Some geopolitical thoughts on what to watch for in 2019.

Posted by Pointman on December 20, 2018 · 41 Comments 

Foreword.

From a very top slice analysis, there are four significant power blocks around the globe struggling for control of the next fifty or a hundred years of the world’s history. What follows is highly speculative, but sometimes when you play the what if game, some of the at face value options you might initially consider outrageous, start to look not so far-fetched.

There’s absolutely nothing to stop such a quasi-predictive analysis being completely blown out of the water by an obscure incident in South Ossetia in the coming year. Gowon, find it on a map and think a century ago of people across the world wondering just who the bloody hell was the Archduke Ferdinand anyway? In the main, it’s all predicated on the continuance of the already demonstrated pragmatic mindsets of the two most powerful men in the world – Trump and Putin.

The speculations are nothing more than my understanding of where things currently are and some idle musings of where they might possibly be at the end of next year, and perhaps further out.

America.

The first and obviously the most powerful block, both politically and militarily, is the United States. The lost ground conceded by the toe-curlingly bad presidency of Barack Obama has largely been recovered by Trump, who unlike Obama when he turns up at foreign summits, is there to kick ass and take names, and to tack on that old punch line as a finisher – he’s fresh out of paper. Obama spent all his time at those international occasions apologising for America’s very existence, and it didn’t go down well at home or in a few places abroad. For instance, such needless grovelling to globalism and various third world and third-rate dictators didn’t exactly engender confidence in places like the old Soviet vassal states who depended on a strong America to protect them from the Russian bear pawing at their borders.

Trump’s two-pronged attack on the established shambles of America’s foreign relations with Europe was quite simple. You all solemnly swear at NATO meetings, with some honourable exceptions like Poland and Hungary, to contribute a certain percentage of GDP to NATO, but the money somehow never quite arrives, so historically America makes up the shortfall. That’s not going to happen anymore, boys and girls. Cough up your fair share or the NATO budget goes on an emergency F Plan diet.

The second is, you’ve been allowed to export your goods into America with not much in the way of tariffs, while at the same time slapping on prohibitive tariffs on American goods entering your trade zones. That’s not going to happen anymore either, or you’ll get the same sort of punitive tariffs we slapped on the Canadians until Twinkle Toes Trudeau came to his senses. We’ve a big enough domestic market to absorb the loss of the small amount of trade with you that your tariffs were specifically designed to keep small. Bottom line, our domestic businesses can produce any of your goods I price out of the American market and we can afford a trade war, you can’t, so there’s going to be some adjustment in tariffs to that unfair trade balance.

His foreign policy outside Europe carries a simple message. America is back and prepared to use its economic and military muscle to claw back the ground and influence lost by the dithering, corrupt and essentially weak Obama administration. While that may sound a bit harsh, the good news is that Trump likes to make deals that are acceptable to all parties concerned, while at the same time, he won’t let America be taken advantage of. Obviously, while there will inevitably be some future alarums and excursion in foreign policy matters, for the moment he’s largely got it settled to his satisfaction.

Domestically, the economic figures have never looked better. GDP is on the way to 4%, unemployment is on a low with hundreds of thousands of people getting back into the jobs pool. Most pleasingly for Trump, Black and Hispanic unemployment is on lows never seen before. Industries like petrochemical and mining have had the Obama-era DNR sticker removed from their forehead and are coming back to life, with America just having become a net exporter of energy. Concurrent with intelligent management of the economy, the stimulus of tax cuts, the culling of job-killing regulations and energy prices nearly one-third of those in Europe, the economy is firing on all cylinders.

All is not so rosy though. There are several problems that need to be addressed. There is a fundamental breakdown in the process of conducting elections honestly and it is being done with the active connivance of politicised law enforcement departments in certain jurisdictions and a justice system that day by day looks to have been politically subverted as the rule of law crumbles. The legal concept of recusing oneself from making rulings in areas you have patently an active conflict of interest in seems, like the proverbial baby, to have been thrown out with the bath water.

The FBI and the DoJ have suffered serious reputational damage and to put it bluntly, are no longer trusted by the citizenry as they once were. In certain areas like the second amendment, the municipal legislative organs are operating seemingly on the basis that they can override the articles of the constitution by simply passing what is essentially local ordinances. He has to get that entrenched corruption under control, or the 2020 elections are going to look like pure banana republic.

When an electorate are cheated out of having a say in who governs them, they either accept it and don’t bother to vote again because it’s a futile exercise, or they take up the arms that they’re allowed by the 2nd amendment, because that’s exactly why it was added to the constitution – to fight against the tyranny of their own governance, whether that’s at a state or federal level. As Lincoln said, “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

There are bigger problems though. The first is a feral news media that totally lacks any checks or balances. They’re totally biased to a liberal viewpoint that’s at odds with the opinions of half of America and are quite prepared to fabricate what’s become known as fake news in furtherance of their own political agenda.

