CONTRARY TO THE PREDICTIONS made by Washington advocates,1 the disintegration of the USSR and the world socialist system did not lead to the end of history. Neither socialism nor the crisis of capitalism has disappeared. Granted, the first has acquired Chinese specifics and integrated the mechanisms of market self-organization, producing a new type of social and economic relations, which half a century ago Pitirim Sorokin prophetically described as an integral order. The second, having assumed the appearance of a global financial crisis, acquired a global scale. However, just as the Great Depression of the 1930s, it did not hurt socialist economies, which, in addition to China, should also include Vietnam, Cuba and, to a certain extent, India and North Korea, which has preserved its uniqueness. On the other hand, as the Soviet Union used the Great Depression in capitalist countries for socialist industrialization purposes, China, by mastering a wide range of Western technology, in response to the global crisis, focused on ensuring the rise of the domestic market.
Of course, these are nothing more than historical parallels that illustrate the complexity of the global economic development process. As Russian President V.V. Putin has aptly observed, geopolitics is the only invariable in it. Its anti-Russian essence has not changed either since the disintegration of the world socialist system or since the collapse of the USSR, remaining the same as it was during the days of the Russian Empire.
Since our Western “partners” think in geopolitical terms, the analysis of these terms can help forecast their future behavior. Otherwise we will only be measuring the stupidity of remarks by representatives of U.S. authorities in Psaki terms, without understanding the logic of their actions. Meanwhile, there is logic, as U.S. taxpayers have to pay a considerable price for these actions and therefore they should know the answer to the question: What for?
Judging by the way both houses of Congress unanimously vote for anti-Russian resolutions, the American establishment knows the answer to this question. Or at least it thinks it does. Surely it was not for the sake of the unfortunate Ukrainians that U.S. special services organized the Maidan [protest movement] with the subsequent political terror, mass killings and a 60% decline in living standards.
To the unversed reader, geopolitics seems to be sophisticated juggling with accustomed words that are given a hidden meaning incomprehensible to the uninitiated. For example, the juxtaposition of land and sea, which has become classic in Western political science textbooks. Or rather, the juxtaposition of landlocked and maritime countries, as though they were doomed to rivalry with one another. To Russia, located between three oceans, this juxtaposition seems nothing more than an amusing mind game, similar to the Heartland Theory.* Being the Heartland of Eurasia in terms of its geographical location, Russia had a vital need for access to unfreezing seas to conduct international trade. It needed both land and sea for normal, self-sufficient development, and it needed the army and navy to protect itself against greedy neighbors.
* Heartland, a part of Eurasia, which, according to the British geographer Halford Mackinder, is the “geographical pivot of history.” According to many modern theories, human communities formed around this “pivot” were the predecessors of modern European nations.
Judging by the behavior of the U.S. authorities, they are doing all they can to cede leadership to China.
Russian geopolitics has always been substantive, issue specific, arising either from the country’s internal needs (“cutting a window to Europe”) or from external threats (putting the oppressed brotherly nations under the protection of the White Tsar). So the abstract conjectures generated by Western political thought seem enigmatic and incomprehensible to the Russian mind. The same applies to its practical manifestations in the foreign policy of Western powers. Take, for example, their age-old
Mackinder also wrote: “Russia replaces the Mongol Empire. Her pressure on Finland, on Scandinavia, on Poland, on Turkey, on Persia, on India, and on China, replaces the centrifugal raids of the steppemen. In the world at large she occupies the central strategical position held by Germany in Europe. She can strike on all sides.” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (no matter how her remarks were subsequently interpreted) said that Russia should be reduced to 15 million [to serve the chinks and the mines]. obsession with Drang nach Osten, the uncontrollable yearning to seize our lands and destroy our people.
Madeleine Albright, the first U.S. female secretary of state, made a remark that adds up to the following: It is “unfair” that Russia should have exclusive ownership of Siberia and Siberia should be placed under international control. Siberia is too big to belong to a single state.
In substantiation of his geopolitical theories, the notorious Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote: I don’t think the Russians can re-establish their empire. If they’re stupid enough to try, they’ll get themselves into conflicts that will make Chechnya and Afghanistan look like a picnic. It would seem that West European aggressors have repeatedly tested “on their own skin” Alexander Nevsky’s famous remark, “Whoever will come to us with a sword, from a sword will perish,” and could have calmed down long ago. But no, in the third millennium AD, they keep violating Christ’s commandments: “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal.”
Until now, however, wars with Russia have not brought the West big victories. As a matter of fact, they have caused serious damage both to Russia and to Europe. Granted, not Europe as a whole but its mainland part, to which Russian troops have often advanced to finish off the aggressor in its den. Meanwhile, the UK has always stayed outside the zone of combat operations, participating in them on foreign territory. The U.S. people have also avoided the horrors of the two world wars, but nevertheless consider themselves winners in those wars. Unwittingly, you start wondering about the secret of the Anglo-Saxons’ geopolitics that has for over two centuries now enabled them to dominate a greater part of the world, wage wars on all continents and never allow the enemy into their own territory.
