I have to tell you that of all the podcasts that Michael Tanner and I have done, it seems like they are getting more critical and covering more ground in the energy market.
I had the honor to have George McMillian, CEO of McMillan and Associates, an unbelievable oil and gas, geopolitical, and industry thought leader. Wow, this two-hour podcast seemed like 5 min.
Thank you, George, for your commitment to humanity and our country. Any major energy company needs to contact you for your opinions on projects worldwide. You have been everywhere.
Reach out and follow George on his LinkedIn HERE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-mcmillan-5665b015/
Thank you again for your time. And I am excited about our future podcasts – Stu.
“Good will win in the long run; till then, it is painful.” – Stu Turley
Full articles, maps, and transcripts will be out on the energynewsbeat.co site.
Sit back, get the popcorn, and check out the video on X. HERE: https://x.com/STUARTTURLEY16/status/1730681590479548553?s=20
@X Full Video Podcast Early release with George McMillian, CEO, world and Energy Geopolitical expert. The beginning of a series with George. “What is the United States Afraid Of?” – Countries go to war over energy, and we need to understand #energysecurity to get a grasp of the… pic.twitter.com/AvDhrYoo9z
— STUART TURLEY (@STUARTTURLEY16) December 1, 2023
UPDATE: 12/12/2023 – Two articles from George’s series that outline some details around our podcast interview.
Russian Natural Gas and Geopolitical Realignment—a reverse domino theory
The Geopolitical Problem of the US—a German-Russo-Japanese Connection
00:00 – Intro
02:48 – Investment Potential: Discussion about the potential for investors in the mentioned energy technology and the possibility of obtaining subsidies for base models.
07:20 – U.S. Strategy: Outlining the U.S. strategy to hinder Russian influence by obstructing pipelines to Western Europe and Asia, with concerns about shifts in alignment and potential exits from the petrodollar.
16:20 – Geopolitical Interconnectedness: Emphasis on understanding global strategies, like Alfred Mahan’s sea power theory, and the impact of infrastructure on economic, diplomatic, and military power. Turkey’s role in new pipeline developments is highlighted.
33:18 – U.S. Strategies based on Mahan: Discussion of U.S. strategies based on Alfred Mahan’s theories, including efforts to control key areas and influence elections in Eastern Europe. Energy vulnerabilities of South Korea and Japan are noted.
40:29 – China’s Silk Road Initiative: Explanation of China’s strategy to create overland logistical supply routes, reducing vulnerability to U.S. naval interdiction. The distinction between the Silk Road and Belt and Road initiatives is emphasized.
49:25 – India’s Strategic Importance: Highlighting India’s strategic importance in providing a shorter overland trade route for Russia and China, fostering economic interdependency and technology exchange.
54:02 – Hamas Attack: Reporting on a Hamas attack on Israel, designated as a terrorist organization by several countries, prompting an IDF response.
01:00:09 – Middle East Dynamics: Discussion of geopolitical dynamics, the Sunni-Shia conflict, and the strategic importance of the Middle East, focusing on funds, oil, and implications of U.S. actions, especially in relation to Iran and Saudi Arabia.
01:22:02 – Complex Geopolitical Landscape: Exploration of a complex geopolitical landscape involving economic, energy, and political factors, with a focus on challenges and intersections between secular and religious strategies in the Middle East.
01:31:13 – Consultancy Business Plan: George McMillan expresses a desire to form a consultancy business focused on geopolitical risk assessment and analysis for oil and financial companies, emphasizing the lack of understanding about Abrahamic religions and grand strategies in government institutions.
01:33:06 – Integrating Disciplines: Emphasis on the importance of integrating disciplines, particularly in economics and geopolitics. Discussion of theoretical model-building and the need to discard outdated theories in favor of a Hume Smith model.
01:35:04 – Outro
George just published on LinkedIn an article with more detailed information and is worth the read.
Russian Natural Gas and Geopolitical Realignment
George McMillan III
August 26, 2023/November 16, 2023
Future energy production and distribution that determine pricing and global consumer good competitiveness and living standards will probably have a wider impact on the realignment of post-Cold War alliances than most people would think at first glance. A second look that considers past and present activities worldwide is warranted.