I was watching some old clips of the election night 2016 results coming in, and as the so-called journalists, both men and women, slowly realised Trump was going to win, I was astonished to see them ‘effing and blinding on live TV like troopers and acting like their obvious favourite Clinton losing was somehow the end of the world. Was this foul-mouthed tirade of filth really being broadcast live and nationwide by supposedly respectable news outlets to what is still an essentially conservative America with a small “c”? Words and phrases like cocksucker, fuck, cock holster, bum boy and worse seem to have entered into common parlance on mass broadcast programs. Just how long is it going to be before news and current affairs programs get a PG rating?

These people were acting like their job wasn’t to report the news to you, but to act out their own little psycho-drama of being distraught and outraged news divas, and have subsequently spent the last two years acting like spoilt children, while all the time not so subtly egging on extremist groups like antifa to commit more and more excessive acts of violence, sometimes when police departments had been instructed by local politicians not to intervene. Sensation has always sold in the news business, but the traditional nod towards maintaining some sort of semblance of objective reportage no longer exists, even in gesture.

Needless to say, this compulsive behaviour pattern of reporting only a parody of balanced news, and instead concentrating on some media driven coup d’etat against a democratically elected president not to their taste, has damaged them. Two years of this outright political crusade posing as journalism has produced nothing more than a drop in earnings, a complete implosion of their credibility and newsrooms suffering wave after wave of redundancies.

For instance, Mark Dice, an independent vblogger producing content on a laptop on his kitchen table, gets nearly a third of the hits that CNN does in an average evening. How the mighty have fallen. If you like, the free internet is taking over the commentary role the MSN used to perform, but even there with the monopoly internet giants like Google, Twitter and Facebook, there’s increasingly a creeping form of partisan censorship which is becoming more brutal and pervasive on a daily basis. They’re essentially abusing their monopoly positions to impose their politics on their consumers by selectively suppressing free speech.

Again, I think Trump will have to address this problem of online censorship, since it’s a direct violation of the 1st Amendment by a handful of internet monopolies abusing their dominant position. Break them up or regulate them seems to be the only two options.

To compound the problem, the entertainment industry is converging with fake news and internet censorship to totally exclude any viewpoint that isn’t congruent with their liberal sentiments. Of course, Hollywood, like fake news, is suffering the consequences with plunging earnings as they lose customers fed up with the constant barrage of propaganda thinly disguised as entertainment. The internet giants will suffer the same earnings hit eventually, because whatever internet service it is you’re providing, there’s never a shortage of new competition, should a notoriously fickle consumer base get fed up or offended with your offering.

To be fair, the problem of abuse of a monopoly position with news, the media and internet censorship is not wholly confined to the US, but seems to be a worldwide problem, which basically pushes a globalist agenda on populations which increasingly object to it.

The other problem is the internecine race war that the Obama administration, in my opinion, deliberately fomented in furtherance of its strategy of identity politics in order to bounce the Black and Hispanic vote into their lap. In Trump’s first year, it seemed an insoluble problem since the liberal propaganda had convinced non-white Americans that Trump was a racist, but in the second, it seems to have become less of a problem, especially with the emergence of young black Americans who no longer feel they somehow have to give the Dems some sort of automatic knee-jerk allegiance.

After all, the party has done absolutely nothing for them in over a century and a half, quite the reverse actually. It’s spearheaded by mainly young people and with a meme like “leaving the plantation” and latterly Blexit – the black exit from the Dem party – it seems to be increasing in strength, especially as black unemployment is at lows never seen before. Trump is delivering for black Americans the one thing they’ve needed for decades – jobs, and plenty of them.

Russia.

The next player is Russia. There’s a phrase I read in a novel some years ago, the Russian knight is dying inside his rusting suit of armour, to the best of my recall, from a novel by John le Carré. It was true then and despite appearances, it’s even more true now. The Russians have only one aircraft carrier left, which is always followed discreetly five nautical miles behind by a tug, because it breaks down so frequently and requires its embarrassing services before the carrier is grounded somewhere on someone else’s coast. Rescuing 5,000 men off a carrier, which is actually a small floating town, with the bottom ripped out of it on a foreign shore, would be a PR disaster that would put the Kursk to shame.

By necessity, it had to be put into dry dock recently for repairs. There was an unfortunate accident there which resulted in one fatality, several injuries and damaged the carrier seriously. Temporarily, they now have no carriers to deploy, which is somewhat of an embarrassment for a supposed superpower which by definition has to be able to project force into any corner of the globe.

