The arctic remains the world’s last frontier of human exploration. It is also a domain of great potential cooperation among great civilizations, or inversely a domain of militarism and confrontation.

In recent years, Russia and China have increasingly harmonized their foreign policies around the Framework unveiled by President Xi Jinping in 2013 dubbed the Belt and Road Initiative. Since its unveiling, this megaproject has grown in leaps and bounds winning over 136 nations, accruing $3.7 trillion of investment capital and evolving new components such as the “Digital Silk Road”, “Health Silk Road”, “Space Silk Road”, and of course the “Polar Silk Road”. In March 2021, the Polar Silk Road, first announced in 2018, was given a prominent role in the 2021-2025 Five Year Plan with a focus on Arctic shipping, resource development, scientific Arctic research and conservation.

With the enthusiastic support of Russia, China has increasingly become a leading force in icebreaker technology, northern resource development, arctic infrastructure construction, with an aim to be a world leader in shipping across the rapidly melting Northwest Passage cutting between 10-15 days off of goods moving between Asia and Europe. The recent clogging of the Suez Canal and over congested Straits of Malacca have been stark reminders that Arctic shipping is a domain of global strategic significance during the 21^st century.

Russia’s role as Chair of the Arctic Council between 2021-2023 will also put a major spotlight on the evolving Russia-China paradigm for win-win cooperation of the north as a territory of dialogue and development which is the theme of the upcoming St. Petersburg Arctic Summit later this year.

The Threat of Confrontation Heats Up

Despite these positive strides, many geopoliticans in the west have repeatedly attacked such developments as “efforts to conquer the world and replace the USA as global hegemons”. Those promoting this Hobbesian outlook not only choose to ignore the countless olive branches offered to the west by the Eurasian powers for mutual development, but have also accelerated a policy which some have dubbed a ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ ballistic missile encirclement of both Russia and China. This latter policy was recently called out by Foreign Minister Lavrov on April 1, 2021 who said:

“We now have a missile defence area in Europe. Nobody is saying that this is against Iran now. This is clearly being positioned as a global project designed to contain Russia and China. The same processes are underway in the Asia-Pacific region. No one is trying to pretend that this is being done against North Korea… This is a global system designed to back U.S. claims to absolute dominance, including in the military-strategic and nuclear spheres.”

Instead of acknowledging the fact that Russian and Chinese military strategies are defensive in nature, advocates of full spectrum dominance have chosen to push an opposing narrative painting both Eurasian nations as competitors and rivals with ghoulish secret intentions to annex the world. Under this confrontational paradigm, both NORAD and NORTHCOM continental defense systems are undergoing a reform under General Glan van Herck who stated in his Declassified Executive Summary of NORAD’s New Strategic Vision:

“Both Russia and China are increasing their activity in the Arctic. Russia’s fielding of advanced, long-range cruise missiles capable of being launched from Russian territory and flying through the northern approaches and seeking to strike targets in the United States and Canada has emerged as the dominant military threat in the Arctic.”

Why the general believes this to be the dominant cause of military threats rather than the USA’s unilateral withdrawal from all confidence building measures such as the 1972 ABM Treaty, the 1987 INF Treaty and Open Skies Treaty is beyond the capacity of this writer’s imagination.

An important part of this continental reform involves an upgrading and expansion of the U.S.-directed Ground Based Midcourse Defense system of 44 silo-based interceptors located in Alaska and California with an additional 20 in response to both China and Russia’s development of hypersonic, maneuverable warheads as well as a new generation of submarine and land-based ICBMs. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Philip Coyle recently attacked this upgraded GMD program by stating not only is the system woefully inept (only half of its 18 tests since 1999 hit their targets), but is also unnecessarily provocative, forcing Russia and China to upgrade their own systems in response to a threat that never should have existed in the first place. In a 2019 interview Coyle stated:

“All of this is causing Russia and increasingly China to build more and more offensive systems, so that they can overwhelm U.S. missile defence- assuming that they would work… We have no way of dealing with more and more missiles from Russia or China and so building up more and more missile defense is backfiring”.

General van Herck has also championed Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technology across all domains of data collection and even supplementing human decision making as part of the goal of achieving “global integration, all domain awareness, information dominance to reach decision superiority”. Dubbed Pathfinder, van Herck has stated “I absolutely believe it can be a model for the Department of Defense. It lays the foundation for improved data-driven decision making and enhanced capability”. Whether it is wise to strive to cut decision making on matters such as thermonuclear war down to 12 minutes as is currently celebrated by Pathfinder supporters while leaving strategic decision-making protocols in the hands of soulless algorithms, or whether it is a living prophecy of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove can be left up to debate. The fact remains that this is the game plan.

Since both unipolar and multipolar paradigms gripping the Arctic are creating an objective tension which threatens humanity and since appreciation for the origins and evolution of the Russia-China alliance is misunderstood and mischaracterized in the west, a few words of context are in order.

A Brief History of Russian Chinese Arctic Synergy

In 2015, Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union first signed an MOU to integrate with the Belt and Road, and as of 2019, China and Russia signed a series of major programs to extend the Belt and Road Initiative into the Arctic. The synergy between what Prime Minister Medvedev called the “Silk Road on Ice” and Putin’s Great Eastern Vision were obvious and in April 2019, both nations released a joint statement “Joint efforts will be made in Arctic marine science research, which will promote the construction of the ‘Silk Road on Ice.” The statement asserted that both nations “look forward to more fruitful and efficient partnerships worldwide to contribute to the sustainable development of the world oceans and a shared future for mankind.”

During an April 2019 BRI forum, President Putin laid out his concept of Russian and Chinese foreign policy doctrines saying:

“The Great Eurasian Partnership and Belt and Road concepts are both rooted in the principles and values that everyone understands: the natural aspiration of nations to live in peace and harmony, benefit from free access to the latest scientific achievements and innovative development, while preserving their culture and unique spiritual identity. In other words, we are united by our strategic, long-term interests.”

In recent months, the Russian-Chinese Joint Statement on Global Governance of March 23, 2021, represented the clearest response to the collapse of diplomatic bridges uniting west and east whose already weak edifices have been set ablaze in recent months. This diplomatic arson took the form of increased anti-Russian and anti Chinese sanctions, accelerated NATO war games on Russia’s perimeter, increased efforts to consolidate an anti-Chinese Pacific NATO, not to mention Biden’s infamous remarks that Putin was a “soulless killer”. These diplomatic disasters culminated in the infamous ambush of Chinese officials in Alaska on March 19, 2021.

Economic Cooperation and Shared Interests

Russia and China’s collaboration on Arctic resource development has seen both nations focus on transportation corridors, energy and research with a consistently open offer for all nations among their western counterparts to join at any time. Among the most important of the Arctic Projects now underway as part of Russia’s Arctic 2035 Vision announced in 2019, the 6000 km Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline is at the top of the list which will make Russia the primary supplier of China’s energy needs by 2030. This project will be joined by a Power of Siberia II doubling the natural gas output to China via Mongolia and both projects are part of the historic $400 billion energy deal signed between China and Russia in 2014 with the aim of sending 38 billion cubic meters of gas to China for 30 years.

A similar strategic project is the LNG-2 involving Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Russian companies on a joint project showcasing the importance of Polar Silk Road thinking in alleviating tensions among Pacific neighbors. Global energy analyst Professor Francesco Sassi of Pisa University stated that this project “will see an unprecedented level of cooperation between Japanese and Chinese energy companies in one of the most important Russian energy projects of the next decade”.

Additionally China’s 30% stake in the Yamal LNG pipeline which involves the Silk Road Fund ties China’s energy interests ever more deeply into the heart of Russia’s north east.

Russia’s program of expanding Trans Siberian Rail traffic 100 fold from the current 3000 twenty foot units/year to 300 000 twenty foot units/year by upgrading and doubling rail is vital as well as the program for the completion of the Northern Latitudinal Railway connecting west Siberian ports to the Arctic. On the strategic point of shipping, Russia is not only expanding its fleet of icebreakers to include new models of Project 22220 nuclear powered icebreakers, but also will increase freight traffic to 80 million tons/year by 2025 (up from the current 20 million). Several of Russia’s 40 icebreakers are nuclear powered, making it the only nation in the world enjoying this claim… a title it will enjoy until later this year as China rolls out its first 33,000 ton nuclear icebreaker which will join its growing inventory (already far advanced of both Canada’s and the USA’s dismal capacity).

Part and parcel of Russia’s new 15-year plan for the Arctic are plans to commit state support for broad transport and energy infrastructure via direct investments as well as the creation of “economic preference zones” giving private sector actors tax incentives. State support will also be directed towards efforts to mitigate climate change, scientific research, monitoring of environmental damage and pollution clean up.

The Rise of China as an Arctic Powerhouse

China deployed their first Arctic research expedition in 1999, followed by the establishment of their first Arctic research station in Svalbard, Norway in 2004. After years of effort, China achieved a permanent observer seat at the Arctic Council in 2011, and by 2016 created the Russia-China Polar Engineering and Research Center to develop better techniques to access Arctic resources. In 2012, China rolled out its first icebreaker (Snow Dragon I) and has quickly surpassed both Canada and the USA whose two out-dated ice breakers have passed their shelf life by many years.

As the Arctic ice caps continue to recede, the Northern Sea Route has become a major focus for China. The fact that shipping time from China’s Port of Dalian to Rotterdam would be cut by 10 days makes this alternative very attractive. Ships sailing from China to Europe must currently follow a transit through the congested Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal which is 5000 nautical miles longer than the northern route. The opening up of Arctic resources vital for China’s long term outlook is also a major driver in this initiative.

In preparation for resource development, China and Russia created a Russian Chinese Polar Engineering and Research Center in 2016 to develop capabilities for northern development such as building on permafrost, creating ice resistant platforms, and more durable icebreakers. New technologies needed for enhanced ports, and transportation in the frigid cold was also a focus.

The Questionable Role of Canada in the Arctic Great Game

Amidst this dramatic rate of Arctic development both towards militarization and towards economic cooperation, the Canadian government has managed to remain remarkably aloof and non-committal.

Despite the fact that a 2016 Foreign Policy Review called for Canada’s integration into the northern missile defense shield last championed by Dick Cheney in 2004, Canada’s policy establishment has not committed to any course and while the field remains open for a potential Arctic policy based on diplomacy and cooperation as a bridge between East and West, time is running out.

On the one side, high ranking war hawks among Washington and Ottawa’s policy elite make every effort to court Canada as a participant of the NORAD/NORTHCOM Strategic Vision as the war drums continue to pound. On the other side, Russia has made its desires for Russian-Canadian Arctic cooperation known as Russian chargé d’affaires Vladimir Proskuryakov stated on April 6:

“Despite political difference between our two countries, prospects for Russia-Canadian Arctic cooperation look wide and generally positive. We should only use our possibilities properly.”

Proskuryakov continued: “Being neighbours across the Arctic Ocean, we want to make maximum use of the Arctic potential as a territory of peaceful dialogue and sustainable development, which naturally combines realities and technological solutions of the 21^st century with cultural and historic traditions of the indigenous populations.”

If Russia’s hopes for collaboration are to make any headway, then it is certain that Canada’s September 2019 Arctic and Northern Policy Framework will play a role. This framework was an honest attempt by the Federal government to create a “long term strategic vision for activities and investments for Arctic 2030 and beyond”. Having committed to an $800 million fund for Arctic development and amplifying the National Trade Corridors Fund of $2.3 billion/year for 11 years devoted to transportation infrastructure, Canada’s Transportation Minister Marc Garneau called for northern infrastructure proposals in October 2020 with a March 2021 deadline saying:

“Efficient and reliable transportation networks are key to Canada’s economic prosperity. Enhancing Arctic and northern transportation will support trade diversification and social development and ensure greater connectivity for Northerners. I encourage eligible transportation infrastructure owners, operators and users to apply for funding under the National Trade Corridors Fund.”

Sadly, months later, the deadline came and went with no concrete projects placed on the table and no mechanisms established to carry out any potential construction. No funding mechanisms were set in place and without a vision the potential use of the Canadian Infrastructure Bank or Bank of Canada continues to go untapped.

The only concretized policies for the Arctic put in place by the Trudeau government during this time are a stark inversion of actual development with three omnibus bills C-48, C-69 and C-88 passing in short order under the fog of a climate emergency declared by the Parliament. Under these bills, a moratorium was placed on all oil tankers in Northern BC stretching from Vancouver to Alaska (C-48), total bans on offshore drilling were passed declaring Arctic waters off limits to development (C-88) and environmental review processes-already among the most elaborate and bureaucratic among developed nations, was expanded (C-69), making new energy projects in the Arctic nearly impossible.