The question is not so simple. At least twice – Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1940, both Britain’s opponents – had enough power to crush it. Instead, however, they attacked Russia, exposing their backs to the British. Indeed, had Napoleon persuaded Alexander I to form an alliance and had he won the hand of the tsar’s sister, Britain would have been doomed. Instead, he began a suicidal march on Moscow. A century and a half later, Hitler repeated the same mistake. What would Europe look like today if Hitler had not violated the peace treaty with the Soviet Union? Britain would hardly have been able to resist the onslaught by Europe united by the fascists. Why did the two European superpowers, instead of taking the obvious path to supremacy in Europe and therefore in the world by conquering the small and vulnerable Britain, get involved in a hopeless war with the Eurasian giant?
Following the rout of the Napoleon’s Europe, Britain took control of the European market and became the “master of the seas,” eliminating its chief rival in the struggle for overseas colonies. As a result of World War I, all of the remaining monarchical empires collapsed, with their territories open for grabs to the British. The UK government did not even deem it necessary to hide its deep satisfaction with the overthrow of the Russian tsar, who was related to Her Majesty. When British Prime Minister David Lloyd George learned that tsarism had fallen, he said, rubbing his hands, that one of Britain’s military goals had been achieved. And as soon as the Civil War broke out, Russia’s erstwhile ally began military intervention in an effort to seize Russian territory and divide the country.
Of course, historians will find a lot of explanations for all of these events. However, the fact remains – on the one hand, the remarkable success of British geopolitics and on the other, Russia’s losses from investment in it. Granted, this also holds true for other countries that were faced with disasters as a result of cooperation with the British. As the Russian geopolitical expert Alexei Edrikhin aptly observed: “The only thing that is worse than feud with an Anglo-Saxon is friendship with him.”
The outstanding analyst Cesare Marchetti once observed that nations behave like people. Just like people, they engage in intrigue, they envy and have showdowns under the influence of emotions. An anthropogenic approach toward international relations often manifests itself in political jargon, when, with regard to an entire nation, they say, “smack them in the mouth,” “kick ass,” “jitter nerves,” “punish” and so on. If we follow this analogy, a question arises about the importance of the value system in international relations. Do values play the same important role in relations between nations as they do in relations between people? And if they do, what is the specificity of British geopolitical ethics? And in what ways does it differ, say, from Russian ethics?
According to F.M. Dostoevsky, Russian national consciousness stands out for its “worldwide responsiveness.” It was manifest in the foreign policy of both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Tsars responded to appeals from oppressed peoples, accepting them as their subjects and assisting their development. Russia considered itself responsible for the entire Orthodox and Slavic world, with a lot of Russian soldiers laying down their lives to defend Georgia against bellicose Caucasus tribes and liberate the Balkans from the Ottoman yoke. The Soviet Union waged an exhausting struggle to build socialism on all continents in the world, helping communist parties, national liberation movements and developing pro-socialist countries and got stuck in Afghanistan in an effort to neutralize the dubious threat of the Americans seizing control over that country.
In other words, Russian geopolitics has always been high-principled and oriented toward helping brotherly nations. Unlike the British, who established the slave trade in their colonies, the peoples who joined the Russian Empire were not discriminated against, while their leaders were incorporated into the Russian ruling elite. The USSR gave priority to the development of peripheries. The Soviet empire was the only empire in the world that developed its “colonies” at the expense of the center, and did not derive super profits from them, as the British did in India, China and Africa.
The key role of ideology was also manifest in the allied relations that Russia built at different historical periods. During the years of World War I, the Russian Empire sustained huge losses as it mounted an unprepared offensive to divert German troops from Paris at the request of its allies and sent an expeditionary corps to help the French. Laying down one’s life “for a friend” is as sacred for Russian geopolitics as it is for a Russian person. And in fact the Russians laid down millions of their lives to liberate Europe from fascism. Meanwhile, Joseph Stalin might have stopped at liberating the USSR, accepting a separate peace agreement with Germany in exchange for reparations and the liberation of Slavic nations, and leaving the battlefield to the Anglo-Saxons!
The Anglo-Saxons acted differently. While the Russians shed their blood, diverting German forces from the western front during World War I, British special services prepared a revolution in St. Petersburg. By drawing the Russian emperor into an alliance and a war against Germany, the British at the same time planned his overthrow. By enveloping the Russian establishment with Masonic webs, recruiting generals and politicians, seizing media control, and discrediting and physically eliminating influential opponents, British geopoliticians achieved considerable successes in manipulating the Russian political process. The assassination of Pyotr Stolypin opened the way for them to preparing the Russian ruling elite for war, while the elimination of Grigory Rasputin by a British agent, opened the way to a revolution. By assassinating the heir apparent to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo the organizers of the war flawlessly provoked the Russian tsar’s mobilization decisions. Likewise, two and a half years later, they provoked a mutiny in St. Petersburg and a conspiracy by the military and political clique against the tsar, leading to his abdication and the subsequent collapse of the monarchy.
Today, there is sufficient evidence pointing to the critical importance of British geopolitics in unleashing World War I by manipulating the ruling circles of the countries that were involved in it, as well as in organizing the February Revolution in Russia. Nor did the Anglo-Saxons behave any better before and during World War II. Taking a favorable view of the Nazis coming to power in Germany, the Anglo-American oligarchy continued its large-scale investment in the German industry, contributing to its modernization about $2 trillion at current prices.
