Revisiting Archetypes,
Gail Tverberg, Is it possible that the world is approaching end times? (This approach may recruit a new group of readers for this important perspective.)
I frequently write that the world economy is, in physics terms, a dissipative structure that is powered by energy. It can grow for a time, but eventually it reaches limits of many kinds. Ultimately, it can be expected to stop growing and collapse.
It seems to me that the world economy is showing signs that it has reached a turning point. Economic growth stopped in 2020 and is having trouble restarting in 2021. Fossil fuel energy of all types (oil, coal and natural gas) is in short supply, relative to the world’s huge population. Ultimately, this inadequate energy supply can be expected to pull the world economy toward collapse.
The world economy doesn’t behave the way most people would expect. Standard modeling approaches miss the point that economies require adequate supplies of energy products of the right kinds, provided at the right times of day and year, if they are to keep from collapsing. Shortages are not necessarily marked by high prices; prices that are too low for producers will bring down the energy supply quickly. A collapse may occur due to inadequate demand...
We are not used to living in a world where very little that is published by the Mainstream Media makes sense. But when we live in a time where no one wants to hear what is true, the system changes in a bizarre way, so that a great deal that is published is false.
Economists have chosen instead to make models that assume no limits are ahead. They seem to assume that all problems will be fixed by innovation, substitution and the pricing mechanism. They produce forecasts suggesting that the economy can grow endlessly in the future. Based on these forecasts, they provide input to models that reach the conclusion that amazingly large amounts of fossil fuels will be extracted in the future. Based on these nonsensical models, our problem is not the near-term limits that we are reaching; instead, our chief problem is climate change. Its impacts occur mostly in the future
.A corollary to this belief system is that it is we humans who are in charge and not the laws of physics. We can expect governments to protect us. We don’t need any outside help from a literal Higher Power who created the laws of physics. We need to listen to what the authorities on earth tell us. In fact, in troubled times, governments need more authority over their citizens. The many concerns regarding COVID-19 make it easy for governments to increase their control over citizens. We are told that it is only by following the mandates of governments that we will get through this strange time...
In fact, we are colliding with resource limits, right now. This seems to be what produced the bizarre situation experienced in 2020...
As time went on, it became very clear that the true nature of the COVID-19 epidemic was being hidden from citizens. It was, and is, not a terribly dangerous illness if it is treated properly with any number of inexpensive medications including aspirin, ivermectin, antihistamine and steroids. In fact, the severity of the disease could also be lessened by taking vitamin D in advance. There really was not a great deal of point to the vaccines, except to enrich the vaccine manufacturers and those who would benefit from the sale of the vaccines, including Anthony Fauci and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
It also became clear that the vaccines don’t really do what a person might expect a vaccine to do. They do tend to stop severe illness, but taking vitamin D in advance would provide pretty much the same benefit. They don’t stop COVID-19 from circulating because vaccinated people can still catch COVID-19. The vaccines seem to have any number of side effects, including raising the risk of heart attacks.
The historical period most similar to the current period, in terms of shortage of energy supply, is that between World War I and World War II. At that time, the Jews were persecuted. Now, there is an attempt to divide the world into Vaccinated and Unvaccinated, with the Unvaccinated persecuted. When the economy cannot produce enough goods and services for all members of the economy, the economy seems to divide into almost warring parts....
Europe is the part of the world where the push for vaccinations is now highest. It is also in terrible shape with respect to energy supply. By ostracizing the unvaccinated, European countries can attempt to cut back their economies to the size that their energy supply will support, without admitting the real problem...
It is disturbing to think that we may be living near the end of the world economy, but there is an upside to this situation. We have had the opportunity to live at a time with more conveniences than any other civilization. We can appreciate the many conveniences we have.
We also have the opportunity to decide how we want to live the rest of our lives. We have been led for many years down the path of believing that economic growth will last forever; all we need to do is have faith in the government and our educational institutions. If we figure out that this really isn’t the path to follow, we can change course now. If we want to choose a more spiritual approach, this is a choice we can still make.
