It is emerging that the overwhelming US and Israeli defeat of the armed forces and repressive police of the Islamic Republic of Iran is already beginning to alter the international balance of power and correlation of forces in favour of the Democratic West. President Trump is one of the few Western statesmen who recognised at the outset of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that the Allied objectives were not only to prevent the Russian reabsorption of Ukraine back into Russia, where it resided for over 300 years, but also to achieve that in a way that did not permanently drive Russia into the embrace of China.
To this end, President Trump went to some lengths to maintain an appearance of even-handedness between Ukraine and Russia, which caused him to be widely reviled in the western media as having been bewitched and hoodwinked by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Of course, this was nonsense, and he was really only concerned that in reinforcing Ukraine the West did not so humiliate and defang Russia that it compromised its independence opposite China. The strategic nightmare scenario of the Ukraine war was a combination of Russia exposing the Western Alliance is a paper tiger in Ukraine but being pushed to such extremities to do so that it effectively opened up the exploitation of Siberia and all its untapped resources to China, which could easily transport tens of millions of its surplus population to that area.
In pursuit of a satisfactory settlement in Ukraine, Trump had first to put an end to the stupefying absurdity of Western Europe effectively financing the Russian war in Ukraine so that it was otherwise somewhat strenuously opposing, by buying large quantities of Russian oil and gas. Trump’s abrupt reorientation of Venezuela as well as the deal he has made with the Prime Minister of India, sharply to reduce Russian oil exports, though Russia will make up some of that by replacing Iran and Venezuela as a supplier of oil to China, albeit at the reduced price China can extract.
Russia has a GDP smaller than Canada’s and has already taken approximately a million casualties and more than half a million desertions and draft evasions in a war that has gone on longer than the mighty struggle between Hitler and Stalin, 1941-1945, and Russia has not significantly increased the amount of Ukrainian territory it had occupied after the first 18 months of this war. Yet with this attrition and with President Trump having bullied NATO into drastically raising its commitment to defence spending so that he can disarm the isolationists in his own party by selling sophisticated weaponry to the Europeans that they then donate to Ukraine, Putin has still apparently not got the message.
So instead of trying to pry Russia away from China at the same time that we promote the defeat of Russia in Ukraine, Trump is now putting the heat directly upon China and not just by ending Venezuelan and Iranian shipments of oil to that country. The whole world noticed the almost effortless US and Israeli destruction of the supposedly advanced air defence system that China sold to Iran. The formerly routine Chinese violations of Taiwanese airspace and coastal waters have stopped and the long vaunted Chinese assault upon American economic pre-eminence in the world has conspicuously failed.
The United States has effectively repulsed Chinese penetration of Latin America. There is a drastic reduction in fentanyl-caused deaths in the US and in the illegal importation of drugs into that country. Obviously, Venezuela has ceased to be a link in the chain and the United States has given military assistance to the revived Mexican government effort to reduce the influence of the infamous northern Mexican gangs, that are no longer able to traffic slaves and violent criminals into the United States. Led by Argentina’s President Javier Milei, much of Latin America is moving consistently to the moderate Right including Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, El Salvador and probably soon Colombia and Peru, as well as Cuba, whose painful 67-year sojourn with communism has been an almost unrelieved disaster.
And in the Far East, with steady American encouragement, India and Japan and South Korea, with Australia the Philippines, Indonesia and other countries are steadily building the foundations of a containment strategy opposite China. The pressure is on Russia to make a reasonable settlement in Ukraine and the ability of China as a supposedly benign big brother of the Kremlin to provide moral encouragement for Putin’s hare brained effort to revive the Russian Empire of Peter the Great and Stalin is in inevitable decline. No one should underestimate the psychological and strategic importance of the disappearance as Russo-Chinese allies in the first half of this year of Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, on the heels of Syria. This is a seismic shift that has gone largely unnoticed and is not over.
US tradition of respecting European leaders in danger of being squandered