We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia…Or Is It Eurasia?

Current US China policy seems to be “Who Needs Russia?  We’ve got…The Philippines!”

Unless President Obama has absolute faith in the ability of the United States and the Asian democracies to restrain the PRC, there would seem to be some disturbing developments for the United States in Asia.

First of all, the People’s Republic of China parked its HYSY 981 oil rig in waters that Vietnam claims as its Exclusive Economic Zone, triggering a heated response from Vietnam, anguished writhing from ASEAN, and a stern “don’t engage in provocations” fingerwag from the United States.

The PRC, however, is not yielding, implicitly highlighting the fact that the United States is failing in its self-proclaimed mission to assure peace and prosperity in the South China Sea (as I pointed out in a previous piece, the PRC’s oil-rig shenanigans accentuate the essential sovereignty/EEZ character of disputes between China and its South China Sea neighbors, and undercut the “freedom of navigation” hobbyhorse that the US has crafted to ride to the rescue of the SCS).

Although VOA reported it as “US Navy ‘Shaping Events’ in South China Sea”, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert acknowledged that the US has its work cut out for it in the SCS:

“We are starting to shape events. We have got to manage our way through this, in my opinion, through this East China Sea and South China Sea [tensions].  We’re not leaving. They know that. They would be the leadership of the Chinese navy. We believe that we have to manage our way through this."

Also, this week also witnessed a slobbery authoritarian love-fest between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at a confab in Shanghai, also attended by Iran and a bunch of stans, illustrating the completely predictable dynamic of the Western hardline on Ukraine driving Russia and its gas into the arms of the PRC.

As of this writing the gas deal has not gotten done, apparently because of a disagreement over the unit price, and because the PRC is jibbing at the Russian demand for a $25 billion prepayment—a prepayment that, I might add, will relieve Gazprom of the financial embarrassment incurred by shipping Ukraine a few billion dollars of gas that it hasn’t been paid for, provide a nice receivable (if not immediate cash cushion) for Russia as it haggles with Ukraine (and a rather anxious Europe) re the next round of gas shipments to the West, and establish a precedent for demanding prepayment for Ukraine.

If the gas deal doesn’t go down, the US foreign policy commentariat in general and the Obama administration in particular will breathe a quiet sigh of relief that the dreaded Eurasian alliance of ex-Commies and pseudo-Commies in Russia and China has failed to occur.

If the gas deal gets done, especially on the basis of a ruble/yuan settlement that sidelines the dollar, on the other hand, the manure should hit the fan.

Right now, the Western response to these Asian developments has been pretty muted, a sign, I think that the foreign policy consultant/think tank/media complex has not received any useful guidance from the Obama administration.

My personal feeling is that the United States is loath to acknowledge the Eurasian “ghost at the banquet” and is declining to escalate openly at the current awkward juncture.  Instead, the Obama administration is quietly rolling out a sequence of passive-aggressive reproofs to the PRC.

Last week the USN Blue Ridge just happened to cruise past the Scarborough Shoal.

This week, the Justice Department indicted 5 PLA officers for hacking US corporations.

This sort of thing was always in the cards.  Starting in 2011, the Obama administration had been methodically rolling out the PRC cyber-bad-guy product for over a year, to be capped by a formal direct confrontation with Xi Jinping by Barack Obama concerning Chinese cybersins at Sunnylands in June 2013, followed by some public naming and shaming, but then Boom!  Snowden!  Doh!

The Snowden thing seems to have derailed the campaign for a year or so—most of the hacking allegations in the DOJ indictment date to 2012 or before, an indication that the United States is belatedly working off its depreciated pre-Snowden inventory of PRC misbehavior.

In rolling out the indictments yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder was obliged to abandon the pre-Snowden framing—that PRC hacking was a Defcon 1 threat both to the US economy and the global Internet commons—in favor of condemning the PRC hackers for the one kind of hacking that the United States government still asserts it does not do…corporate spying…for corporate advantage.

In context, I should point out that the United States has an unequivocal agenda of espionage on economic matters pertaining to energy, since energy is a matter of “national security”.  As to whether the information on potentially unfavorable developments in oil, gas, and uranium is simply put into a dossier for President Obama to wring his hands over, or whether actionable intelligence somehow makes it to pro-Western energy giants, is something that I and the reader can currently only speculate about.