The Ethical Skeptic presents a well developed, detailed, graphically supported and logical case that SARS-CoV-2 actually escaped from a Chinese lab in early 2018, spread and mutated more slowly than announced, was kept as a mystery, though Chinese (and other) people were hospitalized a lot in 2018 and 2019. Chinese SARS-CoV-2 cases were actually in a final third-wave peak when "discovered" in Wuhan in late 2019.
Due to natural immunity, China was able to have great success with lockdowns, as it would have had with doing nothing at all.
The rest of the world was misled, but found ways to make political lemonade out of the lockdown-lemon. Regions of Asia and Oceana, like India and Australia, actually had a lot more herd immunity by 2020, which was explained and dealt with in different ways.
The saga of the lost Omicron variant is also investigated in detail. This variant has a last common ancestor with other COVID strains a long time ago, which could (barely) have happened if it derived from an initial lab leak in March 2018, but it may well have been released later, even intentionally, due to its specific engineered characteristics. It is not more deadly, but quite different, and does evade the antibodies to January 2020 spike protein very effectively.
If this virus is actually spread more through (Gross!) aerosolized fecal particles, then a mode of spread to whitetail-deer is readily explained, and also some of the early patterns of mass epidemics in the US. Mapping graphs explain this.
The Twilight of the Narrative, Posted on the Seneca Effect blog ... One of the main changes wrought by the internet is the shattering of “grand narratives”...
As the corona event drags on interminably, there are those in the dissenter camp who still think the “narrative is about to crack” any day now and the “truth” will be revealed.
This mindset from the old, pre-internet world is no longer valid in the world we live. There is no unifying narrative any more that is going to crack and be replaced by a better, more truthful narrative. Rather, there are now just a seemingly infinite number of sub-narratives with a dominant narrative imposed on top of them...
Narratives must evolve organically with a feedback loop between top-down and bottom-up. The increasing use of censorious tactics in the last couple of years reveals the underlying weakness of the dominant narrative. The powers that be have gone all out in attempting to hold together a narrative that itself doesn’t make sense as it is changed willy-nilly according to purely political considerations.
It’s tempting to think the politicians are doing it on purpose with some larger objective in mind. But what if there is no larger objective? What if these tactics are simply what is required now to create any type of dominant narrative at all? What if these tactics are now the price you pay to create a narrative? ...
The price to create a dominant narrative has gone up for a number of reasons but one is that the internet opened the floodgates on the flow of information and allowed multiple alternative narratives to be created...
The public discourse which existed prior to the internet was facilitated through a system in which the media was known as the “fourth estate”. Its job was to hold government to account. Of course, this was not a perfect system but, as the saying goes, it seems it was better than all the others. It was certainly better than the system we have now where the media does not hold the government to account at all and is little more than a public relations branch of the government...
Whatever the ethical dimensions of these issues, what lies beneath is the fact that the media companies are no longer viable businesses capable of existing without government support. Because they are now reliant on government money, their function as the fourth estate that holds government to account has also all but disappeared. That’s a problem for them but it’s also a problem for the government. The “official narrative” is transmitted through the legacy media. If the legacy media goes away, so does the narrative... The government needs the media as much as the media needs the government.
I would argue that the public also needs the media. It needs the media to act as its representative. That was the whole point of the Fourth Estate arrangement. The public paid for the media and that meant the media had an incentive to represents the readership’s interests. But that is all gone now...
“The system” can no longer control the discourse the way it previously could. This is not a trivial matter. It leads us back to one of Plato’s most dangerous ideas which is the Noble Lie... We could soften it by calling them myths or ideals but the effect is the same. The myths and ideals are the glue that holds things together and, according to Plato, without them society will disintegrate.
Our post-internet public discourse provides some evidence for this assertion. It has become completely detached from reality or, to put it another way, it represents only one version of reality: the one that comes from the top-down. This process is especially advanced in the US. It hit a fever pitch with the Trump presidency and has not relaxed since. There are now at least two mutually incompatible narratives going on in the US meaning that agreement about the fundamentals which hold society together is called into question on an almost daily basis...
