evidence of anything.

But White House spokesman, Jay Carney has (probably inadvertently) admitted the veracity of the intercept. Surely he will attempt to walk this back once he realizes that he has given away the secret, but it’s too late.

The intercept is here; the report of Carney’s press conference is here.

Get it now before it disappears down the memory hole.

So who made the intercept? Carney says Russia but Ukraine also has the capability. Whether Kiev or Moscow, they’re finally getting better at the propaganda war.

Will there be more intercepts coming?

Spooks, Mercs or Merchants over Iceland?

This about Geopolitics, tagged , , , , , was written by for on September 5, 2010

This is a reprint of a post from Arctic Progress.

KnAAPO-Su-35

Back when Iceland tipped over into financial collapse during 2008 and the UK seized Icelandic banks’ assets using anti-terrorist laws as fig cover, Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar stated that Russia could make use of the Keflavik air base in return for a $5bn loan to the insolvent country. However, fevered talk about Russia gaining a military foothold in the Atlantic, including gaining control over the crucial GIUK gap, didn’t end up amounting to anything concrete.

First, Iceland’s status as a NATO member precluded it from offering Russia a true air base in Keflavik; only something like a refuelling and maintenance depot would be allowed. Second, $5bn is not an insignificant amount of money in its own right, being equivalent to about 10% of Russia’s (official) military budget.

But if things couldn’t be worked out with Russia, a private mercenary company would do. Less Red Storm Rising, more Lord of War. TV station Russia Today mailed me a story by Robert Bridge on how Cash-strapped Iceland to host “private army” – and Russian jets. The company, which has a really slick website (and Twitter!), is seemingly flush with cash. They reportedly paid Iceland $160mn to gain rights to Keflavik airbase and plan to acquire 30 Su-27 fighters from Belarus for use in mock war games. If confirmed, this would make it the largest single order for military aircraft by a private investor.

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The Return of the Reich?

This about Philosophy, tagged , , , , was written by for on October 13, 2009

This is my second follow-up post to The Belief Matrix, in which I attempted to advance a universal model for civilizational responses to subsistence crises (The Malthusian Loop) and the Western challenge (The Sisyphean Loop). This time I will look at Germany, a nation that was always torn between its hard-assimilated Roman / Western identity, and German Romanticism – the nativist reaction against the “Idea of the West” (as previously loosely-defined, a set of concepts like the scientific method, rule of law, economic rationalism, and liberalism).

Before World War One, Germany was a confident, expanding power, but  one wracked by insecurity. It was encircled by France and Russia on land, and contained by Great Britain at sea. The increasing cooperation between those three nations reinforced Germany’s suspicions and made it resentful about being denied its rightful place in the sun (all the best colonies had already been snapped up by the time Germany came to the imperialist game). In retrospect, much has been made of the balefulness of the Prussian militarist tradition, the influence of German nationalist groups, and the Kaiser’s bombastic antebellum rhetoric as one of the enabling factors of Germany’s Sonderweg. However, one should also note that in 1900 Germans enjoyed a higher level of adult enfranchisement than the British (22% versus 18% of the population, albeit with the caveat that the Reichstag’s powers were far more circumscribed) and that the anti-war Social Democrats won 34.8% in 1912.

The Teutonic Spirit

That said, imperial Germany was different from the Western liberalisms (Great Britain, France and the US) – not even so much in its political economy, an uneasy fusion of “Western” industrialism and “Eastern” autocracy, but also in its reflection in the psychological make-up of the German people, whose defining trait is a constant internal struggle between “civilized” Roman values (Rationalism / “The Idea of the West”) and “barbarian” Teutonic instinct. From Peter Viereck’s Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler, first published in 1941 (well into WW2):

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Reconsidering Parshev

This , about Economy, tagged , , , was written by for , on August 4, 2009

In most Russian bookstores, there is a bookshelf or two dedicated to so-called “patriotic literature” – reappraisals of Stalin against “liberal revisionism”, overviews of Russia’s secret super-weapons, the exploits of its special forces and Russian theo-philosophy. Much of it is (apparent) nonsense, but the economic crisis has forced me to reconsider one particular “patriotic” thesis – Andrei Parshev’s Why Russia is not America.

His big idea, an elaboration and tying together of earlier work, is that Russia’s economy is structurally uncompetitive on the world stage, and that integrating with the global economy will lead to catastrophe. This is because of his counter-intuitive observation that Russia is overpopulated. Though its population density is low on paper, the cold climate, huge landmass and poor riverine connections means that the carrying capacity of north Eurasia is nowhere near as high as that of the world’s other centers of economic and political power – the US, China, and Europe. Because manufacturing is inherently loss-making on the Eurasian plains, it is much more economically “efficient” to just ship out Russia’s mineral resources to fuel manufacturing in warmer, coastal regions such as the Pearl River Delta or the Great Lakes. No more than 20mn Russians are needed to service the pipelines and grow fat from the proceeds; the other 120mn are free to eke out a subsistence living on Russia’s marginal lands, or die out (as indeed many did during the era of neo-liberal reforms). He recommended a return to sovereignty, autarky and sobornost as the solution to these woes.

I agreed with Parshev’s analysis upon my first reading of his book in 2002, a time when I still thought Putin was no more than a better-dressed, sober gangster in Yeltsin’s mold and the country showed little signs of real recovery. Yet as evidence mounted that Russia really was prospering by the mid-2000’s and I became influenced by Krugman’s criticisms of competitiveness, I increasingly came to reject his ideas (e.g. see this comment). However, since then increasing awareness of the vital role played by protectionism in “catch-up” industrial development, the reality of peak oil and above all the economic crisis forced me into reconsidering Parshev.

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