War in Decline

Since World War II, the USA has been the preeminent military power on Earth with the sole capacity to deliver the full weight of its conventional war making capacity to any border on earth. That plans are afoot for global supremacy is at best moot. That the military mind is trained to be paranoid and hyper alert is also true and throws up odd programs from time to time that at best can be described as overkill.

It is always an eye opener to listen to the pronouncements of military types from other powers such as China or Russia. They are just as bent as some of ours.

The military reality is that once Russia woke up to the futility of sustaining its effort to match the USA with look alike weapons systems, there has been no credible military counterweight. Nor realistically will there be. It is a question of why bother in the first place? The USA is well cured of actually attempting to govern any of these places (although not of meddling) as is just about every body else and act as a global insurer that preserves exactly that status quo.

So long as you do not march into some foreign village on the road to world conquest, odds are you have a pretty free hand to sort things out your way. That has made war steadily decline in the affairs of men.

If we ignore the press, who would paint every conflict as a major event and think of the hard numbers, the numbers have been in steady decline. Most activity now is in the form of tribal conflicts rather than conflicts between states. We still have low level conflict in the Caucasus waiting for a political solution that could be settled if the will was applied. We have the hot Pathan war in the Afghan Hills and remnant echoes of wars everywhere else but Africa. National governments everywhere are sorting out there internal conflicts and developing lasting political solutions. For all of them, Europe is the proof that it can be done.

Africa still suffers from weak central governments unable to quell the internal tribal conflicts or marshal the resources needed to accelerated internal development. If Africa went on a development binge like that of China, it is a certainty that the tribalism would be brought under control by the people themselves. This can not happen so long as it is seen as a road to individual power.

The second military reality that the US military must face is that no country on Earth is prepared to now spend resources playing military catch up. It is economically insane and huge economic advantage accrues to nonparticipants. Also the concept of catch up is itself mindboggling. That is why no one has produced a single creditable carrier fleet to challenge the dozen plus that the US has.

The fact is that the US has far more than is actually necessary of all arms except plausibly ground forces. The past several years for the air and naval arms have been mostly low intensity with brief display of overwhelming firepower such as the recent aerial entrance into Helman province in Afghanistan. Once engaged, the birds’ activity will be minimized and that of ground forces will be maximized for simple cost reasons and real effectiveness also.

The US as super power has made war making an unattractive option for all would be Alexanders. Sixty years of global economic expansion has made these same geniuses reluctant to risk their gains, particularly since the poverty machine of communism is effectively out of business.

Anyway, after writing this I went out and grabbed a copy of the National post and this article was in it. It marshals a few actual statistical facts that fully support my thesis, although that has actually been obvious if you were looking.


Peace has a chance

John Horgan, Slate.com Published: Tuesday, August 25, 2009

http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/story.html?id=1925903&p=2

The West Point War Museum, right across the Hudson River from my home, offers a brisk tour of the history of weaponry, from Paleolithic stone axes to Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. A sign at the museum's entrance states, "Unquestionably, war-making is an aspect of human nature which will continue as nations attempt to impose their will upon each other." Actually, this assertion is quite questionable. A recent decline in war casualties -- especially compared to historical and even prehistorical rates -- has some scholars wondering whether the era of international war may be ending.

Counting casualties is fraught with uncertainty; scholars' estimates vary according to how they define war and what sources they accept as reliable, among other factors. Nevertheless, a clear trend emerges from recent studies. Last year, 25,600 combatants and civilians were killed as a direct result of armed conflicts, according to the 2009 Yearbook of SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Two thirds of these deaths took place in just three trouble spots: Sri Lanka (8,400), Afghanistan (4,600) and Iraq (4,000). In contrast, almost 500,000 people are killed each year in violent crimes and well over one million die in automobile accidents.

SIPRI's figure excludes deaths from "one-sided conflict," in which combatants deliberately kill unarmed civilians, and "indirect" deaths from war-related disease and famine. If these casualties are included, annual war-related deaths from 2004 to 2007 rise tenfold to 250,000 per year, according to The Global Burden of Armed Violence, a 2008 report published by an international organization set up in the aftermath of the Geneva Declaration. Even this much higher number, the report states, is "remarkably low in comparison to historical figures."

For example, Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland's School for International and Security Studies has estimated that war and state-sponsored genocide in the first half of the 20th century killed as many as 190 million people, both directly and indirectly. That comes to an average of 3.8 million deaths per year. His analysis found that wars killed fewer than one-quarter of that total in the second half of the 20th century -- 40 million altogether, or 800,000 per year.

Even these staggering figures are low in comparison with prehistoric ones, if considered as a percentage of population. All the horrific wars and genocides of the 20th century accounted for less than 3% of all deaths worldwide, according to one estimate. That is much less than the probable rate of violent death among our early ancestors.

