From Paris to Karachi – Regime Change is In the Air
From Paris to Karachi – Regime Change is In the Air
There is nothing good about war. On this point all civilized people can agree. So, those that support the ‘current thing’ can stop reading right about….
Now.
But one of the things war does is expose everyone’s real intentions. Even though the first casualty of war is the truth, nothing clears the air more than than troops and tanks crossing political borders and forcing people to react to such a thing.
Since the beginning of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine, nee invasion, there’s been an acceleration of every conflicting agenda on the world stage, with mixed results for all involved, including Russia.
As I’ve talked about at length, this is a conflict of existential proportions for every major player. From the Neocons in the US/UK foreign policy establishment to Davos and the EU, from the terminally corrupt grifters in Congress to Putin’s inner circle in the Kremlin.
Ukraine represents the battlefield which will determine the outcome of World War III.
It’s both the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega.
Because of this political leaders around the world are under the kind of pressure which will define them.
Some will rise to the challenge, others wilt under the glare of the klieg lights .
Regime change is in the air all around the world either from the ground up as populations express their frustration with leadership intent on not serving their needs or from the top down as political elites attempt to retain control or open up new fronts without openly declaring war.
Like the Russian intervention into Syria in October 2015, this invasion of Ukraine also exposes a great deal of the lies and motivations behind those lies for the tensions leading up to it.
Think back to 2015 for a minute. All year long we were told that ISIS was too strong for anyone to really contain. We held Senate hearings on this. A new caliphate was rising in the eastern part of the country. These radicals just sprang up seemingly out of holes in the ground to overrun the Syrian army and begin knocking on the door to Assad’s presidential palace in Damascus.
Russia chose to intervene in Syria after Vladimir Putin’s speech at the UN General Assembly two days prior, where he asked the West, “Do you realize what you have done?” By bringing in air support and precision bombing Russia proved to all the world that ISIS wasn’t unbeatable, it was the exact opposite, a paper tiger created by virtual newspapers.
And that raised the simple question, if a few dozen Russian planes running sortie after sortie can turn the tide in this war in a matter of weeks why couldn’t the US Air Force do the same thing? It’s not like anyone at the time thought the Russian air force superior to that of the US, so what in the holy hell was going on?
Clearly, at that point Occam’s Razor applies and you have your answer, the US was turning a blind eye to ISIS’s rampage and likely assisting it in operations against the Syrian Arab Army.
After all President Obama in 2013 tried to form a new “coalition of the willing” to oust Assad from power after a false flag chemical weapons attack which never formed when the British parliament defied Prime Minister David Cameron and refused to join Obama’s invasion.
Putin negotiated a a face-saving compromise which saw Assad give up his stockpile of chemical weapons and his reward was three months later a coup in Ukraine which brought down corrupt President Viktor Yanukovich. This led to the current state of affairs with the Donbass declaring independence sparking a civil war and the Russians allowing Crimea to join the Russian Federation of its (mostly) own free will.
So, fast forward to today and shouldn’t we be asking the same questions about the war in Ukraine itself?
To even casual observers of this conflict, whether we agree or disagree with Russia’s red lines over NATO’s intentions or Ukraine’s right to ‘self-determination,’ there was clearly a relatively peaceful outcome on the table should both sides have been willing to deal honestly about it.
So why didn’t it happen? Why are we here? Again I refer you to the existential threats to various people, groups and countries for whom Ukraine represents something bigger than just Ukraine itself.
Moreover, today we are clearly not allowed to raise these questions. If you do then the Thought Police come in to take away your Twitter account or worse.
We are seven years advanced from those halcyon days of being able to take in information and discuss it and draw our own conclusions.
Because of this the fog of war has never been thicker in my lifetime. It begs another question as to why. Why should it be verboten to question what happened at Bucha?
Or why Russia invaded in the first place?
Why we’re even contemplating expanding the official presence of NATO in Ukraine as it resists foreign occupation?
Again, it doesn’t matter if conceding to Russia’s demands on Ukraine violate some so-called Western principles of self-determination. When politicians are hiding behind principles you know there is a far different agenda lurking beneath the headlines.
That said, to my mind it is very clear why. When all aspects of this conflict are balanced it is hard to ignore the conclusion that the foundation on which the entire Western neoliberal order rests is crumbling.
It means there can be no quietly going our separate ways, West and East, without one side gaining and the other losing prestige and power.
This is why “regime change” is now the catchphrase of the day. While everyone involved officially denies that’s what’s going on, the actions say otherwise.
The West is openly lobbying for Russians to rise up and overthrow Vladimir Putin. Russians are ignoring them completely. We are mobilizing thousands of troops and tons of materiel into Poland.
