On June 16, Aleksey Miller, Chairman of the Gazprom Management Committee, made a number of significant statements during his speech at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, which were not accidentally ignored by the Western media, and the domestic ones, in my opinion, did not pay due attention.
"We are witnessing the breakup of two systems, on the one hand – the system of commodity markets, the resource system, and on the other hand - let's call it the nominal system – the system of central banks, the reserve system," Miller said.
This brings up a point emphasized by former USSR naval officer Andrei Martyanov. While admitting that his training is in engineering and military science, he asserts that it is obvious the an approach to economics that is nominally based is actually tangential to one that is production-based, that is, on the deployment of real resources for economic purposes.
In Martyanov's conception, a nation or alliance's economic base determined its military power and the combination of economic capacity and military power determines the nation or alliance's geopolitical power. Using this model, he asserts that Russia is more powerful than the combined West, a fact that the West Martyanov missed owing to its faulty assumptions based on a superiority complex that does not correspond to reality.
This seems to accord with the assumptions of the Russian leadership, including the political, intel, and military services. The view in the West seems to be based on the stereotype of Russians a stupid, brutal, drunk, and incompetence with a puny economic and military based on nuclear weapons that can be defeated conventionally with the West's natural exceptionalism and superior intelligence, coupled with its technological prowess.
Anyway, it look like these contrary assumptions are about to be tested in the course of the working out of this moment in the historical dialectic. Russia has concluded, it seems, that not only is NATO using Ukraine as its proxy, but also the US is using the rest of NATO and its other vassals as a proxy against Russia. It also seems that Russia is reaching the conclusion that this means kinetic warfare on a much larger scale.
No comments:
Post a Comment