Yves here. The reason I doubt the idea that the West is trying to precipitate famine in poor economies is that the UK and Europe will suffer the worst food shortages this fall and winter since World War II as a result of the very same sanctions against Russia. So if the putative leaders can be indifferent to the prospect of destabilizing large-scale suffering at home, it seems more likely that famine in Africa and parts of Asia is another unplanned outcome, albeit one welcomed by the more pathological.
Some commentators are predicting revolts and/or tectonic plate shifts, like Europe aligning itself with Russia rather than the US in the name of food security and cheaper energy. With the last 100+ years invested in Soviet and now Putin hatred, it’s hard to see even starvation in Europe, if the most extreme outcomes take place, producing that degree of political change in even a half a generation.
The trigger for this Michael Hudson post was a meeting of the Chairperson of the African Union, President of Senegal Macky Sall with Putin. Sall’s remarks, from a partial transcript of the meeting:
Anti-Russia sanctions have made this situation worse and now we do not have access to grain from Russia, primarily to wheat. And, most importantly, we do not have access to fertiliser. The situation was bad and now it has become worse, creating a threat to food security in Africa.
This morning, I spoke with my colleague from the African Union Commission. I told him that there were two major problems – the crisis and the sanctions. We must work together to resolve these problems so that sanctions are lifted on food products, in particular, grain, and fertiliser.
More explanation from Nezavisimaya Gazeta: African nations to seek Putin’s help in avoiding famine (translated at TASS):
Talk about the starvation threat in Africa has been going on for a while. Agricultural shipments via Black Sea routes are stalled, particularly because Kiev has mined the waters around Odessa for fear of Russia trying to seize the port. In fact, Africa seeks to overcome two shocks in one go because due to the coronavirus pandemic, the economic situation on the continent left much to be desired even before the launch of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. Although Russia and Ukraine produce only a third of global wheat and barley exports, much of those are focused on Africa rather than on wealthier countries. This is why logistics and sanctions issues may trigger a genuine famine.
“The visit of the African Union’s delegation is actually nothing extraordinary because the parties exchange delegations a couple of times a year. It is during the pandemic that food price issues started to emerge. Besides, complications with foreign currency payments and Russia being prevented from making full use of maritime transport are creating additional difficulties. In particular, even if some companies agree to insure Russian vessels, their high rates inevitably affect prices for final customers,” Deputy Director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for African Studies Leonid Fituni pointed out.
Contrast that discussion with how Politico’s European newsletter reacted to the Sall-Putin meeting. Rather than trying to alleviate probable famines in many poor countries, the US and Europe are full on “the solution to any problem is better propaganda”. From its morning European newsletter:
PUTIN’S FOOD WAR
AFRICAN UNION CHAIR BUYS INTO PUTIN’S FOOD PROPAGANDA: So much for the EU’s Africa partnership. Senegalese President Macky Sall, who is also the chair of the African Union, has called on the EU to remove sanctions on Russia wheat and fertilizers — even though neither the U.S. nor the EU have banned imports of Russian fertilizers or wheat — giving credence to Vladimir Putin’s skewed logic. The comments came after Sall met the Russian president in Sochi on Friday. POLITICO’s Eddy Wax has the write-up.
FACT OR FICTION: While EU officials insist the EU has not sanctioned Russian fertilizer, the EU’s fifth sanctions package does mention potash and combined fertilizers. High time, Playbook reckons, to do a quick recap of what the EU is and isn’t restricting.
Fact: The EU has not banned the import of Russian fertilizers. In fact, the bloc continues to import those products from Russia.
Also fact: The EU has sanctioned Belarus fertilizers. And in its fifth sanctions package, the EU placed a quota on Russian fertilizers to avoid circumvention by Belarus, with a yearly cap of 837,570 tons on potash and 1,577,807 tons on combined fertilizers containing potassium — a limit that is higher than the EU’s past imports from Russia.
Fiction: Neither the EU nor the U.S. have sanctioned Russian wheat. Many European and American companies have stopped working with Russia, so it is likely that imports of its food into the EU will fall this year, but it is difficult to see why that’s bad news for Africa. In fact, the less Russian wheat the EU buys up, the more there is for African countries.
What’s really going on: Wheat, corn and sunflower oil prices have skyrocketed worldwide — all these are key Ukrainian exports. They have soared because markets anticipated less supply from Ukraine, because of Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports, bombing of its grain silos and the mining of its fields.
Needless to say, this diatribe is a combination of patronization and fabrication. According to Politico, African leaders have no clue as to why they are suffering from rising food and fertilizer shortages, and have been duped by evil Putin into thinking the Western sanctions have made their already bad situation worse.
Commercial ships not stuck in Ukraine ports left the Black Sea as soon as the war broke out because their insurance didn’t cover transit in a war zone. Commentators have pointed out that arming Ukraine with wunderwaffen to shoot at Russian ships from shore makes cargo ships less likely to want to come back any time soon.
As we’ve repeatedly pointed out, Russia is not and never has blockaded the Black Sea; it had one humanitarian corridor for shipping and has been trying to open a second. It also clear Ukrainian mines out of the Mariupol port.
The idea that Russia mined fields is another Ukraine fabrication; Russian soliders have been instructed to avoid targeting them to the extent possible. Residents in Mariupol said Ukraine was mining roads and some fields nearby. Ukraine has been pushing images of one explosion that it claims was Russia blowing up grain harvesting equipment. Note Russia has no reason to do so, so either this is yet another Kramatorsk-level false flag, or at best, Ukraine made the facility a military target by storing equipment and/or munitions there.
But the point of this long-winded intro is the press and EU officials are already pre-positioning the blame cannons for the coming cold and hungry winter solidly on Putin.
That is a long-winded way of saying that the West, particularly the EU, has imposed and continues to ratchet up sanctions not out of any real strategy except a fervid desire to hurt Russia. They simply can’t admit that the sanctions have not only failed but are hurting them and others far more. They keep trying to pound Russia even more out of the irrational belief that doing more economic harm will have to bring Russia to its knees, when they’ve already hobbled themselves and are on their way to self-amputating.
By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is The Destiny of Civilization
Is the proxy war in Ukraine turning out to be only a lead-up to something larger, involving world famine and a foreign-exchange crisis for food- and oil-deficit countries?
Many more people are likely to die of famine and economic disruption than on the Ukrainian battlefield. It thus is appropriate to ask whether what appeared to be the Ukraine proxy war is part of a larger strategy to lock in U.S. control over international trade and payments. We are seeing a financially weaponized power grab by the U.S. Dollar Area over the Global South as well as over Western Europe. Without dollar credit from the United States and its IMF subsidiary, how can countries stay afloat? How hard will the U.S. act to block them from de-dollarizing, opting out of the U.S. economic orbit?
U.S. Cold War strategy is not alone in thinking how to benefit from provoking a famine, oil and balance-of-payments crisis. Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum worries that the world is overpopulated – at least with the “wrong kind” of people. As Microsoft philanthropist (the customary euphemism for rentiermonopolist) Bill Gates has explained: “Population growth in Africa is a challenge.” His lobbying foundation’s 2018 “Goalkeepers” report warned: “According to U.N. data, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. Its population is projected to double by 2050,” with “more than 40 percent of world’s extremely poor people … in just two countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.”[1]
Gates advocates cutting this projected population increase by 30 percent by improving access to birth control and expanding education to “enable more girls and women to stay in school longer, have children later.” But how can that be afforded with this summer’s looming food and oil squeeze on government budgets?
South Americans and some Asian countries are subject to the same jump in import prices resulting from NATO’s demands to isolate Russia. JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon recently warned attendees at a Wall Street investor conference that the sanctions will cause a global “economic hurricane.”[2]He echoed the warning by IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva in April that, “To put it simply: we are facing a crisis on top of a crisis.” Pointing out that the Covid pandemic has been capped by inflationas the war in Ukraine has made matters “much worse, and threatens to further increase inequality” she concluded that: “The economic consequences from the war spread fast and far, to neighbors and beyond, hitting hardest the world’s most vulnerable people. Hundreds of millions of families were already struggling with lower incomes and higher energy and food prices.”[3]
The Biden administration blames Russia for “unprovoked aggression.” But it is his administration’s pressure on NATO and other Dollar Area satellites that has blocked Russian exports of grain, oil and gas. But many oil- and food-deficit countries see themselves as the primary victims of “collateral damage” caused by US/NATO pressure.
Is World Famine and Balance-of-Payments Crisis a Deliberate US/NATO Policy?
On June 3, African Union Chairperson Macky Sall, President of Senegal, went to Moscow to plan how to avoid a disruption in Africa’s food and oil trade by refusing to become pawns in the US/NATO sanctions. So far in 2022, President Putin noted: “Our trade is growing. In the first months of this year it grew by 34 percent.”[4]But Senegal’s President Sall worried that: “Anti-Russia sanctions have made this situation worse and now we do not have access to grain from Russia, primarily to wheat. And, most importantly, we do not have access to fertilizer.”
U.S. diplomats are forcing countries to choose whether, in George W. Bush’s words, “you are either for us or against us.” The litmus test is whether they are willing to force their populations to starve and shut down their economies for lack of food and oil by stopping trade with the world’s Eurasian core of China, Russia, India, Iran and their neighbors.
