Putin and Merkel
I give German Chancellor Angela Merkel a lot of grief, and with good reason. She's the main conduit through which every bad idea in Europe flows.

Merkel, as an agent for Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, is a ruthless destroyer of human potential. Hence, that's why she's in charge.

I truly despise everything about her.

But as a political animal she has no peer in Europe. None. Not because she's so supremely talented but because everyone else is a literal idiot, placed in important positions with the help of the WEF to ensure EU policy conforms to their vision of the future.

Merkel, like the rest, was chosen.

In fact, Merkel's ineptitude is always on display once she is forced to dabble outside of the EU itself. She rules it with an iron fist but when confronted by nearly anyone else, including a madman like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, she falls on her face spectacularly.

Merkel is a wholly constructed persona whose job it is to keep the ship of the nascent EU state trudging right towards that iceberg of The Great Reset.

The forces behind the ouster of Trump and the selection of Joe Biden did this with the intent of completing the task of subordinating the U.S. (and its military) to EU control through policy normalization on domestic spending, production, taxes, etc.

That's the 40,000 foot view of the mountain of executive orders issued by Biden in his first month in office. That's what the proposed tax plan is for, why the stimulus bill is structured the way it is, and why EU policy towards Russia also has not changed for the better.

It's also why the second Trump impeachment ended with a whimper. None of that would occur if the Senate was bogged down for months calling witnesses.

With Biden as the PFOTUS - President Fungus of the U.S. - the WEF has exactly what it always wanted, a weak U.S. acting as the spear pointed at Russia to subjugate it to the Great Reset.

I'm sure the thinking in Davos is that once Russia is subordinated then China can then it can be tamed.

By the way, I didn't say this policy made any sense, just that that is what I think is happening because it fits the data better than any other theories.

It's been Merkel's job as a head of state and diplomat to sell this Hybrid War with Russia as not her preference.

She's always talked the good game to Putin that she has to go along with the sanctions to keep the U.S. placated. They are the bad guys, we the poor EU are trapped by their belligerence.

But I think that dynamic changed last year with the Navalny 'poisoning' and the attempted coup in Belarus. The question is why?

In hindsight the WEF-aligned forces in the U.S. and Europe expected a Biden presidency. And it was that expectation that let the cat out of the bag as to who was really in charge vis a vis Russia.

Hint: it's not the U.S.

Because Merkel would have never allowed herself to get so obviously dirty on these two issues if she wasn't convinced she would have the upper hand over U.S. policy come January 20th.

This is a part of the story I think a lot of commentators are missing in the the U.S./EU/Russia power dynamic. That the goal here, as Pepe Escobar gets close to in his latest article, is not just a restoration of German sovereignty out from under the yoke of the U.S. occupation, but a reversal of the power dynamic completely.
Now imagine a hegemonic Germany in Europe forging closer trade and investment ties with not only Russia but also China (and that's the other "secret" inbuilt in the EU-China trade-investment deal).

So whoever is lodged in the White House, there's nothing else to expect from the US Deep State apart from the "maniacal" push towards perennial, accumulated sanctions.

The ball is actually in Berlin's court, much more than in the court of eurocratic nightmare Brussels, where everyone's future priority amounts to receiving their full, fat retirement pensions tax-free.
Pepe still thinks there is any room at all between the "Atlanticists" controlling U.S. policy and Merkel's pro-EU policy. I don't anymore. I don't think the U.S. Deep State can or will do anything else to undermine Germany and that all the U.S. posturing about Nordstream 2 is just that, posturing; policy inertia of the Cold War.


Comment: That remains to be seen. The US Deep State can be quite tenacious when it wants to be.


I've been making Pepe's point about Nordstream 2's political implications within the EU since the day it was announced and Poland threw a hissy fit. Germany at the heart of EU energy distribution cements its position as the de facto ruler of the EU in a way that makes it even more difficult to counter.

This is why Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal and the rest are not allowed to have governments who go against Merkel and will be destroyed in the next eighteen months. Italy is especially vulnerable because new Prime Minister Mario Draghi, was put in place now to finish the job he started with TARGET2 and negative interest rates when he ran the ECB.

In my mind, the battle for Germany's sovereignty was won the day the Supreme Court denied Texas' lawsuit against Pennsylvania thus cutting off any legal path to Trump's election challenge.

