Holy moly. Sitting here having a coffee in my favourite coffee shop, trying to figure out what’s going on geopolitically. But that is so far beyond my abilities, I can’t even keep up with what is happening, never mind figuring it out. I suspect I’m not alone.
Historically, some Big Thing happens, like a flare up of a border tension, or tension over a trade agreement, or any one of countless triggers that are almost always massaged away quietly, but are none the less interesting because they could blow up into something much bigger. The normal trajectory of the past half century is that some random x happens, the media announces it, experts are found to comment in the news, we get a few viewpoints, and then back to regular programming or car accidents or weather events while behind the scenes, diplomats smooth ruffled feathers and we carry on largely as before.
These days, a handful of geopolitical bombs seem to go off every day before lunch, events that might just be significant, or could be wildly destabilizing, and they interact with the half dozen other ones from yesterday to throw everything into entirely new directions.
Just look at last Tuesday. Russia sent a bunch of drones into Poland, a NATO member country, and the world’s most powerful military (the US, duh) scrambled jets to intercept these weapons in what a US government representative called an ‘act of war’. Russia, being Russia, gave that famous blank stare and called the situation a fabrication. More on this later.
Then on to Nepal. Nepal?? What the…how does Nepal compete in the Eyeball View Olympics? Well, in quite an innovative way, actually. When the government announced a ban on all forms of social media, protestors torched the main government building and all its records, and for good measure hunted down Communist leaders, stripped them of their clothes, and threw them in the river. Presumably all posted to TikTok as it happened, because irony is funny.
So what, you might think, Nepal is not prominent in global power struggles. Or is it? Some smart people actually dissected the events, and came up with a few fascinating “Well, you know…” scenarios that give pause for thought.
One analyst I’ve stumbled across, a whip-smart gent named Andrew Korybko, is a Moscow-based American that could be writing for anyone he wants, presumably, but chose to go independent and bless him for that. Independent commentators, ones knowledgeable about the scene because they live it, are free to say whatever the f__k they want. He he he.
Mr. Korybko looked at Nepal and saw a lot more happening than well-fed government titans being flung into a river like fish guts. Nepal lays claim to a slice of land that runs between India and China. Being communist, Nepal’s old government – pre-uprising – curried favour with China, who looks kindly on fellow communists. But then, of all things, India and China started getting friendly, in response to Trump, and the two massive countries began trading in a civil manner across the space that Nepal claims as its own. WTF, said confused Nepalese Marxists, a room full of puzzled-face emojis. So they started on a new trajectory to manage the situation as it changed (and this re-orienting took place within weeks or months, as Trump’s foreign policy shotgun blasts shredded the curtains, and countries that had fought for decades decided all of a sudden that maybe the other side was tolerable). Then the students torched the government buildings and sent the leaders for swim time. Someone will form a new government, and you can just imagine the strategic ruminations and calculations going on. Not just Nepal but the US, China, and India. It’s dizzying. How to play the game, who to play against who, with mighty ramifications if the wrong country feels jilted. And this isn’t a globally strategic location like the Strait of Hormuz; it’s the home of Buddha and Mount Everest, and not much else in the way of geopolitical power assets. I’d have thought Nepal might simply try to leverage their position for more peaceful and useful minor victories like getting the thousands of YOLOing westerners to clean their garbage and excrement off the world’s tallest mountain, but no. There is a lot more crap at stake than that. A tiny country finds itself with potentially massive leverage, and why not use it. It’s a safe bet that not one player in this geopolitical mess is thinking “What would Buddha do…” The Nepalese government can ferment a lot of foment and “radicalize a minority of them into anti-Indian Hybrid Warriors” as Mr. Korybko puts it.
So…now we have a path by which American support of a Nepalese leader could cause trouble for the government of India, and because the US is engaged in a chess match with India on other fronts, this Nepalese angle could be the equivalent of squirting lemon juice in their eyes during the match. It all gets very complicated, very fast.
