U.S. President Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. For as many as 70 years, the world played the geopolitics described by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his Grand Chessboard (with a couple of coffee breaks for collapse of the USSR andsmall idle talk about “chess reforms”) and it seemed that it was the game of the century. But Trump has changed the rules.
He does not want a lot: just one more presidential term for himself and great future for America. He wants the world to buy his expensive gas but does not want its cheap steel and aluminum. He would also love to solve some global problem in the meantime. Quite an ordinary dream. What the world is scared of is the methods Trump is going to use to make that dream true. Or was it just a pretext?
Anti-Russian sentiments were not what helped Trump to become U.S. president (just remember his statements on Crimea). The key factor that made the Americans vote for Trump was his promises to revive the Rust Belt, America’s industry. Russia has very little if any influence on the U.S. economy: the blow on Rusal was just a rebound. So, we are no longer under the gun.
The weapons that can be used against Russia are no longer effective as the sanctions are affecting mostly those who are imposing them. Ukraine is giving no dividends. Nord Stream 2 is becoming inevitable. In the final part of this article, we will give you our vision of what Russia should do to crush America’s hegemony. But before we would like talk about what the others have already done.
Last month saw two meetings that will change the world: we mean the meetings of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel with Trump. And even thought the meetings were mostly amicable, shortly afterwards European Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström slated Trump for his decision to impose additional import duties on EU exports of steel and aluminum (25% and 10%, respectively) and for his offer that the EU’s exports to the United States should be reduced to 90% of last year’s level. She also warned that the EU would be forced to react by complaining to the WTO, supporting European producers and imposing duties on U.S. goods. The compliant has already been filed. Europe has taken up the glove. Trump has put off his initiative till June 1.
On Apr 27, when Trump was meeting with Merkel, the leaders of North and South Koreas Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-in, respectively, signed a Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula. Trump was so touched to see the Korean leaders’ hugs in the inter-Korean Peace House that he hurried to post a message in Twitter, saying that he would also like to meet with Kim there. By doing that, the U.S. president confirmed his reputation of a “political idiot”: while his Department of State was looking for a neutral venue, he agreed to meet with Kim in a territory he considered as his own, on the line between “free” and “occupied” Koreas, and by doing that, he not only admitted that the United States was an occupant but also publicly humiliated Moon.
Besides, by expressing good will to stop the launch of ballistic missiles and to shut down the test site in the north of his country, Kim has wrecked Trump’s plans to appear as the one who has prevented nuclear tests in North Korea. On the other hand, the Americans realize that Kim has not promised anything and can take his words back unless he gets something in exchange. But what he may want in exchange will certainly mean capitulation for the Americans and no excuses will help them. Now they are considering a new venue, perhaps, it will be Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia (the “oasis of democracy” according to former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry), and the date will coincide with the annual Khaan Quest U.S.-Mongolian exercise.
The most awful thing is that nobody knows how Korea can be unified – even though there are heaps of various plans. Just remember how much time it took the West and East Germans to actually reunite.
And even if Kim and Trump meet, their topics will be the same as before: no more U.S. maneuvers in South Korea and more support for North Korea. If North Korea gets more rice, its army will grow as will its population. And if one day the Americans refuse to give more, Kim will stop the talks.
But since we have already overthrown Brzezinski’s chessboard, let’s imagine that the North and South Koreas reunified into some neutral, relatively democratic Korea. If this happens, the Americans will lose their last foothold in East Asia.
There is only one thing that can be worse than this: Chinese-Indian rapprochement. The leaders of China and India met in Wuhan on Apr 27. They must have realized that their key problem is their territorial disputes and that they need to do something to solve it. Following the meeting, the Indian prime minister made it clear to Washington that India was not going to join its anti-Chinese axis.
Trump’s last decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal will hardly cause a big war as nobody is ready for it (generally wars start when one side thinks that it is ready and the other thinks otherwise). Today Iran can sweep the Americans out of Iraq and Syria and to rout Saudi Arabia. But the Americans will certainly counteract, like they did in 1991, when Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait.
For this purpose, they have President of Sudan, the “Butcher of Darfur” Omar al-Bashir, who will certainly help them with ships in the Red Sea, and the «Middle East quartet» (three moneybags, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrein, and one cannon fodder, Egypt). It will not be a problem for Egyptian troops to get to Saudi Arabia through Israel. The problem is that in Saudi Arabia, they will face Shias, who account for 1/3 of the population. Saudi Arabia has a “nuclear guarantor”, Pakistan, but India will act as a “nuclear restraint” here. Turkey and Azerbaijan will act as observers. Georgia is always ready!
