The Universe Smiles

Posted on February 13, 2025 by thezman

Tomorrow the Trump team arrives in Germany to participate in the Munich Security Conference, where they are expected to inform the Europeans of their plans to bring Project Ukraine to an end. No one knows what Trump is planning, but the Europeans are braced for bad news. That bad news is either a plan for peace brokered without them or a plan that hands the whole mess over to them. Team Trump had made clear that their first priority is accounting for the money.

As a general rule, anytime the guy giving the money starts making angry noises about accounting for the money, the guy receiving the money is in trouble. This type of scene is always part of gangster movies for a reason. It means the giver is unhappy with the receiver and has come to a conclusion about the arrangement that is going to be bad for the receiver. Imagine some DOGE kids stuffing Zelensky into a locker and you have a good idea of what is coming.

To make matters worse, Trump just had a long call with Putin and both sides described it in very positive language. There has been an exchange of prisoners, with Trump indicating the Russians asked for little in return. He was making clear that he understood their gesture and was ready to reciprocate. It is the sort of thing that is done when two sides are looking to build a larger relationship. You do small deals to build trust and develop a process for larger deals.

What is clear is that Trump has looked at his options with regards to Ukraine and did not see a deal worth pursuing. The Russians are not interested in anything but the deal they feel was done in Istanbul in 2022, plus some extra to cover the costs of litigating it on the battlefield for the last two years. They will get that deal either at the table or on the battlefield and there is nothing to be done to prevent them. Trump seems to understand this and accepts it.

Deal making always starts with discovery. You must first learn if there is a deal to be had, otherwise you are wasting your time. The number one rule in deal making in the private sector is that time is your most precious asset. The best salesmen maximize their time by not wasting time chasing bad business. For Trump, Project Ukraine, as constructed by his predecessor, is bad business. The goal now is to get this off the agenda as quickly as possible.

Most likely, the starting place this week is to inform the Europeans and Zelensky that the deal for them right now is Istanbul plus some other things. If they are ready to take that deal, then the Trump Team will hammer out the deal with the Russians and at some point, the Ukraine government will be invited in to sign it. Who the representative of that government is will be determined by elections to be held immediately. That means Zelensky will not be part of the signing ceremony.

This is why they are talking about the money. Imagine the bosses from Chicago coming out to Las Vegas to talk to the guy they sent out to oversee their operations, and their first question is, “Where’s our money?” Zelensky made the fatal mistake of saying he will never be able to account for it. That sealed his fate. There is simply no way Trump will do business with the guy. It now means any support requires elections and repayment of the money.

Like the guy who cannot pay in the gangster films, this leaves Zelensky and the Europeans in an impossible position, which is the point. Team Trump is prepared to work with the Russian on other issues, even if they cannot get a deal on Ukraine, so they are prepared to walk away from Ukraine entirely. If Europe wants to keep the United States engaged, then it means elections and an accounting of the hundreds of billions sent to Kiev over the last three years.

Now that the Trump plan is coming into focus, the girl boss running EU foreign policy issued a statement declaring the unconditional support for Ukraine. Not having come to grips with what is happening in Washington, she seems to think Team Trump will sit down with her to talk it out and come to a compromise. Instead, this will be used to justify handing the whole mess over to the Europeans so Trump can move onto matters far more important than Project Ukraine.

This is the other thing coming into focus. The war caused the Russians to rethink their relationship with Europe. They stopped taking calls from people like Macron and Schultz, because there was no point in speaking with them. The Chinese have gone out of their way to humiliate European leaders who turn up in Beijing. Men close their doors to the setting sun and that is what is happening to Europe. The emerging great powers of the new world order are ignoring Europe.

Now we are seeing Trump do the same thing. Vance was in Paris this week, in advance of the Munich meeting, and he told the Europeans in no uncertain terms how things are going to be going forward. They were properly offended, and that was most certainly the point of his speech. Friday, the Trump delegation is going to tell the Europeans how it is going to be with regards to Ukraine. If they do not like it, they can go it alone, but everyone knows they lack the ability to do it.

It is proof that the universe has a sense of humor. Four years ago, the Eurocrats were congratulating themselves along with Biden people, telling each other stories about the new world order and how they would build back better. Now, the guy they thought they had vanquished will be telling them their place in the new world order. The guy building back better, will be the guy they were sure was the final boss in their quest to spread the managerial revolution around the globe.

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A Do Nothing President

Posted on January 14, 2025 by thezman

Note: Over the weekend the SSL certificate for the site was supposed to renew, but something went wrong and it did not renew. This is why your browser got angry when you tried to access the site. H1B strikes again!

On Monday, Trump will be installed as president, so naturally everyone is speculating about what he will do once he gets the keys to the White House. Interestingly, much of the speculation is around the foreign policy issues he inherits. The neocons in the media are working hard to keep Ukraine in the news, so they are making claims about what Trump will and will not do with Putin. The Israel lobby wants Israel to be number one, so they are focusing on Iran.

What does not get noticed is Trump was elected on domestic issues. In the last election, Israel and Ukraine were far down the list for all voters. The number one issue was the economy. Immigration was the next big issue. The typical Trump voter looks at Ukraine as a boondoggle and Israel as an unsolvable problem. Logically, these two issues should be far down the list for Trump, but the media is focusing on them, which speaks to the power of their respective lobbies.

The first hint of what Trump has in mind for Ukraine came last month when Trump’s personal envoy to Ukraine and Russia said that it will take one hundred days to get a deal with Russia over Ukraine. This was a big shift from prior claims about Trump ending the war in a few days. Kellogg has also shifted with regards to what is happening in the war. The business about there being a stalemate has been dropped in favor of an acknowledgment that Ukraine is in trouble.