The Private Sector Steps In

When opportunities to connect Canada’s interests with China were advanced, as seen in the case of China’s efforts to purchase Canadian construction giant Aecon Inc in 2018 or the Hope Bay TMAC Resources in Nunavut in 2020, the Federal Government swept in at the last minute to kill the deals ensuring that no Chinese capital would have any influence in Canada’s development prospects.

Stephen van Dine (VP of Public Governance at Canada’s Institute of Governance) wrote that pension funds, the Canadian Infrastructure Bank and Bank of Canada should be used to play a positive role in arctic development. Van Dine wrote in January 2021: “The Canadian arctic is almost investment-ready for the next 50-100 years with a reliable, predictable infrastructure program for schools, public housing, health centers and power generation. What’s missing is a long-term plan.”

Frustrated with this commitment to inaction, Canadian business leaders at various times formed consortiums outside of the influence of Ottawa as seen in the Alaska-to-Canada Railway Development Corporation which won the support of both the Albertan government as well as former President Donald Trump in September 2020. The A2A Program called for building 2500 miles of rail and finally closing the gap separating Canada from Alaska, which to this day remains one of the most underdeveloped frontiers on earth. Despite the billions of dollars of annual federal transfers to the native bands of each of the northern territories, drug abuse, suicide rates, depression and school drop out rates are magnitudes higher among the static, disconnected northern communities of Canada relative to the national average.

Many were curious if Biden would continue Trump’s support of this program but considering the new president’s swift killing of the Keystone XL pipeline and his passage of Executive Orders ensuring a total halt to all economic development of Arctic resources, the answer has become less ambiguous. These orders made Biden’s ideological stance on Arctic economic development and the A2A Project transparent, and also defined what should be expected of the Biden-Trudeau “Roadmap for a Renewed U.S.-Canada Partnership”.

Another group of thought leaders representing interests in the public, private and academic centers, frustrated at the plague of stasis recently formed a group called Arctic360 with the mandate to drum up support for a positive vision for Canada’s High North. Comparing Canada with other members of the Arctic Council, Jessica Shadian (President and CEO of Arctic360) wrote:

“When it comes to Canada’s truly competitive advantage for becoming a global leader in innovation it is time to break out of the usual mould and go where few Canadians go: the North. One just needs to glance at Canada’s Nordic Arctic neighbours to see that there is precedence. The often-made arguments as to why the North is an inopportune place for everything from living to working to starting a business or building a road is its real advantage. That the North is vast, cold, remote, dark six months of the year, has harsh weather and a critical infrastructure gap is one of Canada’s biggest innovation assets. Add to this, that the North is home to many of the critical minerals that China and others want for building technologically advanced infrastructure. The North could be Canada’s unrealized key to leap-frog existing infrastructure and industries and play a global leadership role in 21st Century innovation. The question is whether we have the ambition or the conviction to lead.”

A True Vision for Inter-Civilizational Cooperation: The Bering Strait Corridor

It was in March 2015, foreseeing the Arctic extension of the Belt and Road Initiative by a number of years, that former Russian Railways president Vladimir Yakunin, brilliantly called for a Trans-Eurasian Development Belt with rail stretching all the way up to the Bering Strait crossing and integrating into Asia. Yakunin, who for years has been a proponent of the connection of the Americas and Eurasia by rail, said the project should be an “inter-state, inter-civilization, project. It should be an alternative to the current (neoliberal) model, which has caused a systemic crisis. The project should be turned into a world ‘future zone,’ and it must be based on leading, not catching, technologies.”

Having been originally conceived in the 19^th century as outlined by Governor William Gilpin in his 1890 Cosmopolitan Railway, and supported by Czar Nicholas II who sponsored feasibility studies on the project in 1906, the Bering Strait tunnel connecting Eurasian and American continents fell from general awareness for decades. It was briefly revived during discussions held between FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace and Russian Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942 but was again lost under the fog of Cold War insanity. This century-old idea again resurfaced when Russia signaled its willingness to construct the project in 2011 offering over $65 billion towards its funding, which only required the cooperation of the United States and Canada. China put its support behind the Bering Strait Tunnel in May 2014.

While such a grand design would provide the most direct pathway for the west to synchronise our development paradigm with the Polar Silk Road, and Greater Eurasian Partnership, it is admittedly a far cry from the realities plaguing current geopolitical thinking.

The best that can be hoped for in the short term would be a successful war avoidance strategy adopted by Ottawa in alignment with Moscow’s desires for cooperation on the field of anti-coronavirus programs, education and arctic medical needs and environmental management. If these simple trust building mechanisms can begin to take hold, and if war hawks are kept at bay, then perhaps Canada can eventually play the role of intermediary and diplomatic bridge both for the benefit of its own citizens and the wellbeing of the world as a whole.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

On April 8 the front pages of the main U.S. newspapers noted that President Biden was “open to compromise” and a quick glance prompted optimism that Uncle Joe might be seeing some sense about international developments. He said that “Debate is welcome. Compromise is inevitable. Changes are certain,” which is a deep and important statement that would be immensely heartening if it referred to U.S. relations with China and Russia.

Alas, his words referred to purely domestic affairs, in that the White House was preparing to compromise with the blinkered Republican Party which is intent on defending business interests — and especially those concerned with weapons’ production — at the expense of the average citizen. Joe declared that he is “sick and tired of ordinary people being fleeced,” which is an understandable point of view. But the way he’s heading in foreign policy means that these ordinary people, and everyone else in the U.S. and all round the world, may well be conned, and possibly terminally. They are facing ever-increasing danger of being destroyed, because Joe is backing the sabre-brandishers in their encouragement of confrontation and provocation that could well lead to major war.

Make no mistake : there is going to be no such thing as “limited” war if the U.S.-Nato military alliance continues to goad and antagonise Russia and China. If there is a clash of military forces there will be escalation, and the ensuing conflict will inevitably heighten the risk of nuclear exchanges which would destroy the planet.

The scene-setting by Washington’s military-industrial complex and in the Pentagon’s sub-office in Brussels includes warnings about a Russian “buildup” in the Arctic, as reported by CNN which quoted a Pentagon representative as saying “Russia is refurbishing Soviet-era airfields and radar installations, constructing new ports and search-and-rescue centres, and building up its fleet of nuclear and conventionally-powered icebreakers.” This activity is indeed taking place, and is happening in Russian sovereign territory, which has nothing to do with the Pentagon or anyone else. It’s not in any way similar to the U.S. military’s overseas “forward military presence” of some 200,000 troops in over 800 bases around the world.

USA Today states that Trump “opened additional bases in Afghanistan, Estonia, Cyprus, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Niger, Norway, Palau, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Somalia, Syria and Tunisia”, which seems pretty impressive, but in reality-land is entirely counter-productive. And it seems that Uncle Joe isn’t going to close down any of them.

It is unfortunate that so many of these bases have proved totally useless in practical terms, but this doesn’t stop or even slow down the Pentagon’s global expansion. In spite of all the bases in Afghanistan, for example, a chaotic civil war still rages. As USA Today observes, “The 19-year-old conflict has cost more than $2 trillion and more than 2,300 American lives. More than 38,000 Afghan civilians have been killed. And yet the Taliban controls vast swaths of the country, which continues to be wracked by violence…” So what have all these U.S. bases accomplished? What do they achieve anywhere, other than apprehension and reaction on the part of those whom they are designed to threaten?

In a world already aflame with conflict, one of the most recent threats to peace is growing in the Arctic, where the U.S. is intent on increasing its military capabilities. Forward deployments and operations have so far included flights over the Barents Sea by USAF B-1 Lancer strategic bombers based at Ørland in Norway, where the large air base “is important not only for Norway, but also for NATO. The air station is the base of F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, F-16 fighter aircraft, B-1B strategic bombers, Westland Sea King search and rescue helicopters and a location for E-3A Sentry AWACS…”

The ominous focus of Washington on the Arctic is allegedly justified by Russia’s legitimate improvement of its defence facilities in its own sovereign territory. The Pentagon’s official position is that “Obviously we’re watching this, and as I said before, we have national security interests there that we know we need to protect and defend.” The spokesman then declared (presumably being unaware of the U.S. strategic bomber deployment and other military operations), that “nobody’s interested in seeing the Arctic become militarized.”

The Arctic has always been an important region but has assumed greater significance since global warming resulted in extensive ice-melt and opening of seaways including what is now called the Northern Sea Route or NSR. The Arctic Bulk commercial group, based in Switzerland, describes the NSR as “a shipping lane between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean along the Russian coast of Siberia and the Far East, crossing five Arctic Seas.” Further — and never mentioned by the Pentagon or the U.S. media — the NSR is located entirely within Russia’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

On April 5 the Pentagon announced that “the region is key terrain that’s vital to our own homeland defence and as a potential strategic corridor between the Indo-Pacific, Europe and the homeland — which would make it vulnerable to expanded competition.”

It was not explained how a commercial shipping route could affect Washington’s “homeland defence”, or what “expanded competition” there could be, but Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made that feature clear in Deutsche Welle on March 22 when he said “The melting of the ice in the Arctic could lead to the heating up of geopolitical tensions between different powers in the world. We have seen the increased military presence of Russia. They’re opening up Soviet military facilities in the Arctic.”

China is also a threat, according to Stoltenberg, but the main one in the north is identified as Russia, so in addition to U.S. strategic bomber flights there have been other war preparations involving Nato countries, including a deployment in which “U.S. Marines and Sailors with Marine Rotational Force-Europe 21.1 enhanced their warfighting ability above the Arctic Circle during exercise Arctic Littoral Strike in Northern Norway from March 11-31.”

Further confrontation will include Exercise Northern Edge from 3-12 May, in which, according to the U.S. Air Force Times, “Ten thousand troops will descend on the High North to practice how the U.S. military might react if simmering tensions in the Arctic reach a boiling point.”

The U.S. is preparing for war in the Arctic, and the “boiling point” referred to by the Air Force Times might not be far away. It’s entirely up to Washington to decide on how long the military manoeuvres will continue and what level they will reach. If the provocations are so relentless as to result in local exchanges of fire, there is every possibility that escalation will be rapid — and it could be final. The solution is for Washington to calm down, and President Joe Biden would be well advised to extend his domestic policy to international affairs, in which “Debate is welcome. Compromise is inevitable. Changes are certain.”

As relations between the USA and Russia continue to fall ever deeper into the abyss, and as China’s Belt and Road Initiative continues to evolve deep into the Eurasian Arctic via the Polar Silk Road, a new era of potential for cooperation as well as nuclear war awaits humanity. The decisions made over the coming months will determine which of those two opposing destinies are selected.

For the time being, things are looking bad.

On February 5, 2021 the Canadian press was lit abuzz with the headline NORAD Modernization to Dominate Agenda of Canada-U.S. Defence Relations citing various military think tanks and ivory tower game theorists who should be kept as far from any actual policy making circles if the world is going to survive beyond the coming decade.

Citing the recent Biden-Trudeau meeting which featured a long discussion about Russian-Chinese aggression and Arctic defense, Andrea Charron (head of Manitoba’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies) states:

“Where as before the primary threat during the Cold War was one peer competitor, who wasn’t using greyzone tactics, or at least not to the same extent as now, we now have two peer competitors to the U.S. – China and Russia – and they are using greyzone tactics, and they’re developing more sophisticated weapons like hypersonic glide vehicle weapons,”

The idea being conveyed here is that Russian hypersonic air launched Kinzhal ballistic missiles will soon be stationed in Russia’s north which should cause NORAD to be completely revamped.

Of course, these academics are quick to ignore all evidence of NATO encirclement of Russia and China under the insane “full spectrum dominance” game plan which certain geopoliticians believe will make nuclear war somehow winnable with 21^st century technology.

In the face of this supposed Russian and Chinese aggression, NATO-philes are screeching for Canada’s speedy entry into the NORAD Ballistic Missile shield which it abandoned over 15 years ago.

