By Harley Schlanger

February 25 — As Russian troops moved into Ukraine on February 24 with a mission to degrade Kiev’s military capabilities, which President Putin has described as posing an existential threat to Russia’s security, and the U.S. and NATO nations responded with an unprecedented economic assault against Russia, it is evident that the increasingly shrill and hysterical anti-Putin narrative coming from the Trans-Atlantic world had little to do with Ukraine and the deployment of Russian troops on its border. Instead, it is a response to the collapse of their post-Cold War “unipolar order”. Further, it is an effort directed from the City of London and Wall Street, acting through its “Military-Industrial Complex”, to prevent the further economic development of those nations which are not part of their “club” — and especially the possibility of the emergence of a new, just financial system, serving a multipolar order of sovereign nations, committed to peace and economic development. This most emphatically includes Russia and China, whose leaders consolidated a strategic agreement on February 4, which provoked a panicked response from leading members of the “club,” focused on their concern that the strengthened alliance will gain more adherents from nations unwilling to surrender their sovereignty to the “Rules-Based Order” and the banker’s “Great Reset.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks in Beijing with General Secretary of the Communist Party and President of China Xi Jinping. (4 February, 2022)

This was the theme of many official statements and commentaries about the Putin-Xi summit, typified by one of the more extreme versions coming from Britain’s {Daily Telegraph}, under the headline “Russia and China Rise from Their Knees to Challenge U.S. Dominance.” The author, Roland Oliphant, summarized the cause for the hysteria by writing that, with this agreement, “the dominance of the U.S.-led global West will no longer be taken for granted — or even tolerated.”

This panic was openly displayed in comments from officials in the days leading up to Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, in pronouncements of the intention to proceed with a brutal sanctions regime if Russia invades Ukraine, and their continued rejection of serious consideration of Putin’s demand for security guarantees. Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Union Commission, told the Munich Security conference that the goal of sanctions would be to prevent Russia from diversifying its economy beyond oil and gas, by cutting off Russian access to modern technology. British PM Boris Johnson was even more explicit in comments on February 21, when he said that if Russia invades Ukraine, Russian companies will be prevented from trading in Pounds and Dollars. He added that they would cut off Russian firm’s access to City of London financial markets.

These threats are coherent with the open call for devastating economic warfare against Russia, outlined in a memo released following a White House meeting on January 25, which stated the intent of sanctions would be to conduct financial warfare to destroy the campaign Putin is directing to upgrade and modernize the Russian economy. In a briefing given on January 25, two anonymous senior White House officials said that with the sanctions they intend to impose, the “gradualism of the past is out, this time we’ll start at the top of the escalation ladder and stay there.” An example given was the use of “export controls”, designed to deliver “a severe and immediate blow to Russia and over time make its economy even more brittle.”

In the lead-up to the Russian military actions, Putin accused the west of using Ukraine as a tool to provoke an invasion by Russia, to justify their destruction of the Russian economy. He added, in a joint press conference with Belarus President Lukashenko, that  he expects more sanctions against Russia and Belarus, even if there is no invasion. This was reaffirmed by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, who said on February 22 that the goal of the West is to “punish Russia”, using “all kinds of ‘crippling sanctions’….We know that they will impose sanctions in any case, with or without pretext.”

When the U.S. and NATO countries initiated sanctions as the first Russian troops entered Ukraine, a defiant Putin said, “…the sanctions pressure will not lessen our resolve to firmly stand up for our interests. We see that blackmail, intimidation, and threats are the only tools the American policy has in its arsenal, trapped as it is in the stereotypes of a unipolar world and a false certainty that the United States still has the right and can impose its own global rules on everyone. This does not work with global powers, primarily Russia and other key international actors. Let its satellites and client states which have completely lost their independence, follow the threatening shouts coming from the United States.”

Will Sanctions Trigger An Economic Collapse?

Once Russian military forces launched their surgical actions against Ukraine’s military, which had been bulked up by extensive deliveries of advanced weapons by the U.S., the U.K. and other NATO allies, the onslaught of new sanctions began. President Biden announced the U.S. will impose “sweeping financial sanctions and export controls.” Such measures, he said, will “cripple” the Russian economy, severely affecting Russia’s ability to do business in dollars, Euros and yen. He claimed that the export controls will cut off “more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports” and restrict access to vital technology inputs, “atrophying its industrial base….” Officials in Russia have stated that the country can survive new, harsher sanctions, adding that the effects will be felt much more sharply by the Anglo-American’s European allies, especially if it includes cancelling the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which many European countries are counting on to deal with energy shortages and soaring prices, caused mainly by the incompetent Green policies imposed by the European Union.

Biden has not yet announced removing Russia’s access to the SWIFT foreign exchange transaction system, as this would profoundly damage existing trade of U.S. allies trade with Russia, but has been bandied about as a “nuclear option.”

