Adventures In NATOstan: Sparks Flying In Ibiza, Locked Down Bilderberg In Lisbon – Pepe Escobar

 

Kolozeg.Org – 21/05/2023

With G7 “leadership” mired in a sticky swamp of intellectual shallowness, predictably the only agenda in colonized Japan was more sanctions on Russia.

Let’s start with a graphic depiction of where the Global North and the Global South really stand.

1. Xian, former imperial capital, and key hub of the Ancient Silk Roads: Xi Jinping hosts the China-Central Asia summit, attended by all Heartland "stans" (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgzystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan).

The final statement stresses economic cooperation and "a resolute stand" against Hegemon-concocted color revolutions. That expands what the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) are already implementing. In practice, the summit seals that the Russia-China strategic partnership will be protecting the Heartland.

2. Kazan: the Russia-Islamic World forum unites not only religious leaders but top businessmen of no less than 85 nations. Multipolar Russia proceeded in parallel to the Arab League Summit in Jeddah, which welcomed back Syria to the "Arab family". Arab nations unanimously pledged to end "foreign interference" for good.

3. Hiroshima: the ever-shrinking G7, actually G9 (adding two unelected EU bureaucrats), imposes a single agenda of more sanctions on Russia; more weapons to black void Ukraine; and more lecturing of China.

4. Lisbon: the annual Bilderberg meeting – a NATO/Atlanticist fest – takes place in a not so secret hotel completely locked down. Top item in the agenda; war – hybrid and otherwise – on the "RICs" in BRICS (Russia, India, China).

I could have been in Xian, or most likely Kazan. Instead, honoring a previous commitment, I was in Ibiza, and then scraped the idea of flying to Lisbon as a waste of time. Allow me to share with you the reason why: call it a little tale from the Baleares, breaking the trademark pledge that what happens in swinging, sweaty deep house Ibiza stays in Ibiza.

I was a guest at a top business gathering – mostly Spanish but also featuring Portuguese, Germans, Brits and Scandinavians: ultra high-level executives – in real estate, asset management, investment banking. Our panel was titled "Global Geopolitical Shifts and Their Consequences". Before the panel, participants were invited to vote on what worried them most when it comes to the future of their business. Number one was inflation and interest rates. Number two was geopolitics. That prefigured a very lively debate ahead.

When a EU hagiographer goes berserk

Little did I – and the audience – know that would turn into a wild ride. The first presentation came from the director of a "Center for European Politics" in Copenhagen. She bills herself as a political science professor, and is an adviser to EU Chief Gardener Borrell.

Well, I adopted a Cheshire cat stance after the tsunami of clichés spewed out about "European values" and evil Russkies, as well as her being "frightened" by the future of Europe. At least immediate relief was provided by the impeccably diplomatic Lanxin Xiang, an adorable character, always with a cheerful smile on his face, and one of the very few leading experts on China who actually knows what he’s talking about, in fluent English.

Lanxin Xiang, among other accomplishments, is Emeritus Professor of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva; director of the Institute of Security Policy at the China National Institute for SCO International Exchange; and executive director of the Washington Foundation for European Studies. This is a column I wrote about him and his work, published in October 2020.

Professor Xiang offered a masterly exposition on the American obsession to fabricate a "Taiwan problem" and how Europe, already squeezed by the U.S. proxy war against Russia, must be very careful when it comes to lecturing China.

When it was my turn, I went for the kill, dismissing all those EU press release platitudes as absolute nonsense, and stressing how Europe is already being eaten alive by the proverbial "American interests". As briefly as possible I explained the whole geopolitical background of the war in Ukraine.

Well, this was all delivered to top business people who consume The Economist, Financial Times and Bloomberg as their prime sources of information. Their reaction would speak volumes.

Predictably, the EU-paid bureaucrat completely freaked out, and shrieking with outrage, went full pre-ordained script, from threatening to abandon the stage to accusing me of being "paid by the Kremlin". I asked her, point blank, to "contradict me, with facts". No facts were provided. Just fear and bewilderment, mixed with intimations of cancel culture.

To his great merit the vastly experienced moderator, Struan Robertson from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, kept things civil, giving more time for Lanxin Xiang to explain the Chinese mindset and opening the floor for a sequence of very good questions.

