Europe pays the price for American and NATO policy


Now that Moscow, in response to the sanctions imposed by the NATO countries, has suspended food imports from Europe, it has agreed with China to procure fruit and vegetables from it. A special export zone in Dongning (Heilongjiang province) will be established on the Russian border, with a transit centre of ten square kilometres with refrigerated storage and the like. According to a Chinese official, a second zone will be added in late 2014.
European agricultural exporters thus are paying the price (estimated at 16 billion Euros this year) for an American policy of confrontation that since 1991 has been directed at reducing Russia to a raw material base for the West.
In an important piece in The National Interest Andranik Migranyan, director of an institute in New York that works closely with the Russian government, argues that the Crimea’s reunification with Russia has been followed by a policy to tie the rest of Ukraine to the West and to suspend the buffer role of Ukraine between Russia and the West.

Civilians killed in Lugansk, east Ukraine

This would hit the country’s Russian-speaking population (almost half of the total) hard: according to the Russian immigration authorities, nearly two million of them have fled into Russia already, and for the rest, forced Ukrainization is what they can expect. The readiness of the United States and the EU to help to power ultra-nationalist and even fascist forces in Kiev and then encourage them to perpetrate ethnic cleansing in the east, fits into this framework.

Washington’s aim, according Migranyan, is to further subordinate Europe to the US and impose an Atlantic free trade pact on it that would serve American interests first of all. The next step would be the incorporation of Russian raw materials into a tighter integrated Western bloc, which would necessitate regime change in Moscow. Only on that basis a confrontation with China will become feasible. The fact that the name of Zbigniew Brzezinski, once Carter’s national security adviser but also the strategist behind both Clinton and Obama, once again pops up in this connection, will surprise nobody. This inveterate Russia-hater has always campaigned for bringing down the Soviet empire, and henceforth pleaded for the further division of Russia (in The Grand Chessboard of 1997 he proposes three separate republics).

The Atlantic free trade pact (which among other things is meant to give corporations the right to sue states which by their legislation prejudice profitability, say, by prohibiting the introduction of Monsanto’s GM foodstuffs) is ultimately directed against China; this has been raised before (among others by German foreign policy.com).

In the meantime some important developments have transpired in this area. At the recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Tajikistan, the membership agreed on inviting India, Pakistan en Iran as full members in September. Previously China balked at this prospect as it feared that in doing so, it would bring the US on board. But the new Indian prime minister, Modi, has demonstrated to pursue an independent policy and is no longer willing to collaborate with Japan and other regional players in an encirclement of China. In addition there are the gas agreement between Russia and China and the slow advance of the Chinese currency in international transactions, which may interfere with the Western strategy.

In all of this the EU is the big loser, after it had already sold out completely to the US. Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff among other things cancelled a multi-billion order for American jet fighters after it turned out that her personal phone had been tapped; from Angela Merkel, to whom the same happened, there were only some mutterings, not a real reaction. Here we also must consider that phone tapping has always had the function to be able to blackmail politicians into submission.
Nobody should be surprised that we don’t hear anything any longer about MH17, not counting a handful of ‘private detectives’—nothing about what happened, nothing about the black boxes. It certainly allows us to make a calculation as to what remains of an independent European position.

Kees van der Pijl

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