Becoming Estonians.

Russians are stereotyped globally as drunks and hot shots (Irish might contest that), English--as pompous and having bad teeth, in Russia Estonians are stereotyped as slow. Consider this: what is infinity? It is when Estonians count Chinese. Evidently, most of the American geopolitical pseudo-intellectuals are Estonians, otherwise how can you explain this. Kofman and Kendall-Taylor write in this petty cash rag for STEM-challenged "thinkers", Foreign Affairs, about the myth of Russian decline:

The problem is that the case for Russian decline is overstated. Much of the evidence for it, such as Russia’s shrinking population and its resource-dependent economy, is not as consequential for the Kremlin as many in Washington assume. Nor should the United States expect that Russia will automatically abandon its course of confrontation once President Vladimir Putin leaves office. Putin’s foreign policy enjoys widespread support among the country’s ruling elite, and his legacy will include a thicket of unresolved disputes, chief among them that over the annexation of Crimea. Any disagreements with the United States are here to stay.

As I am on record for many years, the Russia Study field in the West is a fraud and the crop of current Russia "experts" is a prefect reflection of the overall decline of the Western intellectual elites, of which I warned since the inception of this blog and am contemplating writing the book on precisely how this all occurred. Most importantly, majority of the so called "experts" in the West are highly uncultured people despite their many a Ph.D degrees in such subjects as "history", political "science" etc. Why they are uncultured is a separate issue, but it is a fact that they have a very skewed understanding of ethics and the extreme manifestation of such "ethics" one may easily find in the US media and in "Let's Go Brandon". People with actual ethics approach life with the assumption that they do not know much, in the modern West it is exactly the other way around, hence a dominance of clueless "experts" and onset of radical ideologies as a main tool for inquiry. Ideologies are much easier than actual study--as electric current, they take the path of the least resistance. Pontification increasingly becomes the only way of "intellectual exchange".

At this stage, it really doesn't matter what any of US "experts" think or project. Kofman and his co-writer are no exception. They state:

Expectations of Russian decline contain important truths. The country’s economy is stagnant, with few sources of value other than the extraction and export of natural resources. The entire system is rife with corruption and dominated by inefficient state-owned or state-controlled enterprises, and international sanctions limit access to capital and technology. Russia struggles to develop, retain, and attract talent; the state chronically underfunds scientific research; and bureaucratic mismanagement hinders technological innovation. As a result, Russia lags considerably behind the United States and China in most metrics of scientific and technological development.

Kofman, being a proud product of the US "humanities" degree-mill, writes on matters in which he precisely has zero expertise but what can you do? This is how US think-tankdom operates. But then again, you cannot teach the old dog new tricks because Kofman, obviously, has a very vague understanding of what real "metrics of scientific and technological developments" are, because he has degree in political "science" and the only "metric" he knows is that of iPhone. It is understandable in a way, it is difficult to resign oneself to the realities of the West's in general, and American in particular, decline, especially in the field of STEM in which Russia produces almost equal with the US number of graduates (two times more per capita than in the US). But then again, can you explain the difference between Russian public school Physics text book for the 10th grade and the same in the US, ah...wait, I forgot. In related news, Rosatom is a "state-controlled" company, as is most of Russian MIC, which produces weapons (and not only) the United States can only dream about. Well, never mind. 

Kofman's ego is hurt. He is not completely dumb, he feels that things do not go his way, he knows his grasp of Russia and her affairs, from military to economic ones, is at best tenuous. He doesn't understand Russia, he cannot, because he needs to study real history of the 20th century and of Russia's history--he is not able to. He still lives in La La Land of America's hegemony handed to her by providence and a series of historic events of unimaginable magnitude but he is afraid to recognize that. Hence, same beaten to death mantras trying to ignore such facts that today the third of Americans are forced to skip a meal to make their ends meet. 

Our survey results reaffirmed troubling data relating to food insecurity and food prices. The Zogby Poll® found food insecurity is being experienced by almost a third (29%) of respondents, while two thirds said no, and 5% were not sure. It's quite astounding to think nearly three in ten likely voters said they had or family members missed meals due to food price inflation.

