Just how smart are Europe's leaders? If energy policy is any guide, then they could be anywhere on a spectrum between stupidly thick to wilfully treacherous

Amidst the vacuous, diversionary theatre of Brexit, the real world carries on.  Time to put Brexit into context.

The continuing hegemony of so-called "liberal democracy" is demonstrably at stake.  Since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America, the post-1945 political settlement between America and Europe is today under immense pressure from America's choice to change tack, specifically towards resurgent, nationalistic mercantilism.  America has chosen to be as mercantilism as the Germans have been since 1945.

America's change of task is an existential threat to the technocratic institutions of the eugenicist-based "liberal democracy" hegemony.  In Europe, chief amongst those institutions is the European Union and its various agencies.  The European Union does not know how to handle this existential threat.

Energy policy: a timely review from alternative media

A recent article by Wenyuan Wu ("Will Europe Ever Shake Its Dependence On Russian Energy?", 24Aug2019, oilprice.com) analyses recent developments in the energy sector in Europe and, in so doing, illustrates the tears in the fabric of the hegemonic "liberal democrats".

The article pauses for thought about how Europe has reacted disjointedly to the Russian supply of gas via pipeline-under-construction Nord Stream 2.

In short:

• Some EU Member Nations want to buy energy from Russia; other EU Member Nations don't; the EU itself appear incapable of arbitrage between the binary positions.
• The EU has belatedly squawked an alarm about Europe's apparent dependence on energy from Russia, in spite of EU sanctions against Russia because of the American-led false-flag operation in Ukraine.  But the same EU has seemingly made no credible attempt to propose a means to plug the energy gap, instead preferring to jump on the "climate emergency" bandwagon (presumably as a smokescreen to conceal a distinct lack of competence in the Tough Policy Choice Proposal Department).
• The EU having already correctly identified that the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative is a rival - an existential threat - to the European Economic Area ("EEA"), the EU watches on helplessly as Chinese interests buy strategic assets in the European energy industry, gaming the EEA towards further Chinese interests from within the EEA.  In so doing, the Chinese are also tearing holes into the European Energy Union and the European Single Energy Market.
• American energy interests clearly want the Europeans to buy energy exclusively from American interests.  American interests gain significant advantage from America's sanctions on Russia and a tariff war on China.
• Within Europe, vested interests within the energy sector are keen to support Nord Stream 2, contrary to the preferences of American vested interests or the European Union's ego.

In all of these points above, a once-united set of vested interests are now diverging, and doing so at an alarming rate (months rather than years).  I have written before about how game theory well defines Europe's approach to policy choices and "solidarity".

The wider world beyond the energy sector

Beyond Wu's article, we have also recently heard comments in Aug 2019 from the outgoing bankster of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, that the American Dollar is no longer viable as the world's reserve currency.

This follows propaganda from the Russian news agency TASS in May 2019 that Russia and China are preparing to dump the American Dollar as a medium for trade (it might yet move from propaganda to reality - let's wait and see what actually happens - but as an announcement of proposed strategy, it is crystal clear).

And yet, it wasn't that long ago that the Anglo-American Empire of Chaos (sometimes referred to as the "Round Table") arranged for the murder of Colonel Quaddafi when Quaddafi suggested a gold-based currency for all of Africa, thus undermining the monopoly of the American dollar as a trading medium, triggering France to intervene for France's own interests (presumably before the Americans got involved first).  Saddam Hussein did a similar thing, proposing the Euro instead of gold, and look what happened to him (meanwhile, we plebs are expected to fall for the pack of plausibly-deniable lies that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be mobilised in 45 minutes).

In Sep 2018, Russia publicly mused trading oil with currencies other than the Euro or American Dollar.  A blog post in the same month collated some historic context and projected propaganda from RT and South China Morning Post that there now existed a genuine petro-yuan to replace the petro-dollar.

Meanwhile, corrupt monetary policy continues to debase Western fiat currencies.  The policy has facilitates a massive shift of wealth from honest, ordinary Western plebs with modest savers to über-reckless, elitist, global over-borrowers.  The middle classes are all but extinct in the West - the working classes are already extinct in the West, by eugenic design - yet if any pleb (of whatever class) dares so much as to complain, the "liberal democratic" elite are quick to smear the plebs as "a basket of deplorables" (what a great electioneering slogan by Clinton H).

