The Divorce of the Century, by Scipio

I wanted to title this post “The Great Divorce” but that title is already taken by C.S. Lewis’ book, “The Great Divorce”. Lewis’s book deals with an unconventional look at Heaven and Hell where Hell’s gates are locked from the inside.

Similarly, my subject topic is a form of heaven and hell on earth. Russia has officially and publicly divorced itself from the West in what in an American divorce court would be based on “irreconcilable differences”.  In a combative interview with the BBC (known derisively as the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation), on June 2022, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, “Russia doesn’t care what the West thinks.”  Later Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “Russia will never trust the West again.”

Unlike the West, which likes to spar with its foes with words by obfuscating them and then bullying through high altitude “shock and awe” bombing, The Russian Federation speaks directly to their concerns. Since 1991 and following the collapse of the old Soviet Union, The Russian Federation has asked to be welcomed back into the European community, only to be rejected.

Worse, the promises made by the West to not encroach upon the old Warsaw Pact nations on Russia’s borders has been broken while one after another they have been brought under NATO’s control.

The US has since shifted from a nation of laws in international affairs to a “rules based” system, with the US making up the rules. The sole purpose of NATO was to defend against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union did not exist in 1991, and an exhausted and depleted Russia was no longer a threat. You would think NATO would be disbanded, not expanded. Now you know why Trump’s 2016 campaign call to disband NATO sent shivers up the spine of the US military-industrial complex.

The CIA backed overthrow of the Ukrainian election in 2014 and the United States’ intent to make Ukraine a NATO member nation was a red line crossed by the West in the eyes of Russia. Meanwhile, the West refused to enforce the Minsk Agreement negotiated after the 2014 coup. Russian speaking Ukrainians were forced to defend themselves from western Ukrainian NAZIs resulting in two regions, Donetsk and Luhansk, declaring independence from Ukraine.  Kiev immediately started shelling and attacking these break away provences killing an estimated 14,000 civilians from 2014 until 2022.  Even as I write this post, the Ukraine is still shelling civilians behind the Russian/Ukrainian combat lines in the midst of the current war. (SMO as the Russian’s prefer).

Unsuccessful color revolutions in Georgia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan only confirmed Russia’s fears of Western expansion. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin invertedly let the cat out of the bag when on April 25, 2020, he said America’s strategy was to “weaken Russia”, by implication, not defend Ukrainian territorial integrity as advertised.

The West goaded Russia into this war, and they thought they had it figured out.  Russia was ready for this war. The West’s ineptitude and corruption at the highest levels of government made them blind to what they were getting into, and they weren’t ready.

On May 24, 2022 speaking at Davos, international war monger spokesman Henry Kissinger floated the first olive branch for a negotiated partition settlement to the Ukrainian war.  Publicly, an almost audible gasp went through the collective West, while behind closed doors they were saying to themselves, “Please, please Russia don’t deliver our ass on a public silver platter over our miscalculation”.  Stupid Westerners, why would Russia want to negotiate over territory it already controlled as a result of the fighting? Russian blood had been spilled, the West’s image had been tarnished, that’s a big difference in point of view.

In its Ukrainian Strategy, the West depended on its reputation of being the big bully on the block. However, America’s ineptitude in Syria, Iraq, and especially Afghanistan was obvious for the world to see that America had now become only a paper tiger, her only real threat were her nuclear teeth.

Sanctions were the only weapon the West could really use, since the West was no match on the battlefield.  Russia anticipated this and turned the sanctions back on the West.  Russia is now flourishing with record breaking supplies of oil to China at record prices, control of much of the word’s wheat, and its currency increasing in value, while the opposite is happening in the West.

Russia is a nation of actions, not words.  Immediately after commencement of the SMO, Russia went to work with other sovereign nations to form a new world order. (See my March 2022 post “New World Order Formation Is Reaching its Tipping Point” by Scipio).

Pepe Escobar in https://thesaker.is/exile-on-main-street-the-sound-of-the-unipolar-world-fading-away/  has summed up the tremendous efforts at hammering out methods and mechanisms of cooperation between member states. Escobar summarizes, “As much as the Belt Road Initiative (BRI), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and ASEAN, now it’s time for a reinvigorated BRICS to step up its game.  In conjunction, these are the key organizations that will be carving the pathways towards the post-unipolar era. “

Vladimir Putin, speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum June 17, 2022, said, “Over the past decades, new powerful centers have been formed on the planet…each of them develops their own political system and public institutions, implements their own models of economic growth, and, of course, has the right to protect themselves, to ensure national sovereignty.  We are talking about real processes, about truly revolutionary, tectonic changes in geopolitics, global, economy, the technological sphere, in the entire system of international relations.”

While back in the swamp, they are trying to figure out how to spin the obvious Ukrainian military defeat, runaway inflation, shortages from diesel to tampons, degeneration in our major cities, collapse of the financial markets, the deteriorating economy, eroding of the US Dollar’s value, and old Soviet style inquisitions by the US Legislature.  Russia and friends, meanwhile, are not sitting on their hands watching war room vids.  They already know how it turns out.  It’s like watching a football game where one team is getting trounced.  The outcome is not in doubt, only the score.  The score usually doesn’t tell how bad it really was because the opposition always scores some “garbage points” at the end. Vlad is not just talking about a new world order, he is in the midst of currently creating it, and so far, have tentatively created two orders:  Global North and Global South.

America is following a similar path of the UK after WW II when it ceased being the world’s premier power. The economic impact on the UK was equally devastating when the Pound Sterling was replaced by the US Dollar at Bretton Woods in 1944.

This coming new world order will have a new currency as well.  So far it looks like it will be backed by a basket of commodities, gold, other nation’s currencies, and possibly cryptos, not fiat like the American dollar. This US Dollar replacement will not happen overnight.  There are too many US Dollars sloshing around the world financial system to be worked out of the system.  But the US Dollar will begin to lose purchasing power abroad and eventually go the way of all fiat currencies of failed empires.

Pax Britannica finally ended at that end of WW II and was replaced by Pax Americana. Now we are front seat witnesses, and victims of the beginning of the end of Pax Americana.