What the “one hundred days” tells us is Trump is not going to litter his first one hundred days with the Ukraine matter. It is a custom to assume that the first one hundred days of a new administration set the tone, so it is not an accident that Kellogg was suddenly using that phrasing. It is a signal that the Ukraine matter is not in the list of items that will take up the president’s time starting in January. To whom it was a signal is not all that clear and whether they understood it is unknown.

Time is the way to think about what Trump is planning for his second term. He has just one term and that means he has about eighteen months to get his domestic agenda pushed through Congress and the administrative state. Once we get to the summer of 2026 his party will be busy throwing the midterms. This means they will not pass anything the people want but instead focus on angering the base. After the election, Trump will get nothing from Congress.

This is a lesson Trump learned the hard way the first time. Once he won the election, he was swept up in a series of events that forced him to use his time in ways that had no benefit to him. He became the salesman wasting his days tending to customer service issues, rather than finding and closing new business. The number one skill for a salesman is time management. If you fail to manage your time, you fail. This is true for presidents, especially reformers like Trump.

It is why the signs point to Trump being something of a do-nothing president with regards to foreign policy issues. With Ukraine, he can do nothing, and it will resolve itself, as far as Trump is concerned. He inherited an unsalvageable mess from Biden, so no deal is better than any deal. Spending any time on it is a waste, so the one hundred days will probably turn into forever. The post-war deal with Russia will be left to the governments of Europe and the EU.

As for Israel, the signs are there for a delaying action. Kellogg was asked about it and reiterated the usual lines about pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear program, which they largely did long ago. Michael Waltz, the new national security adviser, seems to get his opinions on Iran from Fox News. One suspects that he was picked because he will do what the boss says. Despite talk of new sanctions, Trump remains opposed to a war with Iran, or an Israeli war with Iran.

Another signal that the Middle East may be down there with Ukraine on the priority list is the fact Trump has signaled his disdain for Netanyahu. He was not invited to the inaugural and Trump has tweeted some untoward things about him. He also posted a link to Jeffrey Sachs calling Netanyahu a “deep, dark son of a bitch”, which is not the sort of thing you say about your friends. Trump has also been clear about wanting out of Syria, especially now that it is in chaos.

What may be shaping up for the first half of the Trump term is a policy of doing nothing with regards to the foreign policy hotspots. Trump and his advisors can answer questions and make the usual noises, but when it comes to investing time, the scarcest commodity Trump possesses, the administration will be stingy. These issues will get the absolute minimum amount of time and only so that they do not become a time waster for the domestic agenda.

It is looking like Trump learned that the most important card any president can play in politics is his attention. There is not much anyone can do if Trump simply de-prioritizes Ukraine, for example. “We are looking into it” works just as well against the schemers behind things like Ukraine as it does his own voters. Perhaps this time, instead of saying this regarding domestic issues, Trump will be saying it regarding foreign policy, to focus on the issues that matter to him.

The Wolf At The EU Door

Posted on January 8, 2025 by thezman

Note: An unexpected event this morning left me with no time to write, so this is the green door post from yesterday to fill the void. Assuming nothing else goes wrong today, I should be back tomorrow.

As January 20th grows closer, the Europeans are growing more hysterical about what Trump may do with Project Ukraine. There were rumors before the holidays that Keir Starmer was set to visit Mar-a-Lago to talk with Trump about Ukraine. Starmer had a call with Trump which must not have gone well, as the British media came out with stories about Trump rambling during the call.

It is hard to know what Trump is thinking with regards to Ukraine, which is why the Europeans are in a panic. If they knew what he is planning, they would be busy undermining it, which is why Trump is not talking about his plans. His personal emissary on Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, has cancelled his plants to visit Kiev and European capitals, which only adds to the intrigue.

The big fear in Europe is that Trump will do a deal with Putin and cut the Europeans out of the process. One would think that any deal that leads to peace would be welcome, but the Euros have more skin in the game than most realize. They either need the war to continue, or they need it to end in a way that does not expose the financial corruption around the entire project.

One good example for why the Euros are in this predicament is a town called Shevchenko, which is in eastern Ukraine. The Russians have just captured it as part of the steady push west. This little village would not matter, if not for the fact that it has one of the largest lithium mines in the world. It is part of what may be the world’s biggest lithium deposit.

While lithium is enormously important, that is not why this matters. You see, this mine is not actually owned by Ukraine. The rights to exploit it were traded away to an English company that was planning to use an Australian company to mine it. How this came to be is not all that clear but given the way the world works it surely required underwriting, which means British bankers were involved.

Now west of this town are other towns with massive lithium deposits, which have been pledged as collateral for various things, including the war. It is the thing that never makes it into the media. A significant portion of the financing for this war is tied to Ukrainian assets, which serve as collateral. They also buy the support of economic elites for this project. Project Ukraine is important business.

The reason the Russians captured this town is they are slowly encircling a city called Pokrovsk, which has been a major supply hub for the Ukraine army. The Russians are trying to split the front so they can break up the Ukraine army. This lets them destroy it piece by piece, limiting Ukraine’s ability to shift reserves where needed. This town with the big lithium mine is near the city of Pokrovsk.

This is a huge problem for Ukraine, but it is an even bigger problem for the EU, because Pokrovsk is vital to the coal and steel industry of Ukraine. You see, project Ukraine was supposed to bring the Ukraine steel industry into the EU economic zone, but now it looks like it will become part of Russia. The many investors in Ukrainian industry are not going to happy if Trump signs this land away to Russia.

This is the reason they put a gun to Speaker Johnson’s head last year to get the $60 billion Ukraine bill passed. Much of that money was to make whole those who had invested in project Ukraine. The arms dealers had “lent” the Biden admin weapons to send to Ukraine and they needed to be paid. The same is true for players like Blackrock that invested in Ukrainian agriculture.

Based on the hysteria in Europe, it does not appear as if the political class there has a similar way to solve their problem. If Trump makes a deal with Russia, all those companies and banks that invested in the project will be left with nothing but worthless Ukrainian bonds. It is why the European political class is desperate to be included in the negotiations. They think they can claw back some of the money.

