So the U.S. either wants Putin out of office (either out or dead) or they want him to be the scapegoat for the hot phase of the war. And this is where the two-pronged economic attack comes in. In order to provoke a dumb move on Putin’s part, the U.S. has done the following: The First Prong: Obama started imposing sanctions against Russia early in 2014, and he has progressively increased the severity of these sanctions — imposing more even over the past week, as Russia is in the midst of a currency crisis. Imposing sanctions was more a nuisance than anything else, and Putin didn’t budge. So the U.S. escalated things in the second half of 2014. The Second Prong: Obama made an agreement with Saudi Arabia. You can read about the details here, where I discuss a report from the Wall Street Journal and other sources. The U.S. agreed to attack Syria on behalf of the Saudi king. This alone is a provocation against Russia because Syria is a Russian ally. Impressively, Putin didn’t fall for it. But the other part of the agreement, it appears, was that Saudi Arabia would significantly cut oil prices in order to put significant pressure on the Russian economy, either provoking Putin to take military action or the Russian people to call for his ouster. Unsurprisingly, Russia has weathered the storm fairly well. Why isn’t this a surprise? The Russian economy is stronger than the U.S. economy, and Putin knows it. In fact, it appears that Putin’s war strategy against the U.S. is to wait for the inevitable collapse of the U.S. His speech last week was very telling. Here are a couple of the most important highlights (from the Guardian): He said that the economy would recover within two years — by the end of 2016. He said “external factors” were to blame for the difficulty, mentioning that sanctions and a U.S.-Saudi oil-pricing conspiracy may have caused the crisis. This is very important. Putin is acknowledging this is caused by economic warfare, but he isn’t too worried about it. He even seems confident that it will be over before 2017. Why is this? Because Putin knows the U.S. can’t do this indefinitely. The reduced oil prices will hurt America more than Russia. And he’s content to fight this economic war by sticking to his far more powerful guns — namely, by continuing to drop the dollar. So, it seems, Putin may agree with the Russian lawmaker, Mikhail Degtyarev, who tried to pass a law protecting Russians from the U.S. dollar in 2013. “If the U.S. national debt continues to grow at its current rate, the dollar system will collapse in 2017,” said Degtyarev’s legislation. If Putin agrees with this, or even thinks the collapse will come a little earlier, it is easy to see why he feels comfortable patiently waiting out this economic crisis for a couple years. After all, it will be far, far worse for his enemies in the West.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 08:03:55 +0000
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