Pepe Escobar,
What's in play: the most concise pre-Alaska - and beyond - analysis anywhere. Hit the groove.
https://x.com/RealPepeEscobar/status...18535049396533
https://sputnikglobe.com/20250812/th...122598684.html
Pepe Escobar: The Bear and the Eagle Face-Off in Alaska
Two weeks after Alaska, there’s the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) annual summit in Tianjin, China. India’s Narendra Modi and Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian will join, among others, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin at the same table. A BRICS/SCO table.
September 3, in Beijing, is the 80th anniversary of what is officially defined as the victory of “the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War”. Putin is the guest of honor. The rehearsal, with 22,000 participants, took place this past weekend in Tian’anmen Square.
On the same day, in Russia's Vladivostok, it’s the start of the Eastern Economic Forum, which discusses everything about Russia’s drive to develop the Arctic and eastern Siberia – the equivalent of the Chinese “Go West” campaign started in the late 1990s. Key Eurasian players will be in the house. Putin addresses the plenary session on September 5.
Top BRICS leaders of China, Russia, Brazil and India, meanwhile, are actively involved in a flurry of phone calls coordinating a collective response to the tariff wars – part of the hybrid war by the Empire of Chaos against BRICS and the Global South.
How Trump is Aiming for a PR Win
Let’s see how Alaska is setting the stage for something much bigger.
The summit was announced following what Putin advisor Yuri Ushakov concisely defined as “a proposal from the American side which we think is quite acceptable.”
This sentence was as far as the Kremlin would comment – in contrast with the non-stop verbal onslaught emanating from Washington. That the Kremlin even considered the American offer means an implicit recognition of what Russia is achieving on the battlefield and in the geoeconomic sphere.
Timing. Why now? Especially after Trump had threatened buyers of Russian oil with tariffs? Essentially, because military intel in selected deep state silos have done the math and finally admitted that the long proxy war in Ukraine is lost.
Moreover, Trump personally wants to get over it so as to concentrate on the next chapters of the Forever Wars – including the one that really matters: against “existential threat” China.
From Moscow’s point of view, conditioned by the successful results of its calibrated war of attrition, the facts on the battlefield spell out the special military operation rollin’ on - and no ceasefire; at best a “humanitarian” pause of a few days. The Americans want a ceasefire of at least a few weeks.
Reconciling both sides’ optics will be a Sisyphean task. Still, Alaska is just the beginning: the next meeting is already in the works to take place in the Russian Federation, according to Ushakov.
Trump’s motives are easily identified: create the perception of the US extracting itself from the mess; some sort of truce; and back to doing business with Russia – especially in the Arctic.
In parallel, assuming any sort of deal, the deep state will never recognize the new Russian regions, even Donetsk and Lugansk; and will seek to re-weaponize Ukraine, “leading from behind”, for a NATO-led war replay further on down the road.
So the US-Russia abyss is mirrored by the domestic American abyss – and most of all the Trump-NATO/EU abyss. The toothless chihuahua European pack, trying to salvage its pitiful Kiev actor, is doing somersaults – complete with possible black swans – to derail the summit even before it happens.
There’s no way Trump can sell any sort of settlement to the rabid NATO/EU pack. But nothing would please him more than to transfer the war – in full – to them. With the benefit that the deep state in this case will not complain – because it will be reaping massive euro profits from the weapons sale racket. End result: a classic Trump PR win.
Exit Ukraine, Enter the Arctic
Ukraine, though, will not be the main theme in Alaska. The ever-perceptive Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov cut to the chase: what really matters is that “the first signs of common sense are appearing in Russia-US relations, which were absent for several years before.”
Ryabkov was quick to also highlight the dangers: the risk of nuclear conflict in the world “is not decreasing”; and Russia sees the risk that “after the expiration of the New START Treaty, nuclear arms control will be completely absent”.
Once again: Alaska is just the beginning of something much bigger – including, finally, a serious discussion about “indivisibility of security” (what Moscow wanted already in December 2021, rebuffed by the autopen administration).
And that brings us to the Arctic – and serious stuff that will certainly be debated in depth at the upcoming Vladivostok forum.
The Arctic holds at least 13% of global undiscovered oil reserves and 30% of undiscovered natural gas. Russia controls at least half of all these reserves. The Empire of Chaos badly wants to be part of the action.
Yet one thing is possible massive US investment in joint Arctic projects with Russia. Something entirely different is the US joining the Northern Sea Route (NSR) – which the Chinese call the Arctic Silk Road. The NSR reduces shipping time between Asia and Europe by up to 50%.
The Russian-Chinese rationale for the NSR – including the expansion of Russia’s unique nuclear icebreaker fleet - is exactly to bypass the Suez Canal and connectivity channels controlled by the US. The key question then is what would it take to swing Moscow to accept a Trump-Putin deal in the Arctic.
So on Ukraine, in principle, Russia has all the cards – as long as the special military operation goes on, now on overdrive. On hybrid war, the tariff chapter, the US ruling classes finally realized they have no cards – because blowback caused by secondary sanctions will badly damage the US. What’s left then is a commercial deal: the Arctic.
It's quite intriguing that even the JPMorgan Center for Geopolitics admitted that the best solution for the Ukraine mess is a Georgia scenario: that would somewhat offset the optics of a total capitulation by the West. Only Ukraine would capitulate: no NATO, no EU, no money, no security guarantees.
Inestimable Prof. Michael Hudson has condensed how Alaska will proceed under two vectors: “Part I is whether the US will acknowledge that the trajectory of the current fighting is for a total Russian victory, on the terms that Putin has been explaining for two years: no NATO membership, no foreign arms supplies, Nuremberg-like trials of the Banderite leaders, and perhaps reparations by Ukraine and NATO for the rebuilding of formerly ‘Ukrainian’ Russia.”
Assuming Trump accepts it, and that’s a major “if”, then comes the real nitty gritty (remember Ryabkov), “starting with whether a new atomic missile and arms treaty will be put in place.”
Russia’s version of peace, writes Prof. Hudson, will flow along these lines: “We don’t want an atomic war with the United States. Let’s agree that if a German or other EU/NATO missile hits Russia, when we retaliate it will only be against Britain, Germany and France, not North America.”
Prof. Hudson is adamant that “America has only one thing to offer other countries: the (temporary) promise NOT to hurt them. There’s nothing positive to offer, given its de-industrialization and the world’s de-dollarization.”
As it stands, and also considering the multiple ramifications of the hybrid war against BRICS, Alaska carries the potential of offering Washington a way out of the debris of a massive strategic defeat.
Any analyst who tried to understand the special military operation from the beginning, in detail, could tell that Russia’s war involved something much bigger than Ukraine. It was always about the burial of the “rules-based international order”, in fact the whole old order architecture. That is happening as we speak in the black soil of Novorossiya. Strategic patience, in the end, does pay.
Re: WW3? Ukraine/US vs. Donbass/Russia
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