The West unhappy with Russia's successful strategy in the Caucasus

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France and the United States recognized the unilateral actions taken by Russia to cease fire in Nagorno-Karabakh. However, the West will try to weaken Armenia's "Russian-Turkish noose."

The ceasefire agreement in Nagorno-Karabakh, signed by Moscow, Yerevan and Baku on November 10, ratified all territorial achievements of Azerbaijan (including the capture of Shusha, the second largest city of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic) and unblocked the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic within Azerbaijan, having thus established direct road corridor with Turkey.

A senior representative of the US State Department, following the talks between Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, told TASS that France and the United States recognized Russia's unilateral actions to cease fire in Nagorno-Karabakh. However, the parties would like to receive more information about the process of negotiations.

According to the State Department, the USA acknowledges that there are many issues that the Russians need to clarify, such as the details of the agreement, including the role of Turkey in it. 

Pompeo said in an interview with Le Figaro that the OSCE Minsk Group should serve as a framework for action to resolve the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh. At the same time, he pointed out that the United States is "concerned about the growth of Turkey's military potential."

Three winners in the Karabakh conflict

Michel Marian wrote in the article headlined Karabakh as a Geopolitical Test (published in Liberation), the agreement identified three winners:

Azerbaijan, which, in addition to the reintegration of territories, indefinitely postpones the establishment of the Karabakh statute;

Russia, as a developer and guarantor of the agreement, which restores its military presence in Azerbaijan by deploying 2,000 troops on the ceasefire line;

Turkey, which receives a symbolic prize - the creation of a Russian-Turkish ceasefire observation center and also achieves a historical goal - the creation of a corridor between Azerbaijan and Nakhichevan.

The West has been taken out of the game

The author of the above-mentioned article believes that France and the United States, being the co-chairs of the Minsk Group for the settlement of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, are the losers. The Minsk Group is not even mentioned in the agreement, leaving Russia at the center of the game.

"To remove the West from the game was one of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's goals and a secret satisfaction for Vladimir Putin," the analyst wrote.

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After 44 days of war, Armenia was forced to sign a ceasefire with Azerbaijan, acknowledging the loss of part of its territories. However, as we reported in the form of an interrogation, the initial plan of the United States was to blame Turkey, let it massacre part of the Armenian population, then intervene, overthrow President Erdoğan and restore peace [1].

However, this plan did not work. It masked a British ploy. Underhandedly, London took advantage of the confusion of the US presidential election to double-cross Washington. It used the situation to try to deprive Russia of the map of Nagorno-Karabakh and resume the "Great Game" of the nineteenth century. [2] At the time, London was the ally of the Ottoman Empire against the Tsarist Empire. When Moscow realized this, it imposed a cease-fire to stop the massacre.

Throughout the 19th century, the British and Russian empires engaged in a fierce rivalry to control the Caucasus and all of Central Asia. This episode is known in England as the "Great Game" and in Russia as the "Tournament of Shadows".

Russia began to win the game when it seized Nagorno-Karabakh. By a domino effect, it then extended its domination over the Caucasus.

In view of this historical precedent, London now believes that recovering Nagorno-Karabakh could allow it to undermine Moscow’s influence in the Caucasus and then throughout Central Asia.

The current British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, claims to be the continuator of the imperial policy of Winston Churchill, of whom he is a biographer. He has just made public a costly plan to modernize his armies [3].

To relaunch the "Great Game", on July 29, 2020, he appointed Richard Moore, director general of the Foreign Office, as director of MI6 (foreign secret services). He had previously served as His Majesty’s ambassador to Ankara, speaks Turkish fluently, and has made friends with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He did not take up his new post until October 1, four days after the Azeri attack on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Richard Moore is a personal friend of Prince Charles, himself patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, where the intellectuals of the Muslim Brotherhood have been trained for twenty-five years. The former Turkish president, Abdullah Gül, is also administrator of this center.

As ambassador to Ankara (2014-17), Richard Moore accompanied President Erdoğan to become the patron of the Brotherhood.

He also played a role in the British withdrawal from the war against Syria in 2014. London did not intend to pursue a conflict in which it had engaged for colonial purposes, but which turned into a US imperial operation (Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy).