In 1938, in Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave his blessing to the fascist beast raised with the help of Anglo-Saxon funding, to begin a military campaign against the Soviet Union, offering him Czechoslovakia, Britain’s ally, as a sacrifice. He even personally saved Hitler from the conspiracy of German generals, who were reluctant to fight, by preventing a coup uncovered by the British intelligence services by his surprise visit to the Fuehrer. Until the Second Front was opened in 1944, U.S. corporations continued to receive dividends from their German assets, cashing in on the war, in keeping with Harry Truman’s famous remark made in 1941, “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.”
However, the Americans did not have the time to help the Germans: The Red Army advanced too quickly. They had to violate the Munich Pact and open the Second Front to retain control at least of Western Europe. At the same time, on Winston Churchill’s initiative, Operation Unthinkable was planned, envisioning a U.S.-British attack on the Soviet Union, their ally, by using the remaining Wehrmacht forces. However, even though, as is known, the German forces did not put up any serious resistance to the Anglo-Americans forces, the Red Army’s rapid advance to Berlin thwarted those treacherous plans. Nevertheless, the Yankees left many fascists in the ranks to prepare for a new war against the Soviet Union. They also saved tens of thousands of Nazi collaborators, evacuating them from Ukraine to be used against the Soviet Union. Granted, they could only be utilized after its breakup – to nurture Ukrainian Nazism with the aim of pulling Russia into a new confrontation with Europe, united by NATO.
The U.S. was clearly involved in the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Suffice it to read Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union, a book by Peter Schweizer,2 to see that the U.S. special services played a fundamental role in the breakup of the Soviet Union. Again, you have to wonder at their creative and methodical approach as opposed to our naïveté and helplessness.
The claim that the Soviet Union broke up under the pressure of internal problems does not hold water. The recession that first emerged in its planned economy in the late 1980s is no match for the meltdown of the early 1990s with its shortage of basic commodities and long lines or the dramatic decline in consumption and living standards following the “shock therapy” as a result of the transition to a market economy. After the Chinese economic miracle, there is good reason to say that if the Soviet and then post-Soviet leadership had chosen a path of gradually building market mechanisms and providing conditions for private enterprise with the maintenance of state control, property and planning in the basic and infrastructure sectors, including the banking sector and the media, there would not have been a catastrophe. Not China, but the Soviet Union would have become the core of a new world economic order based on the theory of the convergence of capitalist and socialist economic mechanisms, which was developed by a number of Soviet and U.S. scholars, based on the harmonization of private and public interests under state control.
However, Soviet leaders, including most of the union republics leaders, were affected by cognitive weapons, i.e., the false understanding of social and economic development patterns, imposed by Western agents of influence, contrived “universal human values” and “human rights” and the illusory market democracy guidelines. “New thinking,” which rejected the status quo in the name of radical changes for the better, emerged in the heads of political leaders. A new order was seen in a rosy haze, while the shortcomings of the status quo were conspicuous and seemed beyond rectification. At the same time, the proponents of knowledge and historical experience were discredited and harassed as retrograde and backward. They were ridiculed, dismissed from their jobs and removed from the top level authorities, who were thus isolated from knowledge, while their minds were exposed to manipulation by Western agents of influence.
Along with disorienting the Soviet top leadership, American special services were preparing a new political task force to overthrow it. Today, the offices of the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute in Washington, DC are adorned by agitation posters and leaflets of Yeltsin’s election campaign of 1990 that was conducted by U.S. special services under the guise of glorifying Gorbachev as a modern world leader. They created a network of agents of influence with the aim of destroying the Soviet Union and at the same time praised Gorbachev for the perestroika that he organized, which effectively added up to the self-destruction of the national governance system and a rapidly growing chaos. As soon as the chaos made it possible to organize a new political force, Western leaders who enjoyed Gorbachev’s trust exerted massive pressure on him to paralyze his political will and prevent him from using law to enforce order. The anti-Soviet “maidan,” organized in the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, paralyzed the work of the Union governing bodies. Soon afterwards, with support from the U.S. administration, the Belovezhskaya Pushcha pact was signed by the leaders of the three Slavic republics, who had been conditioned by American agents of influence; this conspiracy buried the USSR. The communist leadership of the former Soviet socialist republics instantly turned nationalist and went ahead with the establishment of oligarchic personal dictatorships in the new nation states on an anti-communist and Russophobic basis.
Following the disintegration of the USSR, the Americans began the colonization of the post-Soviet space, imposing on the leaders of the newly independent states a “shock therapy” policy, based on unscientific market fundamentalist dogma, which was suicidal for their economic sovereignty. Once again, the national scientific community, whose influential representatives were condemned as crazy retrogrades, compared to the “young reformers,” who were artificially raised by U.S. experts, was excluded from the decision-making process. The “young reformers” followed through on the U.S. oligarchy imposed “Washington Consensus” doctrine, which amounted to the dismantling of the state economic regulation system with the aim of opening up completely to the free movement of foreign, mainly American capital and placing Russia under its control to serve foreign interests.