Oh, and central banksters successfully engineered a reversal of the yield curve in Aug 2019.  Some say this is a leading indicator of a recession.  Perhaps.  More likely, it is a leading indicator of the next round of fleecing intangible, unrealised wealth from honest, ordinary Western plebs with modest savers to über-reckless, elitist, global over-borrowers.

Just where in the world are Europe's ruling elites in all of this mess?

The most obvious answer is that they are hiding in their dark, little holes, hoping the real world will just go away.

Even when these supine cowards pipe up, their words reveal a mindset still stuck in the 1950s, a realm of little, tin-pot nationalistic states, contrary to the "liberal democratic" globalist dogma that all of them - all of them - signed up to shortly after 1945.  Say one thing, do another, hope no-body notices, keep the public dumb (the public are paying for it anyway, so who cares?).  So much for European solidarity.  They continue to avoid the tough - and rough - policy choices that they need to take to secure their own elite families' energy future (and that of their general populations, too, but, hey, what member of any elite gives a damn about the riff-raff?).

And these are the very same people who reckon we should centralise power, law and authority in Brussels, so as to institutionalise on-going negligence of key policy matters to the benefit of corporations' short-term profitability.  Thus, instead of a viable and useful energy policy, the European elite instead give us virtue-signalling "climate emergencies".

It is as this point where we really need to ask whether the European elites are stupidly thick or wilfully treacherous.

It is abundantly clear to the small number of us plebs in this world with their heads out of their own backsides that the Anglo-American Empire of Chaos is now entering its last phase of life.  Every empire fails, partly because its victims eventually unify to by-pass the levers of oppression, partly because running an empire ultimately requires totalitarianism, whereby costs (especially opportunity costs) inevitably exceed benefits.  Of the Anglo-American Empire of Chaos - including its European wing, perhaps we should call it the Anglo-Dutch-American Empire of Chaos? - all of the major policy choices are now fine-tuned to cause maximum aggravation, be it energy policy, monetary policy, trade policy or fiscal policy (which the European Union member nations can't agree on).

Whether we in the West like it or not, the medium-term future is Sino-Russian.  This future rests upon an unstable relationship that will require key support from Iran and, less critically, India (assuming Pakistan hasn't nuked India off the map by then).  China will eventually program its numerous economic-only colonies around the world to obey the script when the time is right.  But the only thing that holds Russia and China together is antipathy towards America and Britain.  So, when America and Britain cease to be a credible threat to both Russia and China, Russia and China will slowly diverge (whether peacefully or violently is open to question).

The virtue-signalling policy choices of the EU in energy "policy" fail conspicuously to address this tectonic shift in geo-politics.  The inability of the EU to complete its own monetary union by complementing it with a fiscal union reveals more of the same divisions now visible in energy policy (or lack thereof).  The choice of the EU to reject the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative was Frankish, egotistical, megalomaniac, self-inflicted stupidity: had the EU taken advice from its infamous problem lobbyist Microsoft, the EU might have been told to "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".  Having picked precisely the wrong policies to screw up, the EU itself is now liable to be asked by any member nation, "What is the point of the EU?"

As at today, the EU still serves a role as a useful, plausibly deniable alibi, but even this extends only to matters that are within the scope of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union as EU competences.  In early days, the EU probably thought of itself as quite clever to have a mechanism whereby it could simply take power from its member nations without challenge, and the member nations were probably more than happy to have the policy responsibility taken from them ("All the pay, none of the work!  Wa-hay!  Cash it in!!").  Nowadays, the EU's inactivity sets the EU onto a collision course with a fast-changing American mercantilism; the EU simply cannot move so fast; the EU's position in America's eyes is precarious, to say the least.

So far, it looks as if the Europeans are probably more stupidly thick than wilfully treacherous.  But there is another aspect to consider.