In the end, the audience loved it. Many came to personally thank me for information they will never have access to in El Pais, Le Monde or The Economist. A minority in the room was simply stunned – but our debate at least must have left them musing over a lot of preconceived notions.

It’s the total merit of the key organizers, Jose Maria Pons and head of the program Cristina Garcia-Peri, to host such a debate in fabulous Ibiza, in Spain, prime NATOstan territory. In the current situation, this would be absolutely impossible in France or Germany, not to mention Scandinavia or those demented Baltics.

There’s no way to counter-act the fabricated narratives parroted by EU-paid hacks and bureaucrats except for ridiculing them – in their faces. They become livid and barely manage to stutter when their lies are exposed. For instance, one of the questions from the floor, by a top of the line German businessman, enumerated a litany of dark facts about Ukrainian "democracy" that are absolutely verbotten by EUrocracy.

The G-Less Than Zero freaks out

What happened in Ibiza dovetails with what happened in U.S.-nuclear bombed Hiroshima – Hegemons don’t do apologies – and in that locked down Lisbon hotel.

With the G7 "leadership" mired in a sticky swamp of intellectual shallowness, predictably the only agenda in colonized Japan was more sanctions on Russia – imposed over third countries and on companies in the energy and military-industrial sectors; more weapons to the Ukrainian black void; and a ridiculous counter-productive new obsession of piling up on China "containment" for alleged "economic coercion."

In the photo ops, by the way, it’s not a shrinking G7 that shows up: but a warmongering G9, artificially augmented by that pathetic couple of unelected EUrocrats, Charles Michel and Pustula von der Lugen.

As far as the real Global Majority – or Global South – is concerned, this looks more like a G-Less Than Zero. The more the senseless, illegal Sanctions Wars are "expanded", the more the absolute majority of the Global South moves away from the collective West, diplomatically, geopolitically and geoeconomically.

And that’s why the top Bilderberg agenda at the hijacked Lisbon hotel was to revamp NATO/Atlanticist coordination in a war – hybrid and otherwise – against the driving force in BRICS; the RICs (Russia, India, China).

There were other items on the menu – from AI to the acute banking crisis, from "energy transition" to "fiscal challenges", not to mention proverbial "U.S. leadership".

But when you get in the same room people like NATO’s Stoltenberg; director of U.S. intel Avril Haines; senior director for Strategic Planning at the National Security Council Thomas Wright; Goldman Sachs president John Waldron; Chief Gardener Borrell (whose minion was in Ibiza); vice chair of Brookfield Asset Management, Mark Carney (one of their executives also in Ibiza); Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Christopher Cavoli; and Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, among other Atlanticist shills, the plot is self-evident:

It’s war on the multipolar world. At least we can dance it away in Ibiza.

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News From The NATOstan-Imposed Meat Grinder — Pepe Escobar

 

KOLOZEG - 19/12/2022

Somewhere in her private pantheon, Pallas Athena, Goddess of Geopolitics, is immensely enjoying the show.

No one ever lost money capitalizing on the unlimited nonsense spewed out by the collective deer caught in the headlights also known as Western mainstream media – complete with showering Person of the Year awards on a megalomaniac, cocaine-fueled lousy actor impersonating a warlord.

The non-stop trashy parade of Western military analysts is now “assessing” that the first targets of an incoming, joint Russia-Belarus attack on the 404 black hole formerly known as Ukraine will be Lviv, Lutsk, Rivne, Zhytomyr, and why not throw Kiev in the mix straight out of a second axis.

The Russian General Staff is attentively monitoring all the action and may even follow the advice of such “analysts”.

And then there’s outright panic, as the Ministry of Defense announced that the Strategic Missile Forces have loaded two Yars ICBMs into their intended silos. Cue to widespread shrieks of horror of the “Russia Readies Nuclear Missile Capable Of Striking Deep Into US” variety.

Some facts though never change. Number One is NATO as a figment of the collective West’s – extremely impaired – imagination. If push ever came to shove – as Straussian/neo-con armchair warriors hope and pray – Russia can conveniently defeat the whole of NATO as there is hardly anything “there”.

That, of course, would require a massive Russian mobilization. As it stands, Russia may look feeble in a few quarters as they activated at best 100,000 troops against possibly 1 million Ukrainian troops. It’s as if Moscow was not exactly seduced by the idea of “winning” – which may be the case, in a quite twisted way.

