A Post From A Year Ago I Just Found...Call Me Lazy: From Moscow, With Tough Love

So as I sit here, on a lazy Sunday in Arlington, I think to myself “What should I listen to?” and I just so happen to have a feeling that it should probably be Radiohead – so track one on Kid A gets the green light, and myself and Thom Yorke bond through the medium of song – Everything in its Right Place.

And indeed it seems as though things are returning to their right places, the Ruskis are getting in a bit of a huff and puff over Georgia, maybe they just really like peaches, and the Chinese Olympic cloak has been falling with accusations of faking fireworks (they invented them, surely they should be allowed to fake them if they want to), and lip synching performances unmatched since Milli-Vanilli’s last world tour. So what do we make of all of this?

Well the Chinese, as we all can agree upon, don’t exactly have the most forthright government – did anyone actually expect them to look like angels with no sign of authoritarian coercion in the midst? And so are we really surprised that the fireworks were fake, the girl couldn’t sing, and that some of their gymnasts were given fake documents to make them qualify to compete? Not at all I say, because surely Chairman Mao would have loved to have seen the spectacle on a 62” HD TV, so all is good.

The unfortunate thing, is that while the Chinese government has been funding this Hollywood-esque masquerade, millions of your average citizen are living in extreme poverty. But that’s the problem when communism meets the need for PR, let’s just put a big smile on and pretend everything here is good. In fact, most governments do this, but the fact that communism is all a bit utopian, it seems more cringe worthy. More money was spent on that opening ceremony than what will be put towards education, or even relief efforts, all for the sake of trying to make the west positive on China – I personally would certainly have cast a blind eye on an ever growing list of Human Rights infractions all because one thousand Chinese people can simultaneously bang drums in the dark with glowsticks; don’t know about you.

Drums gives me a nice transition to the “Russian Federation” who seem intent on banging their war drum in Georgia, where the hapless Saakashvili is in all kinds of trouble. Saakashvili, not content with running a semi-successful democracy decided he’d punch above his weight, and decided to test King, Czar, Chairman, Chess-master, whatever Putin by shooting a couple of bullets in South Ossetia – a place that until last week nobody this side of Kiev had ever even heard of before. The result, as we all know, was a very efficient bitch slap by the Ruskis, and a pseudo-world-crisis. “Oh no, what should we do, the commies are back”. Yes they are, but really they were there the whole time, we just decided to ignore them for about the last 15 years, while we all had wet dreams about the fact that Poland and the former Bloc nations were buying our cars (shame really as the aerodynamically challenged Lada was a brilliant little motor) and familiarizing themselves with Microsoft Office.

Russia is back then, and it won’t be too long until Russians begin to be touted as fat men stroking bald cats in James Bond films. This was all on the cards though, Russia has been posturing for the last couple of years. In the last two years alone the RAF has had to scramble jets at least three times off of the northern coast of Scotland to ward away Russian bombers, within the last few months the Russians were playing war games with themselves off of the Iberian peninsula, and we all remember the laughable planting of the Russian flag under the North Pole by their Navy. Yes, their waning world influence, it has been decided, is to be no longer, and now we must all deal with it.

But this is all a result of the Russian psyche, and traditionally always has been. Throughout the years the Russians have always treated world affairs as a game of chess, and in that game they’ve always felt like they’re behind by at least both of their bishops and possibly a rook. The Mongols ran rampant there centuries ago, as too did Napoleon for a little while until he lost his blanket, the Swedes had a crack at them in the Great Northern War, and of course we exploded an atomic bomb on an island off of their coastline around 1945 – the pattern here is that the West is a threat to Russian sovereignty and freedom to drink vodka at will – and this notion has really driven contemporary Russian foreign policy – there goes another rook, lets use Eastern Europe as a buffer zone, oh shit we lost a pawn lets stick some missiles in Cuba, in fact the majority of our pieces are now joining the EU and NATO lets show them what we can do if they step too far out of line by ruffling some feathers in Georgia.

And so the old Russia, that we know and love, is noticed again, making their stock go up, and everyone around the Kremlin is happy again and can pat each other on the back for a job well done.

