The Delusions Of Western Leadership

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The inability of the West to subjugate Russia, Iran and China creates a challenge to the Western elites’ ontological security, their comfort that their view of the world is a tenable one. The disconnection between external reality and an internal worldview is known as cognitive dissonance and can result in either a positive outcome, a change to the internal worldview to align better with external reality, or a desperate attempt to maintain the internal worldview through the rejection of the new external reality and a construction of increasingly disconnected-from-reality rationalizations that support the threatened worldview.

For over five centuries the Western elites have been increasingly reinforced in a civilizational-supremacism (and an explicit racial supremacism until that became passé) belief system that viewed the West as the height of civilization (“the garden”) and the Rest (”the forest”) as requiring Western tutelage. The ability of a recently derided Russia (“a gas station with nuclear weapons”) to not only withstand Western sanctions but to flourish and gain overwhelming military supremacy in Western-backed Ukraine directly contradicts the Western elite worldview.

To understand where the Western elites are in accepting the new reality we can peruse the pages of their major mouthpiece journals and the work of their bought-and-paid-for academics and public intellectuals. I will regularly cover such work as a way of assessing whether or not the Western elites are still struggling in denial or are showing some ability to move on and accept the new reality.

The journal Foreign Affairs, published by the Rockefeller-created Council on Foreign Relations, provides just such a vantage point from which to view the current state of mind of the US capitalist oligarchy. A recent article is entitled “Russia Is Burning Up Its Future: How Putin’s Pursuit of Power Has Hollowed Out the Country and Its People”. It is written by Andrei Kolesnikov, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center - another US oligarch creation. He is a devotee of the Russian “liberals” that helped the West destroy the Russian economy in the 1990s; handing over its wealth to the crooks that became the Russian oligarchs. So of course, he hates a Putin that reined in the oligarchs and asserted Russian nationalism in the process of saving Russia from becoming a US vassal.

He starts by elevating the hardly known in Russia Navalny (a racist right-wing Islamophobic bigot) to a status well elevated from the reality of his position in Russian politics; for example there was never any “Putin-Navalny” confrontation. The recent revelations of Navalny’s associate’s meeting with Western intelligence are of course not mentioned. He does mention the case of Nadezhdin, who was barred from standing in this years elections due to irregularities. This is a man who was directly allied with the traitorous crook Khodorkovsky (who Putin dealt with when he was on the brink of selling a large chunk of Russia’s oil reserves to the West); Nadezhdin has called the Russian intervention in Ukraine a “disastrous mistake”. The simple fact that Western polls have repeatedly shown that Putin enjoys a level of popularity that can only be dreamed of by Western politicians is of course never mentioned by the author.

The war in Ukraine is said to be “Putin’s project” rather than the reality of intervention forced by the 2014 Western-backed fascist coup and the ongoing attempted subjugation and ethnic cleansing of the Donbass. Now that Russia has not collapsed as expected under the massive Western sanctions and foreign exchange reserves theft, a new narrative must be composed of a “weak” Russia. This is what Kolesnikov’s article is all about. He starts with this utter propaganda:

Although it retains market fundamentals, the Russian economy is increasingly dependent on government investment. The military-industrial complex has become the overwhelming driver of this unhealthy and unproductive economy, as the 2024 budget makes clear: military expenditures will be 1.7 times higher even compared with last year’s inflated figures, to reach 25 percent of all spending. Meanwhile, Russian exports, primarily of oil and gas resources, are providing diminishing returns because of the closure of Western markets and discounted sales.

Russia is fighting a Ukraine that acts as a proxy for the whole of the West, a fact which of course will require some increases in military expenditures! A West that has rebuilt the Ukrainian army three times and has spent many US$10 billions keeping the Ukrainian state afloat. Russia is spending approximately 10% of GDP on the war, with the federal government budget deficit falling from 2% of GDP in 2023 to 0.8% of GDP in 2024. To be able to fight such a war with hardly any budget deficit is an incredible sign of strength, not weakness. Kolesnikov attempts to misrepresent this by talking about the percentage of federal expenditures fought on the war while not stating that the Russian federal government budget is relatively small, and certainly not mentioning the tiny budget deficit; while Russian federal debt to GDP is a tiny 19%.

In contrast, the US added at least an additional US$6 trillion in debt fighting its post-9/11 wars against weak countries and sheep herders; while the debt to GDP ratio has increased to 121% and the US federal deficit is 6% of GDP. The Russian economy has continued to grow (outgrowing the Western nations), not only due to the war but also due to the forced domestic re-industrialization as Western nations blocked exports and Western companies exited the country. The same happened with respect to an agricultural sector that flourished after the Crimea-related sanctions. A Western-sanctions forced version of the Import-Substitution-Industrialization (ISI) strategy. Prior to the Ukraine War much of the Russian economy was dominated by Western corporations, now that has changed in favour of domestic and also Chinese corporations.

Then Kolesnikov mentions the low Russian birth rate, which it shares with many Western nations, and tries to insinuate that Russian military losses are so high that the combination will lead to a demographic collapse. Given that the level of Russian military losses has been extremely low, as reported by Mediazona here, and that in no way does the Russian government plan for “a future permanent state of war”, Kolesnikov is simply making stuff up. The incredible demographic collapse of Ukraine and the Baltic States is never mentioned.