The EU and its "liberal democrat" sycophants might have decided that today is too soon to act decisively.  Far better, they might reason, to delay any action, maximise frustration, maximise the wasting of opportunities, wait for the American sanctions with Russia to become visibly counter-productive, wait for the American trade war with China to become visibly counter-productive within the current president's core voter base, to park everything with the EU for the bureaucracy to snarl it all up in red tape and pretend that any solution is hopeless.

This position would make sense if one believed in a multi-polar world.  But that isn't part of the "liberal democrat" globalist dogma.  To accept a multi-polar world means accepting the end of globalism in the medium-term.  It would mean people like Nick Clegg suddenly arguing against everything - everything - they've ever said they stand for.  Even with the European Right to be Forgotten (aka the Right to Hide Corruption), enough of the riff-raff will irritatingly find out how the rhetoric changes with the wind, and announce to anybody listening that the "globalists are lying again".  Google/YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc are likely to need to scale up their industrial-sized censorship algorithms to cope with the public fallout: who is going to "nudge" the tech giants to do so?

And this aspect re-introduces the possibility that the EU's "liberal democrat" globalist elite are still likely wilfully treacherous.  As at Aug 2019, it is far too early to call whereabouts on the spectrum the EU and its sycophants actually sit.

The next opportunity for the EU's "liberal democrat" globalist elite to screw up shall be when (if?) China and America revert to hot war to resolve their differences.  Although banksters saw profit in bankrolling wars during 20th century, it now thought that America's military-industrial complex cannot afford total war in Iran.  This suggests that American strategy is more likely to be focused on containing China in oceans around the Chinese coast.  This will put the EU in an impossible position.  The only certainty one can predict now is that the EU will do whatever it takes to fudge the issue... and in so doing will lose support from within (the member nations), from America, from Russia, from China.  The EU will have parked itself in the ultimate no-win situation.  Schmart.

So what does this mean for Brexit?

To live in Britain, and to follow only the fakestream media, you'd never understand the assumed precepts of the above comment and analysis.

In Britain, in Aug 2019, we still have people who think that the EU is the best thing since sliced bread: those verminous bloody Remainiacs.  For more than 40 years, the UK government has disembowelled itself, giving power away to its great alibi, the EU.  But the EU has failed to be anything as useful as a government, and now seems to be failing as a suitable centrepoint for corporate lobbyists.  Just as Russia and China seek to by-pass the Anglo-American Empire of Chaos, corporate lobbyists probably now see the maximum use of the EU is to have a unilateral law of corporate-based feudalism, then lock the EU down to ensure that it can never revoke such law.  That would be a de facto fascist state.  It's not much of a future for the EU, even less is it a future for the citizens of the EU's member nations (especially for those in the east who lived through communism: for them, plus ça change, plus ça ne change plus).

One has to wonder: are Remainiacs the type of people who would have campaigned amongst Africans to keep the trans-Atlantic slave trade going, "because it would be an economic disaster for us all if you didn't get sold to the American colonies"?

The Brexiteers are no better.  Having conspired with the Remainaics to sabotage the only viable way of starting the multi-decade Brexit process (the EFTA/EEA method), the Brexiteers - specifically, the European Research Group of the British Conservative Party - are now campaigning for closer orbit to America's political economy, necessarily at the expense of any trading relationship with Europe.  This makes no sense.  No investor would rationally put all of their eggs into one basket, they'd diversify.  But, to extend the metaphor, Brexiteers want to us to burn one of our two chicken farms for the sake of it, and unnecessary replace all of the healthy chickens in the remaining chicken farm with somebody else's genetically-modified-buy-a-new-batch-every-season chickens.  And then pretend that nothing bad is going to happen.

One has to wonder: are Brexiteers the type of people who believe that the Round Table is worth fighting for?  In spite of the inconvenient fact that President Trump has clearly rumbled something when Trump sanctioned the then UK ambassador Darroch?  In spite of the other inconvenient fact that the Remainiac British elite successfully drafted in Obama to tell the Brits that Brexit put Britain "at the end of the queue"? (i.e. the American political establishment is not as friendly as the Brexiteers expect it to be.)

Whether it's Brexit or no-Brexit, whether it's a deal-Brexit or a no-deal-Brexit, the Brexit issue is now no more than arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.