I have already shared two excerpts from this Michael Hudson interview this week on my blog, and here is the final one. Europe is in the process of committing economic suicide at the moment. It is backing a dog in a fight it really need have no stake in, just so that it can fulfil its perceived commitments to the United States. There is a strong element of Europe not being as sovereign as most people thought here. But there would also be an underlying current of belief that America should be backed up, because America is the top dog and can defend Europe if needed. But is this the case? Is Europe backing the right horse?
Hudson and Haiphong give us some powerful insight here:
DANNY HAIPHONG: Do you see this succeeding? We’ve been hearing a lot about Russia’s relationship with Europe and just how deep its energy sector is with Europe and how that relationship is a very difficult relationship to break economically. Although Europe is doing everything it can, everything you’ve described. It made me think about how throughout this crisis Europe, because of the dominance of the U.S. and just listening to whatever the U.S. said, was actually going way above and beyond what the U.S. would commit to in terms of Russia and how economically they would wage this kind of warfare. But China and Russia, with Russia’s energy and its natural resources but China I think in a broader kind of portfolio, have so much to offer to Europe, do you think that this will succeed?
Europe has been going the road of austerity for many years but this seems like such a huge step in that direction. Europe could look very much like the United States very soon. Do you see this working given how China has so much to offer it and already has a lot of countries in Europe maybe not the biggest of the clients like the UK for example but a lot of European countries have big relationships with China even the UK does despite all of the nonsense, all the New Cold War stuff. What do you think? Do you think this will work?
MICHAEL HUDSON: There’s a lot of crap that futurists tend to fall into and that’s imagining that countries are going to act in their self-interest. This is the mistake Stalin made with Hitler. He thought if Germany attacks Russia in World War II, it’s obviously going to lose. No sane country would attack Russia just as winter’s coming but Hitler attacked Russia. You’d think that if you tried to say what is a logical future.
Let’s go back to 1991 when the Soviet Union self-dissolved. The whole idea, the dream at that point according to Russia’s leaders was well, if we can have peace, we’re not going to have a war budget anymore. Europe is going to invest in us and help us rebuild a rationalized, efficient industry and we will trade with Europe and we’ll both get rich on mutual trade.
Well, this terrified the United States. It said, “oh my! We want it, we Americans want to be the beneficiaries of Russia.” We don’t want to trade with it. We want to carve it up and privatize it and take over. Basically, have Wall Street take over its oil resources, its gas resources, its nickel resources, its electric utilities. The last thing America wanted was this symbiotic mutual gain between Europe and Russia and I think that Putin and most of the leaders at that time expected that Europe would act in its self-interest and they could both end up gaining.
But that’s not what happened obviously. Europe followed American dictates and continues to because it’s, again, its leaders follow, its leaders are really just like Zelensky in Ukraine, they’re just as dependent on what the State Department dictates to them to do as Zelensky is. And there’s something evangelistic about it.
The Europeans I’ve spoken to really believe that America is the land of the future and that neoliberalism, that finance capitalism, somehow is going to be an ideal of private enterprise. They’ve bought the rat poison, they’ve eaten the rat poison, and they actually believe it and think of themselves not simply as servants of the United States following what it’s doing. As the Pakistan former Prime Minister said a few weeks ago, slaves of the United States policy, they actually are evangelistic promoters of neoliberalism and as sort of disciples, just as bishops you could say really. It’s like a religion and they treat the American-centered neoliberalism as the new religion. It’s literally a crusade against Russia and Europe and I think this has shocked Putin.
I would imagine the Chinese leadership also thinking: How can Europe be so completely unrealistic? How can its media lie so constantly about what’s really happening in Ukraine? How can Europe deify the neo-Nazis in Ukraine as freedom fighters, as heroes, as wonderful people to be supported? I think this has been such a shock to the Russian leadership that they realize finally that, well, Europe is not going to act in its self-interest.
There is not going to be any mutual gain. Europe again and again is just going to grab any money that we have there like they’ve grabbed our whatever was in European or American banks. There’s really nothing we can do. So there’s been a fundamental reorganization with Russia and the rest of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), meaning not only with China but with Iran, with India, with all of the other Eurasian countries. So, in that sense the United States has brought about exactly what it feared. The whole rest of the world is going its own way productively in a capital investment way, raising living standards, things that democracies are supposed to do well.
In the United States, we really don’t have democracy because the political parties are controlled by the donor class, the one percent, that’s what the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling meant. The United States is left without any means of self-support and Europe will be left without any means and self-support at some point. Europe may say, gee we made a mistake, maybe we should have tried to profit from Russia because everybody else is profiting with and getting Russian gas and nickel and China and other countries are rebuilding Russian industry and we could have had our car industry build up Russia but we don’t have a car industry anymore because it doesn’t have the gas that it needs and the raw materials and titanium it needs from Russia so now, we’ve seen other countries replace us.
And so, Europe has been rendered pretty much obsolete and even if it says we made a mistake, let’s be friends again, I don’t think Russia or other countries will trust it mainly because they can afford not to trust it.
They say, why take a risk with trusting Europe may not just continue to be America’s poodle?
Why take a risk? Why not just say, we’re doing just fine the way we are? Why not just work with each other peacefully? And all that the United States can do about this is threaten to bomb it and the way to stay away from this threat is simply to say look, you go your way, we’ll go our way and to have enough of the military between them to defend themselves against the American potential military attack despite the almost eight hundred military bases the United States has. If the United States is not getting foreign exchange from these countries anymore, the dollar with the euro and the yen and the sterling will all go way down against the Eurasian currency block and they’re going to move into a common block with their own counterpart to the IMF, their own counterpart to the World Bank, their own trade organization and the world will be split into two parts – just like the world split when the Roman empire fell apart and the east went forward, Western Europe went down. This is really the final submergence of western Europe."
It's in the best interests of Europe to ignore the USA and build relationships with continental powers that they can trade with. Scratch that it is in individual European countries interests to break ties with the European Union and their US overlords and build their own economic relationships. However, Europe is almost completely following the US empires lead, getting tangled in a war that would do serious damage to every nation in Europe. Why?
Because the US is the dominant power? No, because Europe has forgotten itself. It has forgotten what it can be.
Living in the 20th and 21st centuries can give you a false impression that the West is not only dominant, but always will be. We are just so far ahead of other parts of the world (at least have been). However, for most of history Western Europe was a backwater of civilisation, and only became dominant very recently. And once it flowered it overtook the whole world. The US empire is the last vestiage of that. America looked invincible in 1999, now in 2022, it is clearly on the brink of a serious collapse. Not a decline, but an actual collapse. For whatever reason Europe is just not willing to admit this. And rather than remembering what it can be, it is taking the passive role in its partnership with the US.
The saddest part about this is that Europe does not need America. Europe is the source of American civilisation. It is the source of the Western ideals which made the USA what it is today. The US was built on the European ideals and European people. But in tying itself to the United States, Europe has made itself very weak and very vulnerable.
If you see the world through the lens of Top Gun, you will see the US as the invincible good. But if you see the world through the lens of the rise and fall of empires, it is clear that America is the last vestige of Western power, before the West declines again for who knows how long.
It is in Europe's best interest to remember it does not need the US. Germany, France, England and more were all great civilisations and powers before America existed. As long as Europe submits to American dominance it will suffer. But once it realizes how much it does not need the US, then the World really changes. Europe has backed the wrong horse, because it refuses to back itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment