Chinese drills near the Taiwan Strait. Click to
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Michael Hudson The Unz Review July 22,
2023
The July NATO summit in Vilnius had the feeling of a funeral, as
if they had just lost a family member Ukraine. To clear away NATOs
failure to drive Russia out of Ukraine and move NATO right up to
the Russian border, its members tried to revive their spirits by
mobilizing support for the next great fight against China, which is
now designated as their ultimate strategic enemy. To prepare for
this showdown, NATO announced a commitment to extend their military
presence all the way to the Pacific.
The plan is to carve away Chinas military allies and trading
partners, above all Russia, starting with the fight in Ukraine.
President Biden has said that this war will be global in scope and
will take many decades as it expands to ultimately isolate and
break up China.
The U.S.-imposed sanctions against trade with Russia are a dress
rehearsal for imposing similar sanctions against China. But only
the NATO allies have joined the fight. And instead of wrecking
Russias economy and turning the ruble to rubble as President Biden
predicted, NATOs sanctions have made it more self-reliant,
increasing its balance of payments and international monetary
reserves, and hence the rubles exchange rate.
To cap matters, despite the failure of trade and financial
sanctions to injure Russia and indeed, despite NATOs failures in
Afghanistan and Libya, NATO countries committed themselves to
trying the same tactics against China. The world economy is to be
split between US/NATO/Five Eyes on the one hand, and the rest of
the world the Global Majority on the other. EU Commissioner Joseph
Borrell calls this as a split between the US/European Garden (the
Golden Billion) and the Jungle threatening to engulf it, like an
invasion of its well-manicured lawns by an invasive species.
From an economic vantage point, NATOs behavior since its
military buildup to attack Ukraines Russian-speaking eastern states
in February 2022 has been a drastic failure. The U.S. plan was to
bleed Russia and leave it so economically destitute that its
population would revolt, throw Vladimir Putin out of office and
restore a pro-Western neoliberal leader who would pry Russia away
from its alliance with China and then proceed with Americas grand
plan to mobilize Europe to impose sanctions on China.
What makes it so difficult in trying to evaluate where NATO,
Europe and the United States are going is that the traditional
assumption that nations and classes will act in their economic
self-interest is not of help. The traditional logic of geopolitical
analysis is to assume that business and financial interests steer
almost every nations politics. The ancillary assumption is that
governing officials have a fairly realistic understanding of the
economic and politica...
