As I discussed in a recent post, Washington will be removing almost 10,000 troops out of Germany. I also speculated that these troops could end up in Poland or the Baltics. As it turns out, last August, the U.S. government had threatened to move troops from Germany to Poland in an effort to supposedly get Germany to pay more for the troop presence.

Infobrics – the news outlet for the BRICS coalition – reported this week that Bulgaria has shown interest in having the troops moved there:

The Atlantic Council of Bulgaria is urging for the Balkan country’s government to not pass up the opportunity and advocates that they should ask the U.S. to relocate American soldiers from Germany to Bulgaria.

In a Facebook post, the Atlantic Council of Bulgaria argues that “The urgent need to strengthen NATO’s southeastern flank, in the context of the violated balance of powers in the Black Sea in favor of the Russian Federation” and “a new generation of people who are permanently oriented towards the values of the Euro-Atlantic family and firmly determined to permanently interrupt Russian dependencies, which are still stumbling the development of the state,” are reasons why the U.S. must relocate its troops to Bulgaria.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon just provided an additional $250 million in military assistance to Ukraine and NATO has decided on another round of flirtation with the country by offering the designation of “enhanced opportunity partner.” Scott Ritter gave the following analysis:

The designation of “Enhanced Opportunity Partner” is the latest example of NATO outreach to Ukraine, which fosters the possibility of full membership, something that the Ukrainian Parliament called its strategic foreign and security policy objective back in 2017. The current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has likewise expressed his desire to put engagement with NATO at the top of his policy priorities…

…In 2008 NATO declared that Ukraine could become a full member when it was ready to join and could meet the criteria for membership, but refused Ukraine’s request to enter into a formal Membership Action Plan. The lack of popular support within Ukraine for NATO membership, combined with a change in government that saw Viktor Yanukovych take the helm as President, prompted Ukraine to back away from its previous plans to join NATO.

This all changed in 2014 when, in the aftermath of the Euromaidan unrest Yanakovych was driven out of office, eventually replaced by Petro Poroshenko, who found himself facing off against a militant minority in the Donbas and the Russian government in the Crimea. The outbreak of fighting in eastern Ukraine since 2014 prompted Poroshenko to renew Ukraine’s call to be brought in as a full-fledged NATO member, something the transatlantic alliance has to date failed to act on.

There is a saying that if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck. Given its lengthy history of political and military interaction with NATO, including a decade-long military deployment in Afghanistan, Ukraine has achieved a level of interoperability with NATO that exceeds that of some actual members. US and NATO military personnel are on the ground in Ukraine conducting training, while Ukrainian forces are deployed in support of several ongoing NATO military commitments, including Iraq and Kosovo. Ukraine looks like NATO, talks like NATO, acts like NATO – but it is not NATO. Nor will it ever be.

The critical question to be asked is precisely what kind of relationship NATO envisions having with Ukraine. While the status of “enhanced opportunity partner” implies a way toward eventual NATO membership, the reality is that there is no discernable path that would bring Ukraine to this objective. The rampant political corruption in the country today is disqualifying under any circumstances, and the dispute with Hungary over Ukraine curbing minority rights represents a death knell in a consensus-driven organization like NATO.

But the real dealbreaker is the ongoing standoff between Kiev and Moscow over Crimea. There is virtually no scenario that has Russia leaving it voluntarily or by force. The prospects of enabling Ukraine to resolve the conflict by force of arms simply by invoking Article 5 of the UN Charter is not something NATO either seeks or desires.

Which leaves one wondering at NATO’s true objective in continuing to string Ukraine along.

Read the full article here.

It is also worth noting that half of Ukrainians think their country is on the verge of collapse and the IMF has provided their recent funding with conditions that convey their distrust of the governance of the country, particularly in the area of corruption.

Last summer Psychology Today posted an article online (which I just read recently) called Pathocracy. The term refers to the psychological pathology often found among political leaders and how the political and social structure of the modern world seems all too often to catapult pathological people to positions of power.