As a result, a large proportion of the population no longer has any faith whatsoever in the system. That holds true no matter who is in power. The dominant narrative is now nothing more than the story told by those in power.
In Australia and much of Europe and Canada, we are just now catching up with the US. Here in Melbourne, more than a hundred thousand people marched against the government last weekend. The Premier’s response was to write them off as “thugs” and “extremists”. It reminded me an awful lot of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” moment. When politicians no longer feel like they need to accommodate the interests and opinions of a substantial proportion of the population you know the narrative is already fractured...
The same goes for the demonstrators in Europe who are simply ignored by the mainstream media. Because the public discourse no longer pretends to reflect reality, nobody really believes in it including the people who nominally go along with it. Deep down they also must know that it is fake...
We are entering a time when even the idea of a centralised narrative is no longer believed in. If Plato was right, this fact alone is an existential threat to the state and it is understandable that the state would strive to fix the problem. But it’s almost certainly too late...
Will that lead to the disintegration of the state? Plato would have said yes. We may be about to test that theory.
Jim Kunstler picks up the narrative thread..
For instance, a new study and warning from the American Heart Association concluded that mRNA vaccines dramatically increase risk of developing heart disease between 11 and 25 percent. Twitter slapped an “unsafe” warning on anyone attempting to transmit this news on its sacred app. Unsafe to whom, or what? Why, to the sacred narrative, of course, which is that the USA must be kept in a never-ending paranoid uproar over Covid — certainly until at least past the 2022 elections, in order to maintain all the emergency mail-in ballot provisions that enable voting fraud...
Meanwhile, the emerging reality of Omicron is that it has a much lower transmission coefficient than its predecessor, the Delta variant, and produces only mild symptoms of illness...
Anyway, two federal judges rendered decisions striking down Acting President Fauci’s vaccine mandates. The second ruling, penned by U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of Louisiana’s Western District, featured a particularly lusty and detailed diagnosis of the mandate’s constitutional impropriety, and extended the injunction against vax mandates to all fifty states.
This leaves the USA in a distinctly exceptional position among the other nations within the loose confederation of Western Civ. Thanks to manifestations of sanity on the federal bench, the vax mandates appear DOA here now, while Austria and Germany have rushed into full-blown psychotic fugues over Omicron, announcing harsh punishments for their unvaxxed...
The Covid psychosis is just a reassignment of the Trump derangement, which was provoked by the generalized anxiety about collapsing industrial societies. The reasons for the collapse are not hard to grok: a declining resource base, especially affordable, economically plausible oil, a financial system purposefully detached from on-the-ground material reality, and sets of grossly foolish over-investments in complexity...
Do you know why there isn't an EUA [emergency use authorization]
for fluvoxamine? Steve Kirsch
The drug works. Amazingly well. Better than anything else against COVID when given early. So why isn't there an EUA? The Pfizer 6-month trial showed no all-cause mortality benefit; in fact, if anything, it showed that the vaccine killed more people than it saved. Sure, one COVID life was saved per 22,000 fully vaxed, but the all-cause mortality strongly favored the placebo (21 died in vaccine group vs. 17 in placebo). Doctors rush to recommend it. Nobody is skeptical.
Fluvoxamine on the other hand actually demonstrated a 12 times reduction in all-cause mortality in the Phase 3 trial. It really saved lives and the difference was dramatic in the clinical trial: “There was one death in the fluvoxamine group and 12 in the placebo group for the per-protocol population (OR 0·09; 95% CI 0·01–0·47).” But the NIH ignored the drug and didn’t even mention this astonishing result on the NIH treatment guidelines. The study wasn’t even mentioned at all in the guidelines. It was like it never happened...
Why isn’t there an EUA for fluvoxamine? The reason is simple. We tried. And after 6 weeks of waiting, we were told that to get an EUA for a repurposed drug, you have to partner with a drug company in the EUA application. Because no drug company will partner with us, even if we pay all the filing costs, there won’t be an EUA. Ever.
