July 02, 2023:
Information Clearing House
--
Herodotus (History,
Book 1.53) tells the story of Croesus, king of
Lydia c. 585-546 BC in what is now Western
Turkey and the Ionian shore of the
Mediterranean. Croesus conquered Ephesus,
Miletus and neighboring Greek-speaking realms,
obtaining tribute and booty that made him one of
the richest rulers of his time. But these
victories and wealth led to arrogance and
hubris. Croesus turned his eyes eastward,
ambitious to conquer Persia, ruled by Cyrus the
Great.
Having endowed the
region’s cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with
substantial silver and gold, Croesus asked its
Oracle whether he would be successful in the
conquest that he had planned. The Pythia
priestess answered: “If you go to war against
Persia, you will destroy a great empire.”
Croesus therefore set out
to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward,
he attacked Persia’s vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus
mounted a Special Military Operation to drive
Croesus back, defeating Croesus’s army,
capturing him and taking the opportunity to
seize Lydia’s gold to introduce his own Persian
gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a
great empire, but it was his own.
Fast-forward to today’s
drive by the Biden administration to extend
American military power against Russia and,
behind it, China. The president asked for advice
from today’s analogue to antiquity’s Delphi
oracle: the CIA and its allied think tanks.
Instead of warning against hubris, they
encouraged the neocon dream that attacking
Russia and China would consolidate U.S. control
of the world economy, achieving the End of
History.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
Having organized a coup
d’état in Ukraine in 2014, the United States
sent its NATO proxy army eastward, giving
weapons to Ukraine to fight an ethnic war
against its Russian-speaking population and turn
Russia’s Crimean naval base into a NATO
fortress. This Croesus-level ambition aimed at
drawing Russia into combat and depleting its
ability to defend itself, wrecking its economy
in the process and destroying its ability to
provide military support to China and other
countries targeted for seeking self-dependency
as an alternative to U.S. hegemony.
After eight years of
provocation, a new military attack on
Russian-speaking Ukrainians was conspicuously
prepared, ready to drive toward the Russian
border in February 2022. Russia protected its
fellow Russian-speakers from further ethnic
violence by mounting its own Special Military
Operation. The United States and its NATO allies
immediately seized Russia’s foreign-exchange
reserves held in Europe and North America, and
demanded that all countries impose sanctions
against importing Russian energy and grain,
hoping that this would crash the ruble’s
exchange rate. The Delphic State Department
expected that this would cause Russian consumers
to revolt and overthrow Vladimir Putin’s
government, enabling U.S. maneuvering to install
a client oligarchy like the one it had nurtured
in the 1990s under President Yeltsin.
A byproduct of this
confrontation with Russia has been to lock in
America’s control over its Western European
satellites. The aim of this intra-NATO jockeying
was to foreclose Europe’s dream of profiting
from closer trade and investment relations with
Russia by exchanging its industrial manufactures
for Russian raw materials. The United States
derailed that prospect by blowing up the Nord
Stream gas pipelines, cutting off Germany and
other countries from access to low-priced
Russian gas. That left Europe’s leading economy
dependent on higher-cost U.S. Liquified Natural
Gas (LNG).
In addition to having to
subsidize domestic European gas to prevent
widespread insolvency, a large proportion of
German Leopard tanks, U.S. Patriot missiles and
other NATO “wonder weapons” are being destroyed
in combat against the Russian army. It has
become clear that the U.S. strategy is not
simply to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” but to
fight to the last tank, missile and other weapon
being deleted from NATO stocks.
This depletion of NATO’s
arms was expected to create a vast replacement
market to enrich America’s military-industrial
complex. Its NATO customers are being told to
increase their military spending to 3 or even 4
percent of GDP. But the weak performance of U.S.
and German arms on the Ukrainian battlefield may
have crashed this dream, while Europe’s
economies are sinking into depression. And with
Germany’s industrial economy deranged by the
severing of its trade with Russia, German
Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the
Die Welt newspaper on June 16, 2023 that his
country cannot afford to pay more money into the
European Union budget, to which it has long been
the largest contributor.
Without German exports
supporting the euro’s exchange rate, the
currency will come under pressure against the
dollar as Europe buys LNG and NATO replenishes
its depleted weaponry stocks by buying new arms
from America. A lower exchange rate will squeeze
the purchasing power of European labor, while
lowering social spending to pay for rearmament
and provide gas subsidies is plunging the
continent into a depression.
A nationalist reaction
against U.S. dominance is rising throughout
European politics, and instead of America
locking in its control over European policy, the
United States may end up losing – not only in
Europe but most crucially throughout the Global
South. Instead of turning Russia’s “ruble to
rubble” as President Biden promised, Russia’s
balance of trade has soared and its gold supply
has increased. So have the gold holdings of
other countries whose governments are now aiming
to de-dollarize their economies.
It is American diplomacy
that is driving Eurasia and the Global South out
of the U.S. orbit. America’s hubristic drive for
unipolar world dominance could only have been
dismantled so rapidly from within. The
Biden-Blinken-Nuland administration has done
what neither Vladimir Putin nor Chinese
President Xi could have hoped to achieve in so
short a period. Neither was prepared to throw
down the gauntlet and create an alternative to
the U.S.-centered world order. But U.S.
sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and
China have had the effect of protective tariff
barriers to force self-sufficiency in what EU
diplomat Josep Borrell calls the world “jungle”
outside of the US/NATO “garden.”
Although the Global South
and other countries have been complaining about
U.S. dominance ever since the Bandung Conference
of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, they have lacked
a critical mass to create a viable alternative.
But their attention has now been focused by the
U.S. confiscation of Russia’s official dollar
reserves in NATO countries. That dispelled the
thought of the dollar as a safe vehicle in which
to hold international savings. The Bank of
England’s earlier seizure of Venezuela’s gold
reserves kept in London – promising to donate
them to whatever unelected opponents of its
socialist regime U.S. diplomats designate –
shows how sterling and the euro as well as the
dollar have been weaponized. And by the way,
what ever happened to Libya’s gold reserves?
American diplomats avoid
thinking about this scenario. They rely to the
one unique advantage the United States has to
offer. It may refrain from bombing them, from
staging a color revolution to “Pinochet” them by
the National Endowment for Democracy, or install
a new “Yeltsin” giving the economy away to a
client oligarchy.
But refraining from such
behavior is all that America can offer. It has
de-industrialized its own economy, and its idea
of foreign investment is to carve out
monopoly-rent seeking opportunities by
concentrating technological monopolies and
control of oil and grain trade in U.S. hands, as
if this is economic efficiency, not
rent-seeking.
What has occurred is a
change in consciousness. We are seeing the
Global Majority trying to create an independent
and peacefully negotiated choice as to just what
kind of an international order they want. Their
aim is not merely to create alternatives to the
use of dollars, but an entire new set of
institutional alternatives to the IMF and World
Bank, the SWIFT bank clearing system, the
International Criminal Court and the entire
array of institutions that U.S. diplomats have
hijacked from the United Nations.
The upshot will be
civilizational in scope. We are seeing not the
End of History but a fresh alternative to
U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism and
its junk economics of privatization, class war
against labor, and the idea that money and
credit should be privatized in the hands of a
narrow financial class instead of being a public
utility to finance economic needs and rising
living standards.
The irony is that
America’s historical role has been that although
it itself was not able to lead the world forward
along these lines, its attempts to lock the
world into an antithetical imperial system by
conquering Russia on the plains of Ukraine and
trying to isolate China’s technology from
breaking the U.S. attempt at IT monopoly have
been the great catalysts pushing the global
majority along these lines.
