The New Iron Curtain and the Decline of the West

Abstract

NATO (driven by the US) has needlessly provoked Russia into starting a war by using Ukraine as a battlefield for its own ambitions in a bid for global domination. This gamble has failed spectacularly and will have the effect of creating an “Iron Curtain” between the West and the East (China, Russia, and the global South) in a contest in which the West is bound to lose simply because of demographics. The West has thus dug its own grave by provoking this war.

An Unavoidable, Bloody Conflict

There is a horrific war going on in the Ukraine. Russia has been bombing the hell out of the country and will likely destroy it beyond recognition. Despite the most determined efforts of the Ukrainians, Ukraine will most likely be utterly destroyed. The suffering is terrible. The images coming from Kyiv and Kharkiv are shocking, to say the least.

A Bombed-Out Kharkiv

No country will go into a war if they think they will be destroyed. So why did Ukraine fight the Russians instead of acceding to a simple demand not to join NATO? Did they really not know this would happen?

The TV Tower Bombed in Kyiv

They fought the war because they thought NATO had their backs. Of course, if NATO enters the war directly, we have a European war with the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons and total annihilation. So will NATO actually risk a World War and the chance of nuclear weapons by directly participating in this conflict? If there are any sane people in NATO, the answer is no.

Any novice in international relations would know this. So why did Ukraine defy the Russians and go headlong on an anti-Russian path for years? Because they had been provoked to do so by NATO, with promises of NATO support in case things went wrong. And Why? Because NATO, which had no reason to even exist after 1991, could never let go of its Russophobia and wanted to completely encircle Russia. NATO may have been encouraged by the fact that Russia did nothing in NATO’s previous waves of admitting former Soviet allies into the alliance, in 1999 and 2004. The latest addition to NATO was North Macedonia in March 2020.

Expansion of NATO Over the Years

But in this case, the Russians gave clear advance warning, both to NATO and to Ukraine, that they would simply not accept NATO on their biggest European border. While the Baltics, which are now part of NATO, border Russia, the Ukraine would be the first huge state next to Russia which would be a part of NATO. Russia drew a line in the sand and said this far and no further.

Why did Ukraine ignore these warnings? Did NATO promise them active military support in case of a war? That seems likely, and if so, the blood of innocent Ukrainians is now on NATO’s hands.

It has been speculated that NATO engineered this war so that the US would continue to have a permanent military presence in Europe, as it has done since 1945, thus saving Europe the costs of its own defence. It has also been speculated that the US pushed NATO into provoking the Russians so that they could stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from going ahead, because that pipeline would integrate Russia even closer with Europe and reduce the US’ influence in Europe.

Sanctions?

People in the West are being unbelievably naive in thinking that sanctions will stop the Russians. Yes, it will make the lives of Russians miserable. But Russia is a huge country and can withstand it. Furthermore, they have commodities — oil and gas — that the whole world needs. They will never starve. Conditions might become difficult, but you will not sanction the Russians into submission. To the Russians, this is an existential proposition — either they do this or accept the domination of NATO and the US over them.

And because this is the crucial geopolitical question, China will not let Russia fail. It is not in China’s interest to see the West prevailing over Russia. Also, Russia is in desperate need of Chinese support now, so this will allow China to extract many concessions from Russia in exchange for their support. Of course, all this will infuriate the West, but then the US is anyway openly antagonistic to China, so things cannot get any worse. Some have privately suggested to me that the West can sanction China in retaliation, but that is unrealistic, because it will make the economies of the West collapse because the whole world is so dependent on and connected with China. So I predict that China will bail out Russia if things get too bad and buy all their oil and give them everything in return. China and Russia anyway do all their business in Yuan even today, and do not need SWIFT, and China can supply all of Russians’ needs. And hoping for regime change in Russia is laughable. Putin’s control of Russia is absolute and complete.

Russian Aggression and Realpolitik

People ask me if I am justifying Russian aggression. No. No country should attack another. War is a horrible thing.

But that’s not the way things work in real life. The US never tolerates any hostile power close to its borders, as was evidenced during the Cuban missile crisis, and invades countries in its “sphere” at the drop of a hat if it thinks those countries may have leaders who do not share its world vision (as in Chile in 1973, for example). So we cannot be naive in international relations, and certainly world leaders should not be naive. Zelenskyy may be a brave man, but he has been incredibly naive in thinking that this would not happen. NATO simply took advantage of his naivete to gamble that the Russians were only sabre-rattling and would not actually attack, despite their clear words to the contrary.

It’s like asking a layman on the street to challenge the local mafioso by calling him names in public, and then, when the mafioso reacts violently by beating up the layman, condemning the mafioso for beating up the layman. Of course the mafioso has done something wrong — but is it sensible to go to his area and abuse him? Is it responsible on the part of those who egg on the layman to abuse the mafioso? Would you encourage your son to go and challenge the local thug by deliberately doing something that will anger him? Most of us tell our children to be cautious and not go to dangerous areas after dark to remain safe. We do not encourage them to go there and then scream when they get hurt. Yes, I am comparing Putin to a thug. He is a dictator. Everyone knows it. Why are you provoking him needlessly, NATO, by constantly pushing eastward? Why are you itching for a war?