The threat to Trans-Atlantic allies’ economies was acknowledged by one of the defenders of such sanctions, who said the pain such measures will cause may negatively affect the “unity” of the anti-Russian alliance, but that this is the price that must be paid to defeat Russian aggression. Several analysts have noted that this would also create a pretext to blame Russia for the financial crash which is coming, caused not by Russia but the systemic collapse of the western financial system due to adherence to neoliberal economic policies.

This gets to the heart of the matter. It is becoming increasingly evident that such a crash cannot be avoided, given the volumes of uncollectible debt outstanding, and the inflation which has resulted from the attempt to cover the debt with central bank monetary expansion. As {Executive Intelligence Review} has reported, a nearly $2 quadrillion speculative bubble is already blowing apart. This began in September 2019, when the Federal Reserve had to step in to flood the overnight lending markets — through the so-called Repo window — with ever higher volumes of liquidity. This was necessary as the commercial banks, which had been the suppliers of Repo liquidity, bowed out, as the demands for liquidity exceeded their capacity, as they were scrambling to cover their own bloated debt obligations. This lending ballooned from several billion a night, to more than $120 to $150 billion in overnight lending, and the terms shifted from repayment within twenty-four hours to a virtual permanent roll-over. The demand had spiked in part due to one large derivative default, but was compounded by the need of debt-strapped corporations for liquidity to cover the interest on their debts.

Screenshot of an article posted September 17, 2019. Source: www.Mishtalk.com

There is renewed concern from speculators that the threat of a tsunami of defaults has not been contained by unlimited creation of liquidity, which is the primary cause of hyperinflation, creating a no-win choice for central banks: either cut off the flow of cheap credit to stop inflation, which risks unleashing a chain reaction of defaults; or keep pumping in liquidity, which would guarantee the triggering of Weimar-style hyperinflation globally, with horrific consequences for every nation.

There is another alternative to the neoliberal insanity which has produced this systemic crisis, and that is based on what is emerging in Eurasia, through integration of nations with China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative, which could be extended into Europe. The Putin-Xi agreement, while attacked as a military threat, is more frightening to western bankers and financial manipulators as it represents a potential alternative to the imploding City of London/Wall Street dollar-based system. Addressing the inter-relationship between the financial collapse and the war danger, the Schiller Institute has issued a call for convening an international conference to establish both a “new security architecture” and a “development architecture” for all nations.

End To Geopolitics

The threat of an agreement to scrap the bankrupt system owned by the City of London and Wall Street, and replace it with one based on an alliance between European and Eurasian nations, is not a new concern for the defenders of the present unipolar empire. It was fear of a Eurasian integration with western European nations at the end of the 19th century, typified by such projects as the Trans-Siberian railroad and the Berlin-to-Baghdad railroad, that was behind the adoption of “geopolitics” as a theory of the empire. The theory of “geopolitics” was first formalized by Halford Mackinder, a member of the Royal Geographic Society, in 1904, and was adopted as a strategy to divide East against West, and to isolate Germany, to protect the near-monopoly control of the British empire over world trade and finance. Its application directly led to two world wars in the 20th century. The real aim of the geopoliticians then, was to prevent French-Russian-German cooperation, which would serve as a basis for European integration with Eurasian and Asian nations.

And that is the same fear which underlies the vilification of, and war drive against, both Russia and China today, with the Anglo-American strategists, operating through war hawks in government, academic circles and think tanks, taking the lead in shaping the narrative.

Among their greatest nightmares is the following: Might Germany, perhaps with support of France, break out from under the domination of the Anglo-American forces running NATO and the EU, and join with Russia and China in moving to a new financial system, of the type proposed by American statesman and economist Lyndon LaRouche, as a New Bretton Woods? The escalating provocations against Russia and China are an obvious attempt to prevent this from happening.

This was a theme of the Schiller Institute Conference on February 19, which was elaborated by a distinguished panel of speakers from many nations. It was the explicit theme of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote, in which she presented the urgent need for a new strategic architecture, based on providing security for all sovereign nations, as the basis for a New Paradigm of peace and development. It was also the theme of the other keynote, delivered by this author, who opened the first panel by declaring that the Unipolar Order has come to an end. Watch the conference HERE. 

From the Schiller Institute’s online conference February 19, 2022. Watch it on SchillerInstitute.com

It is this reality which has provoked the impotent hysteria behind the threats against Russia, which preceded the Russian military actions in Ukraine, and have been amplified since. What Putin has initiated was made inevitable by the unwillingness of Trans-Atlantic governments to address the legitimate concerns he raised regarding security guarantees for Russia, which he said must be extended to all nations. There will be no peace or economic security anywhere, unless the return to the principle of the Treaty of Westphalia, as promoted by the Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, and at the center of its call for convening an international conference, is adopted by all.