Putin’s Wagner Moment and the Need for a New International Relations Paradigm – Part II
In Part I, I discussed the Wagner mutiny, drawing heavily on the analysis of a pro-Russian commentator, Rolo Slavskiy, who nevertheless is inclined to view the mutiny primarily as farce. In part II, I’ll comment on the Putinista commentariat’s interpretation of events and then move to a wider discussion of what the Ukraine war means in a world in which globalism seeks to usurp nationalism.
The Putinista commentariat in the Great Freeset movement has demonstrated the futility of putting lipstick on a pig. David Craig’s observation that the Wagner mutiny “has strengthened Putin’s position” withers under the heat of its own glaring internal contradictions. The claim, on its face, is untenable before you even begin to deconstruct the flimsy ‘evidence’ that is provided to support it. That’s because Craig completely avoids addressing the embarrassing absurdity of an advanced industrial nation facing a military mutiny in the first place. Rather than unpick the causes of this surreal event, he starts from the premise that it is not the mutiny itself that matters (perhaps he thinks Russian mutinies are regular occurrences) but rather how the leadership tackles it when it happens.
Imagine a division of the US army marching on the Pentagon to depose the Secretary of Defence. Then imagine the mainstream media declaring that Biden was made stronger after the Canadian premier stepped in and brokered a ‘peace deal’ which saw all charges of treason against the mutineers being dropped. I wouldn’t put it past the MSM to make such a declaration, but those with any brains left would be howling with laughter at that proposition. How then can anyone argue with a straight face that a military mutiny in Russia, albeit a failed one, strengthens the leadership there?
Craig goes on to state that Putin will be celebrating his performance in this farce because he “faced down the mutiny and refused to take any phone calls from Prigozhin.” This ignores extremely embarrassing evidence of the Russian military standing down as Wagner advanced. It ignores the implications for Putin’s authority of being rescued by mediation from Belarus – probably more embarrassing for Putin than the attempted mutiny itself. As for the refusal to take phone calls, Craig has unwittingly decided to evoke the image of a teenage girl putting her boyfriend in the doghouse for flirting with her best friend, as opposed to the image of the leader of a nuclear-armed state competently handling an insurrection.
In his quick-fire bullet points of reasons for Putin having snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, Craig observes that “Putin’s people confiscated around $50 million in foreign currency and gold bars from the Wagner Group’s HQ.” Right. Because $50 million, which represents 0.06% of Russia’s $86.4 billion annual defence budget, is going to make a serious contribution to the war effort, assuming that this $50 million wasn’t immediately snaffled for personal use by the people who confiscated it.
The joke is on me if Craig was in fact satirising Putin’s pants-down moment as a masterful display of Machiavellian genius.
However, Pepe Escobar’s bombastic performance in the Putinista Olympics makes Craig’s overtures to Putin look positively feeble by comparison. Setting the tone with the trumpeting headline in LewRockwell.com – “Putin wins – on all counts” – Escobar establishes in the very first sentence the absolute imperative of throwing caution to the wind when analysing Putin’s greatness: “When the lightning of History strikes, better cut to the chase in our first draft.”
Here is one of the more ludicrous reasons he offers for Putin “mak[ing] an absolute, inter-galactic ass of the whole collective West MSM”:
“He – and the FSB – amassed a formidable list of traitors and 5th and 6th columnists, which will be properly dealt with.”
There’s a fair bit to unpack in this short sentence. First, rather like Craig, Escobar operates with a built-in assumption that, when dealing with Putin and Russia, what would normally be disastrous in the West is par for the course in Russian politics. Thus, a normal and productive day in the office at the top level of Russian politics involves amassing a list of all your traitors. Why a successful leader would accumulate a “formidable list of traitors” in the first place requires no lead-in or context. What’s important is the efficient and comprehensive listing of the thousands of traitors in a sturdy database and then dealing with them. Properly, I might add. You see, Escobar loves freedom and democracy so much, he gets aroused at the thought of a dictator dealing ‘properly’ with his inordinately long list of traitors…in order to restore freedom and democracy…to his dictatorship.
