Ukraine can't gain true independence without American hegemony. Neither can the Baltic States. My wife, her son and grandchildren, sister and mother have their freedom thanks to an $800bn Pentagon budget. Same for the 100000+ expats and foreign students living in Latvia. Ditto for Estonia and Lithuania. And the Poles and Bulgarians I've talked to know they're also on this list of beneficiaries of US hegemony.
This is just a simple geopolitical fact. Your subtitle reluctantly and ambivalently recognizes this. So congratulations are in order now that you've understood that, in the geopolitics restaurant, you can order only what's on the menu: "I guess America is just a better hegemon than Russia."
"The ruble is soaring....": But you still persist in this financially illiterate delusion that currency strength signals macroeconomic health. The RUB is no longer convertible and is managed by capital controls that force all Russian companies with forex earnings to convert 80% of such earnings to rubles. Foreign owners of Russian shares can't sell.
One of our co-investors in a Swiss tech startup was the largest importer of bananas into Russia, owned by expat Russians. They were building warehouses outside Moscow, both for their own use and to rent to tenants. It's not hard to guess what happened to their business.
Also, Russia's imports have shrunk by more than half, which cratered demand for foreign currencies, i.e. sales of rubles. This is a nuanced analysis of the economics of war and sanctions (not mine) by an Australian economist who knows his stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEpk_yGjn0E
"cast out as if they know nothing": Those who persist with evidence-free opinions on subjects they know nothing about put targets on their backs. I'm an experienced forex trader who shorted 20m JPY at 77 JPY/$ in late 2012 with both spot trades and options when Shinzo Abe was elected. I KNEW he would get the Bank of Japan's new governor to print money like no tomorrow to jump start Japan's stagnant economy. Call that empirical proof that I know much more than you or Simon Jenkins about forex and macroeconomics. The pre-Abe super yen of a stagnant zombie economy Japan is proof that currency strength and macroeconomic health are not the same thing. If experts in this stuff tell you that your opinions are evidence-free nonsense, the best reply is to listen or put your life savings into rubles if the sanctions are so impotent. Put your money where your mouth is.
"Some of the things said to me...": I've always welcomed hostile trolls as an endless source of creative sarcasm for replies and raw material for the next article. But if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
"as long as I can remember, there has always been some sort of sanction against Russia....": Only since the Crimea annexation and launch of the war in the Donbass in 2014 and the Magnitsky Act. Your memory is rather short.
"control over the massive oil and gas reserves in Russia."--Russia can't operate its own extractive industries without western tech and expertise. Gazprom and Rosneft decline and die without BP, Schlumberger, Halliburton and Chevron.
"Putin's a madman!": He's bad, not mad. Ask John Sweeney, the former BBC war reporter who lives in Kyiv. He's interviewed on Times Radio.
"Russia provides Europe with 40% of its natural gas": This is a pre-sanctions figure. It's now 15-20% and dropping rapidly. Remember three letters: LNG.
"Trade could tame Russia.": Merkel's mistake. Wende durch Handel ist zu Ende. Finita questa commedia.
"Since 1991, the time that Putin became president": Putin became president on December 31, 1999. But what's an inaccuracy of eight years that erases Yeltsin's presidency, among friends.
"This war is about money": BP, Chevron and Exxon have lost a ton of money by walking away from their joint ventures with Russian oil companies. You're inverting cause and effect. The profits from LNG exports are an effect, not a cause of the war. The American and Canadian companies making that money don't drive Lloyd Austin's policy recommendations to Biden or Blinken's negotiations with Olaf Scholz about supporting Ukraine. This is pure Russian BOT type fantasy.
I thank you for providing an endless source of raw material for new, evidence-based, reality-driven articles for me. And I applaud your subtitle that shows you've partly rejoined the reality-based community.