The author, Steve Taylor PhD, discusses the origins of the naming and study of pathocracy. The term was coined by Andrew Lobaczewski, a Polish psychologist who lived under Nazi occupation during WWII and then under repressive Soviet rule. Taylor writes of Lobaczewski:

His experience of these horrors led Lobaczewski to develop the concept of “pathocracy.” This is when individuals with personality disorders (particularly psychopathy) occupy positions of power. (1)

Lobaczewski devoted his life to studying human evil, a field which he called “ponerology.” He wanted to understand why ‘evil’ people seem to prosper, while so many good and moral people struggle to succeed. He wanted to understand why people with psychological disorders so easily rise to positions of power and take over the governments of countries.

Taylor explains that Lobaczewski was jailed and tortured during the Soviet era in Poland and unable to publish his work on pathocracy and ponerology until he escaped to the west.

This line of study is fascinating and totally legitimate. But there are some problems with Taylor’s essay as it goes on. First, he repeats the common myth about human history that the brutality and tyranny of the modern world has always been so:

Pathocracy is arguably one of the biggest problems in the history of the human race. History has been a saga of constant conflict and brutality, with groups of people fighting against one another over territory and power and possessions, and conquering and killing one another.

This is actually not an accurate portrayal of human history. For most of existence, humans lived in relatively small egalitarian tribes that emphasized cooperation. As outlined by anthropologist Douglas P. Fry in his groundbreaking work The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions About War and Peace. While there were individual homicides, we did not see “constant conflict and brutality, with groups of people fighting against one another over territory and power and possessions” until the rise of agricultural settlement around 10,000-13,000 years ago. Once humans settled in one place and grew crops, food could then be hoarded, controlled and weaponized, while surpluses could promote larger population growth. Essentially, this allowed humans to go beyond taking what they needed from their immediate environment to survive to then taking more than their fair share from both the environment and other groups of humans. Social stratification, hierarchy and competition for territory rose out of this manner of organizing humans, with all of the attendant horrors like war and torture emerging in the archaeological record.

If Taylor has an erroneous starting point as his premise, then he’s not going to be asking the right questions surrounding ponerology. He goes on to point out that a small number of humans suffering from personality disorders on the anti-social spectrum have often managed to rise to positions of power:

A small minority of humans suffer from personality disorders such as narcissism and psychopathy. People with these disorders feel an insatiable lust for power. People with narcissistic personality disorder desire constant attention and affirmation. They feel that they are superior to others and have the right to dominate them. They also lack empathy, which means that they are able to ruthlessly exploit and abuse others in their lust for power. Psychopaths feel a similar sense of superiority and lack of empathy, but the main difference between them and narcissists is that they don’t feel the same impulse for attention and adoration. To an extent, the impulse to be adored acts as a check on the behavior of narcissists. They are reluctant to do anything that might make them too unpopular. But psychopaths have no such qualms.

He then points out that, conversely, those with reasonably high amounts of empathy are not interested in attaining power, leaving the field open to the pathological types lacking empathy. Those who have a sufficient level of ambition and ruthlessness will serve as enablers within the power structure.

Taylor then quotes from a writer, Ian Hughes, who posits that democracy – specifically touting the founders of the US constitution – was intended to put a check on the rise of these disordered individuals. I can see where this idea might sound like it makes some sense in theory, but in reality it’s problematic because we’ve had many leaders throughout US history that have started and presided over wars as well as large-scale massacres of Native Americans and the enslavement of African-Americans. It’s also very debatable whether we have a substantive democracy at all these days in the US rather than the outer trappings of democracy – and even those superficial trappings seem to be disappearing.

Following up on this line of reasoning, Taylor states that these pathological leaders always hate democracy and seek to destroy or roll back what democratic institutions may already be in existence. One of the leaders he cites as an example of this is, of course, Vladimir Putin. I’ve written more than once of how this is not an accurate depiction of Putin. This demonstrates that Taylor is immersing himself in establishment media sources that are distorted, which is another problem with his essay.

In terms of Taylor’s overarching argument that pathological personalities on the anti-social spectrum often rise to the top echelons of power, it is also an oversimplification. One of the worst tyrants and mass murderers in modern history was Adolph Hitler. Interestingly, several psychologists at the time pegged Hitler, not as a psychopath, but as a likely paranoid schizophrenic. Taylor doesn’t seem to acknowledge that people suffering from other severe psychological disorders can also rise to power and be dangerous. Hitler held extremely dangerous delusions that fed an evil ideology that gained steam at a particular time and place in history.

