Tomgram — Pepe Escobar, The Pivot to Eurasia

The quickly evolving Great Game. Good summary of recent developments on the geopolitical and geostrategic front and their implications for geopolitical realignment, with huge economic implications globally.

Tom Dispatch
Tomgram: Pepe Escobar, The Pivot to Eurasia

Ekaterina Bilnova — Iran Nuclear Deal Ushers in Era of New Great Game for Eurasia

According to US geopolitical analyst and StopImperialism.com editor Eric Draitser, Washington is planning to engage Tehran into the Western political fold, neutralizing Iran as influential geopolitical player in the Middle East. 

"Anyone who understands the imperial and hegemonic agenda of the US should immediately understand that there is an ulterior motive for Washington in securing this deal, one which has nothing to do with morality, peace, or cooperation. Instead, the US wants to transform Iran from a regional and global adversary into something of an asset," Draitser underscored.

According to the geopolitical analyst, once integrated into Western economy Iran may abandon its longstanding Shiite allies, Syria, in particular. The stakes would be too high for Tehran, which will run the risk of losing hundreds of billions of dollars and "crippling its own economy."

However, "the single most important objective for US strategic planners though is to prevent Iran's integration into the emerging non-western, Eurasian political, economic, and military architecture," Draitser pointed out.

The West has finally realized that such institutions as BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the New Silk Road projects pose a substantial threat to the US-dominated world order and its Bretton Woods monetary system.

The "triple alliance" of Russia, China and Iran may ultimately undermine the West's strategy aimed at maintaining control over the Eurasian continent, developed by the British back in the 19th century and dubbed "The Great Game."…

Sputnik
Iran Nuclear Deal Ushers in Era of New Great Game for Eurasia

Ekaterina Bilnova

Alfred W. McCoy — Washington's Great Game and Why It's Failing

For even the greatest of empires, geography is often destiny. You wouldn’t know it in Washington, though. America’s political, national security, and foreign policy elites continue to ignore the basics of geopolitics that have shaped the fate of world empires for the past 500 years. Consequently, they have missed the significance of the rapid global changes in Eurasia that are in the process of undermining the grand strategy for world dominion that Washington has pursued these past seven decades.

This is a summary of things I have posted in the past at MNE about geopolitics and geostrategy.

However, I don't like the term "decline." The post is not so much about America's supposed decline as about failure to understand and act on basics of geopolitics and geostrategy that are grounded in geography.

America's geographical situation as an "island" continent is a plus for defense but a minus for dominating world events from the geographical core. Russia and China are well placed for that, being situated at "the geographical pivot of history." With Russia having too much land and too may resources to employ itself and China with too many people and too few resources, their eventual cooperation is ordained by geographically position at the core.

There is no way that the US can permanently dominate them individually or prevent them from combining resources. The only thing possible is a delaying game, and that comes with risks, e.g., the overreach that has ended empires previously. America is already stretching itself in the attempt to project power globally and cover all the bases with bases, for example.

The present strategy of containment and destabilization is creating what Pepe Escobar calls "the Empire of Chaos." That is not a strategy as much as a recipe for disaster.

Moreover, trying to impose liberalism is illiberal. The US is therefore caught in a policy contradiction that is obvious.

Tom Dispatch
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Washington's Great Game and Why It's Failing

Alfred W. McCoy | J.R.W. Smail Professor of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Salman Rafi Sheikh — The Iran deal and the Western Geo-Politics

Geopolitics, geostrategy, and energy resources. Doesn't it always come down to oil and gas?

It is apparent that the deal with Iran is going to have repercussions at global level. The reason for this is involvement of all major powers in this issue directly or indirectly. It is not out of a sudden that Iran has emerged as a strategic necessity for the US and the EU. This change has necessarily emerged due to the collapse of the US-EU-Russian relations due to the former’s interference in Ukraine to restrict the rise of Russia. The deal is, as such, as much a part of the West’s new containment policy as of the new outlook towards the Middle East—-the erstwhile home to all sorts of conflicts: political, strategic, economic, ethnic and religious. 

 New Eastern Outlook
The Iran deal and the Western Geo-Politics
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs

Michael Pettis — Will the AIIB one day matter?

When Isaac, an editor at Foreign Policy, sent me an email two weeks ago asking if I could write a piece on the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), I quickly wrote back promising 1,200 words within a few days. I thought it would be pretty easy to come up with the points I wanted to make, and all I would need was one uninterrupted day to pull them together into a coherent article.

As I see it, the creation of the AIIB is not nearly as important as everyone seems to think, and if Beijing’s decision to create the AIIB, and Washington’s decision to oppose it, was part of the struggle for future geo-political dominance in Asia, let alone the world, they were both going to be wrong. There were only two useful parts to this story, it seemed to me. First, it showed that neither Washington nor Beijing understood very well either the functioning of the global balance of payments or the reasons why the West, and especially the US, dominates the regime that governs global trade and capital flows (but I guess we already knew that). Second, Washington had handled this whole process so ineptly that it had managed to transform a minor initiative by Beijing into a huge symbolic disaster for Washington and a great victory for Xi Jinping.