Mainstream Western media describe the logic behind these sanctions as promoting a regime change in Russia. The hope was that blocking it from selling its oil and gas, food or other exports would drive down the ruble’s exchange rate and “make Russia scream” (as the U.S. tried to do to Allende’s Chile to set the stage for is backing of the Pinochet military coup). Exclusion from the SWIFT bank-clearing system was supposed to disrupt Russia’s payment system and sales, while seizing Russia’s $300 billion om foreign-currency reserves held in the West was expected to collapse the ruble, preventing Russian consumers from buying the Western goods to which they had become accustomed. The idea (and it seems so silly in retrospect) was that Russia’s population would rise in rebellion to protest against how much more Western luxury imports cost. But the ruble soared rather than sunk, and Russia quickly replaced SWIFT with its own system linked to that of China. And Russia’s population began to turn away from the West’s aggressive enmity.
Evidently some major dimensions are missing from the U.S. national-security think-tank models. But when it comes to global famine, was a more covert and even lager strategy at work? It is now looking like the major aim of the U.S. war in Ukraine all along was merely to serve as a catalyst, an excuse to impose sanctions that would disrupt the world’s food and energy trade, and to manage this crisis in a way that would afford U.S. diplomats an opportunity to confront Global South countries with the choice “Your loyalty and neoliberal dependency or your life – and, in the process, to “thin out” the world’s non-white populations that so worried Mr. Dimon and the WEF?
There must have been the following calculation: Russia accounts for 40% of the world’s grain trade and 25 percent of the world fertilizer market (45 percent if Belarus is included). Any scenario would have included a calculation that if so large a volume of grain and fertilizer was withdrawn from the market, prices would soar, just as they have done for oil and gas.
Adding to the disruption in the balance-of-payments of countries having to import these commodities, the price is rising for buying dollars to pay their foreign bondholders and banks for debts falling due. The Federal Reserve’s tightening of interest rates has caused a rising premium for U.S. dollars over euros, sterling and Global South currencies.
It is inconceivable that the consequences of this on countries outside of Europe and the United States were not taken into account, because the global economy is an interconnected system. Most disruptions are in the 2 to 5 percent range, but today’s US/NATO sanctions are so far off the historical track that price increases will soar substantially above the historic range. Nothing like this has happened in recent times.
This suggests that what appeared in February to be a war between Ukrainians and Russia is really a trigger intended to restructure the world economy – and to do so in a way to lock U.S. control over the Global South. Geopolitically, the proxy war in Ukraine has been a handy excuse for America’s to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The choice confronting Global South countries: to starve by paying their foreign bondholders and bankers, or to announce, as a basic principle of international law: “As sovereign countries, we put our survival above the aim of enriching foreign creditors who have made loans that have gone bad as a result of their choice to wage a new Cold War. As for the destructive neoliberal advice that the IMF and World Bank have given us, their austerity plans were destructive instead of helpful. Therefore, their loans have gone bad. As such, they have become odious.”
NATO policy has given Global South countries no choice but to reject its attempt to establish a U.S. food stranglehold on the Global South by blocking any competition from Russia, thereby monopolizing the world’s grain and energy trade. The major grain exporter was the heavily subsidized U.S. farm sector, followed by Europe’s highly subsidized Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). These were the main grain exporters before Russia entered the picture. The US/NATO demand is to roll back the clock to restore dependency on the Dollar Area and its eurozone satellites.
The Implicit Russian and Chinese Counterplan
What is needed for the world’s non-US/NATO population to survive is a new world trade and financial system. The alternative is world famine for much of the world. More people will die o the sanctions than have died on the Ukrainian battlefield. Financial and trade sanctions are as destructive as military attack. So the Global South is morally justified in putting its sovereign interests above those of the wielders of international financial and trade weaponry.
First, reject the sanctions and reorient trade to Russia, China, India, Iran and their fellow members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The problem is how to pay for imports from these countries, especially if U.S. diplomats extend sanctions against such commerce.
There is no way that Global South countries can pay for oil, fertilizer and food from these countries and also pay the dollar debts that are the legacy of U.S.-sponsored neoliberal trade policy subject to U.S. and eurozone protectionism. Therefore, the second need is to declare a debt moratorium – in effect, a repudiation – of the debts that represent loans gone bad. This act would be analogous to the 1931 suspension of German reparations and Inter-Ally debts owed to the United States. Quite simply, today’s Global South debts cannot be paid without subjecting debtor countries to famine and austerity.
A third corollary that follows from these economic imperatives is to replace the World Bank and its pro-U.S. policies of trade dependency and underdevelopment with a genuine Bank for Economic Acceleration. Along with this institution is a fourth corollary in the form of the new bank’s sibling: a replacement for the IMF free of austerity junk economics and subsidy of America’s client oligarchies coupled with currency raids on countries resisting U.S. privatization and financialization takeovers.
The fifth requirement is for countries to protect themselves by joining a military alliance as an alternative to NATO, to avoid being turned into another Afghanistan, another Libya, another Iraq or Syria or Ukraine.
The main deterrent to this strategy is not U.S. power, for it has shown itself to be a paper tiger. The problem is one of economic consciousness and will.
___________
[1]“Bill Gates has a warning about population growth,” World Economic Forum/Reuters, September 19, 2018. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/africas-rapid-population-growth-puts-poverty-progress-at-risk-says-gates.
[2]Lananh Nguyen, “‘It’s a hurricane.’Bank chiefs warn of a weakening economy,” The New York Times, June 1, 2022.
[3]Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Managing Director, “Facing Crisis Upon Crisis: How the World Can Respond
April 14, 2022. https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2022/04/14/sp041422-curtain-raiser-sm2022.
[4]“Putin meets with African Union Chairperson at Sochi, June 3, 2022.” President Sall was accompanied by Moussa Faki Mahamat,Chairperson of the African Union Commission.http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/68564. For a elated discussion on the sanctions see https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/06/sanctions-now-weapons-of-mass-starvation.html.
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“With the last 100+ years invested in Soviet and now Putin hatred, it’s hard to see even starvation in Europe, if the most extreme outcomes take place, producing that degree of political change in even a half a generation.”
The Brits came down with their permanent Russophobia in the late 1830s. See John Howes Gleason “The Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain” Harvard University Press, 1950.
We Americans seem to have caught in starting in the early 1880s. See David S. Fogelsong “The American Mission and the “Evil Empire” – The Crusade for a Free Russia since 1881.”
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-american-mission-and-the-evil-empire-the-crusade-for-free-russia-1881
In both cases, it was a result of cultural/intellectual change in the UK/US, not really in the clash of national/imperial interests.
So, its been about 140 years for us Americans, 180+ for the Brits. That’s pretty deep. A possible hope is the Germans & French come to their senses.
interesting that you mention US russophobia beginning in 1880. that’s when i peg our re-integration at the high oligarch level with the UK. unbeknownst to the masses even to this day, of course.
i came across this article just awhile ago which seems pertinent to seeing our “special relationship” in a new light:
The British are running a coup against the U.S. president again
regardless of how one feels about tRUMP, this should be alarming.
“We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men’ we’ve got the money too
We’ve fought the bear before, and while we’re Britons true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.”
The old musical hall song from the 1870s.
A lot of these comments are trendy Anti American!
As I see it America,the States & the Constitution, are not on board with this animosity toward Russia.
In fact America has much to gain as the Russians destroy the western fiat monetary system based in London,Brussels & the Federal Reserve Bank in NYC.
This is not primarily a political issue,…This is a financial Issue as the Bretton Woods system is collapsing.
The Vichy like regime in Washington,the result of a stolen election,is rather a creature of the City of London Financial District & the Queen’s Privy Council.This regime does not represent the states & people of the USA.
Anti Americanitic culture-racist Anti Americanite Anti Americanism has long been trendy on parts of the left, and separately among the lumpentelligentsia of various countries and societies, whether ” on the left” or not.
If I ever have reason to go to Europe and reason to know about it ahead of time, I will be sure to bone up on my Chomsky so I can at least seem conversant in it. That way, I might stand a better chance of being invited to various trendy parties and gatherings in Europe.
If we ever get a ” quit NATO” party into some measure of power in America, you will be impressed by how fast the Europeans try to keep their American soldier hostages in Europe firmly trapped and kept held-hostage in Europe.
At least in Germany, a lot of people will just say “Good Riddance”. Of course in some countries people will beg for the US to stay, but at least partially because they fear the political weight of Germany.
Well . . . why doesn’t Germany get busy and use its power to end NATO and let us take our hostages home?
The answer to the question is obviously “no” and it’s surprising that it should have been asked, even rhetorically. As on previous occasions, Hudson’s a bit out of his depth on this subject, I’m afraid. As an economist, he’s used to assuming rational explanations for things, especially where finance and commodities are involved. Economists are often prepared to conceive the most elaborate and complicated conspiratorial explanations possible, rather than accept the roles that stupidity, chaos and short-term thinking play in human life and in politics. So surely, it’s argued, all this Ukraine business must have been planned over years if not decades? Sanctions must have been prepared well in advance? Financial measures must have been calibrated long since? All this must be part of a Master Plan? Otherwise, we have to accept that humans don’t always behave rationally.