Citing the 2020 Wilson Center report co-written by former NORAD chief Terrance O’Shaughnessy, and published by the Canada Institute, artificial intelligence programs (“SHIELD” and “Pathfinder”) are introduced as the key to the total overhaul of Canada-USA arctic strategy. O’Shaughnessy wrote of SHIELD that “It pools this data and fuses it into a common operational picture. Then, using the latest advances in machine learning and data analysis, it scans the data for patterns that are not visible to human eyes, helping decision-makers understand adversary potential courses of action before they are executed.”

Anyone who has read Cynthia Chung’s Dr. Strangelove’s Spoonbenders will quickly realize why using AI to pick up algorithms that would normally be missed by human analysts, and generate hair-trigger decisions to counter threats from Eurasia creates a mountain of trouble for humanity, as glitches and mis-readings of Russian/Chinese intentions can easily escalate unstoppably into a nuclear retaliation by deductive/inductive machine thinking.

Now at this point, many onlookers might make the mistake of brushing off these obvious plans for a revamped NORAD-NATO Arctic doctrine since Canada’s military is negligible, and it is merely a “middle power” that couldn’t possible do great damage anywhere.

It is to the person asking this question that this report was written.

The British Great Game Past and Present

The first factor which such a person must recognize is the nature of the British Empire as an efficient power structure dominating the world even today.

Anyone confused about this still-existing power structure need only read Eric Zuess’ new report ‘Further Proof that the U.S. and UK are One Empire’ where the author astutely writes:

“Although the “Special Relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom was first announced by Winston Churchill at Fulton Missouri on 5 March 1946, in the company of an approving U.S. President Harry S. Truman, it was actually started by Cecil Rhodes in 1877 when he drew up his plan for England secretly to retake America and use it so as to preserve and expand Britain’s empire throughout the world, via the Rhodes Trust. Rhodes was the first person to think up a “U.S. empire,” but it was actually only as a tool for the preservation and extension of England’s existing empire. And Winston Churchill, as a young man at the start of the 20th Century, was an acolyte and friend of Rhodes, and was viewed by Rhodes as being one of his most promising young followers.”

The Post-WWII Order and the Rhodes Trust Origins of NATO

In the Post-WWII order, the important tendency for U.S.-Russian partnership which shaped the 1780 League of Armed Neutrality, Russia’s support for the union in 1863 and the U.S.-Russia friendship that made WWII a success was overthrown.

This historic friendship was directly targeted by forces loyal to the British Empire’s grand strategy for global Anglo-Saxon Dominance exemplified by Sir Winston Churchill’s unveiling of the Cold War during his March 5, 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton Missouri and the follow-up creation of NATO in 1949 as a military bloc which would operate independently of the UN Security Council.

An under-appreciated role in the formation of NATO and international dis-order more generally during these Cold War years is the British Deep State of Canada and due to the neglect of this fact, a few words should be said about this problem here and now.

While official narratives have tried to spin NATO’s origins as the effect of an agreement amongst all western powers, the fact is that British intelligence operations are the true source, with British-trained Rhodes Scholar Escott Reid laying out the thesis for a supranational military body outside of the influence of the UN Security Council as early as August 1947. It was another two years before the design would materialize as an anti-Soviet military coalition based on the binding agreement that if one member enters a conflict, then all members must so enter.

At a Round Table-directed Conference on August 13, 1947, Reid, an ardent globalist and co-founder of the Canadian branch of the London Fabian Society “recommended that the countries of the North Atlantic band together, under the leadership of the United States, to form ‘a new regional security organization’ to deter Soviet expansion.” He went on to state “In such an organization each member state could accept a binding obligation to pool the whole of its economic and military resources with those of the other members if any power should be found to have committed aggression against any one of the members.”

The name of the British Imperial game has always been “balance of power”. Manipulate society as a single closed system by monopolizing resources, and then manage the diminishing rates of return by creating conflict between potential allies. This process can be seen clearly today behind the conflicts manipulated in the South China Sea between China and Philippines, the Diaoyu-Senkaku Islands between China and Japan, wars for oil in the Middle East and the new tension being created in the Arctic. The opposing, typically “American System of Political Economy” has always disobeyed this game of “balancing a fixed system” by introducing creative change.

The American System on the other hand, has traditionally located its point of emphasis primarily upon creating new resources, through inventions and discoveries, rather than simply looting, consuming, and distributing what already exists. This system formulated by Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt proved that more energy could always be produced than was consumed IF discoveries and inventions were cultivated in a creatively developing society, shaped by concrete national intentions and bold visionary goals to increase the powers of production of society. The American System is thus understood as an open-system founded upon win-win cooperation while the British System is based on a closed-system worldview under a win-lose operating system where the elite managing nations from above dictate the wars, and diminishing rates of returns to a depopulated society.

Since the British system implies that the world resources are limited, then the stronger will necessarily have to loot the weaker… Hence, the system is also “zero-sum”.

Throughout the Cold War, Canada’s role as a “middle power” was defined most succinctly by Fabian Society asset Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who, when asked what his foreign policy was, explained simply: “to create counterweights”. That is, when the “geopolitical center of gravity” moves towards “capitalist America”, then Canada must move towards befriending “socialist” Russia and its allies. When the center of gravity moves towards a Russian edge within the Great Game, then do the opposite. Although the Cold War “officially” ended in 1991, the imperial Great Game never did, and Canada’s role as a British chess piece continues unabated to the present.

The future battleground which Canada is being prepared to set up is to be found in the Arctic.

The Strategy of the Arctic in History

The struggle for Arctic dominance is currently being defined by the rules of British geopolitics. The above map features the layout of the arctic with dotted lines defining areas still not under the control of any particular nation.

Today, the northern Arctic is among the last unexplored and undeveloped frontiers on the earth. With an area over 14 million square kilometers, this area is rich in a variety of mineral and gas deposits containing approximately 90 billion barrels of oil and 1670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This abundance is complicated by the fact that its borders are highly undefined, overlapping eight major nations with Canada and Russia as the dominant claimants.

In recent history, American System methods were attempted in the opening up of the Arctic for mutual development and cooperation beginning with the sale of Alaska to America in 1867 by the “American system Czar” Alexander II to the allies of Abraham Lincoln. These same forces orchestrated the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway and heavily promoted the Bering Strait Rail tunnel connecting the two great continents which arose by the turn of the century. Early designs for the Russian-American rail connection were published in 1893 by Governor William Gilpin of Colorado which gained renewed support by the soon-to-be-deposed Czar Nicholas II in 1905. Russia again revived this project in 2011.

Throughout the 20th Century, Russia has developed a far greater aptitude at creating corridors of permanent habitation in the Arctic relative to their North American counterparts which are expanding at a fast pace under Putin’s Eastern vision and China’s Polar Silk Road. Due to the post WWII Cold War dynamic of tension, much that could have been accomplished, had resources not been so badly drained by Cold War militarization, was not.

The beacon of light during this Cold Dark process was to be found in Canada’s 13th Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, whose Northern Vision, unveiled in 1958, hinged upon his $78 million allocation for funds to construct a permanent domed nuclear-powered city in Frobisher Bay (now named Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut), as a test case for a greater nation building program in the Arctic. When Diefenbaker was run out of office in 1963 through a British-steered operation, his vision was scrapped, and a new Arctic doctrine was artificially imposed upon Canada.

False Polarizations Imposed onto Arctic Grand Strategy

This new imperial Arctic doctrine was modeled around the two (anti-nation building) measures of “conservation” of fixed ecosystems and indigenous cultures on the one side, and rapacious mineral exploitation for the increasingly deregulated “global markets” on the other. Canadian examples of this operation can be seen in the Munk School of Global Affairs, the World Wildlife Fund of Canada (whose 2^nd president was the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell), and their powerful affiliate, the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, presided over by Pierre Trudeau’s former Principal Secretary Thomas Axworthy. Barack Gold Founder and CEO Peter Munk was one of hundreds of oil barons who acted as founding members of the 1001 Club which was created by Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands and Prince Philip of England in order to fund the WWF in its early years. Other Canadian Deep State founding members of the 1001 Club included WWF Vice Presidents Maurice Strong and Louis Mortimer Bloomfield.

Axworthy is a major player in the Canada 2020 machine associated with the current Liberal Party of Justin Trudeau. The overlap of major banking institutions like the Royal Bank of Canada and Scotiabank with the mineral cartels, holding companies and environmental organizations in this structure produces a very real picture that the left and the right are merely two sides of the same imperial beast.

The role of the above interests in creating the Arctic Council in 1996 (and the later Circumpolar Business Forum) was designed to trap nations into an intellectual cage of resource exploitation under free market doctrines of zero national planning on the one side, with eco-systems management and zero national planning on the other. Now that the post-1971 world financial order is on the verge of collapse, these technocrats believe that a new replacement system will allow for national planning, but only on condition that it be directed by Malthusian technocrats and aimed at the goal of lowering the population potential of the planet. This agenda has come to be known as the Green New Deal in 2018 and since evolved into the Great Reset Agenda.

To re-emphasize: When observed from a top-down perspective, both the “left” eco-green movement and the “right” monetarist institutions are one single thing. It is only by foolishly looking at this process from the “bottom up” that apparent differences are perceived. This is just an illusion for the credulous victims of an imperial education system who have been taught to believe their sense perceptions more than their powers of reason. The reality is that this is nothing more than British Malthusian geopolitics.

Breaking Out of the Great Game

The fact is that while the Atlantic economies have currently submitted to the City of London- Wall Street and Troika demands for policies of depopulation, austerity and hyperinflation, Russia and China are committed to true development. Both countries are intent on creating a unified block of win-win cooperation based upon the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union and BRICS and that intention is based on anti-Malthusian scientific and technological progress. The Belt and Road Initiative which now involves over 135 countries exemplifies this spirit.

The financial system of the trans-Atlantic is collapsing and it will be reset. The only question is, will it be reset by the open system agenda advocated by Russia and China or will it be the closed system unipolar agenda promoted by sociopathic Davos creatures?

If western societies should wish to have any claim to being morally fit to survive, then this is an optimistic power that we must re-awaken in ourselves fast. For it is only by acting on principles of scientific discovery and progress that a proper perspective can be discovered to overcome the current obstacles to our survival. That is, the discovery of what the future can and must become IF a creative change is introduced into the system.

The only pathway to avoiding the collapse of the financial system and a thermonuclear war is to be found in imposing Natural Law vigorously upon the claimed “debts” which Wall Street, and the City of London wishes to have bailed out. The expression of this Natural Law takes the form of the restoration of Glass-Steagall laws across the trans-Atlantic economies, eliminating the $1.5 quadrillion debt bomb before it explodes and returning to the principles of national banking for all countries. Under such a reform and by joining in common interest with other nations in the Eurasian zone, a commitment to progress and security can be realized, and such poisonous agendas as the Great Reset can be avoided.

Escaping the British two-sided trap of monetarism and ecologism means going to fusion energy, space exploration, and mining the moon for Helium-3 as China is already preparing to do. It means closing the fuel cycle, and scrapping low quality “green” energy boondoggles.

The applications of a forward-looking space age society using fusion power, involves not only rendering imperial wars for oil and water obsolete (as energy and water will be made both incommensurably cheap and abundant relative to the fossil fuel based system now defining society’s limits), but gives mankind the tools to green deserts, build great projects, create a system of Asteroid Defense and construct the long-overdue Bering Strait Tunnel, a key link in the World Land Bridge. These are the sorts of long term projects which not only remind us of our common self interests, but as JFK described the space program in 1962, create goals which “will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills”.

Without this sort of “outside the box” thinking, it is safe to say that the current rules of the game now in place are set for total self-destruction.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

In the Arctic, for a start, Mr. Putin is playing by the same Law of the Sea rules we endorse. The truth is that if we could have, we would have, long ago done much the same thing the Russians have just done. We were not amused, but Russia’s gambit was an entirely legitimate use of an impressive technology that we wish we had to highlight a claim.

The operative statement here is “if we could have, we would have”. The truth is that only Russia can and that means that the Arctic is essentially a Russian lake, or, if you prefer, a Russian skating rink. First of all, about 160 degrees of the circle – or 43% – is Russian, quite a bit more than Canada at 22%, Denmark/Greenland at 19% or the USA and Norway at 8% each. But it’s not just that more of it is Russian, the main point is that Russia can and the other four can’t.