Boy, talk about delusion. But then again, this is modern American expertdom for ya. But why being Estonian? Because the slow realization of truth is creeping in as is understanding of a fraudulent nature of any "metrics" by which modern West committed suicide. Kofman finally admits:

Washington must move past the myth that Russia is a beleaguered or cornered state, lashing out in recognition of its own demise. In truth, there is little evidence that Russia’s leaders see their country in this way—on the contrary, they consider Russia to be the center of power in its own region and an assertive player globally. Events such as the bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan only reinforce Moscow’s perception that it is rather the United States that is in decline. Ignoring that view will create false expectations for Russia’s behavior, leaving the United States and its allies poorly positioned to anticipate Russian actions.

Mr Kofman, "perceptions", really? For a man claiming to be an expert in "military affairs" it is about time to start learning about warfare, not from BS propaganda but face a hard cold fact of the United States losing, or not winning, all its wars (with the exception of invasion of mighty Grenada) since 1945 (and even then, in 1945, defeat of Nazi Germany was not exactly to the America's credit as it is claimed often) and escape from Afghanistan was not a "perception" but a solid forecast very many years prior to this embarrassment in Kabul. Many people warned about it. But it is what it is, US geopolitical "elites" continue to fail in finding their own asses with their both hands in a brightly lit room and refuse to recognize that the United States today is at the mercy of global forces which it cannot recognize nor accept as objective laws of real economy, warfare, politics and culture and continue to delude themselves with "garrulous patriotism", as noted by both Alexis de Tocqueville and, later, in different words, by Mencken, in feeble attempts to avoid facing a reality of a multi-polar world in which the US is but one of few global powers and is impotent militarily when facing real militaries and real economies.  

UPDATE: speak of the devil. Putin at Valdai on WW II history. 

It is totally pertinent to this piece above and this is very important. I, however, have an issue with Putin's statement that "they know". Not anymore, many of them are true believers in the Allies defeating Nazism, with some minor help from USSR. They have a completely distorted picture of the events of the 20th century and a defining role (crucible really) of WW II in creating conditions for what we have today--a systemic crisis of liberalism. None of them have any clue on the real price of peace.

Quoting Michael Hudson.

You all know my attitude towards Michael Hudson as one the brightest economic minds of our time. Here is a quote from one of his latest interviews, as always, loaded with insights and food for thought. 

Now Herman Kahn and I on another occasion went to the Treasury Department, and we talked about what the world would look like on a gold standard. I said, “Gold is a peaceful metal. If you have to pay in gold, no country with a gold standard can afford to go to war anymore. Because a war would entail a foreign exchange payment, and you’d have to pay this foreign exchange in gold, not IOUs, and you would end up going broke pretty quickly.” Needless to say, someone from the Defense Department said, “That’s why we’re not going to do it.”

How do we know that payments in gold bankrupt warring parties? Simple, really. Check where did British gold reserves go in the time span between September 1939 and the end of 1940. The whole mechanism of Great Britain becoming a financial lap dog of the United States throughout WW II is extremely well described  by Barnett. 

The last months of England's existence as a fully independent great power, able out of her own resources both to maintain her national existence and to wage war, passed away.  By the third quarter of 1940 the volume of British exports (including munitions for the empire) was down 37% on 1935. By the turn of the year 1940-1941, the dark mid-winter of the Blitz, England's stock of gold and dollars was near exhaustion... For obvious reasons the advent of "lend-Lease" was represented as an act of unparalleled generosity. In fact, it was clearly to America's advantage that American weapons should be carried into battle by fighting men of England and Empire rather than the sons of American mothers. Even after United States entered the war in December 1941--and not then by her own volition--it was still clearly to her advantage that England should be enabled to wage the war on far greater scale than would have been possible on English resources alone. 