In Vietnam (a batch ending in 20A or 21A, perhaps?): 120 children hospitalized, province suspends Pfizer vaccine batch
Thanh Hoa has suspended the use of a Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine batch after over 120 students were hospitalized following their inoculation.
Since November 30, the central province has been vaccinating children aged 15-17 with the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. However, over 120 of the children were admitted to hospitals after exhibiting symptoms like nausea, high fever or breathing difficulties, the provincial Center for Disease Control (CDC) said Thursday...
1 in 2680 young men develop acute myocarditis/pericarditis in adolescents following Comirnaty vaccination in Hong Kong , Robert Malone MD, MS Strong data from a peer reviewed article in the Journal of Clinical Infectious Disease shows that there is a significant increase in the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis following Comirnaty vaccination among Chinese male adolescents, especially after the second dose. Onset of myocarditis was a median of 2 days after vaccination. The clinically significant (acute and/or “mild”) myocarditis/pericarditis incidence rate came in at one out of every 2680 young males...
This study was an analysis of hospital records of myocarditis/pericarditis, so did not include adolescents who may have developed the disease but did not seek medical attention.
Many pediatric cardiologists including my colleague and friend Dr. Kirk Milhoan, MD, PhD (MD board certified in pediatric cardiology, PhD. in vascular inflammation) assert that there is no such thing as “mild” myocarditis in children. Myocarditis causes heart damage. Heart damage is for life - the heart does not heal by replacing damaged cells. It scars. Scars in the heart can lead to changes in electrical conduction in heart muscle, which in turn can result in “sudden death” due to changes in heart beat regularity and muscular contraction of the heart. These events may happen at any time, particularly when the heart is stressed in some way.
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/1-in-2680-young-men-develop-acute
"Trust" , Steve Kirsch
(The vaccines cause formation of antibodies against a placental protein, syncytin, which also occurs in the SARS-CoV-2 capsule.)
28X increase in stillbirths in multiple parts of Canada?
But get this... it's only happening to vaccinated moms. I wonder what is causing this? When Canada's top health official was asked for evidence, she said to trust the authorities...
And that NEJM study on the matter? Well it, at the time that was written, it was too early to know the outcome of the pregnancies since many of the women were just vaccinated. The study should have finished by now, but we only hear crickets as to what the final results of the study were. I wonder why that is? Does anyone know?
Janci Chunn Lindsay, Ph.D., a molecular biologist and toxicologist, has called for an immediate halt to COVID-19 mRNA and DNA vaccines due to multiple safety concerns There’s credible concern that the COVID jabs will cross-react with syncytin (a retroviral envelope protein) and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that may impair fertility and reproductive outcomes...
Lindsay described how she aided the development of a contraceptive vaccine in the 1990s that ended up causing unintended autoimmune destruction and sterility in animals which, despite careful pre-analysis, had not been predicted. She explains: “We were developing what was meant to be a temporary contraceptive vaccine, which was very attractive because it prevented fertilization rather than preventing implantation — or it should have; that was the idea. Unfortunately, even though quite a bit of analysis was done in different animal models to make sure that it did not have an autoimmune action, it did end up having an autoimmune action and caused complete ovarian destruction.
Now it's used in that manner [for permanent sterilization] in dogs, cats and other animals.
So, that's a cautionary tale of how animal studies can help us avoid mistakes in humans when they're used properly, and when proper animal studies are done.”https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/Public/2021/December/PDF/toxicologist-warns-against-covid-jabs-pdf.pdf
Now or Never, The Great Transition Must Be Imposed, Alastair Crooke Thanks Eleni in colonial Athens for this series of stories.
Were you following the news this last week? Vaccine mandates are everywhere: one country, after another, is doubling-down, to try to force, or legally compel, full population vaccination. The mandates are coming because of the massive uptick in Covid – most of all in the places where the experimental mRNA gene therapies were deployed en masse...