Alongside the colonization of the post-Soviet space by Western capital, U.S. geopoliticians thoroughly encouraged centrifugal trends, proclaiming the goal of preventing the emergence of a new power, comparable in terms of influence to them, as their priority. Meanwhile, in keeping with the German-Anglo-Saxon geopolitical tradition, the main thrust was placed on separating Ukraine from Russia and the further disintegration of the latter. While demonstrating comprehensive support for Yeltsin and praising him as a recognized world political leader, including an invitation to the G7 Club, which united the leaders of the world’s leading powers, they actively encouraged separatism in the national republics, sponsoring a revolt in Chechnya and provoking a war in the Caucasus. The U.S., British and German leaders hugged Yeltsin and promised him eternal peace and friendship, on the one hand, and on the other, encouraged the former Union republics to join NATO and supported the Chechen militants.
Putin stopped the process of Russia’s disintegration, restored the vertical chain of command, pacified Chechnya, and launched the process of Eurasian integration. He thereby issued a challenge to the U.S. geopolitical line in the post-Soviet space and began to be perceived by the American establishment as an enemy. After failing to destabilize the situation in Russia, American special services became active in the post-Soviet space to undermine the process of Eurasian integration that was seen by U.S. politicians as “restoration of the USSR”.*
* Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at a news conference in Dublin on December 6,2012: “There is a move to re-Sovietize the region. [It’s not going to be called that.] It’s going to be called a customs union, it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that. But let’s make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”
As a result, in response to that, the EU Eastern Partnership project was launched to draw the post-Soviet republics under Brussels jurisdiction as disenfranchised members of association agreements with the EU. This project was backed up by a rapid expansion in the network of agents of influence and the indoctrination of young people in the spirit of primitive nationalism. The series of “color revolutions” organized by U.S. special services brought puppet governments to power in Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, which started pursuing a nationalist Russophobic policy course. In all cases, this policy resulted in the division of society and the use of violence against dissidents. In Georgia and Moldova, this division ended up with the disintegration of states, while in Ukraine, it led to the seizure of power by neo-Nazis and the establishment of a neo-fascist regime that started a war against its own people.
It is an open secret that the primary and only goal of American geopolitics in the post-Soviet space is the separation of newly independent states from Russia and the destruction of their independence by forcing them to move under EU jurisdiction. This goal is motivated not only by the wish to contain or weaken Russia. The collapse of the ruble that occurred this year and the dragging of the Russian economy into the trap of stagflation demonstrated Washington’s ability to manipulate the macroeconomic situation in Russia.3 Concern about the revival of the Soviet Union on the basis of the Eurasian Economic Union is as groundless as the risks of the restoration of the Third Reich in the EU space.
Objectively, there is no need for the Americans to contain Russia: Its macroeconomic status is manipulated by Washington-based international organizations, while the financial market is manipulated by American oligarchy. Nor do anti-Russian sanctions make sense to the Americans. Russia is not a recipient but a donor of the Western financial system, which absorbs about $150 billion from the Russian market each year. Why did the U.S. launch a hybrid war against Russia? The exploitation of Russian economy brings American capital huge profits, while Russian business generals voluntarily passed under U.S. “command,” hiding their capitals from the Russian state in offshore zones under Anglo-Saxon jurisdiction?
This is not about the containment of Russia. The stakes are much higher. This is about a battle for global leadership in which American hegemony is being challenged by China’s rising influence. America is losing this battle, which provokes its ruling elite’s aggressiveness. Its target now is Russia, which, in keeping with the European geopolitical tradition, is seen as the owner of the mythological Heartland control over which, according to Anglo-German geopoliticians, ensures control over the world.
The world, however, is a different place today. Whereas 200 years ago, the Russian Empire indeed dominated the world and “in Europe, not a single gun could be fired without permission from the Russian tsar,”* today the global economy is controlled by Western multinational corporations whose expansion is supported by the uncontrolled emission of international currencies. The world currency emission monopoly is the basis of the power of Western financial oligarchy whose interests are served by the military and political machine of the U.S. and its NATO allies. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the world socialist system, this power has become global, while the U.S. leadership seemed to be carved in stone. However, any economic system has limits of development, which are predetermined by its technological and institutional structure reproduction patterns.
* “Not a single gun in Europe could be fired without our permission” – this comment is attributed to the 18th century Russia’s State Chancellor and diplomat A. Bezborodko.
The current escalation of international military and political tensions is a result of changes in technological and global economic systems that involve a deep economic restructuring on the basis of fundamentally new technology and new capital reproduction mechanisms.
As the centuries-old experience in the development of capitalism shows, during such periods, the system of international relations sharply destabilizes, the old world order is destroyed and a new order is formed. The possibilities for social and economic development based on the established system of institutions and technologies approach their limits. Leading countries encounter insurmountable difficulties in maintaining the pace of economic growth. The over-accumulation of capital in obsolete production and technological systems plunges their economies into depression, while the established system of institutions impedes the formation of new technological connections. Together with new production technology institutions, they push their way through in other countries, which emerge as new economic development leaders.
Former leaders try to retain their global market domination by tightening control over their geoeconomic periphery, including by military and political enforcement methods. As a general rule, this leads to major armed conflicts in which a former leader uses up its resources without achieving the required effect.