The economist Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute recently analyzed dozens of archaeological and ethnographic studies of hunter-gatherer societies like the ones our ancestors are thought to have lived in for most of our prehistory. Warfare and other forms of violence led to 14% of the deaths in these simple societies, Bowles concludes.

In his influential book War Before Civilization, the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois estimates that violence accounted for as many as 25% of all deaths among early societies. Keeley includes not only hunter-gatherers but also tribal societies such as the Yanomamo in Amazonia and the Enga in New Guinea, which practice simple horticulture as well as hunting. These early people racked up such murderous totals with clubs, spears and arrows rather than machine guns and bombs --and Keeley's stats don't even include indirect deaths from famine and disease.

Our prehistory seems to have grown more bellicose as time went on, however. According to anthropologist Brian Ferguson, there is little or no clear-cut evidence of lethal group aggression among any societies prior to 12,000 years ago. War emerged and rapidly spread over the next few thousand years among hunter-gatherers and other groups, particularly in regions where people abandoned a nomadic lifestyle for a more sedentary one and populations grew. War arose, according to this perspective, because of changing environmental and cultural conditions rather than because of "human nature," as the West Point War Museum suggests.

This view contradicts what many people believe about war. Since 2006, when I first started teaching a college course called "War and Human Nature," I've asked hundreds of students and other people whether humans will ever stop fighting wars. More than four in five -- young and old, conservative and liberal, male and female -- answer, "No." Asked to explain this response, they often say that we have always fought wars, and we always will, because we are innately aggressive.

Of course, all human behaviour ultimately stems from our biology. But the sudden emergence of war around 10,000 BCE and its recent decline suggest it's primarily a cultural phenomenon and one that culture is now helping us to overcome. There have been no international wars since the U. S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and no wars between major industrialized powers since the end of the Second World War. Most conflicts now consist of guerilla wars, insurgencies and terrorism -- or what the political scientist John Mueller of Ohio State University calls the "remnants of war."

Mueller rejects biological explanations for this trend, noting in one paper that "testosterone levels seem to be as high as ever." At least part of the decline, he says, can be attributed to a surge in the number of democracies since the Second World War, from 20 to nearly 100 (depending on how democracy is defined). Since democracies rarely, if ever, wage war against each other, we may well see a continuing decline in the magnitude of armed conflict.

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker identifies several other cultural factors contributing to the modern decline of violence, both between and within states: First, the creation of stable states with effective legal systems and police forces has eliminated the endless feuding that plagued many tribal societies. Second, increased life expectancies make us less willing to risk our lives by engaging in violence. Third, as a result of globalization and communications, we have become increasingly interdependent on -- and empathetic toward -- others outside of our immediate "tribes."

If war is not inevitable, neither is peace. "This past year saw increasing threats to security, stability, and peace in nearly every corner of the globe," warns the SIPRI 2009 Yearbook. Global arms spending -- especially by the United States, China and Russia--has surged, and efforts to stem nuclear proliferation have stalled. An al-Qaeda operative could detonate a nuclear suitcase bomb in New York City tomorrow, reversing the recent trend in an instant. But the evidence of a decline in war-related deaths shows that we need not -- and should not -- accept war as an eternal scourge of the human condition.

In fact, this fatalistic view is wrong empirically and morally. Empirically, because war clearly stems less from some hard-wired "instinct" than from mutable cultural and environmental conditions; much can be done, and has been done, to reduce the risks it poses. Morally, because the belief that war will never end helps perpetuate it. The surer we are that the world is irredeemably violent, the more likely we are to support hawkish leaders and policies, making our belief self-fulfilling. Our first step toward ending war is to believe that we can end it.


Pentagon Plans For Global Military Supremacy:

U.S., NATO Could Deploy Mobile Missiles Launchers To Europe

By Rick Rozoff

URL of this article:

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14877

Global Research, August 22, 2009
Stop NATO

From August 17-20 the annual U.S. Space and Missile Defense Conference was conducted in Huntsville, Alabama, which hosts the headquarters of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency (MDA).

I have omitted remainder of this lengthy article but you may go to the link to get it.

Russian Nuclear Strategy

Most of us would like to see this type of thinking go away and never be heard from again. That folks are still there is a cautionary.

Nuclear weapons are useful only to inflict genocide and are of almost no military use unless you believe in genocidal policies. Since that is mutually cancelling and also denies any fruits of victory, it escapes rational analysis and descends to the realm of lunatic thinking. Of course, we have had Hitler and Stalin to prove it was possible.

Nuclear weapons serve Russia very poorly and should be unilaterally dismantled. They will never deter an ethnic conflict. Russia would be better served, provided the hot internal ethnic wars have cooled off, with applying to join NATO with the Ukraine. They would then have European support for stabilizing their borders with the Islamic cultures and with China and provide a united counterweight to any form of military adventurism.