The only semi-effective arm of the remains of the old USSR’s arsenal is the rocket force, or the nuclear deterrent. By rumour, it’s not in great shape either, but still plenty good enough to do the job, despite the technology being thought to be aged. They can initiate or reply with nuclear-tipped rockets, but even this is looking a bit suspect both from the aspect of political will and the technicalities of delivering megadeath. By political will, I mean that Putin is essentially a nationalist lacking the messianic zeal of his forebears to spread communism abroad, because nowadays it doesn’t exist in Russia anyway. If pushed into a corner, he would of course come out swinging, but I think his eye is mainly concentrated on smothering at birth certain developments in Western Europe.

At the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1963, a lot of studies were consulted which were mainly produced by the at the time prestigious Rand Corporation, which gamed out various escalating nuclear strike scenarios. Mini-max solutions, saddle backs etc and a host of supposedly smart moves derived from the infant field of study called games theory which was being applied to a freshly nuclear weaponised age. It was all highly respected and more or less complete rubbish originating as it turned out primarily from the paranoid mind of a full-blown schizophrenic.

It was all variations on the illusory idea of some sort of controlled escalation of a nuclear war – you hit Boston, we’ll hit Krasnoyarsk, we hit Kharkov, you hit Pittsburgh. If JFK did one thing right in his all too brief presidency, it was not letting himself get inveigled into such immoral arithmetic of tit for tat megadeath and the demographics of destroying equal amounts of industrial capacity. He threw away all of the Rand corporation game scripts and thereby scared the living daylights out of everybody, most especially the grand strategists on both sides, because suddenly they were into a whole new world they’d never gamed.

His direct message to premier Khrushchev was quite simple when you boiled off all the diplomatic flummery – if just one nuke arrives on American soil, irrespective of whether it was launched from Cuba or the USSR, we’ll launch everything we’ve got at the both of you. Everything. Which do you believe in? The inevitability of Marxist-Leninist history and the coming victory of Communism over Capitalism, or both of us nuking each other back into the stone age? Khrushchev wisely decided to negotiate his way out of the crisis he himself had created. Einstein had said less than a decade prior to the Cuban crisis that if WW III was fought with nuclear weapons, the next one would be fought with sticks and rocks. Perhaps they’d heard that warning.

With Trump, Putin knows that a strong political will like Kennedy’s is back in the White House. He won’t be bullied like the ineffectual Obama, who talked a great battle about lines being drawn and then when that was ignored, rather childishly switching to red lines being drawn in the sand, just as Putin walked over every one of them one after another to do things like brazenly annex territory in the Crimea and get a military toe hold in the Near East while Obama did exactly nothing in response.

Obama was always a scaredy cat president, and every foreign leader after they’d stripped off the adulatory sycophancy of the American media, sensed it, and therefore took outrageous liberties with him. Trump won’t stand for that sort of humiliation or disrespect of America, as president Assad found out when a shower of cruise missiles wiped out a quarter of his air force. Trump didn’t even bother drawing a line, red or otherwise, before he gave Assad a slap.

Interestingly, someone tipped off the Russians one hour before the missiles arrived, to get their “advisers” out of the target areas. Even more interesting, the Russians didn’t tip-off the Syrians about what was coming their way in less than sixty minutes, otherwise they might not get the timely warning next time. Big boys play by their own set of rules and are averse to springing nasty surprises on each other unless it’s absolutely necessary. Raggedy assed client states like Syria simply don’t get an invite to that high table.

Putin knows it’s the time to consolidate all the gains he made by walking all over Obama, so for now stay quiet and leave Trump well alone. That’s been the steady game plan for the last two years and barring any serious emergencies, I see no reason why he needs to change it.

Another factor in Putin keeping a low profile is that increasingly, the old status quo supplied by the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) seems undermined by the advances in weapons technology. Most particularly, the generational fold leap in Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) technology that the green shoots of which could be seen emerging as far back as the First Gulf War. Like the old and false idea that the bomber will always get through proved to have serious caveats, the concept and therefore the assurance of MAD, looks increasingly suspect.

There has never been that ultimate weapon to which no counter response could not be developed, and you’d be a fool to think our times are somehow unique in that respect.

Putin wasn’t originally a politician and entered it sideways from the military rank of Lieutenant Colonel of the now defunct KGB. Wouldn’t it be nice to believe the former organisations and people of the Okhrana, OGPU, GRU, NKVD, KGB, GRU and more recently the FSB all disappeared with each reorganisation and renaming, but let’s not pursue fantasies here, though you could very easily add the CIA, NSA, FBI, MI5, MI6 and all the other three-letter acronym organisations for all the utility they’ve shown over the years. Think of the warnings they never gave about surprises like Pearl Harbour, operation Barbarossa, the Berlin Wall coming down, the collapse of the USSR, 9/11 and all the others.