Those wondering why the U.S. Embassy in Yerevan is so huge should know that most of its 2,500 employees dealt with Iran in the past. And at present we have an Orange Revolution in Armenia (the Armenians call it the Revolution of Love). Its leader, new Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan insists that Nagorno-Karabakh should be involved in the peace talks – and he is either serious or is just trying to cover his plans to cede the republic. In any case, Armenia has fallen back to where it started. Pashinyan is acting like a true revolutionary: de jure, he is running the process, de facto, he is ruining it. As a result, Armenia will face a more or less bloody war and hard decisions like breakaway from the Collective Security Treaty Organization and deployment of another contingent in the conflict zone. If this happens, for the Iranian Basij (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), Armenia and Georgia will be just a piece of lulah kebab.
In the meantime, Trump is considering a “triumphant ending” for his war with ISIL and withdrawal from Syria. For as long as six months, the Americans and their Kurdish allies from the left bank of Euphrates did their best to curb the advance of the Syrian army and to save the remnants of ISIL in Syria’s desert with the only aim to justify their presence in that country. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad did the same so as to justify the presence of Iran. But recently both the Kurds and the Syrians began mopping up the ISIL-controlled territory. The Syrians did it in just one day and found no single ISIL fighter, while the Kurds faced fierce resistance. On May 5, they reported the loss of a detachment: one of the eight “Kurdish” soldiers was a Syrian, one was an Iranian and the other six were from Turkey (obviously, from the anti-Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party). So, you see that the war in the Middle East will not finish soon, especially after Trump’s last “nuclear pirouettes.”
And it may go even farther, for example, to the south of Africa, where the black majority may soon attack white farmers. Today the South African authorities are drafting a law that will enable any black South African to expropriate a white farmer’s land if he proves that it once belonged to his ancestral tribe. All this may lead to a civil war in South Africa, where ISIL also has cells. And if it starts, the ripples may reach Islamist Nigeria and Somalia. Best regards to future Europe!
And now about Russia. Whether it is good or bad, the West has gotten tired of Russia. Once Mikheil Saakashvili said that alternative pipelines via Georgia would drive the “bear” into Eurasia’s corner. His plan failed: today TANAP is no longer a rival to Turkish Stream but a good way to raise the efficiency of the hub on Turkey’s border with Greece and Bulgaria. The subtlety of Saakashvili’s statement is that geopolitically, Russia cannot be driven into Eurasia’s corner as it is that corner. But we also can act as a bridge between Europe and China. The truth is that all Europe wants from us is gas and this is great as this gives us time for reviewing our relations with the West.
There is no use in debating with the West. “The OPCW is not a theater!” “This is an obscene masquerade!” This is what the West said in response to Russia’s attempt to prove that there was no chemical attack in Syrian Douma.
The “cynical Russians” really believed that since their western “partners” were also homo sapiens, they would understand them if they explained. They will not. And we need to accept this. They admit that the Interior Ministry of democratic Ukraine has one Nazi battalion but all they did in response was deciding not to finance it from the U.S. assistance. It took them as many as four years to notice that Ukraine had a law praising Nazi collaborationists – those responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews and Poles. And they still insist that Crimea should be returned to such a state.
We cannot do anything against propaganda. The only way for us to reach the brains of ordinary westerners is to repeat the same thing again and again. Just one example: if a journalist asks us a question concerning Russian-Georgian relations, our answer should be: “The OSCE commission chaired by Heidi Tagliavini found out that it was Georgia who started the war of 2008. Georgia committed an act of aggression against Russia by attacking and killing its soldiers. See point 3d of the UN Definition of Aggression 1974. The Russian peacekeepers were deployed in the zone of their responsibility in line with the Sochi Agreement of 1992-1994. The Georgian troops had no right to enter that area. Remember 1967: the Egyptian troops had no right to enter Sinai according to international agreements, even though it was their territory. They did, Israel rebuffed them and the UN Security Council did not qualify Israel’s reaction as aggression. And now I am answering your question.” And the journalists will have to guarantee that this paragraph will not be omitted. And we should speak likewise concerning Crimea, Ukraine, Syria, the sanctions. Only this can help us to stop the lies coming from the West.
As for the rest, time will show. If Trump is actually the Kremlin’s agent, his operation is really brilliant: he is doing exactly what the U.S. elites, Israel, voters, corporations and lobbyists want him to do – he is creating plenty of conflicts in the Middle East, Central and East Asia, Europe and Africa. As a result, at some point, the Americans will face so many conflicts that their concessions to Russia will seem a blessing to them. If this is true, devil take Brzezinski! Trump deserves a Nobel Prize.
Albert Akopyan (Urumov)