Then there are the Russian frozen assets. Most of these are held in European banks and the Euroclear Bank. Any deal the Russians make with Trump to end the Ukraine war will include those assets. Otherwise, the Russians will confiscate American assets currently in Russia and Trump will not agree to it. In fact, walking bank sanctions and unfreezing assets may be the prerequisites for negotiations.

What if those assets are not available? The Europeans have been issuing bonds against the profits from those assets, but what if they have been using the assets themselves for other things? Even if the principle is intact, the investors expect to get paid, so if the assets are gone, then the profits are gone as well. Billions rest on those assets not being unfrozen anytime soon.

In a way, project Ukraine is coming full circle. In Trump’s first term, official Washington freaked out when Trump sent Giuliani to Ukraine. What followed was the first Trump impeachment as a massive smokescreen to hide what was happening. Five years later and the Europeans are in the same bind, but they cannot stage a phony scandal and impeachment to buy time and conceal the crime.

This is probably why the Europeans are going crazy over Musk. They think they can escalate their feud with Trump to the point where he either backs off and agrees to consult with them on Ukraine or maybe they can pin the blame on Trump for whatever happens to Ukraine in the coming year. It is not a great plan, but when you owe money and have no way to pay, you will try anything.

Deep State Nemesis

Posted on December 16, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about how the primary goal of American foreign policy is to create chaos, a post about the challenge of buying an old truck, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the more difficult things for people to accept is that sometimes things happen that benefit no one and for reasons under no one’s control. Other than natural disasters, people just assume that everything happens for a reason and someone wanted it to happen because they gain to benefit from it happening. Conspiracy theories are born when it is not clear who made something happen. This need to know the who and why for everything gets filled by the conspiracy theory.

The collapse of Syria is a great example of this. Everyone just assumed this was another American regime change operation. Then we got stories about how it was the Turks who backed the rebels and wanted Assad gone. Once the Israelis started grabbing land, the usual suspects came in with their usual theories. There is even a theory that the Russians wanted Syria to collapse to create a quagmire for the Americans to manage in the Middle East.

All these theories make some sense, if you ignore the things that make no sense whatsoever, like the dangers of creating chaos in the region. The Israelis might be happy Assad is gone for emotional reasons, but having a bunch of Islamist warlords operating on their border just added a lot of new costs to their budget. The United States now has a new problem to manage. Guarding those Chevon oil fields suddenly got more expensive and more complicated.

Then you have the fact that there are many players on the Syrian board. Before you get to the big players, you have six factions within the rebel coalition. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, called HTS in Western media. They are backed by Turkey, Qatar, the CIA and led by a guy who looks like the main character from the move The Dictator. He wants to create an Islamic state in Syria. This group used to be called ISIS of Syria but now is pretending to be a kinder, gentler ISIS.

Remnants of the Assad Regime are now forming up in the Alawite areas they still control and presumably they will get support from Russia and Iran. Then there is FSA/SNA and allied groups, that have been supported by Turkey, Qatar, the U.S. State Department, and the CIA. The Kurds, called SDF, have the protection of the American military operating in the region. ISIS still exists, with backing of pro-Islamic forces, along with regional tribal and Islamic groups.

What we now have is an area a little bigger than the state of New York controlled by a collection of war lords that do not like one another very much. The most likely outcome of this arrangement is a civil war between the groups. The only reason anyone would want such an outcome is if they have no exposure to it. In other words, there is no reason to think that anyone wanted this outcome, at least none of the countries exposed to whatever comes out of Syria.

This brings us back to that default formula. Everything happens in the world for a reason because someone stands to benefit from it. The cost-benefit for everyone with an interest in Syria is already negative and promises to get much worse as things travel their natural course. In the end, someone might make something of it, but right now it is a chaotic mess. Who would want this result? The answer is no one because no one saw it as a possible outcome.

Instead of a game of four-dimensional chess, Syria is an example of the lack of second order thinking by the Turks and Americans. Since 2011 both sides have supported anti-Assad groups for different reasons. Erdogan is obsessed with the Kurds, who operate in Turkey, Syria and Iraq. The United States backed anti-Assad group because Assad was tight with Russia and Iran. Their goal was to put pressure on Russian and Iran with a slow bleed of Syria.

Based on the associated media campaign, it is clear the United States and Turkey thought this would be a repeat of past flare ups. The rebels would make some attacks, but the Syrian army would push them back. After all, the Syrian army was a quarter million men with the support of Russia and Iran. The rebels numbered around thirty thousand and lacked air power and modern equipment. Instead, the Syrian army collapsed and Russia and Iran did not come in to save them.

Like all large-scale human societies, Syria was a complex system made more complex by relentless pressure from outside. Those outside failed to appreciate this complexity, so they did not plan for what would come from it once they started making changes to the conditions in which that complex system existed. Like a bomb disposal crew randomly cutting wires, the whole thing blew up and now everyone with a connection to the region is scrambling to adjust to a new reality.

Instead of being an example of the cleverness needed for the popular explanations about why Syria collapsed, especially the more conspiratorial ones, Syria is an example of a lack of those things. No one seems to have understood what was happening inside the Syrian system and no one thought much about what could come from monkeying around with the conditions inside Syria. It is the result of a lack of second and third order thinking, not four-dimensional chess.

The thing about this situation is it should have been obvious to all concerned that collapse was a possibility even before the rebel attack. In other words, this scheme was obviously stupid, but the main players did it anyway. This is not the first time the United States has been this stupid. Libya, Tunisia, Egypt are three great examples of the same poorly conceived scheme. If not for the Egyptian military, the Muslim Brotherhood would be controlling most of North Africa.

It is a good reminder for those who love chanting about the Deep State. The same people who create these debacles around the Muslim world are making decisions about all sorts of things, foreign and domestic. In a complex world, the default assumption about why anything happens is Hanlon’s razor. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence, neglect, or ignorance.” What we are seeing In Syria is a combination of all three.

