Putin gaf het westen een memorabele les geopolitiek

De laatste jaarlijkse toespraak van Putin tegenover het volk en diverse overheidsorganisaties ging hoofdzakelijk over Russische binnenlandse aangelegenheden, waarbij hij sprak over politieke voornemens als het helpen van Russen die in nood zitten, mensen die moeten leven van een laag inkomen, kinderen, alleenstaande moeders, jonge professionals en kansarmen. Hulp in de vorm van gratis gezondheidscheques tot een universeel inkomen in de nabije toekomst.

Het buitenland en zoals je begrijpt het westen besprak Putin op een wel heel bijzondere manier als een metafoor op Junglebook van schrijver Kipling. Hij begon daarvoor over de internationale verhoudingen waarbij hij Wit-Rusland noemde en openbaarde dat er een complot is ontdekt om (dictator) Loekasjenko om zeep te helpen en hoe kan het anders: daar zitten geheime diensten van de VS achter...... Zoals altijd in dit soort gevallen en daarbij gaat het meestal om democratisch gekozen regeringen en hun leiders die niet braaf doen wat de VS van hen verlangt, waarbij men demonstraties organiseert en financiert, waarna men probeert een opstand te organiseren, als eerste door zo'n land illegaal sancties op te leggen (op basis van leugens, zoals 'mensenrechtenschendingen'), sancties die immer braaf worden overgenomen door Groot-Brittannië, de EU en Canada, sancties ook die het volk van zo'n land ontevreden moeten maken, waarbij men hoopt dat het volk haar president of premier dwingt op te stappen, als dat niet lukt is men bereid om grof geweld in te zetten en uiteindelijk desnoods zo'n land binnen te vallen, het liefst 'gelegitimeerd' door een false fag operatie*, een specialiteit van de VS....

De geheime diensten van Rusland en Wit-Rusland zijn erachter gekomen dat men zelfs van zins was om de hoofdstad Minsk te blokkeren, inclusief het platleggen van de infrastructuur en communicatie, plus de totale elektriciteitstoevoer naar deze stad, dit zou tevens de aanloop zijn naar een enorme cyber aanval. Daarom heeft Putin nog eens bevestigd dat Rusland niet met zich noch met haar partners zal laten sollen...... (vergeet hierbij niet dat Wit-Rusland of Belarus van groot strategische belang is, niet alleen voor Rusland, maar zeker voor de zeer agressieve VS, dat Rusland en China heeft omgeven met een paar honderd van haar militaire bases, waaronder een 'raketschild' in Polen en Roemenië, zogenaamd tegen raketten uit Iran, terwijl deze raketten in een mum van tijd kunnen worden voorzien van meerdere kernkoppen en daarmee Russische steden kunnen raken, wat volgens het door de VS geschonden INF verdrag verboden was.....)

Putin stelde verder dat e.e.a. leidt tot een 'oncomfortabele waarheid': "Blijkbaar is het niet zonder reden dat onze westerse collega's zo koppig meerdere voorstellen van Rusland hebben afgewezen, voorstellen voor een internationale dialoog op het gebied van informatie en cyberveiligheid". (moet je nagaan en dan durven diezelfde westerse landen keer op keer Rusland te beschuldigen van cyberaanvallen, zonder ook maar één steekhoudend bewijs te leveren; maar vergeet niet dat de CIA een cyberaanval kan uitvoeren en de sporen bijvoorbeeld naar Rusland kan laten leiden, zoals blijkt uit officiële CIA en NSA documenten op Wikileaks, zo heeft de VS een cyberaanval uitgevoerd en de schuld daarvoor in de schoenen geschoven van het Russische Kaspersky Lab....**)   

Putin vervolgde met te zeggen dat het in het westen blijkbaar een sport is geworden om Rusland aan te vallen met zo luid mogelijke verklaringen (die de grootste leugens bevatten, Ap). Op dat moment begon Putin met zijn vergelijkingen met junglebook, waarbij hij wees op de jackhals Tabaqui die de tijger Shere Kan als hulp begeleidde, in dit geval sprak hij over meerdere jackhalzen, een duidelijke verwijzing naar de westerse landen die slaafs de VS volgen en daarbij zonder onderzoek alle leugens geloven die in de VS worden bekokstoofd...... Uiteraard verzinnen die westerse landen zelf ook veel flauwe kul zoals D666 kwaadaardigheid en thorbetert minister Ollongren, deze ploert durfde te beweren dat de Nederlandse verkiezingen en het Oekraïne referendum werden gemanipuleerd door Rusland..... ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Ja excuus beste bezoeker, maar telkens als ik daaraan moet denken krijg ik de slappe lacht, wat een gek!! (natuurlijk zonder dat deze kwezel ook maar één bewijs geeft voor haar leugens en ondanks dat hebben de Nederlandse media deze leugens overgenomen, sterker nog: ze dragen deze nog steeds uit >> ongelofelijk!!!)

Putin stelde dat Rusland geen bruggen wil verbranden, maar als 'iemand' onze goede bedoelingen als onbeduidend of zwakte ziet en deze bruggen totaal wil verbranden of zelfs zou willen opblazen, deze moet weten dat het Russische antwoord asymmetrisch, snel en hard zal zijn.........

