{"id":73129,"date":"2016-05-09T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2016-05-09T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=73129"},"modified":"2016-05-08T12:38:55","modified_gmt":"2016-05-08T11:38:55","slug":"the-calm-before-the-coming-global-storm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/05\/the-calm-before-the-coming-global-storm\/","title":{"rendered":"The Calm before the Coming Global Storm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pepeescobar\"<\/a>6 May 2016 – They have seen what Washington does offer; endless war; the progressive smashing of the nation state; democracy blasted to smithereens; and technocratic governance by the 0.00001%.\u00a0Yet all this is just the calm before the geopolitical\/financial storm. Let\u2019s review the current state of play via the dilemmas afflicting the House of Saud, the EU and BRICS members Russia, Brazil and China.<\/em><\/p>\n

Oil and the House of Saud<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not many people are familiar with the Baltic Dry Index. Yet the Index is key to track commodity demand. Two months ago, it was trading to all-time lows. Since then, it has increased over 130%. Precious metals prices have all moved higher in virtually all currencies. Why is this important? Because it tells us that faith in fiat currencies \u2013 the US dollar especially \u2014 is sharply declining.<\/p>\n

The Baltic Index rise portends a rise in oil demand in Asia \u2013 especially China. Falling supply and rising demand for oil will likely drive up the price of the barrel of oil in the second half of 2016.<\/p>\n

That does not mean that the House of Saud will win back the trust of both the US and Russia. Deep sources keep confirming that as far as Washington and Moscow are concerned, the House of Saud is expendable. Both are really energy independent (should the US want to be). Powerful Washington factions blatantly accuse Riyadh of \u201cterror\u201d \u2013 well, it\u2019s way more complicated \u2013 while Moscow regards the House of Saud as following US orders to destroy Russia in an oil price war.<\/p>\n

Ailing \u2013 on the way to dementia \u2014 King Salman and young Warrior Prince Mohammed would be finished if those famous 28 pages about 9\/11 were released and the Saudi connection is incontrovertible. What next? Regime change. A CIA coup. A \u201ctrusted\u201d Saudi military CIA asset elevated to power.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s left for the House of Saud is to play for time. High up in Riyadh the feeling is that relations with Washington won\u2019t improve while Obama is president; the next president \u2014 whether Hillary or The Donald \u2013 will be a much better deal. So Plan A for now is to keep posing as essential to Washington in the \u201cwar on terra\u201d; that means King Salman falling back on Mohammed bin Nayef, the Crown Prince, way more adept at it than the Warrior Prince, the conductor of the disastrous war on Yemen.<\/p>\n

In parallel, Turkey\u2019s Sultan Erdogan keeps advancing his play to take over oil in Iraqi Kurdistan, eventually diverting the whole supply to make Turkey energy independent \u2013 and thus a regional superpower.<\/p>\n

Moreover, in Pipelineistan terms, Erdogan absolutely also needs the Qatar gas pipeline through Saudi Arabia and Syria to gain energy independence from Russia. That also happens to be a major US goal. And that also portends perennial trouble for the Syria peace process.<\/p>\n

Erdogan already has the German superpower at his feet in the shape of a groveling, begging Chancellor Merkel. Were Turkey on its way to become an energy power, Merkel would prostrate herself on that Ankara palace golden ground non-stop. The CIA intimates as much, when it analyzes how Turkey will keep \u201cexpanding its influence\u201d in Iraq through the militias they support, at the expense of Iraq\u2019s security and political unity.<\/p>\n

Andrew Bacevich\u2019s America\u2019s War for the Greater Middle East examines how Washington ruled that \u201cmilitary preponderance\u201d across the Middle East should be the strategic objective in a war against the USSR \u2014 that was when Dr. Zbig \u201cGrand Chessboard\u201d Brzezinski reigned as geopolitical supremo. This was always supposed to be an endless war \u2013 now encompassing the \u201cGreater Middle East\u201d the neocons are so fond of.<\/p>\n

Russia, Brazil and Hybrid War<\/strong><\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s largest commodity exchange is actively courting international oil traders to join its emerging futures market. The goals are crystal clear; to disconnect the price-setting mechanism from the Brent oil benchmark and, crucially, to move away from the petrodollar. That also happens to be a key condition imposed by Beijing to the House of Saud for continuing to buy their oil.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to forget that it was only 20 years ago that Moscow wanted to join the West as Christians, and was treated like trash. Russia was perceived in the Beltway to be weak under Yeltsin, who let in looters who ate up Russia as locusts, collapsing Russia\u2019s GDP by 40% as they drew out natural resources, absconding with at least a trillion US dollars.<\/p>\n

Now Exceptionalistan keeps updating every trick in the book to destroy or at least undermine Russia with Maidan in Ukraine, an oil price war, attacks on the ruble, Syrian pipelines. Hybrid, unconventional warfare rules \u2013 and these will only get nastier. The BRICS as a whole are under siege. The Brazilian color revolution, set up as a soft regime change process, is just the first stage in a new, sophisticated Hybrid War strategy bound to be studied in academia for decades.<\/p>\n

As oil demand soars and supply contracts, Hybrid War practitioners across the spectrum will have to create a recession to keep the chaos going. A possible scenario is to let the embattled Italian banking system go down; that\u2019s the next frontier in the EU.<\/p>\n

