European Union

When the European Union as a political institution was established on 1 November 1993 with the Maastricht Treaty, following the already established European Common Market, the intention to make it a political prosthesis of the will of the United Kingdom and the United States of America was unequivocal. In fact, the respective political and military leaders participated in the foundation, in particular the then leaders of NATO, a military entity that was the necessary precondition for the ‘New World’ to control the ‘Old World’.

With G7 “leadership” mired in a sticky swamp of intellectual shallowness, predictably the only agenda in colonized Japan was more sanctions on Russia.

The EU, with much ado, this week announced the NINTH sanctions package on Russia. What is it about sanctions the EU doesn’t ‘get’? Russia has comfortably survived Western financial sanctions (even the fervently anti-Putin Economist concurs). Perhaps it is the tech sanctions which ultimately will ‘strangle Russia’. Good luck with waiting that one out! Who ends up strangling whom?

We now have an embarrassment of ‘wars’ of which paradoxically, Ukraine is perhaps of lesser strategic import – though it does retain significant symbolic content. A ‘flag’ around which narratives are spun and support rallied.

Yes, there are no less than five overlapping and interlinked ‘wars’ underway – and they need to be clearly differentiated to be well understood.

These last weeks have witnessed several epochal shifts: The Samarkand Summit; the OPEC+ decision to reduce the oil production of member nations by a (headline) two million barrels per day as of next month; and President Erdogan’s explicit declaration that “Russia and Turkey are together; working together”.

Bedrock U.S. allies, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, UAE, India, South Africa, Egypt and groupings such as OPEC+ are taking a major step toward autonomy, and toward the coalescence of non–Western nations into a coherent bloc – acting to its own interests and doing politics ‘its own way’.