How Will Russia and China’s Asian Strategy Deal With Trump?

President-elect Trump’s meeting this past Friday with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may have been conducted in an unofficial capacity, but it should still worry the US’s rivals. Japan, growing nervous of China’s expansionism, has been cozying up to Russia, who views Japan as a potential ally, counterbalance and check to China’s growth in the Pacific.

Counterbalancing Chinese influence would be prudent as China is introducing their own free trade agreement, the RECP, in the wake of the political death of the Globalist TPP. China’s proposal would include Australia, Japan, and India, aiming to govern and regulate 40% of the world’s trade. The Chinese, who along with the Russians have been suffering from a severely compressed timeline for their operations due to the oil glut and economic sanctions, will have to speed up their operations even further as Trump’s protectionist tariffs could severely impact China’s exports. But I speculate that China’s military infrastructure in the South China Sea, the mechanism responsible for the enforcement of any prospective trade deal, will not be able keep pace with the speed up in negotiations and planning.

One possible indication of these forthcoming protectionist policies is a Congressional advisory commission’s annual report recommending that Congress block Chinese state-run firms from buying up American businesses.

“Carolyn Bartholomew, the Democratic-appointed vice chairman of the review commission, said that while China restricts foreign investment with laws banning foreign participation in large swaths of its economy, Chinese companies face no such obstacles in the U.S.”

Congress urged to bar U.S. acquisitions by China state firms

China is facing more severe, long-term problems in Trump, who wants to reorganize the world economy and renegotiate the Globalist trade deals that have benefited countries like China since the 90’s. Trump also doesn’t believe in the climate change apocalypse, calling it a Chinese plot. Although nobody can deny that the smog and pollution over Beijing is real, the Chinese are relying on climate change/rising sea level hysteria to fuel interest and investment in their renewable energy industry from island nations in the Southeast Pacific.

Heavily invested in technologies like solar, China has agreed to join Japan in a proposal to integrate the countries of the Pacific Rim into one massive electrical “super grid” running entirely on renewable energy. However, the project is a long-term infrastructure deal requiring huge amounts of fixed capital over the next 34 years, so nothing is set in stone at this time.

“The entire idea is contingent on ultra high voltage power transmission lines, thousands of miles operating at more than 1,000 kilovolts AC/800 kilovolts DC. High voltages reduce losses over long distances, and both Russia and Japan already have hundreds (in Russia’s case thousands) of miles of ultra high voltage lines up and running. These pale in comparison to China’s infrastructure; since 2009 China has built nearly 10,000 miles of UHV power lines, with about the same again to come online in the next two years.

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“The larger GEIDCO’s interconnected web of renewable energy becomes, the more stable the supply is, because it’s less dependent on individual sources, so moving toward a global energy network that shares power from Greenland to South Africa, Australia to Switzerland is the ultimate goal.”

Asian “super grid” the first step towards a global, interconnected, renewable energy grid

In their mission to overturn the Western hegemony, Russia and China have split their duties to depress the US economy before ultimately shutting it out.

Russia and its Iranian allies have been using military force to exploit the US quagmire in the Middle East. By intervening in Syria and taking on ISIS, Russia looks like a stabilizing force and Putin accumulates political capital, which he uses to gain access to oil and business ventures in the Middle East and to form economic unions in Asia. Putin even cut oil deals with a disgruntled Israel, still upset over their treatment by the Obama administration and the Iran deal. By increasing their influence over world oil production, Russia can cut into the value of the petrodollar with their oil-ruble, and maybe end the oil glut which has stalled their economy.

On the other front, China’s offensives concern economic and monetary policy. Before the yuan was given reserve currency status by the IMF, it was being decoupled from the dollar’s exchange rate and strategically devalued to help China recover from their stock market crash and to slightly advantage Chinese exports at the expense of the US. Looking forward, the Chinese are developing technologies like the “super grid” to construct a framework for a renewable energy industry. The goal is to get in front of and shut out the US from dominating any forthcoming, Eco-friendly world energy market, designed to heavily favor green energy through policies that the Chinese and Globalists have been calling for. Policies like carbon taxes, carbon credits, carbon markets and their accompanying commodity games for Wall Street to play with.

But now, Trump, with his disregard for climate change and Globalist trade deals, will force them to fundamentally revise their strategies. Trump will have to step carefully as spoiling China’s green energy super grid plan could push the balance of power and world energy markets into the hands of Putin’s oil industry, or vice-versa. The President-elect said during his campaign speeches that he would invest in all forms of energy. That would be a good start.