Policy is evolving in that direction and with the Russian economy clearly progressing and becoming fully integrated into the global economy the volatility is declining. A unilateral exit from the nuclear racket, or better still a planned convergence with NATO and the EU over two decades would allow a face saving climb down from these remnants of the good old days of the cold war.

In the meantime US research and development must surely create an orbital weapons platform sooner or later. Such a platform would consist of sending aloft a cloud of hot ballistic kill devices in polar orbits able to intercept an individual missile rising through the atmosphere. Our present precision targeting ability tells me we have long since had the capability. Perhaps 10,000 or so devices would dominate all ground based systems able to launch while only using that fraction on target in the fifteen minute launch window. It may even get several kicks at any such target.

By having the high ground, a device can go almost immediately to maximum kinetic energy and at a speed that compares to incoming meteorites. It also cannot be countered as perhaps a microwave laser might be.

In the meantime the phrase ‘Strategic Nuclear Weapons’ is an oxymoron when the only plausible posture is stalemate and no realistic tactical option except mutual suicide. We have ourselves fought in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq making full use of conventional force. Of what consequence was possession of nuclear weapons in the conduct of these wars?

While we are at it, of what consequence is even an excess of force if your enemy is prepared to avoid your main force? The B-52‘s dropped countless bombs in Nam and this was simply ignored. It could have been ruder only had the cong laid out visible targets with nice bull’s eyes.



Future of Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces
In the Wake of Obama's Moscow Visit

By General Leonid Ivashov

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14442

Global Research, July 19, 2009
Strategic Cultural Foundation

Now that US President Obama's visit to Moscow is over, what do we have at the bottom line?

First, the summit produced a framework document defining the number of strategic carriers quite broadly (500-1,100) and the number of nuclear warheads – in a narrower corridor (1,500-1,675). The limits are set by the US and Russian Presidents for their negotiating teams and can easily be adjusted in case the sides reach another consensus on the issue.

Secondly, Presidents Obama and Medvedev discussed the future of the US missile defense, but this part of the talks led to no definite agreements. All that was said was that the existing viewpoints would have to be taken into account. Moreover, by default the examination of missile defense was limited to just two – and not even the most important – of the hundreds of elements it actually comprises.

There were indefinite suggestions to go on discussing the possibility to cooperate in building the missile shield, jointly analyzing the XXI century missile challenges, and monitoring missile programs across the world. As a clear reference to North Korea and Iran, the two Presidents warned all the countries having missile potentials against missile technology proliferation.

Thirdly, Russia allowed the US Air Forces to use its airspace, leaving the general public oblivious to details of the deal.

The above are the practical results of the Moscow summit. Can the Russian side be satisfied with the parameters of the agreement on carriers and warheads? Yes and no at the same time. Given the current situation in the nuclear arms sphere (the condition of Russia's strategic nuclear forces, the level of development of the US missile defense and precision weapons, the magnitude of the return potential concealed by the START-1 Treaty) Russia should regard 1,700 warheads as the critical minimum. Why? Estimates show that with this number of warheads and the corresponding number of carriers the Russian nuclear forces can retain functionality after an attack by US high-precision weapons, launch on warning before nuclear warheads carried by US ballistic missiles reach Russia, penetrate the US missile defense (with some 800-1,000 warheads) and inflict unacceptable damage on the US. This is the essence of the nuclear deterrence.

The build-up of the US supersonic high-precision cruise missile potential and the development of the US missile defense capable of intercepting missiles at the boost phase and warheads after their separation from carriers undermine Russia's ability to launch on warning or deliver a retaliatory strike. In other words, the advancement of the US capability to destroy the Russian nuclear forces in their positioning regions (on the ground, on strategic bombers at airfields, and on docked submarines) as well as to intercept Russian missiles and warheads creates such a situation that even having a certain number of nuclear munitions Russia will not be able to deliver them to target locations.

Experts project that until 2012-2015 the level of 1,700 munitions will be sufficient to keep Russia safe, but in more distant future either the US arsenals will have to be slashed or Russia's capabilities to safeguard its strategic nuclear forces will have to be upgraded to preserve the balance. The latter option appears unrealistic due to the overall negative situation in the Russian military-industrial complex and the current conditions and trends in the Russian strategic nuclear forces. What we witness at present is the degradation of Russia's military-industrial complex, the ageing of its missile arsenals, shortages of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, and serious difficulties faced by Russian missile-manufacturing enterprises.

As the US Administration is fully aware of the state of Russia's strategic nuclear forces and the outlook for them, its consent to the proposed parameters of the arms reduction was not hard to extract. Speaking precisely, Washington simply tailored the parameters of the proposed cuts to its own military programs whose underlying strategy is to rely less on nuclear arms and more on advanced conventional weapons, especially cruise missiles and space-based, ground-based, and marine missile defense systems. At present the US leadership in conventional warfare goes unchallenged but the nuclear potentials of Russia, China, and other countries still preclude the global US dictate. As a result, the reduction of nuclear potentials plays into the hands of the US.