Even now, Moscow has not mobilized enough troops to occupy Ukraine – which, in theory, would be imperative to completely “denazify” the Kiev racket. The operative concept though is “in theory”. Moscow in fact is busy demonstrating a completely new theory – irrespective of the fact that a few exalted souls have been peddling that Putin should be replaced by the FSB’s Alexander Bortnikov.

“There will be nothing left of the enemy”

With its array of hypersonic missiles, Russia can knock out all NATO bridges, ports, airports as well as power stations, oil and natural gas storage, Rotterdam oil and natural gas installations, in a matter of a few hours. All energy production equipment across NATOstan would be destroyed. Europe would be shut off from natural resources. A dazed and confused Empire would be unable to move troops, any troops, to Europe.

And still provocations run unabated. The recent attack by Tu-141 Ukrainian drones against Engels-2 airbase was blamed by Moscow on Kiev – which predictably denied all responsibility. Yet what really mattered was Moscow’s strategic messaging to US/NATO, with Putin flirting with the notion that sooner or later the response may be up a serious notch in case US/NATO weaponry supplied to Kiev is used to strike deep into sensitive Russian Federation territory.

The current Russian doctrine even allows Moscow to respond with nuclear strikes; after all Engels-2 airbase is home to nuclear-capable bombers, prime strategic assets.

The drones were certainly launched by infiltrated agents inside Russian territory. If they had originated from outside Russia, and interpreted as nuclear missiles, that could have triggered the launch against NATOstan of hundreds of Russian nuclear missiles.

Putin himself made it – ominously – quite clear at the Eurasia Economic Council summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a week ago:

“I assure you, after the early warning system receives a signal of a missile attack, hundreds of our missiles are in the air (…) It is impossible to stop them (…) There will be nothing left of the enemy, because it is impossible to intercept a hundred missiles. This, of course, is a deterrent – a serious deterrent.”

Not, of course, to the stupidity-corroded Straussian-neocon gang who are actually running American foreign “policy”.

It’s no wonder reliable Russian intel sources established that the missiles that hit Engels-2 were locally launched, though the Kiev regime desired it to be believed otherwise.

And that turns the whole charade into a Dadaist farce – with a dazed and confused Empire still bound to a maniac in Kiev who still believes that the Ukrainian S-300 that hit Poland came from Russia. Cue to the whole world – and not only Washington – as hostage to a “Person of the Year” maniac with the – virtual – power of provoking a worldwide nuclear war.

Red Napoleon in da house

Meanwhile, on the ground, Russia has gone Deep Operations Strategy, big time. In several spots along the extensive frontline, they attack the points that are most likely to draw out poor Ukrainian reserves hiding in the second line of defense. When reserves come out through barren, muddy lands and terrible roads to the rescue of frontline units, entire battalions are massacred.

Russians never go deep into the third line – where command and control may be located. What’s in play is attrition warfare under Deep Operations Strategy, straight out of the playbook of the legendary “Red Napoleon”, Field Marshall Mikhail Tukhachevsky.

Russia saves soldiers, personnel and equipment. The whole thing works wonders in difficult terrain where vehicles get bogged down in rainy roads. This rinse and repeat tactic, day in day out, for months on end has led to (at least) 400,000 Ukrainian casualties. Call it the epitome of Attritional Warfare.

Historians will relish that the whole scenario resembles the Battle of Agincourt – where wave after wave of French Knights (playing the role of present day Ukrainians, and Polish/NATO mercenaries) kept running uphill against English archers and knights who just stood still and let them come, hitting the second line again and again.

The difference, of course, is that Russians are employing attritional warfare tactics day after day for six months now, while Agincourt was just one battle in a single day. By the time this meat grinder is over an entire generation of Ukrainians and Poles will have gone to meet their maker.

The collective West’s myth of a Ukrainian “victory” against the Russian war of attrition does not even qualify as cosmic delusion. It’s a lousy, lethal joke. The only way out would be to sit down at the negotiating table, now, before the hammer (the next Russian offensive) comes down on the anvil (the existing frontline).

But NATO, of course, as Stultifying Stoltenberg keeps reminding the world, does not do negotiations.

Which, in a sense, may be a blessing, as NATO may end up breaking up in myriad pieces, totally humiliated on the ground despite all its elaborate warmongering plans.