Of course, the Pharma-Establishment know that the vaccines are no panacea. There are ‘higher interests’ at play here. It is driven rather by fear that the window for implementing its series of ‘transitions’ in the U.S. and Europe is closing. Biden still struggles to move his ‘Go-Big’ social spending plan and green agenda transition through Congress by the midterm election in a year’s time... Time is short. The midterm elections are but 12 months away, after which the legislative window shuts. The Green ‘transition’ is stuck too (by concerns that moving too fast to renewables is putting power grids at risk and elevating heating costs unduly)...
It’s a race for the U.S. and Europe, where the pandemic is back in full force across Europe, to push through their re-set agendas, before variants seize up matters with hospitals crowded with the vaccinated and non-vaccinated; with riots in the streets, and mask mandates at Christmas markets...
...Is the turn to authoritarianism in Europe a sign of desperation as fears grow that the various ‘transitions’ planned under the ‘re-set’ umbrella (financial, climate, vaccine and managerial expert technocracy) may never be implemented?
Cut short rather, as spending plans are hobbled by accelerating inflation; as the climate transition fails to find traction amongst poorer states (and at home, too); as technocracy is increasingly discredited by adverse pandemic outcomes; and Modern Monetary Theory hits a wall, because – well, inflation again...
There are powerful oligarchic interests behind the Re-Set. They do not want to see it go down, nor see the West eclipsed by its ‘competitors’. So it seems that rather than back off, they will go full throttle and try to impose compliance on their electorates: tolerate no dissidence...
As one high ‘lodge’ member, favouring a form of global governance notes, to make people accept such reforms, you must frighten them.
Yes, the collective of ‘transitions’ must have their ‘Big, overarching Narrative’ – however hollow, it rings (i.e. the struggle to defend democracy against authoritarianism). But it is the nature of today’s cultural-meme war that ultimately its content becomes little more than a rhetorical shell, lacking all sincerity at its core.
It serves principally, as decoration to a ‘higher order’ project: The preservation of global ‘rules of the road’, framed to reflect U.S. and allied interests, as the base from which the clutch of ‘transitions’ can be raised up into a globally managed order which preserves the Élite’s influence and command of major assets...
Western foreign policy becomes less about geo-strategy, but rather is primordially focussed on the three ‘big iconic issues’ – China, Russia and Iran – that can be given an emotional ‘charge’ in order to profitably mobilise certain identified ‘constituencies’ in the U.S. domestic cultural war. All the various U.S. political strands play this game.
The aim is to ‘nudge’ domestic American psyches (and those of their allies) into mobilisation on some issue (such as more protectionism for business against Chinese competition), or alternatively, imagined darkly, in order to de-legitimise an opposition, or to justify failures. These mobilisations are geared to gaining relative domestic partisan advantage, rather than having strategic purpose... Russia and China therefore face a reality in which European and U.S. élites are heading in the opposite direction to epistemological purity and well-founded argument. That is to suggest, the new ‘normal’ is about generating a lot of contradictory realities, not just contradictory ideologies, but actual mutually-exclusive ‘realities’, which could not possibly simultaneously exist...
This is a highly risky game, for it forces a resistance stance on those targeted states – whether they seek it, or not. It underlines that politics is no more about considered strategy: It is about being willing for the U.S. to lose strategically (even militarily), in order to win politically...
These countries understand exactly the point of these value and rights-loaded ‘rules’. It is to force compliance on these states to acquiesce to the ‘transitions, or, to suffer isolation, boycott and sanction – in a similar way to the choices being forced on those in the West not wishing to vaccinate (i.e. no jab; no job)...
But do the U.S. practitioners of meme-politics, absorb and comprehend that the stance by Russia-China – in riposte – is not some same-ilk counter-mobilisation done to ‘make a point’? That their vision does stand at variance with ‘the rules’? Do they see that their ‘red lines’ may indeed be ‘red lines’ literally? Is the West now so meme-addicted, it cannot any longer recognise real national interests?
‘Ideological Fanaticism’: The Folly of Seeing Human Systems as Hardware It seems that the ‘politics of fear’ may be ‘crossing the aisle’. But, in this shift, Big Tech cannot ride so easily to the Establishment’s rescue. With the vaccine meme, it has been relatively routine for the Tech social media to censor and delete all contrarian opinion, whether credentialed or not; but when it comes to inflation, ‘fact-checking’ becomes not just redundant, but counter-productive, for the ‘facts’ are visible with every purchase made. And every consumer can attest that prices are rising well above 6.2% ...