I do feel a lot of this is our fault, what did we do to Russia in the post-Soviet era? Not much to be honest, but there was certainly a sense of a fallen giant and we all jumped on that bandwagon and treated them as if they had no chance of recovery, and made the best for ourselves while leaving many of them to rot. Very little investment was put in to Russia compared to the other ex-Soviet states, Europe let Poland et al come and sit at the dinner table whilst leaving their Russian neighbour a text message stating that they’d have to take a rain check “something has come up.” America was more focused on countering the EU’s gaining economic strength by hashing together NAFTA just so salmonella tomatoes (climbing up the Eiffel Tower) would be a couple of cents cheaper. It still amazes me that Starbucks, which can be found on almost every street corner in the world and possibly Mars only opened up shop in Moscow last year (mushroom sandwiches and all) – and while much of a stagnant economy can be put on the KGB-led government’s shoulders, you have to wonder why a Russian Marshall plan was never thought of – surely the best thing at the time would have been to clamp down Russian friendship and mutual cooperation – they have a UN veto vote for God’s sake! And whilst it’s all fine and well that Russians now wear Levi’s jeans, and Paul McCartney can make his settlement money back by doing a couple of gigs in Red Square, I feel that we missed out on a big opportunity to change the Russian mindset towards the West. And so now we’re going to have to deal not only with posturing, but Russian action, and yes it could come down to another cold war scenario, with the millions of Russian youth turning their attention from intimidating Gary Kasparov to finally purging the Chechens and letting the world know that Russia has influence and brevity.

Expect the press to have a couple of 10 second sound bites that they’ve taken out of context to prove the latter. Expect Fox to hate Russia, expect CNN to try and defend Russia, and expect no one to say that nobody is righteous in this whole cluster-fuck of a situation, and that in fact we’re all to blame.

Regardless, this scenario will only get increasingly more interesting, the press will make it out as if we’re all going to start throwing rocks at each other, but deals will be cut in smokey rooms and we’ll all go back to the status quo shortly and start hashing up game theory matrices to demonstrate Putin’s options and decide whether or not to invest in LukOil. It may be the status quo of the 80’s but nevertheless, status quo is good, and besides, the Cold War was the safest time in history to live in.

I don’t know if there’s a point to much of what I just said, maybe it is just commentary/opinion. And I’m still listening to Radiohead, and will aptly end now whilst listening to the track No Surprises.

BRICs and Mortar

According to the Times Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) have just formed an alliance that is based on economical and political policies that will be used to take away total power in the world system from the United States.

The article explains that;

...The first summit of heads of state of the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — ended with a declaration calling for a “multipolar world order”, diplomatic code for a rejection of America’s position as the sole global superpower...

...The declaration also satisfied a key Kremlin demand by calling for a “more diversified international monetary system”. President Medvedev is seeking to break the dominance of the US dollar in financial markets as the world’s leading reserve currency. He favours the establishment of more regional reserve currencies, including the Russian rouble and the Chinese yuan, to prevent economic shocks. Mr Medvedev said: “The existing set of reserve currencies, including the US dollar, have failed to perform their functions."...

Extraordinary, but extremely hard to accomplish, and a little unrealistic. For starters China has billions of US dollars owed to them which they are using as securities for their own currency. The value of the Yuan would plunge with the decline of the value of the dollar.

Brazil is regionally challenged due to it's geographic relativity to the US as well as having the majority of it's neighbours and trading partners being so tied in to the US economy. Plus, where is all that surplus coffee they started making going to go?

Russia is a mess in their "democracy," the Ruble is worth next to nothing, the leadership and high profile businessmen over there consist of mostly ex-KGB warlords and higher-ups from the old guard. This move for them is more about world status than actual effects.

And India is a country whose educated workforce (think phone banks, IT Tech support, debt collection calls) and uneducated workforce (think tea and rice production, clothing and apparel, and now Range Rover) is so tied in to the US/UK economic system that it would be murderous for them to try and change that balance.

Let's not even start talking about Russia's idea of "regional reserve currencies" either...did all of these world leaders forget to bring a map with them to this conference? Hint, and I'll be nice and whisper it, Russia, India, and China are right fucking next to each other, wonder if that could cause a dispute?!

I'm not too sure that I want to go into this too much more as it's all a bit over the top, and I really don't see it hashing out into anything productive. If anything it will increase trade relations between these countries, but as for political and economic dominance it will do very little, and if it does start to make an impact you'll be sure to see either trade barriers/tariffs against these countries rise, and/or a further closening between the US, EU, and British Commonwealth (with or without India on board). I wonder what Orwell would have made of that?!

Hmmn so now I can blog via mobile device eh? Wolves away first game? I hope we stuff em!