There are a number of reasons why at the moment Russia should exercise maximal restraint. First, the entire sphere of its national security is in disrepair. Russia needs a fundamental analysis of the international situation in the context of the current economic crisis and its own global strategy aimed at rebuilding the international security system. It should also make resolute efforts to restore its military-industrial complex. Secondly, the ongoing shifts in the domestic situation in the US must be taken into account. The US is struggling with the current global crisis, and Washington is in the process of rethinking its politics, both domestic and international. Russia should keep its finger on the pulse of the process and be ready to support the US President's steps whenever they are constructive. Thirdly, the uncertainty in the US-China-Russia triangle seriously factors into the situation. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRIC summits convened shortly prior to B. Obama's Moscow visit, and Beijing sided with Moscow at both forums. However, it is clear that China will be concerned over Moscow's de facto consent to the continuation of the US missile defense program and especially over the indications that Russia and the US might start implementing it jointly. It is natural for Beijing to regard the plan as a threat. Russia's opening its airspace to US military transit is also an alarming development from China's standpoint as Beijing probably suspects a correlation between the surge of the Tibet and Uyghur separatism and the presence of the US forces in Afghanistan. Attention should also be paid to the fact that China no less than other countries seeks strategic partnership with the US. Such partnership was offered to Beijing unofficially some time ago at a high level and has not been rejected so far.

China is likely to maneuver between the US and Russia, but only as long as Russia does not drop out of the top international politics league where it will remain only in case it manages to maintain nuclear parity with the US and nuclear superiority over China. While the US and China mainly owe their geopolitical positions to their economic might, and their nuclear potentials only further strengthen their statuses, Russia's geopolitical standing is based on the proportions of its nuclear arsenal more than on anything else.

In any case, it is a positive result that the nuclear disarmament of Russia ended up being postponed. The Russian expert community has the time to analyze the situation and to formulate suggestions for the Russian leadership on the relations between Russia and the US in the military sphere.

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Eurasian Pipeline Calculus

The tragedy of the twentieth century was that nation based political elites were informed by the type of thinking outlined in this article. In a way, it was the rationale for Britain’s fateful decision to support French ambitions in Europe. The outcome of that bit of utter stupidity was the two great wars of the twentieth from which we are now almost recovered from.

We have entered a future in which the organizing power of the nation state must be come increasingly bound by transnational systems of governance. A huge part of this is that the key element is an educated human being who can today fit in anywhere, whatever the prevailing culture might be.

And if you do not feel like travelling, visit through the internet.

In my manuscript ‘Paradigms shift’ I introduce the concept of the communion of xanadu as a reformation of human governance that draws its power through democratic means in a far less historically bound manner. The role of the classically defined nation state is diminishing as the principal cause d’être of war making, as the nation state itself diminishes and is becoming less and less unique in its own right.

Again The EU is an initial template of the possibilities of the future. The expansion of the EU into the boundaries of the old USSR is desirable as that continues to settle down. It is easy to write of the ethnic conflicts exciting folks, but the expansion of economic interdependence makes convergence progressively more acceptable.

That part of it is easy actually. The problem with extending the EU south is much more troublesome and frustrating. To start with, Turkey has to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, or the EU must accept repudiation of the founding principal of the EU. This is a difficult moral issue and must be addressed or it will haunt relations forever.

The EU and the expanded EU is based on the acceptance of a principle of reconciliation between historic ethnic conflicts. There can be no compromise because political opportunists will always exploit these conflicts. It is happening again in Turkey with the Kurds. It all must end now.

The Eurasian Pipeline Calculus

By F. William Engdahl

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14007

Global Research, June 17, 2009

Calculus has two main variants—derivative and integral. The Eurasian energy pipeline geopolitics between Turkey Washington and Moscow today has elements of both. It is highly derivative in that the major actors across Central Asia from China, Russia to Turkey are very much engaged in a derived power game which has less to do with any specific state and more to do with maintaining Superpower hegemony for Washington. Integral as the de facto motion of various pipeline projects now underway or in discussion across Eurasia hold the potential to integrate the economic space of Eurasia in a way that poses a fundamental challenge to Washington's projection of Full Spectrum Dominance over the greatest land mass on earth.

Since at least the time of the Crimean War of 1853, Turkey has played a strategic role in modern Eurasian and European developments. In the 1850's Ottoman Turkey became a target of Great Power imperial ambitions as Britain and France sought to take advantage of tensions between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in order to weaken and ultimately take vital parts of that weakened empire.

