Seismic Shifts in Geopolitics
17.02.2025
LALIT notes that the past week has seen two or three seismic shifts in geopolitics.
1. US President Trump is to negotiate with Russian President Putin to end the war in Ukraine.
This confirms what the war always was about: The USA trying to weaken Russia. And the negotiations represent the USA’s failure to weaken Russia.
So, we, in Mauritius, after hearing from the Western media for three years, their journalists’ boots on the ground by the literal dozen, that Ukraine is “winning the war”, that Russia’s economy is “crumbling” by the day, we now know that Ukraine has lost the war. We also now know that the Russian economy is doing better than most. And the USA has some quick covering-up to do. Trump and his spokesmen have already conceded that it is not realistic to go back to the borders before 2014 and that Russian gains on the battlefield will need to be respected, nor is it necessary, Trump says, to invite Ukraine to become a NATO member. Russia’s war aim, stated clearly from the beginning, was to prevent its neighbour Ukraine becoming a member of NATO. So, that will be a victory for Russia. It was a victory very costly in terms of lives and the destruction of Ukraine. (The other Russian war aim was to protect Russian-speakers in Eastern Ukraine from persecution, and the Ukrainian failure to respect the Minsk I Agreement in 2014 and Minsk II Agreement in 2015 meant Russia had to go to war to protect Russian-speakers in Ukraine. Now, it is too late to return to that war aim. It has been won on the battlefield.) Ukraine joining NATO was always a red line for Russia. Remember that the USA continually broke the USA-USSR agreements made formally in 1990-91 never to expand NATO Eastwards in exchange for the USSR closing down of the Warsaw Pact, the equivalent of the West’s NATO.* The US-led NATO broke this agreement, expanding Eastwards into country after country**. The USA’s war aim in the Ukraine war was formally expressed by US Defense Secretary General Lloyd Austin way back in April 2022, attempting presumably to explain why NATO had sabotaged the March 2022 peace agreement reached at the summit in Turkey, between Zelensky and Putin. Austin explained that the war aim was “to weaken Russia” militarily. The March 2022 peace agreement turned out to be doomed precisely because the main belligerent was not present: the USA. Now, three years and untold death and destruction later, the USA will meet Russia and reach an agreement through diplomacy.
2. The USA washes its hands of Europe and NATO.
Trump has now informed European countries that they are not invited to these Ukraine peace talks it is having with Russia.
Even Ukrainian President Zelensky was initially excluded by Trump.
The USA thus makes it clear that Europe can now set up its own military protection for the future.
The USA is no longer interested in NATO or its Article 5, meaning protection for each member state by the whole of NATO.
Before this repudiation of Europe, the USA had already under Biden blown up its ally Germany’s North Stream Gas pipelines by a blatant act of state terrorism.***
Trump had already, before washing his hands of NATO, threatened to annex a fellow NATO ally, Canada.
Now the US Vice President, JD Vance, rudely criticizes European countries face-to-face, saying their biggest enemy is not Russia or China, but the enemy “within”. Vance then broke all convention at the Munich Security Conference, and went in and interfered in the “internal affairs” of European states, one after the other, as if they were US vassals. In fact, the USA has exposed European countries’ painful subservience to the USA by telling the European countries’ leaders that they are not worthy to be US vassals, let alone interlocutors, let alone allies.
3. Trump and his emissaries are giving the green light to the Israeli fascist-led Government to go ahead and “finish the job” in Gaza, meaning to complete the genocide and/or total expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, and also giving his word that he will soon make an announcement about the USA’s attitude towards West Bank annexation by Israel. This will be horrific for the people of Palestine, and will also lead to the end of the international legal geo-political framework, the ultimate demise of the state of Israel, and to the speeding up of the fall of the American empire. This will set in motion further seismic shifts, and will represent the beginning of a descent into barbarism – if we cannot prevent it by massive protest movement world-wide to force peace on Israel, and to make it and the USA pay reparations to Palestine. This is also why we need to close the US military base on Diego Garcia down, not act like a vassal begging for pounds sterling in exchange for our dignity.
Conclusion
In LALIT, we just wanted to alert everyone to these important seismic shifts in world events. We realize we are living through times when we are also following the national saga of the arrest of the former Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth on money-laundering charges and his bail hearing until midnight last night, as if we are having a déjà vu of something similar 10 years ago against his predecessor and successor, Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam, and still not explained politically nor elucidated legally. This type of political rot at a national level is an echo of the massive fall of Western capitalism in the outlying country of the Republic of Mauritius. This is all the more reason to rally around a socialist program based on working class organization. The “parwa” between national and international crises begin to fall – as we watch the right-wing press in the UK attempt to hold on to the last fragments of their once-powerful empire, the empire that preceded the one falling now, the USA’s empire.
NOTES
* From the National Security Archive site: “Washington D.C., December 12, 2017 – U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous ‘not one inch eastward’ assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).” The details are in this reference.
** Within 10 years, the USA expanded NATO thus breaking the agreement, and these countries formerly in the USSR block were admitted, in the following order, from 1999 to 2020: Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia.
*** Read Seymour Hersh’s reporting https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream. And his interview with New Left Review at https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/how-to-blow-up-a-pipeline
