David P. Goldman has a checkered past. He first worked for the movement of Lyndon LaRouche, a political activist and almost permanent political candidate. But then he became conservative, working for the Ronald Reagan administration and then on Wall Street. He was also an advisor to the department for property value estimates and the Ministry of Defense, in the financial sphere he worked in high positions for financial institutions such as Bank of America or Credit Suisse. In the 1990s, he wrote columns for Forbes magazine, and his articles were published in other economic media, such as the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.
In addition, he also contributes to the Hong Kong newspaper Asia Times, where he first wrote under the pseudonym Spengler (referring to the German historian Oswald Spengler, who wrote the book The Decline of the West). Among other things, he criticized both Republicans and Democrats for the hopes they placed in the Arab Spring, he predicted that Donald Trump would win the US elections in 2016, but he was also wrong when he wrote three days before the invasion of Ukraine that Russia would not attack Ukraine.
An important meeting and what was heard at it
Now again in Asia Times claims that the US has no other plan to proceed in the case of Ukraine than to continue the war. According to him, he was present at a meeting where several former ministers, military officials, scholars and analysts from think tanks gathered to assess the military situation in the world. Which, he says, gave Goldman a fear not unlike when he worked for the government and the all-too-realistic exercise Able Archer 83 almost started a nuclear war in earnest.
Goldman notes that the US foreign policy establishment has staked its credibility on humiliating Moscow by pushing NATO’s borders just a few hundred kilometers from Moscow and destroying the Russian economy with sanctions. To do this, he collected all the debts with European governments, mobilized all journalists, members of think tanks and politicians to promote this proxy conflict, with the ultimate goal of damaging the Russian armed forces and finally achieving regime change in Russia.
Former ministers and cabinet members who were in charge of defense are said to still hear that NATO is still determined to win at any cost. “The question is whether Russia can create strategic reserves,” it was said at this meeting, for example. “Their officer corps is at 50% and they don’t have many NCOs,” it also said. “The Russians have massive losses of 25,000 to 30,000 per month,” Goldman continued, quoting what he heard. “They cannot maintain the will to fight on the battlefield. The Russians are approaching a tipping point. Can they sustain the national will to fight? Not if we look at the rigged choices. Their economy is really vulnerable. We must double down on sanctions and supply cuts to Russia. Russian power is Potemkin.”
He’s not telling the truth and he knows it
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Goldman himself has a comment on the mentioned quotes. “All this is not true and whoever said it knows it. The idea that the Russians are losing 25 to 30 thousand soldiers per month is ridiculous. Artillery causes 70% of the casualties on both sides, and by all estimates the Russians fire five to ten times more than the Ukrainians. Russia avoids frontal attacks in order to maintain its troops.’
He also noted that voter turnout in Russia was 88%, much higher than in Western democracies. The Russians may not have had a choice in the candidate, but they could have stayed home. And 88% corresponds to the fact that the independent Levada Institute found that Putin is now supported by 85% of the population. And instead of collapsing, Russia is becoming a central point for the reorganization of global supply chains and their financing. Its economy is growing instead of shrunk by half, as Joe Biden promised in March 2022.
In the meantime, Ukraine is running out of troops, there is no consensus on the new mobilization law, and one military historian said of Ukraine that there are “young people hanging around and not in uniform” everywhere, which he says means that Ukraine does not want to deploy everything. Russia produces four to seven times more artillery shells than Ukraine, Ukraine’s air defenses are depleted, having exhausted their stockpile of old Soviet missiles, and the Patriots are running low on missiles. Russia has an almost inexhaustible supply of large Soviet bombs that can be equipped with simple guidance and can hit a target from a distance of more than 90 kilometers. And with five times the population, Russia is winning the conflict of attrition, Goldman reckons.
Nuclear threat
According to the economic strategist, another lecturer claimed that European leaders, for example Chancellor Scholz, are very afraid of a nuclear tipping point, i.e. the point when Russia will use nuclear weapons in a conflict. And he demanded that Germany provide Ukraine with Taurus missiles, which have a range of 1,000 kilometers and have a two-stage warhead for mass destruction of infrastructure. Goldman recalls a leaked conversation between German officers about using these missiles to destroy the Kerch Bridge. When, among other things, was it revealed that the British and other NATO personnel are already in Ukraine.
“Moving the conflict to Russia and large-scale attacks on infrastructure is one way to turn a proxy conflict into a pan-European war. Another is to send NATO troops to Ukraine, which French President Macron has already nixed (but almost certainly does not intend to do),” says Goldman.
Photogallery: – Freedom of expression awards
What was not discussed
On the contrary, what was missing, according to the economic strategist, was a discussion on the negotiation of an end to the conflict. Any agreement would give Russia the eastern regions of Ukraine, which it annexed, as well as a buffer zone up to the Dnieper. The normalization of economic relations with Western Europe would follow. “Russia would emerge victorious and America’s backers in Europe would be humiliated. The impact on America’s reputation in the world would be devastating. As several attendees pointed out, Taiwan is watching closely what happens to American holdings,” Goldman estimated.
He adds that due to the rules of such meetings, he cannot say much more, but he can safely say what he said in this meeting. In other words, the sanctions against Russia have had no effect, because Russia has access to Chinese and Indian imports. Both directly and through intermediaries such as Turkey and the post-Soviet republics. But the resilience of the Russian economy is one thing, the whole world economy is changing. China already supplies more to the global south than to developed markets. It has massively automated manufacturing and is installing more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined. Which is proven in the world car market, but it also has a critical impact on military affairs.
“China claims to have automated factories that can produce a thousand cruise missiles per day. Which is not impossible given that it can produce a thousand electric cars per day or thousands of antennas for a 5G signal. The implication is that China can produce America’s arsenal of 4,000 cruise missiles in a week, while America’s military contractors have been hand-crafting them for years,” Goldman explained.
Conclusion
“No one disputed the data I showed. And no one believed that the Russians were losing 25,000 soldiers per month. The facts weren’t the problem. The assembled dignitaries, a representative selection of the foreign political elite, simply could not imagine a world in which America would no longer rule,” Goldman summed up the impression of this meeting. And he made a chilling prediction: “They’re used to running things, and they’ll bet and lose the world to keep it that way.”
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Ukraine (War in Ukraine)
Reports from the battlefield are difficult to verify in real time, regardless of whether they come from any side of the conflict. Both warring parties, for understandable reasons, may release completely or partially false (misleading) information.
PL editorial content discussing this conflict can be found on this page.
war in Ukraine
Reports from the battlefield are difficult to verify in real time, regardless of whether they come from any side of the conflict. Both warring parties, for understandable reasons, may release completely or partially false (misleading) information.
You can find brief information regarding this conflict updated by ČTK several times an hour on this page. PL editorial content discussing this conflict can be found on this page.
author: Karel Šebesta