Pepe Escobar die het hieronder opgenomen artikel plaatste op Strategic Culture (ik nam het over van Information Clearing House) stelt dat het voorgaande de nieuwe jungle wet is en degene die de Beer port tot het punt waarop de fundamentele belangen van de Russische veiligheid worden bedreigd, het zullen betreuren zoals ze sinds lange tijd iets niet hebben betreurd............

De verbazende gebeurtenissen van de laatste tijd, waarbij Escobar wijst op de Alaska top tussen China en de VS, de top tussen de Russische minister van BuZa Lavrov en diens Chinese partner Wang Yi, de NAVO top en de Iran-China deal, die samenvloeien in een nieuwe realiteit: het tijdperk van de unilaterale laviathan die de ijzeren wil oplegt is voorbij!! (waar met het zeemonster laviathan uiteraard de VS wordt bedoeld)

Voor de Russofoben die de boodschap van Putin niet hebben begrepen, heeft een koele, kalme en bedaarde Putin nog toegevoegd dat: 'We genoeg geduld, verantwoording, professionalisme, zelfvertrouwen en zelfverzekerdheid hebben in de juistheid van onze positie en ons gezond verstand zullen gebruiken bij het maken van beslissingen. Waaraan Putin toevoegde dat hij hoopt dat niemand zal denken de zogenaamde Russische rode lijn te overschrijden en waar ze dat toch doen, wij bepalen hoe we zullen reageren op elke specifieke zaak (een slechte vertaling van mijn kant, mijn excuus, zit nog steeds in de lappenmand en dat maakt het concentreren en schrijven extra moeilijk)

Lees het artikel van Pepe Escobar en bedenk in het vervolg dat elke demonisering van Rusland maar één doel dient: het dienen van het VS belang!! De VS, het land dat vanaf 2000 al meer dan 5 miljoen mensen heeft vermoord (met hulp van andere NAVO lidstaten als Nederland) en dat in illegale oorlogen, door de CIA georganiseerde opstanden, geheime militaire operaties tot slot het uitermate smerige gebruik van drones om verdachten te vermoorden, waarbij in de praktijk meer dan 90% van de slachtoffers niet eens werd verdacht, veelal vrouwen en kinderen....... De VS is dan ook de grootste terreurentiteit ter wereld!! (en een groot gevaar voor elke wereldbewoner!)

Putin rewrites the law of the geopolitical jungle 

By Pepe Escobar

May 03, 2021 "Information Clearing House" - - "SCF" - Putin’s address to the Russian Federal Assembly – a de facto State of the Nation – was a judo move that left Atlanticist sphere hawks particularly stunned.

The “West” was not even mentioned by name. Only indirectly, or via a delightful metaphor, Kipling’s Jungle Book. Foreign policy was addressed only at the end, almost as an afterthought.

For the best part of an hour and a half, Putin concentrated on domestic issues, detailing a series of policies that amount to the Russian state helping those in need – low income families, children, single mothers, young professionals, the underprivileged – with, for instance, free health checks all the way to the possibility of an universal income in the near future.

Of course he would also need to address the current, highly volatile state of international relations. The concise manner he chose to do it, counter-acting the prevailing Russophobia in the Atlanticist sphere, was quite striking.

First, the essentials. Russia’s policy “is to ensure peace and security for the well-being of our citizens and for the stable development of our country.”

Yet if “someone does not want to…engage in dialogue, but chooses an egoistic and arrogant tone, Russia will always find a way to stand up for its position.”

He singled out “the practice of politically motivated, illegal economic sanctions” to connect it to “something much more dangerous”, and actually rendered invisible in the Western narrative: “the recent attempt to organize a coup d’etat in Belarus and the assassination of that country’s president.” Putin made sure to stress, “all boundaries have been crossed”.

The plot to kill Lukashenko was unveiled by Russian and Belarusian intel – which detained several actors backed, who else, US intel. The US State Department predictably denied any involvement.

Putin: “It is worth pointing to the confessions of the detained participants in the conspiracy that a blockade of Minsk was being prepared, including its city infrastructure and communications, the complete shutdown of the entire power grid of the Belarusian capital. This, incidentally means preparations for a massive cyber-attack.”

And that leads to a very uncomfortable truth: “Apparently, it’s not for no reason that our Western colleagues have stubbornly rejected numerous proposals by the Russian side to establish an international dialogue in the field of information and cyber-security.”

“Asymmetric, swift and harsh”

Putin remarked how to “attack Russia” has become “a sport, a new sport, who makes the loudest statements.” And then he went full Kipling: “Russia is attacked here and there for no reason. And of course, all sorts of petty Tabaquis [jackals] are running around like Tabaqui ran around Shere Khan [the tiger] – everything is like in Kipling’s book – howling along and ready to serve their sovereign. Kipling was a great writer”.

The – layered – metaphor is even more startling as it echoes the late 19^th century geopolitical Great Game between the British and Russian empires, of which Kipling was a protagonist.

Once again Putin had to stress that “we really don’t want to burn any bridges. But if someone perceives our good intentions as indifference or weakness and intends to burn those bridges completely or even blow them up, he should know that Russia’s response will be asymmetric, swift and harsh”.

So here’s the new law of the geopolitical jungle – backed by Mr. Iskander, Mr. Kalibr, Mr. Avangard, Mr. Peresvet, Mr. Khinzal, Mr. Sarmat, Mr. Zircon and other well-respected gentlemen, hypersonic and otherwise, later complimented on the record. Those who poke the Bear to the point of threatening “the fundamental interests of our security will regret what has been done, as they have regretted nothing for a very long time.”

