Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Canada. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

I'm Gonna MAGA You, Baby │ Pepe Escobar

It’s the greatest show on earth – unleashing a double bill of New Paradigm and Manifest Destiny on crack. We are the greatest. We will rock you – in every sense. We will crush you. We will take whatever we want, because we can. And if you wanna walk away from the US dollar, we will destroy you. BRICS, we’re coming to get ya. Trump 2.0 – a mix of professional wrestling and MMA played in a giant planetary cage – is in da house, starting next Monday.

 A larger-than-life PsyOp to change the narrative.

Trump 2.0 aims to be in the driving seat of the global financial system, in control of the world’s oil trade and LNG supply, and on strategic media platforms. Trump 2.0 is gearing up to be an extended exercise in the capacity to hurt The Other. Any Other. Hostile takeovers – and blood on the tracks. That’s how we “negotiate.” Under Trump 2.0, global tech infrastructure must run on US software, not just on the profit front, but also on the spy front. AI data chips must be American only. AI data centers must be controlled by America only. “Free trade” and “globalization”? That’s for losers. Welcome to neo-imperial, techno-feudal mercantilism – powered by US tech supremacy.
 
Trump’s National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, has named a few of the targets ahead: Greenland, Canada, assorted cartels, the Arctic, the Gulf of “America,” oil and gas, and rare earth minerals. All in the name of strengthening “national security.” A key plank: total control of the “Western Hemisphere.” Monroe Doctrine 2.0 – actually the Donroe Doctrine. America First, Last, and Always.

Why the Chessboard Needs to Be Rejigged
Well, let’s delve a bit into pesky material imperatives. The Empire of Chaos faces a humongous debt, owed to the usual suspect loan sharks, that may only be—partially—repaid through selected export surpluses. This would imply re-industrialization—a long, costly affair—and securing smooth military supply chains. Where will the resource base come from for this Sisyphean task? Washington simply cannot rely on Chinese exports and rare earths. The chessboard needs to be rejigged—with trade and tech unified under US unilateral, monopoly control.
 
Plan A, so far, was to simultaneously confront Russia and China: the two top BRICS and key vectors of Eurasia integration. China’s strategy, since the start of the millennium, has been to trade resources for infrastructure, developing Global South markets as China itself keeps developing. Russia’s strategy has been to help nations recover their sovereignty; actually helping nations to help themselves on the sustainable development front. Plan A against the concerted geoeconomic and geopolitical strategies of the Russia-China strategic partnership miserably failed. What has been attempted by the ghastly, exiting US administration has generated serial, massive blowbacks.
 
Next best option: Plunder the Chihuahuas.

So, it’s time for Plan B: Looting the allies. They are already dominated Chihuahuas anyway. The exploitation show must go on. And there are plenty of Chihuahuas available to be exploited. Canada has loads of fresh water, plus oil and mining wealth. The Canadian business class, in fact, has always dreamed of deep integration with the Empire of Chaos. Trump 2.0 and his team have been careful not to name names.
 
When it comes to the Arctic as a crucial, evolving battlefield, there may be a vague allusion to the Northwest Passage, but never a mention of what really matters: the Northern Sea Routethe Russian denomination; the Chinese call it the Arctic Silk Road. That’s one of the key connectivity corridors of the future. The Northern Sea Route encompasses at least 15% of the world’s unexplored oil and 30% of the world’s unexplored natural gas. Greenland is smack in the middle of this New Great Game—capable of supplying years of uranium, as much oil as Alaska (bought from Russia in 1867), plus rare earths—not to mention providing useful real estate for missile defense and offense. Washington has been trying to grab Greenland from Denmark since 1946. There’s a deal with Copenhagen in place guaranteeing military control—mostly naval. Now Greenland is being revamped as the ideal US entry point into the Arctic Great Game against Russia.