A potential new leader, which is on a rising tide by this time, seeks to adopt a wait-and-see position in order to preserve its productive forces and enlist the brains, capital and wealth of warring countries that flee from the war. As it builds up its resources, a new leader enters the world arena when the opponents at war become weak enough and appropriates the results of the victory.
After the Cold War between the U.S. and the USSR and following the disintegration of the latter, the U.S. seized global leadership due to the superiority in the development of its information, communications and technology system and by establishing the monopoly of world currency emission. Linked to the global currency “printing press,” U.S. multinational corporations have become a foundation for the formation of a new global economic order based on liberal globalization.
Currently, we are seeing the formation of a new social and economic system, which is more effective compared to previous systems, as the center of global development is shifting to Southeast Asia, which leads a number of researchers to speak about the onset of a new, Asian, age-long capital accumulation cycle.4 After the Genoese-Spanish, Dutch, British, and U.S. capital accumulation cycles, which successively replaced one another, the emerging Asian cycle is creating its system of institutions that retain the material and technical achievements that have already been made and provide new opportunities for the development of the productive forces of society.
Today, as the case was during previous periods of changing cycles, a leader who is losing influence resorts to enforcement in order to uphold his domination. As it is faced with the over-accumulation of capital in financial pyramids and outdated production systems, as well as the loss of markets for the sale of its goods and the falling share of the dollar in international transactions, the U.S. tries to retain its leadership by unleashing a world war to weaken both its competitors and partners. The establishment of control over Russia, combined with its domination in Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, gives the United States a strategic advantage over rising China in controlling the primary sources of hydrocarbons and other critical mineral resources. Control over Europe, Russia, Japan, and Korea also ensures domination in creating new expertise and developing advanced technology.
Not quite understanding the objective mechanisms of cyclical development that doom the U.S. to the loss of global domination, the U.S. ruling elite fears the increase in the number of countries outside its control and the formation of global expanded reproduction contours, independent of it. This threat is posed by the deepening integration of the BRICS countries, South American, Central Asian, and Far Eastern countries. Russia’s ability to organize the formation of such a coalition, asserted by the successful creation of the Eurasian Economic Union, predetermines the anti-Russian vector of the American policy course. If V.V. Putin’s Eurasian strategy, which was followed according to WTO rules, irritated the U.S., his decisions with regard to Crimea were perceived there as shaking the foundations of its world order and a challenge to which it is cannot but respond.
Modern studies of long-term economic development trends provide a credible explanation for the ongoing crisis processes both in the global and the national economy. Such phenomena as oil price fluctuations, financial bubbles, production decline in the basic sectors of the economy that led to depression in leading countries, alongside the rapid spread of advanced technology and the rise of catch-up countries, were predicted in advance by the theory of long waves. On this basis, economic policy recommendations were worked out and a priority development strategy was formulated, providing for the creation of conditions for the development of a new technological order.5
The continuous innovation process, characteristic of the major sectors of modern industry and the services, prevents the economy from achieving a state of equilibrium; it has acquired a chronically unbalanced character. The primary emerging prize of market competition is the possibility of deriving intellectual rent received as a result of technological superiority protected by intellectual property right and making it possible to make superprofits through a higher effectiveness of production or a higher quality of goods. In pursuit of this technological superiority, leading companies constantly upgrade technology amid the broad variability of production factors, which does not allow a point of balance to be established even in theory. The attractors that emerge in the economic system evolution process, which are predetermined by the limits of the development of existing technology, are of a temporary nature, as they disappear and are replaced by others, related to the emergence of new technology.
Nevertheless, the recommendations by Russian experts working within the framework of the evolutionary economy paradigm were ignored by the ruling elite’s tunnel vision of the doctrine of market fundamentalism. The economy has gone through a series of artificially engineered crises losing a significant part of national income as a result of an unequal foreign trade exchange and degraded. The scientific and technical potential of the Russian economy was not used. Instead of rising on the long wave of global economic growth, it slid into a crisis that was accompanied by the degradation of the remaining scientific and technical potential and the growing technological lag behind not only advanced but also steadily developing countries. Particular successes among the last mentioned were achieved by China whose leadership acts in compliance with the aforementioned priority development strategy for a new technological order with the simultaneous modernization of traditional sectors on its basis.
All “objective” explanations of the high growth rate of the Chinese economy related to its initial backwardness are partially true. Partially, because they ignore the main thing, i.e., the creative approach of the Chinese leadership towards building a new system of productive relations that is becoming increasingly self-sufficient and attractive while the Chinese economy is emerging as the world’s leading economy. The Chinese themselves describe their formation as socialist while developing private enterprise and raising capitalist corporations. At the same time, China’s communist leadership continues building socialism, while avoiding ideological clichés and stereotypes. They prefer to formulate tasks in terms of people’s well-being, prioritizing the eradication of poverty and the creation of a moderately prosperous society and subsequently achieving the highest living standards in the world. In so doing, they seek to avoid excessive social inequality, preserving the labor-based principle of national income distribution and guiding economic regulation institutions toward productive activity and long-term investment in the development of productive forces. Herein lies the common specificity of countries that make up the core of the Asian capital accumulation cycle.