The stunning developments of the past few weeks – the China-US Alaska summit, the Lavrov-Wang Yi summit in Guilin, the NATO summit, the Iran-China strategic deal, Xi Jinping’s speech at the Boao forum – now coalesce into a stark new reality: the era of a unilateral Leviathan imposing its iron will is over.

For those Russophobes who still haven’t got the message, a cool, calm and collected Putin was compelled to add, “clearly, we have enough patience, responsibility, professionalism, self-confidence, self-assurance in the correctness of our position and common sense when it comes to making any decisions. But I hope that no one will think about crossing Russia’s so-called red lines. And where they run, we determine ourselves in each specific case.”

Back to realpolitik, Putin once again had to stress the “special responsibility” of the “five nuclear states” to seriously discuss “issues related to strategic armament”. It’s an open question whether the Biden-Harris administration – behind which stand a toxic cocktail of neo-cons and humanitarian imperialists – will agree.

Putin: “The goal of such negotiations could be to create an environment of conflict-free coexistence based on equal security, covering not only strategic weapons such as intercontinental ballistic missiles, heavy bombers and submarines, but also, I would like to emphasize, all offensive and defensive systems capable of solving strategic tasks, regardless of their equipment.”

As much as Xi’s address to the Boao forum was mostly directed to the Global South, Putin highlighted how “we are expanding contacts with our closest partners in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the BRICS, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the allies of the Collective Security Treaty Organization”, and extolled “joint projects in the framework of the Eurasian Economic Union”, billed as “practical tools for solving the problems of national development.”

In a nutshell: integration in effect, following the Russian concept of “Greater Eurasia”.

“Tensions skirting wartime levels”

Now compare all of the above with the White House Executive Order (EO) declaring a “national emergency” to “deal with the Russian threat”.

This is directly connected to President Biden – actually the combo telling him what to do, complete with earpiece and teleprompter – promising Ukraine’s President Zelensky that Washington would “take measures” to support Kiev’s wishful thinking of retaking Donbass and Crimea.

There are several eyebrow-raising issues with this EO. It denies, de facto, to any Russian national the full rights to their US property. Any US resident may be accused of being a Russian agent engaged in undermining US security. A sub-sub paragraph (C), detailing “actions or policies that undermine democratic processes or institutions in the United States or abroad”, is vague enough to be used to eliminate any journalism that supports Russia’s positions in international affairs.

Purchases of Russian OFZ bonds have been sanctioned, as well as one of the companies involved in the production of the Sputnik V vaccine. Yet the icing on this sanction cake may well be that from now on all Russian citizens, including dual citizens, may be barred from entering US territory except via a rare special authorization on top of the ordinary visa.

The Russian paper Vedomosti has noted that in such paranoid atmosphere the risks for large companies such as Yandex or Kaspersky Lab are significantly increasing. Still, these sanctions have not been met with surprise in Moscow. The worst is yet to come, according to Beltway insiders: two packages of sanctions against Nord Stream 2 already approved by the US Department of Justice.

The crucial point is that this EO de facto places anyone reporting on Russia’s political positions as potentially threatening “American democracy”. As top political analyst Alastair Crooke has remarked, this is a “procedure usually reserved for citizens of enemy states during times of war”. Crooke adds, “US hawks are upping the ante fiercely against Moscow. Tensions and rhetoric are skirting wartime levels.”

It’s an open question whether Putin’s State of the Nation will be seriously examined by the toxic lunatic combo of neocons and humanitarian imperialists bent on simultaneously harassing Russia and China.

But the fact is something extraordinary has already started to happen: a “de-escalation” of sorts.

Even before Putin’s address, Kiev, NATO and the Pentagon apparently got the message implicit in Russia moving two armies, massive artillery batteries and airborne divisions to the borders of Donbass and to Crimea – not to mention top naval assets moved from the Caspian to the Black Sea. NATO could not even dream of matching that.

Facts on different grounds speak volumes. Both Paris and Berlin were terrified of a possible Kiev clash directly against Russia, and lobbied furiously against it, bypassing the EU and NATO.

Then someone – it might have been Jake Sullivan – must have whispered on Crash Test Dummy’s earpiece that you don’t go around insulting the head of a nuclear state and expect to keep your global “credibility”. So after that by now famous “Biden” phone call to Putin came the invitation to the climate change summit, in which any lofty promises are largely rhetorical, as the Pentagon will continue to be the largest polluting entity on planet Earth.

So Washington may have found a way to keep at least one avenue of dialogue open with Moscow. At the same time Moscow has no illusions whatsoever that the Ukraine/Donbass/Crimea drama is over. Even if Putin did not mention it in the State of the Nation. And even if Defense Minister Shoigu has ordered a de-escalation.

The always inestimable Andrei Martyanov has gleefully noted the “cultural shock when Brussels and D.C. started to suspect that Russia doesn’t ‘want’ Ukraine. What Russia wants is for this country to rot and implode without excrement from this implosion hitting Russia. West’s paying for the clean up of this clusterf**k is also in Russian plans for Ukrainian Bantustan.”

