The self-appointed Davos “elites” are afraid. So afraid. At this week’s World Economic Forum meetings, mastermind Klaus Schwab – displaying his trademark Bond villain act – carped over and over again about a categorical imperative: we need “Cooperation in a Fragmented World”.
While his diagnosis of “the most critical fragmentation” the world is now mired in is predictably somber, Herr Schwab maintains that “the spirit of Davos is positive” and in the end we may all live happily in a “green sustainable economy.”
What Davos has been good at this week is showering public opinion with new mantras. There’s “The New System” which, considering the abject failure of the much ballyhooed Great Reset, now looks like a matter of hastily updating the current – rattled – operating system.
Davos needs new hardware, new programming skills, even a new virus. Yet for the moment all that’s available is a “polycrisis”: or, in Davos speak, a “cluster of related global risks with compounding effects.”
In plain English: a perfect storm.
Insufferable bores from that Divide and Rule island in northern Europe have just found out that “geopolitics”, alas, never really entered the tawdry “end of history” tunnel: much to their amazement it’s now centered – again – across the Heartland, as it’s been for most of recorded history.
They complain about “threatening” geopolitics, which is code for Russia-China, with Iran attached.
But the icing on the Alpine cake is arrogance/stupidity actually giving away the game: the City of London and its vassals are livid because the “world Davos made” is fast collapsing.
Davos did not “make” any world apart from its own simulacrum.
Davos never got anything right, because these “elites” were always busy eulogizing the Empire of Chaos and its lethal “adventures” across the Global South.
Davos not only failed to foresee all recent, major economic crises but most of all the current “perfect storm”, linked to the neoliberalism-spawned deindustrialization of the Collective West.
And, of course, Davos is clueless about the real Reset taking place towards multipolarity.
Self-described opinion leaders are busy “re-discovering” that Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was set in Davos – “against the backdrop of a deadly disease and an impeding world war” – nearly a century ago.
Well, nowadays the “disease” – fully bioweaponized – is not exactly deadly per se. And the “impending World War” is in fact being actively encouraged by a cabal of US Straussian neo-cons and neoliberal-cons: an unelected, unaccountable, bipartisan Deep State not even subject to ideology. Centennary war criminal Henry Kissinger still does not get it.
A Davos panel on de-globalization was rife on non-sequiturs, but at least a dose of reality was provided by Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto.
As for China’s vice-premier Liu He, with his vast knowledge of finance, science and technology, at least he was very helpful to lay down Beijing’s five top guidelines for the foreseeable future – beyond the customary imperial Sinophobia.
China will focus on expanding domestic demand; keeping industrial and supply chains “smooth”; go for the “healthy development of the private sector”; deepen state enterprise reform; and aim for “attractive foreign investment.”
Russian resistance, American precipice
Emmanuel Todd was not at Davos. But it was the French anthropologist, historian, demographer and geopolitical analyst who ended up ruffling all the appropriate feathers across the collective West these past few days with a fascinating anthropological object: a reality-based interview.
Todd spoke to Le Figaro – the newspaper of choice of the French establishment and haute bourgeoisie. The interview was published last Friday on page 22, sandwiched between proverbial Russophobic screeds and with an extremely brief mention on the bottom of the front page. So people really had to work hard to find it.
Todd joked that he has the – absurd – reputation of a “rebel destroy” in France, while in Japan he’s respected, featured in mainstream media, and his books are published with great success, including the latest (over 100,000 copies sold): “The Third World War Has Already Started”.
Significantly, this Japanese best seller does not exist in French, considering the whole Paris-based publishing industry toes the EU/NATO line on Ukraine.
The fact that Todd gets several things right is a minor miracle in the current, abysmally myopic European intellectual landscape (there are other analysts especially in Italy and Germany, but they carry much less weight than Todd).
So here’s Todd’s concise Greatest Hits.
– A new World War is on: By “switching from a limited territorial war to a global economic clash, between the collective West on one side and Russia linked to China on the other side, this became a World War”.
– The Kremlin, says Todd, made a mistake, calculating that a decomposed Ukraine society would collapse right away. Of course he does not get into detail on how Ukraine had been weaponized to the hilt by the NATO military alliance.
– Todd is spot on when he stresses how Germany and France had become minor partners at NATO and were not aware of what was being plotted in Ukraine militarily: “They did not know that the Americans, British and Poles could allow Ukraine to fight an extended war. NATO’s fundamental axis now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.”
– Todd’s major give away is a killer: “The resistance of Russia’s economy is leading the imperial American system to the precipice. Nobody had foreseen that the Russian economy would hold facing NATO’s ‘economic power’”.
– Consequently, “monetary and financial American controls over the world may collapse, and with them the possibility for the US of financing for nothing their enormous trade deficit”.
– And that’s why “we are in an endless war, in a clash where the conclusion is the collapse of one or the other.”
– On China, Todd might sound like a more pugnacious version of Liu He at Davos: “That’s the fundamental dilemma of the American economy: it cannot face Chinese competition without importing qualified Chinese work force.”
– As for the Russian economy, “it does accept market rules, but with an important role for the state, and it keeps the flexibility of forming engineers that allow adaptations, industrial and military.”
– And that bring us, once again, to globalization, in a manner that Davos roundtables were incapable of understanding: “We have delocalized so much of our industrial activity that we don’t know whether our war production may be sustained”.
– On a more erudite interpretation of that “clash of civilizations” fallacy, Todd goes for soft power and comes up with a startling conclusion: “On 75 percent of the planet, the organization of parenthood was patrilineal, and that’s why we may identify a strong understanding of the Russian position. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a reassuring moral conservatism.”
– So what Moscow has been able to pull off is to “reposition itself as the archetype of a big power, not only “anti-colonialist” but also patrilineal and conservative in terms of traditional mores.”
Based on all of the above, Todd smashes the myth sold by EU/NATO “elites” – Davos included – that Russia is “isolated”, stressing how votes in the UN and the overall sentiment across the Global South characterizes the war, “described by mainstream media as a conflict over political values, in fact, on a deeper level, as a conflict of anthropological values.”
Between light and darkness
Could it be that Russia – alongside the real Quad, as I defined them (with China, India and Iran) – are prevailing in the anthropological stakes?
The real Quad has all it takes to blossom into a new cross-cultural focus of hope in a “fragmented world”.
Mix Confucian China (non-dualistic, no transcendental deity, but with the Tao flowing through everything) with Russia (Orthodox Christian, reverencing the divine Sophia); polytheistic India (wheel of rebirth, law of karma); and Shi’ite Iran (Islam preceded by Zoroastrianism, the eternal cosmic battle between Light and Darkness).
This unity in diversity is certainly more appealing, and uplifting, than the Forever War axis.
Will the world learn from it? Or, to quote Hegel – “what we learn from history is that nobody learns from history” – are we hopelessly doomed?
Pepe Escobar is a veteran journalist, author and independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia.
(The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)
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Awoke this morning and thought it was time to review my political convictions as it had become apparent that the war in Ukraine was beholden to the usual ‘us-and-them’ arrangements that stood in for enlightened insight… Another day wherein the propaganda-controlled media confronted me with the power of its’ nuclear-ballistic narrative (based on fire power), to assure me that our ace-in-the hole superior mediation could slam dunk those who refused to acknowledge Western exceptionality-a clear sign that the Pentagon was in bed with The Chicago School of economics.
My ruminations continued as I set about preparing breakfast…I found time for coffee despite the chaos beyond my boundaries. What was wrong with our market-oriented economy? Was our model up shit creek?
We in the West have a problem it seems? People of the lesser than white pigmentation are no longer accepting the fact that we, the descendants of the first European industrial revolution, can be trusted. We, who colonized great swathes of the non-industrialized world are no longer being viewed as magnanimous partners in any sharing sense.
The neo-conservative West tried exporting its’ Globalization (WTO) rules-based business-school mentality that underpins the theories of the Chicago School of Economics to the entire planet. The white man’s burden should be applied and set… and reset… according to the rules of the inchoate modernist unilateralist and utility-minded who eschew democracy over money.
The dream; to regroup in order to grow the capitalist vision of capturing Eurasia in a muscular web of 800 military bases put there to inhibit the development of peer modelling, meant full spectrum dominance.
On hearing the news that Washington was giving Ukraine a 64 billion super-duper military handout, the inner consultant took over from the inner muse and my mind went into equative overdrive.
Do the righteous amongst us choose formulaic thinking over science-based deductive observation? Well, the answer to that seems to be a big yes!
Shall we start with the Jewish controlled media? The Jewish ability to trade themselves to the center of power is impressive, but does it contain the seed of a truly universal outlook, or is it anchored in ethnic moorings that have succeeded in pulling off a coup par excellence that has taken the West by storm! The question is, does it require an arcane narrative in order to occupy the high moral ground? And, having acquired the moral high ground vis a vis alliance with power brokers, does this give them the right to LORD it over those who are told that they are checkmated vis a vis 800 military bases in Eurasia or the iron rim of the Gaza strip. All of this is precisely what Mainstreet Media is conniving at. Accept our ‘truth’ or we will execute great vengeance upon our enemies with furious rebukes (and Palestine and America are not the only counties that have an Anglo-Zionist problem). Think of what America and Israel have in common; exemption from the injurious consequences of their actions (what’s that line again about actions speaking louder than words and why are their cinematic art forms so bereft of human dignity?).
PART 2
For instance, PULP FICTION, released in 1994 as an American black comedy neo-noir crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, is from a story by Tarantino and Roger Avery. It was, and continues to be a cultural watershed…a great piece of cinematic art capturing the myopia within American culture. Samuel Jacksons treatment of Ezekiel’ passage 25:17 “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them” is quintessentially, American hubris.
Pulp Fiction grafts contemporary narrative on arcane roots in antiquity to create a novel way of resolving the delusions of myopic grandeur that beset Jules Winnfield, a thug in need of redemption. The society Tarantino presents to the public is one where hype and entertainment paralyse the human spirit as the market economy goes about its business shredding the wellbeing of its’ citizens…the sense that an intractable appetite for personal gratification has become America’s raison d’etre is all pervasive.
Marsellus Wallace is a gang boss and husband to Mia Wallace. He is the boss of Vincent Vega, Jules Winnfield, Butch Coolidge and many other unknown gangsters. He famously states that the business he’s in “is filled with unrealistic motherfuckers” when addressing Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis), a pugilist being forced to “throw” a fight. The term motherfucker here implies the existence of somebody of indeterminate status and inevitably applies to all who get in the way of any dominant actor seeking power…hegemony…over others in a rat-race to the top. The three stories capture the ineluctable spread of corruption that seeps through to every nook and cranny of society…leaving Hollywood to capitalize on one unholy mess.
So before leaving part two, a thought: Does Volodymyr Zelensky realize what the tide of neo-conservatism lapping at the shores of Ukraine would bring to that hapless country?
PART 3
When propaganda took control of macro-America, the media went along with the process of shoving Americas’ Foreign Policy ‘down the throat of all and sundry. It happened when America found itself the sole superpower on the planet. What followed was the marshaling of Anglo/Zionist forces to downplay the role of government in economics. With the help of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, governments throughout the West became separated from governance. The Chicago School was libertarian and laissez-faire at its core, rejecting Keynesian notions of governments managing aggregate economic demand to promote growth. It was a 1930s form of economic unilateralism that succeeded in keeping finance out of the hands of the so-called ‘turbulent’ masses. It also became the political incarnation of colonial interference, aided and abetted by military overkill forever available to induct or vamoose main-street–ness.
“MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” became the clarion call of muscular America in the service of promoting the United States of Americas’ dream of empire. But was anybody listening? When Biden said “America is back”, was anybody listening? When Putin said enough is enough, quit the provocation, was he or anybody in Bidens’ administration listening? When the nonaligned nations of the world rejected Americas sanctioning of Russia, was anybody in the West listening? Isn’t it time Americans consulted their inner jerks and gave a thought to the suffering their imperial obsession has wrought on Afghanistan and Palestine, to mention but two examples of the arcane mindset.
Hollywood, the dream machine always gets it right. Life in America is about coupling in one way or another…couples struggling with their destinies are at the hub of the three stories that did it for Pulp Fiction in an extremely fractious way. Hollywood became Hollywood because it succeeded in identifying the American existential narrative as a drama belonging to couples or individuals compelled, by external social conditions, to trade their way through a dog-eat-dog system designed to produce winners and losers from within its protean boundaries.
PART 4
America and Palestine are not the only countries…nations…with an Anglo-Zionist problem!!
As Europe squishes under the yoke of the pulpy Atlantic Alliance, there is little reason to believe that hope might spring eternally from the minds of its’ generally mediocre neo-conservative leadership.
The fixation with Ukraine essentially is but a gloss pasted over the realities of a global order in decomposition.
The First World War signalled the end to a mercantilist order that had evolved under the aegis of European powers. One hundred years later, a very different economic order was in place (neoliberal cosmopolitanism). Believed by its architects to be universal and everlasting, globalisation transfixed the world for an extended moment, but then started the subsidence from its zenith – precisely at the moment the West was giving vent to its triumphalism at the fall of the Berlin Wall. NATO – as the order’s regulatory system – addressed its attendant ‘identity crisis’ by pushing for eastward expansion toward Russia’s western borders, disregarding the guarantees it had given, and Moscow’s virulent objections.
This radical alienation of Russia triggered its pivot to China. Europe and the U.S. however, declined to consider issues of due ‘balance’ within global structures, and simply glossed over the realities of a world order in momentous metamorphosis: with the steady decline of the U.S. already apparent; with a European faux ‘unity’ that masked its own inherent imbalances; and in the context of a hyper-financialised economic structure which lethally sucked out the juice from the real economy.
The present war in Ukraine therefore simply is an adjunct – the accelerant to this existing process of ‘liberal order’ decomposition. It is not its centre. Fundamentally geo-strategic in their origin, the explosive dynamics to today’s disintegration can be seen as blowback from the mismatch from diverse peoples’ looking now to solutions tailored to suit their non-western civilisations, and from the western insistence on its ‘one size fits all’ Order. Ukraine thus is a symptom, but is not per se, the deeper disorder itself.
Tom Luongo has remarked – in connection with the ‘messy’, confusing events of today – that that which he fears most, is so many people analysing the intersection of geopolitics, markets and ideology, and doing so with such striking complacency. “There is a stunning amount of normalcy bias in the punditocracy, too much ‘cooler heads will prevail’ and not enough ‘everyone’s got a plan until they’re punched in the mouth’”.
What Luongo’s retort doesn’t fully explain is the shrillness, the outrage, with which any doubting of the accredited ‘punditocracy’ of the moment is met. Plainly, there is a deeper fear stalking the lower depths of western psyche that is not being made fully explicit.
Wolfgang Münchau, formerly at the Financial Times, now authoring EuroIntelligence, describes how such a canonised Zeitgeist implicitly has imprisoned Europe in a cage of adverse dynamics which threaten its economy, its autonomy, its globalism and its being.
Münchau relates how both the pandemic and Ukraine had taught him that it was one thing to proclaim an interconnected globalism ‘as cliché’, but “It is quite another to observe what actually happens on the ground when those connections get torn apart … Western sanctions were based on a formally correct, but misleading premise – one that I believed myself – at least up to a point: That Russia is more dependent on us than we are on Russia … Russia however is a provider of primary and secondary commodities, on which the world has become dependent. But when the largest exporter of those commodities disappears, the rest of the world experiences physical shortages and rising prices”. He continues:
“Did we think this through? Did the foreign ministries that drew up the sanctions discuss at any point what we would do if Russia were to blockade the Black Sea and not allow Ukrainian wheat to leave the ports?… Or, did we think we can adequately address a global starvation crisis by pointing the finger at Putin”?
“The lockdown taught us a lot about our vulnerability to supply chain shocks. It has reminded Europeans that there have only two routes to ship goods en masse to Asia and back: either by container, or by rail through Russia. We had no plan for a pandemic, no plan for a war, and no plan for when both are happening at the same time. The containers are stuck in Shanghai. The railways closed because of the war …
“I am not sure the west is ready to confront the consequences of its actions: persistent inflation, reduced industrial output, lower growth, and higher unemployment. To me, economic sanctions look like the last hurrah of a dysfunctional concept known as The West. The Ukraine war is a catalyst of massive de-globalisation”.
Münchau’s response is that unless we cut a deal with Putin, with the removal of sanctions as a component, he sees “a danger of the world becoming subject to two trading blocs: the west and the rest. Supply chains will be reorganised to stay within them. Russia’s energy, wheat, metals, and rare earths will still be consumed, but not here – We [just] keep with the Big Macs”.
So again, ‘one’ searches for an answer: Why are the Euro-élites so shrill, so passionate in their support for Ukraine? And risk heart-attack from the sheer vehemence of their hatred for Putin? After all, most Europeans and Americans until this year knew next-to-nought about Ukraine.
We know the answer: the deeper fear is that all the landmarks to liberal life – for reasons they do not understand – are about to be forever swept away. And that Putin is doing it. How will ‘we’ navigate life, bereft of landmarks? What will become of us? We thought the liberal way-of-being was ineluctable. Another value-system? Impossible!
So, for Europeans, the endgame in Ukraine crucially must reaffirm European self-identity (even at the cost of its citizens’ economic well-being). Such wars historically, mostly have ended with a dirty diplomatic settlement. That ‘end’ probably would be enough for the EU leadership to spin a ‘win’.
And there was a big EU diplomatic drive to persuade Putin to do a deal, only last week.
But (paraphrasing and elaborating Münchau), it is one thing to proclaim the desirability of a negotiated ceasefire ‘as cliché’. “It is quite another to observe what actually happens on the ground when blood is being spilled to put facts on the ground …”.
Western diplomatic initiatives are premised on Russia needing a ‘way out’, more than does Europe need one. But is that true?
Paraphrasing Münchau again: “Did we think this through? Did the foreign ministries that drew up the plans to train and arm a Ukrainian insurgency in Donbas in the hope of weakening Russia – discuss at any point what effect their war and their expressed contempt for Russia might have on Russian public opinion? Or what ‘we’ would do if Russia simply opted instead to put facts on the ground until it finished its project … Or did we even address the possibility of Kiev losing, and what that would mean for a Europe loaded to the gills with sanctions that then would never end?”.
The hope for a negotiated settlement has given way to a more sombre mood in Europe. Putin was uncompromising in the talks with European leaders. The realisation is dawning in Paris and Berlin that a fudged settlement is not something that benefits Putin, nor is one that he can afford. The Russian public mood will not easily accept that its soldiers’ blood was spent in some vain exercise, ending in a ‘dirty’ compromise – only to have the West resuscitate a new Ukraine insurgency against the Donbas again, in a year or two.
The EU leaders must be sensing their predicament: They may have ‘missed the boat’ for getting a political ‘fix’. But they have not ‘missed the boat’ in respect to inflation, economic contraction, and of social crisis at home. These ships are heading in their direction, at full steam. Did the EU foreign ministries reflect on this eventuality, or were they carried along by euphoria and the credentialed narrative issuing out from the Baltics and Poland of ‘Bad Man Putin’?
Here is the point: The fixation with Ukraine essentially is but a gloss pasted over the realities of a global order in decomposition. The latter is the source of the wider disorder. Ukraine is but one small piece on the chess board, and its outcome will not fundamentally change that ‘reality’. Even a ‘win’ in Ukraine would not grant ‘immortality’ to the neoliberal rules-based order.
The noxious fumes emanating from the global financial system are wholly unconnected to Ukraine – but are that much more significant for they go to the heart of the ‘disorder’ within the western ‘liberal order’. Perhaps it is this primordial unspoken fear that accounts for the shrillness and rancour directed at any deviation from sanctioned Ukraine messaging?
And Luongo’s normalcy bias in discourse is never more in evidence (Ukraine aside), than when addressing the strange self-selectivity of Anglo-American thinking about their neoliberal economic order.
The Anglo-American system of politics and economics, James Fallows a former White House speechwriter has noted, like any system, rests on certain principles and beliefs. “But rather than acting as if these are the best principles, or the ones their societies prefer, Britons and Americans often act as if these were the only possible principles: And that no one, except in error, could choose any others. Political economics becomes an essentially religious question, subject to the standard drawback of any religion—the failure to understand why people outside the faith might act as they do”.
“To make this more specific: Today’s Anglo-American world view rests on the shoulders of three men. One is Isaac Newton, the father of modern science. One is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of liberal political theory. (If we want to keep this purely Anglo-American, John Locke can serve in his place.) And one is Adam Smith, the father of laissez-faire economics.
“From these founding titans come the principles by which advanced society, in the Anglo-American view, is supposed to work … And it is supposed to recognize that the most prosperous future for the greatest number of people comes from the free workings of the market.
“In the non-Anglophone world, Adam Smith is merely one of several theorists who had important ideas about organizing economies. The Enlightenment philosophers however were not the only ones to think about how the world should be organized. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Germans were also active—to say nothing of the theorists at work in Tokugawa Japan, late imperial China, czarist Russia, and elsewhere.
“The Germans deserve emphasis—more than the Japanese, the Chinese, the Russians, and so on because many of their philosophies endure. These did not take root in England or America, but they were carefully studied, adapted, and applied in parts of Europe and Asia, notably Japan. In place of Rousseau and Locke the Germans offered Hegel. In place of Adam Smith… they had Friedrich List.”
The Anglo-American approach is founded on the hypothesis of the sheer unpredictability and unplannability of economics. Technologies change; tastes change; political and human circumstances change. And because life is so fluid, this means that any attempts at central planning are virtually doomed to fail. The best way to “plan” therefore, is to leave the adaptation to the people who have their own money at stake. If each individual does what is best for him or her, the result will be – serendipitously – what is best for the nation as a whole.
Although List did not use this term, the German school was sceptical about serendipity, and more concerned with ‘market failures’. These are the cases in which normal market forces produce a clearly undesirable result. List argued that societies did not automatically move from farming to small crafts to major industries just because millions of small merchants were making decisions for themselves. If every person put his money where the return was greatest, the money might not automatically go where it would do the nation the most good.
For it to do so required a plan, a push, an exercise of central power. List drew heavily on the history of his times—in which the British government deliberately encouraged British manufacturing and the fledgling American government deliberately discouraged foreign competitors.
The Anglo-American approach assumes that the ultimate measure of a society is its level of consumption. In the long run, List argued, a society’s well-being and its overall wealth are determined not by what the society can buy, but by what it can make (i.e. value coming from the real, self-sufficient economy). The German school argued that emphasizing consumption would eventually be self-defeating. It would bias the system away from wealth creation, and ultimately make it impossible to consume as much, or to employ so many.
List was prescient. He was right. This is the flaw now so clearly exposed in the Anglo model. One aggravated by subsequent massive financialisation that has led to a structure dominated by an ephemeral, derivative super-sphere that drained the West of its wealth-creating real economy, couriering its remains and its supply-lines ‘offshore’. Self-reliance has eroded, and the shrinking base of wealth creation supports an ever-smaller proportion of the population in adequately paid employment.
It is no longer ‘fit for purpose’ and is in crisis. That is widely understood at the upper reaches of the system. To acknowledge this however, would seem to go against the past two centuries of economics, narrated as one long progression toward Anglo-Saxon rationality and good sense. It lies at the root of the Anglo ‘story’.
Yet, financial crisis might upend that story entirely.
How so? Well, the liberal order rests on three pillars – on three interlocking, co-constituting pillars: Newton’s ‘laws’ were projected to lend the Anglo economic model its (dubious) claim to being founded in hard empirical laws – as if it were physics. Rousseau, Locke, and their followers elevated individualism as a political principle, and from Smith came the logic-core to the Anglo-American system: If each individual does what is best for him or her, the result will be what is best for the nation as a whole.
The most important thing about these pillars is their moral equivalence, as well as their interlocking connection. Knock out one pillar as invalid, and the whole edifice known as ‘European values’ comes adrift. Only through being locked together does it possess coherency.
And the unspoken fear amongst these western élites is that during this extended period of Anglo supremacy… there has always been an alternative school of thought to theirs. List was not concerned with the morality of consumption. Instead, he was interested in both strategic and material well-being. In strategic terms, nations ended up being dependent or sovereign according to their ability to make things for themselves.
And last week Putin told Scholtz and Macron that the crises (including food shortages) that they faced, stemmed from their own erroneous economic structures and policies. Putin might have quoted List’s amorphism:
The tree which bears the fruit is of greater value than the fruit itself… The prosperity of a nation is not… greater in the proportion in which it has amassed more wealth (i.e., values of exchange), but in the proportion in which it has more developed its powers of production.
Messrs Scholtz and Macron probably did not like the message one bit. They can see the pivot being yanked out from western neoliberal hegemony.
‘For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places’.
Words recorded by Matthew in his Gospel, chapter 24, verse 7, April 33
‘It is Russia that is now at the forefront of the clash of civilisations’.