On the whole, the ‘meme-politics of lockdown and vaccine mandates’ may be fading, but the inflation meme and the economic aftermath meme has only just begun.
....this dualistic way of ratiocination runs through all of western modernity. Tech vaccines are the solution to the Covid virus. And, forced (human) separation is good for placing the malware into quarantine. The real-economy is the hardware that Central Bank ‘software’ will protect against recessionary pathogens. The Davos’ Re-Set will upload new global software for a ‘fairer, greener future’. A fourth Industrial Revolution is the digital technological management that will clean out Climate malware. Etc, etc.
In reality, all these are highly complex network systems, not susceptible to dualistic intervention. They work – if they work – as organic wholes. At best, we face systemic instability, as a result of these naïve ‘software’ interventions. At worst, systemic collapse.
U.S. Supremacy by Any Other Name Great Power competition it turns out, is nothing other than the globalist, U.S.-centred, rules based world order. The U.S. abstains from ‘transforming’ (i.e. colour revolutionising) the CCP, because it can’t; that tool still applies to lesser fish (i.e. Nicaragua)... All energy is directed to keeping the creaking system aloft (whether the EU’s, or the American ‘rules of the road’), rather than finding real solutions. Cleavages open, that cannot be politically contained; resentments bubble away; crises are managed, not resolved; time is played for; reform is incremental and then, suddenly, unilateral; and, in the end, stasis reigns. It is called Merkelism in Europe (after the German Chancellor)... On the other hand, bad as this is (given the economic crises facing us), its greater ‘sin’ (as articulated by Sullivan) is his demand for global ‘rules’, whose scaffold is simply “the interests and values of the U.S. and its allies and partners”. Sullivan says that the U.S. no longer seeks to transform China’s system (that is good), but insists that China operate within an ‘order’ built around U.S. interests and values – tout court. And, as Sullivan indicated, U.S. diplomatic effort is to be directed at coercing Chinese compliance to this system. Nowhere are the costs to allies mentioned, who would have to forego their relations with China or Russia, in order to please Biden.
The bigger ‘sin’, quite simply, is that the time for such haughty ambitions has passed. The world balance has changed qualitatively, and not just quantitatively. Both China and Russia – the other two components to General Milley’s tri-partite world – have said it plainly enough: They refuse lectures by the West.
Alastair Crooke points out that American politicians are in the very long established habit of taking cheap little actions (like the War in Grenada) for immediate political gain, while ignoring critical long term implications and erosion of political relationships and strategic advantages. Russia and China do not suffer such short-termism.
In the wake of the Kabul withdrawal débacle, the U.S. administration is in a tearing hurry to give Biden the semblance of foreign policy success.
China also has very real political and economic stresses and looming financial default. China will need a face-saving war of national unity behind Xi and the CCP when the financial house of cards collapses, or they will face a power transition.
Former Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe warns China in a global forum that militarily attacking Taiwan would inevitably trigger war with Japan (territorial waters) and thence with the US, and be economically ruinous.
A CCP official replied to insult Abe personally, but the message was clear, and "unofficially official". It is the case that no power alliance can allow Taiwanese chip manufacturing to fall exclusively into the hands of an adversary. It is completely critical to any advanced economy. This would be a major war. It would have to be. Thanks Kimo.
There is a lot of complexity as NATO , Russian-Ukrainians, and Ukrainian power elites jockey for any kind of strategic advantage, which would make a move favorable. Russia much prefers that things calm down, prefers to prevent an attack on the Donbass by Ukraine/NATO, and must keep Ukraine/NATO from having a beguiling military advantage. Turkey's Erdogan plays a very risky and fancy global power game.
In a Friday phone call Russian President Vladimir Putin told his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan that Ukraine is using Turkish-made drones against pro-Russia separatists in the war-torn Donbass region. Putin put the Turkish leader on notice over the "destabilizing" activity of the continued drone transfers from Turkey to Ukraine.
