George McMillan III, Copyright © December 1, 2023 / September 13, 2024
The West-to-East German-Russo-Japanese Pipeline Alliance
The possibility of the Alternative For Deutschland Party defeating Olaf Scholz and the Social Democratic Party and repairing Nordstream to purchase Russian Natural Gas is becoming more realistic the more that Germany deindustrializes, inflation rises, and living standards fall.
The fundamental geopolitical problem of the United States boils down to preventing its two key allies, Germany and Japan, from purchasing cheaper Russian oil and natural gas to reverse the economic decline and collapse of the middle class.
Delivered by pipeline, cheap Russian natural gas would make Germany’s and Japan’s heavy industries increasingly globally competitive and less vulnerable to maritime chokepoint issues during times of conflict. This rationale would compel the secondary and tertiary industrial power centers in their regional orbit to follow suit, connecting to cheap Russian oil and natural gas to remain industrially competitive as well.
The reason why Germany is more important than Japan in this regard is that the German World consists of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Austria which share a border with Germany on the Danube River. If the German oil and gas pipeline network is connected to Russia by any pipeline, it could supply both the German World and the entire Danube River Slavic World as well.
Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg to the West could conceivably follow suit, as the Groningen gas field has been shut down due to the ground tremors associated with natural gas extraction. The BENELUX countries have been connected to the German pipeline network for decades, making it easy to participate in a German-Russo natural gas alignment.
If Germany were to repair Nordstream, it is conceivable that more than a dozen countries could join a Russo-German natural gas market, paying directly in rubles and jettisoning the petrodollar. In this scenario, all the other countries in the German World could pay Germany in Euros while Germany participates in a Euro-Ruble exchange or some other payment arrangement. The external drop in the demand for the US Dollar would likely increase inflation inside the US.
Petrodollar Primacy and the Long March Towards Globalism
Should Germany exit the petrodollar financial system that supports the US’s burgeoning $34 trillion national debt, not only would the petro-dollar debt-support mechanism be in peril, but it would effectively end the NATO alliance as well. The purpose of NATO is to (a) keep the US in Europe, (b) keep Germany down in Europe and (c) keep the Soviet Union/Russia out of Europe. A Russo-German pipeline network reverses all of that proverbially overnight. Hence the US and UK, continuing the Great Game Russia containment strategy, have done everything possible to (a) move the EU and NATO Eastward to the Russian and Belarussian borders where the oil and Natural Gas lines transit through Poland, Ukraine and Georgia, and (b) did everything to possible to prevent the Southstream project from developing in the Black Sea, while (c) Nordstream was mysteriously sabotaged in the Baltic Sea, while (d) proxy wars mysteriously occur in just about every country in the Middle East and the rimland of Eurasia.
To emphasize: Gerhard Shroder’s Nordstream project implied, (1) a massive shifting of the global geopolitical alliances, (2) the nullification of NATO, and (3) the end of the petrodollar trading scheme—all in one fell swoop. As Seymour Hersh reported in February 2023, Nordstream mysteriously blew up.
The Russo-German natural gas pipeline alliance could have radically and rapidly shifted the global center of gravity from Washington and London to Berlin and Moscow while Moscow, Beijing, and Teheran were/are aligning due to shared overland logistical supply route exigencies.
As the Wolfowitz Doctrine of 1992 revealed, “power sharing” between a Washington-London and Berlin-Moscow alliance has never been part of the Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Frederick Kagan, and Bill Krystol “US as sole superpower” ideal in regards to the neoconservative long march towards a form of globalism under World Economic Forum guidance.
The more one understands how the Russian natural gas pipeline advantage works in conjunction with the post-Mahan and post-Mackinder geopolitical theories as well as the post-Clausewitz and Bismark DIME (Diplomatic, Infrastructural, Military and Economic instrument of national power measure explained in a previous article), the more people will understand why the US is feverishly trying to block all Russian and Chinese infrastructural projects around Eurasia, with Nordstream being the most important project to stop. Other than a few people in some of the world’s government entities, only a relatively few university graduate students are exposed to the combination of sea power versus land power strategies in conjunction with political and economic development strategies. The topics are usually taught separately in the University rather than integrated.
Understanding the US Counterstrategy—Radicalizing Mackinder
This form of geopolitical modeling makes it easier to understand US Foreign policy following the collapse of the Soviet Union—the US counterstrategy has been simply to block all logistical supply routes emanating from Russia to as many coastal rimland industrial power centers in Eurasia as possible, and now that China’s Silk Road and Belt and Road overland logistical supply route strategic projects have developed, the US counterstrategy is to thwart them as well.
The US counter-strategy to the Westward expansion of Soviet/Russian oil and natural gas to the West can be summed up in three aspects: first, the immediate expansion of the European Economic Council (EEC) and European Union Eastward as a ‘cover for action’ to expand both the Office of Security Cooperation Europe (OSC-E) and NATO to surround the pipelines emanating from Belarus; secondly, move the EU/NATO into Romania to regulate direct access of Russia to its Slavic allies in the Balkans via the Danube River Valley; and thirdly to move into Georgia to control the South Caucuses that lead to the Caspian Sea oil and natural gas reserves.
By controlling Georgia and Armenia the US can control Azerbaijan’s ability to transit oil and gas via pipeline to the Black Sea and onward to Bulgaria by an undersea pipeline, which was outlined in Fiona Hill’s 2004 article published by Brooking Institution.
An interesting background note is that Fiona Hill’s article was written under the direction of Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institute. The three-part plan to envelop Belarus and Russia to take control of all of the oil and natural gas pipelines was well known within the Washington DC think tank circles, but relatively unknown outside of these circles.
The Sea Power versus Land Power Grand Strategies
It is interesting to know that Frederick Kagan took the Grand Strategies courses at Yale and met and married Kimberly Kagan. Frederick Kagan taught at West Point and subsequently went to work at the American Enterprise Institute while Kimberly Kagan to a position with Bill Kristol at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) which is a reconstitution of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The “ISW” employs retired Generals Jack Keen and David Petraeus. In one way or another, the Kagans, Bushes, Dick Cheney, as well as a host of other influential political elites, all have the Yale Grand Strategies courses or seminars in common. For instance, Henry Kissinger, while at the Harvard Kennedy School attended the Yale Grand Strategies Summer seminars with Klaus Schwab in 1967. The Grand Strategies courses are popular among the political elites.
This is evident when one recalls that General Wesley Clark’s 2007 presidential campaign platform was based on the idea that US Foreign policy was “hijacked” by a relative few. The relative few were pursuing regime-change/nation-building and regime-change/destabilization strategies not widely known, let alone debated, in any of the democratic processes since Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stansfield Turner’s Operation Cyclone to fund the Mujahideen in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the rule of General Zia Ul-Haq from 1977 through the Reagain administration to roughly 1987 when ul-Haq died.
Since “journalists” were unaware of this aspect of combined political and economic development theory in conjunction with International Relations and US Foreign Policy curricula, the media is largely unaware that this subject matter even exists and therefore does not discuss it.
The problem is that it is the sea power versus land power strategies that determine US foreign policy and it is the best kept open secret on the planet. People can buy the series of books used online for peanuts, while many of the topics are covered on YouTube videos if one knows how to select and sequence the viewing order.
Clark argued that the foreign policy decision path was never discussed in open democratic debate as the subject matter is barely known outside of certain very small circles of people who learn it gradually throughout their careers. The critique of retired General Clark’s campaign speeches is that he neither defined the geopolitical strategies well enough to enlarge the decision-making circles to get past the Democrat primaries.
Meanwhile, mass media journalists have little education and training in geopolitical strategic analysis. In a US democracy, it might be the time to make the geopolitical Grand Strategies better known to the general population for democratic debate and should be better known among the world’s energy and financial analysts and planners.
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Part 2: Pipelines and Global Political Center of Gravity Alternatives: A PMESII DIME Analysis
Part 1: Part 1:Russian Natural Gas and Geopolitical Realignment—a reverse domino theory