Boris Mezhuyev, Professor of Russian Philosophy at the VIII Russian Philosophical Congress in Moscow, 26 May 2022
We were promised the future. That of globalism. This was one in which the whole world would become ever more prosperous, though nobody would become as prosperous as the already prosperous elite of the Western world. So those living off a dollar a day would live off two dollars a day and those living off 10,000 dollars a day would live off 20,000 dollars a day. Sounds fair? And all this in a world where all would have the chance, if they wished, to dress like Americans, watch Hollywood films, eat at MacDonalds and drink coffee at Starbucks, that is, to live in a unipolar world, the only pole being the USA. And this world would by 2100 have reached its maximum population of perhaps 11 billion, up from today’s nearly 8 billion.
Then came some annoying people who pointed out that not everyone can live like that, even 8 billion of us, let alone 11 billion, in a world of finite resources and a warming climate (regardless of whether that warming was manmade or not).
And then there came covid (regardless of whether that was manmade or not) and some people of all races died from it. And then came some very annoying people who pointed out that if there is one pestilence, there can be another and another, far, far worse, like the American/Kansas flu of 1918-1920. Unlike covid, this killed perhaps 60 million, ten times more than covid, on a planet with a population less than a quarter of today’s, so was 40 times more lethal. And so, they concluded, anything people do is infinitely fragile, here today, gone tomorrow, and all our much-vaunted vast technology is useless against a mere tiny microbe. The balloon of arrogance was rather punctured.
And then, after pestilence, there came war in the Ukraine and the increasing realisation that actually the future that we were being promised, or rather, that was being imposed on us, was not one that we wanted. There had been just too many injustices down the centuries, not least inside Europe and caused by Europe outside Europe. Such were the ‘World Wars’, that is, the European Wars which Europe exported worldwide. What sort of future can you build, if it is built on the bones of the hundreds of millions of victims of genocide and injustice down the ages? And then came some even more annoying people who pointed out that not everyone wants to live according to that unipolar model. We do not want to be the slaves of Antichrist. And as we do not want that, then to defend Russia is actually to defend the world.
And so the future that had been proposed to us has gone to the back of our minds.
And so now we have to think about the future that we do want, in the front of our minds.
First of all, we know what we do not want. In the words of Sergei Lavrov in his interview with RT Arabic in Moscow on 26 May 2022:
‘Instead of delivering on their obligations under the UN Charter and honouring, as is written in this charter, the sovereign equality of states and abstaining from interfering in their domestic affairs, the West churns out ultimatums every day, issuing them through their ambassadors or envoys….blatantly blackmailing ….The reaction of Arab countries and almost all other countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America that we are seeing shows that these countries do not want to disregard their national dignity, running errands, in a servile manner, for their senior colleagues. This situation is yet another example of colonial thinking….It is wrong and regrettable, and flies in the face of the historical process, which objectively shows that a multipolar world is now taking shape’.
What does this mean, politically, economically and socially?
Firstly, politically we think that in the future every country, people, culture and religion should be respected. That does not mean that we will agree with each other, that there are no differences, it means that we accept the differences of others in freedom, but that we in no way feel obliged to follow other ways. In other words, our relations should be those of good neighbours, live and let live is what we do. We are not superior and narcissistic busybodies who carry out Blairite ‘humanitarian interventions’ in the sovereign rights of others, arrogantly trying to enforce our domination on the deluded pretext of do-gooding. Because we respect ourselves, so we respect others.
Secondly, economically we think that trade between different countries is normal, following the law of supply and demand, but that in the future all trade should be sustainable. Free trade very often becomes the law of the jungle. Free trade has to be regulated, to avoid exploitation, profiteering and the impoverishment of those countries which have fewer resources and advantages. Justice must reign in all international trading relations.
Thirdly, socially, we think that social justice for all in every country is essential. We realise that if you gave a million dollars each to twenty individuals, very quickly you would find that one had ten million dollars and that others had nothing. People are different. It is therefore part of the role of the State to provide some kind of safety net for the weak, without demotivating them from work, and also making sure that those who become rich do not abuse their wealth in order to obtain tyrannical power and commit injustices like gangsters. Money should be a tool to do good. Sadly, often it is not. We no longer want to live in a world in which there are massive gaps between rich and poor. The word ‘oligarch’ has been associated with Russia, only not the Russia we knew, but with the westernised and corrupt Russia of Yeltsin, which is now disintegrating. There will always be richer and poorer, yes, there will always be such. But why should there be multimillionaires, billionaires and even centibillionaires? There is something wrong with such a world, when at the same time there are so many desperately poor.
This is not an ideology, this is not an ism, it is a balance. If you press down on one end of a seesaw without a counterweight on the other end, there is no balance, no possible play. When the world is out of balance, disasters, especially wars, come. This is what has happened in the Ukraine. Retrieve the balance and all will work better. This is what the phrase ‘a multipolar world’ means, a balanced world.
So, the unipolar future to the back. And forward to the multipolar future.
There is a small break in the clouds of the western end of Eurasia with discerning eyes gazing east, eager to revive civilized dialogue along the routes where globalization started.
The Health of the Sick, Europe’s Hot Summer and even Colder Winter
“It’s West Europeans that want to distinguish themselves from us, they don’t have a monopoly on “Europeanness”… We are even more European than they are.”
-Former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev
Growing up in the 90s in Italy, we were taught from the 5th grade on about WWII. The Holocaust, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the valiant partisans, and of course “the liberation”. Photographic and moving images from the archives are constantly played, repeated every year, perhaps dangerously, to the point of banality. The moral of course was that this was the war against wars and therefore the last. A strong “West” united against barbarity would make sure that history would not repeat itself; the raison d’être of the modern European project.
Today, images of civilians executed by Nazis for accepting provisions from the Russian military, and blatant war crimes against prisoners of war are promptly labeled as “Russian disinformation”. Nothing discovered on the ground in Ukraine could be as dark as what the West could manufacture from their media rooms armed with “satellite images” demonstrating Russia’s innate appetite for expansion and violence.
All great reasons to attempt to destabilize Russia through sanctions. The second-rate European ruling classes obediently dragged their economy, kicking and screaming, toward “The End of History”. In total denial of the disintegration of the Atlantic hegemon, while ignoring the integration unfolding on the very continent on which they live, Eurasia.
It is possible that the fatal concoction of hyper-globalization, digital reality, woke cancel culture and biomedical security has caused unprecedented amnesia of modern history on the Western masses. The crucial eight decades after World War II and its resulting rules-based world order relegated to the darkest annals of memory.
The second of May 1945, as such, is a conveniently neglected historic fact. It is the day Berlin fell to the Red Army, finishing Nazi Germany. More than one month before the arrival of American and British forces. Equally important is that every move after the Potsdam Berlin conference in 1945 by the Western winners of the war was targeted specifically at isolating the USSR, trashing previous agreements.
Shortly after, in February 1946, on the propaganda front George Keenan’s “Long Telegram”- hit piece on the Slavic soul, cold and incapable of modernizing with Western civilizations – was instrumental in creating the rhetoric to “other” Russia, and facilitated the creation of consent around what would become the Western bloc’s “containment” strategy toward the Soviet Union.
If one simply examines the dates of key events such as:
1. The Deutsch Mark reform on 17th June 1948 and the Blockade of West Berlin on 24th June 1948;
2. Proclamation of the Federal Republic of Germany on 23 May 1949 and the proclamation of the German Democratic Republic 7th October 1949;
3. Proposal for a free, demilitarised West Berlin refused on 27th November 1958, and the Berlin Wall construction beginning on 13th August 1961.
The West made every move first, for which there was a Soviet response, not the other way around. Ignoring the Yalta agreements that occupied Germany would be controlled under mutual agreement under unified command of the three winning powers, and Potsdam conference article 14: “during the occupation period Germany will be treated as a single economic entity.”
But still, in the years connecting the Potsdam Berlin conference and the construction of the Berlin Wall, Moscow continued to ask for negotiations, proposing several maneuvers that could end in a peace treaty for all Germany. It was reported that crickets could be heard on the western front.
The German reparations promised to Europe (including of course to the USSR) under the auspices of Yalta and Potsdam would be replaced with the American credit scheme Marshall Plan, keeping the USA war-time economic boom moving, through the reconstruction of battered Europe- its economy now under direct control of the international monetary institutions created at Bretton Woods in 1944; namely, the IMF and World Bank. The Marshall Plan (which was offered to USSR, but was quickly rejected) through its various industrial and economic re-incarnations, such as the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community), and the ACUE (American Committee for the united Europa) evolved into the European Union.
No wonder Russians have always seen Europe as a total colony. They shouldered the reconstruction of their territory, sacrificing abundance for independence while watching NATO/American bases swallow Europe from their front yard.
So what is the trouble with Europe today? The European project in reality is very transparent, with a hierarchy designed specifically to have a single center of power within Europe securing the hegemonic interests of its master abroad, while still living in the intoxicating fumes of the fantasy surrounding the Berlin Wall.
Coming out of the 1929 market crash, the United States revitalized its economy weaponizing the allied war effort in the old continent. The cost of their help was 120 NATO/USA bases and 40 American nuclear bombs in Italy alone, the homogenization of “European identity”, and the territory’s transformation into America’s missile launching pad and buffer zone.
Turning its back on institutionalized Nazism in Ukraine for America’s imperialistic goals, West Europe is becoming the moral sick-man of the world. While quickly descending into economic and cultural chaos it is irreparably losing the trust of the neighbors that count. If “European values” mean only speaking and never listening as in the past 500 years, then one can only hope that if anything at all is left of Homer and Cicero that they will be preserved in that land lost in the translation of Dostoyevsky and Gagarin.
There is a small break in the clouds of the Western end of Eurasia with discerning eyes gazing east, eager to revive civilized dialogue along the routes where globalization started.
But first, a remedy is required, only time will tell the prescription.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
As a graduate from two top US universities, the School of International Service – SIS – from the American University and the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies – SAIS – from Johns Hopkins University, I can confirm that every word spoken by Gonzalo Lira are true and spot on. Listen to the man, every word he says is 100% true!
أدّت الحروب بين القوى الكبرى، في العصور الغابرة والحديثة، دوراً مركزياً في صياغة العالم، أو إعادة صياغته، على المستويات الجيوسياسية والجيو ــــ اقتصادية، وفقاً لرؤى المنتصرين فيها ومصالحهم. وإذا حصرنا اهتمامنا بفترة ما بعد الحرب العالمية الثانية، فإن مآلات هذه الأخيرة، وموازين القوى التي كرّستها، هي التي أنتجت “النظام الدولي الليبرالي” ــــ وهو الاسم الكودي للهيمنة الأميركية على عدد من بقاع المعمورة ــــ، من جهة، وأتاحت تشكيل المعسكر الاشتراكي وانتصار حركات التحرّر الوطني في بقاع أخرى، من جهةٍ ثانية. الأمر نفسه ينطبق على المرحلة التي تلت نهاية الحرب الباردة، بعد انهيار الاتحاد السوفياتي، وما تخلّلها من مساعٍ لتوسيع نطاق الهيمنة الأميركية نحو مناطق جديدة، وتأبيدها على الصعيد الدولي.
«إحياء الناتو» ضدّ موسكو وبكين
لم يكن “الناتو” في “حالة موت سريري”، كما قال الرئيس الفرنسي، إيمانويل ماكرون، في لحظة انفعال، رداً على تهديدات متكرّرة من نظيره الأميركي آنذاك، دونالد ترامب، بالانسحاب من الحلف، بذريعة عدم مضاعفة أعضائه الأوروبيين إنفاقهم العسكري السنوي. علاوة على ذلك، فإن الإهانات المستمرّة التي وجّهها ترامب للمسؤولين الأوروبيين خلال عهده، وتلويحه بإمكانية توقّف الولايات المتحدة عن “حماية” بلدانهم، حدت ببعض هؤلاء إلى استعادة معزوفة الدفاع الأوروبي المشترك والمستقلّ، على المستوى الخطابي لا أكثر. فالتعاون العسكري الأورو ــــ أميركي في إطار “الناتو”، لم يتراجع يوماً، وخاصّة في دول جبهته الشرقية مع روسيا، حيث ازداد عديد قواته المنتشرة في بولندا وبلدان البلطيق، وكذلك المناورات التي تجريها. ولا بدّ من الإشارة أيضاً إلى أن الاتحاد الأوروبي ودوله كان لهم دور رئيسيّ في افتعال الأزمة في أوكرانيا، عندما ساهموا، في أواخر عام 2013، في التحريض على رئيسها آنذاك، فيكتور يانوكوفيتش ــــ الذي رفض توقيع اتفاقية التجارة والشراكة مع الاتحاد ــــ، ودعموا القوى التي أطاحته في أواخر شباط 2014.
فسخ الشراكة وتفكّك العولمة
أولى الدعوات إلى إعادة النظر بالعولمة الاقتصادية، وما نجم عنها من مفاعيل “سلبية” بالنسبة إلى الاقتصاد الأميركي، أطلقها الرئيس الأميركي السابق، دونالد ترامب، الذي شنّ حرباً تجارية على الصين، وحضّ على فسخ الشراكة معها. المواقف الرافضة لسياساته وتوجهاته ــــ آنذاك ــــ لم تصدر فقط من بكين، بل كذلك من أوساط الشركات الأميركية والغربية الكبرى، ووسائل الإعلام اللصيقة بها، كمجلة “إيكونوميست” وصحيفة “فايننشال تايمز”. اللافت، اليوم، هو أن الدعوات إلى إخضاع المصالح الاقتصادية، ومبدأ حرية التجارة “المقدّس” للاعتبارات الاستراتيجية، أضحى يصدر من هذه الأبواق، حتى ولو لم تشجّع على فسخ شراكة شاملة.
كان بإمكان دول أوروبا، عندما حشد بوتين قواته على حدود أوكرانيا، التجاوب مع مطلبه بتحييدها
ففي عددها الأخير، وعنوان غلافه “النظام الدولي البديل”، رأت”ذي إيكونوميست”، أن “المواجهة مع روسيا كشفت تناقضاً متنامياً بين حرية التجارة والحرية كمبدأ”. ففي مقال بعنوان “تجارة مع العدو”، اعترفت الأسبوعية “الرصينة” بأن “العدوانية العسكرية لبوتين تثير أسئلة مزعجة حول العولمة بالنسبة إلى أنصار حرية التجارة مثل الإيكونوميست. هل يصحّ أن تقيم مجتمعات مفتوحة علاقات اقتصادية مع أخرى مستبدّة، كالصين وروسيا، تنتهك حقوق الإنسان وتهدّد الأمن، وتصبح أكثر خطورة كلّما ازدادت ثراءً؟ الإجابة سهلة من حيث المبدأ: على الديموقراطيات أن تطوّر مبادلاتها التجارية دون المساس بأمنها القومي. عملياً، الموازنة بين الأمرَين مهمّة بالغة الصعوبة. حرب روسيا تظهر ضرورة إعادة صياغة جراحية لشبكات الإنتاج والتوريد لمنع الدول المستبدّه من التنكيل بتلك الليبرالية… الاجتياح الروسي أكد للغرب خطورة التجارة مع الخصوم. الاعتبار الأوّل أخلاقي. عقود شراء نفط الأورال وقمح البحر الأسود موّلت القمع الذي يمارسه بوتين وإنفاقه العسكري المتعاظم. الاعتبار الآخر أمني، يرتبط بإدمان أوروبا وصناعاتها على غاز روسيا، وما تصدّره من معادن وأسمدة. هذه التبعية تزيد من قوّة الأنظمة المستبدّة، وتُضعِف عزم الديموقراطيات، وتضعها في موقع شديد الهشاشة في حالة الحرب”.
إخراج روسيا من النظام المالي الدولي، عبر إقصائها من نظام “سويفت”، والسعي إلى إيجاد مصادر بديلة منها للغاز والنفط بالنسبة إلى أوروبا، وحزمة العقوبات المفروضة عليها، والتي يجري التلويح بها حيال الصين وأيّ دولة أخرى تتعاون معها لـ”التحايل” على الأخيرة، ما هي سوى خطوات أولى في مجابهة مرشّحة للتصعيد، بالتوازي مع استعار تلك الدائرة في الميدان العسكري. وبما أن القوى الغربية ترى أن هذه المجابهة المصيرية هي مع محور روسي ــــ صيني، وليس مع روسيا وحدها، وأن الصين هي الخصم الأخطر والمستفيد الأوّل منها، فإن الاعتبارات الاستراتيجية ستطغى على تلك الاقتصادية في التعامل معها. بطبيعة الحال، فإن ضخامة المصالح المشتركة مع بكين، وحجم الأضرار الذي سينجم عن عملية فكّ ارتباط معها، سيدفع قوى اقتصادية وازنة في الغرب إلى الاعتراض عليه، غير أن الاستراتيجية العليا لدول تحاول وقف تراجع هيمنتها، في مقابل أخرى صاعدة بسرعة هائلة، لا تنسجم مع المصالح الخاصّة لبعض الشركات. في مثل هذا السياق، فإن وجود مصالح مشتركة حتى بين الدول نفسها لا يحول دون الحرب في ما بينها، وعلى من يشكّ في ذلك أن يقرأ، أو يعيد قراءة، كتاب المفكر السياسي الأميركي غراهام أليسون، “فخ توسيديد”، ليتحرّر من بقايا خرافات “العولمة السعيدة” وأوهامها.
It might be a good idea to start with some theoretical clarifications. Firstly, nationalism should not be confused with national sovereignty. Nations which are effectively ruled by outside agents – from Greece to Honduras – are not sovereign; they are colonies or vassals of some larger agency. And since they are not sovereign, the cannot be democratic, since decision making, and policies have been abrogated to an external ruling power. Secondly, nationalism: the term which in general is generally regarded as the all-weather bête noire by the orthodox left, can be and often is aggressive, racist, imperialistic, and so forth. But this is only half the story and there are ample reasons to believe that this view is both simplistic and narrowly focussed; ‘nationalism’ can be either a reactionary or a radical/progressive force, depending on the local and political circumstances. This is simply an historical fact. The latter phenomenon is particularly true of those nations which struggled under the yoke of imperialism – from Vietnam to Algeria both ex-French colonies – and who actively engaged in national repeat, national, liberation struggles involving a broad coalition of political forces
However, according to the conventional wisdom of the hyper-globalists both nation states and the whole concept of national sovereignty are now defunct. Their reasoning is based upon the following premises. 1.Most products have developed a very complex geography – with parts made in different countries and then assembled somewhere else – in which case labels of origin begin to lose their meaning. 2. Markets when left unfettered will arrive at optimal price, allocative, and productive efficiency. 3.This means that capital, commodities and labour should be free to move around the globe without let or hindrance to achieve these goals. 4. Any barriers to this process – capital controls, trade unions, exchange rate controls, welfare expenditures, minimum wage legislation, wages and even public goods – will result in price and allocative distortions. Q.E.D.
Such globalization has come to be seen and defined by its proponents as the ‘natural order’, almost a force of nature; an inevitable and inexorable process of increasing geographical spread and increasing functional integration between economic activities. This current orthodoxy goes by various other names, Washington consensus, market liberalisation, neo-liberalism and so on and so forth. In fact, there is nothing ‘natural’ about this stage of historical development, since the whole phenomenon has been politically driven from the outset. (Of which more later).
It is important to note, however, the difference between contemporary imperialism in its present stage – i.e., globalization – and the classical imperialism of pre-1914 vintage that Hobson, Lenin, Bukharin and Rosa Luxemburg were writing about. Classical imperialism was characterised by a shallow integration manifested in arms-length trade in goods and services through independent firms and international movement of portfolio capital and relatively simple direct investment. Note also that the British state granted Charters to investment entities such as the East India Company and the British South Africa Chartered Company to ‘develop’ (exploit) these colonial possessions. Thus, even at this early stage the British state actively intervened to facilitate and open up markets for British capital in India and Africa. This was the liberal epoch trade of the 19th century. Full-on globalization did not develop, however, due to inter-imperialist rivalries and mercantilist policies being carried out by the competing imperial powers (which eventuated in WW1). The opening up and liberalization of markets – which did not at that time occur – was and still is the conditio sine qua non for the development of full-blown globalization, which even today is nowhere near total.
This generalised retreat from a classical liberal colonialism began with the First World War and lasted until the early 1970s. This statist phase of the global economy was universalized in the west after the aftermath of WW2 in the form of social-democracy and the welfare state. Suffice it to say that this period is long gone having been systematically deconstructed by the present neo-liberal counter-revolution which began circa 1979. The neoliberal phase really got going in the 1980s. This was the time of the Washington Consensus a set of ideological prescriptions based upon archaic Ricardian trade theory (comparative advantage) to be followed to the letter and by all and sundry. It was argued that this would result in an economic nirvana attendant on the removal of distortions to the market mechanism brought about by welfare capitalism. To repeat: the tripod on which neoliberalism is based consists of 1. The free-movement of labour and ‘flexible’ labour markets, 2. the free movement of capital and commodities which in essence means the loss of control of monetary policy, exchange rate policy and capital controls. The neo-liberal regimen also involves 3. downward harmonisation of wages and working conditions, involving fixed term contracts, zero-hour contracts, the weakening or in the case of the United States, the virtual elimination of trade unions, stagnant wages, structural unemployment, which in turn leads to increased indebtedness which benefits the rentier class, and ongoing and deepening structural inequality. This is sometimes called austerity, but this is putting the horse before the cart. Austerity is the effect not the cause of liberalised financial, labour and commodity markets.
The present stage of neo-liberal imperialism differs from the classical stage insofar as we currently live in a world of deep integration organized primarily within and between geographical and complex global production networks as well as other mechanisms. Moreover, a new factor became apparent in this Brave New World – financialization. There has been a massive increase in both the size and scope of financial markets, with money moving electronically around the world at unprecedented speeds, generating enormous repercussions and instability. The system of unlimited fiat currencies mainly used for purely speculative purposes is resulting in ongoing asset price bubbles particularly in stocks, bonds and property, as well as other financial instruments, e.g. derivatives.
To wit:
The surge of bank loans to Mexico in the 1970s – Th tequila crisis.
The bubble in stocks and Real Estate in Japan – 1985-89
The 1985-89 bubble in stocks and property in Norway, Finland and Sweden
The bubble in real estate, stocks and currencies in East Asia in 1992-97
The bubble in over the counter (OTC) stocks in the US, including hi-tech start-ups
The 2002-2008. The property bubble in the US, UK, Spain, Ireland, Iceland and Greek sovereign debt. (Manias, Panics and Crashes – Kindleberger and Aliber – 2011)
Additionally, the global institutions, which emerged from the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, the IMF, GATT/WTO, World Bank, and increasingly central banks around the world, play a crucial role of the construction of trade policies, co-ordination, guidance, as well as providing and enforcing legal statutes designed to keep the globalist ship afloat. But it should be understood that these institutions are highly politicised and ideologically driven and not disinterested arbiters of the common weal. This is amply illustrated by the recurring breakdowns in the various rounds of trade liberalization talks conducted by the WTO when what are perceived by the developing world (with some justification) as being unfair trade agreements foisted on the them by the more affluent and controlling developed states nations who control voting procedures. In passing, it should also be noted that the EU represents a regionalised version of these global institutional structures, the ECB, EC, Council of Ministers, Eurozone Finance Ministers, European Round Table of Industrialists and so forth. Moreover, there exists a revolving door – in career terms – between state institutions and private corporations. N.B. the ease of which big-time globalist financial honchos such as Henry (Hank) Paulson, Steve Mnuchin and Mario Draghi glide effortlessly between the leading US investment bank, Goldman Sachs, and the US Treasury Department and ECB.
Power to shape/control this system is concentrated in the hands of states and/or the newly emergent Transnational Corporations (TNCs). Of course, there is not going to be a simple answer to this as the relationship between these two pillars of modern imperialism is both fractious and permanently mutating. The received wisdom, as put forward by the various spokespersons for globalization, ranging from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) OECD, and IMF, to the globalist house journals – Financial Times, The Economist and Wall Street Journal – of the global Transnational Uberklasse is predictable enough. Namely that the state is always in a subservient position vis-à-vis the dominant TNCs.
This perhaps would qualify as a procrustean effort to make the facts fit the theory. Contrary to the image of the all-powerful TNC demanding fealty and obedience from prostrate states, the relationship is somewhat more symmetrical; corporations and states are always to a certain degree joined at the hip.
‘’ … they are both competitive and competing, both supportive and conflictual. They operate in a fully dialectical relationship, locked into unified but contradictory roles and positions, neither one nor the other partner completely able to dominate.’’ (Picciotto, S. 1991 The Internationalisation of the State – Capital and Class 43.43-63)
The widespread notion that a TNC can simply up sticks and move lock, stock and barrel to a more compatible venue if its home base no longer suits it purposes is fanciful in the extreme. All TNCs have home bases, national HQs. Here is where global strategy is determined; here is where top-end R&D is carried out; here is where design and marketing strategies take place; here is where the domestic market is situated and where long-term domestic suppliers are located; here is where overseas operations are conceived planned and carried through; here is where AGMs of the Corporations takes place with published accounts circulated to all shareholders; here is where the local workforce, at all levels, is recruited; here is where the political bureaucracy and the above mentioned institutions are situated and amenable to lobbying. Picking an obvious example, the US defence industries, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman are all based domestically and are not going to move out anytime soon.
