Those who are familiar with my articles would
be aware that I am not given to catastrophism or alarmism. But
perhaps the time has come to reflect on who will be president after Trump
(whether after this or the next term) and what this will mean for relations
with Russia and China.
What will
the United States’ relations with Russia and China be like when the 46th
president of the United States takes office in 2025? This is a question that I
often ask myself, especially in light of Trump’s political choices regarding
international arms-control treaties (INF Treaty), nuclear proliferation,
economic war with China, a financial crisis that
is artificially postponed thanks to QE, out-of-control military spending, an
increasingly aggressive NATO stance towards the Russian
Federation, and continuous provocations against the People’s
Republic of China. Where will we end up with after another five years of
provocations? For how much longer will Putin and Xi Jinping maintain the
“strategic patience” not to respond to Washington with drastic measures?
Let us imagine we are in
2025
The four
current global hot spots – Iran, Syria, Venezuela and DPRK – have maintained
their resistance to Washington’s diktats and have emerged more or less
victorious. Syrian territory in its entirety is now under the control of
Damascus; Iran has established enough deterrents not to be attacked; Pyongyang
continues in its negotiations with Washington as the reunification of the two
Koreas continues along; the Bolivarian revolution still lives on in Venezuela.
Putin is
preparing to leave the Russian Federation as president after 25 years. Xi
Jinping could see his mandate expire in a few more years. Washington is about
to appoint a new president, who in all probability will be the opposite of
Trump, in the same way Obama was the opposite of Bush and Trump a reaction to
Obama.
So let us
imagine someone emerging in the Democratic Party completely committed to
advancing the view of the US deep state and the military-industrial complex –
someone like Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright or any of the 2019 Democratic
candidates for the 2020 elections (the ones with anything to commend them do not
count). Such a person would be committed to reinvigorating the idea of American
exceptionalism following eight years of a Trump presidency that has mostly
focused (the neocons notwithstanding) on domestic issues and the policy of “America First”.
Now let
us think about what has been, and will be, dismantled internationally by Trump
during his presidency, namely: the suspension of the INF Treaty and an
indication not to extend the New START treaty
(on nuclear-arms reduction), deployment of troops on the Russian border in
Europe, sanctions, tariffs and economic terrorism of all kinds.
Ask yourself how likely it is that the next
US president will want and be able to improve relations with Russia and China
as well as accept a multipolar world order?
The answer to that is zero, with the Trump presidency only serving to remind us
how every administration remains under the control of the military, industrial,
spy and media apparatus, expressed in liberal and neocon ideologies.
Trump has
increased military spending considerably, singing the praises of the
military-industrial complex and promising to modernize the country’s nuclear
arsenal. Such a modernization would take two decades to be completed, a detail
always omitted by the media. For Trump it is a case of “America First”. For the
deep state the project is long term and ought to be far more alarming for the
global community.
Russia,
China and the US all appear committed to further militarization, with Russia
and China strongly focussing on defending their strategic interests in the face
of US aggression. Beijing will focus on building a large number of aircraft carriers to
defend her maritime borders, while Moscow seeks to seal her skies against
missiles and stealthy aircraft (a land campaign against Russia, as history
teaches us, has little chance of success).
Experts
predict that any great-power conflict in the near future may consist
exclusively of conventional and/or nuclear missiles, combined with robotic
technology, drones, artificial intelligence, cyber warfare, A2/AD, hypersonic weapons and
sabotage. In addition to nuclear weapons, the platforms from which they are
launched, missiles and interceptors, a country’s computational power will be
decisive, with quantum computers already a reality
in China.
The US,
China and Russia will no longer have any restrictions on the production of
nuclear weapons after (absent any new negotiations or agreements to extend it)
the New START treaty expires in 2025. The situation regarding cyberspace and
near-earth space is certainly alarming, with no explicit treaties between the
great powers being in place. The few agreements in force are routinely
violated, especially with regard to near-earth vehicles, as Subrata Ghoshroy informs us when
discussing the US X-37B military vehicle: ‘Backdoor weaponization of space?‘:
“Discussions
about how to prevent an arms race in space started long ago; the UN Conference
on Disarmament even started negotiations on a treaty, but the United States
prevented it from going any further. And at the 2008 Conference on Disarmament
in Geneva, China and Russia introduced an actual space arms control treaty,
popularly known as the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space treaty (PAROS Treaty, 2012)”
Adding to this alarming situation is
the growing US commitment to the doctrine of a preventive nuclear first strike.
One wonders how much longer the world will be able to prevent itself from being
bombed back to the Stone Age.
I wrote an article in
2016 dismissing the possibility of a nuclear war as absurd and impossible. But
while a lot has changed in the meantime, my opinion has not. Nevertheless, I
struggle to understand how such an eventuality can be avoided when the US
remains on a collision course with China and Russia.
Trump
appears unwilling to go down in history as the president responsible for
kicking off nuclear Armageddon. But what about the next president? The deep
state in control of US politics would surely be able to place into office
someone who would advance the final justification for
a headlong confrontation with Moscow and Beijing.
If you
think I am exaggerating, take Pompeo, a representative of the deep state, and
his recent answer to the question of whether Trump was sent by Godto save
Israel from Iran. “As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible”, he
responded. If the US elects someone influenced by the messianic vision of
American exceptionalism, a vision that refuses to accept the realpolitik of
multiple geopolitical poles and great-power competition, then hang on to your hats,
for the chances of a nuclear winter will increase dramatically. Just remember
that the alternative to Trump was Hillary Clinton, who was calling for a no-fly
zone in Syria – that is, for the possibility of the US shooting down Russian fighter jets!