This brings us to another shortcoming of Taylor’s analysis. How are specific political and social conditions conducive or not to the rise of someone like Hitler? Or Stalin? While Stalin is not specifically mentioned by Taylor, he’s consistently recognized as a particularly evil leader (Hitler’s contemporary) who governed over and created the Soviet system for many of the years that Lobaczewski lived under its occupation of Poland. While Stalin no doubt had traits of psychopathy, he also was very much a product of the revolutionary milieu of his time that believed the ends justified the means with regard to violence.

There is also no acknowledgment of the phenomena of the most tyrannical elements emerging from the jockeying for power that follows when diverse revolutionary movements sweep out previous tyrannical regimes.

On the home stretch of the article, Taylor discusses how many psychologists and psychiatrists have publicly stated they think Trump is a leader with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Trump is a full-blown narcissist. However, there are professional rules against psychologists or psychiatrists officially diagnosing a living person whom they have never examined or spoken to.

This also has the effect of pushing the idea – popular among establishment Democrats – that Trump is a uniquely evil or dangerous president rather than a cumulative product of what has come before with previous presidents laying the groundwork for the abusive powers that Trump currently has access to. These include: aggressive war-making with Congress abdicating its responsibility to declare and oversee wars, as well as authorizing torture and illegal surveillance (GWB); expansion of illegal surveillance and drone strikes, the assassination of American citizens without due process, kill lists, limiting of habeas corpus, targeting more whistle-blowers than all previous administrations combined, and allowing government propaganda to be directed at domestic audiences (Obama).

In short, Psychology Today is oversimplifying the problem of pathological and inhumane political leadership and what shapes it, ignoring that there is a dynamic interplay of elements at work. Readers would benefit from a deeper and more comprehensive exploration of this problem from a perspective that better incorporates social psychology and political history.

This neat little 10 minute video gives an overview of how NATO evolved into a never-ending military juggernaut that it was not originally intended to be. The video provides footage of Dwight Eisenhower – NATO’s first commander – explaining that if the alliance was still in existence 10 years hence, it would mean that it had failed in its objective.

The video goes over how the alliance expanded after the dissolution of its Soviet counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, and despite promises that it would not expand “one inch east” beyond a unified Germany. The video ends with AP State Department reporter Matt Lee taking then-State Department spokesman John Kirby to task during a press conference for suggesting that it was Russia at NATO’s doorstep when it was NATO that had expanded to Russia’s border. I remember this exchange when it occurred several years ago. It’s an example of what a real journalist is supposed to do: hold those in power to account for their words and actions, not simply be a mindless stenographer.

Beginning yesterday, the city of Moscow lifted most of its Covid-related restrictions. According to TASS:

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin has lifted most restrictions imposed on city residents due to the coronavirus pandemic, including self-isolation rules and digital travel permits. Hair salons will reopen on June 9, sidewalk cafes, museums and dental clinics on June 16, and restaurants and gyms on June 23. However, the wearing of face masks and gloves in public remains mandatory. The mayor attributed the move to a downward trend in coronavirus cases. Experts consider it to be a political decision stemming from lockdown fatigue, Kommersant writes.

The Moscow Times recently reported that Moscow authorities stated that the date when the first Covid case appeared in the country had been moved back from March to January.

“I don’t know how anyone noticed when [Covid-19] came to Moscow, but in reality it was in mid-to-late January. When China was making its first announcements there … in fact, [Covid-19] was already here,” the Moscow administration’s IT chief Eduard Lysenko told the Khabr news outlet in a YouTube interview Tuesday.

Various media outlets have been reporting since Friday that the U.S. has ordered a draw-down of 9,500 troops from Germany, which would leave around 25,000 remaining. However, German authorities have stated that they have received no formal communication from the U.S. about the troop reduction and their only knowledge of it is via media reports. The removal of U.S. troops is popular with the German public.

Apparently, these reports did not dissuade the Russian military from deploying more troops to its western front on the same day to counter what it sees as intensified and provocative NATO actions near its borders, including the scaled down Defender 2020 exercises that had initially been postponed to the pandemic. Newsweek reported:

The Western Military District press service said Friday that the Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Sevastopol Red Banner Brigade was included in Moscow’s Novomoskovsky Administrative District, joining the Guards Red Banner Tank Army “to perform tasks on ensuring the defense of the Russian Federation in the Western strategic direction,” according to the state-run Tass Russian News Agency.