It is unquestionably true that TNCs and states often have divergent goals: TNCs’ primary function is to maximise profits and enhance shareholder value, whereas the economic role of the state should be to maximise the economic welfare of its society. But although this conflictual relationship exists, states and TNCs need and lean on each other in a variety of ways. States might wish that TNCs are bound by allegiance to national borders – and in many ways they are (see above) – but total allegiance is not an option in a liberal capitalist economy. Indeed, it would be true to say that some states regard TNC (activities) as being complementary to their foreign policy. Here economic issues merge with geopolitical imperatives. For example:
‘’American political leaders have believed that the national interest has also been served by the foreign expansion of US corporations in manufacturing and services. FDI has been considered a major instrument through which the US could maintain its relative position in world markets, and the overseas expansion of TNCs has been regarded as a means to maintain America’s dominant world position.’’ (Gilpin, R. 1987 – The Political Economy of International Relations.)
On the other hand. Businesses, Corporations, TNCs, have always needed the state to provide the necessary infrastructure without which their operations would not be possible. This infrastructure includes what are sometimes called ‘public goods’ the built environment of roads, railways, airports, ports, canals, health services, education at all levels, a legal system, a centralised government with the power to tax and spend, as well as control monetary policy by a central bank, various procurement policies – in the US particularly involving the Military Industrial Complex – publicly funded research, which played an absolutely vital role in the development of the internet and Silicon Valley. In addition, there have been a range of cultural and political goods – the media for example – some of which were provided by the state, the BBC and public service broadcasting, and some by the market, newspapers and commercial television, albeit privately subsidised.
In short, the relationship between TNCs and states is complex and symmetrical and does not conform to the simplistic ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ globalist trope. In fact, the relationship has betimes been the other way around. During the post-war period both Japan and South Korea were at pains to block Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from overseas TNCs entering their economies, principally by operationalising import controls. This notwithstanding the fact that both countries were export orientated. The reasoning behind this policy was that the type nation-building mercantilism being which has been and is still the only way out of under-development could not work in an open liberalised economy. Similarly, Chinese development included inward FDI by overseas Corporations, BUT this time around the state-TNC roles were reversed. Automobile firms wished to invest in China for the simple reason of access to the world’s largest growing market which served as a powerful incentive for these firms to enter. But the Chinese government, consistent with its state-capitalist, mercantilist policies had complete control over such entry and adopted a policy of limited access to foreign firms. It is customary to imagine that TNCs always have the upper hand in the bargaining process, but this time it was different. Auto TNCs whose experience had conditioned them to play off states against each other, were subjected to the humbling experience of China who – given its control of FDI entry – was able to play off one TNC against another.
In fact, the East Asian development model – which for want of a better label I will call, state-capitalist mercantilism – has been successful in enabling states such as China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and possibly Thailand, and Malaysia to claw their way out of the trap of underdevelopment. This nation-building developmental strategy was first outlined by the German economist Freidrich List. The policy advocated imposing tariffs on imported goods while supporting free trade of domestic goods and stated the cost of a tariff should be seen as an investment in a nation’s future productivity – worked and was operationalised in the 19th century by both Germany and the United States, with a view to breaking British industrial and trade hegemony, which it did. As for free-trade, that was a policy strictly for the losers who to this day stay under-developed. It is also worth adding that the East Asian development bloc did not seek permission from the imperialist behemoth to carve out their own place in the sun.
We can say, therefore, that ultimately the negotiating relationship and outcomes between states and TNCs will depend on the relative bargaining strength in any specific instance. It is argued that if nation states are capable of so much why does the record show that they have achieved so little.
Well, South Korea was about equal to Tanzania in terms of all the economic, social and cultural indictors in the 1950s when it was just recovering from the Korean war.
South Korea is now one of the developing world’s long-term success stories. The country is now classified by the World Bank as a high-income economy, with PPP income exceeding $29,000.00 in 2010. Korean consumer electronics and other goods – auto-vehicles, Kia and Hyundai – have become synonymous with high quality and low price. Even more impressive is Korea’s achievements in social development, in education, and health. Life expectancy is now over 75 and the country’s HDI was placed 26th in 2004. As was the case in Japan inward investment was discouraged in favour of an infant protection industry and export led growth. Exports in such sectors as consumer electronics and auto-vehicles, and more recently in high technology have grown at an extraordinary rate. One very important reason for this has been a national strategy that has favoured the promotion of increasingly sophisticated exports and technology. Strong financial incentives for industrial firms to move up the value chain of skills and technology were built into most of the government’s policies. These policies included:
1. Currency Undervaluation: The effective exchange rate favoured cheaper exports and more expensive imports – an overt mercantilist approach
2. Preferential access to imported intermediate inputs needed to produce export goods
3. Targeted infant industry protection as a first stage before launching an export drive.
4. Tariff exemption on imports of capital goods needed in exporting activities
5. Tax breaks for domestic suppliers of inputs to exporting firms, which constitutes a domestic content incentive
6. Domestic indirect tax exemptions for successful exporters.
7. Lower direct taxation on incomes gained from exports.
8. The creation of public enterprises to lead the way in establishing a new industry.
9. The setting of export targets for firms.
(Todaro and Smith – Economic Development – 2009)
These policies were, of course, and still are, the exact opposite of the Ricardian free-trade comparative advantage model and are an anathema to any orthodox economists.
Herewith a development comparison Tanzania/South Korea.
Tanzania:
GDP, US$47,652 – GDP per capitaUS$857 – Education Expenditure US$1678.9, Govt Health Expenditure per capita US$24
South Korea:
GDP = US$1,411,042 – GDP per capitaUS$27,535 – Education Expenditure US$ 289,283.4 -Govt. Health Expenditure per capita US$159. (countryeconomy.com)
I think this is enough and don’t wish to labour the point, the gap is self-evidently enormous. But now the subsidiary question arises: what explains the divergent paths of development for two countries starting at the same point?
Well, according to the conventional wisdom ‘‘the incidence of wealth is only weakly related to the way in which the sovereign power of the state is exercised and is much more closely aligned to the ways in which states are aligned with the circuits of global capitalism.’’ Wrong! Political agency has everything to do with economic and social development, ‘‘and the way in which the sovereign power of the state is exercised.’’ If this were not the case East Asian development strategies would never have worked. Modernisation and development requires/required the indispensable political prerequisite of a modernising, nation-building ruling stratum which mobilises the whole nation in this revolution from above. This pattern has always been almost without exception the historical experience of capitalist development.
Such political and state institutions together with modernising class forces have/been and are, notably weak or even absent in what we generally refer to as the under-developed or developing world. ‘States’ (and I use this term advisably) such as Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo lack the political and social modern(ising), structures and institutions as we understand them which might bring about economic and social development. Crucially, the class structure of these societies is dominated by a comprador bourgeoisie, a self-aggrandising, self-serving elite whose interests are intertwined with the imperial overlord in the ongoing exploitation and looting of their own country. We also know that such nations are stuck in the production of raw materials and agricultural products – low value-added, low research-intensive, low-productivity, primary commodities – all of which are both price and income inelastic and have had a tendency toward price stagnation and decline in the long run – a structural deterioration in their terms of trade. (Oil may be an exception to this, but oil prices are notoriously volatile.) Thus, the unequal and increasing gap between the higher income and lower income countries. But is this the end of the matter? Well from a rigidly structuralist point of view it would seem to be. History, however, is an open ended and semi-voluntaristic process – as the famous quote goes, ‘Men make history, but do not do it as they please’ – and a number of possibilities for fundamental structural changes exist. But for real change to take place both economic and political/ideological conditions must be present.
‘’History has shown that the vicious circles of poverty and underdevelopment can be effectively attacked only by qualitatively changing the production structures of poor and failing states. A successful strategy implies an increasing diversification away from sectors with diminishing returns (traditional raw materials and agriculture) to sectors with constant and increasing returns (technology, intensive manufacturing and services) creating a new and more complex division of labour and new social-economic structures in the process. In addition to breaking away from subsistence agriculture, this will create an urban market for goods, which will further induce specialization and innovation, bring in new technologies, create both alternative employment and the economic synergies that unite a nation state. The key to economic development is the interplay between the sectors with increasing and diminishing returns in the same labour market.’’ (How Rich Countries got Rich, Why Poor Countries Stay Poor – Erik Reinert).
Thus, if you wish to bake a cake these are the ingredients. But comprador bourgeoisies and their imperial sponsors have other priorities and preoccupations, nation-building and economic development are not among them.
PART 2
Turning to the EU the regional prototype for the globalization project, it was Patrick Buchanan, an American conservative who once correctly stated in ‘The American Conservative’ that the US Congress ‘is an Israeli occupied zone’’ by which he meant of course that Israel and the Israeli Lobby, both external and internal, has had a huge input into the framing and operation of US foreign policy. In a similar vein the EU is also occupied territory under the tutelage of US imperialism. (This process of blatant meddling in European affairs by the US-CIA started with ‘Operation Gladio’ in the late 1940s) but the perceived enemy was not merely Soviet communism, but also sotto voce European social and political theory and practise, notably, Gaullism and social-democracy, both of which have long since been politically cleansed with the EU being reconfigured as neo-liberal, and (since the alignment of the EU security structures have been aligned with NATO) neo-conservative vassal states overseen and represented by odious little Petainist/Quisling occupation regimes. This is only too apparent when the fawning behaviours of May, Macron and Merkel vis-à-vis the US are observed. Whenever the US master says jump, the Europeans will reply ‘how high’ And this is even more pronounced by the newly arrived Eastern European states. A group which Dick Cheney once described as the ‘new Europe.’ By which meant the political force which was operationalised to fundamentally change the political direction of the EU in the late 20th century. Euro-widening was meant to prevent euro-deepening, and it worked a treat.
The ongoing Americanisation of Europe carries with it the toxic values of liberal individualism, market liberalisation, structural inequality, a philosophy of winner takes all, and a rapacious/murderous imperialism. A nightmare Hobbesian world of a ‘war of everyman against everyman’; John Stuart Mill also weighed in with considerable disdain writing ‘I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that of trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which forms the existing type of social life are the most desirable lot of humankind … (J.S.Mill – Principles of Political Economy).
The Americanisation process has been going on for the last half century. It degrades Europe, causes it to regress, forces it to abandon everything in its progressive past contribution to the capitalist stage of production the antidotes which it allowed it to resist the liberal poison and promote democracy and equality despite it.
‘’Old Europe’’ has nothing to learn from ‘’Young America.’’ There will be no progress possible on any European project as long as the US grand strategy is not foiled.’’ (The Liberal Virus – Samir Amin)
One particular crisis in the EU – the unfolding to the denouement of the Greek debacle – has presented an archetypal learning curve for an understanding of the structural problems involved in the EU and occasioned a virtual industry of copious tracts which purport to explain the crisis, and I have no wish to repeat the whole sorry tale here. I would say, however, that if Syriza was in earnest in taking on the Troika it would have required not just an imaginary backing of a long-defunct and toothless euro social-democracy, but also a withdrawal from the euro – certainly a leap into the unknown. Assuredly this would have been a high-risk policy – and no-one should be under the illusion that there is any easy way out. The trouble is that social-democracy has vanished into history; the soft-options specialists. The SPD (Germany) PS (France) PASOK (Greece) PSOE (Spain) are political organizations which might (occasionally) refer to themselves as social-democrats, or even on occasion ‘socialists’ but of course they are nothing of the sort. ‘By their works shall thee know them.’
And,
‘’ … Syriza’s strategy was not only long-run but also attempted to incorporate the social virtues of Europe’s once dominant social-democratic heritage. What Syriza did not adequately understand, however, was that heritage was now history, buried deep under the refuse pile of new neo-liberal values.’’ (Looting Greece – Jack Rasmus)
Now we have Varoufakis going on to declare that the ‘nation is dead’. Well, that is certainly true of Greece, which is now to all intents and purposes a colony with the grotesque spectacle of Syriza now playing a governing role in a regime that at one time it stridently opposed. The assertion that nations as such are no longer sovereign – a statement which is wrong both theoretically and empirically – but has a limited application. Truth be told some states are more sovereign than others, and the sovereign nations call the shots vis-à-vis the vassal/colonies which are not sovereign. (One wonders if the United States, or Israel or indeed Syria which has been engaged in physically defending its sovereignty for some time, are not sovereign. I think they are, but Mr Varoufakis may wish to differ) Greek sovereignty and democracy disappeared when the Troika and EU finance ministers and French and German banks forced the surrender and took over the running(-down) of the Greek economy. But this was inevitable in a liberal internationalist globalist economy; open borders will simply mean that TNCs will be free to exploit the productive resources of any country in the world – particularly labour – in order to maximise their economic power at the expense of society’s. In other words, societies with open markets, will be unable to impose any effective controls to protect themselves from the rapacious incursions of TNCs as Polanyi pointed out long ago.
So, what does the ‘supra-national’ solution offer other than comforting words.
Try the following.
‘’DiEM2025 stands today as an attempt to learn the lessons of defeat, and to prepare for future struggles for building a stronger network, not of globalists, but left-wing internationalists whose strategies for advance include the dislocation of imperialist economic chains, as well as real progress in building the capacities of national societies to strengthen democracy and provide for the well-being of their nations.’’
All of which strikes this writer as a series of clichés and meaningless abstractions. Please note, the dog-eared phraseology, ‘learn the lessons of defeat’ ‘prepare for future struggles’ ‘strengthen democracy’ and ‘provide for the well-being of their populations.’ You might as well throw in motherhood and apple pie whilst you’re at it.
Then comes the dawn of realization that ‘a future Labour government which -assuming of course that the next government will be Labour – attempting to carry out its declared programme of bringing some elements of the economy under national control ‘’will come under the assault not only from the EU, but also Washington.’’ Really! Never occurred to me that! What does a Labour government do in this hypothetical situation? Surrender, Syriza style. No, we apparently need a Europe-wide supra-national strategy based upon what policies exactly? We must assume, according to the orthodoxy, that the nation state is either dead or dying, an article of faith of the globalist left and the Washington Consensus. Ergo, the policy the ‘left internationalists’ is one of inter alia ‘strengthening democracy’ – all very noble. But provided that the neo-liberal tripod of the three freedoms of movement – capital, labour, commodities – remains in place, political change will not take place. And provided the institutional infrastructure of globalized capitalism – the IMF, WTO, World Bank, the EU are overseeing and enabling the neoliberal project economic and political change will not take place. It is not the shackles of nationalism that give rise to the bureaucratic monstrosity which is the EU but precisely the opposite. The neo-liberal imperatives of open borders, liberalized markets, flexible labour markets and freedom of movement of labour, capital and commodities, might have had something to do with it. Unless these political/ideological roadblocks are addressed the status quo will continue and continue to deteriorate.
In terms of alliance building, political convergence between states cannot be constructed at regional (for example the EU) or even less so at global levels even if it is not achieved firstly at the level of nations. Because whether we like it or not, nations define and manage concrete realities and challenges, and it is only at these levels that changes in the social and political balance of forces to the advantage of the popular classes will or will not occur. Changes at the regional and global level may reflect national advances and certainly facilitate them – but nothing more.
In order to stop the onward march of globalist neoliberalism governments and state must regain control of their economies. There is no single way to achieve this critical goal, but without it hemispheric co-operation will remain little more than an empty rhetorical flourish. Moreover, everywhere electorates are looking to governments to be a counterweight to footloose corporations. It is this intuitive perception to rein-in markets that will increasingly occupy centre-stage between pro and anti the coming decade. For social-political movements the nation-state continues to be the chosen instrument for the organization of society. However much social institutions will have to adapt to new global pressures, what is not in doubt is that the nation-state remains the crucible for equality seeking movements the world over. Efficiency, profitability and competitiveness have not won the hearts and minds of the peoples worldwide.’’ (States Against Markets – Boyer and Drache)
Reform of the EU, which I understand to be the goal of the campaign of pro-EU aligned leftist factions, fails to take into consideration the fact that the EU cannot be reformed since its whole ideological structure and constitution is built upon neo-liberal technocratic assumptions which can clearly be identified in the interior belief-systems of the bureaucracy and consequently the daily practise and deliberations of its internal institutions. Being explicitly designed on a neoliberal model which was cemented by legal statutes have made such changes impossible.
‘’Any belief that the EU can be ‘democratised’ and reformed in a progressive direction is a pious illusion. Not only would this require an impossible alignment of left movements/governments to emerge simultaneously at the international level. On a more fundamental level, a system that was created with the specific aim of constraining democracy cannot be democratised. It can only be rejected.’’ (Thomas Fawzi – Lexit Digest)
Reinforcing the conservative structure of the EU’s political institutions, and here I have in mind the European Parliament, are dominated by two powerful blocs.
1. An alliance of political parties, centre-left and centre-right which form the usual centrist mish-mash, the extreme centre, as it has been called. This centrist bloc is composed predominantly of euro-enthusiasts and who command a working majority in the European parliament and other EU institutions. 2. The geo-political alliance – i.e., the infusion of members of the ‘New Europe’ into the EU, who were generally very pro-American and fanatically Russophobic, this along with the parallel expansion and incorporation of these new states into NATO has served to undermine some of the earlier Gaullist and social democratic traditions in Europe.
It seems clear, therefore, that the pro-EU bloc which dominates the political, economic and strategic agenda of the EU, in addition to the permanent institutional structures which are mandated to carry out existing policies, will continue to do so for any foreseeable future despite the pipe-dreams of the ‘left-wing internationalists’. Even Varoufakis has admitted that this approach is frankly ‘utopian’ – and if this is the case, the Remainer left can only play games and give a leftish veneer in an attempt to reform what they apparently believe is an unstoppable historical development (globalization). (Lexit Digest)
Having said all this the final outcome of this imbroglio may include elements of piecemeal reform and/and or outright rejection, which is what usually happens. We shall see. But it would be useful perhaps to have an open dialogue between all parties involved rather than highly partisan and misleading attempts to smear and shout down opponents – and we are all guilty to a degree in this respect – who may have something positive to offer.
ما يغيظ أيتام الهيمنة «الحميدة» الأميركية، هذه الأيام، هو أنّ الإعلان عن «تمريغ رأسها في وحل أفغانستان»، لم يعد يصدر عمّن يسمّونهم «أبواق الممانعة»، بل عن أبرز المنظّرين، في ما مضى، للنموذج الأميركي على أنّه أفق التطوّر المستقبلي الوحيد والأبدي للإنسانية جمعاء. فرنسيس فوكوياما، المرجع الفكري، حتى لا نقول الروحي، لغالبية بينهم آمنت بنبوءاته، التي سطّرها في كتابه «نهاية التاريخ والإنسان الأخير»، انضمّ إلى الإجماع الواسع وسط النخب الفكرية والسياسية الأميركية والغربية، حول اعتبار دخول «الطالبان» إلى كابول هزيمة منكرة لواشنطن. غير أنّ الأنكى بالنسبة إلى هؤلاء المكلومين، هو أنّ الإجماع المذكور ينطلق من الإقرار بهزيمة الولايات المتحدة ليصل إلى استنتاج آخر، مزلزل، وهو أنّ هيمنتها دخلت في طور متقدّم من الانحسار. أمام مثل هذا الاستنتاج، لم يجد الخائبون، من العرب أساساً، سوى اللجوء إلى مناورة فكرية مكشوفة ومكرورة، وهي التساؤل عن هوية المنتصر وطبيعة مشروعه السياسي والاجتماعي. سبق لأنصار الاستعمار القديم طرح النوع نفسه من الأسئلة، بعد نجاح حركات التحرّر الوطني في انتزاع استقلال بلادها والمصاعب الكبرى التي واجهتها خلال سنوات إعادة البناء الوطني التي تلت. قال هؤلاء: «هل هذا ما قاتلت الشعوب لأجله وضحّت؟ هل فعلت ذلك لكي تنشأ أنظمة حكم سلطوية أو من أجل الحفاظ على نظام الملل المكرّس لتمييز اجتماعي قاسٍ بين فئات الشعب كما حصل في الهند مثلاً؟». طبعاً، الفرضية المضمرة التي يستند إليها مثل هذا الهراء، هي أنّ أوضاع الشعوب المستعمرة كانت أفضل أيام سيطرة الأسياد البيض! الشعور بسعادة غامرة لهزيمة الإمبراطورية العاتية الأميركية في أفغانستان، لا يتأسّس على قاعدة التماهي مع البرنامج السياسي لـ«طالبان». مستقبل هذه البلاد، هو شأن شعبها الذي سيقرّر وحده مصيره وما يراه مناسباً لمصالحه وتطلّعاته من نظام سياسي واجتماعي، وهو قطعاً ليس شأن الغربيين، الذين نشروا الموت والدمار في ربوعها. كم عدد الأفغان الذين قتلتهم الولايات المتحدة وحلفاؤها المتحضّرون: عشرات الآلاف؟ مئات الآلاف؟ المتباكون الحاليون على مصير النساء الأفغانيات والأقلّيات الإثنية، لم يكلّفوا أنفسهم عناء إحصاء عدد الجثث. هذا النوع من التساؤلات التافهة هو إهانة لعقولنا. ينقسم العالم اليوم بين من يشعرون بالسعادة الغامرة لهزيمة واشنطن، ومن يرتعدون ذعراً بسببها. هم محقّون بذلك، لأنّ التحليلات الصادرة في الولايات المتحدة، قبل روسيا أو الصين أو إيران، تؤكّد أننا نشهد تسارعاً للتاريخ، ولكن ليس في الاتجاه الذي استشرفه فوكوياما قبل 30 عاماً.
نهاية حقبة تاريخية
لفرنسيس فوكوياما فضيلة، نادرة بين أترابه من المثقّفين الذين جرى تكريسهم ناطقين رسميين باسم الإيديولوجية السائدة، وهي الاعتراف العلني أكثر من مرّة بخطأ أطروحاته وتحليلاته. هو لم يتردّد، مثلاً، في القطيعة مع تيار «المحافظين الجدد» الذي انتمى إليه لفترة طويلة، وإصدار كتاب نقدي صارم لهم في عام 2006، بعنوان «ما بعد المحافظين الجدد: أميركا على مفترق طرق». يعيد فوكوياما الكرّة، لكنّه هذه المرّة يتراجع عن نظريته التي أكسبته شهرة عالمية حول نهاية التاريخ. ففي مقال على موقع «ذي إيكونوميست”»، بعنوان «نهاية الهيمنة الأميركية»، نُشر منذ أيام، هو يرى أنّ الاستقطاب الاجتماعي – السياسي داخل الولايات المتحدة، الذي تعاظم بفعل حروب التوسّع والسيطرة التي خاضتها، في العقود الثلاثة الأخيرة، والعولمة التي قادتها والأزمة المالية والاقتصادية في عام 2008 – 2009، بات عاملاً رئيسياً في إضعاف موقعها الدولي. ووفقاً له، فإنّ «المجتمع الأميركي منقسم بعمق، وأصبح يعاني صعوبة جمّة للوصول إلى إجماع حول أيّة قضية.
الثقة المفرطة بخلود الإمبراطورية الأميركية، هي سمة راسخة للعقل السياسي لأنصارها بين ظهرانينا
بدأ الاستقطاب حول موضوعات سياسية تقليدية كالضرائب والإجهاض، لكنّه توسّع ليصبح نزاعاً مريراً حول الهُويات الثقافية. طلب الاعتراف من قبل الجماعات التي اعتبرت أنها عانت التهميش من قبل النخب هو واقع التفت إليه قبل 30 سنة على أنّه كعب أخيل الديمقراطيات المعاصرة. كان من المفترض أن يُفضي تهديدٌ كبيرٌ كجائحة كورونا إلى اتحاد المواطنين حول سبل مواجهته. بدلاً من ذلك، غذّت الجائحة الانقسام الداخلي الأميركي، وتحوّل التباعد الاجتماعي وارتداء الأقنعة والتلقيح إلى رموز للتمايز السياسي… خلال الحرب الباردة وحتى بداية الألفية الثانية، ساد إجماع قوي بين النخب السياسية حول ضرورة الحفاظ على موقع أميركي قيادي على الصعيد الدولي. غير أنّ الحروب التي لا نهاية لها في أفغانستان والعراق، غيّرت موقف العديد من الأميركيين حيال التدخّل الخارجي ليس في الشرق الأوسط وحده، بل على مستوى العالم بأسره». مهما كانت العوامل التي يؤدّي تضافرها وتفاعلها إلى إضعاف الموقع المهيمن لقوة مسيطرة في مرحلة تاريخية محدّدة، فإن تداعيات هذا التطور أول ما تظهر في المناطق الخاضعة لسيطرتها. هذا سرّ ما حصل في أفغانستان، وما سيقع في منطقتنا، وفي مناطق أخرى، في الآتي من السنين.