Most of the Arctic is frozen most of the time and icebreaker ships are necessary. According to this list of operational icebreakers, Canada has six, the USA four, Denmark three, Norway two. Russia has more than seventy. Russia’s fleet is modern, the others are old. Russia has the only nuclear-powered icebreakers – eight in service according to Wikipedia. The Arktika is the world’s largest and most powerful icebreaker capable of operating through three metres of ice; there are three more in the works. But an even larger class is coming: four metre ice; construction began in July. Russia’s icebreaker capacity is so enormous that one of them spends its time running tourist cruises to the North Pole. None of the other Arctic countries has anything like this. The USA is planning to build more to replace its elderly fleet; Canada is “exploring options“.

The principal reason for Russia’s construction of such powerful icebreakers as the Project 10510 (aka Leader or Лидер class) is to turn the “Northern Sea Route” into a year-round useable shipping route. The route runs from Murmansk (ice-free year-round and therefore accessible to world shipping) along the top of Russia, through the Bering Straits into the Pacific Ocean – a much shorter route than anything else. At present, its potential is offset by the facts that it has very thick ice at the eastern end and that current icebreakers move slowly at their icebreaking limits. The intention is that the Leader class icebreakers will be able to move through the heavy ice at normal ship speeds (about 12 knots). All this is explained in here by John Helmer.

There are considerable geostrategic implications – this route is not just a way for Russia to earn transit fees. At present Chinese goods bound for Europe travel south, through the straits in Malaysia and Indonesia, through the Indian Ocean and on either through the Suez Canal, Mediterranean and Gibraltar or round Africa. This route has many narrow passages that can be interdicted by hostile powers; much of it is within reach of NATO. If the Northern Sea Route became routinely useable throughout the year, China would be able to more quickly and cheaply ship goods to its European markets. Using the Northern Sea Route will also put these goods far from the reach of the US Navy and its interminable “freedom of navigation” patrols. Likewise, goods coming to China – especially energy from Russia – will be out of reach of hostile powers. The Northern Sea Route, when added to the fast rail network being built by Beijing through Mackinder’s “World Island“, will be a geopolitical fact of no small significance: a response, if not checkmate, to the five-century power of Mackinder’s “world islands”. Both Beijing and Moscow routinely look farther into the future than Western capitals do and Moscow’s work in the Arctic is an example of this forward planning.

The Arctic is thought to have a great deal of natural resources, particularly petroleum. In such a large and inhospitable territory there is much to be explored but already there are many estimates: one ten-year old source estimates that 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas reserves (most in the Russian Arctic) and 13% of its oil reserves may be there. Another source reports that more than 400 onshore oil and gas fields have been discovered north of the Arctic Circle, more than two-thirds are in Russia. One of the largest Russian petroleum sources is in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Region from which over half of Russia’s oil comes but there are many other oil and gas fields in the Russian sector. Modern technology has made it more possible than previously to tap these resources and Russia is in the forefront of the exercise: Rosneft has just begun what promises to be an enormous operation in the Taymyr peninsula,

Given the inaccessibility of the Arctic, the most efficient way to transport natural gas is to liquefy it. Norway appears to have pioneered LNG technology in cold climates with its plant at Hammerfest that started operations in 2007. Two years later Russia opened its first LNG plant in Sakhalin (52 degrees north). In 2017 another plant was opened in the Yamal Peninsula at 71 degrees north (the same latitude as Hammerfest but much colder weather). To carry this LNG to its customers a fleet of icebreaking LNG carriers has been built in South Korea; the first, the Christophe de Margerie, completing a voyage from Norway to South Korea in August 2017 without needing the support of icebreakers. As of December 2019 the fifteenth and final of the fleet had taken on board its maiden cargo at the Yamal LNG port bound for China. That was the 354^th LNG cargo from the port in the first two years of its existence. Once again we see that the country that supposedly “doesn’t make anything” actually makes big plans and executes them. Work on the plant begun in July 2012, it opened for business in December 2017 in time for the appearance of its fleet of specialised ships. The owner, Novatek, is building a third LNG plant in the Yamal region. Rosneft is building its own fleet of  icebreaker LNG carriers for  its Arctic LNG 2 project. Meanwhile an LNG plant for Alaska has been in concept since 2014 and thus far seems to have produced nothing expect planning permission. In Canada there are  “feasibility studies“.

Petroleum supplies are by no means the only natural resources in the Arctic: there are many minerals there as well. In all these areas Russia is well advanced in exploration and exploitation. For many years Russia has maintained a coal mine in Spitzbergen, the Taymyr Peninsula has large coal reserves that India is interested in, there’s a large gold mine in Chukotka and Norilsk has been a  producer of nickel, copper and palladium for years. Russia’s Arctic helium production is the subject  of a breathless NYT piece. But these are just samples of what is likely there and the Northern Sea Route, when it is routinely operational, will open more areas for exploration, exploitation and transport.

The Arctic is a formidable environment and work, let alone mere survival, requires enormous amounts of energy the sources of which may be far from the sites. Moscow has an answer for that too – nuclear power stations. Specifically floating, and therefore moveable, nuclear power stations. The first of these, the Akademik Lomonosov, has been operating for more than a year in Pevek, Chukotka. A second is under construction and the current plan calls for seven in total. But, if the project succeeds – and so far so good – there will likely be more. Again, none of the other Arctic nations has anything like this, even though the USA actually pioneered the concept.

Of the five Arctic nations, only three seem to operate military bases in the true Arctic area. The USA has a number of facilities in Alaska but all of them are south of the Bering Strait but it does operate a significant air base at Thule in Greenland (76 degrees north) (Google maps). Canada operates CF Station Alert at 82 degrees north; but it is a relatively small huddle of buildings reachable only by air: (Google Maps). A naval facility is being constructed at the top of Baffin Island and is expected to become operational in 2022. This paper describes Canada’s efforts in its 22% of the Arctic and admits “Significant gaps remain between its current abilities and desired end-state, yet there has been a steady improvement in its basic skill sets”. Two of the Arctic nations – the USA and Russia – operate fleets of nuclear-powered submarines which can travel under the arctic ice but only Russia has submarines actually based in the territory at Polyarnyy in the Kola Peninsula.

By far the largest military force stationed in the Arctic is the Russian Northern Fleet. Not only does this include considerable surface and submarine elements but it fields a strong aviation component and coastal troops complete with shore defence missiles and air defence assets. To say nothing of nuclear forces – here are four Bulava ICBMs being fired from an SSBN in the White Sea. Altogether a very strong and balanced force with direct exit into the polar ocean. The Northern Fleet is continually exercised as the Russian MoD site shows. The other Arctic nations have nothing to compare: they may make occasional excursions into the Far North but only Russia is there all the time.

But where Russia really has a military presence in the Arctic are the bases that it has built. In no way can CFS Alert’s huddle of huts be compared to the amazing Trefoil base on Alexandra Land at 80 degrees north (Google maps.) It is said to be able to provide “comfortable” living for up to 150 soldiers for a year and a half. Another base, the Northern Clover base (250 troops) on Kotelny Island, is in operation, equipped and exercised. Another base is being built in Tiksi. There are at least five airbases on the Russian Arctic archipelago. And it’s not just troops and aircraft – a couple of years ago Arctic-adapted vehicles were shown in the Victory Day parade – they include air defence systems, all-terrain vehicles and armoured fighting vehicles. A version of the T-80 tank is being refurbished for Arctic service. Meanwhile, in 2013 Canada was testing a snowmobile but nothing seems to have happened with it.

The reality of Russia’s possession of its Arctic territories is met with the usual hyperventilation in the Western media “Russia sees its assertive military posture…”; “What Is Behind Russia’s Aggressive Arctic Strategy?“; “Arctic Aggression: Russia Is Better Prepared for a North Pole Conflict Than America Is: Not good“; “Meeting Russia’s Arctic Aggression“; “Putin is making a power grab for the Arctic“. And so on. “Assertive”, “aggression”, “power grab” are the words of the propagandist: what Russia is actually doing is defending and exploiting its territory. Just as we would. If we could.

In President Putin’s Arctic policy statement of March 2020:

Russia’s main national interests in the Arctic are as follows: to ensure Russia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity; preserve the Arctic as a territory of peace and stable mutually beneficial partnership; guarantee high living standards and prosperity for the population of the Russian Arctic; develop the Russian Arctic as a strategic resource base and use it rationally to speed up national economic growth; develop the Northern Sea Route as a globally competitive national transport corridor; and to protect the Arctic environment, the primordial homeland and the traditional way of life of the indigenous minorities in the Russian Arctic.

A bit of propaganda there, but mostly cold hard national interest.

Russia has made the plans and followed through – the other Arctic nations mostly talk about it or complain.

To repeat Christopher Westdale:

“If we could have, we would have.”

In recent weeks, this belligerence has taken the form of a new forward posture of 150 advanced U.S. fighter jets to be housed at the Eielson Airforce Base in Alaska including a mix of F22 Raptors and F35 Lighting II jets only 600 miles away from the Russia border. Each fighter plane carries the ability to launch strikes onto Russia after a brief flight across the 100 mile Bering Strait gap. Considering the entire American air force only has 187 F22s and 250 F35s, the proportions of this absurd build up can best be appreciated.

In the most recent DOD Arctic Strategy Report which has shaped this suicidal battle plan, Russia and China are defined as nothing but existential threats to the world order which must he stopped at all costs with the report’s authors stating: “In different ways, Russia and China are challenging the rules-based order in the Arctic. U.S. interests include limiting the ability of China and Russia to leverage the region as a corridor for competition that advances their strategic objectives through malign or coercive behavior.”

Describing this aggressive display that folds into the renewed threats of attack faced by dangerous NATO maneuvers across Europe in recent months, Russian Major General Vladimir Popov told Sputnik News:

“Alaska is remote from the U.S. mainland, but is an outpost in relation to Russia—we are separated only by a strait, and the border is literally within the line of sight. This is a strategic region for the U.S. Adding 150 more fighters would at least double the combat potential of the existing forces there.”

Continuity of Government and NORAD

What makes this dire situation ever more precarious is the fact that President Trump has found himself stuck in a COVID-19 quarantine.

What should be a mere hiccup in governmental procedures is quickly being turned into something much greater as renewed calls for enacting Continuity of Government procedures secretively written into law this past March 2020 arising by various leading figures of the deep state such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. When MSNBC asked Pelosi (now second in line to take the mantle of presidency) if anyone reached out to her from the White House regarding Continuity of Government, Pelosi said: “No, they haven’t. But that is an ongoing, not with the White House but with the military, quite frankly, in terms of the — some officials in the government.”

That these calls are occurring amidst a heightened clamor for military coup to unseat the President, the general threat of civil war and the looming danger of economic meltdown, statements like those uttered by Pelosi to CNN and MSNBC this week should not be taken lightly.

In the updated March 2020 Continuity of Government protocols, General Terrance O’Shaunessy (head of both NORAD and NORTHCOM) would take the “temporary” reins of the presidency under crisis conditions of ungovernability which are not too difficult to imagine amidst the storms currently sweeping America. Military staff who would take up a parallel chain of command continue to be stationed 650 meters below Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado where they have been deployed since March 2020 following Mark Espers’ orders to NORTHCOM to “prepare to deploy”.

O’Shawnessy has repeatedly echoed the views of the Washington/NATO establishment that the greatest threats to the world stem from Russia and China directly referencing their supposedly nefarious intentions in the Arctic.

The Polar Silk Road: A Healthier Paradigm for the Arctic

Rather than bring the forces of war to the Arctic, Russia and China have together been demonstrating a far more efficient and moral approach which certain patriotic forces within North America tend to be in alignment with, including the current President.

Since January 2018, the Arctic has increasingly become dominated by the positive extension of the New Silk Road northward in the form of the maritime and land based “Polar Silk Road” which has united brilliantly with President Putin’s Far East development program. This program aims to increase arctic shipping five fold by 2024 and begin a bold program of infrastructure, rail, road, pipeline, mining and port building in order to begin accessing the vital raw materials desperately needed for the coming centuries of multipolar development.

On September 26, President Trump working alongside political allies in Alaska, Alberta and the private sector alike streamlined a project which taps into this spirit of genuine economic cooperation and long term thinking unseen in decades in the form of the Alaska-Canada Rail connection. Looking at the business models guiding this emerging project, it is important to note that the destructive thinking of globalization and zero sum logic are not to be found at all as the entire program is vectored on tying North America economic interests into China’s Belt and Road and growing Asian markets.