The fact that Putin did not even mention Bantustan in his speech corroborates this analysis. As far as “red lines” are concerned, Putin’s implicit message remains the same: a NATO base on Russia’s western flank simply won’t be tolerated. Paris and Berlin know it. The EU is in denial. NATO will always refuse to admit it.

We always come back to the same crucial issue: whether Putin will be able, against all odds, to pull a combined Bismarck-Sun Tzu move and build a lasting German-Russian entente cordiale (and that’s quite far from an “alliance’). Nord Stream 2 is an essential cog in the wheel – and that’s what’s driving Washington hawks crazy.

Whatever happens next, for all practical purposes Iron Curtain 2.0 is now on, and it simply won’t go away. There will be more sanctions. Everything was thrown at the Bear short of a hot war. It will be immensely entertaining to watch how, and via which steps, Washington will engage on a “de-escalation and diplomatic process” with Russia.

The Hegemon may always find a way to deploy a massive P.R. campaign and ultimately claim a diplomatic success in “dissolving” the impasse. Well, that certainly beats a hot war. Otherwise, lowly Jungle Book adventurers have been advised: try anything funny and be ready to meet “asymmetric, swift and harsh”.

Pepe Escobar is correspondent-at-large at Asia Times. His latest book is 2030. Follow him on Facebook.-   

See also 

Moscow decries ‘unfriendly actions’ as US ends visa services for most Russians

===========================================

*  Een false flag operatie: ofwel men (meestal de VS) begaat een grove misdaad tegen bijvoorbeeld VS burgers, dan wel militairen, of een militair object zoals een VS marineschip en schuift deze in de schoenen van het land ('de vlag') waarvan men de leider(s) wil laten verdwijnen voor een VS marionet...... Voorbeelden te over!! (het is daarbij niet eens nodig dat men werkelijk een eigen marineschip aanvalt, de verontwaardiging die ontstaat na een zogenaamde aanval, genereert meer dan voldoende steun om de VS oorlog te laten voeren......)

** Zie: 'CIA deed zich voor als het Russische Kaspersky Lab, aldus Wikileaks Vault 8.....' (te vinden in de Vault 7 documenten op Wikileaks)

Zie ook: 'De VS zet zichzelf wat betreft Rusland, China en Iran geopolitiek schaakmat'

'Aanslag op Navalny wekt (zonder bewijs) woede in westen, terwijl door Trump toegegeven moorden stilte opleveren in datzelfde westen' (zie de links in dat bericht naar meer berichten over het Navalny sprookje >> een blootstelling aan novitsjok is ten allen tijde zonder meer dodelijk!!!)

'EU neemt uiterst hypocriet sancties tegen Wit-Rusland'

'VS en Oekraïne spelen een smerig spel in Wit-Rusland' 

'VS steun voor 20 dictators' (en dan durven de opvolgende administraties in de VS te zegen dat men voor het verspreiden van democratie is en zich verzet tegen dictators...... ha! ha! ha! ha!)

Dear mister Putin pleas cut Russian ties with Belarus' (dom van mij, immers Wit-Rusland is van groot strategisch belang voor Rusland en de VS, ik had moeten inzetten op een breuk met Loekasjenko)

'Helga Salemon 'met zéééér wijze woorden' over Loekasjenko en de verkiezingen in Wit-Rusland, met de nadruk op Rusland' (zie ook de links in dat bericht voor meer anti-Russische propaganda leugens van Salemon)

'VS dwarsboomt Rusland en China via het IMF en de Wereldbank, terreur op een ander niveau......'

VS dwarsboomt Rusland en China via het IMF en de Wereldbank, terreur op een ander niveau......

De VS dwarsboomt Rusland en China: Oekraïne is het eerste land, dat zegt een lening van Rusland niet terug te betalen, ook al was één van de condities voor die lening 5% rente, veel gunstiger dan die van het IMF en de Wereldbank..... Oekraïne was het eerste land, dat stelde een schuld van 3 miljard dollar aan de Russen niet terug te betalen..... China en Rusland varen een steeds onafhankelijker koers op financieel gebied, als tegenhangers van het uiterst asociale, inhumane, neoliberale aandelenkapitalisme, dat in feite wordt geleid vanuit de VS, via het IMF en de Wereldbank, waarbij de belangen van de VS en haar munt altijd voorop gaan......

Daar de VS feitelijk aan de touwen trekt bij het IMF en de Wereldbank, besloot het IMF niet langer garant te staan voor leningen, die bijvoorbeeld Rusland aan andere landen heeft verstrekt, zoals de hiervoor aangeduide lening van 3 miljard dollar aan Oekraïne. Met andere woorden maande het IMF deze landen en in dit voorbeeld Oekraïne, de lening van Rusland simpelweg niet terug te betalen!! Sterker nog: voorwaarde voor een lening van het IMF, is het niet terugbetalen van schulden aan Rusland of China....... Hiervoor  moest het IMF de regels tijdens het spel aanpassen, een schoftenstreek van enorme grootte!! Oekraïne was normaal gesproken niet zo maar in aanmerking gekomen voor een lening van het IMF of de Wereldbank, vanwege de bestaande schuld aan Rusland, maar kan nu gewoon miljarden extra lenen en het eerder geleende geld in de zak steken.