Regardless of the prevailing property ownership form – public, as in China or Vietnam, or private, as in Japan or Korea – the Asian accumulation cycle is characterized by a combination of state government planning and market self-organizing institutions, state control over the main economic reproduction parameters and free enterprise, and the ideology of common good and private initiative. At the same time, forms of political organization can differ fundamentally – from the world’s largest Indian democracy to the world’s biggest Communist Party of China. What remains immutable is the priority of public interests over private interests, which manifests itself in the strict mechanisms of citizens’ personal responsibility for conscientious behavior, the faithful fulfillment of their obligations, the observance of laws, and the upholding of national goals. Importantly, forms of public oversight and control can also differ fundamentally – from harakiri by heads of bankrupt banks in Japan to the death penalty for corrupt officials in China. The social and economic development regulation system is built on mechanisms of personal responsibility for improving the well-being of society.
The primacy of public interests over private interests comes through in the institutional structure of economic regulation that is characteristic of the Asian accumulation cycle. This includes, above all, state control over the key capital reproduction parameters through planning, crediting, subsidizing and price mechanisms, and the regulation of basic conditions for entrepreneurial activity. The state not so much issues orders as plays the role of moderator, putting in place the mechanisms of social partnership and cooperation among the main social groups. Officials do not try to order businessmen about but organize effective cooperation among the business, scientific and engineering communities in order to formulate common development goals and identify the most effective methods of achieving them. This is also the object of state economic regulation mechanisms.
Of course, the aforementioned cyclical patterns may not work this time. However, judging by the behavior of the U.S. authorities, they are doing all they can to cede leadership to China. The hybrid war that they have unleashed against Russia is prodding them toward a strategic alliance with China, thereby expanding China’s capabilities. Additional incentives emerge for developing and expanding the SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organization], which is becoming a full-fledged regional association. The Eurasian Economic Union [EurAsEC] and the SCO constitute the world’s largest economic space of preferential trade and cooperation spanning half the Old World.
The attempts by the U.S. to organize coups in Brazil, Venezuela and Bolivia are pushing South America outside the scope of the American hegemony. Brazil, which is a member of the BRICS association, has every reason to seek a preferential trade regime and deeper cooperation with the SCO countries. This provides opportunities for the formation of the world’s biggest economic association of EurAsEC, the SCO and the Mercosur countries, which are likely to be joined by ASEAN. Additional incentives for such a broad integration encompassing over half the world’s population, production and natural resources are provided by the U.S. obsessive desire to create Pacific and Transatlantic preferential trade and cooperation zones without the participation of the BRICS countries.
The U.S. is making the same mistake as the previous global leader, i.e., the UK, which during the Great Depression sought to protect its colonial empire against U.S. goods with protectionist measures. However, as a result of World War II, the UK lost its empire, as the entire European colonial system, which had impeded global economic development, collapsed. Today, it is the American financial empire that has become such an impediment, getting all of the world’s resources involved in servicing the growing debt pyramid of the U.S. The volume of its national debt is growing exponentially, while the size of all U.S. debt obligations already exceeds its GDP by a factor of 10, which points to the forthcoming collapse of the American, and together with it, also the entire Western financial system.
To avoid collapse and retain its global leadership, U.S. financial oligarchy seeks to unleash a world war. It will write off debts and make it possible to retain control over the periphery and eliminate or at least contain competition. As always in such cases, a war is unfolding primarily for control over the periphery. This accounts for the U.S. aggression in North Africa and the greater Middle East with the aim of tightening control over this oil producing region and, at the same time, over Europe. However, due to its key critical importance in the eyes of U.S. geopoliticians, the direction of the main attack is Russia. Not because of its strengthening or as punishment for its reunification with Crimea, but due to traditional Western geopolitical thinking preoccupied with the struggle to preserve global hegemony. Again, in keeping with the behest of Western geopoliticians, a war with Russia begins with Ukraine.*
In the course of three centuries, first Poland, then Austria-Hungary and Germany, and now the U.S. have been cultivating Ukrainian separatism. Up until the disintegration of the Soviet Union, this project was not much of a success, except for the establishment, with the help of German bayonets, of a temporary Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918 and the formation of Ukrainian nationalist organizations under the command of the occupation authorities in 1941-1944. Each time, in order to keep in power the Ukrainian nationalists that they had raised, the Germans resorted to terror against local residents. From the genocide against Ruthenians organized by the Austrians during World War I and to the massive punitive operations against the people of the Nazi occupied Ukraine during World War II. Today, this tradition is being continued by the Americans who have established control over Ukraine following the February 21, 2014 coup that they organized, bringing a puppet Nazi junta to power.
Dispensing with the formalities, U.S. special services, through the Nazis that they have raised, organize terror against Ukraine’s Russian speaking population. Ukrainian neo-fascists, under the direction of their American supervisors and instructors, are committing war crimes in the Donets Basin; they forcibly mobilize young men “for a war with the Russians,” sacrificing them to Ukrainian Nazism. The last mentioned has become an ideology of the Ukrainian regime, which is a successor to Hitler’s accomplices who were condemned at the Nuremburg trial as war criminals.
