Michael Hudson Explains that Washington’s Russian Sanctions Have Freed Russia of Her Delusions that She Had “Western Partners” while Destroying Europe Economically. Hudson’s article, slightly edited by PCR, is reproduced with permission with final comments by PCR.
The reaction to the sabotage of three of the four Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in four places on Monday, September 26, has focused on speculations about who did it and whether NATO will make a serious attempt to discover the answer. Yet instead of panic, there has been a great sigh of diplomatic relief, even calm. Disabling these pipelines ends the uncertainty and worries on the part of US/NATO diplomats that nearly reached a crisis proportion the previous week, when large demonstrations took place in Germany calling for the sanctions to end and to commission Nord Stream 2 to resolve the energy shortage.
The German public was coming to understand what it meant that their steel companies, fertilizer companies, glass companies and toilet-paper companies were shutting down. These companies were forecasting that they would have to go out of business entirely – or shift operations to the United States – if Germany did not withdraw from the trade and currency sanctions against Russia and permit gas and oil imports to resume, and presumably prices to fall back from their astronomical eight to tenfold increases.
Yet State Department hawk Victoria Nuland already had stated in January that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward” if Russia responded to NATO/Ukrainian accelerated military attacks on the Russian-speaking eastern oblasts. President Biden backed up U.S. insistence on February 7, promising that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. … I promise you, we will be able to do it.”
Most observers simply assumed that these statements reflected the obvious fact that German politicians were fully in the US/NATO pocket. They held fast in refusing to authorize Nord Stream 2, and Canada soon seized the Siemens dynamos needed to send gas through Nord Stream 1. That seemed to settle matters until German industry – and a rising number of voters – finally began to calculate just what blocking Russian gas would mean for Germany’s industrial firms.
Germany’s willingness to self-impose an economic depression was wavering – although not on the part of German politicians or the EU bureaucracy. If German policymakers were to put German business interests and living standards first, NATO’s common sanctions and New Cold War front would be broken. Italy and France might follow suit. That nightmare of European diplomatic independence made it urgent to take the anti-Russian sanctions out of the hands of democratic politics and settle matters by sabotaging the two pipelines. Despite being an act of violence, it has restored calm to international diplomatic relations between U.S. and German politicians. No Russian energy for Germany means no threat to Germany’s subservience to Washington.
There is no more uncertainty about whether or not Europe will break away from U.S. New Cold War aims by restoring mutual trade and investment with Russia. That option is now out. The threat of Europe breaking away from the US/NATO trade and financial sanctions against Russia has been solved, seemingly for the foreseeable future, as Russia has announced that as the gas pressure falls in three of the four pipelines, the infusion of salt water will irreversibly corrode the pipes. (Tagesspiegel, September 28.)
I have no doubt that U.S. strategists have a game plan for how to proceed and that it is in what the neocons claim to be in the U.S. interest – that of maintaining a unipolar neoliberalized and financialized global economy for as long as they can.
They have long had a plan for countries that are unable to service their foreign debts. The IMF will lend them the money, conditional upon the debtor country raising the foreign exchange to repay the dollar loans by privatizing, that is, selling to private interests, what remains of their public domain, natural-resource patrimony and other assets, mainly to U.S. financial investors and their allies.
Will it work? Or will the countries in debt to the West band together and work out ways to restore the seemingly lost world of affordable oil and gas prices, fertilizer prices, grain and other food prices, metals and raw materials. These items supplied by Russia, China and their allied Eurasian neighbors will not be priced in the artificially high US dollar. By disassociating from the West, the third world can become independent.
Will indebted countries repudiate the debts forced upon them, protect their interests, and use currencies other than the dollar which has been bid high by Washington’s strangle hold on Europe?
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