The US -- and EU -- wet dream remains to replace Russia with Iran in terms of natural gas and oil imports to the EU. Every serious analyst knows this might take at least a decade, and over $200 billion in investment; not to mention Gazprom would fight it with the formidable -- commercial -- weapons in its arsenal.
At the same time Western financial powers in the New York-London axis did not anticipate that Moscow would not bow down and accept their demands that Putin lay off Ukraine - so that they could loot Ukraine's mostly agricultural lands at will. They obviously didn't learn from history; Putin also did not back off when he stopped them from looting Russia.
So the entire, sorrowful Kiev episode, as much as an infinite NATO expansion gambit, was also an attempt to stop Putin from preventing the Western looting of Ukraine.
What we had as a result was a tectonic geopolitical shift; the reconfiguration of the entire world balance of power as Russia and China deepened their strategic partnership -- based on a mutual external threat coming mostly from the US, with the EU as accessories. Russian intelligence very well knows the alliance now makes Russia and China invulnerable, whereas separately they could easily fall victim to trademark Divide and Rule.
As for the counter-NATO angle, Russia has had plenty of time to remilitarize, focusing on defensive and offensive missiles; the key to the next major war, and not obsolete US aircraft carriers. Russian defensive missiles such as the state-of-the-art S-500 and the offensive Topol M -- each with 10 MIRVs -- can easily neutralize whatever the Pentagon may have in store.
After Russia, Western financial "Masters of the Universe" went after China for allying with Russia. The usual financial suspects rigged the Chinese stock market in an attempt to crash the economy, using Wall Street proxies manipulating cash settlement mechanisms to first raise up the prices of the Chinese A shares, creating a giant boom, and then reversing the cash settlement rig to crash the market.
No wonder Beijing, very much aware of what was happening, massively intervened; is actively studying cash settlement moves; and is carefully reviewing the records of major stock operators in China.
Round up those central bank suspectsThe Kremlin's got to do something about the Russian Central Bank.
The Russian Central Bank kept interest rates high, forcing Russian oil and natural gas producers to finance their operations from Western sources, and thereby plunging the Russian economy into a debt trap.
These loans to Russia were part of the New York-London financier axis control mechanism. Were Moscow to "disobey" the West, the West would call in their loans after crashing the ruble, making repayment almost impossible, as they did with Iran.
This is the mechanism through which the West -- and its institutions, the IMF, World Bank, BIS, the whole gang -- rule. Beijing is moving either to complement or replace this set-up with new and more democratic international institutions.
If the Russian Central Bank had operated under sounder principles, it would have lent money at interest rates below the West's, and linked each loan to productive investment. A modus operandi totally different from the US -- where much of the central bank credit goes to banks and financiers for their speculative scams.
Michael Hudson, among others, has already made the case that the entire Fed only serves the interest of its financial rulers and does not give a damn about American industrial infrastructure, which was progressively shifted to colonies and/or vassals, as well as to China.
So the "Masters of the Universe" thought hardcore pressure on both Russia and then China would work. It did not. There are reasons to be alarmed; the "Masters of the Universe" will keep raising the ante, higher and higher.
The scenario ahead spells out Russia further moving east while simultaneously moving to extricate itself from most of the West's institutional architecture.
The merger of the China-driven New Silk Roads, a.k.a. One Belt, One Road and the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union, although slow and full of pitfalls, is irreversible. It's in their mutual interest to invest and develop a pan-Eurasian emporium.
Iranian natural gas will go mostly to the Asian part of Eurasia, and not the EU. And the Chinese economy will at least triple over the next 15 years as the US continues to de-industrialize.
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