* “The Russian power can only be undermined by separating Ukraine from it…. Ukraine should not only be torn away from Russia but also set against it. One part of the single nation should be pitted against the other to have brother kill brother. To this end, it is necessary to find and cultivate traitors within the national élite and use them to change the consciousness of one part of the great nation to such an extent that they will hate all things Russian, hate their own clan, without even being aware of that. The rest is a matter of time,” Otto von Bismarck wrote in his book Reflections and Reminiscences.
The U.S. policy objective in Ukraine is not to protect its interests or its social and economic development. It is to use the people who have been indoctrinated and bamboozled by Nazi ideology as cannon fodder to unleash a war against Russia with a view to pulling its NATO partners in Europe into that war. U.S. historians regard both World War I and World War II in Europe as good wars. They ensured the rise of the U.S. economy by moving the wealth, capital, brains, and technology accumulated in Europe across the ocean. As a result of these wars, the U.S. has emerged as a world leader, establishing its hegemony over European countries and their former colonies. Today, U.S. geopolitics gambles on fomenting a world war in Europe as a tried and tested means of augmenting its power.
The aggressiveness and frenzy of U.S. politicians, which seems amusing to many of our experts, should be in fact taken very seriously. It is aimed at inciting a war, while the brazen lies and even the ostentatious stupidity of U.S. loudmouths are only the means to camouflage the seriousness of American oligarchy’s intentions. It can preserve its global domination only by unleashing a world war. The existence of weapons of mass destruction changes the nature of this war. Experts describe it as a hybrid war, since not so much armed forces are used as information, financial and cognitive technologies, designed to weaken and disorient the adversary to the maximum degree possible. Only when the latter is demoralized to such an extent that it cannot put up effective resistance do they use military operations, which are reminiscent more of punitive rather than combat operations, to finalize the victory and punish the rebels as an object lesson for others.
This is precisely how – without bloody military clashes – the U.S. occupied Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya, Georgia, and Ukraine. Key importance in a hybrid war is attached to a clever combination of financial, information and cognitive technologies. Financially, the U.S. has a strategic advantage, as it can print world money and carry out currency and financial attacks of any level of intensity against national economies. On the information front, the U.S. completely dominates the world electronic media, prevails on the world cinema and TV market and controls global telecoms networks. By combining monetary and financial aggression in the economic sphere and the control of public consciousness on the information level, the U.S. can manipulate the motives of national ruling elites. A key role here is played by cognitive weapons, i.e., misleading national leaders with a false understanding of ongoing events.
We earlier mentioned the importance of the cognitive weapons that the U.S. used to disorient the Soviet and then Russian leadership. To make them work, it is essential to built the adversary’s trust and make it incapable of developing an objective perception of what is going on. The first is achieved with flattery, corruption and deception. The second is achieved by discrediting the national expert community and replacing it with agents of influence and promoting them to all power structures, the media and top business, cultural and intellectual sections of society. One oft-used method of achieving this double goal is to drag top level leaders from the national environment into an international environment, which is accompanied by imposing on them charismatic foreign and “the world’s best” preconditioned national experts and consultants. This method worked beautifully in relation to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, whose “new thinking” was manipulated by experts specially trained in the West, while influential national scholars and specialists were isolated. It also worked with Yanukovich, whose mind was manipulated by American advisors and at the final stage, directly by Western leaders.
An understanding of the technology of affecting political consciousness with cognitive weapons does not provide automatic protection against them. Even quite intelligent, honest and decent people with extensive practical and political experience can become a target of attack. A good case in point is our own political consciousness that easily confuses cause and effect. The assessments and ratings fabricated by U.S. institutions proceeding from their own interests are perceived as true, despite objective reality.
The impact of U.S. cognitive weapons on the consciousness of the Russian ruling elite produces its results, weakening Russia and strengthening the U.S. and NATO.
Our direct losses amount to $150 billion worth of capital that is moved out of Russia to the Western financial system, while our total losses are equivalent to half the Russian production potential. This year alone, instead of a 10% growth in production and investment, we are seeing a 5% decline, while in terms of poverty levels we are thrown back by more than a decade.
Regardless of Russia’s position, the Americans will lose the battle for leadership with China. Such is the logic of the change of world economic systems into which the unfolding hybrid war waged against us by the U.S. and its NATO allies fits completely. The system of integral society institutions that was created in China by using our historical experience, combining the advantages of the socialist and capitalist systems, convincingly demonstrated its superiority over the system of U.S. oligarchic capitalism. Together with Japan, India, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia, China is creating a new center of world economic development based on a new technological order and is building a new world economic order. In contrast to global liberalization, which proceeds from the interests of American financial oligarchy, the new world order will be built on the recognition of the diversity of countries and respect for their sovereignty on an equal, just and mutually beneficial basis.
Anglo-Saxon geopolitics is becoming history. The Chinese political system is reliably protected against the impact of cognitive weapons. The same holds true for India, which suffered greatly from the British colonial oppression, and Vietnam, which experienced the horrors of a war against the U.S. There is no trust in the Americans in South America, which has had its share of “America for the Americans.” The Japanese recently observed the 70th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing.
The space of U.S. hegemony is steadily shrinking. The modern ruling elites of BRICS countries and their integration partners are unlikely to follow Anglo-Saxon geopolitics. Except for Europe and North America, it can work no longer. Nevertheless, it continues to work partially in the post-Soviet space, making us vulnerable to yet another act of Western aggression. This vulnerability makes American geopoliticians euphoric with a sense of close victory, which makes them extremely self-confident and dangerous. The Russophobia that they are blowing up can easily ignite a new war in Europe, which will be waged with the aim of destroying the Russian World.