Well, we know they don’t, and in politics least of all. It would be an insult to headless chickens to compare their behaviour to that of western political and economic elites since 24 February. Sanctions, as we’ve discussed before, were put in place by a shaken and frightened political class whose world had just been turned upside down, not because they were necessarily expected to work, but because it was necessary to Do Something, and sanctions were Something. To expect US and NATO governments (yes, there’s a difference) to think about mid-term, let alone long-term consequences of these sanctions is to misunderstand how politics works. In France, for example, political attention was laser-focused on the electoral season, which started in April and finishes in a couple of weeks’ time. Literally nothing else mattered: after all the consequences of sanctions might be dealt with by an entirely different government. For many other governments, agreeing to sanctions, whatever they may have thought privately, was easier than potentially bruising public battles in NATO and the EU. We’ll worry about the future later.
Western powers do not want hunger in the Global South for one very simple reason. Their problems come to us. We’re already seeing massive population movements north in Africa for reasons of climate and hunger, and a huge amount if effort is going into trying to stabilise the Sahel and the Maghreb (that’s where most immigrants come from). Control of frontiers is a problem that has haunted the EU since its foundation, and is, of course, a factor in the management of the Ukraine crisis.
Just a point on the African Union: it’s a hollow shell, to put it politely, and none of its formal structures, inasmuch as they function, have any power or even much influence over national governments. For complicated political and economic reasons, few African states will accept any direction, or even regional coordination. The visit by Sall to Moscow has considerable political importance at this moment, but that’s all. He won’t be able to “plan” anything, still less implement it.
Or it could be an instance of the Shock Doctrine coming into play. “Never let a crisis go to waste.” It wasn’t planned before the start of the Russian SMO, but when the Black Sea became Anathema Lake for the marine insurers light bulbs popped on in their heads and they told Zelenski to mine the harbor channels and the rest is history in the making.
This business is all about the confusion & dislocation being caused by the imminent collapse of the western financial system.The system founded at Bretton Woods in 1944 & backed by the American Dollar! Since 1971 the Dollar ha been a fiat currency redeemable by hot air!
This Financial system is the last tool that .
western Europe,no longer colonial powers,have to dominate the world. The Russians are shredding this system with Gold & commodities.
The bankers in London & Brussels are desperate….Without their Magic Money Smoke & Mirrors system,Western Europe..EU..will be reduced to Balkan Status as 3rd rate states.
As Zoltan Pozsar states
“We are witnessing the birth of a new world monetary order”
This business is all about the confusion & dislocation being caused by the imminent collapse of the western financial system.The system founded at Bretton Woods in 1944 & backed by the American Dollar! Since 1971 the Dollar ha been a fiat currency redeemable by hot air!
This Financial system is the last tool that western Europe,no longer colonial powers,have to dominate the world. The Russians are shredding this system with Gold & commodities.
The bankers in London & Brussels are desperate.
Without their Magic Money Smoke & Mirrors system,Western Europe..EU..will be reduced to Balkan Status as 3rd rate states.
Between a large population relative to its arable land, climate change and Ethiopia building dams upriver on the Blue Nile, Egypt seems to be particularly vulnerable, whatever the results in Ukraine, and it’s hard to imagine a viable remedy.
Thank you, David. I don’t disagree at all.
Unfortunately, there are elements in western elites, not necessarily in government*, who see this as an opportunity, if not an opportunity for revenge. * That could be so, not career civil servants / experts like you, but the neo liberal and neo con “special advisers” with an axe to grind.
https://www.ft.com/content/fcb92b61-2bdd-4ed0-8742-d0b5c04c36f4 is not untypical. He plays to the gallery and says worse on the BBC. Last week, the Guardian featured a column by Simon Jenkins, questioning the wisdom of sanctions on Russia. Some replies BTL felt the south deserved famine as it refuses to sanction Russia, “a reckoning” according to one.
The week after the invasion of Ukraine began, former banker and PM of Benin, Lionel Zinsou, was in Paris to publicise a pan African bank payment and settlement system that his firm South Bridge had helped launch. At a palatial town house just off the Saint-Honore and near his former employer Rothschilds, a reception was held in Zinsou’s honour. Guests included former colleagues and counterparts from France’s storied financial institutions and corporates. Zinsou explained the impact of the war on Africa and what Africa’s reaction would be, including disgust at the double standards, and was puzzled that western policymakers, some of whom were in the audience, did not think about the impact of food shortages arising from the war and, much in advance of further climate change and continuing deprivation, mass migration.
Thank you, Colonel Smithers! At some point,
after what?, 500 years?, indifference becomes not merely a plan, but an axiom.
“Farmers of the world, Unite! Throw off your chains!”
Its very difficult to imagine the strategic leadership of the West with the Machiavellian agency Professor Hudson is attributing to them, after all it doesn’t seem like there are many if any “wins” on their record. So I would agree with you with respect to this being a well-thought out series of actions and events.
That said, I think its hard to dismiss the fact that using Ukraine as a prodding rod against Russia was planned by the US for the better part of a decade. The US began training Ukrainian “nationalist” regiments in 2015, and I believe RAND put out an explicit game plan, which included the framework and check list for sanctions in 2018. I don’t believe that the “blowback” and failure of Western sanctions is a result of irrational decisions by Western actors. To me it seems clear that Western actors acted rationality but under some massively false assumptions. The most glaring of these illusions is that the notional dollar size of their consumptive economies was greater than the equivalent dollar size of Russia (or China’s) productive economies. This belief was undergirded by a faith in the inviolability of the value of the US dollar. It is actually this premise that Professor Hudson is indicating Global South nations will have to challenge, is the US dollar so valuable they will starve for it?
After premising that the Western sanctions regime is a consequence of irrational behavior, you conclude that the West wouldn’t want disorder in the Global South due to the very rational, self-interested belief that “Their problems come to us.” While I can’t disagree with that, and I concede that actors can be selectively rational and irrational; the evidence provide by the historical record shows that the West happily causes disorder in the global south and disregards that those “problems come to us.” Most notable is the example you cite in the “Sahel and the Maghreb”, where that “huge amount of effort” at stabilization pales in comparison to the huge amount of effort the West expended at destabilizing the region.
Again I would agree with the characterization of the African Union as a symbolic deliberative body with little executive power. But I would point out that its become obvious that a major part of the Western strategy in this conflict is as our host points out that “the solution to any problem is better propaganda”. Consequently the symbolic resistance from the AU to follow the Western narrative presages more conflict ahead.
I think what’s most important is the question posed: Will Global South countries choose to “starve by paying their foreign bondholders and bankers,” or repudiate these debts. And consequently what could be done by the Eurasian powers to support the latter choice. I think that the corollaries of the implicit Russian/Chinese response are a bit thin on detail. Each sounds good on principle, but even in their structuring they seem to require cooperation from the West, which is characterized as the instigator for this mayhem. For instance, declaring a debt moratorium, why would the West do that? It seems to me that there are some actual financial actions that the Russians and Chinese could take, but they would mean more direct confrontation, particularly from China.
I think one of the overlooked dynamics of our inflationary predicament is the power over marginal US dollar inflation which China has. Certainly the Fed owns the “printing press” and controls interest rates; but China as the largest single supplier of our consumer goods has the ability to pass on the marginal increase in USD costs of their production back to the US. It can do this in two ways, first directly via price increases, and second by spending those US dollars on commodities and labor outside the US. Can China use this functional power to transform (via purchases, loans or swaps) the Global South’s dollar debt? Could China then defend this position versus the sovereign issuer of Dollars, the US and its central bank, by using its control of marginal dollar inflation?
For example if China purchased Global South dollar debt(bonds), that debt would still have to be serviced, China would simply be on the receiving end of principal and interest. But if China and a debtor country engaged in offshore dollar swaps, where they would discount dollars to either the Yuan, a debtor country currency or a debtor country commodity/asset, could China provide “scarce” dollars on the cheap. Could the Chinese then use their power over US marginal inflation via imports to defend against the Fed’s attempts to make these dollars “expensive” for the Chinese. Ultimately the Chinese and the US would find themselves in a standoff as to where the US could threaten Chinese access to the Dollar system, and the Chinese would threaten American access to everything on the shelves at Walmart.
Just a breakfast coffee spitball, but I do wonder what concrete actions that don’t require Western/US charity and compliance, the Russians and Chinese could undertake.
dftbs: I believe RAND put out an explicit game plan, which included the framework and check list for sanctions in 2018.
‘Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground.’
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3000/RR3063/RAND_RR3063.pdf
It’s still up, because it was too widely disseminated to be withdrawn — there’s even a paperback version priced at $49.50 you can buy on Amazon, FFS! Being RAND and written by left coast defense intellectuals, it’s relatively lucid, if removed from consideration of the real-world potential frictions and failure points. I’ve seen other documents laying out the same strategic doctrine towards Russia, emanating from right coast think tanks that are far more unhinged.
dftbs:To me it seems clear that Western actors acted rationality but under some massively false assumptions. The most glaring of these illusions is that the notional dollar size of their consumptive economies was greater than the equivalent dollar size of Russia (or China’s) productive economies
By what definition of ‘rationality,’ if this rationality operates under ‘massively false assumptions’? It’s the rationality of the US’s Dunning-Kruger elites.
