Atomic submarines treaty will be prey to close-in China eavesdropping
The Ukraine geopolitical counter weight gave the CCP the opportunity to cause it to be known that China was reinforcing its already troubling presence in Oceania with a base in the Solomon Islands only recently wrested away from an alignment with Taiwan.
The installations in the Solomon Islands will be ready to monitor Australia’s pending fleet of atomic submarines constructed and deployed under the AUKUS alliance and which will represent the allied-controlled major strike force in the southern hemisphere.
Guadalcanal (pictured) the main island, was a critical focus of the defence of Australia during World War 2 and is often considered the decisive battle in the Pacific theatre.
The CCP’s pressing strategy remains to shift attention from the Indo Pacific region and back where the CCP wants it which is in Nato’s backyard in Europe.
The Beijing Olympics provided the ceremonial cover to crystallize this. The war would be over before Nato had even had time to convene the meetings to implements sanctions.
Beijing would anyway underwrite the Russia exports simply by agreeing to take the output should anything go wrong with this scheme.
Even if the war dragged on for months rather than weeks, the United States and German reliance on hydrocarbons from Russia would continue.
The Eastern bloc always understood the way in which governments in the United States and Europe put tactical electoral considerations ahead of defence strategy.
In less than a year the United States had converted itself from an energy exporting nation into a major importing one. An unanswered conundrum is why president Putin abruptly curtailed this allied compounding reliance on Russian hydrocarbons by invading Ukraine.
Inspired leaks reveal that Washington’s belief in its shared common purpose view of the CCP was so enduring and deep set that it approached Beijing to be peacemaker, honest broker over Ukraine.
Seemingly Beijing went along with this asking typically in all such dealings of this nature for more and still more data and giving as much weight to what was undisclosed as was disclosed. One piece of data passed on would have been the strong conviction within the United States military to the effect that the war would indeed be a short one.
When the vaunted and much publicised and increasingly soft-looking Nato sanctions eventually cut in the CCP will take over as the dominant customer for Russia’s hydrocarbons and will duly set the price to suit itself.
Had he remained rules based and within his own constituted frontier president Putin could have at least tripled the value to Russia of this Nato dependency. He had a clear market run to the next United States presidential election at the very least.
CCP encouragement stands out as an obvious reason. The CCP knew that the IGOs along with many NGOs were determined to keep the United States and the United Kingdom as the new avatars of political aversion to hydrocarbons.
They were prize additions to the existing captive market held in line by these same IGOs and NGOs, already featuring such energy dependent jewels as Germany and Italy.
The United States in its new national security self-eroding way had already introduced and thus supercharged for Russia’s immense benefit reverse elasticity for hydrocarbons. Demand increased and so did the price paid to Russia.
The more hydrocarbon prices rose so did demand. The reason demand and thus price consistently and in harness rose was because of the artificial shortage created by the White House
The CCP emerges in one of its favoured win-win positions. When the allied sanctions eventually cut in it becomes the obvious disposal market for Russian hydrocarbons.
If the allied politically-driven campaign into electrical vehicles accelerates then China will similarly become the disposal market for the Russian primary commodities required for these also. Nickel is but one obvious example.
President Putin it is said blames the United States for all and everything that goes wrong. So why did he deliberately ignore Napoleon’s dictum about the folly of interrupting an enemy while he is making a mistake?
In this case the mistake was the United States deliberately and even painstakingly abandoning its central strategy of energy self-sufficiency and in doing so putting itself in the hands of the very dictatorships it is pledged to defy.
In the resulting commotion in Europe China takes advantage of the diversion and digs itself deeper into the Indo Pacific.
Shadowy Kremlin adviser may be answer to West taken by surprise riddle
When John Kerry on learning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine announced that he hoped it would not interfere with his global climate change plans many were aghast. “I hope President Putin will help us to stay on track with respect to what we need to do for the climate.”
There are some signs that the former Democratic presidential nominee’s statement needs to be examined even more closely than it already has been.
The reason is that president Biden’s climate envoy may have believed that he was on one side of a covenant that overruled military intervention in the deeper interest of controlling man made distortions to the climate.
John Kerry is also a former United States secretary of state and his belief that he was party to any covenant, pact, might reasonably rest on his own belief in his Russian counterpart.
Ruslan Edelgeriev (pictured above) is a central figure in this particular drama and who has been ignored in the West which is all the more surprising bearing in mind his obvious status.
His role from the start was designed to mirror the West’s well intentioned attitudes to climate. His candid attitude dovetailed into that of the West’s climate advocates, notably those of Kerry himself. Ruslan Edelgeriev had a one-on-one with John Kerry at Glasgow.
“We agreed to continue cooperation after Glasgow, including on methane and the satellite monitoring of greenhouse emissions," the Russian climate envoy told Tass.
John Kerry told Tass that the meeting with his Russian counterpart was “excellent.”
Ruslan Edelgeriev has a solid and diverse background in Chechen academia garnering degrees in law, and farm products processing technology.
Prior to this he did his conscript service in the Russian military followed by ten years in the security service, the FSB. Now his career took off. He became the Chechen deputy minister of agriculture. Then the big jump to deputy prime minister of the Chechen Republic followed by four years as premier.
In 2018 he took over the climate envoy job, and thus became cemented in as a member of president Putin’s innermost circle.
This was the man that president Putin had in waiting just to meet the John Kerry type that he knew would emerge as the standard bearer for the Democrat flagship binding belief, the climate one.
Indeed, John Kerry’s Roman Catholicism would have blended with his Russian counterpart’s role as a family man complete with six children.
The duo had at least two face-to-face meetings. John Kerry also had a phone call with his counterpart’s boss, president Putin himself. An activist since the 1960s and now fixated on climate John Kerry could not have refrained from rhapsodising about the great future that lay before Russia and the US in shared climate ethics.