To endure the hybrid war that the Americans have unleashed, it is necessary above all to protect ourselves against its major injurious effects, i.e., cognitive, financial and information weapons. It is not difficult to do this by switching to internal credit sources based on a sovereign monetary and credit policy. By de-dollarizing and de-offshorizing its economy, Russia will not only acquire independence but will also be in a position to restore its scientific and production capability, as well as weaken the impact of the American aggression that is based on the use of the dollar as a world currency, which makes it possible to finance the hybrid war at the adversary’s expense.
The most effective protection against information weapons is the truth, and the truth is that U.S. geopolitics threatens the world with destructive chaos and a world war based on the artificial reincarnation of the seemingly outdated forms of the inhuman ideology of Nazism and religious fanaticism against the backdrop of the moral corruption of the Western ruling elite. By relying on this truth, it is necessary to seize strategic initiative in resolving the Ukraine crisis on the principled political platform of the Nuremburg Tribunal rulings. This will open the way to the formation of a broad antiwar coalition of countries interested in transitioning to a new world economic order where relations based on financial exploitation are replaced by the relations of pragmatic cooperation and, instead of liberal globalization in the interest of financial oligarchy, a sustainable development policy will be followed, proceeding from universal human interests.
Needless to say, the transition to a new world economic order will not automatically free the world from conflicts. The Chinese foreign policy strategy will not necessarily be humanistic – suffice it to read the famous 36 Stratagems6 to appreciate the Chinese readiness to use various methods to secure their interests, including some that are not necessarily compatible with our accustomed norms of Christian morality. The illusions of the ideology of a bright communist future for humankind as a whole are alien to China’s present leadership, which is building socialism with Chinese specifics, the latter boils down to the relentless pursuit of national interests based on the socialist ideology of national good and the Confucian principles of responsible national governance. To a certain extent, this ideology is reminiscent of Stalin’s concept of building socialism in one country. However, unlike the internationalism that is characteristic of Soviet socialism, the Chinese version of socialism is oriented solely towards Chinese national interests. But at least they are pragmatic and understandable. The primary goal is, above all, to build a moderately prosperous society. To this end, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon geopolitics of world domination, China needs peace and dynamic foreign trade cooperation. It definitely does not need the new war that is being unleashed by the Americans.
Although China has no historical experience in pursuing a global policy, it has a clear-cut development strategy. Russia has experience in pursuing a global policy, but does not have a development strategy. Without such a strategy, which should be consistently followed on the practical level, historical experience is useless. In order not to end up on the periphery – not of the U.S., but of China – a development ideology and strategy is needed. An ideology of the neoconservative synthesis of religious tradition, socialism, democracy, and a planned market economy as part of an integral order has been developed in general outline.7 A development strategy, taking into account the long-term patterns of technological and economic development has also been drafted.8
Russia can become a leader in the formation of a new world economic order and become an essential element of a new world economic development center. However, it is impossible to do this while remaining on the periphery of U.S. capitalism.
NOTES
1 Fukuyama F. Konets istorii i poslednii chelovek. Per s angl. M.B. Levina. M., AST, 2007, 588 pp.
2 Schweizer P. Pobeda. Rol’ tainoi strategii administratsii SShA v raspade Sovetskogo Soiuza i sotsialisticheskogo lageria. Minsk, 1995.
3 Glazyev S. “O praktichnosti kolichestvennoi teorii deneg, ili skolko stoit dogmatism denezhnykh vlastei,” Voprosy ekonomiki. 2008, No. 7; Glazyev S. “Tsentral’nyi bank pro-tiv promyshlennosti Rossii,” Voprosy ekonomiki. 1998, No. 1, pp. 16-32; No. 2, pp. 37-50; Glazyev S. “Sanktsii SShA i politika Banka Rossii: dvoinoi udar po natsional’ noi ekonomike,” Voprosy ekonomiki, 2014, No. 9.
4 Arrigi, Dzh. Dolgii dvadtsatyi vek: Den’gi, vlast’ i istoki nashego vremeni. M., ID Terriroria budushchego, 2006, 472 pp.
5 Glazyev S.Yu. Strategia operezhaiushchego razvitiia Rossii v usloviiakh global’nogo krizisa. M., Ekonomika, 2010; Glazyev S. Teoria dolgosrochnogo tekhniko-ekonomich-eskogo razvitiia. M., VlaDar, 1993.
6 Maliavin V. 36 strategem. Kitaiskie sekrety uspekha. M., Belye al’vy, 2000, 192 pp.
7 Glazyev S. Sotsialisticheskii otvet liberal’noi globalizatsii. M., APN, 2006.
8 Glazyev S. Teoria dolgosrochnogo tekhniko-ekonomicheskogo razvitiia; Glazyev S. Uroki ocherednoi rossiiskoi revoliutsii: Krakh liberal’noi utopii i shans na ekonomich-eskoe chudo. M., Ekonomicheskaia gazeta, 2001, 575 pp.