United States, obviously, learned her lessons from British WW II experience and recognized that to fight the real war one needs a lot of gold, or, as it turned out in 1970s when Nixon took the United States, which by then lost Vietnam War, from gold--IOUs. Yes, IOUs which are built around, well... let Michael Hudson speak:

The gunboats don’t appear in your economics textbooks. I bet your price theory didn’t have gun boats in them, or the crime sector. And probably they didn’t have debt in it either.

Modern Western "economists" do not operate with power element at all--it is beyond their grasp because unlike some financial theories, military power requires a much higher level of education and knowledge. Economists do not study physics, systems' integration, chemistry or weapons' design, not to mention operations, in the West they also do not study real economics. Yet, all this IOU (or T-Bills and other paper) alternative universe collapses the moment American IOUs lose the main factor behind their forceful "validity"--US military power, or, rather, myth of it and the threat to use it in case some renegades decide not to "trust" IOUs. Do not believe me, even as early as 2015 there were numerous calls from inside US "analytic" community to consider military operations against Russia. I recently wrote about one such ignoramus, George Fridman, who described in 2014 how Russia will be defeated in Ukraine by combined NATO forces. Yes, they ARE that dumb. 

I am not saying anything new here, once the myth of the US military power began to be destroyed in public space, everything else started to follow. By 2018 it was clear that United States cannot win conventional conflict with Russia not only in her vicinity, which was the case since 2010, but even in Europe. I am not talking about nuclear one, because this kills all other reasonable outcomes and expectations. Once you cannot win the war, what's your next step, what's you next default position, so to speak? Right, money, currency and financial "instruments" manipulation. Indeed, China buys Russian oil and gas and pays for it in Yuan or Euro, what can the United States  do about it? Attack Russia or China? Well, we know what's going to happen. So, the only instrument left are sanctions and financial sabotage. But that doesn't change the fact that China and Russia trade, at least significant part of their trade, in Rubles and Yuans. China is  much more vulnerable to intimidation and  blackmail than Russia, but still, this doesn't change the fact that China is not Venezuela or Iraq and she cannot be invaded without the United States sustaining catastrophic losses. 

The fact that US "elite" is incompetent across the board is not a secret anymore to those who matter, and those are China, Russia and, to a degree, Iran as an emerging regional superpower. So, as Hudson states, and I subscribe to his every word here:

By waging this economic warfare against China to protect America monopolies, America is integrating China and Russia. And probably the leading Chinese nationalist in the world, the leading Russian nationalist, is Donald Trump. He’s saying, “Look boys, I know that you’re influenced by American neoliberals. I’m gonna help you. I believe that you should be independent. I’m gonna help you Chinese, Russians and Iranians to be independent. I’m going to keep pushing sanctions on agriculture to make sure that you’re able to feed yourself. I’m gonna push sanctions on technology, to make sure that you can defend yourself.” So he obviously is a Chinese and Russian agent, just like MSNBC says.  

Ability to integrate a complex interaction between military and economic factors  into systemic and easily grasped picture is not there in the US. The whole generation (or two) of the economic ignoramuses who can operate only in the world of neo-liberal voodoo and reign of financial capital has emerged since the collapse of the Soviet Union and it is incompetent, not able to face the realities, especially military realities of the 21st century, which define the catastrophic departure of the United States from her real, and perceived, greatness. "Economy" built on speculation and selling the snake oil of IOUs, or which depends on such news as this:

The explosion on the tanker in the northern Syrian city of Afrin killed at least 10 people, Reuters reported, citing initial reports from Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency Tuesday. News of the bomb detonation led to a rise in oil's “risk premium, even in a market with a glut of crude,” Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at The Price Futures Group, told MarketWatch. Against that backdrop, the front-month June West Texas Intermediate crude (CLM20) briefly traded as high of $13.69 a barrel before turning lower again to settle down by 44 cents, or 3.4%, at $12.34 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Is not sustainable, especially when it lost its power to coerce anyone who matters into believing that Wall Street IS the economy, which it is not. But we all are yet to face unfolding reckoning of REAL valuation and that will shake the global economy to its foundation. Just some thoughts for today.