Sun Tzu applies here, of course: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
dftbs: China as the largest single supplier of our consumer goods has the ability to pass on the marginal increase in USD costs of their production back to the US. It can do this in two ways, first directly via price increases, and second by spending those US dollars on commodities and labor outside the US.
China is already very much doing the latter, reducing the US Treasuries and using the dollars they do have to pay host countries for purchases of BRI-related infrastructure in those countries– ports, railways, etc. Cute, huh?
China forex reserves —
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/china/foreign-exchange-reserves
‘China cuts US Treasury holdings to lowest in nearly 12 years amid volatility in the US’
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202205/1265887.shtml
Michaelmas, all great observations, particularly your last one! China has indeed been spending its USD trade surplus to pay for commodity, labor and infrastructure purchases across the BRI sphere (and beyond). It’s this dynamic that has torn the power over marginal inflation away from the Fed; and its this dynamic that IMO will push the Fed to move interest rates past the present market indicated “terminal” level in the 2.70% area. I wonder if China will use this dynamic(power) to execute the required actions to fulfill Professor Hudson’s second, third and fourth prescriptions:
If they did so, the Fed will have to defend the dollar and its global infrastructure. It would have to make USD scarce scarce and expensive, thus making a direct Chinese assault on dollar debt very expensive in dollar terms. For example within the outline of the “swap” in my previous comment, the higher the Fed brings interest rates to make USD scarce, the more expensive this swap will be for China, as they could use their dollars and “invest” them in higher yielding US dollar assets.
Will the Chinese take on mark-to-market loses in USD terms to remake the geopolitical landscape for the broad benefit of humanity. I both hope and think so.
If the ChinaGov decides to take on mark-to-market losses in USD terms to remake the geopolitical landscape, it won’t be for the broad benefit of humanity. It will be for the narrow benefit of China. “Narrow benefit of China” may benefit broad humanity more than “Narrow benefit of the DC FedRegime and the Anglo-US Overclass” did, could or will.
And isn’t broad humanity lucky? Broad humanity will get to find out over the next 20-30 years.
I’m at a loss to see anything in the record of the Chinese leadership that indicates they are the same sort of creatures as the present Western overclass. Notably absent from their record is the level of violence in international relations. Notably present in their record of leadership is the clear material benefits they’ve delivered to their citizens. You may question and speculate about the morality and motivations behind these actions, I think that’s irrelevant. So I’ll politely disagree with your statement, and the benefits to humanity of removing the present Western system.
I remember reading once where when China originally conquered East Turkestan, that the Chinese military operators of that time exterminated about a million East Turkestanis.
Chinese Great Han CommuNazi Lebensraum policies in Tibet and Sinjiang show what China does to natives who get in China’s way.
China’s pre-emption of all the rivers flowing from Tibet into non-Chinese Asia will leave non-Chinese Asia without fish and without water.
China’s building of a massive fish strip-mining fleet to strip mine every fish from every bit of water that non-China will not be able to keep China out of will illustrate China’s disregard for non-Chinese going forward.
Events will prove me right or wrong.
I don’t care about what China does to the targets of its One Ball One Chain Great Han Co-Prosperity Sphere plans and actions. i just want for America to be able to avoid contact with the One Ball One Chain Empire.
That would require an extermination program to eliminate the Free Trader demographic within America so that America could institute strict rigid protectionism.
I never said that removing the Western system wouldn’t offer potential benefits to humanity. I merely note that the New Chinese Hegemon will make sure that China will pre-empt all those potential benefits for itself and leave precisely zero of them for the rest of you.
But again, events will prove me right or wrong.
And as long as we can achieve zero-contact between America and China, I don’t care what China does to the rest of you.
China needs to accelerate divestiture of its USD holdings and so should the other countries. Simultaneously it needs to reduce investment in US Treasuries an buy a basket of other currencies plus gold. If they don’t do so they’ll be caught in the same situation as Russia with their $ holdings frozen by the US.
If India is receiving discounted oil from Russia it has no business converting it into oil products and selling those to the US becuse they will receive USD in return which at some point will make them liable to a freeze.
I had a look on this RAND report, and it is an intelligent, if not benevolent document. In particular, the timing of the crisis should be such that tilting the market balance to bring energy prices down would be easy. But there is a shortage or a precarious balance at best.
The other aspect is having unresolved quarrels with Russia, Iran and China at the same time which emboldens countries like India and Brazil to follow their economic interests. Which could be avoided. When only few lesser countries like Venezuela, Iran and Syria were in the doghouse of “maximum sanctions”, there was a considerable trepidation in India and Brazil to violate them, so they did it only gingerly.
RAND report had various cautionary statements that inattentive readers in Administration simply ignored.
All good points. I think the distinction I’m making is between a consciously designed and implemented plan and a continuity of policy. Now this may sound a small distinction, but in fact I’d suggest that it’s the difference between how politics actually operates, and how it’s popularly supposed to.
Nobody doubts, for example, that there is a long western history of antipathy to Russia, and that for at least 15-20 years, there has been a deliberate attempt to build up Ukraine as a kind of anti-Russia, and cultivate contacts and support there. (I’ve seen some of this first hand). Likewise, the EU particularly has always had a difficult and conflictual relationship with Russia, which it sees as thumbing the national nose at all of the technocratic, supranational, normative ideas the EU tries to spread. You therefore have a political class which shares many of the same attitudes towards the two countries, and this in turn means that, whoever is in power, there’s a great deal of policy continuity. This is both continuity of theme (“what did we do when we last encountered a similar problem … oh yes, sanctions”) and continuity of action (“we already have sanctions against Russia, I know, let’s have some more”). What there isn’t is some kind of detailed long-term plan. Many of the current political leaders are reacting instinctively, falling back on their prejudices and their vague memories of what was done before.
The same for Africa. My point was that no western state would deliberately set out to promote hunger or even political instability in the continent because of the potential repercussions. (In that sense the situation has changed a lot since the Cold war). Western policies on Africa are consciously intended to make states more stable (again, I speak from first-hand experience). They may not succeed, they may even be counter-productive, and they may be in any case attempting the impossible, but that’s the situation.
In any event, it’s virtually impossible for a political culture to concentrate on more than one political crisis at a time. To expect a politician whose knowledge of Ukraine until a few months ago was limited to the impression that it was On Our Side to suddenly understand all the geopolitical ramifications is not reasonable. Imagine trying to raise the subject with the Foreign Minister of, say, Spain, only to be told: look, I’ve got three telephone calls with my opposite numbers this afternoon, I have to speak in Parliament, there’s a visit by NATO tomorrow, the Council of Ministers is the next day and then I’m travelling for a week. Come back some other time.”
Does anyone have an example of sanctions working as intended?
Anywhere? anytime?
Yes.
1) making the lives of Syrian people living hell, and
2) killing 500,000 Iraqi children.
The former is definitely the sanctions’ desired direct effect; the latter is likely “collateral damage”.
It should though be obvious, that the west is only interested in “stable” african states that are also fully integrated into neoliberal US capitalism, who use GMOs and produce cash crops and allow Shell and Exon to expoit their oil reserves. Any other kind of african state can take a hike and famine as a weapon hs been used many times on such “commy” governments and their peoples.
“My point was that no western state would deliberately set out to promote hunger or even political instability in the continent because of the potential repercussions”
How about the US confiscating 20 bn from Afghanistan to prevent it from buying food? How about the long term sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela to ‘persuade’ the people to rise up against leaders the US wants to overthrow?
How about Madeleine Albright saying the deaths of 500,000 kids was ‘worth it’?
I don’t think today’s EU would set out to promote hunger, but both the US and Britain (e.g. in India) have track records of pursuing starvation policies on third world countries.
and then there is this:
“Although Russia and Ukraine produce only a third of global wheat and barley exports, much of those are focused on Africa rather than on wealthier countries. This is why logistics and sanctions issues may trigger a genuine famine.”
Africa and Russia aren’t the only ones who knew that.
If the sanctions were being planned and the fact above was known while the planning was going on: it’s part of the plan.
Another way of looking directly at what is happening.
It seems the DC FedRegime thinker-planners lost sight of the difference between money and wealth.
Just as some Pakistanis are said to have told some Westerners . . . . ” You have all the watches, but we have all the time” , it could be that the RussiaGov is testing the theory that ” You have all the money , but we have all the wealth.”
And they could be right. Not totally all-the-way-right, but right enough to come out victorious in this economic combat deathmatch under way.
David, thank you.
Very well expressed and to the point.
I strongly suspect that Joseph Biden had one of his famous tantrums and the Nulandites wrote up their wish list and told Joe “We’re gonna Git’em with these” and Joe signed happily because don’t nobody diss Joe.
Joe was point man on Ukraine for Obama having things go his way in Ukraine is important personally because his fingerprints are all over this mess.
Joe and his Family are among the many Democratic insiders who made serious bank in Ukraine,Burisma paid R.Hunter almost enough to cover the cost of his hookers and blow,lot’s of important people got a slice of the pie and there’s a lot of potential embarassment.