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Minority Rule

Posted on December 11, 2024 by thezman

While most see the collapse of Syria as just another Middle East country thrown into chaos by the American government, it is a good lesson in the dangers that come when a distinct minority rules over the majority. The ISIS rebels get the credit, but the real blame lies with the way in which the Syria state was structured. Until now, Syria was ruled by one of the many minorities in the region. That minority is a mysterious ethnoreligious group called the Alawites.

The place to start is with the people. Syria has some of the oldest communities in the world, dating back to the ancient world. Maaloula, a village in western Syria, is one of the last remaining places where Aramaic is spoken. There are Christian communities that date back to Rome. Of course, Islam has been in the area now called Syria since the time of Mohamed. There is also the ethnoreligious group called the Alawites, which split from Shia Islam at some unknown point in the past.

The origins and identity of the Alawites are a mystery. There are roughly four million of them in the region. Their legends say they are descendants of the followers of the eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari. The reason he is called the eleventh Iman is because he was one of the twelve imams who claimed to be the spiritual and biological successors of the Mohamed. These are the founders of Shia Islam. Exactly how they became this distinct subgroup within Islam remains a mystery.

Now, Shia Islam is itself a minority within Islam. Roughly ten percent of all Muslim belong to a sect within the Shia designation. The vast majority of Muslims, especially in the Arab world, are Sunnis. Unsurprisingly, the relations between the Sunnis and Shia have never been good. One result of this enmity between the two camps is that the Sunnis, who make up seventy percent of Syria, claim the Alawites are not just heretics and non-believers, but not even Arabs.

That last claim is not without some merit. There has been a great deal of effort to gloss over the ethnic realities in that part of the world. Western experts are sure that there is no such thing as biological reality, so differences in people, even genetic differences, are explained as cultural differences. The locals, however, understand that the Levant has been the land of invaders, and they left behind more than just their buildings and some of their cultural practices.

That aside, the Alawites have been a highly clannish and resourceful group, often creating problems for the local rulers. The Ottomans tried to suppress them on multiple occasions, but also found them useful in roles requiring skill, like tax farming and managing the empire’s finances. When the Europeans came to dominate the region in the 19th century, the Alawites proved useful to their new rulers. It turns out that every ruler needs smart and clever people.

It is this ability to run complex systems that eventually allowed the Alawites to take control of Syria. That and their clannishness. Under the French, the Alawites played a key role, which gave them access to power and resources. After independence, their resourcefulness and understanding of the systems left by the Europeans allowed Hafez al-Assad and his Ba’ath Party to seize power. The Alawites, despite their numbers, were smarter than their rivals.

As an aside, one of the many claims about the Alawites by the Muslim majority is that they supported Israeli independence and had a long working relationship with the Jews in the region. This is generally considered a smear, but it is clear that the Alawites were willing to work with other minority groups in the region. The Assad family famously protected the Christian communities in Syria, for example. Minorities have a funny habit of sticking together against the majority.

That aside, a country run by a distinct and distrusted minority is never going to be stable, especially when the minority is tiny. This is why the Assad government had been ruthless at times when dealing with the Sunni majority. To keep the peace, the government had to make clear to anyone thinking otherwise that the government would use maximum force to maintain the peace. Minority rule is always made worse by the tactics necessary to maintain it.

Of course, the Assad led Syria had been useful to the West for a long time, so they got the support they needed to maintain themselves. Until now, it had been assumed that chaos in Syria would be bad for the region and bad for Israel. As a rule, confident countries seek stability in their diplomacy. Now that the official policy of the United States is to spread chaos around the world, Assad was an easy target for the now familiar regime change operation.

Regime change was possible in Syria because it was a minority government ruling a hostile majority. Western sanctions starved Syria of the cash it needed to bribe enough of the majority into supporting them. Turkish and American terror groups operating within Syria put constant pressure on the government. The reason Assad fell so quickly to this hodgepodge of ISIS radicals is the Alawite system collapsed. The ISIS mob was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.

This is what makes Syria a timeless lesson. No society run by a distinct minority can be stable, as the majority will always distrust that minority. Even when minority rule results in good times, as in the case of colonial Africa, the majority will find reasons to resent that minority. In fact, the good times allows that resentment to slowly build under the surface of apparent tranquility. As soon as bad times come, the majority revolts and the laws of large numbers takes its course.

Syria is why the Israelis have no interest in ruling over Arabs. They could take control of Gaza and the West Bank, for example, but they would be viewed as a minority ruling a hostile majority, so expulsion is their preferred option. In the oldest part of the world, the people still understand the oldest lessons. One of those is that a minority ruling a majority must always be a temporary condition. In the end, numbers always matter more than even human capital. The majority wins in the end.

Decades And Weeks

Posted on December 9, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about being smart, stupid and lucky, a post about the proper way to assassinate rich people on the streets on New York, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Lenin famously said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” The world has just experienced, and perhaps is continuing to experience, those weeks where decades happen. There is the war in Ukraine, of course, which keeps tempting the world to the abyss, but now there is the collapse of Syria, which promises to make the Middle East more dangerous. On top of that is the political crises in South Korea, France and Romania.

The easiest to diagnose is the Ukraine crisis, which has been creeping toward a conclusion most have understood since it started. The Russian army is slowly grinding up the Ukrainian army, which is slowly retreating. Slowly has been slowly becoming quickly, leading to rumors that big changes await Kiev. Zelensky has all but volunteered to be Trump’s personal footstool to find out what, if anything, Trump plans to do about Ukraine in 2025. The answer is probably nothing.

For their part, the Russians seem to have decided that they will have to sort things out despite whoever is running American foreign policy. The thing to watch is who Tucker Carlson has on from the Trump team after he returns from Russia. There is a good chance that Tucker is operating as an unofficial go between for Trump or who Trump will trust to manage the Ukraine problem. Regardless, the end of Project Ukraine promises to be weeks where decades happen.