كلّ إمبراطورية إلى زوال
الثقة المفرطة بخلود الإمبراطورية الأميركية، هي سمة راسخة للعقل السياسي لأنصارها بين ظهرانينا. نذير شؤم آخر لهؤلاء أطلقه المؤرّخ الأميركي – البريطاني، نيل فيرغسون، المسكون بنوستالجيا الإمبراطورية البريطانية، والذي أجهر بانتمائه إلى ما أسماه «العصابة النيوامبريالية» عقب الغزو الأميركي – البريطاني للعراق، في عام 2003. ففي مقالٍ بعنوان «نهاية الإمبراطورية الأميركية لن تتمّ بسلام» على موقع «ذي إيكونوميست»، جزم فيرغسون بأنّ مآل الإمبراطورية الأميركية لن يكون أفضل من ذلك الذي وصلت إليه الإمبراطورية البريطانية. هو يعتقد بأنّ اجتماع عوامل كارتفاع المديونية العامة للدولة، وتراجع وزنها الاقتصادي النسبي على المستوى الدولي لمصلحة منافسيها الصاعدين والأكلاف الضخمة للتوسّع الإمبراطوري الزائد، والذي عانت منه بريطانيا في زمن مضى وتعاني منه الولايات المتحدة حالياً، يقود إلى فقدان قطاعات وازنة من مجتمعها للشهية الإمبراطورية. وبحسب فيرغسون، فإنّ «البريطانيين في ثلاثينيات القرن الماضي، كما الأميركيين راهناً، فقدوا هواهم الإمبراطوري، وهو ما لاحظه المراقبون الصينيون وابتهجوا بسببه… المشكلة التي كشفها الانهيار الأميركي في أفغانستان هي أنّ التراجع عن الهيمنة العالمية يندر أن يحصل بشكل سلمي. مهما كانت الصياغة اللغوية المعتمدة للإعلان عن الانسحاب من أطول حرب قامت بشنّها، فإنّ ذلك يوازي الاعتراف بالهزيمة، وليس في نظر الطالبان وحدهم… قناعة السيد بايدن بإمكانية الخروج من أفغانستان على غرار ما فعله نيكسون في فيتنام، هي استعادةٌ لتجربة تاريخية سيّئة لأنّ إذلال أميركا في هذا البلد، كانت له نتائج خطيرة. هي شجّعت الاتحاد السوفياتي وحلفاءه على إثارة القلاقل في أماكن أخرى: في جنوب وشرق أفريقيا، وفي أميركا الوسطى وأفغانستان، التي غُزيت في عام 1979. تكرار سيناريو سقوط سايغون في كابول ستكون له تداعيات سلبية مشابهة».
لم تمنع القناعات الإيديولوجية لمدافعين بارزين عن ريادة النموذج الأميركي لعقود، من الإقرار بالهزيمة الأميركية في أفغانستان، وما تشي به من عوامل بنيوية تسرّع في انحسار هيمنة واشنطن على النطاق العالمي، على عكس مريديهم العرب. هنا تكمن أهمية هذه المقالات، ونحن نحضّهم على قراءتها بتمعّن، كما فعلوا سابقاً عندما روّجوا لنهاية التاريخ والهيمنة «الحميدة» وغيرها من الفقاعات الإيديولوجية.
‘The dependency thesis, like all good (and great) theories can be summed up in a single phrase: Modern ‘’underdevelopment’’ is not ‘’historical backwardness’’ the result of late and insufficient development; it is the product of capitalist development, which is polarizing by nature’. (Andre Gunder Frank -1996.)
The leader of the UK Conservative Party, Mrs Thatcher, first came to power in the UK in 1979 with a brief to end the post-war consensus which had prevailed from the Labour party victory in 1945. Although Labour lost the ensuing elections from 1951-1963, the Conservative Party nonetheless adopted many of Labour’s social-democratic policies, particularly the economic policies, which characterised the post-war years. The same process was to take place when Ronald Reagan established a similar ascendency in the United States. The Thatcher-Reagan duo was born and was to terminate the post-war settlement in both the UK and the US.
Theories were put forward by economic luminaries on both sides of the Atlantic, but particularly by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. The notion that there existed a magic panacea that would banish all the problems associated with the failing British and American economic policies of 1945-1979, formed the basis of the Thatcher-Reagan economic radicalism, which was to be followed by the Blair-Clinton consolidation of the 1990s. The so-called ‘supply-side’ revolution consisted of removing all the controls which undergirded capitalism, and which had been painstakingly put in place during the course of the 20th century, and simply letting the system find its own level. Privatisation, deregulation, and liberalisation were the components in this policy paradigm.
Of course none of this is news; it had been the staple of the West’s chattering classes in the late 20th century. But its effects were more than restricted to the North Atlantic bloc and was to have a global impact changing the political and economic policies and structures of the whole world.
NEO-LIBERALISM & GLOBALIZATION
In international terms ‘free’-trade as it was known was at the heart of the system – a system, which was later to become known as globalization, packaged and sold as an irresistible force of nature. Globalization was considered to be neo-liberalism writ large. But on the contrary, a more nuanced interpretation was to be put forward by one of the more astute commentators on the issue.
‘’The standard and most popular narrative is of globalization as the twin of neo-liberalism, expressing the market-fundamentalist view that state-intervention is bad for the economy. It is argued that the state interferes too much with the self-regulating power of the markets, thereby undermining prosperity. This perspective would explain why Alan Greenspan regarded it as fortunate that globalization was rendering the government as being redundant. We call this the anti-state narrative. An alternative narrative is actually considerably more germane: an anti-politics, specifically an anti-mass politics narrative. Greenspan’s statement incorporated the conventional presumption that the West has reached the frontiers of traditional politics: politics has lost its efficacy in the face of global forces. As a result, especially economic policy, is now pretty irrelevant if not actually detrimental, because everything is driven by – determined by – the impersonal force of globalisation. (1) So it is argued.
It was of course taken as axiomatic that free-trade – a vital component in the new economic paradigm – was always and everywhere the best policy. This conventional wisdom was to become known as the ‘Washington Consensus’ and was given a legitimating cachet by political, business, and academic elites around the world. However many of the elements – if not all – of the Washington Consensus where hardly new, many date back to the 18th and 19th centuries and perhaps beyond. It could be said that the newly emergent mainstream orthodoxy represented a caricature of an outdated and somewhat dubious political economy.
The free-trade canon is, of course, spoken of in almost reverential terms. It is as jealously guarded by the economics priesthood in Wall Street and the City of London and of course academia. In short, the theory is based upon a type of formal logic expounded by the early pioneers of political economy, viz., Adam Smith and David Ricardo; and in particular in Ricardo’s magnum opus, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation first published in 1817. Briefly he argued that nations should specialise in what they do best and in that way world output would be maximised. The hypothetical example he used was England and Portugal and the production of wine and cloth, where he calculated that England should produce cloth and Portugal should produce wine. It was asserted, although no evidence was ever presented, that all would gain from this international division of labour.
However, even a cursory glance at economic history, and particularly the transition from agrarian to industrial societies, demonstrates the weaknesses, and indeed serves to falsify the whole Ricardian model – taken as a model of development. The brute historical fact is that every nation which has successfully embarked upon this transition, including most importantly the US and Germany, has done so adopting catch-up policies which were the exact opposite of those advocated by the free-trade school. (2)
In the world of actually existing capitalism free-trade is the exception rather than the rule. Contemporary free-trade is mainly a matter of intra-firm trading, that is to say, global companies trading with their own subsidiaries and affiliates mainly for tax avoidance purposes, transfer pricing for example. Next come the regional trading blocs – the EU, NAFTA, (which was superseded by the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement USMCA) and Mercosur (in Latin America). With regard to Mercosur there is no common currency as is the case in most of the EU. Thirdly there is barter trade where goods and services are exchanged for other goods and services rather than money. Finally only about 20% of world trade can at most be considered free trade, and even here there are exceptions involving bilateral specifications and agreements.
INTERVENTIONISM
Modernisation and industrialisation, wherever it took place, involved tariffs, non-tariff barriers (3) infant industry protection, export subsidies, import quotas, grants for Research and Development (R&D), patents, currency manipulation, mass education and so forth – a smorgasboard of interventionist policies whereby the economy was directed from above by the state. For example, during its period of industrialisation, the United States erected tariff walls to keep out foreign (mainly British) goods with the intention of nurturing nascent US industries. US tariffs (in percentages of value) ranged from 35% to almost 50% during the period 1820-1931, and the US itself only became in any sense a free trading nation after WW2, that is once its financial and industrial hegemony had been established.
In Europe laissez-faire policies were also eschewed. In Germany in particular tariffs were lower than those in the US, but the involvement of the German state in the development of the economy was decidedly hands on. Again there was the by now standard policy of infant industry protection, and this was supplemented by an array of grants from the central government including scholarships to promising innovators, subsidies to competent entrepreneurs, and the organisation of exhibitions of new machinery and industrial processes. In addition ‘’during this period Germany pioneered modern policy, which was important in maintaining social peace – and thus promoting and encouraging social investment – in a newly unified country.’’ (4)
This path from under-development to modern industrial development, a feature of historical and dynamic economic growth and expansion which has taken place in the US, Europe, and East Asia is not a ‘natural’ progression, it was a matter of state policy. It has been the same everywhere that it has been applied. That being said the Ricardian legacy still prevails. But this legacy takes on the form of a free-floating ideology with little connexion to either practical policy prescriptions or the real world.
Turning to the real world it can be seen, by all of those who have eyes to see, that, ‘’ … history shows that symmetric free-trade between nations of approximately the same level of development, benefits both parties.’’ However, ‘’ … asymmetric trade will lead to the poor nation specialising in being poor, whilst the rich nation will specialise in being rich. To benefit from free-trade, the poor nation must rid itself of its international specialisation of being poor. For 500 years this has not happened anywhere without any market intervention.’’ (5)
GLOBAL ECONOMIC ASYMMETRY
This asymmetry in the global system is both cause and consequence of globalization. It should be borne in mind that the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are the providers of cheap raw material inputs to the industrial countries of North America, Western Europe and East Asia. In technological terms the LDC’s find themselves locked into low value-added, dead-end production where no discernible technology transfer takes place. Thus under-development is a structural characteristic of globalization, not some unfortunate accident. Put another way,
‘’ … If rich nations (the North) as the result of historical tendencies (i.e., colonialism – FL) are relatively well-endowed with vital resources of capital, entrepreneurial ability, and skilled labour, their continued specialisation in products and processes that use these resources intensively can create the necessary conditions for their further growth. By contrast LDCs (the global South) endowed with abundant supplies of cheap unskilled labour, by intentionally specialising in products which use cheap, unskilled labour … often find themselves locked into a stagnant situation which perpetuates their comparative advantage in unskilled unproductive activities. This in turn inhibits the domestic growth of needed capital, and technical skills. Static efficiency becomes dynamic inefficiency, and a cumulative process is set in motion in which trade exacerbates already unequal trading relationships, distributes benefits largely to the people who are already well off, and perpetuates the physical and human resource under-development that characterises most poor nations. (6)
Examples of these unequal economic relationships are not difficult to find. US global trade policy was openly based upon a ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ set up. America’s trade ‘partners’ were somewhat less endowed with both political and economic capital compared with their senior trading associate – this fact provides a number of typical case studies in this connexion.
Agriculture was always a particular example of the double standard inherent in the trade liberalization agenda. The United States always insisted that other countries reduce their barriers to American products and eliminate subsidies for those products which competed against theirs. However, the US kept up barriers for the goods produced by the developing countries whilst it continued to underwrite massive subsidies for their own producers.
Agricultural subsidies encouraged American farmers to produce more output, forcing down global prices for the crops that poor developing countries produce and depend upon. For example, subsidies for one crop alone, cotton, went to 25,000 mostly very well-off US farmers, exceeded in value the cotton that was produced, lowering the global price of cotton enormously. American farmers, who account for a third of global output, despite the fact that US production costs twice the international price of 42 cents per pound, gained at the expense of the 10 million African farmers in Mali, West Africa, who depended on cotton for their meagre living. Several African countries lost between 1 and 2 percent of their entire income, an amount greater than what these particular countries received in foreign aid from the US. The state of Mali received US$37 million in aid but lost US$43 million from depressed cotton prices.
In other grubby little deals the US tried to keep out Mexican tomatoes, and Mexican trucks, Chinese honey, and Ukrainian women’s coats. Whenever an American industry is threatened, the US authorities swing into action, using so-called fair-trade laws, which had been largely blessed by the Uruguay Round.
Such Treaties were little more than a con game between two grossly unequal partners where one of the partners holds all the cards. Nor does it end there. Transnational Companies can and do avoid much local taxation by shifting profits to subsidiaries in low-tax venues by artificially inflating the price which they pay for their intermediate products purchased from these same subsidiaries so as to lower their stated profits. This phenomenon is usually called ‘transfer pricing’ and is a common practice of Transnational Companies (TNCs), one over which host governments can exert little control as long as corporate tax rates differ from one country to the next.
It should also be borne in mind that although the IMF and World Bank enjoin LDCs to adopt market liberalisation policies they apparently see – or conveniently ignore – the past and current mercantilist practices of developed nations. Agriculture, as has been noted, is massively subsidised in both NAFTA and the EU. But it really is a question of don’t do what I do – do as I say.
The hypocrisy at the heart of the problem represents the elephant in the room. We know that countries which attempt to open their markets when they are not ready to do so usually pay a heavy price (Russia during the Yeltsin period and the shock therapy for example). The countries which protect their growing industries until they are ready to trade on world markets – e.g. South Korea –have been the successes, even in capitalist terms. The wave of development during the 19th century and the development of East Asia in the 20th bears witness to this.
NOT IN THE DEVELOPMENT BUSINESS
But the object of the free-trade rhetoric and finger-wagging posture of the developed world is precisely to maintain the status quo. We should be aware that … ‘’Transnational Corporations are not in the development business; their objective is to maximise their return on capital. TNCs seek out the best profit opportunities and are largely unconcerned with issues such as poverty, inequality, employment conditions, and environmental problems.’’ (7)
Given the regulatory capture of the political structures in the developed world by powerful business interests, it seems that this situation is likely to endure for the foreseeable future. Development will only come about when the LDCs take their fate into their own hands and emulate the national building strategies of East Asia.
‘’…markets have a strong tendency to reinforce the status quo. The free market dictates that countries should stick to what they are good at. Stated bluntly, this means that poor countries are supposed to continue with the current practices in low-productivity, low-value added, and low research-intensive activities. But engagement in these activities is exactly what makes them poor in the first place. If they want to leave poverty behind, they have to defy the market and do the more difficult things that bring them higher income and development – there are no two ways about it.’’ (8)
APPENDIX
THE RUSSIAN ROAD.
The legacy of the Yeltsin years had left Russia badly exposed to a triumphalist Western US/EU/NATO bloc. The NATO expansion up to Russia’s western frontiers posed a serious threat to Russia’s security. Internationally Russia was relatively isolated. The socialist political and economic alliances (Warsaw Pact and Comecon) were disbanded, and their previous commercial and economic networks were dismantled. The Russian Federation was excluded from membership of the European Union and was not (yet) a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This was the background for the widespread popular support for the assertive policy of President Putin.
But the geopolitical situation was to say the least – challenging. For his part Putin objected to NATO’s deployment of missiles in Poland and Romania pointed directly at Russia. In 1999 the Visegrad countries, Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary, joined NATO and in 2004 they were joined by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. All these states joined in 2009. Albania and Croatia joined in the same year. Economically, politically and militarily, the ‘’West’’ had arrived at Russia’s borders.
In addition to its external enemies Russia had an abundance of internal foes. This latter group was a product of the Yeltsin model and prior to this a tottering bureaucratic system which barely worked and ultimately collapsed. It was possible to distinguish two main groups which, for better or worse, undermined the Soviet system, which were identified as 1. The Administrative Class, and 2. The Acquiring Class, to which should be added the black-market entrepreneurs who were keen to emulate their western business icons in addition to the American mafia. Powerful reactionary and criminal elements in Russia were keen to bring about deep-rooted changes at the expense of the Russian people.
‘’Ostensibly the reforms in Russia were overseen by a group of senior state officials headed by one Yegor Gaidar and advised, supported and encouraged by senior figures from the US administration, as well as by various American ‘experts.’ But according to an American scholar, Janine Wedel, the Russian reforms were worked out in painstaking detail by a handful of specialists from Harvard University, with close ties to the American government, and were implemented in Russia through the politically dominant ‘Chubais Clan’. (Wedel – 2001). Chubais was officially reported as having engaged foreign consultants including officers of the CIA, to fill leading roles in the State Property Committee. Jonathan Hay, citizen of the USA and Officer in the CIA, was appointed director of the Foreign Technical Aid and Expertise Section and Deputy to the chairperson of the committee (Anatoliy Chubais) within the Expert Commission. The Expert Commission was empowered to review draft decrees of the president of Russia to review for the decisions by the government and instructions by the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the State Property Committee of the Russian Federation of the details of privatisation in various sectors of the economy … The memoirs of Strove Talbott, Assistant to the US President William Jefferson Clinton on Russian affairs, left no doubt that the US administration viewed (the then) Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, as a reliable conduit for its interests in Russia.
The US neo-liberal economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrei Shleifer, and Jonathan Hay, had an unprecedented degree of influence over Russia’s economic policy which was unparalleled for a sovereign state. Together with Gaidar and Chabais they formulated decisions that were inserted directly into Presidential decrees … Analysis shows that the implementation of Russian reforms organically combined an aspiration by Soviet bureaucrats to transform themselves from State functionaries into private property owners, and a desire on the part of the ruling elites in the West to impose their own system of values on their historical rival. It was thus inappropriate to speak of Russia and its neighbours in the CIS as having been independent in their conduct of radical economic reforms, and this very lack of independence was crucial for determining the strategy applied in these transformations.’’ (9)
Be that as it may, the damage to Russia carried out and orchestrated by both internal and external enemies was to push back Russian development at least two decades, if not more. Russia has been described by various informed opinion as being a ‘semi-peripheral economy’ and there is some truth in this, its main exports being raw materials and military and defence hardware. But this was a choice forced upon Russia by the US-western alliance. At the turn of the 19/20 century Russia needed to defend itself from western aggression. There were two absolute priorities. Agricultural security and military security. This was the sine qua non for Russia’s continued survival and development. The mixed economy – a characteristic of the western economic models, was for the moment, out of reach. But then the west started to run into its own problems, so things began to balance, particularly with the emergence of the Russian-Chinese alliance. However, the Yeltsin period which had produced a crop of cronies, co-conspirators, criminal and mafia elements, are still hidden in the shadows, often in very high places. The struggle goes on. La Lotta Continua.
NOTES
(1) Phillip Mullan – Beyond Confrontation – p.36
(2) These economic policies as advocated by Alexander Hamilton in the US. In the month of January of 1791, the Secretary of Treasury to the then President George Washington’s administration, Mr. Alexander Hamilton, proposed a seemingly innocuous excise tax on spirits distilled within the United States of America. The move was part of Hamilton’s initiative to encourage industrialization and higher degree of national sufficiency. In his December 1791 report to manufacturers, Hamilton called for protective tariffs to spur domestic production. Also, Hamilton called for the reduction of duties on goods that were carried by American ships.
This was also the case of Freidrich List in Germany in his short work – The National System of Political Economy.
(3) A non-tariff barrier (NTB) is a policy implemented by a government that acts as a cost or impediment to trade. It is not tariffs on products but rather different rules and regulations that are often the biggest practical barrier to trade between countries. Examples of non-tariff barriers include rules on labelling and safety standards on products. Other types of non-tariff barriers to trade can also be the result of policies that differentiate between national and international companies and firms. For example, domestic subsidies by governments to a carmaker may help keep that manufacturer in their country. However, that acts as essentially an indirect non-tariff barrier to other car companies looking to compete. Governments are also often likely to give preferential treatment to companies in their own country when it comes to government procurement contracts. Governments also buy products from their own industries in preference to foreign companies, these are called procurement policies another NTB. This can be seen as an impediment to free and fair international trade.
(4) Ha-Joon Chang – Kicking Away the Ladder – p.32/33.
(5) How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor. – Erik Reinert. It could be argued that political intervention would be the prerequisite for an industrial policy.
(6) Development Economics – Todaro and Smith – 2009
(7) Todaro and Smith – Development Economics – Ibid.
(8) Ha-Joon Chang – Bad Samaritans – p.210
(9) Ruslan Dzarasov – Russia, Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism – Semi-Peripheral Russia and the Ukraine Crisis – pp.82-97
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) centennial takes place this week at the heart of an incandescent geopolitical equation.
China, the emerging superpower, is back to the global prominence it enjoyed throughout centuries of recorded history, while the declining Hegemon is paralyzed by the “existential challenge” posed to its fleeting, unilateral dominance.
A mindset of full spectrum confrontation already sketched in the 2017 U.S. National Security Review is sliding fast into fear, loathing and relentless Sinophobia.
Add to it the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership graphically exposing the ultimate Mackinderian nightmare of Anglo-American elites jaded by “ruling the world” – for only two centuries at best.
The Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping may have coined the ultimate formula for what many in the West defined as the Chinese miracle:
“To seek truth from facts, not from dogmas, whether from East or West”.
So this was never about divine intervention, but planning, hard work, and learning by trial and error.
The recent session of the National People’s Congress provides a stark example. Not only it approved a new Five-Year Plan, but in fact a full road map for China’s development up to 2035: three plans in one.
What the whole world saw, in practice, was the manifest efficiency of the Chinese governance system, capable of designing and implementing extremely complex geoeconomic strategies after plenty of local and regional debate on a vast range of policy initiatives.
Compare it to the endless bickering and gridlock in Western liberal democracies, which are incapable of planning for the next quarter, not to mention fifteen years.
The best and the brightest in China actually do their Deng; they couldn’t care less about the politicizing of governance systems. What matters is what they define as a very effective system to make SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) development plans, and put them in practice.
The 85% popular vote
At the start of 2021, before the onset of the Year of the Metal Ox, President Xi Jinping emphasized that “favorable social conditions” should be in place for the CCP centennial celebrations.
Oblivious to waves of demonization coming from the West, for Chinese public opinion what matters is whether the CCP delivered. And deliver it did (over 85% popular approval). China controlled Covid-19 in record time; economic growth is back; poverty alleviation was achieved; and the civilization-state became a “moderately prosperous society” – right on schedule for the CCP centennial.
Since 1949, the size of the Chinese economy soared by a whopping 189 times. Over the past two decades, China’s GDP grew 11-fold. Since 2010, it more than doubled, from $6 trillion to $15 trillion, and now accounts for 17% of global economic output.
No wonder Western grumbling is irrelevant. Shanghai Capital investment boss Eric Li succinctly describes the governance gap; in the U.S., government changes but not policy. In China, government doesn’t change; policy does.
This is the background for the next development stage – where the CCP will in fact double down on its unique hybrid model of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
The key point is that the Chinese leadership, via non-stop policy adjustments (trial and error, always) has evolved a model of “peaceful rise” – their own terminology – that essentially respects China’s immense historical and cultural experiences.
In this case, Chinese exceptionalism means respecting Confucianism – which privileges harmony and abhors conflict – as well as Daoism – which privileges balance – over the boisterous, warring, hegemonic Western model.
This is reflected in major policy adjustments such as the new “dual circulation” drive, which places greater emphasis on the domestic market compared to China as the “factory of the world”.
Past and future are totally intertwined in China; what was done in previous dynasties echoes in the future. The best contemporary example is the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – the overarching Chinese foreign policy concept for the foreseeable future.
As detailed by Renmin University Professor Wang Yiwei, BRI is about to reshape geopolitics, “bringing Eurasia back to its historical place at the center of human civilization.” Wang has shown how “the two great civilizations of the East and the West were linked until the rise of the Ottoman Empire cut off the Ancient Silk Road”.
Europe moving seaward led to “globalization through colonization”; the decline of the Silk Road; the world’s center shifting to the West; the rise of the U.S.; and the decline of Europe. Now, Wang argues, “Europe is faced with a historic opportunity to return to the world center through the revival of Eurasia.”
And that’s exactly what the Hegemon will go no holds barred to prevent.
Zhu and Xi
It’s fair to argue that Xi’s historical counterpart is the Hongwu emperor Zhu, the founder of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The emperor was keen to present his dynasty as a Chinese renewal after Mongol domination via the Yuan dynasty.
Xi frames it as “Chinese rejuvenation”: “China used to be a world economic power. However, it missed its chance in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent dramatic changes, and was thus left behind and suffered humiliation under foreign invasion …we must not let this tragic history repeat itself.”
The difference is that 21st century China under Xi will not retreat inward as it did under the Ming. The parallel for the near future would rather be with the Tang dynasty (618-907), which privileged trade and interactions with the world at large.
To comment on the torrent of Western misinterpretations of China is a waste of time. For the Chinese, the overwhelming majority of Asia, and for the Global South, much more relevant is to register how the American imperial narrative – “we are the liberators of Asia-Pacific” – has now been totally debunked.
In fact Chairman Mao may end up having the last laugh. As he wrote in 1957, “if the imperialists insist on launching a third world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists; it is also likely that the whole structure of imperialism will utterly collapse.”
Martin Jacques, one of the very few Westerners who actually studied China in depth, correctly pointed out how “China has enjoyed five separate periods when it has enjoyed a position of pre-eminence – or shared pre-eminence – in the world: part of the Han, the Tang, arguably the Song, the early Ming, and the early Qing.”
So China, historically, does represent continuous renewal and “rejuvenation” (Xi). We’re right in the middle of another one of these phases – now conducted by a CCP dynasty that, incidentally, does not believe in miracles, but in hardcore planning. Western exceptionalists may continue to throw a fit 24/7 ad infinitum: that will not change the course of history.