The Wallace Doctrine for the Arctic Must Be Revived

As I wrote in my recent report Trump’s A Revival of the Wallace Doctrine for the Post-War World, the last serious pro-development strategy to arise from a leading American politician took the form of President Franklin Roosevelt’s ardent anti-imperial Vice President Henry Wallace, who spent years with his Russian counterparts during WWII arranging the conditions of mutual development of both nations  during the post-War age with a strong focus on the long awaited Bering Strait Rail connection and obvious Alaska-Canada transport corridors. In his Two Peoples One Friendship, Wallace described his discussions with Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942 saying:

“Of all nations, Russia has the most powerful combination of a rapidly increasing population, great natural resources and immediate expansion in technological skills. Siberia and China will furnish the greatest frontier of tomorrow… When Molotov [Russia’s Foreign Minister] was in Washington in the spring of 1942 I spoke to him about the combined highway and airway which I hope someday will link Chicago and Moscow via Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Molotov, after observing that no one nation could do this job by itself, said that he and I would live to see the day of its accomplishment. It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”

The Molotov/Wallace vision wasn’t something entirely new.

Earlier programs for building the Bering Strait rail connection were advanced by Russian Prime Minister Sergei Witte and Czar Nicholas II who in 1906 sponsored teams of American engineers to conduct feasibility studies of the project, then estimated to costs $200 million.

On the American side of the project, Lincoln’s trusted bodyguard William Gilpin (a man who was known as a leading spirit of America’s own Trans Continental Railway) and later Governor of Colorado promoted the work throughout his life saying of the Alaska Canada rail connection:

“It is sufficiently apparent that the building of a railroad by way of Alaska, Bering Strait and northeastern Siberia, connecting with the Canadian Pacific in British Columbia and in Siberia with the Russian line now being pushed forward to Vladivostok, is by no means an unpracticable undertaking”.

Gilpin’s global program was outlined thoroughly in his 1890 book the Cosmopolitan Railway.

Exhibiting the stark raving fear of the renewal of this latent spirit of U.S.-Russian friendship in the build up to the November elections, Thomas Wright (senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute) wrote a panicky op ed in the Atlantic on September 30 called “What a Second Trump Term Would Mean for the World”. In this article, Wright echoes the broader fears of the deep state of a revival of the Henry Wallace doctrine which the author laments would have been just terrible had it not fortunately been sabotaged by the “great” figure of Harry Truman in January 1945. Wright says:

“Looking back on U.S. diplomatic history, one of the great counterfactuals is what would have happened if Franklin D. Roosevelt had not replaced his vice president Henry Wallace with Harry Truman in 1944. Wallace was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and became an ardent opponent of the Cold War. If he had become president when FDR died, in April 1945, the next half century could have gone very differently—likely no NATO, no Marshall Plan, no alliance with Japan, no overseas troop presence, and no European Union… The U.S. is now teetering on another historically important moment. With Trump, we would not only be deprived of our Truman. We would be saddled with our Wallace—a leader whose instincts and actions are diametrically opposed to what the moment requires. With few remaining constraints and a vulnerable world, a re-elected Trump could set the trajectory of world affairs for decades to come.”

It should be clear to all that the renewal of the Wallace-Gilpin spirit of development into North America’s Arctic is not only good business but also serves as a vital precondition to re-establishing a world order founded upon trust, win-win cooperation, and non-zero sum thinking. While it is fairly clear that Trump’s political instincts are vectored in this direction (giving rise to such frightful diatribes by emissaries of the Cold War at Brookings and the CFR), it still remains to be seen if sufficient political influence can be exerted to rein in the swamp before a hot war and military coup are unleashed.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

In the Pentagon’s “New Arctic Strategy” it is stated that the Space Force will “develop new technologies and modernize existing assets in the Arctic necessary to ensure access to and freedom to operate in space,” while Air Force Secretary Barbara Barret announced in July that “U.S. air and space forces value the Arctic. Access and stability require cooperation among America’s allies and partners, along with a commitment to vigilance, power projection, and preparation.”

Barrett’s observation that the region should be “a free and open domain for benevolent actors” would be more credible were the Pentagon indeed a benevolent actor — and while Washington always declares that other countries are indulging in military adventurism when developing defences in their own territory, it is a different call when the Pentagon indulges in “forward-basing.” For example, it is believed to be sinister that in its own Arctic territory, “Russia has refurbished airfields, invested in search and rescue, and built radar stations to improve awareness in the air and maritime domains” while U.S. military expansion in the Arctic is considered essential because “it is a critical domain to protect America’s homeland.”

This was raised by Trump during his fantasising about buying Greenland when, although acknowledging that “Denmark essentially owns it” he claimed that this hurts Denmark “very badly” because it loses “almost $700 million a year” (which is not so) but that he wants to continue “protecting” Washington’s “big ally.”

Denmark and the rest of the world laughed at Trump’s silly fantasy which caused the usual Trump reaction, in that he promptly cancelled a scheduled visit to Copenhagen and tweeted childish abuse about Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. His reason for scrapping the visit and insulting the Danish people was that the prime minister had “no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland”. As with the entire Washington establishment — and most notably the Machiavellian Pompeo — Trump considers that when a country is presented with demands made by the United States then there has to be speedy and totally compliant action on the part of the targeted government.

Trump’s petulant insult was laughed at by the Danes and everyone else, but then he turned his attention to another part of the Arctic. As pointed out by Juan Cole, on August 18, the same day that scientists produced a research analysis concluding that the Greenland ice sheet is losing 500 billion tons of ice each year (equal to a million tons a minute), the real estate agent in the White House finalised his plans to encourage oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

You have to hand it to Trump, in that he rarely fails to make a complete idiot of himself when an opportunity arises.

The wildlife refuge was first protected by legislation brought in forty years ago, but has been under constant threat from oil and gas companies which are faithfully supported by members of the Republican Party whose Congressional legislators in 2017 (when they controlled both Houses) approved a tax bill that opened the area to oil and gas leasing. It has been calculated that the oil and gas sector contributed $84.4 million in the 2018 election cycle. Koch Industries was the largest single donor, at $10.5 million. Total campaign spending by the oil and gas sector since 1990 has totalled $625 million.

Trump and the people who fill the pockets of legislators — and the pocket-filled legislators themselves — are not in the slightest concerned about the effects of gas and oil drilling in the Wildlife Refuge, which are likely to be catastrophic.

Which brings us to the military expansion equation, in which the Pentagon is to the fore in explaining in its Arctic Strategy that “U.S. interests include maintaining flexibility for global power projection, including by ensuring freedom of navigation and overflight; and limiting the ability of China and Russia to leverage the region as a corridor for competition that advances their strategic objectives through malign or coercive behaviour.”

Russia and China wish to develop economically, and the Arctic is an area that can be beneficial to their interests. Russia, as even the Pentagon has to admit, “is the largest Arctic nation by landmass, population, and military presence above the Arctic Circle”, although of course it is regarded as deplorable that its “commercial investments… have been matched by continued defence investments and activities that strengthen both its territorial defence and its ability to control the Northern Sea Route.”

As to China, the summation is that it is “attempting to gain a role in the Arctic in ways that may undermine international rules and norms, and there is a risk that its predatory economic behaviour globally may be repeated in the Arctic.” In other words, Washington, which fancies it does not indulge in predatory economic behaviour, does not want either Russia or China to continue their initiatives in developing the region.

Neither Russia nor China is furthering schemes whereby northern wildlife will be destroyed by their economic activities, and there is no evidence that their military activities are in any way confrontational or aggressive. But the Pentagon is determined to find justification for its own posture in the region and is developing a “U.S. Arctic deterrent” which “will require agile, capable, and expeditionary forces with the ability to flexibly project power into and operate within the region, as the Joint Force must be able to do elsewhere globally.”

Trump’s emphasis on expanding fossil fuel production and throwing open the Alaskan Arctic to drilling and associated coinstruction will imperil endangered species and contribute massively to the climate change crisis. The Pentagon’s military strategy for the region will increase international tension and inevitably lead to confrontation, as it expands its presence in order to “project power.” Washington’s plans for the Arctic will heat the place up in more than one way.

Even though President Lincoln and Czar Alexander II were both known as great reformers and emancipators for their common commitment to free slaves and serfs, both leaders were assassinated before their grand visions could come to fruition.

In this article, I would like to present another chapter of this forgotten history: The creation of modern Canada in as a confederation designed explicitly to prevent the inevitable construction of a Russian-American rail connection through the Bering Strait in the wake of the Civil War.

The Strategic Value of the Bering Strait Tunnel in History

For those who are not aware, the Bering Strait Rail tunnel project is a 150 year idea which was formulated by allies of Lincoln and Alexander II after America’s Civil War. The original grand design was driven by a plan to connect telegraph lines between continents, followed soon thereafter by a connection of the Trans-Siberian Railway and America’s Trans Continental Railways through British Columbia, Alaska and into Eurasia, as laid out spectacularly by former Colorado Governor William Gilpin in his 1890 book the Cosmopolitan Railway.

Echoing today’s Belt and Road Initiative which is quickly growing to become a world land bridge, Gilpin described what this new paradigm of human civilization was destined to look like:

“The weapons of mutual slaughter are hurled away; the sanguinary passions find a check, a majority of the human family is found to accept the essential teachings of Christianity IN PRACTICE… Room is discovered for industrial virtue and industrial power. The civilized masses of the world meet; they are mutually enlightened, and fraternize to reconstitute human relations in harmony with nature and with God. The world ceases to be a military camp, incubated only by the military principles of arbitrary force and abject submission. A new and grand order in human affairs inaugurates itself out of these immense concurrent discoveries and events” [Cosmopolitan Railway p. 213]

The idea of the Bering Strait tunnel was supported by Czar Nicholas II who, in 1906 hired a team of American engineers to conduct feasibility studies on the initiative which then had an estimated cost of $350 million.

Sadly a couple of World Wars and disastrous revolution kept this project from blossoming as it was intended.

This idea was revived again by FDR’s great Vice President Henry Wallace who discussed the project at length with Russia’s Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942. In this meeting Wallace declared that “It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”

Again, the Cold War derailed this project and it was only in 2007 that the Russian Government revived it once again with Putin even offering to pay 2/3rd of the $65 billion estimated cost to construct the 100 km tunnel across the Bering Strait. This project was offered to the west more loudly in 2011 and in May 2014, China unofficially gave their backing to the initiative. Sadly, unipolar technocrats and neocons controlling NATO foreign policy had not the eyes to see what benefits such projects offered those who joined in its construction, and instead continued onto their zero-sum game plan for full spectrum dominance.

With the 2018 unveiling of the Polar Silk Road extending the east-west development corridors into the Arctic, which have merged increasingly with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and Putin’s Northern Vision, the Bering Strait connection has again been given new life. If nations of the west find the courage to let go of the Titanic before the hellish chaos of the oncoming financial meltdown erupts, then the projects animating the new multi polar paradigm will undoubtedly look a lot like the World Land bridge concept illustrated by the Schiller Institute below.

Arctic development remains one of the best strategic points of alliance and cooperation needed to re-organize the collapsing world economic order around firm principles of multipolar cooperation and value and as such is not too different from the dynamic shaping the world when Lincoln took office in 1860.

The 19th century Clash of Two Systems

Lincoln’s economic advisor and leader of the international export of the American System of Political economy, Henry C. Carey, described this clash between two systems in his 1851 Harmony of Interests:

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

Carey, just like the British Empire’s Lord Palmerston, clearly recognized that America had not completed “the mission of 1776” since not one but TWO Americas existed within Washington: One positive America representing the anti-slavery/anti-colonial principles of the 1789 constitution vs. another hypocritical slave power that never believed that “all men were created equal”. Just as two antithetical impulses existed within America, so too did two opposing views of “Manifest Destiny” co-evolve since 1776: One hellish version driven by the ‘principle’ of spreading slavery and suppressing the weak while the other more noble impulse was represented by the spirits of Lincoln, Carey and Gilpin illustrated above.

This fatal contradiction within the republic was exploited fervently by Anglo-American intelligence for 80 years before the inevitable civil war finally broke out in 1861.

President Lincoln defined the terms of this contradiction and immanent war in an 1858 debate with the Slave Power’s champion Stephen Douglas saying:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

This quote is important as it addresses the fact that Lincoln recognized correctly the inextricable connection between the institution of slavery (even when it masqueraded under a republican veneer) and monarchical principles of colonialism which saw mankind’s right to rule defined not by morality, or merit but rather by “principles” of hereditary right.