These are Mach-9 hypersonic "Zircon" anti ship missiles with 600 mile range, in fixed positions on remote islands. Russia does not announce plans, just facts-in-existence.
This gives Russia a moderating position between the US/Japan and China, not in the Taiwan Straits, but the oceans around northern Japan. It also affords some further protection to the Russian east coast. It would exclude hostile military ships within striking range.
Russia Deploys Anti-Ship Missiles Near Japan On Disputed Kuril Islands The status of ownership of the islands, which Russia de facto currently controls and has small bases on, is still unresolved since the end of WWII as a treaty regarding their status is still being negotiated.
On Thursday the Russian Defense Ministry announced the military has stationed its Bastion coastal missile defense system on a remote part of the island chain near Japan, identified as the island of Matua. These are considered "shore-based anti-ship missile systems" - seen as also potentially threatening to Japan's Western allies, given for example US warships have recently traversed nearby waters. Russia is primed for a Persian Gulf security 'makeover' , Pepe Escobar
Russia is the one state with the necessary clout, tools, sweeteners and relationships to nudge the Persian Gulf into a new security paradigm...Essentially, Moscow is reviving the Collective Security Concept for the Persian Gulf Region, an idea that has been simmering since the 1990s. Here is what the concept is all about.
So if the US administration’s reasoning is predictably short-term – we need Iranian oil back in the market – the Russian vision points to systemic change.
The Collective Security Concept calls for true multilateralism – not exactly Washington’s cup of tea – and “the adherence of all states to international law, the fundamental provisions of the UN Charter and the resolutions of the UN Security Council.” ...
Geopolitically, Russia holds the definitive ace: it maintains good relationships with all actors in the Persian Gulf and beyond, talks to all of them frequently, and is widely respected as a mediator by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, and other GCC members.
Russia also offers the world’s most competitive and cutting edge military hardware to underpin the security needs of all the parties...
And that brings us to the essential Pipelineistan angle, which in the Russia–Iran case revolves around the new, multi-trillion dollar Chalous gas field in the Caspian Sea...
Chalous, in fact, will enable Iran – with Russian input – to become a major gas exporter to Europe, something that Brussels evidently relishes. The head of Iran’s KEPCO, Ali Osouli, expects a “new gas hub to be formed in the north to let the country supply 20 percent of Europe’s gas needs.”
According to Russia’s Transneft, Chalous alone could supply as much as 52 percent of natural gas needs of the whole EU for the next 20 years.
Chalous is quite something: a twin-field site, separated by roughly nine kilometers, the second-largest natural gas block in the Caspian Sea, just behind Alborz. It may hold gas reserves equivalent to one-fourth of the immense South Pars gas field, placing it as the 10th largest gas reserves in the world.
Chalous happens to be a graphic case of Russia-Iran-China (RIC) geoeconomic cooperation. Proverbial western speculative spin rushed to proclaim the 20-year gas deal as a setback for Iran. The final breakdown, not fully confirmed, is 40 percent for Gazprom and Transneft, 28 percent for China’s CNPC and CNOOC, and 25 percent for Iran’s KEPCO.
Moscow sources confirm Gazprom will manage the whole project. Transneft will be in charge of transportation, CNPC is involved in financing and banking facilities, and CNOOC will be in charge of infrastructure and engineering. The whole Chalous site has been estimated to be worth a staggering $5.4 trillion...
Crucially, Moscow also reiterated its full support for Tehran’s position during the current JCPOA round in Vienna, as well as in other Iran-related issues reaching the UN Security Council.
The fine print on all key Chalous aspects may be revealed in time. It’s a de facto geopolitical/geoeconomic win-win-win for the Russia, Iran, China strategic partnership.
Ray McGovern speculates about Biden-Putin talks tomorrow.
Nobody knows, and we won't really know. We'll have to watch for actions.
(China is invisibly sitting next to Russia. They do not have identical interests, but a lot of overlap, these days.)
Discussing Reality
pictured recently "inside the box"