Voor een lening van het IMF en de Wereldbank moet wel een fiks deel van de soevereiniteit worden ingeleverd en zal het land het neoliberale systeem moeten invoeren, waarbij de bevolking uiteraard de klos is, zoals de Grieken dat nu dagelijks merken: leven in armoede en zelfs met een baan, zullen velen in armoede blijven steken, daar de salarissen gigantisch naar beneden werden bijgesteld........ Uiteraard moeten zoveel mogelijk staatseigendommen worden verkocht, zoals openbare nutsvoorzieningen, waar mensen bijvoorbeeld veel meer zullen moeten betalen voor water, de gezondheidszorg en scholing........

Hier het artikel van Information Clearing House, waarin e.e.a. uit de doeken wordt gedaan, een lang artikel, maar uiterst verhelderend:

The IMF Changes its Rules to Isolate China and Russia

By Michael Hudson - Guns and Butter

Dr. Hudson discusses his paper, The IMF Changes Its Rules To Isolate China and Russia; implications of the four policy changes at the International Monetary Fund in its role as enforcer of inter-government debts; the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as an alternative military alliance to NATO; the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) threatens to replace the IMF and World Bank; the Trans Pacific Partnership Treaty; the China International Payments System (CIPS); WTO investment treaties; Ukraine and Greece; different philosophies of development between east and west; break up of the post WWII dollarized global financial system; the world dividing into two camps.

Posted February 05, 2016

A New Global Financial Cold War

By Michael Hudson

A nightmare scenario of U.S. geopolitical strategists is coming true: foreign independence from U.S.-centered financial and diplomatic control. China and Russia are investing in neighboring economies on terms that cement Eurasian integration on the basis of financing in their own currencies and favoring their own exports. They also have created the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as an alternative military alliance to NATO.[1] And the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) threatens to replace the IMF and World Bank tandem in which the United States holds unique veto power.

More than just a disparity of voting rights in the IMF and World Bank is at stake. At issue is a philosophy of development. U.S. and other foreign investment in infrastructure (or buyouts and takeovers on credit) adds interest rates and other financial charges to the cost structure, while charging prices as high as the market can bear (think of Carlos Slim’s telephone monopoly in Mexico, or the high costs of America’s health care system), and making their profits and monopoly rents tax-exempt by paying them out as interest.

By contrast, government-owned infrastructure provides basic services at low cost, on a subsidized basis, or freely. That is what has made the United States, Germany and other industrial lead nations so competitive over the past few centuries. But this positive role of government is no longer possible under World Bank/IMF policy. The U.S. promotion of neoliberalism and austerity is a major reason propelling China, Russia and other nations out of the U.S. diplomatic and banking orbit.

On December 3, 2015, Prime Minister Putin proposed that Russia “and other Eurasian Economic Union countries should kick-off consultations with members of the SCO and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on a possible economic partnership.”[2]Russia also is seeking to build pipelines to Europe through friendly secular countries instead of Sunni jihadist U.S.-backed countries locked into America’s increasingly confrontational orbit.

Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov points out that when Russia’s 2013 loan to Ukraine was made, at the request of Ukraine’s elected government, Ukraine’s “international reserves were barely enough to cover three months’ imports, and no other creditor was prepared to lend on terms acceptable to Kiev. Yet Russia provided $3 billion of much-needed funding at a 5 per cent interest rate, when Ukraine’s bonds were yielding nearly 12 per cent.”[3]

What especially annoys U.S. financial strategists is that this loan by Russia’s National Wealth Fund was protected by IMF lending practice, which at that time ensured collectability by withholding credit from countries in default of foreign official debts, or at least not bargaining in good faith to pay. To cap matters, the bonds are registered under London’s creditor-oriented rules and courts.

Most worrisome to U.S. strategists is that China and Russia are denominating their trade and investment in their own currencies instead of dollars. After U.S. officials threatened to derange Russia’s banking linkages by cutting it off from the SWIFT interbank clearing system, China accelerated its creation of the alternative China International Payments System (CIPS), and its own credit card system to protect Eurasian economies from the threats made by U.S. unilateralists.

Russia and China are simply doing what the United States has long done: using trade and credit linkages to cement their diplomacy. This tectonic geopolitical shift is a Copernican threat to New Cold War ideology: Instead of the world economy revolving around the United States (the Ptolemaic idea of America as “the indispensible nation”), it may revolve around Eurasia. As long as global financial control remains grounded in Washington at the offices of the IMF and World Bank, such a shift in the center of gravity will be fought with all the power of an American Century (and would-be American Millennium) inquisition.

Any inquisition needs a court system and enforcement vehicles. So does resistance to such a system. That is what today’s global financial, legal and trade maneuvering is all about. And that is why today’s world system is in the process of breaking apart. Differences in economic philosophy call for different institutions.

To U.S. neocons the specter of AIIB government-to-government investment creates fear of nations minting their own money and holding each other’s debt in their international reserves instead of borrowing dollars, paying interest in dollars and subordinating their financial planning to the U.S. Treasury and IMF. Foreign governments would have less need to finance their budget deficits by selling off key infrastructure. And instead of dismantling public spending, a broad Eurasian economic union would do what the United States itself practices, and seek self-sufficiency in banking and monetary policy.

Imagine the following scenario five years from now. China will have spent half a decade building high-speed railroads, ports, power systems and other construction for Asian and African countries, enabling them to grow and export more. These exports will be coming online to repay the infrastructure loans. Also, suppose that Russia has been supplying the oil and gas energy for these projects on credit.