The Great Powers of that time, the empires of Britain, France, Russia and Austria began plotting the dismemberment of the vast Ottoman Empire. Debt was their preferred instrument. The foreign debt situation in Ottoman Turkey had become so extreme that Sultan Abdul Hamid II was forced by his French and British creditors to put the entire finances of the realm under the control of a banker-run agency in 1881, the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA), controlled by the two largest creditors—France and Britain. By the late 1880's a new player on the Continent who was not part of this debt control, the German Reich, engaged the Ottoman Empire economically. That strategically challenged the vital imperial design of the most powerful empire of the day, Britain.

After Britain sank into a Great Depression after 1873, Germany's industrial colossus emerged as the fastest-developing economic power on earth with the possible exception of then fledgling United States. The political and economic fate of Germany and Ottoman Turkey were linked after 1899 with the decision by German industry, Deutsche Bank to build a railway connecting Berlin to the Ottoman Empire as far away as Baghdad in then-Mesopotamia. It was a land bridge for trade between Ottoman Turkey and Germany independent of British control of the seas.

A few Eurasian geopolitical basics

German industry had begun to look overseas for sources of raw materials as well as potential markets for German goods. In 1894 German Chancellor, von Caprivi, told the Reichstag, “Asia Minor is important to us as a market for German industry, a place for the investment of German capital and a source of supply, capable of considerable expansion, of such essential goods as we now buy from countries of which it may well sooner or later be in our interests to make ourselves independent.”

Caprivi was supported by German industry, especially the steel barons, and by the great banks such as Deutsche Bank.

That Berlin-Baghdad Railway linking the fate of Ottoman Turkey to that of Germany was a geopolitically strategic factor in the events which led Britain to the First World War in a failed bid to preserve her global hegemony. Turkey then as today was regarded by powerful Great Powers as a “pivot” state. The danger in being a pivot state is, of course, the question of who has their hands on it, who moves the pivot for their own geopolitical purposes.

In 1904 a British professor of geography, Sir Halford Mackinder, delivered a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society titled The Geographical Pivot of History, which was to shape a history of two world wars and subsequent wars and power relations. Mackinder, the father of geopolitics—the relation of geography and political economy and power—developed the systematic axiom of British imperial power. It was simple as it was fateful:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland:

Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island:

Who rules the World-Island commands the World.

For Mackinder East Europe was Continental Europe from Germany to Poland, France and Austria. The Heartland was the vast Eurasian land power, Russia. The World-Island was Eurasia.

When the United States emerged to displace the British Empire in world affairs after 1945, she also took the lessons of Mackinder geopolitics. The leading postwar foreign policy strategists including Henry Kissinger, were schooled in Mackinders' ideas. One American disciple of Mackinder, Zbigniew Brzezinski, cited Mackinder's geopolitical axiom in a 1997 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine where he defined the American strategic priorities in the post-Soviet era:

Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic states...The world's most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world's population; 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's.

Eurasia is the world's axial super-continent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy. [1]

That has largely defined US foreign political and military relations with Turkey and the newly emerging former Soviet Republics of Eurasia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Unfortunately for Turkey and the republics of the Eurasian region, those relations have too often been determined by IMF conditionalities and by military alliances and actions more resembling the Cold War than an era of genuine peace and respect for national sovereignty. Until now the post-Soviet East-West relations have largely been based on a negative construct.

The two geopolitical statements—the one from Mackinder in 1919 during the Versailles talks to divide Europe after the First World War, the second by Mr Brzezinski in 1997 at the end of a bitter Cold War—have defined the principle relations of Turkey and the rest of Eurasia to the world for more than a century.

Eurasia's Opportunity today

What will define the future for the various nations of Eurasia, especially Turkey, two decades since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact Cold War structures?

The answer requires some clarity on basic issues. First and most essential is how Turkey and other Eurasian nations define their bilateral and regional relationships. Second, how do they define their relationship with the Atlantic alliance, the system of political, military and economic relations built after 1945 around the dominance of the United States.

What defines the situation today is a growing realization across all Eurasia from Beijing to Moscow, from Alma Ata to Ankara that the pillar of the postwar order, the United States has become an increasingly incalculable partner and force in world economic and political affairs. Some even within the US speak of a terminal decline in American influence over the coming decades, with terms such as ‘imperial overstretch.' It's essential to understand the extent and nature of the current economic and financial crisis of the Dollar System if we are to make any serious calculation of the future.

The crisis which broke in August 2007 as a crisis in the sub-prime or high-risk segment of US real estate credit was in fact a first manifestation of a process of debt destruction which is bringing the United States into a new Great Depression, one that will last at least a decade, perhaps several. In its severity it will be far worse than that of the 1930's. Today the USA is the world's greatest debtor economy. In 1929 it was the largest creditor. Today the USA public debt is over $11 trillion, growing at the fastest rate in history. The Federal deficit this year is estimated to exceed $1.8 trillion as the Treasury pours money into a bankrupt banking system to try to rescue a collapsing Dollar System. In 1929 US Public Debt was insignificant.