“I flew to Afghanistan, to the Kunar Valley — a rugged, mountainous region on the border with Pakistan. What I saw on that trip reinforced my conviction that only the Afghans have the right and responsibility to lead their country and that more and endless American military force could not create or sustain a durable Afghan government.” President Joe Biden explained in his remarks in the White House on 14 April 2021, where he announced the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan starting from 1 May 2021 and completes on 11 September 2021.
The US invaded Afghanistan to fight against the tribal system of Afghanistan and create a modern democratic government based on American vision. The US, with the help of its allies, and full military might, after spending Trillion Dollars, killing millions of human beings (from either side), devastating the whole country completely, is concluded that the Afghan war is unwinnable and the American must leave Afghanistan. Today in war-torn Afghanistan, there is no electricity because all dams & powerhouses were bombed. No infrastructure, all damaged in the ruthless bombing, no education, no health care, scarcity of food, medicine, fuel, etc. Homes were damaged, crops were destroyed, businesses were damaged—– one of the heaviest bombing and explosive used in the history of humankind. The poor Afghans are living a miserable life, all due to prolonged imposed war.
The US used state of the art, latest, advanced, most lethal weapons, modern war tactics, well-trained troops, and all possible technologies to win this war but failed adversely. The Allies, who were very much proactive in the early days of the war but calmed down gradually and today are not so supportive of the US on the Afghan war.
The number of Nato forces peaked at about 140,000 in 2011 but decreased in subsequent years as Nato countries wound down combat operations, handing over control to local security forces. Countries with troops still in Afghanistan include the US, Georgia, Germany, Turkey, Romania, Italy, the UK, and Australia. The US and allies created an Afghan Army of around 300,000 on the most modern lines and trained & equipped with the Western latest weapons. Yet failed to gain control over Afghanistan. Yet more than 70% of Afghanistan is under Taliban control.
Although the Afghan war has destroyed Afghanistan severely, it at the same time has also cost heavily to the US itself too. Not only Trillion dollars cost of the war, but thousands of servicemen’s lives, and substantial mental disturbance to servicemen involved in the Afghan war. Yet, the most prominent impact has been visible that instead of fighting the tribal system in Afghanistan, America itself has turned into a tribal society. The recent number of shootings and killings are increased sharply, depicting the visible change in the American society – tribal society – where might is right – gun culture. The exponential growth of crimes is undesired at all. Although President Trump created hate in American society and supported white-supremacist, the roots of hatred have existed for a long time, he was just a catalyst. It might take decades to normalize the situation in America.
Afghanistan is an old civilization and one of the oldest countries, which foreign invaders in history never defeated. Afghans have their own tradition of bravery. They might fight internally but are united against any intruders. Their tribal society is strong enough to resolve their issue, and any interference from outside or imposed system may not succeed. It took two decades for to American understand the nature of Afghan society and the solution to their problems. It is never too late; even if the American troop’s exit from Afghan, there might be a vacuum for the time being, and danger of bloodshed moves around. Ultimately, it is the Afghans only who have to resolve their issues. An Afghan let, Afghan-owned solution can be sustainable only.
The Americans should focus on how to help Afghanistan in reconstruction after the troops’ withdrawal. It might require several trillion dollars to rebuild Afghanistan. The US and allies who destroyed Afghanistan have the moral obligations to help Afghanistan generously.
However, the UN may also proactively pursue the reconstruction of Afghanistan after the withdrawal. After the world wars, an agreement like German and Japanese (Potsdam Agreement) agreements needed to be reached between Afghanistan and America, including allies, for war compensation. China and Russia may become guarantors of such an agreement for implementation.
However, Afghans are not the sons of lessor God and deserve equal treatment and access to a quality life. After spending four decades in war, at least they deserve a peaceful and prosperous life. It needs enormous funding, and only those who are responsible for this destruction are supposed to help them appropriately.
It is not the first time which happened with America, where it plans some things and ends up in entirely opposite. I recalled my days in China in the early 1980s, when American and European entrepreneurs were entering China to occupy the vast niche market of China. That was the era of China opening to the outside world and introducing economic reforms. China facilitated market access, and American & European businessmen and investors flooded the Chinese market with foreign products. Those were the days when China was facing a shortage of everything like food, consumer products and etc. A quota system was introduced to buy items of daily life. They made huge profits in the early days, but gradually, they shifted their industry to China to avail themselves of China’s cheap raw material and cheap labor cost. It was in the best interest of foreign companies to manufacture in China to cut down the cost and maximize their profit. But sooner, they became the market of China.
Against their original plan to occupy the Chinese market, they became a market for Chinese products. The worst phenomenon was visible in the early days of the Pandemic when America was dependant on China on essential items like Masks, Sanitizers, Ventilators, Testing kits, and toilet papers, etc. China has become the manufacturing factory for the world, and no other country can compete with China in daily consumer products.
China has emerged as the second-largest economy in the world and the biggest trading partner with most of the nations. China shares one-third of the global economy and supplies almost 70% of consumer products to the whole world. China has become a global power already.
The American experience in Vietnam War, Somaliya War, Syrian War, and Middle-East wars is not much different. In Seven Decades, hardly any war Which Americans can claim a total victory. However, during the World wars, the US was a winner.
Trust, next couple of decades, the US must focus on its domestic issues and re-evaluate its mistakes in the perspective of changed geopolitics. Stop meddling in other nations and countries, stop thinking to change the world order as per the wishes of America. Let others live the life as they desire and live your own life according to your own wishes. Let peace, stability, and prosperity boom around the world, avoid imposing wars on other nations. Respect humanity and respect human lives.
Author: Prof. Engr. Zamir Ahmed Awan, Sinologist (ex-Diplomat), Editor, Analyst, Non-Resident Fellow of CCG (Center for China and Globalization), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan. (E-mail: awanzamir@yahoo.com).
I think it was Sir Ian Gilmour (now deceased) who, as one time member of Mrs Thatcher’s first Cabinet in 1979, referred to her economic policy as ‘Clause 4 dogmatism in reverse.’ (1) This was an apt description from a thinking Tory. The notion that there existed a magic panacea which would banish all the problems associated with Britain’s (and the world’s) economic ills, formed the basis of Thatcherism, Reaganism, and the Third-wayism of Clinton and Blair. The so-called ‘supply-side’ revolution consisted of removing all the controls from capitalism which had been painstakingly put in place over the centuries, and simply letting the system rip – and rip it did. The 1970s was the beginning of the interregnum to the new order of the 1980s and beyond, which had ushered in policies of privatisation, deregulation, liberalisation which were the key components of this policy paradigm.
In international terms free-trade and free-markets were of course at the heart of the system – a system which was to become known as ‘globalization’ and/or neoliberalism packaged and sold as an irresistible force of nature. It was considered, by all the people that mattered, that free-trade was always and everywhere the best policy. This view was codified in what was to become known as the ‘Washington Consensus.’ The new conventional wisdom was conceived of and given a legitimating cachet by political, business, MSM and academic elites around the world.
However, many of the elements – if not all – of the Washington Consensus were hardly new, and indeed many date back to the 18th and 19th centuries and perhaps beyond. It could be said that the newly emergent mainstream orthodoxy represented a caricature of an outdated and somewhat dubious political economy.
The theory that free trade between nations would maximise output and welfare was first mooted by Adam Smith, but its final elaboration was conducted by David Ricardo in his famous work The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation first published in 1817. Briefly, he argued that nations should specialise in what they do best and in that way world output would be maximised. This policy was called ‘comparative advantage’. The hypothetical example he used was England and Portugal and the production of wine and cloth, where he calculated that England should produce cloth and Portugal should produce wine. It was asserted, though no evidence was ever presented, that all would gain from this international division of labour. The theory is in fact full of unsubstantiated and seductive notions, but its practical application is limited. Because it is based upon so many rigid and static assumptions, it is especially appealing to those of a status quo disposition, including most present- day globalist thinkers.
However, even a cursory glance at economic history, and particularly the transition from agrarian to industrial societies, demonstrates the weaknesses, and indeed, serves to falsify the whole Ricardian trade paradigm. The brute historical fact is that every nation which has successfully embarked on this transition – including the UK – has done so adopting policies which were the exact opposite of those advocated by the free-trade school. In the world of actually existing capitalism, free-trade is the exception rather than the rule. Contemporary world trade is mainly a matter of intra-firm trading, that is, global companies trading with their own affiliates and subsidiaries in different countries, mainly for tax avoidance purposes (see below). Next there are regional trading blocs like the EU or US which erect tariff barriers to non-members. Thirdly there is barter trade where goods and services are exchanged for other goods and services rather than money. Finally, only about 20% at most, can be considered to be free trade, and even here there are exceptions involving bilateral specifications and agreements.
Modernisation and industrialisation, wherever it took place, involved tariffs, infant industry protection, export subsidies, import quotas, grants for R&D, patents, currency manipulation, mass education and so forth … a smorgasboard of interventionist policies whereby the economy was directed from above by the state. For example during its period of industrialisation the United States erected tariff walls to keep out foreign (mainly British) goods with the intention of nurturing nascent US industries. US tariffs (in percentages of value) ranged from 35 to almost 50% during the period 1820-1931, and the US itself only became in any sense a free-trading nation after World War II, that is once its financial and industrial hegemony had been established. In Europe laissez-faire was also eschewed. In Germany in particular tariffs were lower in the US, but the involvement of the German state in the development of the economy was decidedly hands-on. Again there was the by now standard policy of infant industry protection, and this was supplemented by an array of grants from the central government including scholarships to promising innovators, subsidies to competent entrepreneurs, and the organisation of exhibitions of new machinery and industrial processes. In addition, ‘’during this period Germany pioneered modern social policy, which was important in maintaining social peace – and thus promoting investment – in a newly unified country … ‘’(2)
It has been the same everywhere, yet the Ricardian legacy still prevails. But this legacy takes on the form of a free-floating ideology with little connexion to either practical policy prescriptions or the real world. It has been said in this respect that ‘’ … practical results have little to do with the persuasiveness of ideology.’’(3) This much is true, but it rather misses the point: the function of ideology is not to supply answers to problems in the real world, but simply to give a Panglossian justification to the prevalent order of things.
Turning to the real world it will be seen that ‘’ … history shows that symmetric free-trade, between nations of approximately the same level of development, benefits both parties.’’ However, ‘’asymmetric trade will lead to the poor nation specialising in being poor, while the rich nation will specialise in being rich. To benefit from free trade, the poor nation must rid itself of its international specialisation of being poor. For 500 years this has not happened anywhere without any market intervention.’’ (4)
This asymmetry in the global system is both cause and consequence of globalization. It should be borne in mind that the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are suppliers of cheap raw material inputs to the industrialised countries of North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. In technological terms the LDCs find themselves locked into low value-added, low-productivity, low-research intensive dead-end production, where no discernible development or technology transfer takes place. Thus under-development is a structural characteristic of globalization, not some unfortunate accident. Put another way:
‘’ … if rich nations (the North) as the result of historical forces, are relatively well endowed with the vital resources of capital, entrepreneurial ability, and skilled labour, their continued specialisation in products and processes that use the resources intensively can create the necessary conditions for their further growth. By contrast LDCs (the global-South) endowed with abundant supplies of cheap, unskilled labour, by intentionally specialising in products that use cheap, unskilled labour … will often find themselves locked into a stagnant situation that perpetuates their comparative advantage in unskilled, unproductive activities. This in turn inhibits the domestic growth of needed capital, entrepreneurship, and technical skills. Static efficiency becomes dynamic inefficiency, and a cumulative process is set in motion in which trade exacerbates already unequal trading relationships, distributes benefits largely to the people who are already well-off, and perpetuates the physical and human resource under-development that characterises most poor nations.’’ (5)
The cocoa-chocolate industry (hereafter CCI) of the West African nations, Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Nigeria are a case in point. These countries produce the majority of the world’s raw cocoa beans. But of course the industry as a whole is controlled by western multinationals such as Hershey, Nestlé and Cadbury-Schweppes (now Kraft). The structure of this industry – vertically integrated – is very typical of the relationship between the LDCs and the developed world. The low value-added part of the industry – growing and harvesting the beans – is left to individual farmers in West Africa. Buying agencies, either very close to, or in fact subsidiaries of multinational companies (MNCs), then buy the raw material at prices usually dictated by the MNCs. This asymmetrical relationship between supplier and sole buyers (the African farmers) is termed ‘monopsony’ in the economics jargon. It should be understood that large companies not only over-price their products to the final consumer, but also under-price their purchases from their captive suppliers. From then on, the various stages of the processing supply chain are in the hands of the parent company. From raw beans, to roasting, milling, refining, manufacturing of chocolate or cocoa, shipping, and packaging, branding and advertising – all of these stages add value to the product, value which is garnered by the MNC. The exporting African nations are left with the low or no value-added end of the operation, a technological cul-de-sac.
Nor does it end there. MNCs can avoid much local taxation by shifting profits to subsidiaries in low-tax venues by artificially inflating the price which it pays for intermediate products purchased from these same subsidiaries so as to lower its stated profits. This phenomenon is known as transfer pricing and is a common practice of MNCs – one over which host governments can exert little control as long as corporate tax rates differ from one country to the next. Hypothetically it works as follows:
Take a company called World Inc. which produces a type of food in Africa; it then processes it and sells the finished product in the United States. World Inc. does this via three subsidiaries: Africa Inc. (in Africa Malawi ), Haven Inc. (in a tax haven, British Virgin Islands with zero taxes) and America Inc. (in the United States).
1. Now Africa Inc. sells the produce to Haven Inc. at an artificially low price, resulting in Africa Inc. having artificially low profits – and consequently an artificially low tax bill in Africa. 2. Then Haven Inc. sells the product to America Inc. at a very high price – almost as high as the final retail price at which 3. America Inc. sells the processed product. As a result, America Inc. also has artificially low profitability, and an artificially low tax bill in America. By contrast, however, Haven Inc. has bought at a very low price, and sold at a very high price, artificially creating very high profits. However, Haven Inc is located in a tax haven – so it pays no taxes on those profits. Easy Peasy, no?
Bear in mind also that although the IMF and World Bank enjoin LDCs to adopt market liberalisation policies, they apparently see – or conveniently ignore – the past and current mercantilist practices of developed nations. Agriculture for example is massively subsidised in both the US and the EU. But it really is a question of don’t do what I do – do as I say. This hypocrisy at the heart of the problem represents the elephant in the room. We know that countries which attempt to open their markets when they are not ready to do so usually pay a heavy price (in the 1990s with Russia and the free-market shock-therapy for example). The countries which protect their growing industries until they are ready to trade on world markets have been the successes – even in capitalist terms. The wave of development in the 19th century and the development of East Asian economies during the 20th century bears witness to this.
But the object of the free-trade rhetoric and finger wagging posture of the developed world is precisely to maintain the status quo. We should be aware that: ‘’… multinational corporations are not in the development business; their objective is to maximise their return on capital. MNCs seek out the best profit opportunities and are largely unconcerned with issues such as poverty, inequality, employment conditions, and environmental problems.’’ (6)
Given the regulatory capture of the political structures in the developed world by powerful business interests, it seems that this situation is likely to endure for the foreseeable future. Development will only come about when the LDCs take their fate into their own hands and emulate the nation-building strategies of East Asia and in the 19th century by Germany and the United States. These leaders and leading nations were not to sit back and let the British rule the roost. They acted and they overcame.
Germany: Georg Friedrich List (1789-1846). He was a forefather of the German historical school of economics and ‘National System of Political Economy’. He argued for the German Customs Union from a Nationalist standpoint. He advocated imposing tariffs on imported goods while supporting free trade of domestic goods and stated the cost of a tariff should be seen as an investment in a nation’s future productivity.
The USA – Alexander Hamilton In the aftermath of ratification, Hamilton continued to expand on his interpretations of the Constitution to defend his proposed economic policies as Secretary of the Treasury. Credited today with creating the foundation for the U.S. financial system, Hamilton wrote three reports addressing public credit, banking, and raising revenue. In addition to the National Bank, Alexander Hamilton founded the U.S. Mint, created a system to levy taxes on luxury products (such as whiskey), and outlined an aggressive plan for the development of internal manufacturing.
The USA – President – Ulysses S Grant
“For centuries England has relied on protection, has carried it to extremes and has obtained satisfactory results from it. There is no doubt that it is to this system that it owes its present strength. After two centuries, England has found it convenient to adopt free trade because it thinks that protection can no longer offer it anything. Very well then, gentlemen, my knowledge of our country leads me to believe that within 200 years, when America has gotten out of protection all that it can offer, it too will adopt free trade.” (7)
Markets have a strong tendency to reinforce the status quo. The free market dictates that countries stick to what they are good at. Stated bluntly, this means that poor countries are supposed to continue with their current engagement in low productivity activities. But engagement in those activities is exactly what makes them poor. If they want to leave poverty behind, they have to defy the market and do the more difficult things that bring them higher incomes – it is as simple as that, and there are no two ways about it.
NOTES
(1) Clause 4 was part of the British Labour Party’s early Constitution. But is no longer in any real sense part of the constitution of the contemporary UK Labour Party, setting out the aims and values of the party (New Labour) as it is now called. The original clause, adopted in 1918, called for common ownership of heavy industry, and proved controversial in later years; the then leader, Hugh Gaitskell, attempted to remove the clause after Labour’s loss in the 1959 general election.
In 1995, under the leadership of Tony Blair, a new (revisionist) Clause IV was adopted. This was seen as a significant moment in Blair’s redefinition of the party as New Labour, but has survived and become a centrist party along with sister parties in Europe and the Democratic party in the US beyond the New Labour branding.
(2) Kicking Away the Ladder – Ha-Joon Chang
(3) The Trillion Dollar Meltdown – Charles Morris
(4) How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor – Erik Reinert.
U.S. leaders seek to suggest that America still has the power to alter ‘reality’ to fit to its own exceptionalist myth.
U.S. leaders seek to suggest that America still has the power to alter ‘reality’ to fit to its own exceptionalist myth.
President Putin in 2007 (at Munich) challenged the West: ‘We didn’t. You did; You continuously attack Russia; but we shall not bend’. The audience sniggered. Now, speaking at (a virtual) Davos this last month, after an absence of twelve years from that forum, President Putin held up a mirror to the key ‘influencers’ of the West: ‘See what you have become in the interim; Look at yourself, and be worried’.
This was not so much a be-gloved slap, prefacing duel-by-weapons-of-choice, but an earnest caution. At its’ bottom is a warning that the socio-economic dynamics set into motion by the western zero-interest, debt-led model have not just thrown swaths of society under the economic bus, but rather, that the internal socio-economic catastrophe is being widely vented at external ‘others’. That is, projected psychically abroad, in a lust to fight imaginary demons.
Italy in the 1400s had experienced psychological stresses somewhat similar to todays’ – the upending old ‘myths’, old cultural ties and sources of social cohesion, triggered by the gathering storm of Reformation and Scientific Enlightenment. The new leaders insisted to put old values and the ethos of ‘continuity’ to the auto da fé bonfires of sceptical rationalism’s shiny, new culture. There was then, no China to blame, but the witch and Satan hysteria of that era – a mass collective hysteria – led to some ten thousand Europeans being ‘cancelled’: they were burned alive for clinging to ancient ways (judged to be denials of ‘Truth’). Ultimately the Inquisition was instantiated to condemn and punish heresy.
“This [crisis in the economic models], in turn, is causing today a sharp polarisation of public views, provoking the growth of populism, right- and left-wing radicalism and other extremes … All this is inevitably affecting the nature of international relations, and is not making them more stable or predictable. International institutions are becoming weaker, regional conflicts are emerging one after another, and the system of global security is deteriorating … the differences are leading to a downward spiral”.
“The situation could take an unexpected and uncontrollable turn – unless we do something to prevent this. There is a chance that we will face a formidable break-down in global development, which will be fought as a war of all, against all … And attempts to deal with contradictions through the appointment of internal and external enemies [to scapegoat] the negative demographic consequences of the ongoing social crisis and the crisis of values, could result in humanity losing entire civilisational and cultural continents”.
The existing model, Putin explained, seems to have inverted ‘means and ends’ – Means (as in the Great Re-set’s emphasis on technological – even trans human – instrumentation of the economy) seem to have taken primacy over humans as its Ends.
Yes, globalisation may have lifted billions out of poverty, yet as Putin points out, “it has led to significant imbalances in global socioeconomic development, and these are a direct result of the policy pursued in the 1980s, which was often vulgar or dogmatic”. It has made “economic stimulation with traditional methods, through an increase in private loans virtually impossible. The so-called quantitative easing is only increasing the bubble of the value of financial assets and deepening the social divide. The widening gap between the real and virtual economies … presents a very real threat and is fraught with serious and unpredictable shocks …”.
“Hopes that it will be possible to reboot the old growth model are connected with rapid technological development. Indeed, during the past 20 years we have created a foundation for the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution based on the wide use of AI and automation and robotics. However, this process is leading to new structural changes, I am thinking in particular of the labour market. This means that very many people could lose their jobs unless the state takes effective measures to prevent this. Most of these people are from the so-called middle class, which is the basis of any modern society.”
Putin points out that these flaws, inherent within the western growth model, and the ‘turn’ to Big Tech as salvation, were not specifically caused by the pandemic. The latter nonetheless, has pulled the mask from the face of the economic model, and also exacerbated its noxious symptoms:
“The coronavirus pandemic … which became a serious challenge for humankind, only spurred and accelerated the structural changes, the conditions for which had been created long ago. Needless to say, there are no direct parallels in history. However, some experts – and I respect their opinion – compare the current situation to the 1930s [the Great Depression]”.
Putin hints, but does not say explicitly, that that the pandemic, by aggravating the socio-economic stress, precisely has contributed to the general hysteria (and polarisation) – and the hunt for external enemies (i.e. such as the ‘CCP virus’).
Putin notes a further contributing factor:
“Modern technological giants, especially digital companies, have started playing an increasing role in the life of society. Much is being said about this now, especially regarding the events that took place during the election campaign in the U.S. They are not just some economic giants. In some areas, they are de facto competing with states. Their audiences consist of billions of users that pass a considerable part of their lives in these eco systems. In the opinion of these companies, their monopoly is optimal for organising technological and business processes. Maybe so – but society is wondering whether such monopolism meets public interests”.
Putin here alludes to something more troubling – the failure of the system-model to deliver on the promise of prosperity and opportunity ‘for all’, and specifically for the less advantaged in society. Can this flaw not be said to be directly related to the rise of Tech soft totalitarianism? Since the systemic nature of the failure cannot be admitted, is it then so surprising there has been a resort to big Tech enforcement of its more favourable version of reality (i.e. one that insists that the systemic failures all derive, rather, from historic racism and injustices, and they will not countenance any dissent from this narrative)?
The core idea here – the response to civic, socio-economic anger – is that a combination of unparalleled monetary injection, radical positive discrimination prioritising non-white identities, plus access to élite oligarchic Tech expertise, will solve most of society’s problems. This is pure ideology. But, unable to deal directly with the evidence of systematic failings and economic ‘rigging’ (that being far too sensitive an issue), western leaders work instead to alter the definition of reality. When you are attempting to extend a make-believe economy by printing more and more debt, in spite of its failed history, it is no wonder you have to silence dissent.
Those then, that do not embrace the propaganda that big Tech and the corporate media relentlessly push, need to be de-platformed, and pushed to the fringes of society. In a striking echo of that earlier Italian era of psychic tensions, the New York Times is now asking for the Biden administration to appoint a “Reality Czar” who will be given authority to deal with “misinformation” and “extremism” (shades of the Inquisition)?
Putin’s speech was a withering de-construction (polite, and very measured) of where we stand – and why. Did his audience hear? And will President Putin’s call for a return to the ‘classic’ economic model; to the real economy; to job creation; comfortable living standards, and education with opportunity for the young, have any impact?
Probably not, unfortunately. One only has to note the European ‘hysteria’ for the quick return to absolute ‘normal’ – to everything being ‘just as it was before’ – and above all, to ‘our summer holidays’. Again Putin alludes, but does not say it: The pandemic has exposed the brittleness, the friability, of European society. It finds hardship impossible to endure (even by those well insulated from the true hardships, which have been real, but only for some: “Worse than WW2, this pandemic”, one veteran said to me this morning!). The space for true (and urgent) structural reforms is disappearingly small.
The future course for the western economies is obvious – one only has to observe the return of (former Fed head) Janet Yellen to the U.S. Treasury; of (former IMF head) Christine Lagarde to the ECB and (former ECB head) Mario Draghi as PM in Italy, to understand that a full blown ‘reflation trade’ is underway.
And as for Putin’s caution about “attempts to deal with contradictions through the appointment of internal and external enemies [to scapegoat] the negative demographic consequences of the ongoing social crisis”, this looks no more promising than the financial scene.
Recently, an anonymous former U.S. government official wrote a paper of policy recommendations on China. The Atlantic Council and Politico both published versions of the piece, and they agreed to keep the author’s identity under wraps for reasons known only to them. The Atlantic Council claims that anonymity was necessary because of “the extraordinary significance of the author’s insights and recommendations”. It is not clear however, why they find these insights and recommendations to be so extraordinary – the paper simply is yet another blueprint for regime change (in this case, a coup against the CCP).