So I would add venality and mental illness to your list.
What a heck of a show!
>” As on previous occasions, Hudson’s a bit out of his depth on this subject, I’m afraid. As an economist, he’s used to assuming rational explanations for things, especially where finance and commodities are involved.”
As much as I appreciate your erudite commentary throughout this unfolding tragedy, please note the difference between deductive, inductive and abductive reasoning. If we weren’t looking for “explanations”, we would not be here reading and looking for answers, within the amplitude of perspectives that NC always facilitates. Although estimating capacity can be fairly precise, discerning intent is a whole other matter. Effects as facts can be readily ‘observed’, but the causal chain isn’t always clear. I would certainly agree that stupidity often plays a role, but there are also powerful psychopaths in positions to make consequential decisions…and paraphrasing Forrest Gump-“psychopathic is what psychopathic does.”
To claim that Dr. Hudson is out of “his depth” is such a remarkable bit of condescension. And while it is uncomfortable to see, to remind, to sit with how our “empire” behaves in such violently overt ways consistently over time, it is incumbent upon us as readers, thinkers, scholars, citizens, and individuals new to foreign affairs/economics/social conflict to give the benefit of the doubt (not to empire, but to all of those people past, present and future, that empire destroys without regard for anything other than unipolar superpower).
So in this light, I want to give Dr. Hudson special gratitude for his writing, thinking and expression of this moment because all one need do is mine the last 100 years of Empire to uncover all sorts of atrocities that we have been complicit with and to (having served our interests first and foremost). Here are just a few events explained away by the pursuit of American Exceptionalism, which for me really is a sea Neo-colonial crimes against humanity:
1. Vietnam, Cambodia Loas invasions; Phoenix Operations
2. Murder of Lumumba; Dag Hammarskjold in the Congo
3. Indonesia Genocide – Oil, Precious Metals, and Sukarno installation
4. CoIntelPro, MK Ultra, Operation North Woods, and Gladio
5. Political Assassinations of the 50′, 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s Worldwide (unipolarity)
6. Oil Spills, Suppression of Climate Change research, and the Powell Memo
7. Iran-Contra, October Surprise, The CIA’s Family Jewels operations, Brzezinski’s Chessboard
8. Dollar world’s reserve currency, military spending/bases, free market rentier capitalism propaganda
9. Harvard boys shock Russia, US pulls out of nuclear weapons treaties, Increase NATO membership
10. PNAC group offers an invasion plan for entire Middle East
11. 9/11 attacks – we invade Iraq and Afghanistan & later on Libya, Syria, Yemen (all failures)
12. Media, Financial, and Corporate consolidation into monopoly empire entities
13. Federal institutions, universities, and community leaderships deteriorates at unprecedented levels
14. Gun violence, prison populations rise, and policing failures all become much more prevalent
15. Political indifference to those in poverty, climate activists killed or Palestinians or _______ (fill in)
I could keep going, but the point here is why should we give the benefit of the doubt to empire when it has proved over and over, systematically, that it is operating outside of any real accountability as humans, unless you consider the pursuit of material resources for profit, unipolar power, and rentier capitalism to be justifiable behavior for this abomination of culture, which is a whole new level of pathology.
No, I do not believe Dr. Hudson is out of his depth. Instead, I tend to think he is ahead of his time.
Suharto installation – apologies
Thanks for your reply. I too was irked by the unsubstantiated condescension.
Whether or not the Western governments want to create a famine is surely irrelevant. Famine will be the result of their policies, regardless. Did the Western powers want to turn Libya from a functioning, wealthy country into a wrecked slave state? Doesn’t matter, does it? Because that is what they did.
The important point which Hudson makes – and which is surely right – is that this is the opportunity for the poorer countries to repudiate their odious debt.
Alex wrote: “Whether or not the Western governments want to create a famine is surely irrelevant. Famine will be the result of their policies, regardless. Did the Western powers want to turn Libya from a functioning, wealthy country into a wrecked slave state?’
No that is dead wrong. There is no doubt that western powers destroyed Libya because that is what they wanted, but the implied notion that if the West stops providing Africa with food assistance then Africa will starve is the really the stupidest part of your comment. Food assistance to economies that are mostly yeomen agricultural is intended to destroy those economies.
https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/rnac17/1975/rnac17.v009.i07/10714839.1975.11724007/20161003/10714839.1975.11724007.fp.png_v03
Africa is a sparsely populated region with excellent soil and climate for growing its own food the whole notion that the West must intervene to provide food for Africa is based on pure malice and/or stupidity. The West has done its best to impede Africa’s ability to feed itself. What the West did to Libya is just one glaring example of that. Now that the west is preoccupied with its own survival (and thus is less capable to molest Africa) that may be the best thing that has happened to Africa in a long time.
No, what I mean is that Dr Hudson is an eminent economist, and I wouldn’t dream of arguing with an economist on economic issues. But these are political, strategic, regional and defence issues which require different expertise and sets of knowledge, and economists should be careful of venturing into them. The international system works in a certain way, international organisations work in a certain way, and this is observable and would be described in much the same way by anyone with the practical experience, just as experts here on, say, engineering, finance, or military issues, would have broadly the same sense of how their worlds work.
Nobody, I think, wants to make excuses for the US: I certainly wouldn’t. But this is a question of the reality of how international politics works.
No, it’s how international politics doesn’t work, especially in the hands of “experts” who’ve proved for a very long time the “reality” of their inexpertness, and can not be waved away with “it was always thus” excuses from those who fail the most while ascending the Peter Principle ladder .
“Shaken and frightened?” The necessity to “do Something?”
Oy vey…
I disagree. Dr Hudson is not just an eminent economist — he is an eminent political economist. The diffidence to experts suggested by your comment chafes me. Would you really not “dream of arguing with an economist on economic issues” after the many remarkable failures of the current dominant economic theory’s repeated and horrendous failures of economic policy and theory? Economic experts in such economic theory should be questioned and argued with. Of late, how many experts in how many fields have amply demonstrated the poverty of the theories they advocate.
I hear your point David, but on the scale of abject failures and the guiding of those who overshoot their professional expertise to share opinions, I must say there are billions more qualified to hang the “stick to your lane” label upon than the good professor Dr. Hudson.
I think one thing that really gets lost in the question (and a point that Alex Cox makes expertly) is that we have been using “the Dulles Method” of foreign policy ultimatums for so long that the with us or against us carrot-to-stick debt threats are pretty much all we have left.
And this is not as well understood among the public, or how prevalent this kind of unipolar world view is in our foreign policy initiatives over the last 100 years. To explain why the US is fast tracking the dedollarization of its currency, causing all this damage is a complex analysis and I am grateful Dr. Hudson is sharing his insights about the implications for the EU and Africa.
Then again, we all can make room for dissenting opinions in an age where cancellation is chic.
Prof. Hudson makes many excellent points as usual. Speaking as a professional economist, I agree with David that some of Hudson’s speculations are a bit outlandish. E.g. on the ability/intention of leaders to conceive and carry out — with persistence and success–long term strategies.
As Hudson demonstrates well, economists tend to conceive scenarios. What Hudson doesn’t do is assign probabilities to them. It’s OK for Hudson to offer some scenarios that might be a bit outlandish. And we need folks (e.g. like David) in the socio-political arena, to assess that some of these probabilities are (probably!) very low indeed. But, given the fog of current circumstances, the range around those probabilities are “probably” pretty high also! Unknown unknowns, Dunning-Kruger, and all of that.
These speculations and scenarios have, nevertheless, proven valuable for provoking a very enlightening discussion here on NC. I’m not aware of any other website that attracts such depth of knowledge, variety of informed perspectives, willingness to go out on a limb, and maintain civility. We can thank the moderators for that!
Thanks for this rich discussion!
I think he’s better for turning to on politics within an economic framework then just purely economics. Since let’s face it, economics on it’s own is a sham science for guiding policy decisions. I think Jeremy’s distinction below of political economist is a good description. Looking at Hudson’s book list seems to support that as well.
The U.S. Army was beefing up its Africa CORPS back over a decade ago. I do not know where that effort stands now. Around the same time, TRADOC issued threat assessments on the consequences of Climate Change. Those threat assessments directed procurements for several years. I believe the threat consequences of famine and the potential for scattered unrest in the poorer areas of the Empire were discussed in TRADOC’s threat assessments. The consequences of decreasing production of resources in the face of ongoing and increasing demand for those resources were often studied and analyzed following the OPEC Oil Embargo of 1973, and repeatedly before and after that time. The u.s wheat sales to the Soviet Union in 1973 nicely demonstrated the consequences of a reduction in the supplies of grain available to the rest of the world markets. Much later, the Arab Spring of 2011 offered a more compelling example of what might be expected. I have no idea of any Evil Master Plan at work, but I cannot believe the u.s. Power Elite was unaware of what immediate consequences to expect from the u.s. embargoes. I am not sure u.s. Power Elite worries much beyond near term consequences of their actions based on their belief that the flood will come after they are gone. The Pivot to the East around the time of the U.S. Navy’s turn for the lion’s share of funding. Then Russia became the great Evil as the MIC maneuvered to often funding lines for rebuilding our nuclear weapons arsenal and TRIAD. These are all merely coincidences, not a suggestion that the MIC controls u.s. government policy.