The problem that promises to create lots of chaos for the world is the unexpected collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. One of the things you must learn when doing business in the Arab word is that nothing is ever as it appears. That is most certainly true with the fall of Assad and his exile in Russia. While it is clear that the Turks trained and supplied the “rebel” army, made up of mercenaries from around the Muslim world, it is unlikely that they anticipated this result.

It is also certain that the United States and Israel had a hand in developing this “rebel” army and setting it on its course. Like everyone else, they appear to have been unprepared for this result. Strangely, the Russians and the Iranians seem to have anticipated this result or at least were the first to see what was happening, so maybe they had a hand in this as well. The Russians have been operating in that part of the world for generations, so they understand Arab reality.

What we know is that Syria is now “controlled” by a collection of Muslim fanatics who have little in common with one another. They lack the resources and manpower to remain in control for long, so that means the many other factions and their sponsors will be looking to either flow into the void left by Assad or carve out more space for themselves in what used to be Syria. Iran, Russia, Israel, the United States and the Gulf countries will be backing their proxies in this chaos.

As an aside, the Trump demand that the United States stay out of the Syrian crisis is only going to make things worse. One reason is we will see a flood of refugees from Syria into Europe. This will be done on purpose to draw the West into the conflict, despite what Trump says. Then you have the portion of the foreign policy blob that exists to “manage” the Middle East. There is zero chance that they stay out of of what they see as an early Christmas present.

The Arabs are not having all the fun. South Korea just had an attempted coup, which saw the current president try to arrest parliament. The parliament fought back against martial law and then the president backed down. Then parliament tried to impeach the president but could not find the votes. If you want a laugh, Costin Alamariu did a piece on the bizarre politics of Korea. If North Korea decides it is time to invade South Korea, no one should be surprised.

Europe also is experiencing weeks in decades now. The Romanians tried to have an election, and things did not turn out as expected. They carefully followed the rules of “our democracy” by banning opposition parties and making sure the media ignored anyone questioning the authority of the regime. The result was the “far-right” candidate won a big victory in the first round and was holding a massive lead heading into the second round, so the Romanians annulled the election.

The reason they annulled the election is they said there must have been Russian interference causing the unexpected result. You see the logic of “our democracy” in how Western rulers operate. “Our democracy” is a system that always confirms their righteousness and their right to rule. Any other result means someone or something has sabotaged “our democracy.” Since “our democracy” is sacred, any means necessary must be employed to defend it, even annulling elections.

There is something similar happening in France. Last summer, the French populist party scored a stunning win in the first round of legislative elections. This is the party led by the Le Pen family. They were poised to win a majority in the national Assembly until Macron conspired with the other parties to rig enough seats to prevent it. Then Macron finked on his partners and appointed a prime minister none of his partners liked, which has now led to the collapse of the government.

Convention says that when the government is paralyzed this way, there are new elections to break the deadlock. The only way this can happen is for Macron to resign, which he is not going to do, because Notre démocratie est trop importante pour la laisser aux mains des électeurs. This means France is currently without a government, other than Macron playing the organ grinder’s monkey to Trump. French bonds are now less attractive to investors than Greek bonds.

The political chao in France is a foreshadowing of what lies ahead for all the EU countries as the bill for Project Ukraine comes due. Germany is headed for elections in 2025, and they are desperately trying to avoid a Romanian result, so they will probably jail anyone who could be a problem. Britain is now ruled by a party that is slightly less popular than rectal cancer. The opposition party, the Tories, is led by a clown they imported from Nigeria.

Overall, the European economy is in serious trouble. It is a thing that Western media ignores, for the most part, but anyone doing business in Europe or with companies having exposure to Europe understands. It turns out that an economy built on cheap energy from Russia performs poorly when that cheap energy from Russia is replaced by expensive energy from America and even more expensive energy from Russia, sold through Asian intermediaries.

What all of this points to as we close out the year is that what lies ahead is a time when decades happen in weeks. The looming chaos that is the next Trump administration only adds to the uncertainty. Through no fault of his own, Trump will inherit an empire surrounded by chaos of its making but lacking the human capital to understand the problems and set them right. Instead, it will be old solutions to the new problems, meaning this may seem like a calm time by comparison.

A Ship Without A Crew

Posted on November 26, 2024 by thezman

It appears the plan is to fill the time between now and when Donald Trump regains the White House with stories about starting a nuclear war with Russia. First, we got the NATO missiles strikes on Russia, then it was the Russian use of a mystery weapon that should terrify everyone. Instead, the response from NATO is a series of stories about doing even dumber things than the missile strikes. It is as if Western leaders are in a contest to see who can think of the dumbest idea possible.

So far this week we have stories leaking out from Europe that the Brits and French are talking about sending an “expeditionary force” to Ukraine. That was followed by comments from the head of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, suggesting NATO launch preemptive strikes on Russia. All of this is taking place in the looming shadow of a second Trump administration. The Europeans are carrying on as if Godzilla is approaching the continent.

Of course, all these ideas are being floated by people who would urinate themselves if faced with a physical confrontation. Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron are ridiculous people who have landed in these positions due to the collapse of their respective political classes. The rest of the European political class is equally silly, but most lack the vanity of these two. Most are like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who seems to cherish being a middling mediocrity.

The question that is never asked is how did it come to this? Surely Britain has better men than Keir Starmer. The UK has a lot of problems, but it still has some of the best human capital on the planet. The same is true of France. This is a country that defined diplomacy in the West. There must be a deep well of talent in the country, despite generations of bad policy making. How in the world did these two feckless nitwits end up ruling these two once great nations?

Obviously, these two men did not arrive on the scene by chance. They were selected and groomed by the political system that rules their countries. They made the right friends, followed the right advice and most importantly, never asked the wrong questions about the current narrative. In many respects, these two men were selected purely on narrative grounds. They filled a role in the story better than the alternatives, so they got the job and here we are on the verge of war.

