The New Dark Age

Monday, 16 December 2024 — Pepe Escobar

“Well, the bigger picture is that it’s much bigger than Syria.

The United States says, “We are ending up with total war with Russia and with China.”

Russia is saying, “We hope that there’s peace in the Near East.”

China is saying, “We want peace. We don’t want war.”

I don’t understand why they’re saying this. Why don’t they say, “We realize that this is a war to the death.”

Russia talks about a proportional response, certainly in Ukraine, for instance. So if there’s just an attack and bomb, it will have a proportional response.

But what’s the real proportion at work? The proportion is the Cold War. “We want to control the whole world. We want to break up Russia into parts. We want to break up China into parts. And we’re going to make step after step after step until there’s a response.”

And the fact is, the Americans, if you’re a general, the Americans, you never know how far you can push until somebody else pushes back.

And there really hasn’t been any pushback. And if you’re told by Russia that there is a proportional response, then Russia and the Americans and NATO can do whatever they want, step up and step up and know that there will only be a response to the local tactic, not to the overall strategy.

I don’t see any strategy on the part of NATO.

Well, your question is about Syria. And obviously, the whole country is now in motion. There really isn’t any Syria anymore, much as there probably won’t be a Ukraine anymore.

You see Israel taking Western Syria.

You see Turkey taking the Kurdish areas and what it can.

And the Americans saying, well, we’re taking all the oil to give to Israel, is our agreement.

You have the leaders of the ISIS al-Qaeda group wearing T-shirts made by Mossad. Apparently people have seen that.

So this has completely cut off Lebanon from support by Iran. I don’t know what Iran is thinking.

Probably Saudi Arabia is thinking, well, they’re really trying to grab the whole Near East. Maybe we should be very careful about joining BRICS and threatening to move our assets out of the dollar because we could be next.

America has turned on one so-called ally after another, you know, starting with Saddam Hussein, who was put in by the CIA originally, just all the way rest.

It looks like the U.S plan to take over all of the Near East and its oil is working, using Israel as its battering ram for that. Israel will get the land. America will get the oil and control of that. And that’s sort of the, it looks like the division of labor.

Now, what does all this mean for BRICS and for Russia and China? They’ve talked about having alternatives to the dollar, de-dollarization. They’ve been talking about having alternative institutions to the International Monetary Fund in the World Bank. But the question is now, do they need an alternative institution to NATO? Do they need some kind of coordinated military plan?

I can understand Russia not intervening in Syria at all because Assad was utterly incompetent, utterly rigid. He refused, he refused to make any kind of accommodation to anybody else. He was almost a nutcase.

And the Russians quite properly said, well, if the Syrian army will not fight, we’re not going to send our army into there because this really isn’t our fight. If we can keep our naval bases and our air bases there, that’s all we care about. Russia can lose Syria and it’s not serious. It’s not vital to them.

But what is vital is the United States being able to now move against Iran.

You’d think that China that gets a lot of oil from Iran would be worried and have some desire to intervene in the area. But China is sitting it out. And so the Americans think, well, we can pick off one country after another, one area after another. And it’s more than salami style. We’re now going in big chunks, much more than salami. I don’t know what a good medical or culinary metaphor there would be. But everything’s up in motion and all of the initiative is in NATO.

Russia and China have said, we will only react. We won’t act. We will react.