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Ray Dalio is making some waves with his post on the current state of China-US relationship: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-i-think-going-1-china-us-relations-2-other-countries-ray-dalio He is generally quite astute in his assessment of the current state of affairs. However, there is still a bit of head-in-the-sand type of denial-ism. The economic war is already in full steam.

Nominating Trump may be a good thing for Democrats in the short term, it is a bad thing for the country, and a bad thing for the Democrats in the long term. With a rapidly changing world, we need a lot of serious policy debates. The absence of a functional opposition to Democrats makes them lazy and unrestrained.

The WP article that I linked was from a book “Rigged: America, Russia, and One Hundred Years of Covert Electoral Interference,” which will be published on June 30, 2020 by Knopf. There are a lot more of covert electoral interference than that 1996 Russia case.

It may not be open financial support. But there was certainly election meddling: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/06/26/russian-election-interference-meddling/ BTW, you can get the $1 subscription for WP if you are not already a subscriber lol.

Here is an interesting article in the Intercept about the Nord Stream saga. The NYT story about a pro-Ukrainian group is silly in so many aspects. It is sad that NYT acted as the mouthpiece of the US intelligence agencies. In the golden days, the Grand Lady published the Pentagon papers. https://theintercept.com/2023/03/10/nord-stream-pipeline-bombing/

Here is his article in Foreign Affairs https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/07/america-is-too-scared-of-the-multipolar-world/

He is paid by some fat cats like all other lobbyists or policy experts :-). But it is not Russian. He is affiliated with Quincy Institute, which is funded by George Soros and Charles Koch.

A week has passed and the media seems to be going in a different direction now. Here is one of the excellent analysis of the situation in Ukraine: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/devastating-moment-clarity-ukraine More troubling are rumors of a huge arms deal between Saudi and China. Saudi is negotiating to buy over a dozen destroyers from China. Of course, the deal will not be done in dollars :-).

This is an interesting interview with Lawrence Wilkerson, retired Army Colonel and former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, about the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.

The EU response to the Chinese proposal is expected lol. They are really not the targeted audience for the Chinese side. The economic prediction is suspect because it is based on the number from 3 covid years. What is missing from this analysis is that all predictions are based on US dollar. The biggest "war" on the economic side is the dollar denominated US debt. This may need to go a different thread as it is very complicated. There are a lot of talks about what will happen in this summer with the debt ceiling approaching. A simple fact is that a devaluation of US dollar by 20% against Chinese currency will make Chinese economy instantly bigger than the US.

Although Putin is a despot, he is still only one piece in this chess match of the global competition. His options and decisions are constrained by others. On the other hand, Biden has the greatest influence and most options to dictate what will happen next. At the moment, he decided to push for a Russian defeat by escalating the military supports to Ukraine because Ukrainians were clearly willing to pay the price for a total military victory against Russia. The fault in this path of action is really an assumption that this conflict will not escalate to a nuclear Armageddon. The question that needs to asked and answered is what will be the US reaction if Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. Here are possible options: 1. Direct NATO/US involvement in the war and they will try to fight it with only conventional weapons, which US can certainly win; 2. a limited nuclear strike on Russia as a warning; 3. all out strikes against Russia with nuclear strategic weapons. The sad truth is the option 1 and 2 are not really viable options because Russia will not be willing to be constrained to a type of war that they will lose. So it will be a road to Armageddon. The next question is whether Putin will push the nuclear button when Ukrainians defeat the Russians on the battlefield by reclaiming eastern Donbass and Crimea. Biden's advisers seem to think that Putin will not. Plenty of people think that Putin will. It is interesting that there may be a correlation between the perception of Russian strength and Putin's willingness to use nuclear weapons. It seems that people who perceive Russia as strong believe that Russia will use all means to fight (i.e. 5-6k nuclear warheads) whereas people who think that Russia is militarily weak have taken nuclear weapons out of the equation. This seems to a peculiar mental blind spot for neoliberals in Biden's administration. Is Putin a modern day Hitler or not? If he is, why would he refrain from going nuclear? If he is not, why the war must continue at all costs? I think that the smarter option for Biden is to declare a victory, which is a real one by the simple fact that Putin failed to topple the Ukraine government. A ceasefire at the existing line of contact with maintaining economic isolation of Russia should be viewed as a great outcome from the US perspective. Pushing for more would mean a real and substantial risk of nuclear Armageddon.

The exact wording were provided along with the numbers. It is a single poll so it may or may not be accurate. But it is done by the Europeans to gain some understanding to why the rest of the world are not joining them to sanction Russia.