Other commenters have described how helpful the u.s. government policy might be to Cargill and ADM. Is it a reach to suggest that like the Grain Cartel the Petroleum Cartel might find benefit from the u.s.government policies? That the government pays little more than lip service to the needs and desires of the Populace, in the u.s. and abroad, has been well and often demonstrated. Without postulating some Masterplan crafted by the Power Elite, I can readily believe many elements of the Power Elite controlling u.s. policy can expect benefit from the seemingly irrational policy actions of the u.s. government. I do not understand the dynamics of the power relations between the u.s. and Europe and remain dumb struck by Europe’s acceptance of the u.s. policy.
Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice/an Evil Master plan the which can be adequately explained by stupidity/incompetence” — may explain the larger, longer term consequences of the u.s. embargoes on Russia, but it challenges my credulity to believe that the short term consequences come as a surprise or were not considered before the embargoes and affiliated actions against Russia were actualized.
The thing is, multinational corporations (like ADM etc.) behave in a coordinated (and maybe only quasi legal) fashion with other similar elite entities. This coordination, typically under the radar, is rather indistinguishable from what is colloquially referred to as a conspiracy, as in “evil Master Plan.”
So, I would modify Hanlon’s razor as follows: never attribute to malice or Master Plan that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, incompetence or profit.
Brzezinski’s Chessboard is an example of a freelancing foreigner with his own grudges directing DC FedRegime policy in furtherance of his own grudges. Brzezinski was always a racist Anti Russianite who was also legacy-bitter over the Polish Zlachta’s loss of “privileges” and “rights” in Greater Polonia during the various partitions. And he wanted to exploit America as the instrument of his revenge.
Likewise for Ahmad Chalabi, who exploited America to pursue his own agenda of Shia Domination of Iraq.
So the Empire does not always make its own decisions. Highly intelligent foreigners can manipulate the low-functioning dull-normal minds of the Empire’s decision makers and enforcers into confusing the pet desires of said foreigners with the Empire-staffers’ own desires and decisions.
As I said the other day in answer to a different part of the Ukraine puzzle, I doubt that US elites are capable of planning in any meaningful sense, but I am pretty sure they are capable of saying “So what’s the downside? Millions of people starve in Africa? I can live with that.”
I recently stumbled upon a web comic about Western aid to Africa – Mzungus in Development and Governments.
This comic is an example of the surprising and interesting things on the internet, all of which clamor to be read. And which will have to be read now, soon or not at all once the internet is shut down and destroyed for good.
Yet, I wonder if groups like the Trilateral Commission are as preoccupied with the present moment as those in government are wont to be. Theirs are long-term and not tactical considerations to globalized politics and economies. If Biden’s expensive floundering in Ukraine does not advance the long-term cause, another government’s on the way.
Petro-power is foundational and that’s getting in the way of addressing climate change
versus
So you are saying that they are not rational but that they are so rational. Or perhaps what you are really saying is that you don’t accept Hudson’s version of the plan even though he is just asking the question. There is after all a case to be made that the sanctions were all planned in advance so as to regime change Putin and perhaps the war was provoked as well. So if NATO and the Bidenistas are willing to sacrifice thousands of Ukrainian lives to such a goal is it really that much of a stretch to at least wonder whether the well known WEF conspiracy theory is a reality?
In recent times the US and others including Europeans conjured up the Syrian civil war with considerable blowback to themselves. And these included the unintended consequences of a re-engaged Russia not to mention more thousands dead. Perhaps the real question is not are they rational but rather are they competent? Stupidity is a thing.
The difference isn’t that hard to understand, I think.
The first thing is a tendency, found among economists, but not limited to them, to seek to impose logical frameworks of interpretation on collections of chaotic events, on the assumption that rational objectives must be being pursued by someone, somehow. At one end, everyone who writes history has to do this to some extent; at the other you get conspiracy theories. The idea that “all this was planned” is an attempt to impose, post facto, an intellectual structure on chaotic events which is not justified by actual evidence. That’s why you often hear people say things like “this must have been planned because reasons even if I don’t have any actual evidence.” It is also a form of western, and specifically Americo-centrism, making us the principal actors in dramas where we are actually subordinate players. The origins of the crisis in Syria are well known and extensively documented, and the West had little to do with it, though it moved quite quickly to try to take advantage of it.
The second thing is much simpler, and it is that, for all that the political classes these days are pretty inept, they seldom or never do something which is certain to rebound against them if they can avoid it. That’s not even rationality, it’s human nature. There may be cases (here is one) where there is a kind of realisation that they’ve started a process which will probably rebound against them later, but that’s different to choosing to do so.
So, two things. On the one hand the search for an externally-imposed conceptual framework to turn apparently chaotic events and stupid decisions into what looks like a coherent master-plan, and on the other hand the observation that people seldom act deliberately against their best interests if they have the power to do so. These two things are not the same.
Obviously you are the expert on Europe and I’m just defending the headline/question. But all of the economic blowback we are experiencing was predicted here on the web before Putin invaded and therefore Biden’s refusal to even respond to Putin’s warning was very stupid indeed–for him politically, for all of us. So when it comes to the American politicians that we Americans live with I don’t accept your premise. Or if stupidity is the wrong word then, yes, we humans in general are quite irrational and particularly when we live in a bubble like America’s elites.
Weren’t the alt-stream saying “of course Putin isn’t going to invade why would he that’s dumb this is just American sabre-rattling”?
that wasn’t an unreasonable observation or position at the time either, I don’t think. Perhaps Putin yolo’ing the invasion constitutes the chaos of which David speaks.
(and perhaps the reverse of his overinterpretation thesis being the normie liberals on “the other side” arguing that Putin is a Hitlerian megalomaniac, with the information they’re using)
The “eltes” never or very seldom suffer from the destruction of stuff in far away places. they only have issues when their Yachts can’t dock in “some-exotic-place” due to war/famine/plague, although they can usually fly in all they need by private plane /chopper.
The rich and powerful want only to control all of the world’s ressources and if millions die in the pursuit of this aim, then so be it.
Politics does not come into it – politicians are there purely to serve the elites and “blowback” for the masses is irrelevant.
“On the one hand the search for an externally-imposed conceptual framework to turn apparently chaotic events and stupid decisions into what looks like a coherent master-plan”
I’d back you up on that. People like to chronicle things looking backward as if the series of events was always predictable vs our society at large really being a complex system that is invariably hard to predict because it exhibits emergent behavior. I have always believed there is a large campaign of propaganda in our country but the more I’ve sat back and looked at how quickly our media scape can shift from one crisis to the next I think its more emergent behavior then master plan propaganda, at least at this point in time.
Back in early December the msm in America, WPost, and Europe, BILD reported that American intel had intercepted Russian plans for the invasion of Ukraine back in October. Recently they again reported that since October NATO countries had been working on a set of sanctions and plans for when the war started, which they expected to be in Feb 2022, which it was. They were not only waiting for the war to start they wanted it and tried to force it to start by getting the Ukraine military to massively increase bombing against the breakaway Donbas the week before Russia officially recognized them, so they could legally bring military assistance and start the war.
This had been planned out for 4 years earlier but the Trump interregnum made them have to wait till they had a pliable administration in Washington. But they were so anxious that they tried over and over to impeach Trump to get the ball rolling. Putin had screwed up the plan of elites for Syria, where a lot of plans had been made for a future Syria controlled by western elites–and they still want Syria yet can’t take over Syria unless Russia pulls out. So the plan was to make it difficult for Russia to not invade Ukraine so they could 1) weaken Russia financially 2) threaten nations to not work with Russia 3) take over Syria.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/russia-s-ukraine-invasion-may-have-been-preventable-n1290831
“The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I’m using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield,” said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail.”
Ukraine was planned alright, and the financial sanctions that started the broadside were planned as well. Also hoping that it will trigger a “regime” collapse in Russia. There wasn’t a Plan B and Plan C and this is where the chaos, hysteria, and all the other unaccounted things started rearing their realistic heads…
Maybe it is helpful (for purposes of saving lives) to characterize their stupid and confused actions as intentional. It onlookers say, “oh, they’re just confused”, then it is easier for them to keep dithering along on a genocidal path. If it is pointed out that they are being directly accused of intentionally starving people, maybe they will have more of a motivation to change course.
This is my instinctive reaction as well, David — never ascribe to malice what is readily explained by mere incompetence …
“Mere incompetence” is the best cover that malice ever had.
And “mere incompetence” seems to be so prevalent as to make the mind boggle with repeating patterns of the same playbook.
We cannot excise the delusion, the lying, the propaganda, and profiteering as unintended consequences of poorly thought out policy (as oopsies). No, there is a parallel deep state, unaccountable to the public who serves the unipolar masters in the military, corporate world and the intelligence community that has become so powerful — that their human treachery and nefarious dealing cannot be ascribed to fundamental incompetence.
Mere incompetence is a middle management theory of trying to explain a larger phenomenon without enough information.
