Pepe Escobar
Are China-Russia - and a great deal of the Global Majority - really ready? Call it an auspicious vow.
Close the door, put out the light
You know they won't be home tonight
The snow falls hard and don't you know
The winds of Thor are blowing cold
Led Zeppelin, No Quarter
In a matter of less than a year, Russian scientific know-how came up with four bangers:
1. Oreshnik: hypersonic missile, already tested in the Ukraine battleground.
2. Burevestnik: Or "Stormbringer", with that nice Deep Purple ring. Nuclear cruise missile with unlimited range.
3. Poseidon: nuclear-powered torpedo, capable of loitering underwater, undetected, for unlimited time; then, at a command, strikes enemy coasts with a nuclear payload, provoking a radioactive tsunami. Largely exceeds the destructive power of the Sarmat, Russia's largest ICBM.
4. Khabarovsk: nuclear sub. Call him The Messenger of Doom: capable of delivering at least 6 Doomsday-enabling Poseidons.
President Putin was crystal clear when detailing some key facts. The "compact nuclear systems" used in the Burevestnik and the Poseidon "can also be adapted to create new energy sources, including for the Arctic."
Putin also stressed how both Burevestnik and Poseidon "use only Russian-made parts". Praise the Lord for those chips from upgraded Soviet washing machines.
And there's a lot more to come following the tracks of Burevestnik and Poseidon: "I'm talking about...the Avangard system, or the serial production of the Oreshnik missile system...soon the heavy intercontinental Sarmat missile."
The Sarmat - nicknamed Satan II - will enter combat next year: a super-heavy ICBM, carrying 10 heavy warheads, and compatible with the Avangard hypersonic glider, capable of dodging any anti-ballistic missile system.
Welcome to Russia's next generation nuclear-powered cruise missiles, with reactors going online in a matter of seconds, and 3x speed of sound, heading towards hypersonic status.
In a nutshell: Burevestnik and Poseidon "will ensure strategic parity for the whole 21st century."
Cue to thunderous silence heard all across the NATOstan sphere - permeated by the usual "the Russians are bluffing" gaggle noise.
Who cares? Facts are stubborn, and continue to be incontrovertible. Extra facts: Putin and Xi signing into law a mutual investment protection agreement, which translates as China protecting trillion-dollar worth Russian companies, Sberbank, Rosneft and Lukoil in case of a potential NATO-Russia war.
Or, in Eurasia connectivity corridor terms, take Putin, during the Russia-Central Asia summit, proposing unifying Eurasian logistics projects into a single network: "This would allow us to exponentially increase the volume of international transportation through our shared region."
The massive economic/trade potential of Eurasia still remains largely untapped. Cut to the Russia-China goal of building a production-technological belt from the Russian Far East to Central Asia.
Ain't got no deal on Russia-China
Well, these sharp facts are inbuilt in the new, emerging global reality, now a historical process - in sharp contrast with the paroxysms of Deep Desperation exhibited by the fragmented West and, significantly, the rise and rise of unilateral Empire of Chaos bullying.
Exhibit A is of course Venezuela.
The Circus Ringmaster - in a revamped remix of the war on drugs meets the war on terra - is mulling:
Bombing of Venezuelan military bases; deployment of Navy SEALS to capture or kill President Maduro; "securing" - as in invading and seizing Venezuelan oil fields, after controlling their key airfields; or even all of the above.
Trump 2.0, totally bypassing the US Congress and of course the illegality of assassinating foreign leaders, is already drafting dodgy legal "justifications" to go after Maduro as a "narco-terrorist" - much to the delight of ghastly Nobel Prize 5th columnist Machado, the female Guaido.
Total psyops is in full effect - complete with intimidating B-52 and B-1 bombers and the deployment of aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and thousands of troops.
Venezuelans though are not impressed. Diego Sequera, from the excellent Mission Verdad, notes, "if you take how things are seen from here you get the feeling that nothing will happen. No social breakdown, no one's freaking out. Everyone is about their business looking for la plata with an end-year holiday mood."
