via Sputnik

The Quad was officially launched in 2007 but suspended in 2008 after Australia pulled out of the US-led grouping over concerns expressed by China. The grouping was revived in 2017, a year after the US announced its ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’. Beijing has labelled the Quad ‘Asian NATO’, accusing Washington of inciting tensions in the region.

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating has slammed the US-led Quad grouping as “illegitimate” and a “strategic piece of nonsense,” as he advised Canberra to not be a part of the US-led efforts to “ring-fence” China.

The Quad, which comprises Australia, India, Japan and the US, says that its official goal is to maintain a “free and open Indo-Pacific region”.

“We shouldn’t be stringing together the US, Japan, India and Australia to try to contain China,” Keating, a senior party colleague of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, said on Wednesday.

Keating argued that that Beijing’s “ambitions are in the west, not the east,” as he underlined the inroads made by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in regions outside Asia. “Everywhere between Wuhan and Istanbul, in the next 30 years, will have a huge Chinese influence.”

Keating pointed out that the BRI has already financed infrastructure projects in the Baltic states as well as in former Soviet countries.

The multi-trillion-dollar BRI initiative was launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 and strives to connect east Asia with Europe and beyond through connectivity and infrastructure projects. As of March 2022, a total of 147 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, South America as well as North America have been members of the Beijing-backed global initiative.

Keating also reckoned that the era of US “supremacy” as the pre-eminent global power has already passed.

“This idea that the US is an exceptional power… they have God’s ear and proselytizing democracy was fine in the 20th century. The 20th century was owned by the US. The 21st century belongs to someone else,” stated Keating.

He also expressed doubts whether the US would come to the help of Taiwan if Beijing went ahead with the re-unification of the island with the mainland through military means.

Beijing has doubled down on its commitment to “reunify” Taiwan with the mainland following the visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taipei in August. Chinese President Xi Jinping has said that reunifying Taiwan is part of China’s goal to achieve “national rejuvenation”.

“China would see every amphibious vessel coming towards the United States, whether it is San Diego or Honolulu. They would see them and sink them,” the former Australian PM claimed, suggesting that the chances of an American “victory” in such a scenario would be “nil”.

Keating advised the Australian government not to get involved in the “geopolitical conflict” around Taiwan.

“We should be no more interested in the political system of Taiwan than Vietnam and Kazakhstan,” argued Keating.

via RT

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to strike “a new grand bargain” with the West to erase the humiliations of the post-Cold War period, Turkish presidential adviser Ibrahim Kalin told CNN on Saturday.

In an interview with the American broadcaster, he said that the Ukraine conflict will inevitably end in a negotiated settlement, with the only question being when, “and how much damage will have been done by then?”

Such a settlement will be about more than the borders of Russia and Ukraine, he continued, arguing that what Putin really aims to do is renegotiate the balance of power between Moscow and the West, after a weakened Russia accepted several rounds of NATO expansion in the aftermath of the Cold War.

“Our understanding is that Mr. Putin wants to have a new grand bargain, a new deal, with the West,” Kalin said. The Turkish official referenced agreements signed by Moscow and NATO in the early 1990s – which included the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, which stated that the alliance would continue to expand, and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia agreed not to use force against its neighbors – as decisions Putin would like to re-do.

“The Russian perception is that the Russia of that day, that signed that agreement – that is, the Russia of the Gorbachevs and the Yeltsins – is over,” Kalin claimed. “There is a new Russia, there is a new world, there is a new reality, and they want to have a new bargain.”

Putin declared last week that “the ongoing collapse of Western hegemony is irreversible,”and that “things will never be the same.” A multipolar world, he said, will give non-Western nations “an opportunity to strengthen their sovereignty.”

According to Kalin, “This puts of course the entire global order, the liberal order, to a test.”He added: “So far the response has been war from both sides.”

Western leaders have not indicated that they intend to negotiate an end to the Ukraine conflict in the near future. Washington’s official line is that it will continue to funnel tens of billions of dollars’ worth of arms to Kiev “for as long as it takes,” and will allow Ukraine to dictate its terms for ending the conflict.

Amid the broader conflict between Russia and the West, Türkiye has positioned itself as a middleman, with Ankara hosting peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in March that ultimately broke down. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Thursday called for both sides to return to negotiations, declaring that “even the worst peace will be better than war.”

by Claudiu Secara

First published on August 25, 2022

Part I: The Fall of Europe

Part II: The Fake War

Part III: More Evidence of the Fake Wars

Part IV: Hungary and Turkey: More on the Fake War

I think Western Europe has been split, since the 1970s, into two major camps. One camp contains the majority, the “people”, the hoi polloi who cannot conceive that they should pay homage to the barbarian Russkies, that Russia is their inevitable new sovereign. In the other camp is a tiny elite within the power structure that has long understood the way the wheels of history turn; they made a compact with the Soviet Union in the late 1970s.

They worked out the puzzle of Western Europe during the conferences on Security and Cooperation in Europe at Helsinki and Madrid, following the Vladivostok Summit, 1974. They recognized that in the long run the US would not be able to defend Western Europe, so they divided the world. The Gordian knot was cut. The problem, though, was the “people”: 450 million Europeans were not prepared to make such a change, so the world was left in limbo.

At the same time, the Western, including the American, elites were also deeply divided — between those who called for unrelenting “full spectrum dominance” and the much fewer voices of reason. — Henceforth, we have been seeing the policy of the worst, what the French call La politique du pire, in action.

That amounts to giving the political platform to the most extreme demagogues, to the most extreme anti- this and anti- that. Those who advocated the destruction of the nation-state, those who advocated the abolition of the family, those who advocated replacing the white population with blacks and browns, those who advocated total war until total destruction, those who advocated the lunacy of closing the coal mines, closing the nuclear generators, closing off the cheap gas and petroleum from Russia, etc.

It took quite some preparation to get to today’s total woke lunacy. It started reasonably, with Margaret Thatcher’s patriotic closing of the UK’s coal mines, followed by the Germans closing their plentiful coal mines, and then even Poland’s and Ukraine’s well-established coal mines. Nuclear power was a lot easier to shut down, just cause the hype around Chernobyl and all of Western Europe was ready to vote for the self-inflicted deprivation of a major source of energy.

What was more difficult was to neutralize the potential gas and petroleum outsourcing from the countries bordering on Europe – the Middle East, Libya, Algeria, even as far as Nigeria. Wars and destruction turned their oil and gas industries into ruins.

Where war was not feasible, like in Iran, or Venezuela, they imposed sanctions. No more gas and petroleum from Iran or Venezuela – out of spite for ourselves. A fine implementation of the policy of the worst!

So, we have come to the year 2022. Europe has cut itself off from all possible options for producing or importing energy. The West provoked a war in Ukraine, where it cannot possibly win on the terrain where a Russian population has been humiliated by more than a decade of suffering at the hands of the Ukrainian paranoiacs. At the same time Europe managed to convince itself that it can defy the laws of physics and replace a functioning economy with one run on thin air. Let’s remember that it also fell into the trap of getting used to easy energy from Russia at a time when Russia looked unthreatening – under the fantastic assumption of Russia becoming the next colony of the West. Was that 40% dependency on Russian gas and oil just by accident? Probably not.

The Winter of reality is coming. The Europeans are all chanting in the Church of the Green to be saved by Providence. Who is going to help them, though?

Next episode: Europe is handed to Russia on a silver platter.
To be continued.