It is the machine that generates the narratives that makes it possible for so many mediocrities to bubble up to the surface of the system. For example, the crackpot idea of an expeditionary force was not dreamed up by Starmer or Macron. This has been floated by the best thinks tanks in the West. Here is a post from the Center for Strategic and International Studies talking up the expeditionary force. It was written by what the system calls an expert on the topic.

This idea is part of a larger narrative that assumes, like all managerial class narratives, that the world can be set right if the managerial elite simply has the will. That is the themes of this post in The Guardian by one of the UK’s top experts on the war in Ukraine and Russia in general. It is a completely insane post that has no bearing on objective reality, but that is not important. What is important is it tells guys like Starmer that the good guys have the will to make the narrative real.

That post is not written by the typical kook that fills the pages of The Guardian, but by a fellow calling himself James Nixey. He leads the Russia-Eurasia program at Chatham House, which is a prestigious think tank in the UK. In other words, he is a guy people like Starmer will call for advice on Russia. Note that Mr. Nixey is barely qualified to offer tour advice on Russia. His entire life has been about sitting in a room somewhere imagining what life is like outside that room.

This is a recurring theme in Western politics. From top to bottom it is people who are very good at playing along inside imagination land and even better at avoiding anything that resembles real life experience. Generations ago, the Prime Minister would have served in the military and maybe even seen war. Even the more effete politicians could rely on a class of men who understood how the world actually worked. Today such men are treated as skunks at a picnic.

In the fullness of time, the defining characteristic of managerialism will be its boiling off of the capable, independent men in favor or complaint mediocrities. Lacking genuine men of action, the compliant mediocrities search for consensus, which becomes their authority figure and their moral authority. It is why everything that comes from the think tanks and media reinforces the agreed upon positions. The most terrifying thing for a mediocre man is to stand alone against the consensus.

The narratives we keep seeing serve to make manifest the consensus and cast those within the consensus as the white hat in the drama. Much of what seems to drive these mediocre men of late-stage managerialism is moral affirmation. It is why they have all herded themselves off the Ukraine cliff. They care only for being seen at the sincerest believer in the prevailing narrative. For the political class, it means public policy is always a public act of piety.

If the crew of a ship all die at once, the ship does not immediately capsize. It will float around until it runs aground or succumbs to a big wave. On rare occasions it makes its way to land in one piece. That is the West right now. It is a ship bobbing around, crewed by mediocre men who are terrified at the thought of being in charge. Instead, they huddle together inside a consensus and ruthlessly enforce it. To continue the metaphor, they are below decks debating the need for a captain.

Two Minutes To Midnight

Posted on November 25, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about my various handyman-DIY projects, a post about magnificent short film about Star Trek called Unification and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Last week, NATO began firing long range missiles into Russia and in response the Russians fired something entirely new at Ukraine. There is not much data on what it was and what it did, but the Russians claim it was their Oreshnik system, which is a type of intermediate-range missile. The Ukrainians, of course, claim it never happened and Western media is saying it was a ballistic missile. Whatever it was is serious enough to warrant an emergency NATO meeting this week.

From independent sources, the most likely answer is that the Russians demonstrated the first combat use of a hypersonic glide vehicle in this attack. The word “hypersonic” gets tossed around quite about by online “geopolitical analysts” because it is a cool sounding word that is often used in video games. There is nothing all that new about hypersonic missiles, as many long-range ballistic missiles reach or exceed Mach 5 as they descend toward their target.

In fact, there is nothing new about hypersonic glide vehicles. The Russians started working on this technology in the 1960’s. America also had a program testing this technology for weapons. Both sides of the Cold War figured out that traditional ballistic missiles were good enough for the job of terrifying the other side with the prospect of nuclear annihilation, so the technology never went into use. The cost of hypersonic vehicles was simply too high for the task.

There was another problem with hypersonic glide vehicles. Traveling through the atmosphere at those speeds made them impossible to hide. Satellites would be able to track them as soon as they were launched and ground radar would then also be able to track them, even if they have some maneuverability. A pretty good rule of air defense is that if it can be tracked it can be killed. At the minimum, the other side sees it coming and has time to get its own missiles in the air.

That is a bit of the arms race that has been forgotten. It was not just the race to have the most devastating warheads, but also a race to have the best detection systems and the best cloaking system. If the other side could not anticipate your launch or see it coming right away, you had an obvious advantage. This is why both sides eventually banned intermediate range missiles in Europe in 1987. The United States unilaterally withdrew from the treaty in 2019.

The intermediate range missile presents a big problem if your goal is to avoid wiping out mankind in a nuclear war. Because it can hit its target in less than thirty minutes, there is no way to respond, short of mag-dumping your ICBM’s. By the time the launch is detected, the missiles are closing in on the target. Missile defense in the nuclear scenario depends on hitting them in their boost phase or as they leave the atmosphere to prevent them from exploding over your territory.

It is unclear when the Russians resumed their intermediate missile program, but it was probably not long after the U.S. withdrew from the treaty. It is not all that clear when the Russians resumed working on hypersonic glide vehicles either. There is growing evidence that they have been collaborating with the Chinese on this project, because last year the Chinese demonstrated a hypersonic weapon. It combined a hypersonic glide vehicle and a fractional orbital bombardment system.

That last bit is another clue that the Chinese have been working with the Russians on this project, as the fractional orbital bombardment system is technology that dates to the Soviet Union. The Russians first developed this technology in the 1960s for its nuclear program. Unlike a ballistic missile, the FOBS only reaches low-earth orbit and can then deorbit over the target. This makes it very hard to track, because the warhead does not follow a predictable path.