The Dastyari Scandal: Australia Could Be Turning Against China

While China was completing the construction of its artificial island chains, the assistant chief of staff to the US Army, Colonel Tom Hanson, spoke publicly to pressure Australia into picking a side in the South China Sea conflict. The US has been trying to build a regional coalition to stop China’s takeover of the region’s fishing lanes, off shore oil reserves, and the $5 trillion worth of trade that passes through maritime shipping lanes.

That was over a month ago, and now Australian politics are hinting towards the continuation of the alliance with the US and the West and away from China. A recent scandal surrounding a high ranking senator, Sam Dastyari, saw accusations of bribery and influence peddling. Dastyari was accused of asking for and accepting money from a Chinese business with ties to the Chinese government to cover travel expenses and a legal bill. Those travel expenses were incurred while Dastyari was on a conference tour in China, speaking out against anyone who would interfere with the ongoing take over of the South China Sea and undermining the positions of the Australian government and his own party. After being condemned by the Prime Minister, he resigned from a prestigious senate position to become a rank and file senator with little influence.

Sam Dastyari steps down from Labor frontbench after accepting money from Chinese donors

This incident, along with the Australian Treasury’s blocking of two bids from Chinese investors to buy up infrastructure in New South Whales, are indicative of the growing suspicion of Chinese influence in the country. This is good news to the Globalists in Washington who are now threatened with a plethora nationalist uprisings in addition to Russian and Chinese expansionism and their own weakened economy.

Right now, the only country that has a lot of capital to invest is China. After agreeing it would no longer manipulate the value of the Yuan at the last G20 in Hangzhou, the IMF announced the Yuan would become an IMF reserve currency in November. It’s a sign that China’s currency is becoming commonly traded and stable, and on track but still not close to replacing the dollar as the most widely used reserve currency. A great number of Aussies are wary of foreign investment, but beggars can’t be choosers and China has the capital.

Australia’s wealthy have watched the developments on the world stage and are not immune to the uncertainty over who will control world energy markets and trade. Billionaire entrepreneur Gina Rinehart, whose business make billions in coal mining annually, has recently placed a bid on one of Australia’s largest beef producers with capital from Chinese investors who were limited to minority ownership. Understanding the need to diversify, Rinehart sees potential in Australia’s ability to produce food.

Chinese investment in Australia

Under the bid, Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting will end up with 67 per cent of Australia’s largest landholding. But one third of the ownership is to be taken by a Chinese group, Shanghai Cred, which had also formed part of the original bidding consortium rejected by the Treasurer.

Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal, the fourth largest producer of coal, and also the third largest producer of liquefied natural gas and expected to lead that market by 2020. With the uncertainty around energy markets, climate change policy and green technology, Australia is reacting like New Zealand, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries who have had to adjust their policies as well as their financial dealings to suit new geopolitical realities.

The West is arranging to tank Putin’s oil-ruble through the climate change debate, but they have not been able to keep pace with the developments rapidly being made in BRICS nations. The Globalists in DC, London and Berlin haven’t prepared a new framework to tie to the value of the dollar now that the Russians are trying to take the world energy market from them. This poor timing, combined with the intensification of climate change policy and treaties, is part of the reason why there is so much uncertainty seen in the markets and governments across the globe. But this course of action by the West has also placed additional pressure on the BRICS system to develop even faster, and maybe not very neatly or cohesively.

Before Monsanto’s reputation was so damaged that it had to be sold off to Bayer, the company that trademarked heroin and produced Zyklon B for Nazi concentration camps, GMO’s could have been the framework that the West was building to replace the petrodollar. GMO’s are designed to be hardier and have more consistent yields, making for a more stable commodity to trade on and pin the dollar to, and the reason I think they were given protections in the TPP and TTIP trade deals.

GMO’s are allowed in Australia with the exception of the state of South Australia, but the view towards them looks mostly negative as many Australian grocers have banned them from their stores voluntarily. If you suddenly start seeing campaigns and NGO’s calling for Australia to trade in GMOs or accept a treaty like TPP, you’ll know that the Globalists still have Australia on their side.

After Rejecting the EU, Will Britain Reject Climate Change Too?

If the leaders of the Western world aren’t already stressed out about the Brexit decision a little over a month ago, they will be absolutely tearing their hair out at the possibility of the “Clexit.”

Rejection of experts spreads from Brexit to climate change with ‘Clexit’

With widespread dissent against EU immigration policy already creating nasty geopolitical blow back with Turkey and Southern Europe, a wholesale rejection of the climate change argument is yet another potential sociopolitical contagion that the West is going to have to contain. Climate change acceptance is a crucial component of the soft power cultural revolution the West has been operating since the end of the Cold War, an operation that has began to seriously lose steam in the years following 9/11 and the Iraq War.