Since Washington abandoned the Bretton Woods Gold Exchange Standard convertibility in August 1971 it has been accepted wisdom in Washington that, as Dick Cheney put it, ‘deficits don't matter.' So long as the dollar was world reserve currency and the US was the greatest military power, the world would support the dollar. That era appears to have ended. The trade surplus economies of Asia, above all China are becoming increasingly concerned that the value of their dollar investments in US debt will depreciate as the volume of debt needed continues to soar.

In recent months China has begun exploring alternative investment avenues to replace their dollar investments. Russia and Brazil, seeking to reduce their dependence on the dollar, plan to buy $20billion of SDR bonds from the IMF and diversify foreign-currency reserves. Russia's central bank said it may cut investments in US Treasuries, currently estimated at $240billion, and China says it may reduce reliance on the dollar and US bonds. China today is America's largest foreign creditor.

This is no short-term impulse to dump dollars or a pressure tactic by the countries of Eurasia. It's the beginning of a global tectonic shift away from a sole financial center to many regional or ‘multipolar' centers over the next decade. As the trillions of dollars of US taxpayer bailouts have demonstrated, try as they might, Humpty Dumpty, the Dollar System can't be put together again, as it was even three years ago. Wrong economic policies, decisions taken more than four decades ago in Washington and Wall Street, have reached their relative limits. The world is in what Joseph Schumpeter once called ‘creative destruction.' The consequences for the future of Eurasia are enormous.

With the pillar of the US-centered Dollar System slowly collapsing, the choices for Eurasia begin to define themselves. At this point they can go one of two ways: Continue the status quo and subordinate national economic decisions to support the Dollar System. That means abiding by the rules of IMF and World Bank austerity. It means abiding by the trade rules of the G7-dominated WTO, even on issues such as GMO seeds which go against national health security. It means to subordinate national security interests to NATO, an institution created in the Cold War atmosphere of the Truman Doctrine in 1948. That, despite we are at a time the original purpose for NATO, defense against a Soviet military threat or Warsaw Pact aggression has long since become a relic of past history. Those four institutions are at the heart of the 1944 Bretton Woods Dollar System, as I have described in detail in a recent book.

The main problem for fast-emerging Eurasian nations with continuing this Atlantic status quo, sometimes referred to by Washington as ‘Globalization,' is that it now means going down with the Dollar Titanic over the longer term.

Emerging Eurasian Economic Space

On the other hand there is second dynamic economic perspective, still raw and unformed, but one containing everything necessary to build a vast zone of economic prosperity, a huge new market.

The catastrophic US military experience in Iraq and also in Pakistan and Afghanistan since 2001 has led to much rethinking across Eurasia.

The fact that the new Obama Administration to date, while making rhetorical gestures of a change, has done little of substance to shift US fundamental economic and military policy, suggests that the real options for maintaining the American Century are few at this point. That is clear from the fact that the key players in Obama economic policy were the same persons responsible for creating the conditions of the financial disaster in the first place. The military policies in the new Administration are represented by the same persons responsible for past military misadventures. They are representing an outmoded paradigm that is in fatal decline.

In this situation of a declining economic influence of the USA the various nations across Eurasia are clearly beginning to look to new regional arrangements which could secure export markets, in fact to build new markets.

A market in the end is a political decision. Markets, contrary to what Milton Friedman taught, do not exist free in nature. They are created. There is no abstract ‘world market.' Regional or local markets can be and are created peacefully.

In the past several years steps to build new markets have become visible across Eurasia. Notable is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). According to Russian and to Chinese economists with whom I have discussed, the SCO is seen as an evolving framework to build a new Eurasian economic space.

It is very initial, but an important framework to economically weave the nations of China, Russia and Central Asia into closer cooperation. From the perspective of geopolitics, the SCO is a natural economic convergence of mutual interests of the republics of Central Asia. SCO founding members include Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Mongolia, India, Pakistan and Iran are observers. They just concluded an annual meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia where they discussed deeper economic, security and social cooperation. The background of the present deepening dollar crisis shaped the talks. As well the governments of Brazil and India joined after with Russia and China, to discuss mutual economic interests, including energy cooperation.

The Eurasian energy calculus

The future of any economic cooperation among the states of Eurasia, including Turkey, rests on the resolution of vital energy supply issues. Here Eurasia is fortunate to straddle some of the richest energy regions on our planet, in Russia as well as the Caspian Basin state of Kazakhstan and the contiguous Middle East Gulf region.

Following the ill-conceived decision by the G7 in June 1990 to place the economic reorganization of former economies of the Warsaw Pact including Russia under the mandate of IMF conditionalities, a role for which the IMF had never been intended, Russia today is struggling to regain a stable economic base.