In a strange way, I think he shares a certain military influenced view of the world with Trump, whose secondary level of education was at a military academy where he graduated as captain of his class. It’s perhaps ironic, but despite what you might think, they share a lot of common features; genuinely nationalistic and patriotic, extremely public personas, almost flamboyantly so, tough guy façades while at the same time intensely private individuals. They both also know the sadness of losing an older brother they loved dearly when they were young, and that sort of passionate grief has a way of either crushing you or burning into you and growing you up fast.

When Putin and Trump exchanged smiles at the recent centenary in Paris of the end of the Great War, the fake news media in its irrational way went mad, but if they could have seen beyond their pathological hatred of both men, they should have been reassured. Both of them are well in touch with the realities of what a nuclear tiff between their respective countries would result in.

If Putin, like a wolf, sniffs weakness in a leader, he strikes. No question of that. It’s okay to assassinate dissidents on UK soil because May is weak, but Trump’s America is off-limits to such acts of studied disdain to another country’s sovereignty. He respects strength, and is perhaps waiting for a corrupt political system in America to pull down Trump. He, like Trump, always plays the wait and see, the long game. A long patient stalk, followed by a quick pounce.

There is another consideration a Russian friend explained to me. Putin, just like Trump, is extremely popular with their average citizens, despite what the Western press might say about either of them. The fake polls and fake news in the Western media are always against them, but the ordinary bloke in the street, whether that street is in Louisville, Kentucky or Magnitogorsk in the district of Chelyabinsk, just loves them and that’s the simple reality, whether you like it or not. But my friend also sees some downsides to what the collapse of the USSR and Russia’s subsequent recovery has produced. It’s given the younger generation of Russia a taste of honey, and they want more.

The raw naked devotion to Communism and the altruistic romance of it that was displayed in the Great Patriotic War, which is what the Russians call WWII, has been replaced by baser motives in his opinion. They want CDs, Internet, more stylish clothes, MacDonalds, a quick shag and wonder how they can become a multi-billionaire overnight without actually lifting a finger to achieve that ambition.

My friend’s a man with boots on the ground whose opinion I trust, but despite his assessment of the modern Russian generation, I can’t help but remember his people took an estimated twenty million deaths in the Great Patriotic War and still came back to scatter the powdered remains of the Wehrmacht over the snowy windblown wastes of the Russian steppes. You have to bear in mind that horrendous amount of blood-letting in contrast to the 400,000 Americans who lost their lives in the same war, when you consider Russia’s attitude to western Europe.

Europe.

Europe, in the shape of the EU, would be the third power block, but it’s in such chaos at the moment, any conjectures as to where it might be at the end of 2018, never mind 2019 can only be highly speculative. I, like more than a few EU watchers, think it’ll implode well before it reaches its obvious intention of becoming the United States of Europe (USE). If you recall how quickly the USSR disintegrated after the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89, there are more than a few potential triggers like that which could totally collapse the house of cards in the very near future.

If you’ve a taste for history and in your youth were persistent enough to read Gibbon’s classic volumes The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (don’t by the way, life is simply too bloody short), the history and current state of the EU is like a Lilliputian-scale parody of those cataclysmic events of ancient times.

It started off in the aftermath of WW II and was called the European Economic Community (EEC), which basically set out a free trade area between participants and dropped all protectionist tariffs between them. Because everybody in their right mind knows real free trade is always good for all parties concerned, the EEC expanded almost geometrically. What you lose on the swings, you’ll more than get back on the roundabouts. Everybody wanted in. As long as you were inside it, there were no interior trade tariffs. Anyone outside had to pay export tariffs to access the common market, which protected your home industries from outsiders.

Given its original and essential function of dismantling tariffs and regulations between member nations, no electoral process to its ruling committees was required, just some sort of say in the whatever it was doing proportionate to each member state’s trading power. However, wheels started coming off the EEC when it morphed into the European Union (EU). The EU, unlike the EEC, is a political union, an attempt at forcing the birth of the United States of Europe, which has always been the final agenda of internationalists who’ve morphed into globalists in recent decades.

It has a European parliament with Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) elected to it, but they don’t have any real power to initiate, frame or veto any of the EU legislation that overrules any domestic legislation of the member states. It’s just an ineffectual gravy train and talk shop to all its emasculated MEPs. The actual legislation is produced by unelected and therefore unaccountable committees of faceless bureaucrats.