The motorized rifle units are equipped with “more modern weapons and specialized vehicles,” including the T-90A tanks, BTR-82A armored carriers, BMP-3 combat vehicles, and 9A34 Strela-10 and 2S6M Tunguska air defense systems, the Russian military said.

The moves came just days after Colonel General Sergei Rudskoi of the Russian General Staff slammed “anti-Russian” activities conducted by the U.S. and allied states of the 29-member NATO defense pact near his country’s borders. The largest deployment of U.S. troops in a quarter-century was scaled down due to novel coronavirus concerns in March, but the U.S. still stepped up its presence through other maneuvers.

My first thought on hearing about the removal of troops from Germany is: where are they going? I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that they end up in Poland who would be more than happy to host them. This idea is reinforced by the actions of U.S. diplomats to Germany and Poland last month. As Scott Ritter discussed in an article right afterwards:

Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany and the acting director of national intelligence, put matters into motion by writing an OpEd for the German newspaper Die Welt, criticizing politicians from within Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition who were openly calling for the US to withdraw its nuclear weapons from German soil.

Adding fuel to the fire, the US ambassador to Poland, Georgette Mosbacher, tweeted out two days later that “If Germany wants to diminish nuclear capability and weaken NATO, perhaps Poland – which pays its fair share, understands the risks, and is on NATO’s eastern flank – could house the capabilities here.”

Granted, this was specifically in reference to nuclear capabilities but it likely reflects the overall thinking by Washington of possibly shifting military resources around Europe to keep the pressure on Russia. Needless to say, these kinds of actions would not go down well in Moscow.

On a more positive note, there were some signs last week of the beginning of a gradual economic rebound for Russia, including a modest increase in the price of oil. Ben Aris from Business New Europe’s Intellinews reported the following:

Oil prices have also recovered remarkably quickly, driven by optimism over a new OPEC++ production cut deal that will reduce the production of oil by 9.7mn barrels per day (bpd) that was signed on April 13. The price of oil broke back above $40 briefly on June 3, which is once again in the Kremlin’s comfort zone.

So far Russia and most of the other cartel members are sticking to the new deal. Indeed, Saudi Arabia has said that it will cut even more than it committed to in the deal to help prices recover even faster….

…According to the OPEC+ agreement signed in April, production cuts should ease on July 1 from a cumulative 9.7mn bpd to 8mn bpd. The Wall Street Journal reports that Saudi Arabia wants to extend the current 9.7mn bpd quota up until the end of the year, while Russia wants to increase output in July. The two countries reportedly see September as a middle ground and are close to reaching an agreement.

Russia’s official position is now that supply and demand in the oil market could finally be balanced by June or July. That is partly why it is reluctant to extend the OPEC++ production cut deal to the end of the year and wants to ramp up production as early as July. But the Kremlin appears willing to compromise. President Vladimir Putin held talks with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) last week and pledged “close co-ordination” between their respective energy ministers. Saudi needs oil prices to be closer to $80 for its budget to balance.

Recovery already feeding through to the capital markets

Step back a moment and mull those changes. With oil prices at $40 Russia Inc. is back in business, as the budget more or less breaks even.

And with the ruble trading at RUB68 it even gains some competitiveness on exports as well as seeing budget revenues (which are denominated in rubles) improve from the increased revenues from the recovering oil price (which are converted from dollars). One of the quirks of the Russian budget is it is actually one of the biggest winners of ruble devaluations, as it gets more rubles to meet its obligations in the budget (which are not adjusted for devaluations), even if those rubles are worth less.

Indeed, Russia closed out the first quarter with a triple surplus – trade ($3.8bn), current account ($1.8bn) and federal budget (0.2%). While the budget will also certainly go into deficit in the second quarter – especially after the government just announced a new RUB7.3 trillion National Recovery Plan – the drain on the RUB9 trillion Russia holds in its National Welfare Fund (NWF) reserve fund to cover budget deficits in times of crisis will be greatly reduced.

That is not to say the economy has not been hurt by the coronacrisis. Russia’s economy will contract by 5% in 2020 and will start to recover at the end of the year, Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshetnikov said in a statement published on May 22.