The EU’s top diplomats is now saying only a military solution is possible in Ukraine as Russia prepares its next major assault on Ukraine’s forces trapped in the eastern part of the country, incapable of coordinated strikes of militarily strategic significance.
Russia smothered the pivotal city of Mariupol and has finally secured some of the last holdouts in the Azovstal Steel Complex where reportedly hundreds of NATO officers of French, British, Canadian and (yes) American allegiance were trapped when the Russians surrounded the city and were apparently held as hostages by the remaining Azov Battalion forces holed up there.
That is the subtext of Emmanuel Macron’s poor showing in last weekend’s first round of the French Presidential elections. And it has him in the thinnest position an establishment French President has been in electorally in decades, having not gotten French military men out of harm’s way before things got out of hand.
When I say regime change is in the air, I don’t just mean some nefarious intelligence agency operation.
Viktor Orban’s impressive showing in Hungary was also a black eye for Davos as this election campaign was widely reported as very close with polls showing him in danger of losing to a Not-Orban coalition. And then on the day see him win with stronger support than he had previously. This leaves the EU vulnerable to Hungary’s clear unwillingness to get involved in a war on the European continent.
In the US, President Biden is in serious trouble as the issues surrounding his son, Hunter, and his involvement in shady dealings in Ukraine. If you needed a reason, other than Biden’s obvious cognitive decline and inability to project US influence over countries necessary to isolate Putin and Russia, for the Democrats to come up with a reason to get rid of him before the mid-terms in November look no further.
If you want you can add in rampant inflation and his administration’s ridiculous claims about it being “Putin’s price hike.”
No wonder Jenn Psaki wants out of this clown show.
But, Biden was put into power to be the fall guy for US incompetence in the hopes that they can scapegoat him for the administration’s struggles.
As if no one has a memory capable of going back farther than a month or so.
With these troubles brewing in important countries in the West. The pressure on countries unwilling to agree with the West’s characterization of this war as only Russia’s fault has increased substantially.
In Pakistan, Imran Khan is now the former Prime Minister, as a combination of his own failings as a leader mixed with intense external pressure led to him being ousted from power but also not leading to a new election, which was the path he tried to choose.
Sound familiar? This is similar to what happened in Italy in 2019 when Italian political insiders closed ranks to oust Lega’s Matteo Salvini from power and put former ECB President Mario Draghi in charge of the country just in time to destroy it for Davos’ Great Reset and the COVID-19 great leap into tyranny.
Pakistanis are coming out in huge numbers protesting the “Imported Government” now forming up after Khan successfully made the pitch to the people that the situation there is a product of US intervention.
I would keep a close eye on what’s happening in Pakistan over the next few weeks. Biden was in India to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to pressure him into giving up his support of Putin through bilateral trade.
The goal is to get India to re-establish ties with the US and, more importantly, the US dollar.
And that’s the real crux of what is going on now. The dollar isn’t in trouble today. A quick look at the US Dollar Index tells you that.
But it is in trouble in the long run, as I’ve discussed in previous articles (here and here).
It seems the only guy not in some kind of political trouble is the one person supposedly suffering the most, Vladimir Putin. A few weeks ago I asked the question whether Putin was destined to drown or hang over his refusal to bow to the West.
Putin knows he’s been pushed into this by people who are powerful but psychologically small. And the Russian people have been deeply disrespected to the point of war. That’s why his poll numbers rise while Bidens’ barely budge.
That all leads to regime change as the end-game because it may be the only option, which implies continued escalation to the point of something unthinkable.
That something unthinkable is what Robert Kagan, husband to Victoria Nuland, thinks is worth getting rid of Putin over, nuclear conflict with Russia.
Kagan knows that Putin, for all of the issues he’s navigating now, is in no worse a position than he was six weeks ago. The Russian people are lining up to fight in Ukraine, his popularity hasn’t been this high since reunification with Crimea and he’s begun the process of reversing the nothing for something global monetary order having tied the ruble to gold and, by extension, all commodity trading worldwide.
But it seems now, with the surrender of most of the Azov forces in Mariupol and the Russians massing a huge force to roll over the rest of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the next few weeks in the Donbass, a small dose of reality is beginning to filter into the minds of neocons and Davos.
When they send out a CFR Senior Fellow to write a massive apologia for a return to realpolitik for the New York Times (link to a non-paywalled version of the story here) you know we are now beginning to look at the costs of escalating this conflict any further.
The right move here for everyone is to get back to the bargaining table, accept the fact that the Great Reset has failed and live with the idea that to survive what damage has already been done to the global economy and humanity itself, post-COVID, is already an Herculean task which doesn’t need regime change on a mass scale but the barest modicum of humility to let sane minds begin the rebuilding.
Sadly, I don’t think that is the most likely outcome.
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