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ENB Pub Note: This article is by George McMillan III, on January 29, 2025, and he has been contributing to Energy News Beat in articles and guest spots on the podcast. His insights are critically needed in the Trump Administration as the Biden and Obama-appointed folks have removed much of the curriculum in the war colleges, universities, and think tanks. George has the boots-on-the-ground experience, and I have found his publicly available information spot-on when looking at energy and geopolitical analysis. I highly recommend the Trump administration work with George to help General Keith Kellogg with a plan to end the Ukraine War. On a recent podcast, George said, “Putin has won and does not need to meet at the negotiation tables.” He has grown the Russian economy by an estimated 4% in 2024, even under strict US sanctions. Without a viable upside to doing business in the EU, he does not need anything President Trump could offer.
Introduction: Putin’s European Populist Election Strategy
Stuart Turley and I have been explaining the “role of energy” in economic development theory and geopolitical strategies since November of 2023 in our “Russian Natural Gas and Global Geopolitical Realignment” series of papers and videos.
The problem is that the University system is so overly compartmented that far too few people understand the role of energy in the context of political and economic development theory in a narrow sense and the role of energy and economic development theory in the context of Sea Power versus Land Power Grand Strategies in a global sense.
Essentially “energy” and its ability to power machines is “the multiplier” in the “multiplier coefficient” in economic growth theory. Therefore the role of “energy in society” is best explained in an integrated causal model of political development, economic growth, and geopolitical strategies explained in the papers and slide sets presented on Energy News Beat since November 2024 and on the start-up Working Brother channel on YouTube since November of 2023.
The more people understand this confluence of interdisciplinary macro theories in terms of the Sea Power versus Land Power strategies, the easier it is to understand why Putin, Lavrov, and Medvedev are in no hurry at all to enter into discussions with Special Envoy Keith Kellogg concerning the cessation of hostilities in Ukraine.
The short answer should be obvious to any businessman, since Russia has no more meaningful commerce with the West to fuel its export-led growth import substitution industrialization investment strategy there is simply nothing to talk to the West about. Russia needs to be talking to the other countries in Eurasia and limit discussions with the collective West since they have proven to be counterproductive since the 1990s.
Post Cold War
In recent history, Russia’s attempt to join the European Union was roundly rebuffed during the 1990s and 2000s, and the movement of the EU and NATO Eastward served the purpose of erecting tariff and nontrade tariff barriers against Russia for the sole purpose of thwarting a petroleum-based export-led growth strategy that would let them economically develop and conceivably militarily develop.
The purpose of this is thoroughly explained in the Wolfowitz Plan of 1992 published in the New York
Times and the two RAND articles appearing in 2019 titled “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia” and “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground” explain that the goal of the US was to thwart the development of any near-peer super-power competitors. The US strategic plans were posted online for anyone interested in reading them, including the Russians and Chinese.
The plan to completely thwart Russian commerce was essentially accomplished via the 2014 Euromaidan color revolution to replace Viktor Yanukovych with Petro Poroshenko, which was followed by the movement of offensive military equipment and personnel to the Azov Sea area to threaten Russia’s only warm water port in Rostov-on-Don and the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea. Russia had already been witnessing Operation Sea flotilla of hundreds of NATO warships in the Black Sea since 2006. The “dominance displays” of NATO in the Black Sea were duly noted—the message that the Russian Black Sea Fleet could be overwhelmed inside the Black Sea was received.
The 2014 Euromaidan Coupe and the New Cold War
From 2014 forward Russia knew that it had to abandon all commercial relations with the West and pursue an economic growth strategy with the rest of Eurasia as the Global War on Terror revealed itself as a continuation of Kennan’s “strategy of containment.” To be sure Angela Merkel even stated that the Minsk Accords was merely a ploy to better train and equip the Ukrainian Army in the Ukrainian Donbas to attack the Russian-speaking areas that border Ukraine and Russia.
In that context, why would Russia wait until the hostilities cross the border? After all, the favorite slogan of the American military has always been “it is better to fight them over there than here” as the pretext to forward deploy its military all over Eurasia to encircle Russia and China. In reality, it has been the US and NATO who have been consistently forward deploying offensive military assets into former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern Europe, not the Russian Federation.
It is in this recent historical context that the Kellogg-Gorka approach of “dealing with Putin from a position of strength” was dead on arrival for two simple reasons. First, it has been the West that continually engages in naval and military dominance displays in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea, and secondly, since the Russians no longer have any meaningful commerce with the West they have nothing to discuss.
Lavrov stated in his December 26, 2024 interview that a “ceasefire was the road to nowhere.” Lavrov and Medvedev both have reiterated that sentiment several times since which is why the Kellogg-Gorka plan to “deal with Putin from a position of strength” only sounds like a good idea to an American electoral base who are not familiar with the history of Sea Power versus Land Power Grand Strategies, but for those who are familiar with the Grand Strategies the Kellogg-Gorka plan was a complete non-starter for the reasons that will be explained in greater detail in the next articles in the series.
Source: George McMillan
The post Why Keith Kellogg’s Plan is DOA: Avoiding the Catastrophic Downside Risk of Russo-Ukraine Negotiations appeared first on Energy News Beat.
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