In the midst of over 40 million people out of work – 1/3 of whom haven’t been able to access unemployment benefits due to dysfunctional application systems – a pandemic and unrest in the streets all over the country, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the 1960’s, the Democratic Party establishment has decided to respond by trotting out a variation of the completely discredited Russiagate narrative yet again.

During an interview with CNN on May 31st in which former Obama-era National Security Adviser Susan Rice – who’s also in the running as Joe Biden’s VP – provided her opinion on the dynamics behind the George Floyd protests that were heating up throughout the nation. And what grand insight did Ms. Rice offer? Russia done it. Here’s part of the exchange:

“I’m not reading the intelligence today, or these days — but based on my experience, this is right out of the Russian playbook,” Rice, who served as national-security adviser to president Obama, said in a CNN interview on Sunday. “But we cannot allow the extremists, the foreign actors, to distract from the real problems we have in this country that are longstanding, centuries old, and need to be addressed responsibly.”

Anchor Wolf Blitzer responded, “you’re absolutely right on the foreign interference.” Blitzer then asked Rice if she thought the Russians were attempting to “embarrass” the U.S. by “promoting the racial divide in our country.”

“Well we see it all the time, we’ve seen it for years, including on social media where they take any divisive, painful issue . . . and they play on both sides,” Rice said. “I would not be surprised to learn that they have fomented some of these extremists on both sides on social media . . . [or] that they’re funding it in some way, shape, or form.”

Absolutely Incredible: Obama’s Former NSA Susan Rice on CNN talking about the protests and domestic strife

“This is right out of the Russian playbook” pic.twitter.com/luXiPV0bOq

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) May 31, 2020

Note that Rice admits she’s not basing this on any actual evidence – “I’m not reading the intelligence today, or these days” – but that she’s basically just spit-balling this ludicrous idea that Russia is behind massive protests involving hundreds of thousands of Americans in every major city in the country and even some smaller ones. Let’s see, I guess that all-powerful and pernicious Putin decided, in the middle of dealing with a public health crisis and economic recession in his own country, that he was going to get into a time machine and create the slave trade, Jim Crow, lynching, and police brutality mixed with a poorly handled economic and health crisis and dilapidated infrastructure in the U.S. Damn, he’s good.

This constant flogging of a phantom Russian conspiracy to destroy the U.S. reminds me of Captain Queeg’s obsessive and paranoid quest to find an elusive key to explain the imaginary theft of a quart of strawberries aboard ship in The Caine Mutiny, ordering his officers to search the entire vessel and all the men to find it.

Here is the scene from the 1954 movie, starring Humphrey Bogart, in which Queeg convinces himself that someone stole a portion of leftover strawberries:

This is comparable to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party establishment convincing themselves of a conspiracy to explain their embarrassing loss to Trump in 2016, kicking off the Russiagate scandal.

Here is the scene where Queeg orders his officers to toss the ship in search of an imaginary key he thinks is at the center of an elaborate scheme to break into the icebox and steal the strawberries:

This is the equivalent of the Mueller investigation and the unhinged rantings of Representative Adam Schiff who kept insisting that he was privy to evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. Eventually the Mueller investigation ended with a whimper and not the bang we’d been promised for months. Now that the transcripts of closed-door interviews between Congress and members of the intelligence and security community as well as the CEO of Crowdstrike have been released, we know that Schiff was lying. There was no evidence of collusion or that the DNC had been hacked, much less by Russia. The Democratic Party establishment had no problem turning Washington upside down looking for the symbolic key that would prove their election strawberries had been stolen.

It’s becoming clear how the cynical political class will be shaping the narrative around the George Floyd protests for the upcoming election. The Democrats will blame Russia, while the Republicans blame the radical left (“antifa”). Though they will blame different parties, the bipartisan consensus will conveniently be that they don’t really have to offer anything to meaningfully help the American people – universal health care, a jobs program, UBI, and an end to the wars will be off the table.

Unlike this sad fiasco, The Caine Mutiny was based on good literature and Queeg, as it turns out, really did believe his own paranoid delusions, making him a pitiful character who elicited sympathy rather than the despised ogre he’d seemed throughout the story.