However, it will be interesting if Glenn Greenwald comes up with any blockbuster revelations concerning Brazil, its over the top anxiety concerning the security and secrecy of the bidding process for its massive “deep salt” offshore oil blocs (first award included Total & two PRC companies), Brazil’s stated desire to disconnect from the US Internet, and any US NSA/CIA hijinks.

Also, I might point out that, in the founding document of the pivot, “America’s Pacific Century” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton defined US “economic security” as “national security”, which would conceivably place a broader range of corporate information into the purview of the CIA and NSA.

A look at the indictment seems to indicate that the US wanted to make sure its threat to prosecute looked credible, and not be hamstrung by US corporations’ unwillingness to air matters pertaining to vital proprietary knowledge or the loss thereof in open court.

Many of the hacking infractions pertained to US firms that were involved in various trade disputes with the PRC on issues like solar panels, steel, and whatnot and already involved extensive declarations of fact before the WTO.   

The US grand jury returned the sealed indictment on May 1 and the Department of Justice exercised its discretionary powers to unseal the indictment on May 19; in other words, the timing was a matter of choice by the Obama administration.  I suspect it was a squib fired across the PRC’s bow in response to the PRC’s defiance in the SCS and its romance with Russia.

The PRC has responded with spluttering denials, suspension of a working group on cybersecurity, and threats of a chill in military-to-military ties.  

The Obama administration’s move doesn’t seem to have much of an upside; it scotched the joint US-PRC work on groundrules in cyberwarfare, something that I think is of genuine interest to the Pentagon if not the keyboard commandoes of the national security apparatus; it also threatens military-to-military exchanges, again a priority for the military, which cherishes interactions with opposing commanders it may be called upon to confront or fight; and it provides very little consolation for US high tech businesses like Cisco, which are reeling from the public revelation of their intimate games of footsie with the NSA.

Needless to say, the indictment also did nothing to advance what should be the sin qua non of superpower geopolitics: trying to drive a wedge between the PRC and Russia by highlighting differences in treatment.  But instead of stroking Xi Jinping, we gave him a whack on the snout at the same time we’re pummeling Putin.

That is, it would seem, rather stupid, since Russia is wary of PRC economic dominance, especially in the Siberian east, fears the demographic onslaught of the “Yellow Horde”, and is not an automatic and natural ally of China.

Nevertheless, “Eurasia” is now becoming a thing, and that’s not very good news for the pivot to Asia.  The pallid multilateralism of the pivot, I must confess, does not compare favorably to the muscular posturing of red strongmen that makes the hearts of neo-nationalists, particularly in Russia, go pitty-pat.

The premise of the pivot—that an ostensible united front of the US and Asian democracies will impel the PRC to modify its behavior to adhere to desired Western norms—is taking a hit along with the optics.

As the relative weight of the US and Europe in the world economy diminish, US sanctions encourage disintermediation of the US financial system in the world economy, the US pursues an ineffectual but polarizing all-stick/zero-carrot confrontation with Russia at the very time it is seeking to isolate the PRC diplomatically, and “Eurasia” looks more viable, the PRC’s willingness to bear the cost of defying US soft power increases.

Don’t get me wrong.  PRC aggressiveness in the South China Sea is real.  Problem is, the US will to confront the PRC in the SCS is not.  The Rube Goldberg structure of the pivot announces that fact instead of hiding it.

As the deterrent effect of US soft power in Asia dwindles, the US must decide whether to force developments in Asia into the sphere in which it still exercises unquestioned dominance—the hard power of military action—or resign itself to an ineluctable erosion of US prestige and influence in the region and a retreat to bilateral horsetrading with the unpalatable “Eurasian” powers.

It will also be interesting to see if America recognizes that it has a choice, albeit from an unattractive menu of options.  But if the Western spin of the Ukraine crisis is any guide, the US will console itself with the fantasy that it is merely reacting passively to aggression, the pivot was forced on it, and the PRC can be blamed for the unwise choices that Washington made.

The U.S. is not in the business of acknowledging it made bad foreign policy, even though it has made spectacularly bad foreign policy during the Obama as well as Bush administrations.  The usual temptation is to blame incapable proxies and venal antagonists for crises exacerbated by the United States.  

