Breaking Anglo-Saxon Hegemony Over Eastern Europe

First gradually, then suddenly

Must a political union be named to exist? Must formal mechanisms of power be enumerated in order to accept they exist? Or can we observe the unity of policy and alliance between the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States and name it the Anglosphere? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglosphere) Could we call NATO an Anglo-Saxon power, as did Putin? (https://www.reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-putin-nordstream-idAFS8N2Z80FZ) Is that a fair characterization given Brexit from the European Union bifurcated the Anglos from the Saxons? From a 'Russia is its own civilization' point of view, it probably is.

To draw from Paul Ricoeur, our national false consciousness must be demythologized. (http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-94222016000400011) We are not members of national entities, but rather, of treaty organizations. Treaties between nations are joint unions of their special interests. How can we differentiate treaties that form a common good and those which serve to entrench special interests with privileges? In state actions, which inevitably serve one faction's interests over another. How is it possible that professional cadres from every major Western country started issuing homogeneous social and economic policy? Special interest unions invisible to the voting public that act in coordination. Whether it's the British Royalty, the City of London, the World Economic Forum, the Washington Consensus, G-7, G-20, or some other elite club that creates peer association between various national elites, they do so at the expense of the national interests these elites are supposed to represent. The end result is a loss of meaningful sovereignty for the nationals they purportedly serve. This is the genesis of the war in Ukraine: European and American elites were more interested in absorbing Ukraine than in considering the interests of their constituents.

World War I decapitalized Britain. They spent over $35 billion dollars on the war, (https://ww1hull.com/the-financial-cost-of-ww1/) back when gold was $20 /t oz. It's $2000 today, so Britain spent $3.5 trillion worth of gold on World War I. A lot of that money went to the United States and since Britain's main export item to the US was capital (insurance and loans), it made for an unbridgeable trade deficit and led to permanent loss. (https://www.nber.org/digest/jan05/economics-world-war-i) But Britain had something more valuable than gold: it had the English language and its symbolic legacy. To this day, most premium products sold to middle-brow Americans use a British accent. British royals married Americans. British banks and insurance companies used their existing ties with New York and global markets to serve as credit arbitrageurs. This eventually grew and the profitable Eurodollar market which forked from this new business model cemented the relationship even more. Britain marketed American credit around the world as aggressively as it had traded its own. By replacing British investors with American investors, Britain kept the financial structure of its empire. America had to follow this financial logic and defend its investments abroad. This is what has led to imperial America. There are too many financial special interests around the world that must be defended and only a combined Anglophone world has power sufficient to project to enforce contracts and treaties. British treaties with Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (ANZAC), have kept the Anglophone world unified in a partial political union: decentralized, but incentivized to cooperate. Post WW2, the British-American relationship was called “The Special Relationship” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Relationship_(United_Kingdom%E2%80%93United_States). A relationship that no single President, like Barack Obama, could break. (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36084672) (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/14/barack-obama-delivers-parting-snub-to-special-relationship-with/). So when Russian political discourse lumps the Anglo nations together, it's with more consideration than a dismissive, 'all English speakers are the same.'

By referencing Saxon powers, Putin differentiates between the European Union and Germany. This in itself is an assertion that Germany dominates the European Union, whose members have suffered from the Nord Stream attack and its industrial consequences and yet continue to mostly act in unison against Russia. We can see how information control in the West is almost complete in the way even last week the New York Times was seriously claiming 'we don't know who attacked Nord Stream' (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-sabotage-theories.html) with a straight face. (https://countercurrents.org/2023/04/cias-nord-stream-story-absurd-seymour-hersh/) This seamless coordination of policy between the Anglo and Saxon powers in service of NATO, its military union, is something only a political chimera could achieve. There is even another deeper meaning behind Putin's statement, re: Anglo-Saxon powers: recognizing the two as a joint force is a recognition of massive empires working against Russia. Russia is presented like this big bully, when in fact it's outnumbered and outproduced. Russia covers less land area than the Anglophone powers. The disparity is only bigger when Saxon power is included. Putin efficiently communicates to domestic and international counterparts his perception of the situation. This is why Russia is hesitant to escalate. Personally, I think Putin does not want to escalate in a Belarus or Lithuania scenario as I outlined here:

Belarus As Proxy War Weapon Against NATO

However, there are others that may prefer escalation. Perhaps Putin is not one of these 'escalate to de-escalate' types, but Putin does not control the entirety of his side of the Iron Triangle. We have seen other siloviki in the background (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60573261):

The Iron Triangle Is Back

And we have seen that his ally, Shoigu, may have been targeted by the FSB (or GRU, since he's 'just an engineer' and not a 'real' military man), as I suspect:

Poisons Slow And Fast: Gambits Against Politically Inconvenient People

So there may not be as much unity as the West thinks, but not as much disunity either. It's quite possible that Putin is 'Good Cop' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_cop,_bad_cop) and that the bad cops have a less realistic assessment of Russia's capabilities.

Putin has been patient and will continue to be patient. In order to take Ukraine intact he can't break the place. Kiev has already attacked the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/ukrainian-cleric-court-amid-dispute-kyiv-monastery-98286881)(https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-orthodox-worshippers-gather-kyiv-monastery-eviction-looms-2023-03-29/) and continues to act in a manner that any reasonable, unbiased person would consider similar to Nazis (https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/17/xuxk-m17.html). Even though most Orthodox churches complied with a nationalist agenda and broke from the Russian Orthodox Church (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moscow%E2%80%93Constantinople_schism). As Ukrainian combat veterans return from the front, they are going to be Russia's biggest allies. Their aspirations for a better life were abused by the Anglo-Saxon powers. Do you think after seeing your country trashed by disastrous leadership and after being kidnapped and sent to the front line with almost no training, do you think a guy who survives that and comes back to Kharkiv, Kiev, or Lviv is going to be a friend of the regime?