There are people who are drawing parallels to 1938 and Munich. There is a vital difference. Hitler actually wanted territory in exchange for non-aggression. He wanted the return of the Rhine, he wanted Sudetenland, he wanted Austria. Putin has not demanded that Ukraine become part of Russia. All he has asked is that Ukraine not join NATO, an explicitly anti-Russian military alliance. This is not an unreasonable demand. No country would like a military alliance targeted against it next to its borders.

Western Propaganda

Those who can think beyond the western propaganda surrounding this war will clearly see some things:

1. The concerns about an unsanctioned war (sanctioned by the UN) and the violation of the sovereignty of another country are false. Most US-led wars have not had UN approval — Gulf War II, Libya, Syria, just to name a few (some more names in the point below.) The US has never had a problem with an illegal, unilateral war, and neither have its allies, NATO and Australia. The US has never cared about other countries’ sovereignty. Think of Nicaragua, Grenada, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, Lebanon, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Lebanon, Panama, Philippines, Iraq, Somalia, Serbia, Sudan, Indonesia (East Timor), Afghanistan, Pakistan (attack on Abbotabad), Yemen, and Syria. Regardless of the justification you may use (you might say, for example, that bin Laden was a terrorist who needed to be captured), it IS a violation of sovereignty. Putin can also claim reasons for his invasion. Ask the Pakistanis or the Iraqis if they liked their sovereignty being violated.
2. The concern about people losing lives is not genuine. Under Obama, the US used drones to bomb poor Afghans, including women and children, for 8 years at the rate of about 5000 bombs a year. Of course, those were brown Muslim lives and not White Christian lives, so that’s something to ponder for a Western audience. The US war in Vietnam cost the lives of about 3 million Vietnamese, and nobody asked the US to go there. And nobody asked the US to poke their nose in the internal affairs of other countries. Yet they keep going to other countries and killing people to project their power. The US has been constantly in a state of war with one country or another since 1945. And, of course, killing people in the process.
3. The concern about the use of powerful weapons is insincere. The US, of course, used the granddaddy of all powerful weapons when it used nuclear weapons in World War II. The US remains, to this day, the only country to ever have used nuclear weapons in war. But there are other war crimes the US has been responsible for, such as the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and the use of “bunker-buster” bombs using depleted uranium in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the most horrific weapons used in war are cluster bombs. The US has accused Russia of using cluster bombs, saying it is illegal. However, the US refused to sign the Convention for Cluster Munitions, signed in 2010 and outlawing the use of cluster bombs, even though 123 other countries signed the convention. The US and UK have supplied cluster bombs to the Saudis in Yemen in 2015, using which the Saudis, in a truly horrific and brutal war, have been bombing women, children, schools, and hospitals indiscriminately with active American help. Nobody in the US is bothered about these victims of genocide.
4. Much is made of the fact that Putin is a brutal dictator. But the US has never had a problem supporting brutal dictators and helping them kill and oppress their own citizens: Chile, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Albania, Cuba, El Salvador, Haiti, Iraq, and many more countries. So Putin being an evil dictator is irrelevant to the issue, and is just being used to inflame passions.

A Schoolbus with Children in It Bombed by US-Saudi Bombers in Yemen

Anyway, now the die has been cast, and so we must understand what this means for the future.

Cold War II

Russia will overcome Ukraine in a couple of weeks at the most. Despite all the noise, the West will be unable to stop it. The West will impose punishing sanctions on Russia, as they already have. There can now be no rapprochment between Russia and Europe. This is going to cause some seismic shifts:

1. The world has been split into two camps: a Western camp consisting of the US, Canada, Australia, and Western and Central Europe (the “West”); and an Eastern camp consisting of Russia, China, Belarus, Iran, Pakistan, the Central Asian Republics, other Third World countries in Asia, Africa, and South America with whom China has very strong economic relations because of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (the “East”). This is Cold War II.
2. The US dollar will be supplanted by the Chinese Digital Yuan in the East. Until now, the digital Yuan was only used by 10% of banks globally, but with the drawing of the new Iron Curtain, its spread will increase rapidly until the entire East adopts the Yuan exclusively and drops the dollar as a medium of exchange.
3. The West will be shut out of trade with the parts of the globe that are experiencing the highest growth (Asia and Africa), whereas China, with exclusive trading rights in these regions, will rise to a position of economic supremacy in the world. This is because most of these countries are extensively indebted to China because of the BRI. This will help China offset its major problem of population decline, because overseas demand will compensate for the rapid loss of domestic demand as China grapples with the dual challenges of a modernizing and increasingly prosperous economy and a dropping population growth rate.
4. Starved of markets and facing a rapid population shrinkage, Western countries will slip into gradual decline in a slow and painful process, with an attendant increase in unemployment, homelessness, and decaying infrastructure.

India, the country I live in, has a choice to make: should it align with the winning side or the losing side? It is in India’s best interest to bury the hatchet with China, even conceding territory if necessary, so that it can grow with peace on both its borders (because China is capable of controlling Pakistan, which is its client state.) The costs of peace with China will only mount as time passes and China becomes more and more powerful. China is in no hurry to have peace with India, but India should be in a hurry to patch up things if it wants to grow and become prosperous.