I subscribe to "Today's Worldview", a usually-useful geopolitical insight from the Washington Post into something not in the news but worthy of note. Last night's newsletter was titled something inane like "What does Putin want in Ukraine" even as the WaPo issued a news alert about Tokayev issuing a shoot-to-kill against protesters.
I gotta admit - I didn't see it until the capital burned but I mean, once you see it it's obvious. Everyone's been losing their shit about troop positions
but I mean
And it's not like Putin has ever seized power in a manufactured domestic crisis before.
Kazakhstan has proven coal reserves 320 times greater than their annual consumption, tenth largest reserves in the world. China's shit in Kazakhstan is doing fine, Chevron's is not.. Kazakhstan is also uhhh where the Russian space program lives.
So the old Soviet dude got kicked out by the new Soviet dude who is being an asshole and murdering protestors while "a coalition of the willing" flies into Almaty which uhhh isn't too far off from how the Soviets ended up in Afghanistan. they were there to "shore up" the government. Dollars to donuts the new Soviet dude is going to be allowed to overreach just enough that a hand-picked successor can take over, stabilize things and allow Putin to dictate terms to Xi against the West.
Ukraine. Yeah Putin was gonna roll on a prospective NATO member. That was definitely going to happen.
Turkey is going to fall https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/1/7/just-how-bad-is-inflation-in-turkey-it-depends-on-who-you-ask Or, it's going to get all protesty and shooty-in-the-streetsy and Putin will step in there, too. And then the 3.4 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, as well as a whole bunch of Kurds who are going to get the shit bombed out of them, are going to spill all over Europe. Which isn't going to have any gas because Russia. Cheers!
I'm curious what will happen with U.S. nukes in Turkey regardless of weather Russia intervenes. The hawk position has long been that there is no way to withdraw missiles without pushing Turkey into Russia's arms but leaving them there has looked like a hostage situation for the last few years..
On the plus side, the Venn diagram of "Russia" and "nukes" has been overweighted in American foreign policy scholarship at least three decades after it was relevant. On the minus side, it hasn't had any fresh training data since Able Archer. The nukes in Turkey are "special stores". They could be in Italy in two hours or Britain by nightfall. Incirlik doesn't have any attached American aircraft, just American nukes. If they were missiles that'd be exciting.
I lost a few grand trying to short the Shanghai market back in 2015 when it looked certain they were eating shit. I've become very hesitant about prognosticating since then, but it's gonna come eventually. No other possibility. Just depends how big of a gauze pad Xi can put on the bleeding.
The tricky thing about China and capitalism is they're only pretending to be capitalists. Evergrande like found their last bond payment in the couch cushions or some shit and everyone was all "lol OK let's keep the merry-go-round spinning." But Xi appears to be more interested in retaining power than escaping the middle income trap so... there will be unwinding I reckon.