To avert this prospect, suppose an American diplomat makes the following proposal to the leaders of countries in debt to China, Russia and the AIIB: “Now that you’ve got your increased production in place, why repay? We’ll make you rich if you stiff our adversaries and turn back to the West. We and our European allies will support your assigning your nations’ public infrastructure to yourselves and your supporters at insider prices, and then give these assets market value by selling shares in New York and London. Then, you can keep the money and spend it in the West.”

How can China or Russia collect in such a situation? They can sue. But what court in the West will accept their jurisdiction?

That is the kind of scenario U.S. State Department and Treasury officials have been discussing for more than a year. Implementing it became more pressing in light of Ukraine’s $3 billion debt to Russia falling due by December 20, 2015. Ukraine’s U.S.-backed regime has announced its intention to default. To support their position, the IMF has just changed its rules to remove a critical lever on which Russia and other governments have long relied to ensure payment of their loans.

The IMF’s role as enforcer of inter-government debts
When it comes to enforcing nations to pay inter-government debts, the IMF is able to withhold not only its own credit but also that of governments and global bank consortia participating when debtor countries need “stabilization” loans (the neoliberal euphemism for imposing austerity and destabilizing debtor economies, as in Greece this year). Countries that do not privatize their infrastructure and sell it to Western buyers are threatened with sanctions, backed by U.S.-sponsored “regime change” and “democracy promotion” Maidan-style. The Fund’s creditor leverage has been that if a nation is in financial arrears to any government, it cannot qualify for an IMF loan – and hence, for packages involving other governments. That is how the dollarized global financial system has worked for half a century. But until now, the beneficiaries have been U.S. and NATO lenders, not been China or Russia.

The focus on a mixed public/private economy sets the AIIB at odds with the Trans-Pacific Partnership’s aim of relinquishing government planning power to the financial and corporate sector, and the neoliberal aim of blocking governments from creating their own money and implementing their own financial, economic and environmental regulation. Chief Nomura economist Richard Koo, explained the logic of viewing the AIIB as a threat to the U.S.-controlled IMF: “If the IMF’s rival is heavily under China’s influence, countries receiving its support will rebuild their economies under what is effectively Chinese guidance, increasing the likelihood they will fall directly or indirectly under that country’s influence.”[4]

This was the setting on December 8, when Chief IMF Spokesman Gerry Rice announced: “The IMF’s Executive Board met today and agreed to change the current policy on non-toleration of arrears to official creditors.” Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov accused the IMF decision of being “hasty and biased.”[5] But it had been discussed all year long, calculating a range of scenarios for a sea change in international law. Anders Aslund, senior fellow at the NATO-oriented Atlantic Council, points out:

The IMF staff started contemplating a rule change in the spring of 2013 because nontraditional creditors, such as China, had started providing developing countries with large loans. One issue was that these loans were issued on conditions out of line with IMF practice. China wasn’t a member of the Paris Club, where loan restructuring is usually discussed, so it was time to update the rules.

The IMF intended to adopt a new policy in the spring of 2016, but the dispute over Russia’s $3 billion loan to Ukraine has accelerated an otherwise slow decision-making process.[6]

The target was not only Russia and its ability to collect on its sovereign loan to Ukraine, but China even more, in its prospective role as creditor to African countries and prospective AIIB borrowers, planning for a New Silk Road to integrate a Eurasian economy independent of U.S. financial and trade control. The Wall Street Journal concurred that the main motive for changing the rules was the threat that China would provide an alternative to IMF lending and its demands for crushing austerity. “IMF-watchers said the fund was originally thinking of ensuring China wouldn’t be able to foil IMF lending to member countries seeking bailouts as Beijing ramped up loans to developing economies around the world.”[7] So U.S. officials walked into the IMF headquarters in Washington with the legal equivalent of suicide vests. Their aim was a last-ditch attempt to block trade and financial agreements organized outside of U.S. control and that of the IMF and World Bank.

The plan is simple enough. Trade follows finance, and the creditor usually calls the tune. That is how the United States has used the Dollar Standard to steer Third World trade and investment since World War II along lines benefiting the U.S. economy. The cement of trade credit and bank lending is the ability of creditors to collect on the international debts being negotiated. That is why the United States and other creditor nations have used the IMF as an intermediary to act as “honest broker” for loan consortia. (“Honest broker” means being subject to U.S. veto power.) To enforce its financial leverage, the IMF has long followed the rule that it will not sponsor any loan agreement or refinancing for governments that are in default of debts owed to other governments. However, as the afore-mentioned Aslund explains, the IMF could easily

change its practice of not lending into [countries in official] arrears … because it is not incorporated into the IMF Articles of Agreement, that is, the IMF statutes. The IMF Executive Board can decide to change this policy with a simple board majority. The IMF has lent to Afghanistan, Georgia, and Iraq in the midst of war, and Russia has no veto right, holding only 2.39 percent of the votes in the IMF. When the IMF has lent to Georgia and Ukraine, the other members of its Executive Board have overruled Russia.[8]

After the rules change, Aslund later noted, “the IMF can continue to give Ukraine loans regardless of what Ukraine does about its credit from Russia, which falls due on December 20.[9]

The IMF rule that no country can borrow if it is in default to a foreign government was created in the post-1945 world. Since then, the U.S. Government, Treasury and/or U.S. bank consortia have been party to nearly every major loan agreement. But inasmuch as Ukraine’s official debt to Russia’s National Wealth Fund was not to the U.S. Government, the IMF announced its rules change simply as a “clarification.” What its rule really meant was that it would not provide credit to countries in arrears to the U.S. government, not that of Russia or China.