What would be needed if faced with such a
presidency is a healthy, grass-roots internal opposition throughout Europe and
the US. As things stand now, there is no longer an anti-war movement, the
public disoriented by the mainstream media feeding them a constant stream of
lies, misinformation and propaganda. Assange is unjustly imprisoned and Yemeni civilians
are continuously bombed, and yet the media tells us that Julian works for the Kremlin,
that Moscow wants to destabilize and destroy Europe, that China intends to
subjugate the whole world, that Kim Jong-un is seeking the nuclearization of
half of Asia, that Assad has massacred hundreds of thousands of civilians, that
Saudi Arabia is a country undergoing full reform, and that al-Qaeda is fighting
for freedom in Syria!
In such a
current situation, truth is malleable, able to be fashioned and shaped
according to the needs and requirements of the military-industrial complex,
which needs justifications for its endless wars. The situation can only get
worse over the next six years, with citizens less and less able to understand
the world around them. The further advances in technology will only help
governments and corporations to control information and decide what is right
and wrong in a process of mass lobotomization. The Internet will hardly
continue to be free, and even if it were to continue in its current state, the
ability to offer counter-narratives will be limited by a lack of advertising
revenue to expand businesses and reach more people for independent media
platforms.
To avoid the possibility of nuclear
annihilation we have to rely on the cool heads and leadership qualities of
those who will succeed Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping (it is unclear when Xi
Jinping will leave office).
Only those who assiduously keep themselves
informed are able to appreciate the forbearance that the Sino-Russian
leadership has and will continue to have in the face of continuing US
provocations.
But what will happen when these two
even-tempered leaders are no longer in power while the means to inflict a
devastating blow to the US remain available to their successors? Will the same
forbearance remain in the face of ongoing US provocations?
Moscow
will be deploying all sorts of hypersonic weapons that the US cannot
intercept, together with a hundred state-of-the-art Su-57 fighters. China will
have about six to seven aircraft carriers, escorted
by numerous destroyers,each
with 112 vertical launch system (VLS) cells, hypersonic missiles, anti-satellite and electromagnetic weapons.
The S-500 systems will be scattered
throughout Russia (and presumably also in China and Belarus), armed with
hypersonic interceptors. In addition to this conventional deterrence, the
current Chinese and Russian nuclear arsenal is already capable of wiping out
the US in the space of a few minutes.
Washington
will continue to raise the temperature vis-a-vis China and Russia, even after
Putin and Xi have left the office. It is therefore likely that their successors
will come from their country’s most hawkish and intransigent wings.
In 2025
Putin and Xi will hopefully have succeeded in
avoiding a conflict with the US through the skillful employment of diplomatic,
economic and often military means, playing a moderating role that stands in
contrast to that played by the West, which, not understanding this approach,
brands it as extremist.
Imagine that the tensions between these
three countries continues to steadily increase over the next five years at the
same rate as it has over the last 10 years. How will the respective deep states
of Russia and China react? Imagine in these two countries the appointment of
two intransigent personalities ready to respond to US provocations.
Washington
continues its inexorable decline relative to
other powers as a result of the new multipolar reality, which evens out the
distribution of geopolitical weight over a wider area of the global chessboard.
We must hope, for the sake of humanity, that Washington’s decline will
accelerate to such an extent under the Trump presidency that the US will be
forced to focus instead on its own internal problems. Reaching such a point
would require the collapse of the global economy that is based on the US
dollar; but this is another story
altogether that could also end in bloodshed.
Trump is
appreciated by a part of the deep state for his efforts to reinvigorate
Washington’s military-industrial complex by practically offering it a blank
check. This is without considering Trump’s economic-financial assault on allies
and enemies alike, which seems to be an attempt to squeeze the last drops out
of any remaining advantage to the dollar-based system before it collapses.
The
long-term plan of the US elites sometimes seems to be to provoke a great-power
conflict in order to gain victory and then construct a new global financial
order atop the rubble.
The
selling of US government bonds by Russia, China and several other countries is
an important indicator of global economic trends. The conversion of these
securities into gold and other currencies is further confirmation of
multipolarity. The IMF’s inclusion of the yuan in its basket of reserve
currencies is a tangible example of the multipolar world in action and the
diminishing power of the US. The sustainability of US public and private debt
comes from investor confidence in US government bonds. The system hangs
together through the willingness of investors to buy this trash printed by the
Fed. The investors’ confidence lies not so much in the ability of the US to
repay the debt but in its ability to use the most powerful military in the
world to bully other countries into purchasing US securities that only serve to
further fuel US imperialism.
Moscow
and Beijing’s efforts to untangle themselves from this system is the way they
will deny oxygen to the economic-military threat posed by Washington.
If the US
deep state thinks it can squeeze out any last remaining benefits from the
dollar system, collapse everything in a great-power conflagration, and then
revive the US dollar system in a new form atop the rubble, then it is
miscalculating terribly.
If my
predictions regarding technological progress between now and 2025 are correct,
with quantum computing and artificial intelligence and so on, then perhaps
Moscow and Beijing will be able to avert this apocalypse with the clicks of a
mouse thousands of miles away. Science fiction? Possibly. But who would have
been able to imagine that Bashar al-Assad’s Syria would be capable, after six
years of war, to repel 90% of the latest-generation
missiles launched by Israel? Technology has a democratizing
effect.
If you think I am exaggerating, try
reflecting on the fact that Washington has been at war almost every
year since World War II, conducting clandestine operations in more than 50
countries and killing millions of civilians directly and indirectly, all the
while having the world believe it is a blameless force for good on the side of
truth and justice.
We live in a world based on lies. Without
this reality changing in the foreseeable future, with the mainstream media
continuing to keep much of the population disoriented and confused, then it is
not too difficult to imagine the United States by 2025 pulling the rug out from
under everybody’s feet through a great-power conflict, so as to build atop the
debris a new, unchallengeable Pax Americana.