Walking Dead Europe, meanwhile, subcontracted and\/or externalized a policy of refugee repression, thus unleashing the largest mass deportation since WWII, complete with camps financed by EU taxpayers and managed by the Great Democrat Erdogan. The missing link is now in the open; everything is proceeding under control of NATO-linked think tanks.<\/p>\n

As appalling as it may be, this is hardly new. It was already inbuilt in agreements that the EU imposes on African nations, \u201cupgrading\u201d their status to border Cerberuses. That\u2019s the key mission of the Frontex agency, which is progressively delocalizing the external borders of the EU \u2013 to the east and to the south \u2013 to better repel migrants. Not a dot connected to NATO\u2019s neo-imperial wars of choice, of course.<\/p>\n

No wonder Noam Chomsky has noted that support for formal democracy in the West is dwindling, because they are not real democracies. All major decisions affecting the EU are taken by unelected eurocrats in Brussels. In a groundbreaking book published in Spain, Mercado-Estado-Carcel en la Democracia Neoliberal Espanola (Anthropos), Daniel Jimenez, doctor in Juridical Sociology at the University of Zaragoza, details how the new institutional local order is about de-democratization, denationalization and dependency; NATO, IMF, World Bank, the Paris club, BCE, the European Commission, the Fed, they are part of a global web of institutions, private but self-described as public or public but managed by private interests (such as the Fed). Michael Hudson, among others, has detailed how the EU never developed sustained mechanisms of transfer of capital from the wealthier economies towards poorer members.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a mess without my China fix<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sophisticated Hybrid War-derived techniques may have been deployed full blast against Russia and Brazil. But against China, everything fizzles.<\/p>\n

Exceptionalistan\u2019s spin is that China is not as economically secure as it seems. So global public opinion is bombarded by the usual litany of \u201cconvulsions in its financial markets\u201d, \u201cinvestor risk aversion\u201d, \u201cvolatility\u201d, or an inevitable crash.<\/p>\n

Nonsense. The leadership in Beijing has its strategic imperatives fully delineated in the latest Five-Year-Plan. It will pump whatever amount of credit into the system whenever it takes. It won\u2019t depreciate the yuan \u2013 no matter how loud Washington\/New York complain.<\/p>\n

A yuan devaluation would sink an array of Chinese firms loaded up on US dollar debt. Moreover, Beijing is tweaking its system, a carefully calibrated transition from an export-driven model to one geared toward consumption by the internal market. A strong yuan preserves the purchasing power of tens of millions of members of the New Chinese Middle Class \u2013 all of them upwardly mobile, and all of them asset owners.<\/p>\n

According to the US Treasury, only about $1.2 trillion in liquid securities is in Chinese hands. And that will keep diminishing, fast \u2013 as China keeps buying gold. And to top it off, China has already turned its economy around. That brings us back to that dramatic increase in the Baltic Index. Oil prices are rising. And China is buying the whole lot.<\/p>\n

Beijing is advancing on all fronts; spreading influence\/commercial deals all across Eurasia, which the New Silk Roads will shape into a mass emporium; modernizing its military; buying strategic foreign assets; building up global trust in the yuan as a stable reserve currency; allowing Chinese elites to diversify their enormous wealth by buying foreign assets, from vineyards in Bordeaux to the odd football giant, such as AC Milan.<\/p>\n

No wonder the astonishing spread of Chinese economic power has left assorted Exceptionalists \u2013 from neocons to neoliberalcons \u2014 totally deranged. Washington has absolutely nothing to offer to nations across Asia, Africa and Latin America \u2013 to the whole Global South for that matter. They have all seen how Beijing is not in the market demanding Mob-style compound interest on sovereign debt; \u201csupport\u201d for neo-imperial moves by NATO or the UN; one more extra-territorial hub for the US Empire of Bases; or total domination of their central banks.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, they have seen what Washington does offer; endless war; the progressive smashing of the nation state; democracy blasted to smithereens; and technocratic governance by the 0.00001%.<\/p>\n

Yet all this is just the calm before the storm. The Empire is already striking back. There\u2019s serious blood on the tracks ahead.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Pepe Escobar is a Brazilian independent geopolitical analyst. He is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia Times Online. He has been a foreign correspondent since 1985, and has lived in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Washington, Bangkok and Hong Kong. Even before 9\/11 he specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central and East Asia, with an emphasis on Big Power geopolitics and energy wars. He is the author of \u201cGlobalistan<\/a>\u201d (2007), \u201cRed Zone Blues<\/a>\u201d (2007), \u201cObama does Globalistan<\/a>\u201d (2009) and \u201cEmpire of Chaos<\/a>\u201d (2014), all published by Nimble Books. His latest book is \u201c2030<\/a>\u201c, also by Nimble Books, out in December 2015.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theinternationalreporter.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

6 May 2016 – They have seen what Washington does offer; endless war; the progressive smashing of the nation state; democracy blasted to smithereens; and technocratic governance by the 0.00001%. Yet all this is just the calm before the geopolitical\/financial storm. Let\u2019s review the current state of play via the dilemmas afflicting the House of Saud, the EU and BRICS members Russia, Brazil and China.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}