It remains up to the IMF board – and in the end, its managing director – whether or not to deem a country creditworthy. The U.S. representative can block any foreign leaders not beholden to the United States. Mikhail Delyagin, Director of the Institute of Globalization Problems, explained the double standard at work: “The Fund will give Kiev a new loan tranche on one condition: that Ukraine should not pay Russia a dollar under its $3 billion debt. … they will oblige Ukraine to pay only to western creditors for political reasons.”[10]

The post-2010 loan packages to Greece are a case in point. The IMF staff saw that Greece could not possibly pay the sums needed to bail out French, German and other foreign banks and bondholders. Many Board members agreed, and have gone public with their whistle blowing. Their protests didn’t matter. President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner pointed out that U.S. banks had written credit default swaps betting that Greece could pay, and would lose money if there were a debt writedown). Dominique Strauss-Kahn backed the hard line US- European Central Bank position. So did Christine Lagarde in 2015, overriding staff protests.[11]

Regarding Ukraine, IMF executive board member Otaviano Canuto, representing Brazil, noted that the logic that “conditions on IMF lending to a country that fell behind on payments [was to] make sure it kept negotiating in good faith to reach agreement with creditors.”[12]Dropping this condition, he said, would open the door for other countries to insist on a similar waiver and avoid making serious and sincere efforts to reach payment agreement with creditor governments.

A more binding IMF rule is Article I of its 1944-45 founding charter, prohibiting the Fund from lending to a member state engaged in civil war or at war with another member state, or for military purposes in general. But when IMF head Lagarde made the last loan to Ukraine, in spring 2015, she merely expressed a vapid token hope there might be peace. Withholding IMF credit could have been a lever to force peace and adherence to the Minsk agreements, but U.S. diplomatic pressure led that opportunity to be rejected. President Porochenko immediately announced that he would step up the civil war with the Russian-speaking population in the eastern Donbass region.

The most important IMF condition being violated is that continued warfare with the East prevents a realistic prospect of Ukraine paying back new loans. The Donbas is where most Ukrainian exports were made, mainly to Russia. That market is being lost by the junta’s belligerence toward Russia. This should have blocked Ukraine from receiving IMF aid. Aslund himself points to the internal contradiction at work: Ukraine has achieved budget balance because the inflation and steep currency depreciation has drastically eroded its pension costs. But the resulting decline in the purchasing power of pension benefits has led to growing opposition to Ukraine’s post-Maidan junta. So how can the IMF’s austerity budget be followed without a political backlash? “Leading representatives from President Petro Poroshenko’s Bloc are insisting on massive tax cuts, but no more expenditure cuts; that would cause a vast budget deficit that the IMF assesses at 9-10 percent of GDP, that could not possibly be financed.”[13]

By welcoming and financing Ukraine instead of treating as an outcast, the IMF thus is breaking four of its rules:

1. Not to lend to a country that has no visible means to pay back the loan. This breaks the “No More Argentinas” rule, adopted after the IMF’s disastrous 2001 loan.
2. Not to lend to a country that repudiates its debt to official creditors. This goes against the IMF’s role as enforcer for the global creditor cartel.
3. Not to lend to a borrower at war – and indeed, to one that is destroying its export capacity and hence its balance-of-payments ability to pay back the loan.
4. Finally, not to lend to a country that is not likely to carry out the IMF’s austerity “conditionalities,” at least without crushing democratic opposition in a totalitarian manner.

The upshot – and new basic guideline for IMF lending – is to split the world into pro-U.S. economies going neoliberal, and economies maintaining public investment in infrastructure n and what used to be viewed as progressive capitalism. Russia and China may lend as much as they want to other governments, but there is no global vehicle to help secure their ability to be paid back under international law. Having refused to roll back its own (and ECB) claims on Greece, the IMF is willing to see countries not on the list approved by U.S. neocons repudiate their official debts to Russia or China. Changing its rules to clear the path for making loans to Ukraine is rightly seen as an escalation of America’s New Cold War against Russia and China.

Timing is everything in such ploys. Georgetown University Law professor and Treasury consultant Anna Gelpern warned that before the “IMF staff and executive board [had] enough time to change the policy on arrears to official creditors,” Russia might use “its notorious debt/GDP clause to accelerate the bonds at any time before December, or simply gum up the process of reforming the IMF’s arrears policy.”[14] According to this clause, if Ukraine’s foreign debt rose above 60 percent of GDP, Russia’s government would have the right to demand immediate payment. But President Putin, no doubt anticipating the bitter fight to come over its attempts to collect on its loan, refrained from exercising this option. He is playing the long game, bending over backward to behave in a way that cannot be criticized as “odious.”

A more immediate reason deterring the United States from pressing earlier to change IMF rules was the need to use the old set of rules against Greece before changing them for Ukraine. A waiver for Ukraine would have provided a precedent for Greece to ask for a similar waiver on paying the “troika” – the European Central Bank (ECB), EU commission and the IMF itself – for the post-2010 loans that have pushed it into a worse depression than the 1930s. Only after Greece capitulated to eurozone austerity was the path clear for U.S. officials to change the IMF rules to isolate Russia. But their victory has come at the cost of changing the IMF’s rules and those of the global financial system irreversibly. Other countries henceforth may reject conditionalities, as Ukraine has done, as well as asking for write-downs on foreign official debts.