The Stage is Set for a Forgotten Battle

By now most informed people are aware of Russia’s 1863 intervention into the Civil War as a turning point that blocked British and French imperialist forces from entering the war militarily on the side of the Southern rebels. What is not so well established is how Russian and American grand strategy to connect the continents by rail did not occur as it was intended after the sale of Alaska.

There are several convergent factors at play during the 1865-1867 period which presented a major challenge to the weakening British Empire strategists:

The need to confederate British territories in North America as possession of the Empire instead of allowing them to either become independent nations or annexing to Lincoln’s republic.

If this first task could be done by ousting pro-Lincoln forces in Canadian political power and killing Lincoln, then the next task involved transferring the vast private territories owned by the Hudson Bay Company separating eastern colonies from the lone western outpost of British Columbia on the Pacific. The majority of Canada during this pre-1867 period was private Hudson Bay land as it had been since it was chartered in 1670 by Prince Rupert.

If this transfer of Hudson Bay possessions into federal hands could be affected, then it would still be necessary to somehow persuade the fiercely independent British Columbian subjects to join Confederation. This was not a simple task as the vast majority were in favor of annexing to the USA due to the economic despair of their colony caused by the collapse of the Gold rush bubbles in 1858 and total isolation from the other British American colonies.

The Anti-Union Confederacy That Succeeded

On July 1, 1867, the British North America Act was enacted consolidating Britain’s “other” anti-American confederacy operation under a new constitution dedicating the new federation’s existence to be conducive “to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the interests of the British Empire”.

It should be kept in mind that the project to confederate actually began during the Civil War in the form of a week-long booze-soaked orgy of the Charlottetown convention of 1864 which hammered out the resolutions later put into law in 1867.

Some have wondered why just days before the July 1, 1867 enactment, would-be confederate President Jefferson Davis gave a speech to cheering crowds in Lennoxville Quebec stating: “I hope that you will hold fast to [your] British principles and that you may ever strive to cultivate close and affectionate connections with the mother country”.

This pro-British gushing from a confederate traitor in Quebec shouldn’t be surprising at all if we take into account the fact that Montreal and Toronto served as Southern confederacy bases of operations used with the full support of the British Empire to run terrorist operations, raids, espionage and financing of the war against Lincoln’s forces from the North (while Canada “officially” maintained an air of neutrality). Even Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Boothe was discovered to have been deployed from Montreal to kill Lincoln, with union officers discovering a $500 cheque amidst his possessions signed directly by none other than Ontario Bank President Henry Starnes (who would later become Mayor of Montreal).

As Barry Sheehy pointed out in Montreal: City of Secrets, during the Civil War, “the largest Confederate Secret Service base outside Richmond was located in Montreal” under the direct control of confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin- himself an asset of British Intelligence.

Much like the exiled Russian and Hong Kong oligarchs and traitors of the modern day, Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin and many other confederate rebels lived out their days in comfort in both Canada and Britain (Benjamin becoming an English Barrister in London from 1865 until his death in 1884).

The Sale of Alaska and the Rush for British Columbia

On March 30, 1867, the British Empire was caught off guard with the news that Russia’s Alaskan possessions had been sold to America for $7.2 million in a secretive diplomatic maneuver which Secretary of State William Seward described as the most important deal of his life.

The sale had suddenly made the isolated colony of British Columbia very hot real estate. During this 1867 purchase, Lincoln’s Trans Continental Railway, begun in 1863 at the height of the Civil War was a mere two years from completion, linking the Pacific to Atlantic for the first time in history and thus destroying the British monopoly over maritime shipping routes.

With students of Lincoln’s program to be found among the intelligentsia of Russia, led by Count Sergei Witte and Dimitri Mendeleyev, the American modeled (and largely American-built) Trans-Siberian Railway’s construction was not far away, and the linking of rail across the two continents was discussed as a real possibility by republican visionaries the world over.

The chances that British Columbia would join confederation were minute at this time as the broken colony had no ties of commerce to Britain or the east coast confederacy 3500 km away. In fact, on July 2, 1867 the first of several petitions was sent to Queen Victoria requesting that either the colony’s debt burdens and economic woes be alleviated by the Mother country or that the queen grant them permission to annex to the USA!

At this time, American consul to Victoria Allen Francis, wrote a letter to the president stating:

“Even the colonists claiming most loyalty to the queen, are now urging with great unanimity annexation to the United States as their only salvation- as the only means of retrieving the colonies from their present embarrassment and decline.”

BC’s Colonialist Newspaper described the situation in the following terms:

“Since no change would be for the worse, they (British Columbians) would welcome annexation to the United States to continuing in a state of poverty and wretchedness. In writing this we know we speak the mind of 9 out of every 10 men in the colony… the sentiment is heard at every gathering street corner- at social gatherings, in business circles- in all places”

On July 18, 1868 the Hudson Bay territories (aka: Rupert’s Land) were sold to Ottawa under an operation led by Sir Georges Etienne Cartier who stated “in this country we must have a distinct form of government in which the monarchical spirit will be found.”

Cartier’s monarchical spirit was reflected in Canada’s leading fathers of confederation such as Sir John A. Macdonald who famously stated “a Britisher I was born and a Britisher I will die” and who looked to the vast wilderness west of Toronto saying in 1867: “I would be quite willing, personally to leave the whole country a wilderness for the next half century, but I fear if Englishmen do not go there the Yankees will.”

On May 22, 1867, Father of Confederation Sir Alexander Galt stated British policy for western expansion (to block the connection between Russia and the USA) saying: “If the United States desire to outflank us on the west, we must accept the situation and lay our hand on British Columbia and the Pacific Ocean. This country cannot be surrounded by the Unites States- We are gone if we allow it… ‘From the Atlantic to the Pacific’ must be the cry in British America as much as it has ever been in the United States”

The last serious effort by British Columbians to join America was made with the Annexation petition of 1869 listing BC’s desperate grievances with the empire and appealing to President Grant:

“The only remedy for the evils which beset us, we believe to be in a close union with the adjoining States and Territories, we are already bound to them by a unity of object and interest; nearly all our commercial relations are with them; They furnish the Chief Markets we have for the products of our mines, lands and waters; They supply the Colony with most of the necessities of life; They furnish us the only means of communication with the outer world… For these reasons we earnestly desire the ACQUISITION of this Colony by the United States.”

The Alabama Claims

The last great hope for extending Lincoln’s rail through BC into Alaska at this time arose amidst the 1869-1871 Alabama Claims affair which saw the world’s first international trial in Geneva address the matter of Britain’s military support for the confederacy during the Civil War (reflecting the irony of America’s recent covert support for Syrian rebels). Britain’s air of neutrality was betrayed by her construction of Confederate war ships that unleashed havoc on Lincoln’s Navy. The court ruled in favor of America and soon Britain came close to loosing it’s Canadian possessions as payment for their sin (Senator Charles Sumner and Secretary Seward both advocated this course), although weaker figures in America ended up agreeing to a measly $15 million settlement in 1872 while all wrongs were forgotten.

With these failures to capture the pregnant moment, the effort to assimilate BC into London’s northern confederacy was accelerated.

Ottawa negotiations began on June 7, 1870 and within weeks nearly all resolutions and clauses were agreed upon. The two biggest impediments to B.C.’s entry into the Confederacy were dealt with by the payment of all of the colony’s debts by Ottawa and the promise made by Sir Macdonald to construct a rail line linking the new province with Montreal and Quebec “within ten years”. This promised rail line was necessary in order to sabotage the intention of the American Manifest Destiny policy.

The Empire Strikes Back

With these arrangements agreed upon (paralleling similar arrangements in the former Red River Settlement in today’s Manitoba), British Columbia was admitted into Confederation as the 6th Canadian Province. Within the coming decades, as Canada was opened up to form a British-controlled Northern Confederacy blockade against the civilizing progress of the sovereign nation state intention of the United States, Saskatchewan and Alberta were formed as provinces where there had formerly been only Hudson’s Bay land. The lack of progress on Canada’s rail by 1878 had resulted in renewed disenchantment on the part of British Columbians who demanded once more for annexation into the USA resulting in Sir John A. Macdonald’s “National Policy of 1878-1885” which forced the construction of Canada’s own trans continental rail (with the inaugural train cars arriving in BC’s Port Moody from Montreal on the 4th of July, 1885).

By the time of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the American System of Political Economy had resulted in the greatest explosion of wealth in the United States and became a model for the whole civilized world seeking to break free of British colonial hegemony.

Converts to the American System were made by all lovers of progress from around the world who came to the Convention. Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck vigorously applied American System practices of high protective tariffs and vast internal improvements under his Zollverein. Czars Alexander II and III and their close circle of Russian advisors applied the American model for the vast modernization of Russia vectored around the Trans-Siberian Rail. Even Japan under the Meiji Restoration applied the American model to escape feudalism and enter the modern age.

Sadly, an age of London-financed revolutions, assassinations and wars mis-shaped the 1880s, 1890s, and 20th century, preventing this system of win-win cooperation from evolving as it was destined.

Today the world is again pulled by two opposing systems represented by Lincoln’s international allies on the one hand and British Intelligence on the other… although today’s champions of the multi polar world of cooperation have names like Xi Jinping and Putin. These Eurasian statesmen have ushered in a new system of credit, diplomacy, security, economic and science policy governed by the best principles displayed by the American System of the 19th century and occasionally revived albeit only briefly under such 20th century leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

Whether the western nations have the moral fitness to recover their lost traditions and join in this new paradigm or not yet remains to be seen…

The author delivered a lecture on this topic which can be viewed here:

In 2007, the Russian government first voiced its support for the construction of the Bering Strait rail tunnel connecting the Americas with the Eurasian continent- a policy which has taken on new life in 2020 as Putin’s Great Arctic Development strategy has wedded itself to the northern extension of the Belt and Road Initiative (dubbed the Polar Silk Road). In 2011, the Russian government re-stated its pledge to build the $64 billion project.

On the Stone Age side of things, deep state neocons have also looked upon the arctic as a strategic zone of global importance, but with a very different mental filter from their Russian counterparts. NORAD chief Terrance O’Shaughnessy, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a vast array of NATO-philes have repeatedly called upon the Arctic as a domain of militarization and confrontation with their primary “strategic nemeses” Russia and China.

So let’s assume the Dark Age nut jobs infesting the USA don’t win the day, and a new system emerges from the rubble of the currently collapsing world order premised around certain principles of long term cooperation, infrastructure and science investments, rather than the worship of money and debt slavery. Even the most cynical among us must admit that this is at least possible. After all, Russia Gate has increasingly collapsed, General Flynn has been exonerated, and Putin has called repeatedly for an emergency meeting of the five nuclear powers of the UN Security Council to discuss the creation of a new system.

So if this new system occurs and if saner forces amongst the western nations go with the Putin Plan for Arctic Development rather than the neocon WWIII agenda, then this happier outcome would not exactly be an unprecedented event. It is after all the case that the same historic American-Russian brotherhood which saved America during the Civil War would finally realize that great intention of leading statesmen in Lincoln’s America and Czar Alexander II’s Russia from the very moment Russia sold Alaska to America.

The Civil War and the Alaska Purchase

The sale of Alaska stands out as an incomprehensible historical anomaly for many who choose to see history merely as a sequence of linear events determined by “practical decision making”. The failure to recognize higher organizing principles shaping humanity’s collective experience as a universal process has blinded many historians from recognizing the true dynamic from which such a decision sprung and which could only be recognized from a top down perspective.

Just as 19th century America suffered from an internal struggle between factions who interpreted the Constitution in diametrically opposing ways, so too did the Russian state feature a similar battle between forces who saw Russia’s destiny likened to a 3rd Roman Empire in opposition to forces who saw Russia’s destiny as a sovereign nation state meant to exemplify the highest moral and intellectual powers that human society had attained. These figures, of whom several will shortly be showcased, represented the best traditions set into motion by the Leibnizian reforms of Peter the Great (Czar from 1682 until 1725).

As Russian expansionism was promoted by opportunist forces dominating the government of Czar Nicholas I (Czar from 1825-1855) who chased after Ottoman possessions in their obsession to expand Russian influence in Central Asia, the seeds of Russia’s self-destruction were being sown. While Russian expansionists were expecting the easy capture of territories long held by a failing Ottoman empire, what they found was a spiders’ web of Anglo-French intrigue and traps which nearly destroyed the proud nation during the bloody Crimean War (October 1853 to February 1856). The war’s outcome saw Russia humiliated, indebted and crippled morally and physically.