Maybe these larger phenomenon’s cant necessarily be explained by more information because they are complex system’s exhibiting emergent behavior that can’t be easily predicted. That is why economics as largely practiced is a sham science and terrible for policy prescriptions in its current state.
Apropos grain exports from Russia, Zelensky is claiming that this is ‘Ukrainian grain stolen by Russia’. As he is a serial liar/fantasist, I take that with more than a grain of salt, or maybe he wants to escalate matters by begging western powers to seize the grain. Incidentally, there have been reports of retreating Ukrainian troops torching fields of wheat, which presumably is from ordered on high.
Russia would be very smart to block food and fertiliser exports to Europe and divert them to the global south to win even more friends and influence there.
fta:’This suggests that what appeared in February to be a war between Ukrainians and Russia is really a trigger intended to restructure the world economy – and to do so in a way to lock U.S. control over the Global South. Geopolitically, the proxy war in Ukraine has been a handy excuse for America’s to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
The choice confronting Global South countries: to starve by paying their foreign bondholders and bankers, or to announce, as a basic principle of international law: “As sovereign countries, we put our survival above the aim of enriching foreign creditors who have made loans that have gone bad as a result of their choice to wage a new Cold War. As for the destructive neoliberal advice that the IMF and World Bank have given us, their austerity plans were destructive instead of helpful. Therefore, their loans have gone bad. As such, they have become odious.””
a dying hegemon lashes out, but it’s brain is muddled, being intoxicated by it’s own narrative.
i don’t put it past the “Masters of the Universe” to think about famine as a good thing…nor to i doubt that this ancillary effect of the main show was considered and approved of.
it’s who they have shown themselves to be…
usaempire has been a real dick to the whole world for a long, long time….but most of the world was too frightened to do anything about it…and with good reason.
but the empire pushed russia into a corner, and they said ‘now or never’…and here we are.
i’ve wanted an end to usa empire since i figured out that that’s what we are.
and…contrary to some foam-mouthed teabillies circa 2008…this makes me a frelling patriot….like Cicero…i liked the idea of living under a republic a lot better than being a subject of the evil empire.
i’ve been watching the entire star wars canon in order, on my son’s disney thing…
the first one(New Hope) was incredibly influential on my young self(i was 10), as far as Knight Errantry, of course…but also in my attitude, all but congenital at this point, towards imperialism.
most of my peers back then identified the Galactic Empire with Russia/USSR…as was intended.
but once reagan came around, i thought of us thataway.
fie.
KiAs the living stereotype of a Hollywood “Liberal” George Lucas later occasionally claimed that the Empire always was meant to be America, with his more cultish and hagiographic fans even going so far as to claim that the Rebel Alliance was the Vietcong.
But that is part of the many legends that Lucas wove about himself, looking at the things he said back in the days of making the original Star Wars movies makes it clear that he was in many ways quite the reactionary who resented the “New Hollywood” for being too critical of America and questioning all sorts of received, comfortable, patriotic myths.
Reagan claiming rebel status for imperial America was neither misunderstanding nor abberation of any sort.
Later he made the prequels and dunked on Bush in the process (very much deserved, of course), but any remotely “leftist” ideas he might have had were never more that skin-deep, if even that.
i was never a lucas fanboy,lol.
watching the first three now, with my earned sophistication…hamhanded small l-, JS Mill liberalism, filtered through cervantes.
i still dig them, though..because i am a Jedi…a Knight Errant…down in my bones…and largely because of those films.
whatever flawed vessel lucas is…it doesn’t matter.
the whole point of teh windmills is that they are impossible.
The elites have deliberately on purpose fostered mass death in America from covid, and keep fostering more of it deliberately and on purpose. But they have been able to look “incompetent” enough that not very many people are willing to face the fact that spreading covid is the deliberate goal.
Why would people willing to kill millions of Americans now and later with covid be any less willing to kill millions of Third Worlders with famine? But in the case of artificially caused famine, their desire to achieve mass death may look too purposeful to be accepted as a mere accident. As such, it may tip off a lot of people to the fact that Jackpot is a plan and that Jackpot Design Engineering is a deliberately studied and applied discipline.
So many horns are blowing about the famine idea that I am starting to get suspicious. Nobody knows the facts on the real life side (like maybe Ukrainian fields are farmed almost normally), since media is what it is. As big Pharma and MIC already got their plays, maybe it is time for big ag/commodity play now? Of course the poorer countries are in trouble with prices, but now it looks there will be at least 2 offers to select from. Ample space for all sorts of plays for the rest of the year in grains and fuels – the producers, of course, getting little benefit, mostly pain from fuel&fertilizer. Much depends on how much fields are left fallow this year and especially next year. And speculation-driven food price rises can conveniently be blamed on Putin. I mean, procuring the oil out of the ground does not cost much more today than it did a year ago. All oil producers are just in money-collecting mode. Grain&meat production will cost some more only because of fuel prices. And those fuel prices are high only because we refuse buy what comes out of Russia. So, self-made crisis being blamed on Putin. How convenient. I guess this is snarky and cynical, but it looks to me like another round of never let a good crisis go to waste.
“Nobody knows the facts …” I remember reading a brief article about ArcherDanielsMidland and Cargill closing their facilities at Odessa (shipping and processing plants) at the beginning of the conflict in February. Thought, mmmmmm, those ‘big thugs of agriculture,’ pushers of GMO seeds, are everywhere. Then, I read recently about the 2016 Russian restrictions on GMO seeds and products. The ABCD (ADM, Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus) group lobbyists must have swung into action; can’t lose a market for GMO products the size of Russia! Shades of United Fruit and the Banana Wars!
I recall that prior to the 2014 coup in Ukraine much was made of the EU ban on GMO produce. After the coup there were stories about how Monsanto was a player behind the scenes to change the laws to allow foreign corporations to buy up land so that they could evade the ban in Europe.
Your speculation as to this being another United Fruit war is not far off.
Taking over the world, one patent at a time
Yeah. All your seedz is ours!
Well, at what point does depopulation policy become “conscious.”?
Take the Baltics. Since 1991 their population has declined by over 20% — mainly the working-age population, which has gone to work in the rest of Europe. The demographic plunge is much like that of Ukraine. Neoliberal policy kills — as we saw in Russia after 1991.
I grant that the neoliberal “models” don’t show a demographic plunge. But the tendency is so universal and similar that of course it is part of the “collateral damage” of U.S. policy. Let’s call it “benign neglect.”
I agree that the Africa Union is not a policy-making body. Such a body will require a critical mass, and that means that it will have to come from China and Russia. US/NATO pressure is on them, almost forcing them to make an institutional response along the five lines that I’ve described.
Point of order – the depopulation of “The Baltics” and of Ukraine actually had very different dynamics depending on the specific country involved.
In Latvia, it was driven primarily by de-industrialisation. The lemon twist here is that during the Soviet era, a majority of jobs at the various auto-electornics-what-have-yous went to non-Latvians, where as the “natives” took advantage of more favourable agricultural ruleset than in most other places in the Soviet Union. So when you shut the factories down – at the behest of Western Europe, as the price of getting into the EU – a lot of the non-Latvians just left, and in the case of ethnic Russians leaving, they certainly did not go to Europe.
Estonia was mostly a case of institutionalisation of ethnonationalism, and yet the impact (on non-Estonians) was still a lot lower than in Latvia – the ethnic Russian population declining by only ~33% since 1989 vs. 46% in Latvia. Things get even more complicated there because of some re-migration to Estonia from Russia (e.g. via marriage to locals) in recent years in order to get EU passports.
Lithuania I know rather less about, but the overall demo figures seem to suggest that it was a garden-variety post-Soviet “falling birth rates and rising death rates” neoliberalism story. Though they did shut down at least some facilities at EU’s behest, e.g. the Ignalina nuclear power station, and that might have played a role as well.
And then you have Ukraine, which, prior to 2013, was only losing population at roughly half the rate of the Baltics (~10% vs. >20%). Population statistics get very hazy afterwards due to territorial changes. But on the other hand, Ukraine also did not have EU passports, and so instead of outright immigration its working population would instead work on a temporary or seasonal basis in the “near abroad”, mostly Poland and Russia. Which, by the way, makes for a very different economic effect in that a lot of these workers would actually live and spend their wages in Ukraine, unlike some Estonians ending up working in Switzerland (personal observation) or whatever. So lumping Ukraine with the Baltics here is…kind of like saying both Russia and China have the same sort of export-driven economies, which they emphatically do not.
And I should also point out that some of this population loss was very much unrelated to “neoliberal policy” in general, but rather to specific local circumstances. So “tendency is universal” is eliding a bit – absent local conditions the tendency should be universal, in principle, but the four countries cited are a poor way of demonstrating that, in my opinion.
and wasn’t Qaddafi’s worst crime(after that whole african oil bourse thing–can’t allow that,lol) trying to gin up a pan african policy making system?
in fact, as i remember it, Qaddaffi’s agenda was a lot like what we’re seeing russia actually accomplish, today….just on a smaller continental scale.
Being an easy target was his mistake. I’m largely convinced this Ukraine brouhaha wouldn’t be happening if more people understood operational distances of airplanes. Russia was supposed to collapse at the mere thought of a US no fly zone. Too many elites can’t conceive Yaknov Smirnov isn’t real.