Then we have pure sophistry, with increases in social spending and preferential treatment for the poor being spun as a bad thing! Only from a Russian oligarchic disciple and Western academic vassal could such tripe spew forth.

One of the scarcest resources, however, is psychological. Unable to satisfy the public’s hunger for peace and normality, the regime has resorted to gigantic social expenditures and preferential treatment for the poor, turning Russia into Putin’s Barbieland. Russian society in turn has been reduced to adapting and surviving, rather than developing

Then he waffles on again to elevate both Nadezhdin and Navalny to a status that they have never enjoyed while ignoring the overwhelming popularity of Putin. The line of people to say goodbye to Navalny was supposedly “enormous”, whatever that means. Even CNN counted the lineup as only “thousands” hardly enormous in a country of 140 million! This man can simply not get his head around the fact that the Russian population hated the oligarchs that Putin tamed, and fully support his intervention in Ukraine to protect the ethnic Russians of the Donbass and the security of the Russian Motherland.

Then there are just reams of garbage about Gaidar being incorrectly “blamed … for destroying the Soviet economy and impoverishing the population” when he was really the true architect of Russia’s success in the author’s estimation! An utter reversal of history by this seeming Gaidar super fan, it seems that he is part of the “Gaidarees” a parallel of the “Swifties”. How dare Putin steal Saint Gaidar’s thunder! How dare Putin unthrone the crook oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky (referred to laughingly as a “tycoon”)! How dare he take back control of the media from the oligarchs! How dare he take actions and change the constitution to reduce the possible influence of foreign funded and foreign born vassals and fifth columnists! How dare Putin act in the best interests of the Russian people and the Russian nation!

Supposedly in 2014 Putin “seized Crimea, which he justified by ultraconservative imperialist ideology”; tell that to the vast majority of Crimeans who happily voted for freedom from the Ukrainian ethnic fascists! Supposedly, in starting the SMO against Ukraine Putin was rejecting the “democratic heritage of Boris Yeltsin”! The very man who rejected the votes of the vast majority of Soviet citizens to maintain the Soviet Union when he triggered the separation of Russia with the help of his Ukrainian buddy! The man who staged a coup, including shelling the Russian Parliament Building, in 1993! The man who stole the 1996 election with oligarch and US help! The author seems to live in a parallel universe which is utterly disconnected from the real history of the 1990s. Oh and of course he has to praise the wretched Gorbachev who is the man most responsible for the hell of the 1990s, hated at home but loved by the West and the liberal Russian compradors.

The author then falls back on his misrepresentation of Russian losses in Ukraine as he states “The Kremlin now spends human capital profligately, as if it were a mere commodity”, which is yet another utter lie. The Russian tactics in Ukraine have been designed to keep casualties to a minimum while generating huge Ukrainian losses. And oh no, Russia is showing its traditional values - how dare it celebrate family values, as Irish voters have recently in rejecting their elite’s attempts to change the Irish constitution to reject such family values:

To further this goal, the Kremlin continues the fight against same-sex relationships and abortion while promoting “traditional” families. It is no coincidence that Putin declared 2024 the Year of the Family and devoted much of the 2024 presidential address to supporting large families.

The author also attempts to infer that the Russian death rate has increased during Putin’s term while in fact it has continued to fall, while also studiously ignoring the BBC/Mediazona work on identifying Russian war casualties. He then laments the labour shortage (2-3 million in a country of 140 million), while ignoring the basic economics of a labour shortage driving increased efficiency. The opposite of the West where mass immigration has become the sop for “labour shortages”; resulting in compressed wages and low levels of efficiency gains, with Canada being an excellent example. He states that Russian labour productivity fell in 2022 (actually only at the start of 2022), which may be expected as a country reorganized for a major war. The latest data for Sept 2022 to Sept 2023 shows Russian labour productivity rising as expected during a labour shortage by a healthy 2.89%, and given Russia’s continued growth in 2024 further healthy gains can be expected; utterly demolishing the author’s economically ignorant assertions.

He finishes with a flurry of delusional copium:

But Russia is defending a dying model of development, one that requires a totalitarian and imperial ideology—and that necessitates using up resources now, including the same old oil and gas.

So this is what the author spent thousands of words of utter tripe to spew out, the ravings of a delusional who is unable to accept the reality of a strong Russia that is only getting stronger while the West only gets weaker. Reflecting the position of the US oligarch class who pay his wages.

The web site Naked Capitalism (NC) covers another Foreign Affairs article here, one which shows a desperate struggle to reject the new reality by falling back on out of date tropes; in this case the Cold War policy of containment. As NC shows, this is an utterly delusional position as unlike during the Cold War, Russia has the Chinese workshop of the world together with Central Asia and much of the Rest of the World with which to evade any such containment. In fact, it may very well be the West that is cutting itself off from the international connections that it requires to flourish. The Western elites are still deep in a denial of reality, leading to policy decisions which negatively impact their own position.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/russia-burning-its-futureG

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROGER BOYD is an academic researcher in Geopolitics and Climate Change. Fellow, Balsillie School of International Affairs