16 June 2022
Many of the commentators on the situation in Ukraine seem to think that Russia has been kicked out of the international system, that it's a pariah and that it will never be re-admitted.
Fact is, the Russian and European economies have been very closely integrated for decades and the proof is the squealing you can hear from France and Germany now that they have to kow-tow to American sanctions.
But reality is that the entrepreneurs in the small and medium-sized Russian companies and the managers in the larger companies have, by their frontier positions, got this international outlook - why, they even send their kids for schooling in top British and European universities, they own real estate on the Côte d'Azur - they have got this international outlook and are in contact with their European counterparts, and once the political side of this conflict has quietened down, the economic and social sides will come back to the fore.
On a related point of some interest, it's worth noting that where Western countries have pulled out of Russia, this has presented a golden opportunity for Russians with a bit of money to take over. For example, the well known case of the McDonald's chain. This will only serve to make them richer and if Russians have money to spend then Europeans' and Americans' ears prick up and tills open and trade resumes.
4 June 2022
Germany is rearming like the Nazis, says Putin. The story goes back further than this, according to George Friedman.
https://youtu.be/r-8KV_GurLY
Remember that prior to Bismarck, Germany was just a collection of many little different states, so while from 1492 onwards, Britain, the Netherlands, France and Spain had their empires, with whom to trade and grow rich; Germany had nothing.
The Germans unite together very well, they work together very well, they are super efficient and also from looking at the historic record you can see that they are a very aggressive people.
Germany has an industrial base that produces twice what it needs but unlike the other European powers it had no Empire to export to. This is why Germany abandoned the deutschmark for the euro : because it could set the exchange rate and thus found an export home for its surplus production ... at the expense most of these so-called Club Med countries who, by their Catholic or Latin culture, could not keep up.
500 years of war in Europe. Europe was a slaughterhouse that lost 20% of its population. But still, overall Europe is more populous and wealthier than the United States od America.
America created all those institutions after the last war, including the EU and the Marshall plan, and as a sea power it made safe the world's sea lanes for trade. It did all this in order to stop the slaughter in the birthplace of culture, and have a stable block with whom to trade, and to nobble any would-be European hegemon that might form alliances and come back and challenge it.
But it meant that Europe lost much of its sovereignty and the world was dominated by the two powers, America and Russia.
Then in 1992 the Soviet Union collapsed and in that same year, Europe united under the Maastricht Treaty. One of those American institutions, NATO, should have gone out of business at this point, but Europe had disbanded its militaries to a large extent, so NATO remained and began kicking Russia while it was down, rolling in all those newly-independent states along the Russo-central-European fault line. Why? Because it could, as America now had no challenger to check its behaviour.
And this is what led to the present war : as in the past, as soon as Russia regained its strength, it responded to the beating.
So in conclusion, I think it's true to say that while this war is completely unnecessary, but America is never in a mood to listen, if America loses and has to withdraw from Europe, then yes, German re-armament could be a big problem. America will not be there to bully Germany into considerate behaviour for its neighbours, and there is a real risk that if the southern debtor nations stop repaying their debt, they will have problems with Germany, in the same way Sri Lanka currently has problems with China and we could see sovereignty, and the power to make war or peace, flow to a newly militarised Germany.