Still, they have to run rings over Circus Ringmaster - who wants all that oil so bad (the takeover of natural resources is essential to maintain the Empire) and pathetic neo-con gusano Marco Rubio's only obsession in life: regime change in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua.
And that brings us, once again, to the insoluble Empire of Chaos drama. TACO Trump, even if his brain is not capable of conceptualizing it, may be coming to grips with the hard facts of life: he cannot "win" - or impose a "deal" - on the Russia-China strategic partnership.
On the contrary: he needs to find diversionist tactics to evade the fact he is being inflicted a massive strategic defeat in Ukraine (yes, it's his war now) while he simply does not have the cards (all made in China) to win a protracted trade-tariff-tech war against Beijing, as demonstrated in that G-2 in South Korea. Managed decoupling is already on.
Still, the supreme delusion of American military might persists, graphically incarnated by the clownish Secretary of Forever Wars. Can't harm Moscow or Beijing? Caracas will do.
Oh, that Shakespearean sound and fury signifying...nothing, as the Empire of Chaos devours itself by re-colonizing the vassal puppies (Europe), financial shakedown-style, while threatening/ bullying selected Global South latitudes.
Emmanuel Todd has summed it all up, succinctly. What to do when "this is indeed the first American strategic defeat on a global scale, in a context of massive deindustrialisation in the United States and difficult reindustrialisation", while "it is already too late to compete [with China] industrially."
Hence the vociferous, bullying Circus Ringmaster, without saying a word (a miracle, in his particular case) progressively hitting TACO-on-steroids territory when it comes to Russia-China.
That's our cue to the new Netflix series: the Empire of Rage lashing out, irrationally, against anyone, any nation, it deems weaker, a graphic demonstration of its massive resentment. Those fishing boats are full of narco-terrorists because I say so. Kill them all.
An extra danger is that the EUro-chihuahuas take a cue from this irrational drive to increase their Russophobic provocations inter-galactically. The only rational way to deal with it would be by Oreshniking them.
The mountains are high, but the Emperor is everywhere
A classic Chinese motto, repeated dynasty after dynasty, merrily states that "The mountains are high, and the Emperor is far away". Well, in our contemporary case, there's no mountain high enough - to borrow from Motown - and the all-seeing Emperor of Chaos, enabled by AI, is everywhere.
Yet even that is not enough to prevent him from collapsing inside his own schizophrenic bubble, unleashing Primal Fear into the intertwined plutocracies of Big Money, Big Oil and Big Tech.
Dystopia Central: it's not hard to draw the map of the deep, dark geostrategic void self-described "elites" plunged themselves in.
And that brings us to how - in which register - the Russian leadership is watching the show. No expectations: realism prevails.
There may be a Trump 2.0 escalation in Ukraine - or not. There may be a more devastating attack on Iran - or not. There may be a serious regime change attempt in Venezuela - and that one is a near certainty. Trump 2.0, after all - complete with Zionist oligarchs on backing vocals - is a privileged psycho-killer realm.
And then there's the ultimate chimera: de-dollarization - which is happening in practice, slowly but surely, without being named, in several domains. Only four months ago, the Circus Ringmaster was in panic: "BRICS was set up to hurt us; BRICS was set up to degenerate our dollar and take our dollar... off as the standard".
The panic is still there. So when in doubt - and when you can't strike Russia-China - the next "best" option is to strike another BRICS member. Demand capitulation from Iran. Or else. Tehran, as much as Caracas, is not impressed.
Chinese wisdom, once again, would solve the enigma: "Let him be strong, the breeze will blow over the hills; let him be arrogant, the bright moon will shine on the vast rivers."
It will be a very rough ride - to stare down the Empire of Chaos without letting it unleash Total Dementia, destabilizing Africa, West Asia, the Caribbean, everywhere, using the Syria al-Qaeda playbook (the former headchopper is to be received at the Oval Office soon).
Are China-Russia - and a great deal of the Global Majority - really ready? Call it an auspicious vow.