I thought it would be easy to explain this because the discussion over the AIIB was almost a caricature of the discussion over a number of other finance-related topics during the last decade or two, in which an overwhelming consensus quickly develops around some event concerning both its unprecedented nature and the nature of its transformative impact – the sustainability of China’s astonishing growth miracle, the creation of the euro, the abolishing of credit cycles by Washington, the consequences of the reserve status of the US dollar, the rise of the RMB, and so on. Both assumptions always turn out to be wrong – the event under discussion does have a very deep and very useful historical context, and this context suggests that many of the assumptions underlying the discussion are, in fact, quite implausible.…

According to Pettis, much ado about nothing.

These issues are important politically (geopolitically) but less important economically, if at all.

Some good lessons from history, too.

China Financial Markets
Will the AIIB one day matter?
Michael Pettis | Professor of Finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management

RT — Berlin and Paris look East: How close are we to a Common Economic Space?

This is an important post geopolitically and geostrategically. It not only articulates Russia's likely take on it, it is quite accurate in my view also.

In the end, the US cannot prevent Eurasia uniting economically from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Mediterranean to the Arctic.

North America is simply not positioned geographically to be able to do this longterm, and the US will sap itself by trying to do so, if it doesn't spark a nuclear conflagration that could easily render the entire Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable for centuries.

RT
Berlin and Paris look East: How close are we to a Common Economic Space?

Also

In an interview for Sputnik, Dr. Xu Jin, Director of the Department of International Politics at the Institute of World Economics and Politics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, laid down his vision of the Chinese perspective on geopolitics, noting that Russian-Chinese relations serve as a model for relations between great powers....

Xu emphasized that in the Asia-Pacific region, "Russia and China can cooperate to deal with many problems, such as terrorism in Central Asia, or Japan's desire to violate the basic international principles set after WWII." He noted that in Asia, "Russia is China's most important partner, because a good Sino-Russian relationship means a stable strategic rear."

Sputnik 

Cooperation With Russia Allows China to Focus on East Asia – Analyst

As soon as relations with Iran are normalized, Tehran will be admitted to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); currently it enjoys observer status. Washington dreads the move – as it will advance Iran’s Eurasian integration, and solidify a Moscow-Tehran-Beijing political/commercial axis.

Russia already does very good business with Iran – from nuclear plants to weapons sales. No US deal with Iran will come through without a tacit Russian acquiescence – and the Americans know it. Beijing, for its part, tends to cling to the status quo – as in not desiring Tehran to get any closer to the West because that would mean a freer hegemon in its "pivoting to Asia" mode, which China, correctly, identifies as containment. 

Further on down the road, Tehran can use a rapprochement with the West to increase its bargaining power with Beijing. Assuming a deal is reached this summer, Tehran will be in an excellent position to extract concessions – on the economy, security, defense – from its Chinese partners. But the name of the game remains Eurasian integration....

Sputnik
The Real Story on Iran, US, Russia and China
Pepe Escobar

Francis P. Sempa — Is China Bidding for the Heartland?

Beijing doesn’t have to choose between land and sea predominance. It could have both.

The Diplomat
Is China Bidding for the Heartland?
Francis P. Sempa | Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy

Zach Przystup — China-US Relations: The Return of Mao’s Noose

‘The U.S. and China are locked in a great power competition, and their primary goals are incompatible.’…

National visions are powerful motivators. For the U.S., a national vision of liberal democracy and free markets has translated into permanent forward deployment of the U.S. military and the world’s largest alliance system. Underlying this forward strategy is the belief that liberal democracy is the best form of government, and that it must be protected at home and given to others when possible. This American vision is less than three centuries old; China’s view of itself as the center of the universe goes back thousands of years. As scholar Yan Xuetong notes, Chinese people believe China’s fall from preeminence to be “a historical mistake which they should correct.” If it is true that old habits die hard, the main tenets of China’s national vision are unlikely to change. 

By pivoting to Asia, Washington is placing a bet that Beijing desperately wants to avoid a disastrous conflict as much as it does, and that the status quo in the region will endure. By tightening the noose, Beijing is trying to call its bluff. As Sun Tzu might observe, both sides are trying to win without fighting. 

For now, that may be a viable strategy. But even if China continues its steady growth, avoids threatening its neighbors, and generally demonstrates that it is a responsible stakeholder in the international system, it is inconceivable that it would allow another superpower to have the best real estate in its own neighborhood. At some point, the U.S. and China’s national visions will collide. When that happens, Washington and Beijing will both have to make a monumental decision about the future of East Asia, and the rest of the world.

The Diplomat
China-US Relations: The Return of Mao’s Noose
Zach Przystup | Assistant Director for Global Executive and Diplomatic Education at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University

Marshall Auerback — Russia And The Ukraine- Sanctions Won’t Work

Russia's energy club with which to beat Washington. Pipelines.

Macrobits by Marshall Auerback
Russia And The Ukraine- Sanctions Won’t Work
Marshall Auerback