It's therefore unsurprising that Escobar is rhapsodic about how “good ol’ Luka prevented Russia from sliding into civil war in June 2023”, seemingly oblivious to the notion that narrowly avoiding civil war is not exactly the gold standard of performance to which you would hope to hold any successful national leader, dictator or not.
The only way to adequately convey Escobar’s comical and sycophantic stream of consciousness is to let it speak for itself:
“[Kyiv’s] “counter-offensive” remains teetering over the edge of a cliff, ready to kiss the black void. Putin winning on all counts implies the whole civilian population – and the military – engaged into preserving him and the Russian institutions, as well as perfecting them. There’s absolutely no nation anywhere across the collective West where we find this level of citizen support. Russian politics is a special animal. It works at the highest level and also at grassroots level – unlike in the West, where the norm is deep hatred between the elites and the people. Of course it should always be stressed it’s the less patriotic Russian oligarchs who run away every time something approaching The Longest Day takes place. For a few hours, the West was betting heavily on the dismemberment of Russia. Not now. And not in the foreseeable future. The succession is already being prepared, by Team Putin and selected patriotic oligarchs. Among the contenders, there’s a secret name that will stun everyone when it pops up. He’s still invisible in terms of public opinion, and works in the shadows. His name should remain secret for the time being….So Putin is stronger than ever. But everyone should always keep this in mind: the one thing he can’t forgive is betrayal.”
But there is actually one thing more disturbing than the above excerpt – Lew Rockwell’s decision to publish it.
So what’s my verdict on the charge that Escobar is on the Kremlin’s payroll of propagandists? Not guilty for the simple reason that Putin could not be so stupid as to think that such tactless, cringeworthy and unhinged drivel would serve as effective propaganda.
In summary, there are two bad choices being made by the alt media Freedom Movement in relation to the recent puzzling events in Russia. One is to paint the Wagner fiasco in the colours of the 5-D chess narrative, with no coherent or plausible explanation of the gains made by the alleged architects of this ‘brilliant’ 5-D chess move. Then again, perhaps I am ignoring the inherent nature of a 5-D chess move – its complexity cannot possibly be fathomed by mere mortals like me and its stratospheric ingeniousness may never be made manifest in my puny consciousness. The second, and worse, choice is to pretend that Putin being caught with his pants down is somehow a good look. This sentiment is rife among commentators in the independent media who, while rightly critical of NATO warmongering, have decided that Putin can do no wrong.
What does it all mean?
As you may have deduced by now, I don’t share John Mearsheimer’s somewhat blasé dismissal of the half-hearted mutiny as something that doesn’t weaken Putin’s authority. Putin manages an oligarchy, and a spat between two of these oligarchs resulted in a PMC marching on Moscow with the aim of deposing the Kremlin’s minister of defence, the loss of Russian equipment and lives and a de-escalation mediated by a satellite state. I can’t even see how it’s a neutral event. It’s a low-point for Putin and the Kremlin.
So does the Wagner fiasco signal a turning point in the war in favour of Ukraine and NATO? I doubt that very much. I am inclined to favour Mearsheimer’s assessment that the fundamental gaping disparity in military strength between Ukraine and Russia means that Ukraine cannot ‘win’ this conflict, even with NATO throwing billions at it. Where those billions are going is largely for another essay, but the US/NATO empire is run by a kleptocratic oligarchy as venal as Russia’s.
However, Russia’s superior military strength has not translated into a comprehensive victory nearly 18 months into the war, so you have to ask whether NATO’s military support has achieved the stalemate it was looking for. Given its military superiority, Russia’s failure to bring Ukraine to the negotiating table with Russia dictating terms raises serious questions about Russia’s prosecution of the war.
If nothing else, Russia’s failure to dictate events on the battlefield and this latest Wagnerian farce have made me realise how urgent it is to formulate a whole new international relations paradigm that takes into account what we’ve learnt in the past three years about how the world really works. When I first encountered Mearsheimer’s exposition of the causes of the war, it made perfect sense. It fits my worldview of the evil US/NATO empire and how the prospects for world peace would increase exponentially the sooner it hit a BRICS wall. Now Mearsheimer’s lectures seem stale and desperately in need of revision.