Richard Moore has just undertaken a tour of Egypt and Turkey. He was in Cairo on November 9th (the day of the Russian imposition of a cease-fire in Karabagh) to meet President al-Sissi and in Ankara on November 11th. Officially, he would not have had an audience with his old friend, President Erdoğan, but only met his spokesman at the White Palace.

In the Azeri-Turkish war in Nagorno-Karabakh, Washington believed it could count on President Armen Sarkissian and the Armenian Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, one of George Soros’ men, [4] as bait.

George Soros is an American speculator who pursues his own political agenda, but works in concert with the CIA [5]. Unfortunately, the British do not have the same relationship with Soros: he owes his fortune to a vast operation against the pound sterling (on Black Wednesday, September 16, 1992), hence his nickname "the man who broke the Bank of England".

London let Washington do it first. The Americans encouraged the "Two-State Nation" (Turkey and Azerbaijan) to forcibly end the Artsakh Republic.

MI6 helped its Turkish partner to transfer jihadists to Azerbaijan [6], not to kill Armenians, but Russians. But there are were Russians in Karabagh yet.

Soros reacted by sending Kurdish mercenaries to support the Armenian side [7].

Pretending to play the US game, London supported Baku and Ankara. During the first days, the three powers of the Minsk Group (in charge of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict since the dissolution of the USSR) - i.e. the United States, France and Russia - all three tried to obtain a halt to the fighting and a resumption of negotiations [8]. When they each successively noted Azeri bad faith, they presented a proposal for a resolution to the Security Council. For Washington, it was a question of operating in a coordinated manner a reversal, from neutrality to the condemnation of the "two-state nation".

In the first days, the Armenians defended themselves as best they could. However, the head of state, Armen Sarkissian, modified the plans of the military staff and brought up inexperienced volunteers to the front. [9] Sarkissian has dual Armenian-British nationality. The result was a massacre among the Armenian army.

Suddenly, the United Kingdom announced that it would use its veto if the text was put to a vote. The United States, taken aback, publicly accused Azerbaijan of bad faith on 25 October.

But it would take another two weeks for Russia to understand that Washington, entangled in its presidential election campaign, was no longer handling the issue.

It is only around October 6 that Russia became certain of the existence of an English trap in the American trap. It quickly concluded that London had relaunched the "Great Game" and was preparing to steal its influence in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called his Turkish counterpart on October 7th. He negotiated with him a cease-fire very unfavorable to the Armenians. Erdoğan, who has understood that he will not be able to resist a stabilization of the political situation in the United States, agrees to gain only territory and renounces the relaunch of the Armenian genocide. President Putin then summoned his Azerbaijani counterpart, Ilham Aliyev, and the Armenian Prime Minister, Nikol Pachinian, to the Kremlin. He saved what could still be saved by forcing his interlocutors to sign a ceasefire on October 10tj under the terms negotiated by Erdoğan [10]. His priorities were to draw up the Russian military presence via a peace force and then to stop the bloodbath. He then addressed the Russian people to announce that he had saved the interests of his country by saving Armenia from an even more terrible defeat.

The Armenians realized, far too late, that by taking them away from Russia for the USA, Nikol Pachinian had bet on the wrong horse. They understand in retrospect that however corrupt the former team that led them was, it was patriotic, while Soros’ men are opposed to the very concept of nationhood, and therefore to the independence of their country.

Demonstrations and resignations followed one another: the Chief of Staff, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Defence, but not the Prime Minister. For his part, the Azerbaijani President, Ilham Aliyev, is jubilant. He mocks copiously the Council of Europe and the Parliament of the European Union, proclaims his victory and announces the reconstruction of the conquered territories [11]. The British will have new privileges for British Petroleum and apply to exploit the Azeri gold mines.