Andrei Martyanov has been peerless tracking the collective West’s complete economic, moral, intellectual – and most of all military – degradation, everything drenched in lies, lousy P.R. twists and “stupefying incompetence across the board.”

All this while Russia prepares “for yet another ‘defeat’, like retaking all of Donbass and then… Who knows what then. A quick win for Russia would be a loss because NATO would still exist. No, Russia has to pace this so as it sucks in NATO into the grinder.”

Somewhere in her private pantheon, Pallas Athena, Goddess of Geopolitics, is immensely enjoying the show. Oh, wait; she’s actually reincarnated, and her name is Maria Zakharova.

★

All The Young Dudes, Carry The (Russian) News – Pepe Escobar

 

Kolozeg - 25/09/2022

The SCO in Samarkand and the UN General Assembly have demonstrated how virtually the whole Global South outside of NATOstan does not demonize Russia.

Geopolitical tectonic plates are reelin’ and rockin’, and the sound is heard all around the world, as the twin baby bears DPR and LPR plus Kherson and Zaporozhye vote on their referendums. Irretrievable fact: by the end of next week Russia most certainly will be on the way to add over 100,000 km2 and over 5 million people to the Federation.

Denis Pushilin, head of the DPR, summed it all up: “We’re going home”. The baby bears are coming to Mama.

Coupled with the partial mobilization of up to 300,000 Russian reservists – arguably just a first phase – the raise-the-stakes consequences are immense. Exit the previous soft format of the Special Military Operation (SMO): enter serious kinetic war, not hybrid, against any actor, vassal or otherwise, that dares to attack Russian territory.

There’s a very short window of Chinese-coined crisis/opportunity for the collective West, or NATOstan, to negotiate. They won’t. Even as anyone with an IQ over room temperature knows that the only way for the Empire of Chaos/Lies/Plunder to “win” – outside of the cover of The Economist – would be by launching a first-strike flurry of tactical nuclear weapons, which would meet a devastating Russian response.

The Kremlin knows it – President Putin has publicly alluded to it; the Russian General Staff (RGS) knows it; the Chinese know it (and have called, also publicly, for negotiations).

Instead, we have hysterical Russophobia reaching a paroxysm. And from the deer-caught-in-the-headlights vassals, an extra toxic sludge of fear and loathing.

Implications have been sharply and rationally addressed at The Saker and by Andrei Martyanov. On the realm of social network “influencing” – a key component of hybrid war – cheap entertainment has been provided by everyone from frightened Eurocrats to crappy retired U.S. generals threatening a “devastating strike” against the Black Sea Fleet “if Vladimir Putin uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine”.

One of these specimens is a mere P.R. front man for an Atlanticist think tank. He was properly disposed of by the now totally unplugged deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev: “Retired idiots with general’s stripes do not need to scare us with talk about a NATO strike on Crimea.”

Freak out on a moonage daydream? Oh yeah. Tawdry wet dreams, stripped off the Bowie glow.

Maskirovka meets Sun Tzu

Moscow’s rerouted strategy takes maskirovka – mask, feint, fool the enemy – to another level, actually dropping the mask, plus the velvet gloves. Now it’s all very clear: this is turbo-charged Sun Tzu (“May your plans be dark and impenetrable like the night, and when you move, strike like lightning.”)

There will be plenty of strikes like lightning ahead in the Ukrainian battlefield. This is the culmination of a process that started in Samarkand, during the SCO summit last week. According to diplomatic sources, Putin and Xi Jinping had a very serious conversation. Xi asked tough questions – as in you must finish this off – and Putin arguably explained how things would reach the next level.

Yoda Patrushev was on the road to China immediately afterwards – meeting with his Yoda counterpart Yang Jiechi, head of the Foreign Affairs Commission, and the secretary of the Central Political and Legal Committee, Guo Shengkun.

Following-up on Samarkand, Patrushev outlined how Moscow will help Beijing militarily when the Empire tries anything funny in the next battlefield: Asia-Pacific. That should happen under the framework of the SCO. Crucially, the Patrushev meetings were requested by the Chinese.

So the Russia-China strategic partnership is about to achieve full-fledged cooperation before the going gets tough in the South China Sea. It’s as if Russia-China were on the brink of creating their own CSTO.