I think there are three possible international relations paradigms through which to view the NATO/Ukraine/Russia triangle.
Let’s call the first paradigm the Classic Geopolitical Paradigm. It represents the classic realist’s view of great power politics as elucidated by John Mearsheimer. This states that the US has irresponsibly and needlessly provoked another great power, Russia, which is responding to an existential threat in the way any great power would. Operating under this paradigm, the exhortation of the EU’s chief ghoul to “double down on [its] support for Ukraine” is a reiteration of NATO’s goal to sap Russia of all its strength, sacrificing the entire Ukrainian population in the process if needs be.
Furthermore, under this paradigm, the Kremlin understands NATO’s objective, and it’s reasonable to assume that, in the process of achieving primary military objectives regarding annexation of territory and reducing Ukraine to a dysfunctional rump state, they are also trying to beat NATO at its own game. In other words, Russia might be gambling that NATO will exhaust itself before it exhausts Russia. Which may explain why Putin chose to put PMCs at the forefront of the fight and why Russia is dragging it out – Ukraine gets thoroughly dismembered and ceases to be a threat to Russia for the foreseeable future while NATO gaily empties the public purses of its allies as it sends hundreds of billions into a black hole.
So far, it has cost at least $113 billion to the American taxpayer, not counting the EU’s contribution, and possibly the loss of 200,000 thousand lives of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and 40,000 civilians dead. It’s anyone’s guess as to how much of that loot has found its way into the war machine and how much of it is part of a money laundering operation. Tucker Carlson in February 2023 estimated the number to be $200 billion but Newsweek was quick to ‘fact-check’ it back to $113 billion. So the number is anywhere between $113 billion and $200 billion. The former number exceeds Russia’s annual military budget by around $28 billion.
Meanwhile, Russia has taken 23% of Ukrainian territory by Mearsheimer’s estimates, and may end up with 43% in the final analysis.
If this is a war of attrition, perhaps Russia is winning, but no-one except Russia really knows the Russian casualties.
The second paradigm invites us to ask who else, other than the obvious national interests at play, might be influencing global strategy and decision-making. Iain Davis’ lucid representation of global policy formulation and implementation is the starting point for appreciating that global policy is not dictated by national governments. Under this paradigm, national governments are in fact relegated to the role of policy enforcers. From top to bottom, the hierarchy consists of:
Policy makers (e.g. Bank for International Settlements, central banks, Council on Foreign Relations, World Economic Forum);
Policy distributors (e.g. UN, WHO, IMF);
Policy Enforcers (e.g. national governments, scientific authorities like CDC, MHRA);
Policy propagandists (mainstream media, the Censorship Industrial Complex and an ecosystem of information warfare specialists like 77th Brigade);
Policy subjects (you and me – the plebs).
The top four layers are mediated by concentrations of wealth and power variously named globalists, global capital, the global oligarchy or the global corporatocracy. All the names have one thing in common – they recognise that the operations of this power structure are global. Using this policy structure, globalists have succeeded in perpetrating the greatest deception of all time. They have usurped national governments and yet are not elected by the people of those governments. They demand the supreme power of global governance without having been elected by the people of the world. They say they obey ‘international law’, a law created by themselves for themselves. They are unelected, unaccountable and yet all-powerful. And the world is only beginning to wake up to this totalitarian power grab.
The influence of these power structures manifests itself in international relations as the second paradigm – the Globalist Geopolitical Paradigm.
The third paradigm invites us to accept that things are often more complicated than they seem. It admits a hybrid of the Classic and Globalist paradigms under which globalist and national interests compete. Globalists want a world in which national interests are reduced to fighting over whether a food manufacturer in France has the right to call their pies Cornish pasties. They’re getting there but they haven’t yet succeeded.
