Israeli security chiefs were gravely concerned Wednesday, May 17, when they learned that a high-ranking Iraqi military delegation had arrived in Damascus, the first in decades during which the Iraqi and Syrian ruling regimes were at odds, for a discussion on the situation unfolding on the Syrian-Iraqi border – in particular the Al-Tanf crossing.
Wednesday saw a flurry of military activity in the area by US, British and Jordanian special forces, on the one hand, and Syrian, Hizballah and other pro-Iranian forces, on the other. A race appeared to be quietly developing over who would reach the border first and seize control of the Al-Tanf crossing.
On this very subject, the Iraqi military delegation held separate talks in Damascus with senior officers of the Russian command in Syria and senior Iranian officers posted at Syrian General Staff headquarters. Concurrently, the Russian military command announced that Russia, Iran and Iraq were holding consultations on how to secure the border regions between Syria and Iraq.
Our forces add that the three groups of officers got down to brass talks, in fact, on ways to fit Iraqi army units into the Syrian-Iranian effort for guaranteeing full control by Damascus and Tehran of the sensitive border regions.
Israel was deeply disquieted to discover that Iraq’s Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi had secretly pivoted his support away from the US-Jordanian campaign for control over the borders of Iraq and Syria, and switched instead to alignment with Moscow and Tehran.
Israeli policy-makers are worried that President Donald Trump will be constrained by the daily barrage of personal attacks descending on from fully focusing on the forces building up dangerously against US military plans in Syria.
Following the deployment of the cutting-edge US-built THAAD missile system in South Korea and Sunday’s successful launch of Pyongyang’s most powerful ballistic missile to date, newly elected South Korean President Moon Jae-in has declared that war with the North is a "high possibility."
Mere hours after President Moon stated his intention to reopen negotiations with the People's Democratic Republic of North Korea (DPRK), the leader tempered his suggestion by asserting that an armed conflict with his northern neighbor was probable.
"The reality is that there is a high possibility of a military conflict at the NLL [Northern Limit Line] and military demarcation line," Moon said, cited by Reuters.
Moon's remarks follow statements from Pyongyang officials asserting a continuation of their defiance of the United Nations Security Council ban on nuclear and ballistic missile weapons testing, and the concurrent deployment of a powerful new US-built anti-missile system on South Korean territory.
Like pieces on a chess board, the players are all aligning to create a New World Order, that is of course after the fall of the Old World Order.
History would record the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing marked the juncture where the 21st century New Silk Roads assumed their full character of Globalization 2.0, or “inclusive globalization,” as defined by President Xi Jinping in Davos earlier this year.
Through trade, the two Eastern countries of Russia and China are formidably attempting to create a “civilization-wide project” that will expel the US from deep Eurasian integration. In fact, the new roads Russia is embarking on will further implement the phases of polarity as they are attempting to ween the US off of its unipolar/bipolar stance.
The (Russian backed) Eurasian Economic Union is an economic union of states located primarily in northern Eurasia. A treaty aiming for the establishment of the EAEU was signed on 29 May 2014 by the leaders of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, and came into force on 1 January 2015.
The OBOR/BRI: One Belt, One Road (OBOR) or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); is a development strategy, proposed by Xi Jinping that focuses on connectivity and cooperation among countries primarily between the People’s Republic of China and the rest of Eurasia, which consists of two main components, the land-based “Silk Road Economic Belt” (SREB) and oceangoing “Maritime Silk Road” (MSR). The strategy underlines China’s push to take a bigger role in global affairs.
With Putin in agreement, China is peddling away at the project, and the next meeting is in 2019. The European Union is hanging in the balance of this monstrous plan, and of course, trade with the US is at stake as this spans across the entire Eurasian continent.
I confess to being amused by the mainstream media’s implicit view that everything would be peachy if only Trump wasn’t president. Memo to MSM: the nation is fragmenting for reasons that have nothing to do with who’s president, or indeed, which party is the majority in Congress, who sits on the Supreme Court, or any other facet of governance.
The nation is fracturing and fragmenting because the Status Quo is failing the majority of the citizenry. The protected few are reaping all the benefits of the Status Quo, at the expense of the unprotected many.
As I have outlined many times, this unsustainable asymmetry is the only possible outcome of our socio-economic system, which is dominated by these forces:
1. Globalization–free flow of capital, labor arbitrage
2. Nearly free money from central banks for financiers and corporations
3. Pay-to-play “democracy”
4. State protected cartels that privatize gains and socialize losses
5. A system stripped of self-correcting feedback and accountability
Once you understand the inputs and structure, you realize there is no other possible output other than unsustainably expanding debt and wealth/income inequality. Policy tweaks cannot change the output; all they do is provide an illusion of reform that serves the need of those at the top to obscure the systemic injustices and unsustainability of the extractive, exploitive, predatory, parasitic system that’s enriching them.
If there is one reality that is denied or obscured by the Status Quo, it is that the economy no longer works as it did in the past. This is the fundamental economic context of our current slide into political-social disintegration.
The Status Quo narrative is: the policies that worked for the past 70 years are still working today. Boiled down to its Keynesian state-corporate essence, the Status Quo economic narrative is simple:
All we need to do to escape a “soft patch” (recession) is for governments to borrow and spend more money to temporarily boost incomes and demand until the private sector gets back on its feet and starts borrowing and spending more.
But the inconvenient reality is these Keynesian policies no longer work. Fiscal stimulus (governments borrowing and spending trillions more than they did before the recession) has continued for a decade–or in Japan’s case, almost three decades.
The Keynesian gods have failed, but the worshippers of these false idols have no other form of black magic to turn to.
Why is fiscal stimulus now a permanent policy? The answer is uncomfortable: if fiscal stimulus is withdrawn (or even trimmed), the economy immediately goes into a self-reinforcing contraction.
As for near-zero interest rates: after 10 years of supposed “recovery,” central banks are terrified of pushing rates higher by quarter-point baby-steps, for the same reason that fiscal stimulus cannot be withdrawn: raising interest rates to historic norms would immediately send the economy into contraction.
The economy no longer works, and the Status Quo has no Plan B. All the Status Quo has is policies that no longer work: lowering interest rates (10 years and counting), fiscal stimulus (10 years and counting) and monetary easing/stimulus (10 years and counting).
We sense the economy is no longer working as it did in the past, but we’re too terrified to even admit this. Since there’s no conventional fix, our “leadership” acts as if everything is just fine, and authorities “adjust” measures of stagnation to appear healthy to support the illusion of solvency and expansion.
There’s no Plan B for a state-corporate form of central-planning capitalism that is no longer functioning. The only policies available are the “emergency” ones that are now permanent life-support systems of our failed global economies.
President Moon realizes that North Korea is a land of die-hard warmongers. Only a miracle from Christ can bring peace in this unstable peninsula.
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