For a useful illustration, I direct readers to the case of Libya, where the US & NATO destroyed the governing authority, handed the reins over to groups totally incapable of exercising power, and are now apparently backing a coup by an ineffectual strongman who just might make things right; the cavalcade of bloody disaster that is US policy in Syria; the botch in Ukraine; and, for that matter, the massacre and misery of Iraq.  And I almost forgot the disaster that the US-midwifed regime of South Sudan has become.  And how about Yemen?   

Either the US is rather maladroit practitioner of foreign policy, or failure is displaying an inexplicable bias for dogging American actions.

For a classic specimen of US bewilderment at the pickle it’s in, I direct you to “China’s Grand Strategy Disaster” by Brad Glosserman of CSIS.  He is genuinely gobsmacked that the PRC cannot perceive the subtle genius of the pivot, which is so evident from the privileged perspective of the Washington Beltway.  Must be collective terror and/or insanity in the PRC ruling elite:

Why, then, does China stick to this course? Either no one in the upper echelons of the Chinese leadership sees the big picture—which is a very disturbing scenario—or no one in that leadership is prepared to question the wisdom of current policies, because the price of dissent is potentially too high. If true, that should be extremely worrying. That logic implies the momentum of current decisions cannot be diverted and confrontation, if not clashes, will follow.

There is only one convincing explanation for Chinese behavior: Beijing is trying to harvest a new source of energy to fuel its economy—capturing the power generated by Deng Xiaoping as he spins in his grave.

You know, I’m not sure a diagnosis of collective insanity in Zhongnanhai is really going to reassure President Obama that the pivot to Asia is the magic elixir for America’s “Pacific Century”.

There is, of course, another convincing explanation: that the PRC thinks it has enough regional clout to avoid catastrophic long term consequences from the transitory distaste of its neighbors and US for its policies, just as the United States feels it can shove its Ukraine policy down the throats of Germany and the EU.

For the US in Asia, I predict a choice off the confrontation/accommodation menu of “both and neither”, escalating but indecisive sanctions and military posturing, a mish-mash of soft power and hard power antagonism, i.e. an era of ugly and counterproductive muddling.  Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.

America's Oligarch Strategy

a.k.a. Empire in the Age of the 1%

At US behest, Austria arrested a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmytro Firtash in Vienna on some corruption and bribery charge that appears to be involved tangentially with the United States. 

 

Apparently, Firtash was small fry, 14^th on the Ukraine list, worth only $673 million.  Being an oligarch is, in itself, no crime in Ukraine.  Yulia Tymoshenko is an oligarch (the “Gas Queen); the new Ukrainian government openly appointed oligarchs Igor Kolomoisky and Serhiy Taruta as governors in two western provinces in order to keep a lid on pro-Russian sentiment; and the great white hope of the Maidan activists, the “good oligarch” Petro Poroshenko, a.k.a. “The Chocolate King” is the seventh-richest man in Ukraine, worth about $1 billion.

Firtash’s problem is that the US identified him with the Yanukovych camp and close to Russia because of his gas dealings.  It also looks like Firtash moved into Tymoshenko’s gas interests while she was in prison, which may account for the FBI obligingly dropping the hammer on him.

More importantly, I expect, Firtash’s arrest is meant to send a message to another oligarch-heavy area, Russia, in anticipation of Western sanctions for the Crimea referendum.

And, I think, the message is “Work with the US and against Putin if you want your Western assets to be protected and respected.”

This message is likely to be heeded.  After all, most oligarchs are laser focused on their personal wealth and their personal interest.  In an era of globalized finance, the dependence of the wealthy on the nation states that spawned their biological integument is less important than the matrix of trans-national institutions that sustain their finances and cater to their need for personal impunity.  Personal profit, in other words means more than patriotism or even national prosperity.

This state of affairs is magnificently illustrated by the story of a magnificent yacht currently docked in New York, courtesy of  the town herald of the globalized wealthy, CNBC:

New Yorkers have been tweeting, instagraming and posting countless photos of a gleaming blue megayacht docked off midtown Manhattan. It's called "Serene." At a staggering 436-feet, with five levels, several swimming pools, two helicopter pads and soaring chrome exhaust pipes at the top, it nearly outshines the Intrepid Museum next door. (Its best amenities are inside: the "underwater viewing room," an indoor climbing wall, children's playroom and cabins for 24 guests and 52 crew, according to the yacht builder.) Anyone doing a quick Google search learns that the owner of Serene is Yuri Scheffler, the vodka-and-spirits magnate behind the Stolichnaya brand. And with the turmoil in Ukraine and Russia , many have also speculated that Serene's sudden presence is a sign of the worried oligarchs-the Putin-connected, Russian super rich who now face a financial backlash from the West for Russia's actions. But they would be wrong. Scheffler is no Putin oligarch. And he has a surprising perspective on Ukraine.