By my last count, it has seven presidents of various things, all of whom are of course unelected by voters and the leading one of whom is Jean-Claude Junker. His previous experience of running anything was a biblically corrupt administration in the postage stamp-sized country of Luxembourg (you’ll have to zoom in on it to find it on a map), which is where all the huge tax avoiders like Amazon are domiciled for European tax purposes. They end up paying bugger all in the way of tax. Patently, his work experience there is not helping him out with scaling up to running something as big as the EU, and the strain is beginning to tell on the poor fellow.

His breakfast appears to consist of Kellogg’s corn flakes and three stiff Scotches, so the common wisdom runs that if you want to get any sense out of him, you better do it in the morning, because he’s usually wasted after lunch. He recently shuffled up onto a podium wearing one black and one brown shoe. The cover story is that it’s caused by sciatica of all things, but after his latest performance at an EU summit of ruffling a woman’s tresses as a greeting, blocking the lens of a camera filming him and throwing his papers from the speaker’s lectern onto the floor beside him before tossing back a glass of something transparent, it’s obvious he’s drunk again. The fact that he’s still in place is a sad comment on the sinecure-like status of a senior EU appointment.

It’s major flaw is it’s run by people who’re not elected and therefore not accountable to anybody, and that shows in the autocratic way it’s run.

There’s simply no concept of any accountability or the separation of powers in both its governing structure and in the way it operates. If you object to that state of affairs, its propaganda arm in the shape of the mass media will label you as variously populist, nationalist, extreme right and cruelest cut of all, stigmatise you as being racist. If that’s not enough to subdue you, the next step is to threaten to withhold the pennies due to you as a member, and if even that doesn’t bring you to heel, you’re going to get treated to the use of violent force, which is the endpoint that’s already been reached in France, which is teetering on the very edge of a revolution.

All across Europe, the penny is dropping about the true nature of the EU. It is in both word and deed nothing more than a dictatorship masking itself behind the classic self-serving notion of seeing itself as being a benevolent dictatorship that knows what’s best for the people. It exercises, with complete disregard to the wishes of its vassal states, an unelected authority which overrules the national laws, budgets and more importantly the culture, customs and mores of its members.

If your laws allow you to deport an illegal immigrant who is an habitual criminal offender, then their way out is an appeal to the yet again unelected European Court of Human Rights, who always seem to rule on the side of the scumbags, so you get stuck with them.

Your economy is suffering and you need to adjust interest rates to get the ship of state back on an even keel? Forget about it, you’re in the Euro zone, so interest rates in most essential areas are set in Brussels and again by an unelected committee. Unelected. Spotting a pattern here? That’s what forced Brexit in the end. Unelected distant bureaucrats ruling your country, not some little Englander bigotry.

This one size fits all Euro currency is crippling the economies of the so-called PIGS – Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, where youth unemployment is running at 25% or higher in some areas. Things won’t be improving for them either, as they try to service mountains of debt to the EU. They’re struggling to hit the interest payments, austerity regimes seemingly with no end in sight and Germany have basically refused to write them any more cheques.

The final straw was Merkel bulling through the objections of EU states to allow nearly two million Muslim migrants from the third world into Europe. They’re nearly all young men and simply unemployable since they’re illiterate, even in their own languages, but are smart enough to burrow straight into the state welfare system for the rest of their lives, thereby necessitating a wave of crippling tax rises on anyone holding down a job in a member state.

Culturally, mass unchecked migration has been a complete disaster. Small countries like Sweden have been totally overwhelmed, with their cultural heritage virtually annihilated. All the migrants do is set up no go areas, chase the police out of them with hand grenades and Kalashnikovs and start doing various illegal businesses such as selling drugs in broad daylight. When you also add in the twin impacts of murderous terrorist attacks by fanatics deliberately planted in the migration, and the number of violent rape and sex attacks committed by the migrants, you can feel the very structure of the EU groaning like a submarine that’s dived too deep and is about to implode.

The attack on basic European culture and human needs imposed by the EU has now reached breaking point. The everyday perception by the EU’s subjects is of someone breaking into your home, lolling about on your settee all day and demanding you supply board, food and money to them while at the same time you daren’t leave them alone with your womenfolk or children. All the while, you’re being told by some officious mouthpiece speaking for the ruling elite that there’s nothing you’re allowed to do about that situation.

Can someone, in the name of God, explain to me how that’s going to have a happy ending?

The UK establishment are desperately trying to get parliamentary approval of a deal that in draft form apparently runs to 585 pages, which in its bedevilled detail totally reverses the effect of the Brexit referendum. I feel that’ll prove to be the end of Theresa May’s disappointingly mediocre career. She was only being kept afloat by the Northern Ireland political Apache tribes, and since somewhere in the 585 pages is a nebulously worded agreement to detach them from the UK, it’s a declaration of war as far as they’re concerned, and quite rightly so.