A theme in this would have been in the US side pointing out to the Russians the degree to which they were even on track to being the beneficiary of global warming as their vast Arctic territories unfroze and opened up to agriculture, along with the ports needed to ship the cornucopia to a needy world.
John Kerry’s mind we may assume had become cleansed of the awful occasion when as US Foreign Secretary he stood by while Russia not waiting for the Arctic to heat up simply grabbed instead the Crimea and its warm water ports.
The Atlantic alliance consistently gave the impression of being untroubled by the gathering indications that Russia intended to reabsorb the remaining Ukraine and by any means;
The lead up period was characterised notably in the United States and Great Britain by an ever increasing revivalist vilification and condemnation of oil and gas.
This transatlantic chorus increased in crescendo as the indications of the Ukraine invasion grew more obvious. The possibility must be considered that among the choir masters there was a belief that the problem had been taken care of.
Was this a belief that in the transcending common and higher interest of climate cooperation there had been concluded a non-aggression pact? John Kerry’s reaction to the invasion in which he trusted that president Putin would keep climate “on track” reinforces this sense of priority of a fixed if undisclosed objective amid the turbulence.
Electorally in the United States climate consistently emerges as the common preoccupation of the coastal elites. This is why the White House postures that the surge in energy prices due to the war in Europe is actually beneficial. Why? Because it compels the introduction of new energy alternatives.
Neither is this confined to the United States. The outcome of Australia’s pending general election shows signs of being decided on the same doctrine and by the same type of people.
The Atlantic alliance remained consistently blind to the nuances of this war notably for example that the completion of the Beijing Olympics inaugurated the start of it. A reluctance to factor in Ruslan Edelgeriev is another example.
Squeamish Officials Confront Clash of energy supply versus altruism choice in South Seas
The closure of the Marsden Point oil refinery underlines the success of New Zealand’s Labour government in capping its own energy industry.
The enthusiasm of the incoming government was demonstrated when in it immediately announced legislatively enforced cut backs in oil and gas exploration and production.
The fact that this proclamation was made to a gathering of university students was itself indicative of the target voter market that Labour intended to lock in.
A doctrinally be-dazzled mainstream media skirts around New Zealand’s developing energy dependence symbolised by closing the Marsden Point Refinery, the nation’s only such installation and the keystone investment in the nation’s quite recent industrialisation era.
Disclosures meanwhile from international energy regulatory authorities to the effect that the government’s de-industrialisation countervailing offset emission trading certificates are losing in global markets their fungibility, tradeable value, was discretely buried.
Then came Ukraine. This demonstrated how an ideologically-triggered reliance on foreign energy supplies placed the once energy independent world into the grasp of the world’s most vicious despot suppliers.
This has led to a clash of cultures in New Zealand which is simply too awful for anyone to point out. It is the collision between the all-embracing climate ideology and traditional humanitarian ideals.
New Zealand’s official politico-media class hysteria over climate rests on the determination of international bodies to frighten the nation. They do so by calculating the sparsely-populated nation’s contribution on a per-head basis.
Even this produces a world contribution percentage that can barely be expressed even in fractions of a single decimal point.
Also smoothed over in the interest of ideology is that most of this is from grazing animal methane which is a short lived gas.
US cabinet members insist that the Russian supply embarrassment is merely an awkward interruption in its Net Zero policy, its real and true objective.
In New Zealand which has long pointed the way to the most purist climate ideology the cost of this same ideology is forecast by the respected NZIER consultancy as $28 billion.
This is similarly brushed off. So is the effect on Taranaki the nation’s energy region which also happens to be the only industrially diversified district.
Moscow’s embassy in Wellington will have used New Zealand as a Western-attitude sampler, bellwether, in all this.
The embassy is the most effective of foreign legations in the capital ensuring that its officials who are adept with colloquial English gauge personally opinions and that these same officials enjoy a longevity of service in order to cultivate their contacts.
They will have reported for example how New Zealand’s very large number of officials with job descriptions involving climate ideology become so unnerved at any suggestion from international organisations that New Zealand is somehow not pulling its weight globally, that it is failing to meet its “targets.”
These international organisations constantly urge these same officials to be ready to get their climate agenda “back on the table.”
At first this priority was to be resumed as soon as the Covid emergency subsided
Now it is once the Ukraine war, an authentic crisis, has receded from the public consciousness.
More worrying still is New Zealand’s contribution to the overheated evangelical fervour emanating from the COP26 convocation in Glasgow.
This had the effect of showcasing to the Russians especially the silliness that had overtaken Great Britain. Boris Johnson radiated the impression that diets had become Britain’s priority and that a Net Zero scheme had become the once energy-exporting nation’s overall and overriding strategy.
The Russians saw how there was no effort to manage the expectations from COP26. They saw how Boris Johnson’s climate fervency was a by-product of his own recent domestic rearrangements.
Then Johnson became wrapped in the kind of backsliding-in-high-places dottiness that from time overwhelms the Establishment in Britain. This time it was who had been partying-and-where during the Chinese plague lockdowns?
This, on top of the grip that United States progressives have on the White House now combined to reassure the Russians of their own grip on the West’s energy requirements.
The Russians also continued to wonder after the uncoordinated evacuation of Kabul why those responsible kept their jobs, and even appeared to flourish in them.
The ensuing Ukraine war has emerged as a direct challenge to hitherto sacrosanct new western ideology which in its way has proved to be as enduring and as indelible as anything communism once engendered among its adherents.
Nations in the political grip of it are now required to make up their minds over which cruel despot will fill in their energy shortfalls.
There becomes introduced a clash of cultures, one that the politico-media class deems so sensitive that they can only dance around it.
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242