In an email interview, Scheffler said he is in New York on business-hence the boat.

Although Scheffler's company, SPI Group, started in Russia, it's now based in Luxembourg. Scheffler is now a British citizen who spends much of his time abroad and hasn't been to Russia in 12 years. Scheffler has publicly battled President Vladimir Putin for years as the Russian government tried to seize the company and "renationalize" its assets. The government even issued a warrant for Scheffler's arrest in 2003 after he refused to hand over the company. So when asked about his views on Ukraine, Scheffler was highly critical of Russia's government.

One might think that, the feelings of a British citizen with a Luxembourg company about Russia might not be newsworthy, even if he is a rich fuck who owns a yacht longer than a football field.

Well, you’re wrong.  Oligarchs are not only rich guys and gals.  They also invest in media and politics to give their interests the greatest possible weight.  So they can bring down governments.

One of the most interesting takeaways of the Ukraine crisis was the report that Victoria Nuland had threatened sanctions against the Western interests of key Ukrainian oligarchs if violence was used against protesters…which erupted with suspicious alacrity.  Since the various oligarchs controlled dozens of deputies in the Ukrainian parliament, Yanukovych’s Party of Regions imploded and the rest is regime change history.

It is safe to say that the US has a similar strategy to pressure Russia’s 19 billionaires, first indirectly through sanctions against Russia and then, if British squeamishness over attacking one of the props of London’s prosperity are overcome, against the oligarchs’ personal wealth.

We even have a “good” oligarch, Mikhael Khodorkosky, the oil tycoon who was imprisoned by Putin ten years ago on the well-founded suspicion that he was ready and willing to serve as the vehicle for American interests and mischief in Russian politics and the strategic Russian oil industry.  

Khodorkovsky, although he had promised to eschew politics in return for a pre-Sochi Olympics pardon, emerged in Maidan Square recently with an impassioned attack on the Russian adventure in Crimea, and on Putin personally.  Khodorkovsky, prior to his imprisonment, had spent lavishly on think tank funding and PR in the West and he apparently still has his soft power mojo; his remarks were recorded and broadcast to the world by a small army of prestige media scribes.

Apparently the Forbes list of the world’s richest people had 424 billionaires on it with $1.1 trillion worth of wealth ($2.5 billion per capita and about 3% of global world product) in 1996;  now it’s 1,565 billionaires with $6.5 trillion ($4 billion per capita and around 10% of the global nut).  In case you’re wondering, the growth in billionaires and their wealth is outrunning inflation (about 50% since 1996), real GWP  (about 40%), and my 401K (don’t ask). All I can say is, “Waiter!  I’ll have what they’re having!”

I suppose it’s good that the United States is keeping up with global economic trends and has a strategy to exploit the proliferation of oligarchs who view national governments as just another item in their portfolios of assets and interests, to be rebalanced as pressure from the United States indicates.

Even though the PRC has largely maintained the Communist Party’s political and media monopoly, China has an oligarch problem, too, and has been aggressive in making sure that rich people with reformist inclinations and large followings on social media are cut down to size.  The PRC also cares about rich people who have evaded capital controls and stashed their ill-gotten gains in the West, making them vulnerable to US and EU extortion.  The PRC has to tread carefully in its anti-corruption drive, since the threat of local prosecution will drive the rich to put more of their money overseas and out of the Party’s reach and within range of US sanctions.  I expect some thought is being given to identifying and cultivating a safe overseas haven for cash and investments, to deal with the headache that the West is still the most attractive destination for investment, liquidity, and the free movement of capital.  

In passing, I might note that for lefty liberals it is one of those inconvenient truths that the countries that occasionally attempt to subordinate the interests of the wealthy to those of the state (and possibly to the occasional benefit of the huddled masses of the 99%) are often, by a funny coincidence, America’s most detested enemies, i.e. Russia, China, Cuba, and Venezuela.