She’s only in power because she managed to swing a very expensive coalition deal with them in the aftermath of her catastrophically managed election campaign, and now she seriously expects them to take one up the butt for the greater good of Europe. After twenty years of bloody sectarian warfare to prevent their colony being cut adrift by a fatigued mainland UK?

Never going to happen Theresa, and anyway, the mandarins of the conservative party decided after the disaster of the last election you masterminded, you had to get the boot before the next one, even if running against an unelectable cluster fuck like Jeremy Corbyn for the second time is all the excuse they needed and you supplied it all by yourself. Trying to push a pseudo Brexit by saying that’s the only exit deal on the table or you take the risk of letting Corbyn in at the next election, simply isn’t selling to anyone.

Exit actually means exiting the EU, irrespective of whether there’s a deal acceptable to them in place or not. A lot of people are so angry because of the Brexit sellout, they’re quite content to vote for Corbyn, let him run the country into the ground for four years, and then perhaps after an ice-cold shower like that, the political elite will listen to the results of referendums. How on Earth can anyone so incompetent or what’s more likely, so duplicitous, rise to be come PM of Britain with so few political smarts?

The political elite and rich vested interests have been running one delaying tactic after another for two years to deny the people the full-blooded Brexit they voted for in the referendum. The PM, Theresa May, is now commonly referred to as the traitor May, because the supposed Brexit “deal” she brought back from Brussels was a complete betrayal of the United Kingdom. What’s for sure is that her career in politics is over and her name tarnished forever, and she certainly will have company in that political wilderness.

Italy has already elected a new administration which is right-wing and very much anti-EU, anti-Euro, anti-migrant and refusing to modify its budget despite the usual threats from Brussels. At this stage, they’re gaining absolutely nothing from their EU membership except a recurrent permafrost of austerity regimes. Things are so bad, they’ve got nothing to lose by exiting the EU.

France as we’ve seen over the last five weeks, is on the verge of revolution not only against the nouveau Marie-Antoinette aspects of Emanuel Macron’s autocratic administration, but also his apparent willingness to prostrate France before both Merkel and her EU superstate. So far, the line has been held by the brutal application of violence by government forces and the usage of armoured vehicles ominously bearing the flag of the EU. Hitherto the mass demonstrations have been aimed at doing a rerun of the storming of the Bastille but in this case the Élysée Palace, but without much success, if you exclude forcing Macron into hiding for the last five weekends.

The protesters are average blue and white-collar workers rather than the usual ragbag of extremist hooligans out for a weekend of rioting and opportunistic looting. The moment, and it’s coming, that they declare a general strike paralysing France, Macron is finished and a new government will be formed via a coalition in which Marine le Pen will be playing a significant part.

In an apparent response to Trump demanding the nations belonging to NATO pay their dues, Macron, a big fan of the EU, also seemed to think it provided an excellent excuse to do what they’d always denied they wanted to do – set up an EU army. As usual, the globalists are really pushing the idea, but would it be Brussels in its customary fashion deciding, without consultation with or the permission of member states, who to declare war on?

More worryingly, when you look at potential enemies, the only one in any territorial striking distance of the EU is Russia, which even in its much slimmed down state, would run an EU army through the meat grinder by mid-afternoon, even allowing for a leisurely lunch break in Poland of pirozhki washed down with a few glasses of freshly liberated slivovitz. So, if not Russia, who would it be used on?

A much more likely use for such an army would be to put down anti-EU uprisings in member states. Certainly, that’s the big fear of such a monstrosity in the formerly Eastern European states now inside the EU, and recent events in Paris have graphically reinforced that concern. They know within living memory what it’s like to be occupied by a foreign army. The track record of unelected EU bureaucrats forcing deeply unpopular policies on the smaller nations using nothing more than threats of financial penalties has stopped working at points east, where you might see them disengage with the EU completely. Longer term, and I’m talking a decade or more, they might even conceivably move back towards the Russian block, if it can evolve into some sort of true democracy by then.

The creation of an EU army also gets you into some pretty imponderable scenarios very quickly. If the EU declares war on someone, will NATO necessarily get involved? If for instance it’s used to put down an uprising in a member state, what are the odds of NATO or the USA judging it to be an act of aggression on the EU’s part and side with the member state being invaded? What if the active deployment of an EU army internally provokes a civil war between member states?