To what extent is the Globalist paradigm in operation in the Russia/Ukraine/NATO conflict? I think a lot more than people who want a Great Freeset are willing to concede. Russia’s Ministry of Defence is run by a corrupt criminal oligarch, not a Russian patriot. One of the Kremlin’s most effective military units in the war – the Wagner Group PMC – is owned and operated by an oligarch. It’s my view that Putin paid a price for opting to use oligarchic power in the form of PMCs to fight the war and failing to manage the resultant power dynamics.
You could view ‘the Kremlin’ as a synecdoche for the complex machinery that administers Russian oligarchic politics. In this sense, the Kremlin, like all Western governments, is an administrative hub of the global oligarchy. So, the national entities of ‘Ukraine’ and ‘Russia’ are, to some extent, figments. They are not complete illusions but rather the voice of the people being strangled by the global oligarchy.
Needless to say, the West is also run by the global oligarchy, and it is intertwined economically and culturally with the more Western liberal wing of Russia’s oligarchy. If the global oligarchy wishes to maintain its grip on global affairs it can’t afford to cause too much irritation to the Russian oligarchy by curtailing the benefits of its membership in the global ‘family’. This would threaten a nationalist backlash, and nationalism is the enemy of the global oligarchy since it fractures global control and power.
To the extent that Western oligarchs, Russian oligarchs and Ukrainian oligarchs are all cashing in on the war, it will continue. The military industrial complex on both sides is obviously making out like bandits. Having just seen Big Tech and Big Pharma stiffing the taxpayer out of billions with the covid scam, Big Oil has muscled in on the wealth transfer scam via an artificially hiked energy price blamed on the Ukraine war. And while Ukrainian and Russian bodies are being ground down in the battlefield, Ukraine is being used as an incubator for the Fourth Industrial Revolution with all manner of digital enslavement experiments, including Ukraine’s CBDC, being rolled out at pace despite the bloodshed.
In the eyes of the psychopaths who view war as an opportunity, the easiest way to catalyse economic reconstruction is through wartime destruction. The US Department of State in April 2023 proudly announced its facilitation of the fascist public-private partnership to “rejuvenate Ukraine’s economy”. According to the State Department:
“The Ukrainian government has published a 10-year reconstruction plan that encompasses 850 wide-ranging projects requiring an estimated $750 billion, while the World Bank in its latest report estimates reconstruction costs of $411 billion over the next 10 years.”
Meanwhile BlackRock and JP Morgan have signed agreements with Ukraine to “coordinat[e] the efforts of all potential investors and participants in the reconstruction [of Ukraine]”. 28% of Ukraine’s farmland is owned by oligarchs and global agribusinesses, and that is set to increase under a war-time sell-out of the economy.
All of this is not to deny that the nationalist part of Russia is seeking to address what it perceives as a threat from Ukraine moving closer to NATO. What I think it means is that both the globalists in the West and the nationalists in Russia needed a war, and both sides will get what they want out of it.
There is a fantasy in the freedom movement that has cast Russia in the role of bulwark to the Great Reset. It dreams of Russia giving NATO and its WEF chums a bloody nose, when in fact Russia is more advanced in the Great Reset agenda than most of the West. Russia to the rescue is beginning to look as comical as a bare-chested Putin on horseback. Perhaps Putin is no more in charge of Russia’s affairs than any Western puppet is in charge of their captured governments. We must ask to what extent he is a manager, an enforcer, or a goon for the global oligarchy along with all the other goons in the West like Biden, Trudeau and Sunak. He may appear to be at loggerheads with his counterparts, but they will all fall in line when the global oligarchy calls time on the Ukraine chapter of the global power play.
Why am I not worried about a nuclear exchange being precipitated by this conflict? Because I can’t see how the global oligarchy would benefit from it, and they are the ones dictating global relations even if they still compete with national interests. They benefit far more from the fear of nuclear war. An actual nuclear exchange would introduce a level of unpredictability that they can’t live with. Biden, Putin, Zelensky, Prigozhin, Von der Leyen and Stoltenberg are all putting in fine performances. I won’t try to predict a timeframe for the end of the war, but it will end when the real directors of the movie say “cut”; when everyone has got what they want. Until then, the awful show must go on.