After the Ukraine, will Russia kiss and make up with the West?

Posted by Pointman on March 18, 2022 · 13 Comments 

As a small child, I once asked my father why he didn’t beat or slap us, which was not an uncommon practice back then. He’d lots of strong-willed children who’d try the patience of a saint but he glanced down at me knowing I’m sure what had prompted the question. A day or two before, we’d been out for a walk together and seen a man and a women really beat a child for something. I’d never seen anything like that. Standing beside him looking up, I could feel the anger radiating off him. He was almost rigid. It was a side of my always gentle and contemplative Dad I’d never seen before and it’d frightened me.

He explained to me that beating a child was stupid. You’d either end up with a cringing beaten cur or just be teaching them how to take a bloody good hiding and in that case if they still wouldn’t do what you wanted, your only option was to escalate the beatings. He was right of course. For different reasons, both outcomes would be the result of a losing strategy neither of which would be good. Someone with a deep understanding of human nature but also how to draw a practical conclusion out of it. A simple pearl of wisdom like that could only come from a man like that, and I later learnt such men are rare.

The current sanctions and propaganda offense against Russia and Russians in general is developing into that same child beating scenario and it looks to me like it’ll have one of the same two analogous outcomes. Russia becoming a cringing beaten cur? Believe me tovarich, that’ll never happen in a million years. Hitler couldn’t do it, Napoleon couldn’t do it and let’s not forget their former allies in the Great War tried an invasion to restore the czar and they couldn’t do it either.

In WWII, the invading Nazis slaughtered somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of Russia’s population but they never gave up. To give you a feeling for what that means in human terms, apply the same 25% to your own country’s population. Imagine 82 million dead Americans or 16 million dead Britons or 17 million dead Germans or 6 million dead Australians as the price of defeating Hitler. That’s the price they paid. If the West escalates Russia into WWIII, then the West better get used to suffering similar horrific numbers of casualties.

I hated the old USSR and communism but have always held the fortitude and courage of the Russian people in awe. Like a child who’s been on the receiving end of heavier and heavier beatings, they can take whatever pain you want to dish out but it’ll just make them stronger and more determined to get you back.

In the middle of that holocaust, a Russian propagandist whose name escapes me coined a phrase which Russians to this day still remember – “we’ll never forgive, we’ll never forget”. They haven’t and they won’t after the damage the West has tried to inflict on their economy. Distrust of anything coming from the West was already ingrained, but after this war ends – and it will – they won’t be forgetting the sanctions and pure petty spite aimed at them from our direction. It’s already kicking in. Putin’s approval has gone from 61% to 71% as the hate speech has escalated against Russia and Russians in general.

Russian government assets and accounts of people whose only crime appears to be being Russian are getting frozen. It’s basically theft. I’ve yet to hear a single legal justification for such actions which are not even UN approved but of course Russia is simply retaliating but not in its usual tit for tat fashion. Sure, they’re also freezing foreign assets but they’re also seizing them in the territories under their control. Freezing or seizing, what’s the difference? What was frozen can be unfrozen, what’s been seized is now the property of the Russian Federation or whatever corporate entities they choose to give it to. You won’t be getting them back any day soon, if ever. That’s a door being slammed shut in the face of the West permanently.

I don’t propose to go through an exhaustive list of the sanctions being deployed by the West against Russia or the retaliatory ones either because short of a nuclear strike, Russia already has what they call the energy weapon which is instantly deployable and Putin knows exactly how to use it. It’s their exports of gas and oil. That supply can be turned off overnight. For instance, Germany, which is the sole economic powerhouse of Western Europe and the EU now that the UK is out of it, gets about one third of its gas and about half of its oil from Russia.

That weapon can be used both locally in Europe or globally far abroad. Locally for instance, if the sanctions being rolled out against it actually get serious, he’ll turn off Germany’s supply of energy. That’ll crash the German economy and therefore throw Western Europe and the EU into a recession. Remember the 70s when the Arabs lost yet another war against Israel and quadrupled the price of oil to punish the world for supporting Israel? It threw the whole world into what was a near decade long recession with raging inflation that nearly started to approach Weimar Republic levels.

There’s absolutely nothing to stop Putin doing that and after all, he’ll be justified – you tried to destroy our economy, so have a taste of that back. If something you really need is made beyond carrying distance of you, then it has to be transported to you. If the cost of fuel quadruples, then that has to be factored into the retail price of all goods if the producer wants to stay in business. If you severely restrict the supply of any vital commodity, its price will rise. Hey presto, recession and massive inflation occurs almost overnight.

Globally, a bit more deftness is required. He’s talking to both the Saudis and Iran, who’re both refusing to pick up a call from Biden who’s been reduced to cadging some accommodation with the dictator Maduro of Venezuela who is the only major oil supplier who’s interested in talking to Biden. The reality is Venezuela simply doesn’t have either the production or transport capacity to meet American demand and after the gelding Biden did to domestic production, there’s no hope of it rising any day soon to address the current gas price emergency in America, so expect even higher gas prices.

Russia supplies about 4% of America’s oil, so banning it might please those baying for Russian blood, but the net effect of it will be negligible. The other realistic supplier is Saudi Arabia but they won’t be obliging Biden either by boosting production quotas. The Saudis hate the Iranians on the traditional basis of one being Sunni and the other Shia Muslim and both in a fierce competition to be the leadership of the Arab world but the deeper reason is an Iran with a nuclear bomb presents the Saudis with a clear and present danger and America has backed off Iranian sanctions. As a result they’re back to full speed ahead developing their bomb.

As soon as they get it, the madmen in Iran will choose one of three targets: the West, Israel or Saudi Arabia. Guess which one of those three doesn’t have any nuclear retaliatory capability?

From the Saudi viewpoint, the Biden administration has done them no favours, quite the opposite actually. Like Putin, they have no problem crashing the American economy. This craze for freezing cash assets merely means both Russia and China will not be holding significantly much in American dollars, which actually means it’s half way out of the global economic door as the world’s reserve currency. Add in the fact that the Saudis are actively considering selling oil in yuan rather than petrodollars, and it’s not hard to see the dollar losing its status as the world’s reserve currency.

Between them, the Russians and Saudis can taper back production, make obscene amounts of money on the resultant rise in the price of oil while at the same time putting the boot into the American economy. The oil that used to flow to America will instead go to China. What’s not to like if you consider America your enemy?

All those companies who rushed to sanction Russia like Mastercard, Facebook, Google, Twitter, the BBC etc he imposed sanctions on them in return. It’s really given him justification for permanently barring most of them access to Russia and its client states which I’m sure at some point they’ll want back. I wonder if he’ll tell them to piss off when the come back in a year or two with cap in hand? Another war won will make him more popular than ever. Our little Vladdi wins again! I think a lot of people are going to have to work very hard to get back into Russia.

So the answer to the above question is I think they won’t. A lot of western organisations and foreigners are going to have to do a lot of grovelling in the coming years before they ever get a sniff of any meaningful access to Russia for commercial or even diplomatic reasons. Russia, especially as it’s now been firmly driven into league with China, has no need of their services. They allowed what observers thought was a dangerous dependency on services provided by the West to develop, but that was illusory. That won’t be allowed to happen.

Just how the hell did American foreign policy descend into this laughable Keystone Cops mess inside one year?

©Pointman

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