When the Chinese demonstrated the combined use of FOBS and hypersonic glide vehicles, American military planners had a panic attack. General Milley famously compared it to Sputnik, by which he meant a moment when the West suddenly realized it had fallen behind the Soviets in space technology. Everyone dismissed his comments, because he is a notorious liar, but he may have been right. The possible use of this type of weapon by the Russians likely proves it.

The Russians have not said much about this system, other than stating that the West has no defense against it. The usual suspects are claiming that it is just an old intermediate missile system, and the Ukrainians say it was an ICBM. What we know is that minutes after it was launched, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles slammed into targets in Ukraine at speeds above Mach 5. Some claim Mach 10, but that is probably an exaggeration, but Mach 5 is still very fast.

What this means is that the Russians, if sufficiently provoked, could remove any European city from the game board in a matter of minutes. There is no defense and not much of a warning to the target country. If France, for example, starts firing SCALP missiles into Russia, Paris could cease to exist within a few minutes of someone telling Macron that he better say his prayers. It is easy to see why the deployment of such a weapon is so terrifying to fans of human civilization.

Of course, it is why the treaty banning the development of such weapons was viewed as an important step in deescalating the Cold War. This technology puts the world on a hair trigger with no time to pause for communication with the other side. It is also why the neocons desperately wanted the U.S. to withdraw from the deal. John Bolton was instrumental is convincing American officials to pull out of the treaty. In 2018, politicians still thought listening to psychopaths was a good idea.

The path to this point is a familiar one. The neocons first invent a threat, in this case the threat was that China and Iran were developing intermediate range weapons. There was little evidence of this, but that never matters. This is then turned into a justification for the United States to do something stupid. Famously, the invasion of Iraq was based on the entirely false assertion that Iraq was building doomsday weapons. It turned out that they only had WW1 vintage chemical weapons.

For the next two months, the psychopaths are still in charge of Ukraine policy, so they will no doubt keep poking the bear. It is pretty clear they want the Russians to use nukes in Ukraine. They have been yapping about it since 2022. That means the NATO meeting this week will be about getting the Germans to start launching their Taurus missiles at Russia. The excuse will be that they need to call the Russian bluff, but the real reason is they want a reason to fire the nukes themselves.

It remains to be seen if Trump is up for the difficult task of deescalating the arms race with China and Russia. He fell for every trick Washington could muster the first time, even some tricks they invented just for him. He seems to be set on keeping the neocons out of his administration this time. Even so, he will inherent a world that is now infinitely more dangerous thanks to the reckless behavior of the Biden admin. Simply surviving the next term might be the best he can do.

Trump’s Foreign Policy Problem

Posted on October 30, 2024 by thezman

One of the problems the world faces is that the dominant power on the planet has entered a period of incoherence. Joe Biden has come to symbolize the country he allegedly leads in that he is old, frail and not always understandable. This is how much of the world now sees the United States. What they see from Washington are people either trapped in a bygone era or divorced from present reality. It is as if the last several decades never happened.

You see this in this Financial Times post about what foreign policy could be like under a second Trump presidency. Keep in mind that the Financial Times is often used by the intelligence community to plant stories it wants to launder. The audience is not just the English-speaking world, but also Europe. The people quoted are all said to be associates of the Trump team. Their views may or may not reflect the thinking of Trump’s inner circle.

That aside, the first thing to note is that there is no acknowledgement of present reality in the story. For example, Congressman Michael Waltz is quoted often about how to resolve the Ukraine war. He says, “Trump could threaten to crash Russia’s economy by lowering the price of oil and gas.” According to Waltz, this will force the Russians to beg for peace negotiations. This policy makes sense if it is 1985 and Russia is still the Soviet Union with a brittle command economy.

For starters, the president cannot willy-nilly change oil prices. No amount of American production can drive down prices to a level where it would have an impact on the Russian economy. The “break even” point of Russian crude is well below that of the cheapest American production. Then you have the fact that it will take a decade to bring American crude production to the levels needed to crash prices. There is also the fact that Biden emptied the strategic oil reserve.

In other words, the big idea from the foreign policy experts is something they read about from the Reagan years that has no chance of working now. It is as if they are unaware of the sanctions war they launched two years ago that not only failed to crater the Russian economy but boomeranged back on them. The German economy is in in free fall because they no longer have access to cheap Russian gas. Meanwhile, the Russian economy is booming.

Of course, there is the fact that these people can only think in terms of threats when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world. Congressman Michael Waltz is a neocon sock puppet who was an early cheerleader for Project Ukraine. He was also wrong about every aspect of it. In any other profession, being as wrong as Mike Waltz would be disqualifying, but here he is being quoted as an authority on Russia. This is what happens when there are no consequences to failure.

Elsewhere in the article, they quote Fred Fleitz, a former John Bolton staffer and current foreign policy adviser at the America First Policy Institute, which promotes itself as helping shape Trump policy. With regards to Iran, Fleitz argues “The objective should be to bankrupt Iran again and to reinstitute maximum pressure.” Again? Has he not noticed that Iran survived sanctions for three decades? Is he not aware that Iran now has the support of China and Russia?

With regards to settling the war in the Ukraine, Fleitz says, “We freeze the conflict, Ukraine does not cede any territory, they don’t give up their territorial claims, and we have negotiations with the understanding there probably won’t be a final agreement until Putin leaves the stage.” Unlike Waltz, Fleitz has no clue as to why the Russians would entertain such a silly offer. Note that this idea was first floated by the neocons when the Ukrainian counter-offensive failed.

The jaw droppingly ignorant part of that post is the use of the term “Minsk-3” to describe the Trump strategy. The Russians correctly view the Minsk agreements as a Western ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine. The reason they think this is Angela Merkel said this in an interview last year. Naming the Trump strategy after two prior efforts to trick the Russians is just a way to make sure there can be no negotiations between the Trump people and the Russians.

This is probably why this story was planted in the Financial Times. The hope is to poison the well, so to speak, for the next administration with regards to negotiating with the Russians. They may not be able to control what Trump does, but they can give the Russians many reasons to not trust any overtures. After all, Trump will be gone in four years, so if they can freeze the Russia situation, they have a chance to get back in power and resume their efforts to start a war with Russia.

