Last week
I went through just some of the highlights as to why Russia is becoming a
destination for global capital.
For years
it’s been a little lonely out here banging on about how well the Russian state
headed by Vladimir Putin has navigated an immense campaign by the West to
marginalize and/or isolate Russia from the world economy.
But that
is changing rapidly. And 2020 will likely be the year the New Cold War begins
to end. And it starts with Europe. In recent weeks there have been a number of
moves made on both sides to end the economic isolation of Russia by Europe.
As always,
however, it begins politically. French President Emmanuel Macron speaking at a
press conference before 70th Anniversary NATO Summit in London no less, made it
clear that he no longer wants the EU positioning itself as an adversary of
Russia or China.
Standing
next to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg Macron put a further down
payment that he is looking to replace German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the
person setting the tone for European Foreign Policy.
“NATO is a
collective defense organization, but against what or against who? Who is our
common enemy? We need to clarify that. And it is a very strategic question,” he
told reporters at a press conference in Paris on Nov. 28.
“Sometimes
I hear some saying that it is Russia or China, our enemy. Is it the purpose of
the Atlantic Alliance to identify one or the other as our enemies? I don’t
think so. Our joint enemy, clearly within the Alliance, is terrorism that’s
struck our countries.”
Macron
said that NATO needs “a common definition of terrorism, of who the terrorist
groups are and how to act in coordination against them.” He said that “the
absence of dialogue with Russia” did not make the European continent safer and
that he wants to “clarify our relationship with Russia.” “We want a lucid,
robust, and demanding dialogue with Russia, with neither naivety nor
complacency,” he said.
Macron’s
full remarks can be found here.
The big
shift here is Macron signaling out that NATO needs to shift its focus away from
Russia and China and focus on threat of terrorism. There are at least two
reasons for him doing this.
First,
this aligns Macron with Putin on where the focus of security concerns should
be. Putin has been banging this drum for years, certainly since his
game-changing speech at the 2015 U.N. General Assembly two days before he sent
Russian troops into Syria.
These
words more than the others are music to Putin’s ears and a complete
needle-scratch for the foreign policy orthodoxy on K Street and in Vauxhall. As
they have been the architects of this new Cold War with Russia which has
altered the landscape of EU economic progress for the past five years.
At some
point the ‘frozen conflicts’ that Macron mentions in his remarks have to thaw
because, as he rightly points out, it has been Europe that has been made less
safe by U.S. foreign policy imperatives — ending the INF Treaty, freezing all
diplomacy with Russia, etc.
So, Macron
is prepping the table for his upcoming Normandy format talks with Germany,
Russia and Ukraine on how to end the conflict in Ukraine.
Reality
has seen in that Crimea is now off the table for NATO and so are the eastern
breakaway provinces of the Donbass. I’ve maintained for years that Russia was
always playing the game of attrition in Ukraine, winning by waiting for the EU
and Ukrainians to tire of the war and eventually sue for peace.
Moreover,
the economic defense of Russia that Putin mounted supported this policy. By
doing the unthinkable in 2014, floating the ruble and allowing it to fall, he
laid the foundation for today’s victory.
Make no
mistake, this speech by Macron is a victory for Russia and, by extension, the
world. Because Macron, Merkel and Putin have all the tools in their grasp to
now push Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to fully implement Ukraine’s
responsibilities under the Minsk agreements.
This would
never happen under former President Petro Poroshenko, who is a long-standing
U.S. asset and who openly bankrupted Ukraine during his tenure even more than
his predecessor Viktor Yanukovich, no mean feat that.
Secondly,
Macron’s comments underscore his desire to raise a transnational EU army and
his comments are a direct statement that he wants the two security
infrastructures to have separate mandates. It’s clear Macron doesn’t want
Europe’s security to depend on the U.S. any longer.
And I’m
sure that this idea gets a sympathetic ear from President Trump. The problem,
of course, is that that idea isn’t popular with anyone else in the U.S. Deep
State. Hence the push to create a chimeric impeachment process to remove him
from power, or, at least, neuter him completely.
On the
latter point they’ve nearly succeeded.
To Macron,
NATO should deal with terrorism, downgrading its importance and paving the way
for ending it in the future, while the EU army is under the control of the
European Commission, which to a globalist like Macron is the epitome of
‘sovereignty.’
Macron,
with these remarks as a prologue of what he will argue for at the NATO Summit,
is telling the world Europe is done paying the price for the U.S.’s Cold War
with Russia.
He’s also
letting everyone know that 2020 will see the end of the sanctions in exchange
for ending the conflict in Ukraine and re-opening the floodgates of European
investment into Russia.
This puts
paid everything I talked about in last week’s blog and which was also picked up
by Alexander Mercouris at The Duran who is one of the very few analysts who
understood Russia’s strategy and what the end-game would look like.
This is
welcome news in Germany who absolutely want the sanctions lifted which will put
Merkel under even more pressure to lift them. Putin has already made the moves
necessary for Merkel to save face here — offering a new gas transit contract
for Ukraine, handing back the ships seized in the Kerch Strait incident,
prisoner exchange, etc.
A lot will
ride on Putin’s upcoming meeting with Zelensky. There is so much coming
together for the first half of December that by year-end we could be staring a
very different geopolitical landscape in Europe.