In response to this failure, a new breed of statecraft arose as an enlightened Czar (Alexander II) took the reins from the deceased Nicholas in 1854. With his leadership, statesmen such as the Grand Duke Constantine (Alexander’s brother), General Nikolai Muraviev, Foreign Minister Gorchakov and the great Russian Ambassador to America Eduard de Stoeckl gained a new level of influence and a new foreign policy doctrine was created. This doctrine was exemplified by an enhanced appreciation of the destructive role of the British Empire’s global strategy and the importance of America as a collaborator and partner.

Alexander II quickly began tackling endemic corruption, and worked to transform Russia by freeing the serfs in 1861 earning him the namesake “the Great Liberator”.

Although America had fallen into a Civil War by 1861, the British Empire which had done so much to keep the world subdued during the Crimean War, Opium Wars, and suppression of vast Indian uprisings was petrified that a Russian-American friendship would set into motion a great power alliance capable of undoing its global hegemony.

One of the few means Britain had to keep these two historic allies from uniting remained its territories of Canada and especially the colony of British Columbia. This colony was then an isolated and bankrupt outpost on the west coast separated by 3000 km of undeveloped wilderness privately owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company. British Columbia’s primary economic connection was not Britain, but rather California and a large movement of colonists had been calling for separation from the Empire in order to annex to the then-prosperous USA.

In 1860, Ambassador Stoeckl wrote to the Czar: “If the United States should win mastery of our possessions then British Oregon (British Columbia) would be squeezed together by the Americans from the north and south and would hardly be able to escape”. (1)

Grand Duke Constantine echoed Stoeckl saying: “the United States of North America should in the course of events be eager to conquer all of North America and will therefore meet us sooner or later and there is not the slightest doubt that it will seize our colonies without great effort and we shall be in no possession to retain them” (2)

As early as 1853, General Muraviev had already promoted Russia’s sale to Alaska in a letter to the Czar stating: “Due to the present amazing development of railroads, the United States will soon spread over all North America. We must face the fact that we will have to cede our North American possessions to them.” (3)

The Civil War and Russia

By 1862 the Civil War had begun in full force and with British corporations and Foreign Office supporting of the Confederacy (and banks launching financial warfare launched against the Union), tides had quickly turned against Lincoln. The British possessions of Toronto and Montreal served as Confederate bases from which dozens of terrorist attacks were launched against Lincoln’s Union from the North (including the President’s eventual assassination from Montreal) while British-sponsored battles were being waged from the South.

As the world watched with bated breath Ambassador Stoeckl wrote to Gorchakov:

“The disintegration of the United States as a nation would from our point of view be something to be deplored. The American confederation has acted as a counterpoise to British power and in this sense, its continued existence constitutes an important element in the balance of power.” He continued that he desired “the preservation of the American Union as an indivisible nation.” (4)

Surely the outcome of the Civil War would have been much darker had it not been for Czar Alexander II’s deployment of the Russian navy to California and Atlantic coasts of America in 1863 which kept British and French forces from assisting the confederacy in open warfare against Lincoln.

Later describing his motive, Czar Alexander II said:

“In the Autumn of 1862, the governments of France and Great Britain proposed to Russia, in a formal but not in an official way, the joint recognition by European powers of the independence of the Confederate States of America. My immediate answer was: `I will not cooperate in such action; and I will not acquiesce. On the contrary, I shall accept the recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by France and Great Britain as a casus belli for Russia. And in order that the governments of France and Great Britain may understand that this is no idle threat; I will send a Pacific fleet to San Francisco and an Atlantic fleet to New York…All this I did because of love for my own dear Russia… I acted thus because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American Republic, with advanced industrial development were broken up and Great Britain should be left in control of most branches of modern industrial development.” (5)

By December 26, 1864 as the outcome of the war in favor of the union was blossoming, Secretary of State William Seward encouraged the Grand Duke Constantine to come to America with the following words “I think it would be beneficial to us, and by no means unprofitable to Russia. I forebear from specifying my reasons- They will readily occur to you, as they would to his imperial highness if his thoughts were turned in that direction.” (6)

The Sale of Alaska Consummated

In 1866, Stoeckl was called back to Russia and after a lengthy meeting with Czar Alexander II, the Grand Duke Constantine, the Foreign Ministers and Finance Minister, was given approval to initiate the sale of Alaska to America.

On the evening of March 29, 1867, Ambassador Stoeckl delivered the news to William Seward at his private residence in Washington D.C. When asked if Seward wished to convene a meeting the following day, the Secretary of State asked why wait until tomorrow what could be done that very evening?

At midnight, the office of the state department was opened with a select group of Senator Charles Sumner, Seward and a few trusted members from the Russian consulate alongside Stoeckl.

As the sun rose on March 30, the treaty was written finalizing the sale for $7.2 million and before the ink was dry, it was presented to a shocked Congress who passed it in the following weeks.

Seward himself described the treaty as the most important diplomatic maneuver of his life saying “this treaty stands alone in the history of diplomacy, as an important treaty conceived, initiated and prosecuted and completed without being preceded or attended by protocols or dispatches”. (7)

Events Move Fast in the Post-Civil War Years

In order to prevent pro-American forces in Canada from declaring independence from a weakened Empire, the 1867 British North America Act was signed establishing a northern Monarchy on Deep State principles for the next 160 years and which this author developed in a 2014 lecture “Prometheus and Canada 1774-1874”.

The British hand behind the Civil War was exposed for all the world to see in the Alabama Claims of 1872 (the world’s first international trial) finding the British government guilty of militarily supporting the confederacy. In recompense for this crime, Sumner and Seward wanted the British to cede all of their remaining possessions in North America. Such an act would certainly have given great fuel to the connection of the Trans Continental Railway begun during the height of the Civil War and completed in 1869- with Eurasia.

Desperate to keep its independently-minded colony from annexing to America, the British Foreign office offered a bribe its Pacific colony. A desperate Britain purchased the private Hudson Bay lands in 1870, cancelled the colony’s debts and promised to build a railroad from Ontario to the Pacific under a program which I outlined in my 2013 report ‘The Imperial Myth of Canada’s National Policy’.

Russia had by this time positioned itself to begin construction of its own trans-continental railroad with the help of American engineers which was finally completed 1905 under the leadership of “American System” follower count Sergei Witte. On its maiden voyage the Trans-Siberian rail saw Philadelphia-made train cars run across the Russian heartland, and it is no accident that all of the key players involved in the Alaska purchase were also involved in the Russian continental rail program on both sides of the ocean.

The China Connection

Both Charles Sumner and William Seward were also strong advocates of uniting America’s destiny with China. Seward and U.S. Consul to Beijing, General Anson Burlingham, worked in tandem with Seward’s son George Frederick Seward (U.S. Consul to Shanghai) to organize the Seward-Burlingham Treaty of 1868 with China, giving China free emigration and travel in America, reciprocal access to education for citizens living in the others’ country, and favored nation status with the United States on trade. While treacherous politicians later annulled this treaty, its existence brought a new generation of Chinese revolutionaries to America including a young student named Sun Yat-sen who would later lead a revolution in 1911, establishing a new Chinese republic upon the Three Principles elaborated first by Abraham Lincoln!

Senator Sumner expressed his understanding of America’s connection with China and the Trans-continental railroad during his 1867 speech in defense of the Alaska Purchase:

“To unite the East of Asia with the West of America is the aspiration of commerce now as when the English navigator (Meares) recorded his voyage. Of course, whatever helps this result is an advantage. The Pacific railroad is such an advantage; for, though running westward, it will be, when completed, a new highway to the East.”

When President Ulysses Grant came to power in 1869, he gave much support to this internationalization of the American system while also fighting valiantly to advance Lincoln’s plans for reconstruction and reconciliation with an emancipated America.

Gilpin’s World Land-Bridge

Lincoln’s former body guard and first Governor of Colorado William Gilpin was not least among this group. Gilpin had been known as one of the earliest champions of America’s Trans Continental Railroad from as early as 1846 and his hundreds of speeches, published maps and writings went further than any other statesman to concretize what those international public works would look like.

Describing his grand design for international public works, Gilpin wrote in his widely read 1890 magnum opus ‘The Cosmopolitan Railway’:

“Railways continue to extend themselves, soon to become a universal system over all the lands of the globe. We have seen the energies of the American people, bringing into line and into use these new powers, span their continent with the Pacific railways… they will continue to expand their work to Bering Straits, where all the continents are united. This will extend itself along similarly propitious thermal selvage of the oriental Russian coasts into China. To prolong this unbroken line of cosmopolitan railways along the latitudinal plateau of Asia, to Moscow and to London, will not have long delay. The less significant and isolated continents of the southern hemisphere- South America, Africa, and Australasia- will be reached by feeders through Panama, Suez and the chain of Oriental peninsulas and islands. The whole area and all the populations of the globe will be thus united and fused by land travel and railway.”

Gilpin re-iterated his view that it was only by embracing its promethean heritage and fully committing to develop Alaska that America could avoid falling back under British manipulation. As applicable then as it is to today’s emerging Four Power alliance and expanding Belt and Road Initiative, Gilpin knew that national institutions must stay in the driver’s seat when he said:

“Twenty four years have already elapsed since we first assumed the responsibility of ownership, and since then what have we done? What improvement have we made upon the condition of life, the stolid, animal existence of the half civilized Russians and Aleuts! None whatsoever…. Place Alaska on the line of a world-encircling railway, give her a special code of laws befitting her requirements, and men of enterprise and capital to develop her resources, and she would pay for the road five times over. There is every reason to believe that Russia would hail the opening of her great eastern interior with joy. She would have everything to gain by it and nothing to lose… Since the time of Peter the Great, the ambition of Russian rulers has been not only to extend their possessions, but to improve the conditions of those who inhabit them.”

Within his 1890 book, Gilpin again continuously emphasized his long held belief that the inevitable awakening of China would be the basis for renewal and salvation of the west:

“In Asia, a civilization resting on a basis of remote antiquity has had, indeed, a long pause but a certain civilization- although hitherto hermetically sealed up from European influence- has continued to exist. The ancient Asiatic colossus, in a certain sense, needed only to be awakened to new life, and European Culture finds a basis there on which it can build future reforms”.

By 1906, Czar Nicholas II of Russia supported the plan for the American-Russian Bering Strait tunnel, officially approving a team of American engineers to conduct a feasibility study. A New York Times article reported on March 27, 1906:

“The Czar of Russia has issued an order authorizing the American syndicate, represented by Baron Loicq de Lobel, to begin work on the Trans-Siberian-Alaska railroad project. The plan is to build a railroad from Siberia to Alaska by bridging and tunneling the Bering Strait. It is said that the enterprise will be capitalized at from $250 to $300 million and that the money centers of Russia, France and the United States will be asked to take bonds.”

While the Anglo-American financed revolution deposed of the Czar and his family by 1917, the Russian government under the guidance of Vladimir Putin, working in tandem with Xi Jinping’s China have put the project back onto the agenda, and with the first American System President in decades at the helms of the USA government who has repeated stated his desire to unite America’s interests with those of Eurasia, the vision of Gilpin’s New Paradigm is being given a new chance at life.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Notes

(1) S.B. Okun, The Russian-American Company, 1951 p.251
(2) Okun, p. 242
(3) Pacific Historical Review vol. 3, 1934 p. 30
(4) Okun, p. 259-260
(5) Published in The Independent March 24, 1904
(6) American Relations 1815-1867, N.Y. DaCapo Press, 1970, p.148
(7) Congressional Globe, Volume 40, by USA Congress, 2nd Session, p. 1339

How right he is. But of course his internationalist views don’t meet with approval from others with axes to wield and drums to beat. The new German defence minister, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (AKK), eyeing her future political career through red-tinted glasses, is aghast at such a non-confrontational approach, and insists her country should become involved in military affairs further afield than Europe and, for example, join the anti-China drive in Asia by contributing to combat vessel patrols in the South China Sea.

AKK’s support for NATO is unconditional, and understandably meets with the approval of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg who declares that Germany is “at the heart of NATO” which is becoming increasingly active in the Arctic. According to NATO, its massive exercise Trident Juncture in Scandinavia was the largest since the First Cold War and involved 65 combat ships, 250 aircraft and 50,000 personnel from its 29 member countries along with supposedly neutral nations Finland and Sweden. It was declared that this enormous and expensive military jamboree was “not directed against anybody” which brings up the questions — Why go to all the enormous trouble and expense of conducting the largest military deployments in thirty years so close to Russia? Does NATO spend vast sums of taxpayers’ money holding mammoth manoeuvres that have no point at all? If Trident Juncture was not “directed against anybody” then what was the military objective of the whole affair?