And that is happening even as the Chinese leadership continues to express – mostly in private – that war in Russia’s western borderlands is very bad for business (BRI, EAEU, SCO, BRICS+, all of them) and should be wrapped up a.s.a.p.

The problem is a swift wrap-up is off the cards. Foreign Minister Lavrov, in New York for the UN General Assembly, has stressed how.

“Ukraine has eventually become a totalitarian Nazi sort of state” – unconditionally supported by the collective West.

NATOstan has predictably doubled down on its tactics since the non-response response to Russia’s demand for a serious discussion on indivisibility of security, in late 2021: it’s always about shelling Donbass.

This could not possibly be tolerated anymore by the Kremlin and Russian public opinion. Thus the partial mobilization – forcefully proposed by the siloviki and the Security Council for quite a while now, with Kostyukov at GRU, Naryshkin at SVR and Bortnikov at FSB on the forefront.

The symbolism is powerful: after so many years, Moscow is finally fully committed to supporting Donbass all the way to the baby bears coming to Mama for good.

There are – unconfirmed – rumors in Moscow that the decision was accelerated because GRU has intel on the Americans soon transferring long-range missiles to Kiev capable of striking Russian cities. That’s beyond a red line for the Kremlin – hence Putin’s express mention that every weapon available in Russia’s mighty arsenal will be used to protect the Motherland.

The red line is even more relevant than the much-ballyhooed Kiev all out counter-offensive, which could only happen by Spring 2023. With the partial mobilization, Russia may count on a new batch of fresh troops ready for war by the end of the year. The much-touted Ukrainian numerical advantage will soon be nullified.

Slaves humming “Das Rheingold”

So the General Winter picture will be unveiling considerably less slow grind – the prevailing tactic so far – and way more vast scale maneuver war cum devastating strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure.

Europe meanwhile may go dark and freezing, flirting with a return to the Middle Ages, but the imperial Lords of War still will refuse to negotiate. The Kremlin and the RGS couldn’t care less. Because Russian public opinion overwhelmingly understands the Big Picture. Ukraine is just a pawn in their game – and what “they” want is to destroy and plunder Russia.

Defense Minister Shoigu put it in a – factual – way even a kid can understand. Russia is fighting the collective West; Western command centers in Kiev are running the show; and the entire array of NATO military and “civilian” satellites is mobilized against Russia.

By now it’s already clear. If these NATO command centers tell Kiev to strike Russian territory after the referendums, we will have the Putin-promised decimation of “centers of decision”. And the same applies to the satellites.

This may be what the RGS wanted to do from the beginning. Now they can finally implement it, because of popular support in the internal front. This crucial factor is what NATOstan “intel” simply cannot understand and/or is incapable of professionally evaluating.

Former Pentagon advisor during the Trump administration, Colonel Douglas Macgregor, an extremely rare voice of sanity in the Beltway, totally understands the stakes: “Russia already controls the territory that produces 95 percent of Ukrainian GDP. It has no need to press further west.” Donbass will be fully liberated and the next step is Odessa. Moscow is “in no hurry. The Russians are nothing if not methodical and deliberate. Ukrainian forces are bleeding to death in counterattack after counterattack. Why rush?”

The SCO in Samarkand and the UN General Assembly have amply demonstrated how virtually the whole Global South outside of NATOstan does not demonize Russia, understand Russia’s position, and even profits from it, like China and India buying loads of gas and paying in rubles.

And then there’s the euro/dollar shuffle: to save the U.S. dollar, the Empire is breaking the euro. This is arguably the (italics mine) power play by the USG/Fed in cutting off the EU – most of all Germany – from cheap Russian energy by organizing a controlled demolition of the European economy and its currency.

Yet StupidEUROcrats are so cosmically incompetent they never saw it coming. So now they’d better start humming “Das Rheingold” all the way to a “hello darkness, my old friend” Middle Ages revival.

Switching to a Monty Python register, the sketch would run like an evil Putin masterminding the wreck of the Euro economy and industry; then making the Euros donate all their weapons to Ukraine; and then leaving NATO stranded in the fog, yelling desperate platitudes. In the end, Putin gets rid of his mask – after all, this is maskirovka – and reveals his true usual suspect face.

All the young dudes, carry the (Russian) news: let’s rock. It’s strike like lightning time.

★