02 October 2022

WORLD WAR III: What if What? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

 Intro: Hmmm so far who is 'concerned' - there's that convenient passive word again! 


 

As far as Hill is concerned, we are already fighting in the Third World War, whether we acknowledge it or not. “We’ve been in this for a long time, and we’ve failed to recognize it,” she said.

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www.bloomberg.com

Investors Are Often the First Casualties of War

Niall Ferguson
17 - 21 minutes


"The Ukraine crisis may yet produce the biggest war in Europe since 1945. 
Or it may produce some strange new hybrid of cyberattacks, “little green men” and maskirovka (military deception) that won’t quite match our preconceived notion of war. Or — though this now seems the lowest-probability scenario — President Vladimir Putin may turn out to be Russia’s answer to “The Grand Old Duke of York,” who (as well-educated children know) “had ten thousand men / He marched them up to the top of the hill / And he marched them down again.”

In January, I warned: “War is coming.” Yet history is full of wars that nearly happened but then didn’t, from the Franco-German “War in Sight” crisis of 1875 to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. For regular investors, these are nail-biting times because wars, unless they are very small and asymmetrical, tend to have big financial consequences. For speculators, by contrast, war scares are golden opportunities. Position yourself correctly, and you can make a killing if the dogs of war are unleashed — though if the hellhounds get sent back to their kennels, it’s you who gets killed and the guy who bet on peace gets the champagne.

In normal times, markets ebb and flow on the latest economic statistics. During a war scare, by contrast, it’s political news that moves the markets. During the past week, for example, all kinds of prices have moved, sometimes by large amounts, in response to the mere utterances of the key actors in the geopolitical drama. The price of gold, the price of oil, the exchange rate of the ruble, the European and American stock markets, as well as a host of exchange-traded instruments linked to measures of volatility — all have gyrated as the world’s managers of money have adjusted their probabilities of war upward or downward. . ."

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www.marketwatch.com

'Why shouldn’t it be as bad as the 1970s?' Historian Niall Ferguson warns the world is sleepwalking into an era of political and economic upheaval akin to the 1970s — only worse.

Clive McKeef
4 - 5 minutes

“‘I’m going to go out on a limb: Let’s consider the possibility that the 2020s could actually be worse than the 1970s.’”

— Niall Ferguson, historian and author

Historian Niall Ferguson warned Friday that the world is sleepwalking into an era of political and economic upheaval akin to the 1970s — only worse.

Speaking to CNBC at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy, Ferguson said the catalysts had already occurred to spark a repeat of the 1970s, a period characterized by an OPEC oil embargo, Middle East war and high inflation. Yet this time, the severity of recent shocks was likely to be greater and more sustained.

“The ingredients of the 1970s are already in place,” Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick.

“The monetary- and fiscal-policy mistakes of last year, which set this inflation off, are very alike to the ’60s,” he said, likening recent price hikes to the high inflation of the 1970s.

“And, as in 1973, you get a war,” he continued, referring to the 1973 Arab-Israeli War — also known as the Yom Kippur War — between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria.

As with Russia’s current war in Ukraine, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War led to involvement from the superpowers, the Soviet Union and the U.S., setting off a wider energy crisis. Only that time the conflict lasted just 20 days. Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is six months old, suggesting any repercussions for energy markets could be far worse.

“This war is lasting much longer than the 1973 war, so the energy shock it is causing is actually going to be more sustained,” said Ferguson.

Politicians and central bankers have been trying to mitigate the worst effects of the coronavirus pandemic and the Ukraine war by raising interest rates to combat inflation and reducing reliance on Russian energy imports.

But Ferguson, who has been a professor at Harvard, the London School of Economics and New York University and has authored 16 books, including his most recent, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe,” said there was no evidence to suggest that current crises could be avoided

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✓ [ 2 ] SUSAN GLASSER 

Video Insert



Susan Glasser & Peter Baker: A History and a Warning (The Bulwark Podcast) - YouTube

m.youtube.com › watch
2 days ago · The Bulwark Podcast: https://www.thebulwark.com/podcast/the-bulwark-podcast/Charlie Sykes and guests discuss the latest news from inside 

What if We’re Already Fighting the Third World War with Russia? 

Putin’s latest provocations once again put Washington in an awful bind.
www.newyorker.com
Susan B. Glasser
8 - 10 minutes

"Nuclear blackmail, illegal annexation of territory, hundreds of thousands of Russian men rounded up and sent to the front lines in Ukraine, undersea gas pipelines to Europe mysteriously blowing up. After endless speculation, we can now say it for sure: this is how Vladimir Putin responds when he is backed into a corner.

Throughout seven awful months of war in Ukraine, President Joe Biden has held to a steadfast line when it comes to the Russian invasion: his goal is to help Ukraine win while also insuring that victory does not trigger a Third World War. 

But as Russian forces have experienced U.S.-aided battlefield setbacks in recent days, Putin has reacted by ratcheting up the pressure. It’s far from clear how Washington will be able to continue to pursue both goals simultaneously, given that Putin is holding Ukraine—and the rest of the world—hostage to his demands. On Friday, Putin plans to affirm the results of what the Biden Administration has sternly termed “sham ‘referenda’ ” as a pretext to declare Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine part of the Russian state. How could Biden, or the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, or anyone else who believes in international order agree to that?

And yet Donald Trump and the growing faction of pro-Putin cheerleaders in the conservative media—Tucker Carlson, I’m thinking of you—are demanding still more concessions to Russia in response to Putin’s escalating threats. The other night, Carlson, citing no evidence, blamed the United States for somehow playing a role in attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines. Charlie Kirk, one of the most outrageous of the junior Trumpists, speculated that it was “a potential midterm-election operation” and that U.S. intelligence agencies should be considered “guilty until proven innocent”—an appalling smear gleefully parroted on Russian state TV. The ex-President—who during his time in office did so much to weaken NATO and undermine American allies while also praising Putin—even offered himself up as a mediator. On Wednesday, in a post on Truth Social, his Orwellian-named social-media platform, he insisted, “get a negotiated deal done NOW.”

Which, of course, is exactly what Putin wants Trump to say. After a Ukrainian counter-offensive in the eastern Kharkiv region this month pushed Russian forces back to their own border, Putin responded with new provocations designed to force the West to the bargaining table, since his exceptionally brutal yet inept application of military force failed to do so. That, at least, is the consensus view of many of America’s smartest Kremlin watchers. . .
[.  ]  Watching all of this, it’s hard not to think of how often over the past two decades the West has collectively failed to get Putin right—or to get him at all. Over the summer, the Aspen Strategy Group asked me to give a presentation about Russia at war, and what stood out to me in my research was the number of times, and variety of ways, in which the U.S. and its allies had missed the mark in understanding Putin at critical junctures in his long tenure as Russia’s modern tsar.

Again and again, Putin has profited from the application of military force to achieve otherwise unattainable political gains. He came to power by promoting war in the separatist Russian province of Chechnya. He sent Russian troops to Georgia and Syria and, in 2014, to Ukraine. Each time, there were endless rounds of speculation in Western capitals about how to create an “exit ramp” that would finally entice Putin to end his incursion. Putin just kept barrelling down the highway.

So, yes, I’m skeptical when I hear the latest round of “exit ramp” talk. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching Putin all of this time, it’s that he is not one to walk away from a fight or back down while losing—escalation is his game, and by now he is very, very practiced at it. As the Moscow Times put it, in a fascinating piece of reporting from inside the Kremlin, “Putin always chooses escalation.”


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