“Yeah, just send me back out again. I want to keep trying to die for you guys.” Do you think he's going to be easy to kidnap next time? Fascism started after WW1 vets decided the political class used them. Disgruntled vets are not an easy political force to control, and people have oppositional psychology to things that hurt them. So I expect that many war veterans will become Russia sympathetic. They have seen what extreme Ukrainian nationalism has done to their lives. Russia seeks to reabsorb Ukraine back into Russia. A more hawkish approach makes this harder.

If one looks at the post-USSR as feudal Russia, then enforcing such a strict 'international' standard to boundaries is as non-durable as a Sudetenland or Rhineland partition. As Machiavelli makes the point, these feudal countries are harder to unify, but harder to conquer. If Ukrainian national identity was so real, then the dissolution of Ukraine would have been no more complex or violent than that of Czechoslovakia. This 'imperial' structure (per Machiavelli's standard) is just a class-overload (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python-method-overloading/) atop a feudal one. This is why it was on one hand easy for the Anglo-Saxon powers to control the central government, but difficult for them to control the regions. And let's not forget that Ukraine is so corrupt, it was quite easy for the West to compromise their elite.

One Trillion Dollars In 2023: How Russia's Military Came To Outspend The United States Part 2

When we look at the coalition of forces arrayed against Russia in Ukraine, one of the main advantages that Russia has is that NATO has started this war and there is low enthusiasm to fight it outside Washington, Poland, and Clown World. (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Clown+World) It's essential that Russia keeps the coalition's efforts smaller than Russia's own, so that it can successfully absorb Ukraine.

War is negatively correlated to trade and China is the top industrial exporter. The Russian-Chinese coalition can only outproduce NATO forces so long as NATO does not consider the war an existential threat. As long as NATO keeps sending hardware to get blown up in Ukraine and keeps losing special forces, NCOs, spies, and who knows what else, Russia is able to sap Chinese strength while improving its own comparative position with the West.

As Paul Kennedy made the point of in Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers (https://archive.org/details/risefallofgreatp0000paul_h0h2), the coalition with the most productive capacity wins. One interesting controversy in political-economy is whether industrial capacity or capital-trade capacity is more important.

One Trillion Dollars In 2023: How Russia's Military Came To Outspend The United States Part 3

Russia and China combined have more industry ($7.193 trillion vs $2.648 trillion), but have slightly smaller economies than the US ($22.7 trillion vs $23.3 trillion). And much smaller economies than the whole Anglophone world ($22.7 trillion vs $30 trillion). And even smaller economies than the Anglo-Saxon world ($22.7 trillion vs $44.629 trillion). Based off Russia and China's behavior, they do not think industrial power is stronger than financial power. Otherwise why are they trying to fight the dollar? (https://news.yahoo.com/dollarization-started-odds-chinas-yuan-020938603.html) Because the dollar is the clock and at a certain point the clock runs out. Monetary velocity and volume decline. And then they are stuck with lethal dollar debts and a shrinking ability to fund new projects. Russia knows this so much better than China. China is trying to emulate Soviet industrial policy where they just make everyone obey, even if capital won't cooperate. How did that end for the USSR? So the slow game is more important. And the slow game is re-unifying Russia. Putin will probably go down in history as one of Russia's greatest leaders. Like up there with Ivan and Peter. They were screwed by 1999. It seemed impossible they'd ever reunify. Now it seems all but inevitable. Patience is powerful and having a soft touch can be more effective than bashing everything in the way. A slow war runs down China's trade centrality and taints China with guilt by association. A slow war gives Russia the time to re-arm and increase its material advantage by destroying NATO material in Ukraine. If Russia is to reunify the Slavic world, it must do so by preventing Americans and Europeans from getting angry at them. Better to divide them and get them angry at each other. This is why Putin made the Anglo-Saxon comment: Hungary and Italy for example are hurt by this war. They just want cheap gas and the right to determine their own national destiny, but the Germans running the EU work against that aim. Split them off from the EU and others will follow. Germany has bullied Greece since before 2008 which is on-brand with Nazi occupation of Greece (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_occupation_of_Greece). NATO and EU might be able to bully leaders like Meloni, but they can't change how people feel about stupid wars (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/21/giorgia-meloni-visit-kyiv-ukraine-voldymyr-zelenskiy-italy). With each exit from the union, comes more financial instability. What is the EU going to do, make a Grexit Greece pay off its 'share' of EU debt in Euros? They'll just default. That just accelerates the decay. Calling out the EU as a 'Saxon' institution underlines these tensions.

When interrogating the logic of Russian warfighting, it's not that they are less aggressive—they are more patient. Soviet active measures cause damage to America to this day. That was an extremely slow war. Belarus with nukes serves to ratchet up the menace non-'Saxon' powers experience and creates incentive for others to disassociate. It also creates escalation ambiguity. While it is possible that ambiguity will be used to trigger a hot war from an advantageous position, it is more likely the ambiguity will poison NATO command and control, which has trouble dancing to a tune it did not call. That is a necessary result of this slow strategy. Treaties require more conference. Putin attacks these sinews connecting elites with the intention of dissolving them. As anyone who has dealt with a committee knows, committees exponentially increase decision-response time. Hawks might want to do something rash, but much like chess, when there is a lot of tension on the board, the inferior player is inclined to initiate trades for equal material, but winds up in a very weakened position. Likewise, those making hasty actions in Ukraine and even in Taiwan are more likely to lose than win. Russia is trying to re-establish the Slavic world as a power before it is forever balkanized. It cannot afford to trigger a total coalition war against it.