October has been a month of marshalling alliances. And in the ally gathering game, Joe Biden and NATO have come out on top. With the exception of one important Putin victory.
There was a vote in the general assembly of the United Nations on October 12th to condemn Russian annexation of Ukrainian territories. The West won the vote 143 to 5. In other words, 143 nations voted to condemn the Russian invasion. Only five sided with Russia.
Putin’s rain of up to 185 rocket attacks a day on civilian structures in Ukrainian cities was so appalling that states in Russia’s stealth alliance, nations in Russia’s Axis of Evil, did not vote against the condemnation. That included Axis of Evil members Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and the really big one—China. Only Syria, Nicaragua, North Korea and Belarus voted on Russia’s side. And the second most populous country in the world, India, also stayed on the sidelines.
The West’s victory was so overwhelming that the United Nations’ official press release on the subject read like it was written in the White House: it said, “Ukraine: UN General Assembly demands Russia reverse course on ‘attempted illegal annexation.’”
Politico reports that the avalanche of votes in the UN was no accident. The US, the United Kingdom, and the European Union lobbied their fellow UN ambassadors, counting their support one nation at a time the way a whip in the US congress counts votes and goes for a win.
But the vote at the UN was not the only measure the US was taking in October to solidify its alliances.
In Brussels, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was meeting with other NATO defense ministers in the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a group that monitors Ukraine’s need for weapons day by day and speeds those weapons’ delivery. Then Austin had a meeting of NATO defense ministers on October 12th and 13th.[i] And Austin was scheduled October 14th for a meeting of the Bucharest Nine Group in Brussels, a group of nine countries on Russia’s western flank, countries vulnerable to Russian invasion.
Said Poland’s president Andrzej Duda opening the Bucharest Nine meeting, “Yesterday, the demons of a great war, not seen since 1945, returned to Europe, One country and only one country is responsible for the pictures of war reaching us from Ukraine: it is Putin’s Russia.”
Meanwhile, how was Vladimir Putin doing in the alliance business? Putin held an energy week in Moscow from October 12th to 14th , with “2,500 participants from more than 80 countries.” He told the attendees that the West was responsible for the energy crunch that will freeze Europe this winter.
“What does Russia have to do with it?” asked Putin in his plenary speech. The West, he says, constantly tries “to blame someone else for their mistakes.” The mistake, says Putin, is leveling sanctions against Russia.
What’s more, Putin accused the United States of sabotaging the Nord Stream pipeline that delivers gas to Germany. The USA, Putin claimed, wants to cripple Europe.
A strange accusation to make when it is Putin who is trying to cripple Europe. And to destroy the system that he believes is Satanic—Western democracy.
Then there was Putin’s one big win. Putin met with the President of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Far more important, he worked with Saudi Arabia’s ruler Mohammed bin Salmon to get the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, to cut oil production by two million barrels a day.
That move that will jack up the price of oil, increase inflation, and make life hard for you and me, but will give Putin the money he needs to sustain his invasion. The move will also help Putin and Mohammed bin Salman’s friend Donald Trump and his hand-picked Republicans in the American election.
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Putin’s control of the five Central Asian and Caucasus mountain countries is falling apart. But Putin is trying to patch some of this up by visiting Kazakhstan to attend the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia summit, the Commonwealth of Independent States summit, and a Russia-Central Asia summit.
Meanwhile, Putin has accused the West of introducing dangerous “nuclear rhetoric”. What he doesn’t want you to know is what he has been encouraging his TV hosts at home to say.
His TV mouthpieces have been calling for nuclear strikes on London, New York, and Washington. As Russian TV host Olga Skabeeva, known as the Iron Doll of Putin TV, put it, “What is the goal of the collective West? The victory of Ukraine and defeat of Russia. As long as the Russian Federation has nukes, and the Russian Federation does have nukes, push us into a corner and everyone dies.”
References:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/10/1129492
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69567
https://www.president.pl/news/president-calls-for-military-aid-to-ukraine,49477
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/12/ukraine-seeks-weapons-to-counter-russias-ability-to-strike
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/12/russia-ukraine-annexation-un-vote-00061558
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/08/world/asia/russia-putin-soviet.html
https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-10-14-22/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/business/opec-russia-oil-output.html
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Howard Bloom has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his seven books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am et every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.institute.