According to the US Army’s Field Manual FM 3–0 the nine Principles of War are headed by the Objective which lays down that every military operation must be directed “toward a clearly defined, decisive and attainable objective. The ultimate military purpose of war is the destruction of the enemy’s ability to fight and will to fight.”

But then Stoltenberg altered course and said “The scenario for Trident Juncture is that a NATO Ally – in this case, Norway – has been attacked by a fictitious adversary” and “our task is to defend Norway and to drive back enemy forces.”

A “fictitious adversary”?

In answering questions from the media, Stoltenberg was at pains to emphasise that “I think we should still work for avoiding increasing the tensions in the High North, because this is an area where we need also to work together with Russia”. So why hold the biggest military exercise in three decades in Norway, which has a 200 km border with Russia? Does Stoltenberg really imagine that this did not increase tension?

Stoltenberg’s rationale for the huge increase in NATO’s military activity is that “We have seen increased military presence of Russia in the Arctic. NATO is not mirroring, plane by plane or submarine by submarine or ship by ship, exactly what Russia is doing, but of course one of the reasons why we are strengthening our collective defence, why we are strengthening our presence also in the High North, is because of what we see from the Russian side, especially the need to also protect the sea lines of communications in the North Atlantic.”

So it’s the Arctic that disturbs Stoltenberg — the Arctic in which Russia has a coastline of 24,140 kilometres in the Barents, Kara, Laptev and East Siberian Seas. Of the eight Arctic Nations (NATO members Canada, Denmark [plus Greenland], Iceland, Norway, US, in addition to Russia, Finland and Sweden), Russia has 53 percent of the entire coastline, which makes utter nonsense of the confrontational front page headline in the Britain’s ultra-nationalist Daily Telegraph newspaper that announced on November 4 that “Putin is making a power grab for the Arctic. The West needs to wise up – and prepare itself for conflict.”

But the West is already planning for conflict, with such manoeuvres as Trident Juncture and the early November deployment of B-52 nuclear bombers which “flew training missions with Norwegian F-16s in the Barents Sea region of the Arctic Circle” as part of the “US Strategic Command’s recently completed Global Thunder 20 exercise.” Not even Stoltenberg could imagine that such an Arctic foray could serve to reduce tension.

The economic facts are simple, in that, as noted by the US Energy Information Administration, the area north of the Arctic Circle contains over 90 billion barrels of oil, representing some 13 percent of the world’s unexploited oil reserves, and more than 42 billion cubic meters of natural gas — about 30 percent of the world’s untapped gas resources.

The infuriating thing for the West’s military-industrial complex is that 80 percent of these assets lie in Russian territory.

The Voice of America announced on November 6 that “Russia Ups the Ante in the Arctic” by taking action “from launching the world’s first ‘combat icebreaker’ to training soldiers on how to handle sleds pulled by reindeer, from rebuilding Soviet-era airbases and radar stations to adapting weapon systems and armoured vehicles for cold-weather warfare, Russia is bolstering its military presence in the Arctic — and is keen to advertise the fact with war games and test firings of new missiles.”

The definition of “Up the Ante” is “to increase what is at stake or under discussion, especially in a conflict or dispute” and the claim that Russia is doing this by “training soldiers on how to handle sleds pulled by reindeer” is in line with the absurdity of the West’s approach to explaining why it wants to get its collective hands on the Arctic. Does VOA really believe that Russia needs to adapt its weapons for cold-weather warfare? Does it not dawn on reporters that Russia is a country with some history of operating in cold weather and that it is standard procedure to produce equipment, civil and military, with it being borne in mind that it is likely to be exposed to a bit of snow and ice, now and then?

To give VOA credit for a morsel of objectivity, it did say that “President Vladimir Putin has made Russian development of the Arctic one of his key long-range goals, and has talked ambitiously this year of enticing shippers away from the Suez to plying the Northern Sea Route instead. Some international investors are already buying into projects to export liquefied natural gas along the route.” Quite so.

The authoritative ‘Live Science’ notes that under the terms of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), signatory countries can exploit resources from the seabed out to 370 kilometres off their shoreline. But one problem for Washington is that the United States has declined to ratify the Convention.

The military-industrial complex in Washington is determined to extract as much cash as possible from the Arctic, and the planned peaceful development of the region by Russia is a disturbing complication. Washington is using NATO as a front to establish an Arctic Circle of military confrontation in the hope that this will prevent Russia from exploring the region for oil and gas and extracting the resources known to be there. In the final breakdown it all comes down to oil money, as made clear by Trump’s justification for his war in Syria when he declared that “We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind, only for the oil… But again, we’re keeping the oil.”

Then Trump elaborated by announcing that “What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly … and spread out the wealth.” Just like Washington wants to do further north by having NATO establish an Arctic Circle of military confrontation.

When it became evident that the regime change wars that grew out of 9/11 were not merely driven by oil profits- but were rather designed to prevent the possible formation of an alliance of Eurasian nations, a counter-offensive was adopted by those targeted Eurasian powers to ensure their survival and international stability. This counter-offensive was driven by the incredible alliance of Russia and China who together had the combined talents of Russia’s extraordinary military/intelligence capabilities and China’s powerful infrastructure building capabilities.

While certain Asian nations had been positioned by western geopoliticians to be anti-China, other nations under the NATO cage were forced to be anti-Russia. With the surprise Russia-China partnership, moves to unwind impossible knots of conflict threatening WWIII have begun to come unwound. Xi’s current visit to India is just one of many examples made possible by the flanking maneuvers created by the great alliance.

India Joins the Polar Silk Road

The importance of India and Japan’s participation in the 5^th Eastern Economic Forum from September 4-6 in Vladivostok Russia can only be appreciated by recognizing this cooperative strategy between Russia and China. Both nations have recently transformed the ambitious development plans of Russia’s Far East and Arctic region into a Polar Silk Road – bringing the BRI into Russia’s Arctic.

The fact that India was able to integrate its destiny into this emerging Polar Silk Road is vitally important for the future of international affairs, as President Modi was welcomed as Russia’s guest of honor. This visit ended with a historic 81 point joint statement with President Putin, solidifying cooperation in nuclear development, space technology, telecommunications, AI, nanotechnology, as well as Russia’s participation in major Indian infrastructure and India’s investment into Russia’s Far East and Arctic infrastructure. The International North-South Transport Corridor was high on the agenda as was an increased building up of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as “an equal and indivisible security architecture in Asia and the Pacific region”. Putin beautifully stated that both nations have “similar civilizational values” and similar approaches to the “fundamental issues of development and economic progress”.

Echoing Putin’s message of multipolar cooperation, Modi said “by declaring the development of the Russian Far East a ‘national priority for the 21^st century’, President Putin has taken a holistic approach towards improving everything ranging from economy, education, health to sports, culture and communication”.

As the Indian president spoke these words, a $1 billion USD line of credit was offered by India for Russia’s Far East development, adding to the $7 billion USD currently invested by Indian firms in Russian oil and gas.

This incredible unification of interests between Russia and India on the Polar Silk Road have flanked the fanatics within Modi’s own government who are ideologically committed to an enemy relationship with China due to the latter’s partnership with Pakistan on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

While not as dramatic in effect, the Vladivostok meeting was also highlighted by participation by the leaders of Malaysia, Mongolia, and Japan- all of which have increased their commitments in the Polar Silk Road program and have in the same measure begun to liberate themselves from western manipulation.

Putin’s Far East Vision Diffuses Japan-Chinese Tension

For years, Japan has been a problem case in the Asia Pacific due in large measure to a decades-old military treaty with the USA resulting in 50 000 US military personnel, dozens of bases and an anti-China/Russia missile shield hosted in Japan. Fuel has been poured on the flames of conflict with China over the disputed East China Sea (known in Japan as the Senkakus and Diaoyus). Similarly, a Japan-Russian conflict has been kept hot over decades due to Japan’s claims over ownership of its “Northern Territories” which in Russia are dubbed the “Kuril Islands”. Of course Russia has made clear that it is willing to give those territories to Japan in accord with a 1956 Joint Declaration, but due to Japan’s status as colony of a US military seeking unipolar hegemony around “Full Spectrum Dominance”, it cannot do so, nor can it accept Japan’s calls to formerly end WWII with Russia. These obstacles aside, progress has been made.

While Japan did not make the dramatic commitments into Russia’s Far East as India did, PM Shinzo Abe did make headlines when he stated Russia should be re-introduced in the G8, joining in similar statements recently made by both Emmanuel Macron and President Trump on August 21 in France. President Putin took the opportunity to advance on the theme by saying that not only would Russia accept being re-introduced into the group, but that China, India and Turkey must also become members!

Just two months earlier, Abe applauded the signing of a deal “that facilitates Russia’s efforts to develop the Arctic and ensures stable energy supply to our country”– referring to the Mitsui and JOGMEC oil giant’s participation in the 2^nd LNG project in Novatek. Commenting on the LNG-2 deal, Energy Security expert Professor Francesco Sassi of Pisa University recently said that the project “will see an unprecedented level of cooperation between Japanese and Chinese energy companies in one of the most important Russian energy projects of the next decade”.

Lastly, the 9300 km Trans-Siberian Railroad has increasingly become a part of the BRI carrying goods between the East and West. On July 3^rd Russian Railways announced a 100-fold increase in Cargo volume from 3000 twenty ft units to 300 000 by upgrading and doubling the rail, making this the “main artery for Europe-Japan trade”.

Malaysia Solidifies its Relations with Russia and China

While Malaysia has been pushed by the US Military Industrial Complex to participate in war games while confronting China over disputed territory in the South China Sea, the current President Mahathir Mohammed has resisted this anti-China stance by calling for increased cooperation on China’s BRI. President Mahathir’s visit to Vladivostok resulted in the creation of a Russian-sponsored Aerospace University in Malaysia and Mahathir’s happy announcement that the Russian Far East will open up new markets for his nation.

On the Aerospace University, Dr. Mahatir stated: “we are very interested in aerospace and engineering. I am confident that the proposal by Russia to set up an aerospace university would not only boost investment but also promote transfer of technology in the sector.”

Mongolia and the New Silk Road

Up until just a few years ago, Mongolia was seriously being courted to join NATO. Canada’s Governor General David Johnson did the most to seduce Mongolia’s leadership going so far as to praise Genghis Khan as the great civilization builder and true soul of Mongolia that needed to become hegemonic in the Mongolian psyche as the nation joined North Atlantic Alliance.

Luckily, the nation’s leaders recognized the sea change and made the decision to drop the offer (though still hasn’t managed to join the SCO beyond its current Observer Status). The creation of the China-Mongolia-Russia Economic Corridor in 2016 was a watershed moment which expands heavily upon the Trans-Mongolian Railway and AH-3 Highway Route creating vital links between Russia and China. These projects play heavily into China’s BRI.

The days before the Vladivostok summit, Putin visited Mongolia where the two nations signed a “Treaty of Friendly Relations and Comprehensive Partnership” to bring “strategic partnership to a whole new level.” Putin announced a joint investment fund and $1.5 billion USD loan which President Battulga announced would be used to build more rail to the Chinese border for coal and mineral exports and the upgrade of the Ulan Bator Railway which Putin stated “is an important transportation artery for Mongolia”. Since 2017, Russian-Mongolian trade grew by 22%.

In spite of all of this incredible development, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper demonstrated the superhuman disconnection from reality shared among all technocrats and neocons of the west during his August visit to Mongolia where he tried in vain to win the nation over to his imagined anti-Chinese alliance.

The Welfare of Humanity is at the Heart of Everything

Re-stating his concept of the global importance of the new paradigm emerging in Russia’s Far East and its connection with the broader BRI as an international affair for all mankind, President Putin stated “I believe that our brainstorming today at this forum will not only strengthen the efforts of human welfare in the Far East, but also the entire mankind.”

This parting thought represents one of the most powerful concepts and sources of creative energy which both fuels the growth of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Polar Silk Road. It is also the core reason why western game theory logicians cannot understand how to beat it (except using the temper tantrum strategy of a toddler wielding nuclear weapons). It is creative and premised on a care for all mankind, whereas technocrats and game theorists operate on the narrow principle of selfishness which cannot generate anything truly creative.