It has a way to go. But Russia brings to the table huge positive resource advantages in terms of its wealth of oil and gas reserves and energy technology no Western country possesses. Given the rapid industrial expansion of China since the beginning of the decade, a natural partnership is emerging linking the economies of Russia, Kazakhstan and China increasingly around energy. The role of pipeline geopolitics in the economic future of Turkey and Eurasia generally is central.

Today the future of competing gas pipelines is at the heart of the Eurasian economic calculus. Here Turkey is in a position to play a central role given its geographic and historical role as a bridge between East and West, North and South—Europe and Eurasia.

One key link through Turkey has been the oil and gas pipeline from Azerbaijan to the port of Ceyhan via Georgia. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline are cited as part of Turkey's foreign policy strategy to become an energy conduit. BTC has also been a high priority US foreign policy goal to weaken Russian influence over Caspian energy corridors. By itself BTC has limited strategic effect on the regional geopolitical balance. Were it to be coupled with a second project, the much-discussed Nabucco project, the impact would definitely be a direct challenge to Russia's energy role. The EU knows this well, which is why several member states have been less than eager to invest serious sums in Nabucco.

Recent developments in discovery and development of new natural gas reserves in both Azerbaijan and most recently in Turkmenistan in South Yolotan-Osman and Yashlar gas fields, located in the eastern part of the Amudarya River basin, add significant new energy resources to the energy calculus of the emerging Eurasian economic space.

Turkey-Russia cooperation or Turkish-Washington Cooperation?

Turkish-Russian economic ties have greatly expanded over the past decade, with trade volume reaching $32 billion in 2008, making Russia Turkey's number one partner. Gas and oil imports from Russia account for most of the trade volume.

Turkey and Russia are already connected by the twin Blue Stream natural gas pipelines across the bottom of the Black Sea. Moscow and Ankara are talking about increasing deliveries through the network, which in 2008 carried 10 bn cm of Russian gas to Turkey.

More importantly, following a March meeting in Ankara between the Turkish Energy Minister and Gazprom chief Alexei Miller, discussions are underway about a Blue Stream-2 project. It would be a new gas pipeline parallel to Blue Stream, in addition to the construction of a gas transportation system in Turkey by expanding Blue Stream to interlink with the proposed Samsun-Ceyhan line, with a spur line under the Mediterranean to Ashkelon in Israel.

Russia's Prime Minister Putin has also said he was counting on the support of Israel in the construction of a new oil pipeline via Turkey and Israel. The pipeline would link to the Samsun-Ceyhan oil pipeline, to be constructed across the Red and Mediterranean seas.

For Turkey, which currently imports 90 % of its energy, the projects would provide increased energy security and, in the case of the Samsun-Ceyhan-Ashkelon pipeline, generate significant transit revenues.

Discussions are also underway on possible extending Turkey's gas lines across its Thracian territory to supply neighbouring Balkan nations Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary. In such an event, Moscow would have gained a prime goal of lessening its dependency on the Ukrainian pipeline network for transit.

Russia also won a tender for the construction of Turkey's first nuclear plant recently, though final resolution is unclear at this time. Russia's market also plays a major role for Turkish overseas investments and exports. Russia is one of the main customers for Turkish construction firms and a major destination for Turkish exports. Similarly, millions of Russian tourists bring significant revenues to Turkey every year. Importantly, Turkey and Russia may start to use the Turkish lira and the Russian ruble in foreign trade, which could increase Turkish exports to Russia.

In recent months both Turkey and Russia have taken steps to deepen economic and political cooperation. Cooperation between Russia and Turkey is seen by both now as essential to regional peace and stability.

In talk of revived ‘Great Games' in Eurasia during the 1990's it seemed Turkey was becoming once more Russia's geopolitical rival as in the 19th Century. Turkey's quasi-alliance with Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Georgia led Moscow until recently to view Turkey as a formidable rival. That is changing significantly.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recently commended Turkey's actions during the Russian-Georgian war of last summer, and Turkey's subsequent proposal for the establishment of a Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform (CSCP). The Russian President said the Georgia crisis had shown their ability to deal with such problems on their own without the involvement of outside powers.

Russian's aim is clearly to use its economic resources to counter what it sees as a growing NATO encirclement, made dramatic by the Washington decision to place missile and radar bases in Poland and the Czech Republic, as they see it, aimed at Moscow. To date the Obama Administration has indicated it will continue the Bush ‘missile defense' policy. Washington also just agreed to place US Patriot missiles in Poland, clearly not aimed at Germany.

If Ankara moves towards closer collaboration with Russia, Georgia's position is precarious and Azerbaijan's natural gas pipeline route to Europe, the Nabucco Pipeline, is blocked. If it cooperates with the United States and manages to reach a stable treaty with Armenia under US auspices, the Russian position in the Caucasus is weakened.