The big question about an EU army that’s giving military strategists some nightmare scenarios to lose sleep over is simple. Leaving aside all the niceties, it’s actually Germany which runs the EU, with ever so discreetly France like a poodle doing as it’s told by them. But the only nuclear bomb equipped country within the EU is France. Is France prepared to surrender control of that military asset to an EU army? To what a lot of people might consider to be German control? Whatever happened to the Gaullist doctrine of we’ll never rely on an ally for our security again?

And what would Gospodin Putin make of a nuclear-armed EU army on his western border, conceivably with Germany’s finger on the launch buttons? This will never happen goes the old refrain, but echoes of Victoria saying cousin Willie will never attack us, Germany will never make war again after the defeat of the Great War and other such gems of popular wisdom, have often proved to be nothing more than wishful thinking.

It just hasn’t been thought through, most especially Russia’s reaction to an EU army camped on its periphery. When you wargame all the scenarios of who does what to whom on Russia’s western border, you get into nightmare country very quickly, because there are simply too many theoretical cases most of which could quickly spiral out of anyone’s control. For example, Russia invades a Baltic state for some reason, does the EU army go to war against Russia? What’s NATO’s role in such a scenario? Given the likely possibility of an EU army not doing well against the Red Army, can they suck NATO into the conflict? America? If the EU is facing certain defeat in a conventional war, do they go tactical nuclear or big casino nuclear?

The more you think about the permutations of scenarios involving an EU army, NATO, America and Russia, the worse it gets. Don’t kid yourself contingency plans for scenarios exactly like that are not being considered. As Gen. Mattis the US secretary of Defense said, “Be polite, be professional with everyone you meet, and then have a plan to kill them”.

This atmosphere of EU threats by unelected faceless bureaucrats is having a backlash in many of its vassal states and causing the overthrow of establishment parties by unashamedly nationalist and in some case far right parties, the effects of which have still to play through, but they’re on their way. The EU elections scheduled for May 2019 will change its political makeup considerably, with in most realistic estimates what’s called the “far” right by the EU propaganda machine making considerable gains.

What’s actually happening is that member states are resisting the globalists throwing them into some huge melting pot together with their nations, identities, cultures, religions and even their military being subsumed into some bastard morass, the final shape of which nobody has the faintest idea. Whatever economic benefit the smaller member states formerly got out of membership, now comes with too big a price tag in terms of loss of sovereignty and impoverished EU servitude, especially for the southern states such as Greece and Spain. The latter have just elected the right-wing anti-migration Vox party, forcing a coalition administration in Andalusia which had been solid socialist for decades.

A common thread with this tectonic change in political sentiment across Europe caused by the growth of populist or nationalist parties, is that it’s mainly at the expense of traditionalist socialist or centre parties who’re seemingly frozen into inaction by a straight jacket of ossified ideological baggage and being left behind in the current wave of revived nationalist politics.

That pattern of populist or nationalist parties winning a significant share of the vote is happening right across Europe. Already, Angela Merkel has been forced off her throne to relinquish her leadership of the CDU party in Germany, because her type of authoritarian politics was making the party unelectable, especially in the south where there are some real fears that unless the problem of the migrant invasion isn’t addressed realistically, states like Bavaria might actually secede from the federal republic. That’s not as fantastic a possibility as it might seem at face value, because Germany, like Italy, has only been a unified country for less than two centuries. They are relatively young countries and the bonds of national unity are still quite pliable.

If the globalists think they’re fighting against far right political sentiments at the moment, they ain’t seen nothing yet. They way they’re going, they’re actually creating a real extreme right all across Europe, with consequences nobody can see.

China.

The fourth and final block is China. There are a number huge misconceptions in occidental heads about China. It’s not a poor country, on the contrary, it’s a rich country that’s building two coal-fired power stations a week to support an economy that until only recently, was showing a 10% year on year growth rate. Given an estimated population of 1.4 billion people, it’s therefore also a massive consumer market. They have the usual creeping territorial ambitions in the South China Sea, but dealing with Trump seems to have made them back pedal on that particular front.

The real problem they’re always struggling with was expressed rather succinctly by a friend who’s actually lived in China for more than a decade – the rulers of China know they’re only two steps away from revolution. What this means is running the country in the non-democratic authoritarian style of the old Soviet communism, while at the same time producing wealth by giving what is actually free-market capitalism control of the production of consumer goods, is trying to have their cake and eat it. It’s a very delicate balance, and one miscalculation of even minor Macronian proportions, could easily throw the whole country into chaos.

If they press down too hard by ruling with the iron fist, they risk damaging the expanding economy. With a population that size, and a large enough number of people becoming unemployed and therefore dissatisfied, it significantly increases the risk of some sort of rebellion, if not a full-blown revolution. If they back off the iron fist too far and let consumerism rip, they risk an increasingly prosperous population demanding reform and real freedoms.