Quite possibly, the door to a peaceful resolution of U.S. tensions with China already is closed. China’s intention always has been peacefully, through economic integration, to re-absorb Taiwan into China. It is committed to that. But it seems from Biden Administration statements that it is equally committed to exacerbating the Taiwan autonomy issue sufficiently so that Beijing has no other option, but to annex Taiwan by force (a last resort for Beijing). In the pages of mainstream U.S. media, experts ostensibly regret this, yet nonetheless conclude that America will again ‘be obliged’ to intervene, in order to stop ‘an aggressor state’ from occupying a democratic, American ally.
Again in the context of the U.S. internal tensions, this is more about the fragility of the U.S. psyche at a moment of potential Thucydides’ angst, than of China posing any real threat to America. China will overtake the U.S. economically, at some point. U.S. leaders seek to suggest that America still has the power to alter ‘reality’ to fit to its own exceptionalist myth.
President Putin of course, knows all this, but at least no one can now complain, ‘We were not warned’.
People want to know where the economy is headed. What they should be asking is does the US still have an economy? My answer is no, it doesn’t. I will explain why.
For a quarter century I have pointed out the destructive effect of moving American investment and jobs to China and other points abroad. Offshoring served the interests of corporate executives and shareholders. The lower labor costs raised profits and, thereby, executive bonuses and the prices of the stocks, resulting in capital gains for shareholders.
These benefits accrued to a small percentage of the population. For everyone else these closely held benefits imposed huge external costs many times greater than the rise in profits. The American manufacturing workforce was devastated, as was the tax base of cities, states, and the federal government. The middle class shrunk and the populations of St Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, South Bend and Gary Indiana, Flint Michigan and other cities declined as much as 20%. The hopes and aspirations of millions of Americans were crushed. Once thriving American cities became blighted. Supply chains and real estate values collapsed. (See Paul Craig Roberts, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, Clarity Press, 2013. https://www.claritypress.com/book-author/paul-craig-roberts/ )
As incomes fell for the bulk of the American population, incomes rose for the One Percent. Income and wealth gains have been concentrated at the top resulting in the United States today having one of the most unequal distributions of income and wealth in the world.
As the offshoring of high productivity, high value-added manufacturing jobs reduced American incomes, US aggregate domestic demand was impacted and economic growth fell. The Federal Reserve expanded credit and substituted an increase in consumer debt for the missing growth in consumer income. This aggravated the indebtedness that economist Michael Hudson correctly emphasizes is exhausting consumer income to pay debt service—mortgages, car payments, credit card and student loan debts—which leaves little or no discretionary income to drive economic growth.
Hudson, who has been on the job of analyzing America’s eroding economy for a long time, emphasizes that the US economy is no longer a productive or industrial economy but a financialized economy in which bank lending is not used for new plant and equipment but for the financing of takeovers of existing assets in pursuit of interest, fees, and capital gains– what the classical economists called unearned income or “economic rent.” In short, Hudson demonstrates that the American economy is no longer a productive economy. It is a rent-seeking economy.
Hudson points out that as the economy is increasingly financialized, looting shifts to the privatization of public assets. The examples are endless. In the UK the post office was privatized at a fraction of its value, along with public housing, transportation and British Telephone, resulting in huge private gains. The French also privatized public holdings. In Greece the municipal ports and water companies were privatized along with Greek protected islands. In the US, segments of the armed forces are privatized, along with prisons. Chicago sold 75 years of its parking meter fees to a private entity for one lump sum payment. Everywhere public assets, including services, are being sold to private interests. In Florida, for example, the issuance of the annual vehicle license tag is privately provided. When there is nothing left to privatize, what will banks finance?
Hudson notes that the real economists, the classical ones, focused on taxing unearned economic rent, not labor income and productive activity. Today’s neoliberal economists are unable to differentiate between economic rent and productive activity. Consequently, GDP analysis fails to reveal the economy’s transformation from a productive to a rentier economy. Hudson terms neoliberal economists “junk economists,” and I concur. Essentially, they are shills for the financial sector and for the offshoring corporations who paid them to conflate job and investment offshoring with free trade.
I am convinced that if the entirety of neoliberal economics were erased nothing of value would be lost. Economists, particularly academic economists, are in the way of truth. They live in a make-believe world that they created with assumptions and models that do not bear on reality.
I am familiar with universities and academic economics. I graduated from an engineering and scientific institution—Georgia Tech—and then was a graduate student in economics at the University of Virginia, University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University. I had four Nobel prize-winners as professors. I have a Ph.D. in Economics. I have made contributions to major journals of economics and to others outside the field, 30 published articles altogether before I left academia. I served for years as a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy with the power to decide publication of submitted research. I have peer-reviewed books from Harvard University Press and Oxford University Press. I have debated Nobel prize winners before professional audiences. I served as a Wall Street Journal editor and as Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, and have had many university appointments. Michael Hudson also has real world experience in major financial institutions, international organizations, and governments, as well as US and overseas professorships and contributions to academic publications in many languages.
In other words, we know what we are talking about. We have no interest to serve except truth. No one pays us to serve an agenda.
But we are only two voices.
Two decades ago I was presented with the prospect of a large increase in amplification of my voice about the deleterious effects of offshoring. In December 2003 I received a telephone call from US Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat, New York. Senator Schumer had been reading my columns in which I made the case that under the guise of free trade, jobs and investment were being moved offshore at the expense of US economic success. Senator Schumer shared my concern and asked if a Reagan Treasury official would agree to coauthor with a Democrat Senator an article for the New York Times raising the issue whether job offshoring was in America’s interest.
Our article appeared on January 6, 2004. Here it is:
Second Thoughts on Free Trade
By CHARLES SCHUMER and PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
New York Times, January 6, 2004
“I was brought up, like most Englishmen, to respect free trade not only as an economic doctrine which a rational and instructed person could not doubt but almost as a part of the moral law,” wrote John Maynard Keynes in 1933. And indeed, to this day, nothing gets an economist’s blood boiling more quickly than a challenge to the doctrine of free trade.
“Yet in that essay of 70 years ago, Keynes himself was beginning to question some of the assumptions supporting free trade. The question today is whether the case for free trade made two centuries ago is undermined by the changes now evident in the modern global economy.
“Two recent examples illustrate this concern. Over the next three years, a major New York securities firm plans to replace its team of 800 American software engineers, who each earns about $150,000 per year, with an equally competent team in India earning an average of only $20,000. Second, within five years the number of radiologists in this country is expected to decline significantly because M.R.I. data can be sent over the Internet to Asian radiologists capable of diagnosing the problem at a small fraction of the cost.
“These anecdotes suggest a seismic shift in the world economy brought on by three major developments. First, new political stability is allowing capital and technology to flow far more freely around the world. Second, strong educational systems are producing tens of millions of intelligent, motivated workers in the developing world, particularly in India and China, who are as capable as the most highly educated workers in the developed world but available to work at a tiny fraction of the cost. Last, inexpensive, high-bandwidth communications make it feasible for large work forces to be located and effectively managed anywhere.
“We are concerned that the United States may be entering a new economic era in which American workers will face direct global competition at almost every job level — from the machinist to the software engineer to the Wall Street analyst. Any worker whose job does not require daily face-to-face interaction is now in jeopardy of being replaced by a lower-paid, equally skilled worker thousands of miles away. American jobs are being lost not to competition from foreign companies, but to multinational corporations, often with American roots, that are cutting costs by shifting operations to low-wage countries.
“Most economists want to view these changes through the classic prism of “free trade,” and they label any challenge as protectionism. But these new developments call into question some of the key assumptions supporting the doctrine of free trade.
“The case for free trade is based on the British economist David Ricardo’s principle of “comparative advantage” — the idea that each nation should specialize in what it does best and trade with others for other needs. If each country focused on its comparative advantage, productivity would be highest and every nation would share part of a bigger global economic pie.
“However, when Ricardo said that free trade would produce shared gains for all nations, he assumed that the resources used to produce goods — what he called the “factors of production” — would not be easily moved over international borders. Comparative advantage is undermined if the factors of production can relocate to wherever they are most productive: in today’s case, to a relatively few countries with abundant cheap labor. In this situation, there are no longer shared gains — some countries win and others lose.
“When Ricardo proposed his theory in the early 1800’s, major factors of production — soil, climate, geography and even most workers — could not be moved to other countries. But today’s vital factors of production — capital, technology and ideas — can be moved around the world at the push of a button. They are as easy to export as cars.
“This is a very different world than Ricardo envisioned. When American companies replace domestic employees with lower-cost foreign workers in order to sell more cheaply in home markets, it seems hard to argue that this is the way free trade is supposed to work.
“To call this a “jobless recovery” is inaccurate: lots of new jobs are being created, just not here in the United States.
“In the past, we have supported free trade policies. But if the case for free trade is undermined by changes in the global economy, our policies should reflect the new realities. While some economists and elected officials suggest that all we need is a robust retraining effort for laid-off workers, we do not believe retraining alone is an answer, because almost the entire range of “knowledge jobs” can be done overseas. Likewise, we do not believe that offering tax incentives to companies that keep American jobs at home can compensate for the enormous wage differentials driving jobs offshore.
“America’s trade agreements need to to reflect the new reality. The first step is to begin an honest debate about where our economy really is and where we are headed as a nation. Old-fashioned protectionist measures are not the answer, but the new era will demand new thinking and new solutions. And one thing is certain: real and effective solutions will emerge only when economists and policymakers end the confusion between the free flow of goods and the free flow of factors of production.
“Charles Schumer is the senior senator from New York. Paul Craig Roberts was assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Reagan administration.”
Senator Schumer’s staff seemed to think that free trade was the problem because real world conditions had changed. My position was that jobs offshoring was not free trade. But I realized that any opening of the question was promising.
Our article in the New York Times had an extraordinary impact. The Brookings Institution, at that time an important liberal economic policy think tank that was home to former economic policy makers, called a Washington conference to hear us and examine our position. There was a panel with myself, Schumer, a former policymaker and the head of the US manufacturing lobby who could not figure out which side to be on. C-Span gave the conference live coverage and rebroadcast it a number of times.
Schumer and I carried the day. Members of the audience came up afterwards, including World Bank economist Herman Daly, in support of my position that the destruction of the American manufacturing economy could not be reasoned away as a free trade result.
Senator Schumer had a sincere interest in what job offshoring was doing to his constituents. He proposed that we continue our collaboration and write a second article for the New York Times. In those days the Times was still, partly, a newspaper rather than a total propaganda voice for the Establishment, and the Times assumed nevertheless that a Democrat Senator from New York and an Treasury Official who had been confirmed in office by the US Senate were part of the establishment.
The second column began and then suddenly went dead. No response. A telephone call revealed that the staffer with whom I was working was no longer there. After discussing this with old Washington hands, I concluded that Schumer had not realized that he was threatening Wall Street’s interest in higher profits by opening the question of jobs offshoring and had received a good talking to.
Wall Street Killed the Schumer/Roberts truth squad and protected the profits from job and investment offshoring.
This is what happens to elected officials when they attempt to represent the general interest rather than the special interests that finance political campaigns. The public interest is blocked off by a brick wall posted with a sign that says get compliant with the Establishment or get out of politics. Unless money is taken completely out of electoral politics, there will be no democracy.
Globalism serves to destroy sovereign and accountable government. In the US globalism destroyed the manufacturing middle class. Now Covid lockdowns are destroying the remainder of the middle class—family businesses. Businesses have fixed costs. When they cannot operate red ink mounts and the businesses fail. The lockdowns together with jobs offshoring monopolize the economy in few hands. This is not a theory. It is what we are experiencing. Feudalism is being resurrected. A few lords and many serfs. The serfs will be dependent on the lords and will have no independence.
President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Schwab, dear Klaus,
Colleagues,
I have been to Davos many times, attending the events organised by Mr Schwab, even back in the 1990s. Klaus [Schwab] just recalled that we met in 1992. Indeed, during my time in St Petersburg, I visited this important forum many times. I would like to thank you for this opportunity today to convey my point of view to the expert community that gathers at this world-renowned platform thanks to the efforts of Mr Schwab.
First of all, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to greet all the World Economic Forum participants.
It is gratifying that this year, despite the pandemic, despite all the restrictions, the forum is still continuing its work. Although it is limited to online participation, the forum is taking place anyway, providing an opportunity for participants to exchange their assessments and forecasts during an open and free discussion, partially compensating for the increasing lack of in-person meetings between leaders of states, representatives of international business and the public in recent months. All this is very important now, when we have so many difficult questions to answer.
The current forum is the first one in the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century and, naturally, the majority of its topics are devoted to the profound changes that are taking place in the world.
Indeed, it is difficult to overlook the fundamental changes in the global economy, politics, social life and technology. The coronavirus pandemic, which Klaus just mentioned, which became a serious challenge for humankind, only spurred and accelerated the structural changes, the conditions for which had been created long ago. The pandemic has exacerbated the problems and imbalances that built up in the world before. There is every reason to believe that differences are likely to grow stronger. These trends may appear practically in all areas.
Needless to say, there are no direct parallels in history. However, some experts – and I respect their opinion – compare the current situation to the 1930s. One can agree or disagree, but certain analogies are still suggested by many parameters, including the comprehensive, systemic nature of the challenges and potential threats.
We are seeing a crisis of the previous models and instruments of economic development. Social stratification is growing stronger both globally and in individual countries. We have spoken about this before as well. But this, in turn, is causing today a sharp polarisation of public views, provoking the growth of populism, right- and left-wing radicalism and other extremes, and the exacerbation of domestic political processes including in the leading countries.
All this is inevitably affecting the nature of international relations and is not making them more stable or predictable. International institutions are becoming weaker, regional conflicts are emerging one after another, and the system of global security is deteriorating.
Klaus has mentioned the conversation I had yesterday with the US President on extending the New START. This is, without a doubt, a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, the differences are leading to a downward spiral. As you are aware, the inability and unwillingness to find substantive solutions to problems like this in the 20th century led to the WWII catastrophe.
Of course, such a heated global conflict is impossible in principle, I hope. This is what I am pinning my hopes on, because this would be the end of humanity. However, as I have said, the situation could take an unexpected and uncontrollable turn – unless we do something to prevent this. There is a chance that we will face a formidable break-down in global development, which will be fraught with a war of all against all and attempts to deal with contradictions through the appointment of internal and external enemies and the destruction of not only traditional values such as the family, which we hold dear in Russia, but fundamental freedoms such as the right of choice and privacy.
I would like to point out the negative demographic consequences of the ongoing social crisis and the crisis of values, which could result in humanity losing entire civilisational and cultural continents.
We have a shared responsibility to prevent this scenario, which looks like a grim dystopia, and to ensure instead that our development takes a different trajectory – positive, harmonious and creative.
In this context, I would like to speak in more detail about the main challenges which, I believe, the international community is facing.
The first one is socioeconomic.
Indeed, judging by the statistics, even despite the deep crises in 2008 and 2020, the last 40 years can be referred to as successful or even super successful for the global economy. Starting from 1980, global per capita GDP has doubled in terms of real purchasing power parity. This is definitely a positive indicator.
Globalisation and domestic growth have led to strong growth in developing countries and lifted over a billion people out of poverty. So, if we take an income level of $5.50 per person per day (in terms of PPP) then, according to the World Bank, in China, for example, the number of people with lower incomes went from 1.1 billion in 1990 down to less than 300 million in recent years. This is definitely China’s success. In Russia, this number went from 64 million people in 1999 to about 5 million now. We believe this is also progress in our country, and in the most important area, by the way.
Still, the main question, the answer to which can, in many respects, provide a clue to today’s problems, is what was the nature of this global growth and who benefitted from it most.
Of course, as I mentioned earlier, developing countries benefitted a lot from the growing demand for their traditional and even new products. However, this integration into the global economy has resulted in more than just new jobs or greater export earnings. It also had its social costs, including a significant gap in individual incomes.
What about the developed economies where average incomes are much higher? It may sound ironic, but stratification in the developed countries is even deeper. According to the World Bank, 3.6 million people subsisted on incomes of under $5.50 per day in the United States in 2000, but in 2016 this number grew to 5.6 million people.
Meanwhile, globalisation led to a significant increase in the revenue of large multinational, primarily US and European, companies.
By the way, in terms of individual income, the developed economies in Europe show the same trend as the United States.
But then again, in terms of corporate profits, who got hold of the revenue? The answer is clear: one percent of the population.
And what has happened in the lives of other people? In the past 30 years, in a number of developed countries, the real incomes of over half of the citizens have been stagnating, not growing. Meanwhile, the cost of education and healthcare services has gone up. Do you know by how much? Three times.
In other words, millions of people even in wealthy countries have stopped hoping for an increase of their incomes. In the meantime, they are faced with the problem of how to keep themselves and their parents healthy and how to provide their children with a decent education.
There is no call for a huge mass of people and their number keeps growing. Thus, according to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), in 2019, 21 percent or 267 million young people in the world did not study or work anywhere. Even among those who had jobs (these are interesting figures) 30 percent had an income below $3.2 per day in terms of purchasing power parity.
These imbalances in global socioeconomic development are a direct result of the policy pursued in the 1980s, which was often vulgar or dogmatic. This policy rested on the so-called Washington Consensus with its unwritten rules, when the priority was given to the economic growth based on a private debt in conditions of deregulation and low taxes on the wealthy and the corporations.
As I have already mentioned, the coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated these problems. In the last year, the global economy sustained its biggest decline since WWII. By July, the labour market had lost almost 500 million jobs. Yes, half of them were restored by the end of the year but still almost 250 million jobs were lost. This is a big and very alarming figure. In the first nine months of the past year alone, the losses of earnings amounted to $3.5 trillion. This figure is going up and, hence, social tension is on the rise.
At the same time, post-crisis recovery is not simple at all. If some 20 or 30 years ago, we would have solved the problem through stimulating macroeconomic policies (incidentally, this is still being done), today such mechanisms have reached their limits and are no longer effective. This resource has outlived its usefulness. This is not an unsubstantiated personal conclusion.
According to the IMF, the aggregate sovereign and private debt level has approached 200 percent of global GDP, and has even exceeded 300 percent of national GDP in some countries. At the same time, interest rates in developed market economies are kept at almost zero and are at a historic low in emerging market economies.
Taken together, this makes economic stimulation with traditional methods, through an increase in private loans virtually impossible. The so-called quantitative easing is only increasing the bubble of the value of financial assets and deepening the social divide. The widening gap between the real and virtual economies (incidentally, representatives of the real economy sector from many countries have told me about this on numerous occasions, and I believe that the business representatives attending this meeting will agree with me) presents a very real threat and is fraught with serious and unpredictable shocks.
Hopes that it will be possible to reboot the old growth model are connected with rapid technological development. Indeed, during the past 20 years we have created a foundation for the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution based on the wide use of AI and automation and robotics. The coronavirus pandemic has greatly accelerated such projects and their implementation.
However, this process is leading to new structural changes, I am thinking in particular of the labour market. This means that very many people could lose their jobs unless the state takes effective measures to prevent this. Most of these people are from the so-called middle class, which is the basis of any modern society.
In this context, I would like to mention the second fundamental challenge of the forthcoming decade – the socio-political one. The rise of economic problems and inequality is splitting society, triggering social, racial and ethnic intolerance. Indicatively, these tensions are bursting out even in the countries with seemingly civil and democratic institutions that are designed to alleviate and stop such phenomena and excesses.
The systemic socioeconomic problems are evoking such social discontent that they require special attention and real solutions. The dangerous illusion that they may be ignored or pushed into the corner is fraught with serious consequences.
In this case, society will still be divided politically and socially. This is bound to happen because people are dissatisfied not by some abstract issues but by real problems that concern everyone regardless of the political views that people have or think they have. Meanwhile, real problems evoke discontent.
I would like to emphasise one more important point. Modern technological giants, especially digital companies, have started playing an increasing role in the life of society. Much is being said about this now, especially regarding the events that took place during the election campaign in the US. They are not just some economic giants. In some areas, they are de facto competing with states. Their audiences consist of billions of users that pass a considerable part of their lives in these eco systems.
In the opinion of these companies, their monopoly is optimal for organising technological and business processes. Maybe so but society is wondering whether such monopolism meets public interests. Where is the border between successful global business, in-demand services and big data consolidation and the attempts to manage society at one’s own discretion and in a tough manner, replace legal democratic institutions and essentially usurp or restrict the natural right of people to decide for themselves how to live, what to choose and what position to express freely? We have just seen all of these phenomena in the US and everyone understands what I am talking about now. I am confident that the overwhelming majority of people share this position, including the participants in the current event.
And finally, the third challenge, or rather, a clear threat that we may well run into in the coming decade is the further exacerbation of many international problems. After all, unresolved and mounting internal socioeconomic problems may push people to look for someone to blame for all their troubles and to redirect their irritation and discontent. We can already see this. We feel that the degree of foreign policy propaganda rhetoric is growing.
We can expect the nature of practical actions to also become more aggressive, including pressure on the countries that do not agree with a role of obedient controlled satellites, use of trade barriers, illegitimate sanctions and restrictions in the financial, technological and cyber spheres.
Such a game with no rules critically increases the risk of unilateral use of military force. The use of force under a far-fetched pretext is what this danger is all about. This multiplies the likelihood of new hot spots flaring up on our planet. This concerns us.
Colleagues, despite this tangle of differences and challenges, we certainly should keep a positive outlook on the future and remain committed to a constructive agenda. It would be naive to come up with universal miraculous recipes for resolving the above problems. But we certainly need to try to work out common approaches, bring our positions as close as possible and identify sources that generate global tensions.
Once again, I want to emphasise my thesis that accumulated socioeconomic problems are the fundamental reason for unstable global growth.
So, the key question today is how to build a programme of actions in order to not only quickly restore the global and national economies affected by the pandemic, but to ensure that this recovery is sustainable in the long run, relies on a high-quality structure and helps overcome the burden of social imbalances. Clearly, with the above restrictions and macroeconomic policy in mind, economic growth will largely rely on fiscal incentives with state budgets and central banks playing the key role.
Actually, we can see these kinds of trends in the developed countries and also in some developing economies as well. An increasing role of the state in the socioeconomic sphere at the national level obviously implies greater responsibility and close interstate interaction when it comes to issues on the global agenda.
Calls for inclusive growth and for creating decent standards of living for everyone are regularly made at various international forums. This is how it should be, and this is an absolutely correct view of our joint efforts.
It is clear that the world cannot continue creating an economy that will only benefit a million people, or even the golden billion. This is a destructive precept. This model is unbalanced by default. The recent developments, including migration crises, have reaffirmed this once again.
We must now proceed from stating facts to action, investing our efforts and resources into reducing social inequality in individual countries and into gradually balancing the economic development standards of different countries and regions in the world. This would put an end to migration crises.
The essence and focus of this policy aimed at ensuring sustainable and harmonious development are clear. They imply the creation of new opportunities for everyone, conditions under which everyone will be able to develop and realise their potential regardless of where they were born and are living
I would like to point out four key priorities, as I see them. This might be old news, but since Klaus has allowed me to present Russia’s position, my position, I will certainly do so.
First, everyone must have comfortable living conditions, including housing and affordable transport, energy and public utility infrastructure. Plus environmental welfare, something that must not be overlooked.
Second, everyone must be sure that they will have a job that can ensure sustainable growth of income and, hence, decent standards of living. Everyone must have access to an effective system of lifelong education, which is absolutely indispensable now and which will allow people to develop, make a career and receive a decent pension and social benefits upon retirement.
Third, people must be confident that they will receive high-quality and effective medical care whenever necessary, and that the national healthcare system will guarantee access to modern medical services.
Fourth, regardless of the family income, children must be able to receive a decent education and realise their potential. Every child has potential.
This is the only way to guarantee the cost-effective development of the modern economy, in which people are perceived as the end, rather than the means. Only those countries capable of attaining progress in at least these four areas will facilitate their own sustainable and all-inclusive development. These areas are not exhaustive, and I have just mentioned the main aspects.
A strategy, also being implemented by my country, hinges on precisely these approaches. Our priorities revolve around people, their families, and they aim to ensure demographic development, to protect the people, to improve their well-being and to protect their health. We are now working to create favourable conditions for worthy and cost-effective work and successful entrepreneurship and to ensure digital transformation as the foundation of a high-tech future for the entire country, rather than that of a narrow group of companies.
We intend to focus the efforts of the state, the business community and civil society on these tasks and to implement a budgetary policy with the relevant incentives in the years ahead.
We are open to the broadest international cooperation, while achieving our national goals, and we are confident that cooperation on matters of the global socioeconomic agenda would have a positive influence on the overall atmosphere in global affairs, and that interdependence in addressing acute current problems would also increase mutual trust which is particularly important and particularly topical today.
Obviously, the era linked with attempts to build a centralised and unipolar world order has ended. To be honest, this era did not even begin. A mere attempt was made in this direction, but this, too, is now history. The essence of this monopoly ran counter to our civilisation’s cultural and historical diversity.