At the St. Petersburg forum last June, I had the privilege of following an exceptional roundtable on the Northern Sea Route: that’s an integral part of Russia’s 21st-century development project, focused on commercial navigation—“We need more icebreakers!”—and bound to surpass Suez and Gibraltar in the near future. Slightly over 50,000 Greenland residents—which already enjoy autonomy, especially vis-à-vis the EU—would more than accept a full Danish exit; Copenhagen actually abandoned them in 1951. Greenlanders will love to profit from vast US investments. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov went straight to the point: “The first step is to listen to the Greenlanders”—comparing it to how Russia listened to the residents of Crimea, Donbass, and Novorossiya vis-à-vis Kiev.


What Trump 2.0 actually wants from Greenland is crystal clear: total militarization; privileged access to rare earths; and the commercial exclusion of Russia and Chinese companies. Chinese military expert Yu Chun noted that “soon, the long-desired ‘golden waterway’ of the Arctic Ocean is expected to open, allowing ships to traverse the Pacific Ocean and sail along the northern coasts of North America and Eurasia into the Atlantic Ocean.” As the Northern Sea Route is “a key element of Sino-Russian cooperation,” it’s inevitable that the US’s “strategic vision is to prevent the establishment of a ‘golden waterway’ between China, Russia, and Europe by controlling Greenland.”

Freak Out on the Chihuahua Front
On the wider Chihuahua front, activity is frantic. Assorted Davos/Deep State-linked elites across NATOstan—from Europe to Canada—are in the process of being replaced by new, Trump 2.0-affiliated elites. That’s indissociably linked to the Looting the Allies strategy: the further destruction of the vassal EU economy to strengthen the heart of the Empire. In Germany, the AfD’s Alice Weidel—pragmatic, intellectually capable—offers a quite intriguing perspective. She is stressing, on the record, that Germany needs to restart importing raw materials and cheap natural gas—let’s reopen Nord Stream—from Russia.

That opens the tantalizing possibility that Trump and his factotum Elon Musk fully realize that Germany is worthless to the US as a de-industrialized backwater—even under the overall framework of a hardcore neoliberal asset-stripping offensive. Of course, Trump 2.0 will extract a hefty price for Germans to get a revitalized nation back.

Trump 2.0 at least holds the
dubiousmerit of a relatively realistic reading of the chessboard; Russia, India, China—the Primakov triangle—as well as Iran have become too powerful to be looted. So, the next best option is: Plunder the Chihuahuas. The blowing up of Nord Stream, as ordered by the Biden crime family—as detailed by Sy Hersh—was a gleaming starter.

The future of NATO in the Great America project is now up for grabs. Gotta pay up—or else: the contribution of each member nation should go up to 5% of GDP instead of the current 2%. Talk about a 150% price hike. Incidentally, Trump so far has not even muttered the nonsensical expression “Indo-Pacific.” For all practical purposes, Trump is telling NATO to take a hike. In the event of a double NATOstan annexation of Canada and Greenland, the US may even be able to match Russia’s resource base. Arguably, that’s the key rationale for unleashing this New Great Game. Forget “multipolarity.” BRICS, take note.

The most intriguing side plot is, of course, Elon Musk. Trump badly needs Musk’s massive social media/propaganda digital megaphone. Simultaneously, on the Chihuahua front, the platinum sidekick wants to profit from a Europe capable of assessing enough energy, raw materials, and loads of consumers with solid purchasing power. The facts on the ground already spell out the “rules-based international order” being replaced in a flash by a no-rules international disorder. After all, international law has already been abolished by the Empire of Chaos itself (that’s bipartisan)—when it comes to illegal, unilateral sanctions, theft of financial assets, or legitimization of genocide and head-chopping “moderate rebels.”

Trump 2.0 will be nothing but enforcing a de facto phenomenon: a post-historical disorder. End of History—that was always for suckers. All of this incendiary chain of events is on a roll essentially because of one single reason: the Empire of Chaos lost the proxy war in Ukraine. What remains to be discussed is the modality of the surrender. So, it’s no wonder Trump had to come up with a seductive, but still fraught-with-danger, larger-than-life PsyOp to imperatively change the narrative.