They do go to extremes, with the active cooperation of technocratic quislings like Google and its project Dragonfly to blacklist certain sites, in order to control the input from abroad their citizens see, because they rightly suspect it might plant a lot of seeds of unrest. For instance, they’ve had for over a decade what’s called The Great Firewall of China. Its job is to block access to what is deemed politically unacceptable websites and is manned by what’s wittily nicknamed The 50c Army, since for every site they block, they get 50c. I kid you not.

They have to export the products they produce and were having great success with that until Trump came along. The now defunct NAFTA trade agreement was being used to bypass import tariffs on Chinese goods by using Chinese manufactured parts in goods coming into America from Canada and Mexico, while at the same time China was protecting its domestic industries by imposing huge import tariffs on foreign-made goods. Trump and China have had some bullshit free talks about the problem, and I think the usual Trump kind of deal is well on the way, with everybody walking away from the negotiating table with something, but one thing is for certain – the days of China making savage profits at the expense of damaging American industrial infrastructure are history.

It’ll not be a hard deal to figure out – China drops or reduces import tariffs and hidden barriers to American goods and in return, Trump will impose reasonable tariffs on Chinese goods exported directly into America. Everybody gets something. Allowing China direct access to American markets will offset the loss of income from the scrapped NAFTA as well as the cut Canadian and Mexican manufacturers had to be paid for giving them indirect access to those markets. American exports will now have freer access to a huge and growing consumer market. Everybody is a winner, especially China, who can’t risk a serious recession caused by Trump restricting their access to the American market.

What’s obvious though, is the Chinese government know they can not only do business with Trump, but they can also usefully work together to control the rogue and unpredictable behaviour of some states in their region, such as North Korea. China were already less than comfortable with having an unpredictable but nuclear armed dictator like Kim Jong-un on their southern border, but when he started threatening Guam, a US territory, it delivered itself into the mercy of both China and the USA, who finding a common enemy made the obvious deal of working together to defuse the North Korea situation.

In less than six months, China and Trump between them pulled North Korea’s nuclear fangs by a combination of China stopping imports of North Korean coal (the only thing it exports) and Trump leaving the Koreans in no doubt what would happen if they nuked Japan or Guam. Historically, the Chinese are noted for two things; being incorrigible gamblers and first-class businessmen. Underneath that veneer of Communism, neither of those two traits have changed much, especially the latter. They know they can do business with Trump.

Other hotspots.

Around the world, there are various potential flash points from smaller nuclear armed countries. Pakistan and India have both had nukes for some time but have managed so far not to use them on each other despite the occasional war, though there is increasing concern about Pakistan exporting nuclear technology to places like North Korea, but the big fear is that some rogue element in the government will sell a nuke to an Islamic terrorist organisation. As a contact in the security consultancy business expressed it – the first time they get their hands on a nuke, we’re going to lose a city. What needs to be done to terminate such a situation will be done, and without a second’s hesitation.

In the Arabic part of the world, the real mad dog is Iran, whose hatred of Israel is pathological. The latest rumour is they’ve developed extremely long-range rockets capable of hitting America, but that’s improbable at this time. The fear is that they’ll attack Israel with the nuclear weapons they’re frantically developing, despite the billions of dollars in cash bribes paid to them to stop by the weakling Obama. They simply ploughed the money into their nuclear research program. The reaction by the nuked party would be so quick, the superpowers wouldn’t have any time to get between them.

We’d be back into the Cuba crisis situation, but this time without a reasonable chance of deescalating it. Iran nukes Tel Aviv, Israel would immediately retaliate against Tehran and every nuclear facility they even faintly suspect they’ve located in Iran. The reaction in the Arab world to Iran getting plastered by Israeli nukes would be loud condemnation but nothing more than that, because they’re all just as concerned as Israel with an unstable Iran armed with nuclear weapons, especially a Sunni Saudi Arabia. Shias and Sunnis hate each other more than they hate Jews.

The same would apply if for instance, Pakistan nukes Delhi, the Indians would take out Islamabad and any Pakistani town they think worth a Uranium 235 visit.

The two superpowers would come up with a lot of calm down words in both scenarios, but the reality is that as long as it’s kept off continental USA and the Rodina, as the motherland is still called by the military in Russia, they’ll let them do the megadeath to each other until through sheer exhaustion, they come to their senses. What other rational choice would there be?

Anyway, I’ll close it off there since, like Topsy, it keeps on growing. There’s more than enough material to kick off your own speculations, which I’d be interested to hear. It’ll be amusing to compare how things actually pan out by the end of next year, against this fanciful and speculative take on the direction the world’s going in. Hopefully, we’ll all still be here.

©Pointman

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