With China being the most powerful competitor of the US in the 21st century, it is but natural to see various US administrations and the more permanent US defense establishment obsessed with China’s rise and the question of maintaining the balance to their advantage. The US, under the Trump administration, decided to confront China on the economic front and it started a seemingly endless ‘trade war’ that saw many attacks from both sides. Before the Trump administration, the Obama administration had decided to confront China through more military means in the form of ‘Asia Pivot.’ The US, under the Biden administration, is more likely to mend trade ties with China. However, it is already moving towards bringing the Obama-era focus back on the military front. While the Biden administration will be fighting the same war the Trump administration had been fighting since 2017, the in-coming president will use different tools.

This is evident from the military postures the US is adopting in the wake of China’s massive military transformation and how it is already on the path to out-scoring the US in military terms. While China’s capacity to fight the US economically is already well-established, its military transformation will stamp its relatively stronger military capacity vis-à-vis the US as well, displacing the latter from the seat of the world’s strongest military. This will certainly have major implications for how the global system has run since the end of the Second World War.

A recent Pentagon report to the US Congress tells the story of how China’s military rise in past 20 years has not only been phenomenal, but is also the biggest challenge the US is facing today. If the Chinese military, as the report shows, was merely “sizable” and an “archaic military that was poorly suited to the CCP’s long-term ambitions” in 2000, it has already “marshalled the resources, technology, and political will over the past two decades to strengthen and modernize the PLA in nearly every respect.” Indeed, as this report shows, “China is already ahead of the United States in certain areas”, including shipbuilding, land-based conventional ballistic missiles and integrated air defense systems.

As opposed to the 293 ships the US Navy has at its disposal, “The PRC already has the largest navy in the world, with an overall battle force of approximately 350 ships and submarines including over 130 major surface combatants.” Similarly, the report shows that “The PRC has one of the world’s largest forces of advanced long range surface-to-air systems—including Russian-built S-400s, S-300s, and domestically produced systems—that constitute part of its robust and redundant integrated air defense system architecture.”

China’s military modernization and the fact that it has already begun to out-number the US is part of the PRC’s overall strategy to, as the report argues further, “revise aspects of the international order.” The PRC, therefore, is being increasingly seen as a “revisionist power” bent upon destroying the US-led current world order. It is further seen as a power willing to use hard military power to secure soft economic and political goals.

The report accordingly concludes that the Communist Party of China “has tasked the PLA to develop the capability to project power outside China’s borders and immediate periphery to secure the PRC’s growing overseas interests and advance its foreign policy goals”, adding also that “The PRC has increasingly recognized that its armed forces should take a more active role in advancing its foreign policy goals.”

The Biden administration, influenced as it will largely be by this report, will focus more on containing the rise of China.  Jake Sullivan, Biden’s pick for national security adviser, is known to have repeatedly criticized the Trump administration for failing to strop China’s increasing militarization. Sullivan is someone who has been advocating a higher degree of resource allocation to ‘manage’ Chinese activities. In an interview given last year, Sullivan was reported to have said that “We should be devoting more assets and resources to ensuring and reinforcing, and holding up alongside our partners” against China in South China Sea region [and elsewhere as well.]

Sullivan, in another lecture, had noted that China’s “economic rise” was useful for the world on the whole and should be encouraged. It shows why the US under the Biden administration would be shifting its focus from economic confrontation to military confrontation once again. In other words, while we will see the US-China trade war coming to an end [though this will not happen quickly], it will end only to give birth to military confrontation in Asia and the Pacific.

Anticipating this, the US is accordingly planning to send more ships to the South China Sea region in future. The US ships will also “accept calculated tactical risks and adopt a more assertive posture in our day-to-day operations,” the above-mentioned report said.

It is, therefore, obvious that US under the Biden administration will not adopt a radically different policy, dumping the confrontation that we saw [and continue to see] during the Trump era. The only difference that we are going to see is that of a relatively increased focus on checkmating China’s military expansion and its increasing political and economic influence. In other words, the Biden administration will be paying a close attention to reverse the course of affairs that has already badly damaged, as the report shows, the “unfettered access” the US used to have to “the world’s oceans” as and when it needed. If “unfettered access” was the key to the US global supremacy, the Chinese presence and expansion is a stumbling block, one that the Biden administration will be keen to remove.

Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2020/12/22/the-us-china-trade-war-to-become-war-of-military-resources-under-biden/

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