What Are the Neocons Thinking?

They have an idée fixe about Russia

In 2015, Stratfor.com, viewed by many as a mouthpiece for the CIA, published their decade-ahead forecast, and topping the list was their forecast that Russia would "collapse" and that the US military would have to go in and decommission all their nukes because Putin is a maniac.

You can read about it here.

An American-initiated invasion of Russia would not be about making the world safer, but about controlling Russia's vast natural resources, especially of energy, and preventing the Mackinder nightmare of Eurasian integration.

Thanks to the fractiousness of the neocons, we have lost the opportunity to draw Russia into cooperation with Europe through lawful adherence to the Budapest Memorandum and Minsk II agreements, which NATO and the Ukraine violated.

An alumnus of Stratfor.com, Peter Zeihan, is making a splash promoting his new book (which I will review later), The End of the World Is Just the Beginning. He draws heavily on geography and demographics. An overview of his thinking can be found in videos here and here.

Zeihan seems to adhere to the type of strategic thinking his former boss George Friedman advocates, which can be summed up as, “sowing chaos among friends and enemies alike is good for us.” This is the sort of thinking Israel demonstrably follows.

The essence of Zeihan’s and the neocons’ apparent belief that they can win World War III is that Russia and China both face steep demographic cliffs, Russia’s an echo of the WWII losses and the collapse of the USSR; and China’s of the one child policy under Mao. China’s is by far the steeper.

Zeihan believes that the Chinese Communist Party will be thrown out of power this year as the result of their zero-Covid policies and real estate-led financial collapse. Russia’s situation is not as bad with respect to internal politics, at least according to survey results of the heavily repressed population. Russia’s debt situation is exemplary. I won’t go into the many ways the West’s attempt to isolate Russia and destroy its currency have backfired.

Zeihan’s other thesis is that globalization was only possible so long as the US Navy maintained open sea lanes. He is content now to let the rest of the world stew in their own juices, believing that international trade will be difficult without US gunboats to patrol the seas.

Direct non-dollar-denominated trade outside the Western bloc is exploding.

However, my objective here is to ask the question, “What are the neocons thinking?” with respect to the war in the Ukraine. Zeihan is an avid supporter of Ukraine in its war with Russia; he never talks about how a peaceful resolution was scornfully thrown away in the apparent interests of promoting global chaos and a take-down of Russia, the old idée fixe.

But as it becomes apparent that Ukraine, even with NATO arms and maybe some troops, is not likely to win the war with Russia in the Ukraine; even Henry Kissinger is talking about a negotiated settlement. Russia means to expand its territory to include the buffer zone Gorbachev was promised; a promise reneged upon by Bill Clinton and succeeding presidents.

I am afraid that the neocons running American foreign policy think they have an ace up their sleeve. Whether it’s a preemptive nuclear or biological or cyber or something-we-don’t-even-know-about attack hardly matters. Putin does not bluff. An attack on the Russian homeland will elicit a devastating response. And the Russian economy does not seem ready to collapse.

Or will the objective be to promote more and more chaos, as the world turns its eyes upon the “golden billion,” as Vladimir Putin has termed the West, with more and more resentment, with the neocons hoping the Russia and China … and India … and Brazil … and Indonesia … that all will collapse?

Are the neocons really working for global collapse and the Great Reset?