The early Cold War strategy of the United States to contain Soviet communism was defined by Ambassador George Kennan in 1947. In his famous “long telegram,” Kennan simply did a nominal counting of the major Industrial Power Centers of each region of the world, deciphering whether they were in the Western alliance of pro-democracy countries or the Eastern communist bloc. In 1950, after Mao Zedong chased Chiang Kai Shek to Taiwan, the concept was slightly modified to include communist China.
Borrowing from the sea power versus sea power maritime chokepoint strategies of Alfred Thayer Mahan and the post-Alfred Mackinder sea power versus land power Grand Strategies, the idea was (a) for the US in North America to use the Marshall Plan to rebuild the coastal rimland powers of Western Europe and Japan to surround and contain the Soviet Union and China on all sides, and (b) to follow Nicholas Spykman’s idea of devising ways of dividing them in Central Asia and eventually collapsing the Soviet Union and China in a long-term regime-change strategy.
Since China’s return to a market economy in the late 1980s and the rejection of Communism in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, Russia and China have been steadily partnering in oil and natural gas pipeline and railway projects. This partnership has become the nucleus of aligning Russia in the “heartland” of Eurasia with all the Coastal industrial power centers.
This overland logistical supply route strategy follows the land power counter strategies of Ratzel and Haushofer. The basis of this strategy is that coal delivered by railroad and natural gas and oil delivered by pipeline are the cheapest forms of energy at present. The ability to move these fossil fuels overland not only makes them the cheapest forms of energy but avoids US Naval interdiction at the key maritime chokepoints.
Russia has immense oil and natural gas reserves from the Caspian Sea to the entire arctic range and including Russia’s Far East Pacific rim territories. Russia and the former Soviet Bloc Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—the Central Asia ‘stans—have enough energy and mineral reserves to power and supply the industrial power centers in Germany, China, South Korea and Japan, all by pipeline and overland railway. Doing so would in one fell swoop significantly lower the energy costs of these nations, make their industrial and consumer goods more cost competitive globally, lower inflationary pressures and raise living standards. Politicians like such positive correlations.
Were this to occur, Russia would be economically integrated by pipeline, railway and highway to Germany (via Nordstream), China, South Korea (via North Korea) and Japan (via the Sakhalin to Hokkaido tunnel).
In this scenario, India would lag behind as the “TAPI” pipeline connecting Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India has been held up for decades due to ideological, religious and age-old ethnic rivalries. Therefore India and Iran, along with China’s Belt and Road Initiative expansion of their overland Silk Road Initiative, developed the deep water Chabahar port outside of the Strait of Hormuz as a workaround. This project only needs the completion of a 500-kilometer railroad extension from the port to Khash and Zahedan in the Sistan Baluchistan Province of Iran.
This port and railway project would connect India to the entire post-Soviet railway system that has been radically upgraded in the Chinese Silk Road Initiative. While the numerous pipeline, port, railway and highway infrastructural projects are explained in other papers and PowerPoint slide sets, the integration of Russia with coastal industrial powers portends to shift the global political and industrial centers of gravity away from Washington and London. The collective West has heavily offshored jobs and deindustrialized during the 1980s and 90s in order to lower labor costs and improve the profit margins of the financial elites. At the same time, under the banner of preventing “climate change” in order to seize control of the means of production via heavy regulation, Leftists in the West have been canceling oil and natural gas pipeline projects.
The strategy of massively offshoring manufacturing to China in a coastal sea power to sea power alliance strategy to bring China into America’s Pacific Rim alliance with Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea and Japan and separate China from Russia in the 1990s has immensely backfired in the 2000s. China has steadily focused on the overland Silk Road counter sea power strategy to infrastructurally integrate with the Central Asian ‘stans and Iran. This links China to the Middle East, the Persian Gulf region, and the entire Russian Federation.
The geostrategic motive is obvious: On one hand, China has chosen a land power counter strategy to avoid US Naval interdiction; on the other, to adopt a Mahan and Mackinder coastal trade strategy to exploit its unique geographical location and territorial size, it has built a Navy.
China chose to expand its infrastructure inland in Eurasia because pipeline, railway and highway expansion offers them access to immense petroleum, mineral, and agricultural supplies. It also keeps the US and UK out of Central Asia, denying the West the ability to weaken and “divide and conquer” Russia and China.