The establishment is aware of the depopulation effects. Their concern is monitoring for when masses (outside of the areas affected) become conscious of it.
They already KNOW they aren’t giving up their private jets, multiple homes, and resource extraction.
Anybody think that all those starving people in the third world will just sit around and watch their bellies rub against their backbones? Of course not. They will move to find a place to where they can find food to eat and will risk their lives doing so. Remember a few years ago all those people being forced out of places like Syria, Iran, Pakistan, etc. who went west and started to push against the doors of Europe? Anybody think that Germany will open their doors to take in another million or two from the middle-east? How about if hundreds of boats carrying Africans sought safety by crossing the Mediterranean to get to places like Spain, Italy and Greece? What if there was a caravan of several hundred thousand people that snaked their way up South America to get to the border? What will that do to the political stability of those receiving countries? Because it is coming. Of that I am sure.
when you say this, could this scheme be a part of the longer range strategy of “let them move now rather than die of climate change later. hunger is a good motivator” strategy?
i mean, this Cold War 2.0 gives them the perfect cover and convenient bogeyman.
i have long thought that this was the unstated policy behind a lot of the refugees and immigrant issues all over the world. but that implies that the owners actually care that some of these “third worlders” survive.
then again, perhaps that’s just for genetic diversity longer term, and the idea that “U.S. got all of the ambitious, adaptable innovators” has a long shelf life here in the social engineering (oops, i’m not supposed to say that, am i?) sphere.
Which is why the notion that, “Western powers do not want hunger in the Global South for one very simple reason. Their problems come to us,” is questionable.
Western powers exhibited no foresight or concern about blowback when they embarked on regime change ops in Syria, bombed Libya, enacted NAFTA, etc,
It depends on who in the West is calling the shots, and generally that is the US. When NATO dismantled Yugoslavia, countries like Greece dealt with the influx of refugees, not the US.
It sure feels like the belief in the US is that other weaker countries can deal with the blowback of US actions. There are oceans protecting the eastern and western borders, Canada will play nice if they know what’s good for them, and a wall will keep out the pesky brown people from the south, unless we need cheap labor in the chicken plants or fulfillment centers – in that case come on in while the authorities look aside.
I don’t think the US deliberately wanted to start a famine, but I agree with Hudson that they definitely wanted to lock in US control over trade and finance. Meddling in Ukraine was a way to disrupt China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The West most definitely had a plan – it was just a really bad one designed by idiots who aren’t used to being challenged by other world powers and who as a result learned to like the smell of their own farts too much, to put it bluntly.
It’s arrogance and hubris on the part of Western leaders, and nemesis is starting to come into focus after a gross miscalculation on Ukraine.
Well, the African Development Bank, ever the faithful servant of the World Bank and IMF, thinks the solution to all this is to help African farmers “wean themselves off dependence on Russian grain imports” (their words). And the solution? A $1.5 billion credit scheme to saddle 20 million farmers on the continent with more debt by supplying them with “climate-certified seeds” (GMO sounds all so baggage laden after all) and fertilizer. If you think these farmers will be price takers for their harvest, and that they’ll be forced to front their lands as collateral, you’re probably right.
Thuto, you can’t make this stuff up. Reality puts conspiracy theorists to shame.
Food sufficiency would wean the global south off imports from larger players, e.g., the US, EU, Russia, who just want to gather up the fruits of a food-dependent labor force
Agreed, although placing (poor) farmers in a precarious position by saddling them with debt isn’t the way to go about it, especially because most of these farmers aren’t equipped to even understand the nature of what they’ll be signing up to (or more cynically, signing away). I do think that, similar to how Covid exposed the folly of offshoring everything and brought localized supply chains to the top of political agendas worldwide, this crisis will do the same for food sufficiency.
food sufficiency /=/ food independence.
monsanto’s plan for all the world is “no seeds unless we say so. now sign in blood on the dotted line”.
Monsanto’s wish may not be our command. There may be ways to undermine and delay Monsanto in the short and mid term, so as to be able to change the food power balance over time enough to exterminate Monsanto in the long term.
It would be good if the RussiaGov can keep Russia a GMO-free zone. Assuming it still wants to.
Is it hard to imagine that our ‘war cabinet’ mindset that makes a poor excuse for a government would do anything and everything to blame anyone or everyone for something that they did?
Russia continues to demonstrate compassion and provide assistance for anyone that is friendly. Those that are not are asking for privation for their people.
The EU will be thrown down before we can see it coming. The legs are being sawed off now and the beggars will soon blame the US because they know what the alternative is.
Lunatics dance with no clothes so everyone can see. 5 eyes blind.
Wow! Great discussion by All. And it’s just the beginning of the day for me.
Thanks very much for this post. Very important topic and analysis, mostly overlooked by the MSM in favor of promoting their official narrative, imo.
Yves’ point is that the famine is largely a case of gross negligence, where I lean more toward benign neglect in the Daniel Moynihan sense of the term: partially intentional if one actually thinks about the consequences. But in practice, gross negligence is punished as if the negligent party actually committed the crime, given the consequences. The idea is that people should think of the consequences.
It certainly is true that politicians typically block any such consideration of the collateral damage (“external economies”) of their policies, because these consequences do indeed involve a cost. But negligent parties are dangers to society. And if their behavior is consistently damaging to other people, the effect is as if it were planned. That is the case with America’s Cold War 2.0 policy, and with neoliberal economics generally.
Mining the Ukrainian harbor channels, for instance. Blocking payments in dollars or other currencies in the U.S. Cold War orbit. Sanctions against countries trading with Russia. Soft threats, such as were made to China and India (without effect, to be sure).
i’m always on the boys for doing mindless things…fiddling with a nail till it comes loose…twirlling a power cord, etc.
what you’re describing is a rather lovecraftian mindlessness.
i don’t know if i like my Blobs that Rule The World to be mindless or cold and calculating…
both sound pretty bad,lol.
I agree that it is hard to imagine that this situation was not foreseen. Especially by Bill Gates. He has been messing around with GMO tech. and Monsanto/Bayer for 15 years now. And he has been very interested in promoting his special seeds and herbicides in Africa. And in all that time the information has been trickling in about how the seeds are not viable beyond the first year, the herbicides are highly poisonous, and the produce is less nutritious. Mexico has taken steps to protect its traditional corn from being exposed to genetically modified corn pollen, etc. I’m curious how GMO seeds can be propagated for use as seeds over the seasons when the seeds they produce are not viable yet their technology has replaced unmodified varieties. Sounds as ill-fated as neoliberal economics itself. Africa would be smart to ban all GMO tech now and go with traditional methods.
i have always raised the specter of whether these self-terminating seeds could somehow interact their dna with the foliage at large and create a whole planet of self-terminating plants that can’t reseed themselves.
i’m sure that genetic scientists have ruled this possibility out in advance (or would) because how can sterile A breed with fertile B to create perpetually infertile and self-suiciding C at all?
and yet we find people who have somehow incorporated the DNA of latent abdominal tapeworms in with their own cancer cells somehow. so that’s not very comforting to me. life seems to find a way.
even without advanced genetic engineering, the current situation, re: pesticides and herbicides is terrifying…if you know what yer lookin at.
Big Ag is already a Crime Against Humanity, a thousand times over.
Hostis humani generis now rule the world.
Many GMO seeds are self-reproducibly viable. That is why their “owners” work so hard to keep farmers from reproducing them.
There were thoughts and plans for a while for embedding “terminator technology” into GMO seedlines. Perhaps that is what you are remembering, those plans for creating self-sterile seeds which self-prevented their own replication by anyone not in possession of the master-lines and the secrets?
https://www.technicalagri.com/terminator-seed-technology/
https://www.progressio.org.uk/content/what-terminator-technology
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/gmo-faq/whats-the-controversy-over-terminator-seeds/
Many many thanks to Yves, to Professor Hudson, and to the larger commentariat at NC for this insightful and deeply informative discussion. There is nothing like it available elsewhere.
My thanks also to Yves and Prof. Hudson for insight and perspective.
Not sure if this was linked at NC but it’s definitely applicable to the geopolitics of food:
A key question is what part/how much of Ukr. “bread basket” will now be
part of Russia hence GMO free.
Also interesting the linkages between Russian “liberals” and “human rights
activists” and big ag, etc.
Geopolitics of food likely to be very important (and mostly hidden)
as the jackpot unfolds.
” A garden each day keeps the Jackpot away.”
Old future proverb among the post-Jackpot survivors who survived in part by gardening.
Agree: excellent discussion, thank you Yves and team, and participants!
And this, too “Geopolitics of food likely to be very important (and mostly hidden)
as the jackpot unfolds” One thing about food is that most places that are inhabited are also capable of producing their food. Egypt, for example. But their land is in use for cash crops – cotton, for example. So big&cheap grain producers are enabling the step up in the production chain for those who use that grain. How will people adapt to grain becoming expensive – a lot hinges on that. Russians had (and still have) their cabbage patches that enabled them to keep going those times when salaries were not paid and pensions were decimated by inflation.
Michael Hudson is a God that Walks the planet!!!!!