Simply putting a puppet like Biden in the White House, who is a stand-in for Obama whose foreign policy was all about boosting Europe in hindsight, was all that was needed.

Merkel, to give her credit, played the Coronapocalypse well. She used the crisis to revive her flailing political prospects, salvaging her CDU party's position.

Then again, she also was handed a pair of aces in the hole and knew one was coming on the flop, so giving her too much credit is, at best, dubious.

In short, all she had to do was not screw it up completely by not over-betting her hand. But, she did with Navalny, badly.

And Putin finally sniffed out what was really going on.

In recent months Putin and Russia have stonewalled the EU on every issue of contention between them. Putin issued the bluntest opposition to the Great Reset uttered by any world leader. It was a speech for the ages.

EU bureaucrats go to Moscow and come home whining in their Chablis. Meanwhile Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov make clear statements of ever-escalating import that the EU's behavior is unacceptable and diplomatic ties between Russia and it are now at an ebb.

Why does anyone still think that this isn't an expression of EU/German independence and 'sovereignty'? Have we all become so lazy in our analysis and opposition to U.S. hegemonic behavior that we excuse the same behavior from Europe, especially Germany?

Have we, by degrees, been snookered by Merkel's apparent weakness for all these years or did we not look far enough into the future because we never really considered a bunch of eugenicist oligarchs trying to pull off something so monumentally stupid as The Great Reset?

These are good questions and I'm as guilty of missing the bigger picture as anyone. For a long time I believe even Putin and Lavrov didn't understand what was really the plan in Brussels all along.

So, given that Germany's independence, and by extension the EU's, is accelerating towards its conclusion with the Obama Restoration and Biden as PFOTUS, where do things sit?

In my opinion, just as badly for Europe as they were before this happened. Because as I said, beginning last year Putin and Russia have given Merkel nothing.

She's tried to play her game of making big promises to Putin and then never following through and failed. It's forced Germany to back down on more sanctions over Navalny and Russia's involvement in keeping Lukashenko in power in Minsk.

Moreover, Russia's return to the Council of Europe saw them remove all further action there over Russia's reunification with Crimea from the agenda.

The EU having to accept Russia's Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine is yet another example of who wears the pants (not pants suit) in Russian/German relations.

Merkel needs Nordstream 2 now more than ever. She needs Russia now more than ever. The problem for her and Germany is that Russia is now on a path to a more dynamic and interesting economic arena than Germany is.

She's slowly losing the support of the German people, who come out in greater numbers each week against the lockdown policies, while in Russia even the U.S. and European intelligence and diplomatic corps can't generate anything resembling a protest against Putin.

Merkel is destroying the strong social contract bond between the German people and the government while Putin has only enhanced it between Russians and the Russian state.

She's ground Germany to a halt with draconian GDR-style lockdowns. Putin left Russia's economy mostly open and is now coming out of the Coronapocalypse at a much quicker pace than expected despite increased sanctions.

The last round of economic statistics from Russia released this week for January are impressive considering these are year-over-year at pre-COVID levels when oil prices were above $65 per barrel.
  • Unemployment continuing to fall, now at just 5.8%.
  • Retail sales nearly flat year-over-year to pre-COVID levels
  • Real Wage Growth in January at 4.6%.
  • PMI indicating expansion, not recession.
  • CPI running hot at 5.2%
And as long as Putin continues to promote Russian sovereignty he will be forgiven his mistakes. And in the foreign policy arena, Putin's Achilles' heel with his people has been his willingness to compromise with Europe and the U.S. in the past.

Since that is no longer the case and he led the opposition to the Great Reset I only see his political positioning strengthen into the Duma elections later this year.

Merkel has the opposite problem, she's in hiding now, but there is no credible opposition to her that isn't just as much in the pay of Klaus Schwab as she is. Her political capital can only go down.

Since AfD - Alternative for Germany — is in disarray and incapable of leading a political revolt at this point, this year's elections in Germany look right now a walk for Merkel's CDU to formally create an open alliance with the Greens like she's had in the German Upper House, the Bundesrat, for years, but things can change a lot in eight months.


What's clear to me at this point, however, is that while Merkel may have been handed Germany's new found sovereignty from the U.S. to throw around at her European 'partners,' she has no power to influence how things play out in the future with either Russia or China.

And that was the point of giving her this power in the first place.

They will dictate terms to her and to whoever comes after her on a 'take or leave' basis.