The strategy for Washington to bring Germany into closer cooperation with the US is to weaken German dependence on Russian energy flows. With the recent Obama visit to Ankara, Washington is evidently attempting to win Turkish support for its troubled Nabucco alternative gas pipeline through Turkey from Azerbaijan which would potentially lessen EU dependence on Russian gas.

Turkey is one of the only routes energy from new sources can cross to Europe from the Middle East, Central Asia or the Caucasus. If Turkey decides to cooperate with Russia, Russia retains the initiative. Since it became clear in Moscow that US strategy was to extend NATO to Russia's front door via Ukraine and Georgia, Russia has moved to use its economic “carrot” its vast natural gas resources, to at the very least neutralize Western Europe, especially Germany, towards Russia.

A Washington Great Game?

However the question of Turkish-EU relations is linked with the issue of Turkish membership into the EU, a move vehemently opposed by France and also less openly so by Germany, and strongly backed by Washington.

Washington is clearly playing what some call ‘a deeper game.' Obama's backing for Turkey's application for EU membership comes with a heavy price. As the US is no member of the EU it was an attempt to try to curry favor with the Erdogan government. Since the April Obama visit, Ankara has begun to discuss an agreement with Armenia including diplomatic relations.

A Turkish accord with Armenia would change the balance of power in the entire region. Since the August 2008 Georgia-Russia conflict the Caucasus, a strategically vital area has been unstable. Russian troops remain in South Ossetia. Russia also has troops in Armenia meaning Russia has Georgia surrounded.

Turkey is the key link in this complex game of geopolitical balance of power between Washington and Moscow. If Turkey decides to collaborate with Russia Georgia's position becomes insecure and Azerbaijan's possible pipeline route to Europe is blocked. If Turkey decides to cooperate with Washington and at the same time reaches a stable agreement with Armenia under US nudging, Russia's entire position in the Caucasus is weakened and an alternative route for natural gas to Europe becomes available, reducing Russian leverage with Western Europe.

This past March a memorandum was signed between the Azerbaijan state oil company SOCAR and Russia's Gazprom for major deliveries of Azerbaijan natural gas to Russia by January 2010.

Azerbaijan is the only state outside Iran that would likely supply gas to the planned EU Nabucco pipeline from Azerbaijan through Turkey to south-eastern Europe. Russia has proposed South Stream as an alternative to the Nabucco project, also in need of Azerbaijan gas, so in effect Russia weakens the chances of realization of Nabucco.

In this Eurasian pipeline and economic diplomacy, clear is that Turkey and the other nations of Eurasia are grappling with new possible economic arrangements which will have profound impact on the future of the world economy. The EU as a body is at present clearly frozen in the dynamic of the old post-1945 Bretton Woods order. Initiative is unlikely to come from Brussels for a dynamic economic growth in Turkey or Eurasia generally. Interestingly, Eurasia is becoming the growth locomotive for the EU. Many Europeans find that a hard pill to swallow. It is however the reality, and a fascinating opportunity for the nations of Eurasia as well as for the economies of the EU. Ultimately, as well, a vibrant growing Eurasian economic space would be in the best long-term interest of the United States in a multi-polar world.

1. Brzezinski, Zbigniew, A Geostrategy for Eurasia, Foreign Affairs, 76:5, September/October 1997.

F. William Engdahl is author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. He may be reached via his website www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net

Zodiac to the North Pole

Looking at Saturday's sea ice map reveals that the perimeter has continued to tighten and that we also seem to have 50% ice coverage to the North Pole coming from the Bering Strait side of the ice. That means that small zodiacs could possibly penetrate to the north pole. That would be fun.

The North West Passage continues to be essentially open although 50% ice has blown into the mouth of Lancaster Sound. I suspect that the reduction of sea ice thickness this year which had to be substantial will lead even less ice presence there next year even if next year turns out to be neutral.

In fact, I think an ice thickness survey this season is highly appropriate. In the meantime, we are likely looking at the maximal perimeter reduction since any further reduction is likely to be small.

There has been a lot of discussion in Canada on the role of the Canadian Navy in patrolling the Arctic seaways. I think it is time to think through the possibility of deploying a commercially built large nuclear powered hovercraft ice breaker. It would have to be as long as an aircraft carrier and at least twice as broad.

The down draft from a hovercraft design lifts ice up out of the water, causing it to breakup. This has now been demonstrated on thinner ice in the St Lawrence Seaway with much smaller craft. It is a very elegant solution to working safely with the problem.

Such a vessel would also be able to deploy in the off season on other missions as a high speed troop transport and limited weapons platform. I do not know if it would be feasible to fly helicopters off such a system.

At least we should announce a plan to do so and study it to death for a few years. Then no one at NATO could claim that we are not taking our commitments or the Arctic seriously.