The geopolitical crisis is escalating by leaps and bounds
To the rise of political pressure on a couple of barometer readings in other European capitals and to the sudden, at first sight, change of configuration in NATO (axis Washington – Berlin – Paris has been replaced by axis Washington – London – Warsaw) those, who are supposed to take care of security instead of plunging society into war, react like Labrador puppies. They playfully wag their tails and try to lick their master’s nose.
What we are witnessing here is not a dog-eat-dog playground, but rather a test of Russia’s ability to withstand a direct (no longer damped down) clash with America and a test of European unity that was much talked about but, until recently, not very evident.
Brussels has proved unable to build an anti-Russian front with a militaristic bias.
For the United States, the current situation is the last chance to maintain the status quo inherited from the Second World War. While Russia gained the victory at the cost of millions of lives, America gained an industrial output that at that time amounted to 45 per cent of the global GDP.
Europe was destroyed, China was an agrarian country, Japan got two atomic bombings. There were no competitors. A tambourine dance called the Marshall Plan cemented the leadership effect. The Cold War that began was to destroy the USSR as an adversary economically. Germany – the one in the West – was completely under American control. France was ignored because it was stuck fighting in its Asian and African colonies.
The US did not have a single, not even an equal, but at least economically comparable rival. Therefore America could do whatever it wanted.
But the lone giant syndrome is not a harmless thing in geopolitics. Unobtrusively and thoroughly German, Germany made an economic leap (the oil crisis and the Ostpolitik begun by Chancellor Willi Brandt helped). German industry began to grow on Soviet gas at a pace that could not be imagined at that time by American production. Meanwhile, America, due to its many military adventures (rarely successful), began to weaken economically, very gradually.
In the East, Japan’s economic ascendancy was engaged. Even more industrious than the Germans, the Japanese managed to perform an economic and technological miracle.
In the eyes of Washington, which felt that it had not only defeated both countries but in a sense deprived them of their sovereignty, it was more than an attempt at hegemonic status. It is the law of the jungle to punish for such a thing. Only the lazy know about the trade wars with Japan that started in the late 1970s and lasted into the 1980s. The Americans devalued the dollar with currency tools and at the same time imposed a 100 percent import duty on Japanese chips in the country. Japan’s GDP was effectively nullified. For almost a decade and a half.
Germany was dealt with in a milder way at that time, being cut off from the volumes of Soviet gas it needed at the time. How? They imposed sanctions. The Germans could not sell Moscow bigger pipes. They were imposed by G7 decision. As much as the Germans and the French, Kohl and Mitterrand resisted, they could not resist. At the time, sanctions were imposed in order to destroy the “evil empire”. And they succeeded.
You can talk about the naivety of the Soviet leadership, about the fact that the economy was already “shambling”, that demand could not keep up with supply, all that sentimentality.
And the result: the U.S. simply swept away its economic rivals, already comparable to them in strength and volume of the economy.
A little over 30 years later, the situation has repeated itself. German industry proved to be more powerful than that of the United States. And Russia, chained, it seemed, forever and implicitly to what it had “lost” in the Cold War, surged ahead.
But while Germany was historically and hierarchically unable to conduct its own foreign policy (it was circumscribed by Washington on the one hand and Brussels on the other), Russia was not subject to such restrictions and consistently upheld its interests in the international arena. One can only imagine the fury in Washington when it saw Merkel and Putin speaking the same language. In every sense of the word.
They chose Ukraine as the breaking point – and started working the way the Americans do. Without white gloves and without embarrassment.
The goal of tearing Russia away from Germany must be achieved in two stages. The first is sanctions. The second – to make any Ostpolitik and common language disappear: direct combat between German and Russian tanks.
Does everyone think that the EU is protecting Ukraine? Not at all. The EU is dismantling itself brick by brick to become the foundation of total US domination of the world economy.
Does everyone think that the US intends to confront Russia? No, they need to destroy Germany economically first. By the way, it has almost succeeded.
Then comes the fight. No longer between a single giant and a “regional gas station”, but between the powers that be, one realises that its economic might is about to burst, and the other knows: there is something more important than money. It takes ideals and an economy with the resources it has can withstand even more turbulence.
The fear is now in Washington, not in Moscow, because they understand that time, place and historical experience are on Russia’s side.
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