The United States also has an oligarch problem.  Rich guy Michael Bloomberg ran New York for several years.  We’ve got the Koch brothers lavishly funding political candidates at the state and national level, and turning Wisconsin into a petri dish for their economic agenda.  A California billionaire, Tim Draper, is engaging in the oligarch version of nation building, funding a ballot initiative to split California into six states.  And of course Tom Perkins came straight out and said it: it should be one dollar not one person one vote.  I suppose we should be grateful that some oligarchs are still interested in restructuring the balky United States operation instead of just “going Galt” and abandoning it outright.

Maybe you haven’t noticed the oligarch problem because the rather dubious decision has been made to shield the identities of the malefactors of great wealth behind the anonymizing “1%” tag, allowing their defenders to deploy the “class warfare” trope and talk about economic growth and tweaks to the minimum wage as a solution for the “income inequality” crisis.  

I doubt that giving burger flippers an extra two dollars an hour will restore prosperity and dignity to the working poor.  But there is no mainstream constituency for redistributing oligarch wealth to solve our problems, on the valid basis that any attempt to mess with the oligarchs will simply send them and their billions scampering to a more amenable jurisdiction.  

When Bill Clinton went whole hog on globalization, we pretty much let the oligarch cat out of the bag.  Now the national government of the United States has committed to globalization with the idea that the America’s globalization-related problems of employment and investment can be solved…with more globalization, a rather dubious assertion that resembles the voodoo-economics mantra of Republican conservatives that the problems encountered in cutting taxes will be solved by…cutting more taxes.

So we have a solution for manipulating and exploiting oligarchs overseas.  Too bad we don’t have one for oligarchs at home.  Welcome to the 21^st century.

Is President Obama Trying to Break Vladimir Putin’s Political Back in Ukraine?

[For readers who have not done so already, I urge them to take 10 minutes and 49 seconds of their time to listen to the Paet/Ashton a.k.a. “snipergate” phone call.  It is not only a useful corrective to the laboriously constructed and misleading pushback now slowly working its way through the Western press, including the dubious accusation by the Ukrainian government that the snipers were Russian (which, perhaps inadvertently, supports the call’s contention that Yanyukovich was not responsible and, therefore, his ouster was improper); it also give a clear picture of the split between the Maidan activists and the rather unattractive cabal of pro-Western technocrats, oligarchs, and thugs who piggybacked on the Maidan demonstrations and vaulted into power with the help of the EU and the United States.  In particular, Ashton’s palpable impatience with the whole sniper issue and her single-minded focus on cobbling together the IMF package is worth noting.  The Maidan activist quoted by Paet is Olga Bogomolets, the “Mother Teresa of the Maidan” in the Daily Beast’s hyperbolic phrasing.  Subsequent to the release of the tape she has made a couple of equivocal statements that have been seized upon as rebuttals but, when more closely examined, fall somewhat short.  Bogomolets is perhaps unwilling to give aid and comfort to the Russian narrative on snipergate, especially while Russian is violating Ukrainian sovereignty in Crimea.  She is also a major political factor and has even been mentioned as presidential timber.  Indications are Bogomolets' preferred candidate, according to Paet--Petro Poroshenko, a.k.a. the “Chocolate King”, seventh richest man in Ukraine, and apparently a “clean” oligarch—will win the May 25 presidential election and try to steer the new government in a direction more to the liking of the Maidan activists.]

According to media reports, President Obama seems to be going all in on getting the Russians to back down over Crimea.

The White House readout of a recent telephone call between President Obama and China’s Xi Jinping recorded that the US president said that “preserving the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Ukraine was his “overriding objective” [emphasis added].  

It is somewhat eyebrow raising that President Obama seems to have turned Crimea into his own personal crusade, especially since a large segment of world and informed opinion is ready to kiss off Crimea as Putin’s to take.

Perhaps President Obama is using Nixon’s “madman” theory i.e. communicate to the Russians that the president might do something crazy bad if they don’t negotiate.

Another possibility is that President Obama is genuinely eager to push Putin to the wall, confront him, humiliate him, and defeat him, and shatter Russian pretensions in Eurasia.

Maybe Obama believes this is his Kennedy moment, his Cuban missile crisis, his opportunity to face down the Russians, rebuke the geopolitical handwringers, and demonstrate the supremacy of American power.

Indeed, before the Crimea adventure it was Putin, not Obama, who looked weak in Ukraine. 

Persuasive reports indicate that Putin let Yanyukovich flounder, then urged him to sign the February 21 EU-brokered transition agreement that would have paved the way for an earlier presidential election, and then was completely wrongfooted by the sudden installation of a new regime totally free of Russian influence.