The reality is such that really different development centres with their distinctive models, political systems and public institutions have taken shape in the world. Today, it is very important to create mechanisms for harmonising their interests to prevent the diversity and natural competition of the development poles from triggering anarchy and a series of protracted conflicts.
To achieve this we must, in part, consolidate and develop universal institutions that bear special responsibility for ensuring stability and security in the world and for formulating and defining the rules of conduct both in the global economy and trade.
I have mentioned more than once that many of these institutions are not going through the best of times. We have been bringing this up at various summits. Of course, these institutions were established in a different era. This is clear. Probably, they even find it difficult to parry modern challenges for objective reasons. However, I would like to emphasise that this is not an excuse to give up on them without offering anything in exchange, all the more so since these structures have unique experience of work and a huge but largely untapped potential. And it certainly needs to be carefully adapted to modern realities. It is too early to dump it in the dustbin of history. It is essential to work with it and to use it.
Naturally, in addition to this, it is important to use new, additional formats of cooperation. I am referring to such phenomenon as multiversity. Of course, it is also possible to interpret it differently, in one’s own way. It may be viewed as an attempt to push one’s own interests or feign the legitimacy of one’s own actions when all others can merely nod in approval. Or it may be a concerted effort of sovereign states to resolve specific problems for common benefit. In this case, this may refer to the efforts to settle regional conflicts, establish technological alliances and resolve many other issues, including the formation of cross-border transport and energy corridors and so on and so forth.
Friends,
Ladies and gentlemen,
This opens wide possibilities for collaboration. Multi-faceted approaches do work. We know from practice that they work. As you may be aware, within the framework of, for example, the Astana format, Russia, Iran and Turkey are doing much to stabilise the situation in Syria and are now helping establish a political dialogue in that country, of course, alongside other countries. We are doing this together. And, importantly, not without success.
For example, Russia has undertaken energetic mediation efforts to stop the armed conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, in which peoples and states that are close to us – Azerbaijan and Armenia – are involved. We strived to follow the key agreements reached by the OSCE Minsk Group, in particular between its co-chairs – Russia, the United States and France. This is also a very good example of cooperation.
As you may be aware, a trilateral Statement by Russia, Azerbaijan and Armenia was signed in November. Importantly, by and large, it is being steadily implemented. The bloodshed was stopped. This is the most important thing. We managed to stop the bloodshed, achieve a complete ceasefire and start the stabilisation process.
Now the international community and, undoubtedly, the countries involved in crisis resolution are faced with the task of helping the affected areas overcome humanitarian challenges related to returning refugees, rebuilding destroyed infrastructure, protecting and restoring historical, religious and cultural landmarks.
Or, another example. I will note the role of Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United States and a number of other countries in stabilising the global energy market. This format has become a productive example of interaction between the states with different, sometimes even diametrically opposite assessments of global processes, and with their own outlooks on the world.
At the same time there are certainly problems that concern every state without exception. One example is cooperation in studying and countering the coronavirus infection. As you know, several strains of this dangerous virus have emerged. The international community must create conditions for cooperation between scientists and other specialists to understand how and why coronavirus mutations occur, as well as the difference between the various strains.
Of course, we need to coordinate the efforts of the entire world, as the UN Secretary-General suggests and as we urged recently at the G20 summit. It is essential to join and coordinate the efforts of the world in countering the spread of the virus and making the much needed vaccines more accessible. We need to help the countries that need support, including the African nations. I am referring to expanding the scale of testing and vaccinations.
We see that mass vaccination is accessible today, primarily to people in the developed countries. Meanwhile, millions of people in the world are deprived even of the hope for this protection. In practice, such inequality could create a common threat because this is well known and has been said many times that it will drag out the epidemic and uncontrolled hotbeds will continue. The epidemic has no borders.
There are no borders for infections or pandemics. Therefore, we must learn the lessons from the current situation and suggest measures aimed at improving the monitoring of the emergence of such diseases and the development of such cases in the world.
Another important area that requires coordination, in fact, the coordination of the efforts of the entire international community, is to preserve the climate and nature of our planet. I will not say anything new in this respect.
Only together can we achieve progress in resolving such critical problems as global warming, the reduction of forestlands, the loss of biodiversity, the increase in waste, the pollution of the ocean with plastic and so on, and find an optimal balance between economic development and the preservation of the environment for the current and future generations.
My friends,
We all know that competition and rivalry between countries in world history never stopped, do not stop and will never stop. Differences and a clash of interests are also natural for such a complicated body as human civilisation. However, in critical times this did not prevent it from pooling its efforts – on the contrary, it united in the most important destinies of humankind. I believe this is the period we are going through today.
It is very important to honestly assess the situation, to concentrate on real rather than artificial global problems, on removing the imbalances that are critical for the entire international community. I am sure that in this way we will be able to achieve success and befittingly parry the challenges of the third decade of the 21st century.
I would like to finish my speech at this point and thank all of you for your patience and attention.
Thank you very much.
Klaus Schwab: Thank you very much, Mr President.
Many of the issues raised, certainly, are part of our discussions here during the Davos Week. We complement the speeches also by task forces which address some of the issues you mentioned, like not leaving the developing world behind, taking care of, let’s say, creating the skills for tomorrow, and so on. Mr President, we prepare for the discussion afterwards, but I have one very short question. It is a question which we discussed when I visited you in St Petersburg 14 months ago. How do you see the future of European-Russian relations? Just a short answer.
Vladimir Putin: You know there are things of an absolutely fundamental nature such as our common culture. Major European political figures have talked in the recent past about the need to expand relations between Europe and Russia, saying that Russia is part of Europe. Geographically and, most importantly, culturally, we are one civilisation. French leaders have spoken of the need to create a single space from Lisbon to the Urals. I believe, and I mentioned this, why the Urals? To Vladivostok.
I personally heard the outstanding European politician, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, say that if we want European culture to survive and remain a centre of world civilisation in the future, keeping in mind the challenges and trends underlying the world civilisation, then of course, Western Europe and Russia must be together. It is hard to disagree with that. We hold exactly the same point of view.
Clearly, today’s situation is not normal. We need to return to a positive agenda. This is in the interests of Russia and, I am confident, the European countries. Clearly, the pandemic has also played a negative role. Our trade with the European Union is down, although the EU is one of our key trade and economic partners. Our agenda includes returning to positive trends and building up trade and economic cooperation.
Europe and Russia are absolutely natural partners from the point of view of the economy, research, technology and spatial development for European culture, since Russia, being a country of European culture, is a little larger than the entire EU in terms of territory. Russia’s resources and human potential are enormous. I will not go over everything that is positive in Europe, which can also benefit the Russian Federation.
Only one thing matters: we need to approach the dialogue with each other honestly. We need to discard the phobias of the past, stop using the problems that we inherited from past centuries in internal political processes and look to the future. If we can rise above these problems of the past and get rid of these phobias, then we will certainly enjoy a positive stage in our relations.
We are ready for this, we want this, and we will strive to make this happen. But love is impossible if it is declared only by one side. It must be mutual.
ما زالت الضبابية تسود المشهد السياسي الأميركي بعد الانتخابات الرئاسية الأخيرة المثيرة للجدل وما تلاها من أحداث كاقتحام الكونغرس (او غزوة كما يحلو للبعض!) من قبل أنصار دونالد ترامب والتي كانت ضربة قاسية وربما قاضية لهيبة الولايات المتحدة. لكان بغض النظر عن ذلك الجدل وما يرافقه من تشكيك بشرعية انتخاب جوزيف بايدن واحتمال نقل السلطة بشكل هادئ وولاية حكم طبيعية فهناك غموض حول توجّهات السياسة الخارجية للإدارة الأميركية الجديدة يعزّزها عدم الاستقرار الداخلي البنيوي الذي ظهر مؤخّرا. وهذا يجعلنا نقول إن زمام المبادرة لم يعد في يد الولايات المتحدة بل في يد المحور المناهض الذي يضم الكتلة الاوراسية بقيادة روسيا والصين ومحور المقاومة وعدد من دول أميركا اللاتينية. السؤال لم يعد ماذا ستفعل الولايات المتحدة بل ماذا سيفعل المحور المناهض؟ لكن هذه الحقيقة لم يتم استيعابها بعد حتى الآن عند النخب العربية الحاكمة ومن يدور في فلكها.
مقاربتنا مبنية على واقع برز منذ أكثر من عقدين وهو عدم التوازن بين الرغبات/الأهداف الأميركية في الهيمنة على العالم مهما كلّف الأمر وقدراتها الفعلية لتحقيقها. فالأهداف الأميركية للهيمنة تتطلّب قدرات لم تعد موجودة عند الولايات المتحدة. بالمقابل أصبح لخصومها قدرات تمكّنها من التصدي لها، فردعها، وربما إخراجها من المناطق التي كانت تسيطر عليها. لكن بالمقابل هناك حالة إنكار بنيوية في العقل الأميركي فيما يتعلّق بدورها في العالم المبني على وهم استثنائيتها ونظرية قدرها المتجلّي لتقوم بما تقوم به دون مساءلة ومحاسبة. لسنا هنا في إطار طرح حيثيات ذلك الواقع الذي تم تفصيله في أبحاث عديدة بل نكتفي بالتذكير أن هذا اللاتوازن بين الرغبات والقدرات هو ما نبني عليه في مقاربة التوجّهات الممكنة والمحتملة للإدارة الجديدة إذا ما كتب لها أن تدير الأمور بشكل طبيعي.
الجزء الأول: جوهر الإشكاليات
وإذا افترضنا حدّا أدنى من الواقعية السياسية فإن منهجية الإدارة الجديدة ستكون مبنية على محاولة تحييد العلاقة بين الملفّات الخارجية والداخلية. فالملفّات الداخلية السياسية والاقتصادية والاجتماعية تدعو إلى انتهاج سياسات اقتصادية تقارب الواقع المترهّل للبنى التحتية والضمان الصحي والبيئي وإعادة تمركز القطاع الصناعي في التكنولوجيات التي لا تستدعي الاتكال على الطاقة البترولية والغازية وذلك على سبيل المثال وليس الحصر والقائمة طويلة ومعقّدة ومليئة بالتناقضات. فعلى سبيل المثال نرى الرئيس الأميركي المنتخب يدعو إلى أن تتحوّل الولايات المتحدة إلى أكبر دولة في صناعة السيارات الكهربائية. التداعيات على القطاع النفطي ستكون جذرية فكيف سيتعامل القطاع النفطي الأميركي مع ذك؟ والمكوّن النفطي للدولة العميقة لن يقف مكتوف الأيدي تجاه ذلك التحوّل. فالقطاع النفطي بنى القطاع الصناعي الذي كان قاعدة القوّة الأميركية. شطب ذلك القطاع تحوّل جذري لن يمرّ بسهولة.
من جهة أخرى، معظم المكوّنات للدولة العميقة من الناحية الاقتصادية كانت وما زالت تدعو إلى العولمة والهيمنة الاقتصادية المباشرة على العالم وبالتالي استمرار التدخل في شؤون الدول لتحقيق مصالح تلك المكوّنات. فكيف يمكن فصل الملفّ الاقتصادي الداخلي عن الملفات الساخنة الخارجية؟ وأهم من كل ذلك ماذا ستفعل الإدارة الجديدة إذا كان مشروعها الاقتصادي على تصادم مع مصالح الدولة العميقة التي أوصلت الرئيس بايدن إلى الحكم خاصة أن تحالف تلك القوى لم يمكن مبنيا على رؤية مشتركة بل فقط على ضرورة الإطاحة بدونالد ترامب؟ بالمقابل فإن قوّة الشركات العملاقة التي تحوّلت إلى شركات عابرة للقارات والأمم بنت شبكاتها ومصالحها مستندة إلى القوّة الذاتية الأميركية التي كانت حتى بعد الحرب العالمية الثانية منغلقة على نفسها وتكتفي بالتصدير للعالم. اليوم هذه الشركات توطنت في الخارج وأصبحت تصدّر إلى الولايات المتحدة. فإذا فقدت الولايات المتحدة مصادر قوّتها الذاتية عسكريا واقتصاديا وماليا ماذا يمكن أن تفعل الدول المستضيفة للشركات العملاقة الأميركية المتوطنّة في بلادها؟
ما نريد أن نقوله إن هناك ضرورة وجودية للولايات المتحدة للتركيز على ترميم الوضع الداخلي. لكن ذلك التركيز سيصطدم مع مصالح الدولة العميقة في التمدّد الخارجي فيصبح السؤال كيف يمكن التوازن بين مصلحتين متناقضتين؟ والولايات المتحدة لم تعد لها القدرة على التمدّد والهيمنة فكيف ستعمل مكوّنات الدولة العميقة على سد ذلك العجز؟ قد تأخذ الإجابة على ذلك وقتا طويلا عند النخب الحاكمة والسؤال يصبح هل تمتلك الوقت لذلك؟ فمهما تمّت مقاربة الأمور دخلت الولايات المتحدة مرحلة جديدة في تاريخها قد تفضي إلى إعادة النظر الكلّية بتركيبتها. لكن هذا حديث آخر لا داعي لمقاربته الأن. يكفي أن نخلص إلى نتيجة أن قدرة التأثير في الملفّات الخارجية محدودة وهذا قد يساهم في إعادة التوازنات في العالم على قاعدة أكثر عدلا مما كانت عليه في عهد القطبية الواحدة.
هذه الملاحظات كانت ضرورية لفهم الصعوبات كي لا نقول الاستعصاءات التي ستواجه الإدارة الجديدة. فكيف ستتعامل مع الملفّات العالقة خارجيا؟ معظم التحليلات والمقاربات تعتمد الكتابات خلال الحملة الانتخابية لرموز الإدارة الجديدة ومنها مقال بايدن في مجلّة “قورين افيرز” في ربيع 2020 ومنها كتابات لكل من وزير الخارجية المسمّى انطوني بلنكن والمستشار الأمن القومي جاك سوليفان. فماذا يمكن أن نتوقّع من الإدارة الجديدة إذا ما كتب لها أن تمارس مهامها في ظل الانقسامات الداخلية في الولايات المتحدة وحتى داخل الحزب الديمقراطي فيما يتعلّق بالملفّات الخارجية وحتى الداخلية. قد تطفح التناقضات الداخلية في الحزب الديمقراطي لأن القاعدة الشابة للحزب داخل الكونغرس وخارجه على تناقض كبير مع القيادات التقليدية التي ما زالت في مناخات الحرب الباردة. القاعدة الشابة متماهية أكثر مع حيثيات الداخل الأميركي وحتى الخارج ولا تشاطر هواجس القيادة. فكيف ستتصرّف هذه القاعدة فيما لو أقدمت القيادة على اتباع سياسات في الملفّات الخارجية والداخلية متناقضة مع تطلّعاتها؟ ولا يجب أن ننسى أن “فوز” بايدن يعود إلى حدّ كبير إلى الإقبال الشبابي على الانتخابات تحت شعار “كلنا ضد ترامب” وبالتالي تجاهل هذه الشريحة الأساسية من قبل القيادة قد تكون مكلفة في الانتخابات النصفية القادمة في 2022 وفي الانتخابات الرئاسية في 2024. المعركتان بدأتا فعلا منذ الآن! لكن بغض النظر عن هذه الاعتبارات التي ستظل تلقي بظلالها على مجمل القرارات للإدارة الجديدة كيف ستقارب الإدارة الجديدة الملفات الخارجية؟
بعض الإشارات الواضحة تقودنا للاعتقاد أن الإدارة الجديدة ستكون أكثر ليونة وأكثر دبلوماسية وتتجلّى عبر التوازن في التسميات لمناصب رفيعة في الإدارة الجديدة. فمن جهة هناك “الصقور” التي يمثلهم في الصف الأوّل كل من انطوني بلينكن للخارجية وجاك سوليفان لمجلس الأمن القومي ومعهما كل من كاثلين هيكس كنائب وزير الدفاع ووندي شرمان كنائب لوزير الخارجية وسوزان رايس كرئيسة لمجلس السياسة الداخلية (البعض يعتبر أنها ستكون رئيسة الظل في الإدارة الجديدة) وفيكتوريا نيولند كوكيلة وزارة الخارجية للشؤون السياسية المنصب الذي شغله جيفري فلتمان سابقا. نذكّر هنا أن فيكتوريا نيولند زوجة روبرت كاغان المنظر الأساسي للمحافظين الجدد. ونيولند كانت بطلة الانقلاب في أوكرانيا ولها مقولات مأثورة في الاتحاد الأوروبي وصلت إلى حد الشتيمة والتحقير. أما وندي شرمان، فهي من أنصار مادلين اولبريت التي بررت مقتل 500 ألف طفل عراقي خلال الحصار على العراق. ولشرمان تصريح شهير أن المخادعة هي في الحمض النووي للإيرانيين. وكانت تحرص على إبلاغ نتنياهو بكل تفاصيل المفاوضات مع إيران في الملفّ النووي كما أوضحه ضابط الاستخبارات السابق فيليب جيرالدي في مقال له نشر على موقع “انفورميشون كليرينغ هاوس في 12 كانون الثاني/يناير 2021.
ويعتبر أحد خبراء معهد كاتو تد كاربنتر في مقال نشره على موقع “ناشيونال انترست” الذي يضم دبلوماسيين وعسكريين وضباط استخبارات سابقين وجامعيين أن فريق السياسة الخارجية لإدارة بايدن لا يتمتع بالفكر الإبداعي بل التقليدي حيث لا يتوقع إلاّ الدفع بنفس السياسات المتبعة في إدارة باراك أوباما وحتى ترامب ولكن بأسلوب أكثر لطافة. فتصريح بلينكن في 25 نوفمبر أن الرئيس المنتخب سيكون رئيس مواجهة مع روسيا كما أنه سيعزّز من قدرات الحلف الأطلسي كمنظومة وكما سيدعم الدول الأوروبية المناهضة لروسيا كأوكرانيا وجورجيا ودول البلطيق وبولندا. ويضيف كاربنتر أن المشكلة ليست بالتفكير الاعتيادي فيما لو كانت السياسات قبل وصول ترامب جيّدة وصاحبة نتائج بل أنها كانت فاشلة. والوعد بالعودة إلى تلك السياسات يعني المزيد من الفشل!
بالمقابل فإن تعيين الجنرال لويد اوستين كوزير للدفاع ووليم برنز الدبلوماسي العريق لإدارة وكالة الاستخبارات المركزية (سي أي أيه) يمثل “لاعتدال” في السياسة الخارجية. هذا التوازن يعود إلى ضرورة إرضاء مكوّنات التحالف الذي أوصل بايدن إلى الرئاسة من جهة وحرص الإدارة الجديدة على إعادة الاعتبار لصورتها التي تصدّعت عند حلفائها خلال ولاية ترامب. لكن هذا لا يعني التخلّي عن العقيدة العميقة التي تحكّمت بسلوك الإدارات المتتالية بعد الحرب العالمية الثانية في ضرورة قيادة العالم على قاعدة القراءة التوراتية للإنجيل كما تشير مصطلحات “القدر المتجلّي” و”المدينة على الجبل” و”ارض الميعاد الجديدة” في خطابهم عن الولايات المتحدة. من هنا نفهم التماهي في الشكل والأسلوب مع نشأة دولة الكيان الصهيوني ونشأة الولايات المتحدة.
هنا لا بد من لفت الانتباه إلى عامل جوهري يساهم في فهم الدافع الأساسي لسلوك سياسات عدوانية في العالم عند مختلف الإدارات الأميركية. فنظرية “القدر المتجلّي” أتت لتغطي جرائم نشأة الولايات المتحدة في إبادة الشعوب الأولى للقارة من قبل المستعمرين الأوروبيين ومن ثمة استعباد الافارقة لتشغيل مزارع القطن، القاعدة الأولى للقطاع الزراعي في المجتمع الناشئ، وذلك لمصلحة المستعمر الإنكليزي. الجمهورية التي نشأت كاحتجاج على سياسة التاج البريطاني لم تكن لتستقر لولا التوسع الجغرافي. وعند الانتهاء من التوسع الجغرافي غربا وعبر المحيط الهادئ إلى جزر هاواي ومن بعدها الفيليبين وبعد فشل المحاولات لإيجاد موطن قدم في شمال إفريقيا عبر حروب شاطئ البرابرة في شمال القارة الإفريقية في بداية القرن التاسع عشر، كان لا بد من التوسع الاقتصادي عبر الهيمنة الاقتصادية، فالاقتصاد وسيلة للهيمنة وليست هدفا قائما بذاته. السياسة دائما قوّامة على الاقتصاد وإن كان للأخير دور في رسم السياسات.
والتوسع عبر المحيط الهادئ اصطدم بمصالح الإمبراطورية اليابانية فكانت الحرب العالمية الثانية. والتوسع في أميركا اللاتينية اصطدم بمصالح الاسبان فكانت حروب التحرير من الهيمنة الاسبانية التي دعمتها الولايات المتحدة في مطلع القرن التاسع عشر ومع اسبانيا مباشرة في آخر القرن التاسع عشر وبداية القرن العشرين في كوبا والفيليبين. فالجمهورية إذن مبنية على قاعدة التوسع ونهاية التوسع بكافة اشاكله يعني نهاية الجمهورية. من هنا نفهم مغزى “حق التدخلّ لمساعدة المضطهدين” في العالم بينما الهدف الحقيقي هو فرض السيطرة تحت رافعة العولمة وذلك لديمومة الجمهورية. فالمصالح الاقتصادية لقوى العولمة في الإدارة الديمقراطية الجديدة ستصطدم مع مصالح الذين يريدون الاهتمام بالملفات الداخلية كما سنراه في الملف الصيني والاوروبي والمشرق والوطن العربي.
لذلك نعتقد أن السياسة الخارجية ستحكمها الوقائع الداخلية وأن المبادرة في الملفات الخارجية لم تعد في يد الولايات المتحدة. فالاستراتيجية الأميركية ستصطدم بمواقف المناهضة لها وفتور تأييد الدول الحليفة لها لأن إملاءات الولايات المتحدة لم تعد تصب في مصلحة مشتركة عند مكوّنات السلطة أي الدولة العميقة والتحالفات التي نُسجت للإطاحة بدونالد ترامب. هذا هو ارث ولاية ترامب وليس هناك من دليل عن تراجع في الأهداف بل فقط في الأسلوب والعودة إلى اتفاقات خرجت منها الولايات المتحدة والتي لن تكلّفها أي شيء إضافي. ولكن هذا الرجوع إلى الاتفاقية لن يغير في اهتزاز الصورة عند الحلفاء كما عند الخصوم حيث المصداقية فقدت. فأي ضمان أن إي إدارة مستقبلية ستلتزم بما تتعهد به الإدارة الجديدة في البيت الأبيض. لن تقبل الدول أن تكون رهينة مزاج متغيّر بين إدارة وإدارة وبالتالي المصالح للدول الحليفة ستعود لتتحكّم بأولويات سياساتها الخارجية.
هذه حدود الإدارة والتي لا نتوقع أي تعديل عن السياسات السابقة سواء فقط في الأسلوب واللهجة. فهي غير قادرة على التغيير وغير قادرة على الاستمرار. هذا هو مأزقها وليس مسؤولة دول العالم حل المأزق الأميركي. التحوّلات في الميدان ستفرز الوقائع التي ستحكم السياسة الأميركية التي تصبح يوما بعض يوم غير ذي جدوى. فلا قدرة لها على شن حروب جديدة وإن كانت رغبتها في ذلك مؤكّدة ولا قدرة لها على تقديم تنازلات لعقد تسويات. فانفراط الإمبراطورية الأميركية قد تتلازم مع انحلال الجمهورية. في أحسن الأحوال ما ستقوم به الإدارة الجديدة هو ربط نزاع دون حلول ودون حروب. في أسواء الأحوال بالنسبة لها مسألة وجودها ككيان لدولة عظمى. الخطورة تكمن فقط في استمرار حالة الإنكار وارتكاب بالتالي حماقات تسّرع في زوالها وما سيرافق ذلك من خسائر في الأرواح.
*باحث وكاتب اقتصادي سياسي والأمين العام السابق للمؤتمر القومي العربي
The U.S. political landscape continues to be blurred after the recent controversial presidential election and subsequent events such as the storming of Congress (or an invasion as some would like!) by Donald Trump’s supporters, which was a severe and perhaps fatal blow to the prestige of the United States. Regardless of that controversy and the accompanying questioning of the legitimacy of Joseph Biden’s election and the prospect of a quiet transfer of power and a normal mandate, there is uncertainty about the foreign policy directions of the new U.S. administration, reinforced by the recent structural internal instability. This makes us say that the initiative is no longer in the hands of the United States, but in the hands of the counter-axis, which includes the Eurasian bloc led by Russia and China, the axis of resistance and a number of Latin American countries. The question is no longer what will the United States do, but what will the anti-axis do? But this fact has not yet been absorbed by the ruling Arab elites and those in their orbit.
Our approach is based on a reality that has emerged for more than two decades: the imbalance between American desires/goals to dominate the world at all costs and its actual capabilities to achieve it. U.S. hegemonic goals require capabilities that no longer exist in the United States. On the other hand, its opponents have the capabilities to confront them, deter them, and possibly remove them from the areas they controlled. On the other hand, there is a structural denial of the American mind regarding its role in the world based on its exceptional illusion and the theory of its manifest value to do what it does without accountability. We are not here to put forward the merits of that reality, which has been detailed in many researches, but merely to recall that this imbalance between desires and capacities is what we are building on in approaching the possible and potential directions of the new administration if it is to manage things normally.