In the current geopolitical flux and conflict in the “neutral zones” of Eurasia, using Spykman’s terminology, it is essential to have an understanding of the Grand Strategies in order to interpret current events and anticipate possible outcomes. It seems that both Russian and Chinese strategists have been reading the Grand Strategies of Mahan, Mackinder, Ratzel, Haushofer, Spykman, Brzezinski and Dugin (following the war colleges of the US and the UK).
In line with other writings in this series, it is important to understand that China pursued the Silk Road Initiativepipeline, railway and highway projects in the early 2000s to build overland logistical supply routes from East Asia to the ports of Western Asia, avoiding maritime chokepoints.
Then China developed the Belt and Road Initiative, building ports on the Western Southern parts of Asia to facilitate the offloading of Chinese cargo and tanker ships in Chabahar, Gwadar, Karachi, and Kyakpyua in order to send their cargo overland to China. The Belt and Road initiative minimizes the distance and time that ships are on the Indian Ocean between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa
These two Initiatives mean that instead of having to navigate the key maritime chokepoints of the Straits of Hormuz, Malacca and the Island choke points of the South China Sea, Chinese-bound cargo and tanker ships can merely offload in Western and Southern Asia.
Thus, the strategic plans of Russia and China’s overland pipeline, railway and highway projects over the last two decades have been to counter the sea power versusland power post-Mahan and Mackinder Grand Strategies. This foils Kennan’s “five industrial power center strategy” that has been one of the pillars of US and UK foreign policy since the late 1940s.
Expanding Russia’s and China’s port, pipeline, railway and highway integration is creating a competitive advantage in energy delivery and trade that will make it increasingly attractive for Japan and South Korea to exit their Cold War alliance with the US and UK.
Certainly, Russia and China are increasing options for Japan and South Korea in the event of a potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific (especially over Taiwan). Conflict there would largely cut off oil and LNG from the Middle East, since ships would have to either go through the Panama Canal or sail around South America, both time-consuming and risky routes. Any interference in the delivery of oil and gas would be catastrophic for heavy industry, automobile, electronic and consumer goods industries in Japan and South Korea. Under these conditions, Japan and South Korea would be faced with either (a) coping with a severe depression, or (b) simply purchasing their oil and natural gas supplies from Vladivostok. As for South Korea, is there any doubt that Putin’s recent trips to North Korea are about more than foreign military sales as Western media purports; that is, does Putin go anywhere without discussing petroleum and pipelines? Japan might complete its own natural gas pipelines via the Sakhalin-to-Hokkaido undersea tunnel. It’s easy to see that a war in the South China Sea might change the Cold War alliances based on energy availability and delivery costs, since Japan and South Korea could easily avoid the immense economic, social and political problems associated with unstable energy supplies by opting to lower their energy costs, raise their living standards, and avoid World War Three with China.
Keep in mind that the US has already moved the EU and NATO into the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine and Georgia to prevent Russian oil and gas delivered by pipeline from reaching Germany and Western Europe. This was despite Secretary of State James Baker’s promise to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch farther” to the East after German re-unification in 1989.
The fear since the 1982 sabotage of the Siberian pipeline by Western intelligence agency malware and the untimely death in 1989 of Deutsche Bank Chairman Alfred Herrhausen (who financed the pipeline extension deal from East Germany to West Germany) was that once a country receives cheaper Russian energy supplies, then exiting the Petrodollar trading scheme and trading directly in Rubles becomes inevitable.
The combination of the loss of the petrodollar trading scheme advantage for the United States and the potential loss of both European and Pacific Rim allies would have an immense negative impact on the US and North American economies and global superpower supremacy. Global allegiances could vary directly with cheaper Russian, Western and Central Asian oil and natural gas supplies delivered overland via pipelines, eliminating the need to pay financial transaction fees to bankers in Wall Street or the City of London.
One can conclude that the global financial and economic future increasingly will be shaped by geopolitics regarding the building and blocking of pipeline and railway infrastructure by the two primary state-actor tools—overt diplomacy and violent covert actions. Post-Mahan and Mackinder geopolitical strategies will probably play a larger role in predictive financial analysis. [end]