And Putin’s move into Crimea was largely defensive, in my opinion, recognizing that the new regime in Kiev, pro-US, anti-Russian, and with a strong Ukraine-chauvinist component, would probably try to consolidate its power and popularity by evicting the Russians from their naval base at Sebastopol.

The same elements that point to Russian determination over Crimea—the weakening of Russian power and Putin’s personal prestige if the Russians are humiliated—might also be incentives for the Obama administration to escalate the crisis.

After all, the direct costs to the United States of a catastrophic confrontation in the Ukraine are relatively minor, and I have a feeling that President Obama’s advisors are telling him that Russia is a paper tiger, and Putin’s power will crumble if the US pushes back.  Indeed, the idea that Russia is teetering toward political, economic, and social collapse and needs only a strong shove to push it into the abyss i.e. rebirth as a meek and tractable member of the global liberal-democratic camp seems to be an article of faith among US foreign policy poobahs.

And President Obama did make the rather interesting decision to put Victoria Nuland—a confrontational regime-changenik whose husband, Robert Kagan, is a hard-core neo-con—in charge of the Ukraine brief.

In my personal opinion, as his presidency inches towards its terminus, President Obama has decided to wipe that “You won the Nobel Peace Prize, wimp” sneer off the world’s face.

Maybe the president has decided to even scores in his last two years, and doesn’t want to see his antagonists like Assad, Putin, and Maduro smugly seeing him off with a condescending pat on the rump come Inauguration Day 2017.  Maybe his advisors are telling him that he can avoid lame duck humiliation only by being more aggressive in his foreign policy, by getting out front with more confrontational policies that force equivocal allies to line up behind the United States.

In any case, the US has been markedly more aggressive in its approach its biggest foreign policy botch of Obama’s second term, Syria.  In response to the chemical weapons red line humiliation, the United States seems to be more interested in imploding Syria by supporting insurrectionists than it is in pushing forward the increasingly ridiculous Geneva process.  

The United States has also become more pro-active in attempting to manage the cat-herding dynamic of empowered but less capable allies taking on China that it set in motion with the “pivot to Asia”.

And there’s Venezuela, where the United States is now openly supporting a Ukraine-style process by which it demands that the government bestow legitimacy and political traction on the protesters confronting it in the streets (and thereby void the election outcome that the United States found displeasing without the risk and inconvenience of a new election).

And in Ukraine, it looks to me that the United States and Victoria Nuland may have been instrumental in blowing up a transition process that would have conceded the lead to Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin in the establishment of a new government.  The new Ukranian government might be deficient in key areas of legitimacy, finances, access to the good offices of Russia for trade, financial assistance, and favorable gas pricing, and terminally estranged from much  of its Russian-speaking minority, but as an effort in imperial crotch-hefting it served notice on the EU as well as Russia that the United States was more interested in calling the shots than behaving like a peer interlocutor of European bureaucrats and Russian authoritarians.  In passing, I might as well point out that the point of the F*ck the EU speech was that Victoria Nuland had no interest in seeing Angela Merkel’s preferred opposition leader, Vitali Klitschko, enter the government at the expense of her beloved “Yats”, Arsenyi Yatsenyuk.  And of course, after the EU-brokered agreement collapsed in a hail of bullets, Yats is in and “Klitsch” is out.

I am hoping that the truth behind President Obama’s confrontational posturing is a little more mundane: that Russia does not intend to annex Crimea, President Obama knows it, but wants the undeserved credit for resolutely entering the den of the Russian bear and giving his testicles a mighty twist.

According to the much-maligned but often interesting and informative RT (full disclosure: I was interviewed on an RT show a couple times), the speaker of Crimea’s Supreme Council stated that, even if the outcome of the March 16 referendum is pro-independence, Crimea would prefer to stay autonomous (the second choice on the referendum is to return to an early 1990s constitution that gave Crimea an even higher degree of autonomy in Ukraine than it enjoyed, well, until the current Russian shenanigans).

And the Europeans clearly have no interest in enlisting in a serious sanctions crusade against Russia, let alone a hot war.

So perhaps the West will content itself with half a loaf in Ukraine (actually, the 90% that isn’t Crimea) and Russia will exercise de facto suzerainty over Crimea while it ostensibly remains part of Ukraine.

And the United States, claiming victory over Russia in Ukraine, will be emboldened to make further mischief elsewhere.