Part 1: The Essence of The Problems
Assuming a minimum of political realism, the methodology of the new administration would be based on an attempt to neutralise the relationship between external and internal files. The internal political, economic and social files call for economic policies that converge with the lax reality of infrastructure, health and environmental security and the repositioning of the industrial sector in technologies that do not require dependence on oil and gas energy, for example, but not limited to the long, complex and contradictory list. For example, we see the President-elect calling for the United States to become the largest country in the electric car industry. The implications for the oil sector will be radical. The oil component of the deep state will not stand idly by in the face of that transformation. The oil sector built the industrial sector, which was the base of U.S. power. Writing off that radical lying sector won’t go through easily.
On the other hand, most of the components of the deep state economically have been and continue to call for globalization and direct economic domination of the world and thus continued interference in the affairs of states in the interests of those components. How can the internal economic file be separated from external hot files? Most importantly, what would the new administration do if its economic project were to collide with the deep state interests that brought President Biden to power, especially since their alliance could not be based on a shared vision but only on the need to overthrow Donald Trump? On the other hand, the power of giant corporations that have turned into transcontinental corporations and nations built their networks and interests based on American self-power, which, even after World War II, was closed to itself and merely exported to the world. Today these companies have settled abroad and are being exported to the United States. If the United States loses its own sources of power militarily, economically and financially, what can the host countries do to american giants endemic at home?
What we want to say is that there is an existential need for the United States to focus on restoring the internal situation. But that focus will clash with the deep interests of the state in the external expansion, so the question becomes how can we balance two contradictory interests? The United States no longer has the capacity to expand and dominate, so how will the deep components of the state fill that deficit? The answer to that may take a long time when the ruling elites and the question becomes do you have time for it? No matter how approached, the United States has entered a new phase in its history that could lead to a total reconsideration of its composition. But this is another conversation that doesn’t need to be approached right now. It is enough to conclude that the ability to influence external files is limited and this may contribute to the rebalancing of the world on a more just base than it was in the arctic era.
These observations were necessary to understand the difficulties so as not to say the difficulties that the new administration will face. How will you deal with externally pending files? Most analyses and approaches are based on the writings of new administration figures during the campaign, including Biden’s spring 2020 article in The Foreign Affairs, including those of Secretary of State Anthony Plankin and National Security Advisor Jack Sullivan. What can we expect from the new administration if it is to exercise its functions in the light of internal divisions in the United States and even within the Democratic Party with regard to external and even internal files. Internal contradictions in the Democratic Party may be overcome because the party’s young base inside and outside Congress is in great contrast to the traditional leaders that remain in cold war climates.
The young base is more closely identified with the US internally and abroad and does not share the leadership’s concerns. How would this rule behave if the leadership proceeded to pursue policies in the external and internal files that contradict its aspirations? We must not forget that Biden’s “victory” is largely due to the youth turnout for the elections under the slogan “We are all against Trump” and thus ignoring this basic segment by the leadership may be costly in the upcoming midterm elections in 2022 and in the presidential elections in 2024. The two battles began. Already since now! But regardless of these considerations that will continue to cast a shadow over the overall decisions of the new administration, how will the new administration approach the external files?
Some clear indications lead us to believe that the new administration will be softer and more diplomatic, and are evident in the balance in designations for senior positions in the new administration. On the one hand there are the “hawks” represented in the front row by Anthony Blinken for Foreign Affairs and Jack Sullivan for the National Security Council, along with Kathleen Hicks as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Wendy Sherman as Deputy Secretary of State, and Susan Rice as Chair of the Domestic Policy Council (some consider that she will be the shadow chair in the new administration. And Victoria Newland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, a position previously held by Jeffrey Feltman. We Note here that Victoria Newland, wife of Robert Kagan, is the main theoretician of the neoconservatives. Newland was the hero of the Ukrainian coup and had proverbs in the European Union that amounted to insults and contempt. As for Wendy Sharman, she is a supporter of Madeleine Albright, who justified the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children during the siege on Iraq. Sherman famously declared that deception is in the DNA of Iranians. She was keen to inform Netanyahu of all the details of the negotiations with Iran on the nuclear file, as explained by former intelligence officer Philip Giraldi in an article published on the “Information Clearing House” website on January 12, 2021.
And one of the experts of the Cato Institute, Ted Carpenter, in an article he published on the National Interest website, which includes diplomats, military, former intelligence officers and academics, considers that the Biden administration’s foreign policy team does not have the creative thinking but the traditional, as it is expected only to push the same policies followed in the administration of Barack Obama and even Trump. But in a kinder way. Blinken’s statement on November 25 that the president-elect will be the president of a confrontation with Russia will also enhance the capabilities of NATO as a system and will also support European countries that are anti-Russian, such as Ukraine, Georgia, the Baltic states, and Poland. The problem, Carpenter adds, is not in the usual thinking about whether the policies before Trump arrived were good and yielding results, but rather that they were a failure. And the promise to return to those policies means more failure!
On the other hand, the appointment of General Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defence and William Burns, a veteran diplomat to run the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), represents “moderation” in foreign policy. This balance is due to the need to satisfy the components of the coalition that brought Biden to the presidency on the one hand, and the new administration’s keenness to restore respect for its image, which was cracked by its allies during Trump’s term. However, this does not mean abandoning the profound belief that governed the behavior of successive administrations after World War II regarding the necessity of leading the world on the basis of the biblical reading of the Bible, as the terms “Manifest Destiny”, “City on the Mountain” and “New Promised Land” indicate in their speech on the United States . From here we understand the identification in form and style with the emergence of the Zionist entity and the United States.
Here, attention must be drawn to a key factor that contributes to understanding the fundamental motivation for aggressive policy behaviour in the world in various U.S. administrations.The theory of “manifest destiny” came to cover the crimes of the emergence of the United States in the extermination of the first peoples of the continent by European colonialists, and from there the enslavement of Africans to operate cotton plantations, the first base of the agricultural sector in the emerging society, for the benefit of the English colonial. The republic that arose as a protest against the policy of the British Crown would not have been stabilised without geographical expansion. When geographical expansion was completed westward and across the Pacific to the Hawaiian Islands and then the Philippines, and after attempts to find a foothold in North Africa through the barbarian beach wars in the north of the African continent at the beginning of the 19th century, economic expansion was necessary through economic domination, the economy being a means of domination and not a self-contained goal. Politics is always based on the economy, although the latter has a role to play in policy-making.
The expansion across the Pacific collided with the interests of the Japanese Empire and was the Second World War. The expansion of Latin America ran into the interests of the Spaniards, and the wars of liberation were spanish domination, supported by the United States at the beginning of the 19th century and directly with Spain at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Cuba and the Philippines. The Republic is therefore based on the basis of expansion and the end of expansion in all its forms means the end of the Republic. Hence, we understand the meaning of the “right to intervene to help the oppressed” in the world when the real goal is to impose control under the lever of globalization in order to perpetuate the Republic. The economic interests of the forces of globalization in the new democratic administration will collide with the interests of those who want to take care of the internal files, as we will see in the Chinese, European, Levant and Arab world.
Therefore, we believe that foreign policy will be governed by by domestic realities and that the initiative in foreign files is no longer in the hands of the United States. U.S. strategy will clash with anti-government positions and the lack of support from allied nations because U.S. dictates no longer serve a common interest in the components of power, namely the deep state and the alliances that have been spun to topple Donald Trump. This is the legacy of Trump’s term and there is no evidence of a decline in targets, but only in style and a return to agreements that the United States has come up with that will cost them nothing more. But this reference to the Convention will not change the image shake of allies as when opponents where credibility has been lost. Any guarantee that any future administration will abide by the commitments of the new administration in the White House. States will not accept to be held hostage to a changing mood between management and administration and therefore the interests of allied states will return to control their foreign policy priorities.
These are the limits of the administration, and we do not expect any modification from the previous policies, either in style or tone. unable to change and unable to continue. This is its dilemma, and the countries of the world are not responsible for solving the American impasse. The transformations on the ground will produce the facts that will govern U.S. politics that will once become some useless day. It has no capacity to wage new wars, although its willingness to do so is certain and it cannot make concessions for settlements. The break-up of the American empire may coincide with the dissolution of the republic. At best, what the new administration will do is connect a conflict without solutions and without wars. In the worst case for it, the issue of its existence as a superpower.
The break-up of the American empire may go hand in hand with the dissolution of the Republic. At best, what the new administration will do is to link a conflict without solutions and without wars. At worst for her, the question of her existence as an entity of a super-Power. The danger lies solely in the continuation of the state of denial and therefore the commission of follies that accelerate its demise and the attendant loss of life.
*Researcher, political economist and former Secretary General of the Arab National Congress
It is about a ‘Great Reset’ vs. longing for greatness
It is about Jerusalem vs. Athens
It is really about the ‘last days of the Weimar Republic’ all over again.
Throughout its history, capitalism has been using different tactics to suppress opposition.
At one stage it was the fantasy of an inevitable revolution. It is indeed the threat of that rebellious spirit which contributed to the evolvement of the welfare state, yet the promised revolution never materialized.
It doesn’t take a genius to gather that in historical perspective, those senses of freedom, productivity and hope which became Western emblems during the post-World War II era, had very little to do with our humanist desires and whims. Our ‘freedom’ was manufactured to titillate the poor human fellows behind the Iron Wall. The Cold War which threatened to wipe out civilization was just the means towards capitalist growth. Accordingly, it would be right to argue that we owe our post-war sense of ‘freedom’ to the USSR and Stalin. The more oppressive communism was, the more liberal the West pretended to be. Once the Soviet bloc evaporated, there was no need to sustain our ‘freedom.’ There was no one to ‘titillate’ with Coca Cola and McDonalds. A new Battle Zone was required to divert the masses’ attention from their true eternal oppressors.
Once again it was the so-called ‘Left’ that provided the goods. Instead of the old Left mantra that called to unite us into a proletarian angry fist regardless of our race, skin color, gender or ethnicity, the ‘New Left’ introduced a completely new hymn. Against the most basic Left universal ethos, the New Left taught us to think and speak ‘as a’: ‘as women,’ ‘as a gay,’ ‘as trans,’ ‘as a Jew,’ ‘as a Latino,’ ‘as a Black.’ We practically learned to fight each other instead of uniting into one people. Instead of eliminating differences, we built new ghetto walls emphasizing and celebrating every possible dividing line (White/Black, male/female, heterosexual/LGBTQ etc.). Instead of identifying Wall Street, MSM propaganda and the technology giants as our fierce global enemy, these actually became the catalysts and cash suppliers in a war we, the people, foolishly declared upon ourselves.
In this new ‘Left’ Identitarian amalgam, every ‘as a’ voice is welcome except the White one. Is it because anyone really believes that ‘White people’ are categorically or collectively bad? I doubt it. It is simply because the so-called ‘White’ was picked to play the ‘role’ of the Soviet bloc. The ‘White’ has become the new imaginary ‘evil.’
As things stand no one in America can unite the nation: neither Biden nor the DNC can introduce a harmonious solution as the above are actually extensions of the problem. Biden and the DNC are inherently tied to Wall Street, Soros, the MSM and technology giants that formulated and sustain this tragic battle. Trump and the GOP of course, cannot do much either, because in the eyes of his many opponents Trump himself is the core of this entire disaster. He is clearly ‘too white’ on top of being a ‘man’ and if this is not enough, he is also an abrasive narcissist.
What we see in America is practically the Weimar Republic all over again.
The public is losing its trust in the democratic process and democratic institutions. Poverty and public unrest is spiking. The national press and media are becoming more and more detached from larger segments of the population. Amidst all of this, Wall Street is booming. The two sides of this divide cannot tolerate each other. They are removed demographically, spiritually, culturally and intellectually. Democracy is becoming a nostalgic notion in the USA and this shouldn’t take us by a big surprise as democracy and freedom are not and never have been prime capitalist goals or values. Democracy and liberty were the means, not the goal. They were there to serve mammonism.* But not anymore; back in November 2016 Wall Street gathered that democracy is in the way. The City of London came to the same conclusion after the Brexit referendum.
If America wants to save itself, it may have to grasp its conditions first. It better transcend itself beyond the fake battle between Trump and Biden or between the Democrats and the GOP. America should figure out who is pushing it into the abyss of civil war. America should figure out who works so hard and successfully, so far, to split it and every other Western country in the middle.
If Orwell’s 1984 carries any prophetic merit, it is easy to figure out who is taking care of the Big Brother’s role. What you may want to do next is figure out who is/what is the current Immanuel Goldstein? Who controls the opposition?
* Mammonism the obsessive pursuit of material wealth and possessions.
What we see playing out in front of the whole world is the final battle of Trump and his Enemies. The historic vote, the democratic process of the will of the American People, is a sideshow. Atop that election event, which was the largest and most egalitarian in modern U.S. history, is the existential struggle between Donald J. Trump, interloper and paradigm destroyer, and an array of the most powerful U.S. stakeholders, his avowed enemies.
As the legal combat rolls out to try save Trump’s election results, each state or city that Trump’s lawyers challenge in court is a citadel of Trump enemies, some unique, some sub rosa, most flying their colors as adversaries since he unleashed his candidacy for the Executive Power of the Presidency.
There are three key states that are headlining the legal contests—Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania. Additionally, North Carolina and Georgia present as conflict zones, too, the former holding for Trump, the latter leeching the lead to Biden. Peeling back the Repubs versus the Dems struggle for victory, we discover the enemies are not political foes. We discover the enemies are power foes. Trump came for their power and took the hilltop, the Oval Office. They have spent billions of dollars to dislodge him, to destroy him, to decimate his assets like the ninja blade missile fired at General Soleimani shredded the Iranian’s body.
Trump’s candidacy for a second term relies on winning in all these states. Examining the legal skirmishes in each case, he has little chance of achieving his needed goals. Meanwhile, his winning vote totals are being diminished by the hour as his enemies use century old “vote” manipulations to assure Biden’s victory.
What this is not is an ideological-political fight, though the campaign was overwhelmed with ideological munitions exploding at every level.
The struggle for dominance now underway is about pure power to command the domestic and foreign assets of the United States Government and to influence the corporate assets and human assets of the nation domestically and globally. Trump wants to focus on domestic economic and technological development and GDP growth while his Enemies want to use all the power they need to maintain global hegemony.
Trump took the Presidency in 2016, and with it, the Republican Party, the Conservative movement, and the Evangelical base. Recently, in this election, he expanded the Black, Gay and Hispanic component of the Republican voting base. This has held the Senate for the Republicans and increased the House seats, as well as gaining ground in State governors and State legislatures, critical in a year of Census that determines Congressional districts for the next decade.
Trump immobilized a potential nemesis, the MIC, with $2.5 Trillion in contracts for new weapons and munitions and R&D to pursue offensive and defensive systems that the Russians and Chinese already possess. That he also poured ice water on the Afghan War and the Syrian War, and is chilling the African secret special forces wars did not rattle the corporate pigs who live off defense budgets. But, he has agitated the officer corps that depends on small-scale conflicts that boost their careers with battle ribbons and commendations and keeps them climbing the ladder to ‘stars’ on their shoulders. Without wars, the future is very limited for officers. The careers of officers are pressurized by the Congressional mandate of “up or out”, which is a culling process of either you get promoted up or you are exited out of the active duty service. The best insurance of constant career advancement is perpetual wars, small and laden with proxies actually doing the fighting and dying. The US officer corps has lived on these regional wars for many decades. Trump threatens them by shutting the Presidential valves that sustain such ventures. Many officers have spoken out against Trump.
A brief tour of what was done early on and during the campaign to stop Trump from winning outright is necessary. This year, after three years of false accusations of being a stooge for Russia, colluding with Putin, the House impeached Trump for a phone call to Zelensky, President of Ukraine, fabricating a deal was proposed, quid pro quo, that would benefit Trump. Immediately disproved with the official transcript of said phone call, the country and Trump were nonetheless put through the agony of the one-party impeachment which was instantly killed in womb (Pelosi’s or Schiff’s, it was never established), but the demon was dead on arrival. It cost Trump prestige and some votes in the middle. Mud sticks and stains in politics. Bullshit does, also, and stinks for quite some time, too.
Then Covid hit the nation. Trump worked assiduously as President to use US influence and domestic resources to get PPEs, ventilators, swabs and tests, and hospitals ready for an onslaught of patients. He used national presidential powers to get corporations to manufacture ventilators. He coaxed the Big Pharma corporations to push out therapeutics and to design a mass manufacturing of vaccines. He broke the inertia in the Homeland Security, CDC and FDA and dissolved red tape and traditional foot-dragging to get emergency approvals of whatever looked promising to mitigate, moderate and stop the virus from harming or killing the infected. He created a national task force that incorporated all branches of the military to solve all logistical issues that arose and might arise as testing, therapeutics and vaccine would roll out in hot spots Dr. Birx determined and then into regions and states the epidemic modelers directed. Trump was far ahead of the curve on everything a President could do.
Most importantly, in the single decision that had to be made, to close the nation’s economy and get tens of millions of businesses to shut down while employees stayed safely at home as the virus swept around the country, he did it when the ‘scientists’ and ‘doctors’ advised him to. It was the death knell of his economic success and tore the foundation from his re-election campaign.
Trump would have been unstoppable in 2020 election if not for the shutdown. It cost millions of Americans their income, their jobs, their businesses and impacted their children who were subject to digital home schooling because all their schools were closed, K-12 and colleges and universities, too. The Covid deaths and fears would not have stopped him.
The collapse of the economy altered the Trump MAGA success. His re-election would have been an historic landslide and wipeout of the Dems, likely winning the House back, also. Certainly, he would have won 40 of the 50 states.
What Covid did was give the Dems a campaign issue that along with the 3+ years of demonization, the impeachment, the investigations, the Infowar, the sabotage and treachery by the Intel agencies and State Dept., all the legal cases against Trump allies by Muller, the prolonged agony of General Flynn made by a Federal DC judge, enabled by the Appeals Court, made the false charge that Trump did not listen to the doctors and scientists stick.
Trump never made a false move, never went against science. He pushed the envelope to get breakthroughs. He was ahead of the curve, and the economy coming back so swiftly and strongly proves he did everything correctly. He saved lives and saved the economy. But it cost him support at the ballot box. He was pilloried by MSM and Dems, and demagogued by the Biden campaign. All false charges. But they stuck.
The one thing that Trump could not do in the fight against Covid was direct and order 50 states to act in concert. The Federal system of states left governors in charge of the fate of their citizens, and many governors, Dems all of them, messed up, acted late, made the wrong decisions. Their failures were heaped on Trump by the Media and the very Dem governors who caused a large percentage of the deaths by the virus.
The facts are the facts. In New York, Governor Cuomo caused thousands of deaths in nursing homes. He did not use thousands of beds provided by Trump in the Javits Center and on the Naval hospital ship, all of which Cuomo had requested. He did not even use a 110-bed tent facility in Central Park provided for him by Samaritan’s Purse. Culpability in New York alone was criminal and accounted for 40% of US deaths by Covid. Trump, however, got covered with the mud from Cuomo’s mess.
The final poison arrow from Covid’s quiver was Trump got infected. He quickly proved his amazing genetic health and recovered, experimenting upon himself with emergency-approved (due to his prior swift actions) therapeutics. The entire ordeal (which also touched his wife, Melania and son, Baron) cost him two weeks of vital campaigning. The ironically named by him, China virus, had come to ruin his re-election as if Zhongnanhai had intended to inflict him with the novel Corona virus. Fate or karma had entered the campaign.
We can uncover his thinly veiled enemies as we look closely at the States ‘counting’ the votes. Perhaps, the verb ‘compiling’ the votes is best used because any freshman observer of what has traditionally and continually occurred where and when needed is not mere vote counting. We see the completion of vote counting of the opponents largest haul (in this case, Trump’s bastions) and then, calculating with simple arithmetic, addition and subtraction, as the long night (always), with delays (always) and the days or weeks needed to ‘find’ the votes needed to overcome his total in order to create victory for Biden. Compiling votes is what we see going on in these key states.
This compiling is an art form, a tradecraft, indeed, a tradecraft used by State Dept. and CIA to win victories for satraps the US wants to win or hold power in other countries’ elections. In parts of the U.S., in Democrat vales and burgs, it is learned with mother’s milk. Professionals handle the task. I have personally seen it in operation in Florida, in New Jersey and in California. When it comes time to “count the votes”, the pros appear. Some know their names. Whether the system of voting is machines, punch cards, ink fill-ins, magical things occur. This is the final step of stealing an election.
Worse awaited Trump as he roared around the nation, rallying his voters by the tens of thousands, some days doing five rallies. Enemies lurked among the 19,000 counties of the United States where the votes of 2020 would be tallied. Some enemies, no doubt, were ideological, political foes. Some were institutional, government employees who feared four years of coming reforms that might likely cost them their jobs. Others were sore losers and turncoat Republicans who lost in 2016. A few were billionaires, oligarchs of high tech, whose demi-god status in the Liberal Cult was defied by the upstart Trump who would never kneel before their billions and influence. A ground swell for breaking up some of the big tech corporations and regulating them seemed primed for his second term.
The oligarchs sent their money to pay for the work needed to stop Trump. They sent billions of dollars mostly for negative advertising and for social media memes picked up by MSM as themes of the day, all rancid attacks against Trump.
Proven social and political science: negative advertising works. It depresses voting turnout and suppresses votes for the target. It eats at the undecided and independents who otherwise would have voted for the target. Billions of dollars of negative ads stopped the Red Wave. Turnout was historic, and the Republicans gained ground, but the landslide Trump needed was stopped.
The oligarchs who control all social media, also leveraged their platform’s influence and impact worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, to manipulate discourse, Internet search, government officials’ statements, tweets and re-tweets, advertising and digital content. Namely, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt were allied against Trump. Jeff Bezos, through his Washington Post, contributed the devastating suppression poll of a 17 pt. Biden lead in Wisconsin. Publicized nationally, that was a very powerful negative cast against the Trump campaign in the last days of the campaign. In addition, Bloomberg and George Soros injected hundreds of millions of dollars in the election in the swing states.
Nevada: Harry Reid, former Senate Majority Leader, operates a political machine in the state, openly hostile to Trump. The unionized casino employees, culinary workers union of 60,000, and thousands of illegals who worked construction, landscaping and low level jobs in Reno and Las Vegas, coalesced against Trump. Most all of these two groups are unemployed due to Covid shutdown, with thousands illegally voting, while many worked were paid Biden and Dem campaign volunteers.
Arizona: John McCain’s family, livid at the insults to John by Trump, were openly allied with NeverTrumpers like Jeff Flake and Mitt Romney, most importantly the Bush dynasty operatives all of whom hate Trump for his humiliating defeat of Jeff Bush campaigned against Trump. This hatred of Trump manifested into an irrational undermining of the campaign of Senator Martha McSally. One would think that Martha McSally as a combat A-10 Warthog pilot and group commander with years of active warfare experience would be a natural successor to the McCain Senate seat. However, her career as a combat pilot was a success that dwarfed the disastrous McCain career. So the McCains chose to work against her and Trump, especially when Trump backed her strongly. Arizona also has substantial illegals, useful to work and vote against Trump’s campaign because in a second term, they would likely be deported. Finally, Blue State émigrés from California have populated Maricopa County and voted against Trump as they would have in California. Their vote in Arizona made a difference.
Pennsylvania: The Philly Dem political machine is historic and perpetual. They cheat in local, state and federal elections and have for a century. Additionally, the Hillary Clinton-family machine is alive and well, ever ready to deliver votes when needed in the Commonwealth. Her father was from Scranton, she and her brothers and Bill had a political machine that could deliver to her most of the state except the Philadelphia region. She certainly activated her machine to work against Trump. Watch the grin on Ed Rendell’s face when Pennsylvania is stolen for Biden. He’s always been out front for the Clintons.
Georgia: There is a cadre of Black officials who projected the drumbeat of “Trump is a Racist”, the chanting led by the Atlanta mayor. Countering this propaganda, Trump had the personal endorsement of the greatest athlete Georgia ever produced, Herschel Walker, who has had a 37-year friendship with Trump and campaigned for Trump. Making these officials livid, too, was the relationship Trump had with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s niece, Dr. Alveda King. She testified endlessly that Trump was no racist. Nonetheless, the massive Black vote was tainted away from Trump, though he made larger than predicted inroads with Blacks in other venues.
North Carolina is now a state heavily influenced by Virginia’s shift to Blue. Sections of the state, where high tech industry abounds, are ideologically liberal and created enough barrier against Trump sweeping the state. Details haven’t emerged about how this state is now subject to delivery to Biden unless Trump’s margin can hold.
However, the elites, oligarchs, status quo stakeholders, criminal officials, the corrupted, deep state operatives, shadow government bureaucrats, influencers, neocons, and a sea of demented activists have waged a war to prevent a second term for Trump.
They sought Power and, apparently, will seize it soon.
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 