Rise to the extremes?

Some commentators increasingly openly fear that this war could escalate into a nuclear confrontation between the two blocs. Indeed, the turn of events in Ukraine makes us think of a possible rise to the extremes of violence, according to the formulation of Carl von Clauzewitz. On the one hand, the United States and EU countries are massively sending arms to Ukraine, on the other, the Russians are considerably reducing their exports to the EU. So let’s go back to the sources and first to the concept.

The rise to extremes, a theoretical concept

In his famous book “On War”, Carl von Clauzewitz develops the concept of climbing to extremes. It is in fact an abstraction which only exists at the state of theory and which results from an exercise in logical thought starting from the nature of war, or in any case from the definition that gives Clauzewitz: “an act of force by which we seek to compel the adversary to submit to our will. Thus, each side will logically seek to outdo its adversary by committing more effort than itself, which will lead to the unlimited use of force and an escalation to the extremes of violence.

But, says Clauzewitz, in real life, war is limited by all kinds of phenomena: the fog of war, errors in assessing the enemy’s will, internal friction due to the workings of state machinery and armies themselves… But above all, the limits to the rise to extremes are set by the political aims of the war which, for both of the belligerents, will require the means to be consented to and will influence the motivation to fight.Moreover, often the rise to the extremes is limited by the exhaustion of one of the camps, or even both.

What are the war aims?

The war in Ukraine began in 2014 with the US-organized Maidan coup. The objective of the Anglo-Americans was to take control of Ukraine, a country considered strategic. Indeed, in his book “The Grand Chessboard “ greatly influenced American strategic thinking since the mid-1990s, Zbigniew Brzezinski classifies Ukraine in the category of geopolitical pivots. It should be clarified that Z.B. is based on the geopolitical theory of Halford John Mackinder according to which it is necessary to hold the “Heartland”, mainly the plain extending from central Europe to Western Siberia, as evoked by his famous motto: “Who governs the Eastern Europe rules the Heartland, which rules the Heartland rules the world-island, which rules the world-island rules the world”.

The Ukrainian plain then represented, according to Mackinder, the space of mobility par excellence allowing rapid invasions by means of cavalry. Logically, Z.B. places Ukraine in the category of geopolitical pivots: “The notion of geopolitical pivots refers to states whose importance is less related to their real power and their motivation than to their sensitive geographical location and their potential vulnerability, which influences the behavior of geostrategic actors. Geostrategic actors being “states with sufficient capacity and national will to exercise their power and influence beyond their borders”.

We understand the link between a geopolitical pivot and a geostrategic actor. Z.B. cites the most important geopolitical pivots: Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Korea, Turkey and Iran (respecting the order of his book). The war goal of the Anglo-American ruling classes is therefore probably to rely on Ukraine to neutralize Russia, so as to remove Russia from the list of geostrategic actors. But the idiots who run the Western states and the EU apply the cooking recipes of Z.B. without having understood the spirit, all in their illusion of supremacy and manifest destiny.

One can even imagine that they harbor a fantasy of a great replacement; after all, they have already had a successful experience with the North American Indian genocide. In short, this is therefore deeply an existential question for Russia. Moreover, this is how Vladimir Putin understood it. After trying in vain to enforce the Minsk II agreements for seven years, while the Americans were arming and taking control of Ukrainian military assets (attachment of Ukrainian operations centers to the NATO chain of command, training and command of the units on the ground…) and were preparing to carry out a deadly offensive in the Donbass around mid-March, he ended up initiating hostilities himself, according to his principle: “When the fight is inevitable, you must attack first”.

For many years, we have been developing the theme of the change of paradigm ongoing geopolitical paradigm shift, or phase transition to use Stuart Kauffman’s mathematical model. Well this time, it is said very clearly by Vladimir Putin, by Sergey Lavrov and by Dmitry Medvedev: the real aim of this military operation is not only to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine, it is to implement a new world order based on equality between nations and security rules that suit each of them. In short, it is about ending Anglo-American hegemony.

This hegemony based on the primacy of the dollar (monkey money because it is not backed by any real wealth) in international exchanges maintained by force (blackmail or declared violence) by American military power. The strategic war aim of Russia, and behind it of all the non-aligned states, is therefore of monetary and economic essence because the center of gravity of the Western system is of monetary and economic essence.

Here too we are dealing with an existential question for the West. The fantasies about a possible nuclear war, if it stems from anxiety about the turn that relations between Russia and Western countries are taking, are not in the right place; the real war is economic. So this war involves an existential threat to Russia versus an existential threat to the West, except… it’s almost certain that the idiots who run the West haven’t figured this out, so long as they don’t do not even have the intellectual level to correctly analyze a tactical situation.

Dumb as a goose!

In all methods of operational planning, there is a phase which consists of making the most objective analysis possible of the balance between the adversary’s strengths and weaknesses and our own strengths and weaknesses. Sun Zi addresses this issue in “The Art of War” in Article VI titled “Of Full and Empty”. And Western rulers are declaring an economic war on Russia. Russia, an energy self-sufficient country and exporter, food self-sufficient and exporter of GMO-free products (Vladimir Putin has banned the use of GMOs in Russia for several years), on the road to self-sufficiency for manufactures. Western countries, especially European countries depend on Russian energy and Russian food products, to varying degrees.

Western action against Russia can therefore be summed up as follows: attacking the adversary head on, on his strengths which are also our own weaknesses. Without wanting to be excessive, I would say to have an IQ not exceeding that of a hen, and even then it is not very nice for hens, to imagine such a plan. The rise to the extremes therefore began in the field of the economy, and the finance that goes with it. It will end with the exhaustion of the western camp. Because for Vladimir Putin, it is the rise to extremes of resignation in the face of so much stupidity and the indifference that follows.

The following ?

On the side of the new world, the development of exchanges between non-Western states in the currencies of each country will intensify until Russia can do without the exports that it reserved for Western countries. Infrastructure is needed (gas pipelines, railways, highways, etc.) but within two to three years they will be built.

On the western side, we are going to witness a very rapid deterioration in the living standards of the populations, which differ in their nature and their brutality depending on the country. This could cause revolutions, in one form or another, in certain particularly fragile countries… until we get rid of these fools who govern us and we fully enter the 21st century and join the new world.