So what’s the problem with climate change? Well, there are a few red flags that are apparent from the outset to anybody who is paying attention. Without even looking at the facts or the reasoning, a close look at the language of the debate is somewhat revealing, if off-putting. One will notice a lot of alarmism, oversimplifications, divisive rhetoric, and silencing and shaming tactics. The actual academic, scientific argument, all of those scientific studies and whitepapers laced with technical terms and jargon, are not an actual argument, but an appeal to the authority of the scientific establishment as nobody but them can translate and comprehend their own theories and ideas. Without a real, understandable argument to convince the laymen, oversimplified rhetoric is needed. Hence the term itself “climate change,” which is a description of an ongoing process rather than something explicitly new. It is broadly similar to “Earth rotating,” or “moon orbiting” in its all-encompassing vagueness. No need to get bogged down in debate over the finer details, or any debate, really. The other oversimplification is the 97% scientific consensus figure. Notwithstanding the fact that referencing a poll is not a real argument but an appeal to popularity and the bandwagon approach, the scientists taking the poll were asked to simply acknowledge whether or not humans have had an effect on the climate of the planet. Fair enough. But none of the scientists were asked about how urgent or dire the threat of climate change is. If one were to poll the appropriate scientists for a consensus on “imminent climate change apocalypse,” there would not be a 97% consensus. So what’s up with the alarmism? How does the time metric factor into all of this? We’ll cover that later.

There are a few finer points that go unnoticed in the rancor of the debate. The very fact that there is a scientific consensus on any aspect of climate change is exceptional and worth noting on its very own. Considering the interpretation of the Greenland ice cores samples, the Earth has been through some dramatic, actually scary climate changes just in the past 20,000 years or so. Scientists have not reached a consensus, or even a solid theory on why the Earth entered, and just as abruptly exited, the last major ice age.

But the biggest anomaly in this mess of a cultural conversation is the question of why there is even a debate in the first place. If the rhetoric is true, and the threat of climate change is truly grave, why even wait for a consensus? Why not just ignore the naysayers and go save the world? The leaders of the Western world are not, and have never been, in the habit of justifying, let alone asking for consent, for their decisions and policies in response to strategic geopolitical realities. They never asked for consent on the war on terror and the surveillance state. They never asked for consent for the financial bailouts and the infringement of our civil liberties. They usually don’t care about what you think, so why do they care now?

The purpose of all of this consensus building is not as a means to an end, it’s the forming of a consensus itself that is the goal. In other words, the widespread rejection of oil consumption, and therefore, an end to buying and trading on the global oil markets, is the true geopolitical goal of this western soft power strategy. With Russia and China entering the oil markets, setting up the BRICS system, and threatening the petrodollar hegemony the US has enjoyed since the Nixon days, a change had to be made. In response, the western bankers dumped oil stocks from their portfolios and have begun funding alternative energy. Giving the oil industry away to China and Russia meant that the value of the dollar had to be pegged onto another commodity. I believe food was chosen as that commodity and the GMO process has sought to create crops that are hardier, longer lasting, and more bountiful than normal to make for a more stable trading commodity.

So why hasn’t this plan worked? It’s because the soft power strategy relies on actually having something that people want, IE the carrot rather than the stick. The GMO carrots of the West, and their bee-killing pesticides, have not gone over well. There are now 38 countries who have banned GMO food or products, compared to the 28 who have accepted them. Russia is also investing in agriculture to offer a regular alternative to GMO crops. Worse yet, the western bankers are prepared to leave oil but have no widespread alternative energy infrastructure or framework to offer to the world. Sure, electric-powered cars are common now, but the electricity powering your home probably comes from a massive coal-fired power plant. Maritime trade, a crucial component to every economy, still uses a huge amount of fossil fuels everyday. The globalists in Washington, London, and Berlin have painted themselves into a corner. For the first time in a long time, the music is going to stop and it will be the globalists who won’t have a chair to sit in.

This explains the alarmism, the decisive rhetoric, and the building of consensus for the sake of consensus. It’s clear that the West needs the climate change dialectic to work, otherwise Russia and China win the soft power game with their lucrative offers of oil exploitation and the eclipse of the petrodollar. Therefore, geopolitics demands that the “climate denier” be done away with, and the rhetoric is cranked up to the max setting. The very term “denier” denotes either a mental problem or ulterior motives, suggesting a lack of virtue or a lack or morality on those given the epithet. It’s a shaming tactic, and it is not scientific in any way as science has always valued a plurality of ideas. All of the shaming, intellectual bullyism, and mind games have the opposite of their intended effect. Rather than acquiescing, people have become suspicious and combative. And for good reason, in my opinion. Will climate change denial spread like a contagion in Europe? I seriously doubt it, but the response of the Western elites have shown just how desperate and out of touch they have become. Their only option is to spread divisive rhetoric in order to divide and obfuscate the argument, and hold what little ground they still have.