What is fascinating is that these relatively minor events – large events for the participants, but globally speaking, small events – can trigger massive global dislocations, either by accident or by guileful intent. As an extreme and ghastly example, On October 7, 2023, a relatively small number of militants executed a simplistic incursion into Israel via some of the most basic technology imaginable – ultralight aircraft, and guns. As far as international military incursions go, it wouldn’t rank in the top thousand in terms of firepower or scale or territorial shake ups.
But the repercussions have been globally devastating and earth-shaking. The terrorist strike, designed to generate the most vicious repercussions possible, has ratcheted up tensions among even the biggest global superpowers; it has seen a dozen countries become militarily engaged in one way or another, and it has set back peace prospects by possibly decades. The follow-on waves are so massive, it’s like finding a way to generate ten thousand corpses with one bullet. Everyone’s good at something.
This kind of demonic efficiency is known and flexed elsewhere. Turn now to something like Russia’s ‘innocent’ wave of drones that entered Poland. US officials are treating this live grenade very carefully, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio stating that while the drones were clearly launched intentionally, “The question is whether the drones were targeted to go into Poland specifically.”
The difference is just as earth-shaking as the Hamas-Israel attack, or believe it or not potentially even worse. A Russian attack on a NATO country opens up a can of either worms or whoop-ass the likes of which we can hardly imagine.
And then there is the elephant in the room, which Rubio clearly knows but wouldn’t say out loud, that it is incredibly improbable that the Polish attack was either an accident or an all out attack on NATO – that would have looked a lot different than 19 drones. The drone swarm was most likely Putin initiating a provocation to see what happens. It is what he does; Putin is an ultra-sneaky ex-KGP POS that it would be insane to trust. Even Trump seems to be tiring of the Russian dictator’s antics, his continuous obfuscation and trickery.
There is a Russian word for this – vranyo, which is, by this seemingly common definition, a form of institutional lying where everyone knows the institution is lying but they go along with it anyway. This tic or tactic was a hallmark of Soviet communications, where the propaganda was so centralized and so controlled and so disconnected from reality that it ultimately just became bizarre nonsense pasted on every wall, and everyone recited it because they didn’t want to spend time in a gulag, but no one believed it. Putin is of that world; is it any wonder he carries on with it?
That’s wading too far into politics for my liking, so to get back on some sort of firm ground, this is all relevant to the world of energy, or can be. If Nepal manipulates its situation into a larger conflict with India and China, that can have global energy repercussions because India and CHina now need to decide who to align themselves with, within the context of the hornets next that Nepal creates. It’s a compounding problem because there are many such hornets’ nests, and many angles to consider.
The US is pressuring India not to buy Russian oil (and, as of Sunday, the EU too). But this is a scant few weeks after the heads of the US and Russia met to potentially discuss joint economic development in the arctic. And then India needs to decide: Does it sacrifice the well-being of its citizens (cheap oil) to pacify the US, who wields the tariff hammer (and others), or does it pacify Russia with whom it is working to develop the BRICS group? How does either path affect India’s relationship with China? How is that Indo-Chinese relationship impacted in the short term vs the long term?
What happens to India if they choose to keep buying cheap Russian oil regardless of the US’ displeasure – as they’ve indicated they will do – and Russia goes too far in provoking Poland? Who are your friends now?
And, dear energy readers, keep in mind that these actions might just dictate your energy future for the next decade. Oil prices could soar or crash. LNG potential could continue it’s amazing trajectory, or be cut off at the knees.
This isn’t to say that studying all this crap will lead to any firm answer, it would be unwise to think that this can all be figured out and an appropriate bet made. But it is important to understand as much as possible, because the balance of probabilities can shift under our feet, and that is what we can work towards understanding.
At the peak of the energy wars, The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity challenged the narrative, facing into the storm. Read the energy story for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Email Terry here. (His personal energy site, Public Energy Number One, is on hiatus until there are more hours in the day.)