What becomes clear in that Financial Times story is that the American foreign policy establishment does not have a clue as to how to address the many problems the next president will face. The main reason for their incoherence is they seem to be unaware that these problems were caused by them. Compounding it is the toxic ideology of neoconservatism that has poisoned the foreign policy community. It is a cancer in the bowels of America’s most important institution.

It is what makes prospects for a sober minded and realistic approach to foreign policy under Trump unlikely. Trump’s instincts are good, as are those with many of the people around him, including JD Vance, but he will inherit a foreign policy establishment that is both stuck in the past and corrupted by a worldview that is inconsistent with the world as it is today and with the needs of the country. Fixing this problem without the use of extrajudicial means may not be possible.

The Kazan Catastrophe

Posted on October 24, 2024 by thezman

Back in the ancient times, if you wished to buy product from someone you arrived at their location with money, or they arrived at your location with product. The product was inspected, and the money was inspected. Once both sides were satisfied, the exchange was made, and the deal was done. It did not take long for a class of middlemen to turn up who brokered such deals. They inspected the goods, arranged transportation and safeguarded the product and the money.

World trade has not changed much since the ancient times. Middlemen still facilitate most of the trade. They are called banks, insurance companies, freight brokers, shipping companies and so forth, but they are all part of this vast and essential middleman economy that makes it possible for the local Walmart to have shelves stuffed with goods from Asia. It is what makes it possible for the Chinese company selling dog food to get paid by Walmart.

One thing to note about this setup is the two greatest seafaring nations in the history of the planet, the United States and Britain, do very little shipping. Instead, they control the flow of goods around the world through control of the insurance markets and the financial system used in global trade. If you are involved in global trade, you are certainly using the American financial system and either directly or indirectly the British maritime insurance system.

The dollar being the world’s reserve currency has been to this point the main driver of the explosion in global trade. The buyer in South America can do business with a seller in China, because his bank is connected to the American financial system through his country’s central bank. He does not have to get RMB from his bank to pay the Chinese vendors, because the exchange is done automatically through the dollar dominated global financial system.

This is about to change with the launch of an alternative payment system that was announced at the BRICS summit in Kazan Russia. The Russians and the Chinese have been working on creating an alternative to SWIFT, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It is the platform that networks the world’s banks to facilitate the flow of money around the world. The new system seeks to replace SWIFT for trade among the BRICS countries.

For most people this is an eye-glazing topic, but in the fullness of time it could be an event that generations of historians study as an inflection point. What the BRICS countries are seeking to do is wrest control of the global financial system from the West, specifically the English-speaking countries, at least for the members of BRICS and those countries willing to trade with BRICS. By extension, it is an effort to reduce the power of the dollar and thus the power of the American empire.

What this new system proposes to do is make it easier for participating countries to conduct business in the currency of other participating countries. Instead of China needing dollars to buy oil from the Saudis and therefore preferring dollars from other countries for Chinese goods, the Chinese will be able to buy oil in RMB and the Saudis will be able to buy Chinese goods in whatever currency they possess. The new system would handle the conversion and exchange rates instantly.

As an aside, that last part is interesting. In the United States, a business does not get paid by the credit card company for a few days. Often, the delay is longer. Of course, there are fees for taking credit card payments. In Russia and China, the movement of money is instant. The system is treated as a public utility, so fees are relatively small compared to what we see in the West. This is owing to much better and newer technology and a different attitude toward banking.

That aside, the significance of this proposal is enormous. The BRICS countries represent half the world’s population. The Arab oil countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, are onboard for this new system. The Saudis let expire the fifty-year-old deal with Washington that established the petrodollar. China, India and Russia are the driving force behind this new arrangement and represent three of the most important economic powerhouses in the world at the moment.

What this means for the West is far less influence over the rest of the world through the control of the financial system. The main reason China, Russia and India have pushed for this new system is they have grown weary of Washington abusing its position to bully the rest of the world. The sanctions war unleashed by Washington against Russia in 2022 was the final straw. If Washington would use the dollar to try regime change in Russia, it would do it to anyone, especially China.

What the BRICS summit in Kazan represents is decades of belligerently incompetent foreign policy in Washington. Ten years ago, it was inconceivable that these important countries would come together to create a parallel financial system, as all of them were committed to the dollar and the Western system. They were committed to the “rules-based order” because they assumed it served their interests, but decades of abuse by Washington has convinced them otherwise.

What this means for the West is clear. What we see forming up is a trading and cooperation block that includes all the countries outside the West, representing the bulk of the world’s population and the majority of economic activity. Add in the fact that the West has let its manufacturing base shrivel and seems to be at war with its agricultural base and you can see the problem. Economies based in providing services tied to the financial system are facing a cliff now.

For the United States, this could not come at a worse time. Debt is already at staggering levels and is accelerating. The productive and innovative portion of the population is aging, while the unproductive portion is exploding. Add in decades of infrastructure neglect, the demographic and cultural catastrophes, and now is not a good time for a decline in the dollar. America is an empire that debased its currency via the perfidious subversion of its own rules.

Contrary to some claims, the dollar is not about to collapse, but what Kazan signals is the steady decline in the dollar. As the rest of the world begins to trade outside the dollar, it means dollars and instruments denominated in dollars, like debt, will lose value on the global market. This means the American banking system must slow the creation of dollars to prevent inflation. This means the cost of borrowing dollars must go up and stay up in anticipation of declining dollar demand

The steady decline of the dollar means a steady decline in the American standard of living, baring a revolution in Washington. Being the world’s mint and banker only works if the world accepts what you are minting. A rentier economy reliant on skimming from every transaction is only possible if you control the currency. The parasitism that has become a feature of our economy is going to become more obvious. That will bring political consequences as well.

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