That was the great fear of neoliberal U.S. and Eurozone strategists last summer, after all. The reason for smashing Greece’s economy was to deter Podemos in Spain and similar movements in Italy and Portugal from pursuing national prosperity instead of eurozone austerity. “Imagine the Greek government had insisted that EU institutions accept the same haircut as the country’s private creditors,” Russian finance minister Anton Siluanov asked. “The reaction in European capitals would have been frosty. Yet this is the position now taken by Kiev with respect to Ukraine’s $3 billion eurobond held by Russia.”[15]

The consequences of America’s tactics to make a financial hit on Russia while its balance of payments is down (as a result of collapsing oil and gas prices) go far beyond just the IMF. These tactics are driving other countries to defend their own economies in the legal and political spheres, in ways that are breaking apart the post-1945 global order.

Countering Russia’s ability to collect in Britain’s law courts
Over the past year the U.S. Treasury and State Departments have discussed ploys to block Russia from collecting by suing in the London Court of International Arbitration, under whose rules Russia’s bonds issued to Ukraine are registered. Reviewing the excuses Ukraine might use to avoid paying Russia, Prof. Gelpern noted that it might declare the debt “odious,” made under duress or corruptly. In a paper for the Peterson Institute of International Economics (the banking lobby in Washington) she suggested that Britain should deny Russia the use of its courts as a means of reinforcing the financial, energy and trade sanctions passed after Crimea voted to join Russia as protection against the ethnic cleansing from the Right Sector, Azov Battalion and other paramilitary groups descending on the region.[16]

A kindred ploy might be for Ukraine to countersue Russia for reparations for “invading” it and taking Crimea. Such a claim would seem to have little chance of success (without showing the court to be an arm of NATO politics), but it might delay Russia’ ability to collect by tying the loan up in a long nuisance lawsuit. But the British court would lose credibility if it permits frivolous legal claims (called barratry in English) such as President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk have threatened.

To claim that Ukraine’s debt to Russia was “odious” or otherwise illegitimate, “President Petro Poroshenko said the money was intended to ensure Yanukovych’s loyalty to Moscow, and called the payment a ‘bribe,’ according to an interview with Bloomberg in June this year.”[17]The legal and moral problem with such arguments is that they would apply equally to IMF and U.S. loans. They would open the floodgates for other countries to repudiate debts taken on by dictatorships supported by IMF and U.S. lenders.

As Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov noted, the IMF’s change of rules, “designed to suit Ukraine only, could plant a time bomb under all other IMF programs.” The new rules showed the extent to which the IMF is subordinate to U.S. aggressive New Cold Warriors: “since Ukraine is politically important – and it is only important because it is opposed to Russia – the IMF is ready to do for Ukraine everything it has not done for anyone else.”[18]

In a similar vein, Andrei Klimov, deputy chairman of the Committee for International Affairs at the Federation Council (the upper house of Russia’s parliament) accused the United States of playing “the role of the main violin in the IMF while the role of the second violin is played by the European Union, [the] two basic sponsors of the Maidan – the … coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014.”[19]

Putin’s counter-strategy and the blowback on U.S.-European relations
Having anticipated that Ukraine would seek excuses to not pay Russia, President Putin refrained from exercising Russia’s right to demand immediate payment when Ukraine’s foreign debt rose above 60 percent of GDP. In November he even offered to defer any payment at all this year, stretching payments out to “$1 billion next year, $1 billion in 2017, and $1 billion in 2018,” if “the United States government, the European Union, or one of the big international financial institutions” guaranteed payment.[20] Based on their assurances “that Ukraine’s solvency will grow,” he added, they should be willing to put their money where their mouth was. If they did not provide guarantees, Putin pointed out, “this means that they do not believe in the Ukrainian economy’s future.”

Implicit was that if the West continued encouraging Ukraine to fight against the East, its government would not be in a position to pay. The Minsk agreement was expiring and Ukraine was receiving new arms support from the United States, Canada and other NATO members to intensify hostilities against Donbas and Crimea.

But the IMF, European Union and United States refused to back up the Fund’s optimistic forecast of Ukraine’s ability to pay in the face of its continued civil war against the East. Foreign Minister Lavrov concluded that, “By having refused to guarantee Ukraine’s debt as part of Russia’s proposal to restructure it, the United States effectively admitted the absence of prospects of restoring its solvency.”[21]

In an exasperated tone, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Russian television: “I have a feeling that they won’t give us the money back because they are crooks … and our Western partners not only refuse to help, but they also make it difficult for us.” Accusing that “the international financial system is unjustly structured,” he nonetheless promised to “go to court. We’ll push for default on the loan and we’ll push for default on all Ukrainian debts,” based on the fact that the loan

was a request from the Ukrainian Government to the Russian Government. If two governments reach an agreement this is obviously a sovereign loan…. Surprisingly, however, international financial organisations started saying that this is not exactly a sovereign loan. This is utter bull. Evidently, it’s just an absolutely brazen, cynical lie. … This seriously erodes trust in IMF decisions. I believe that now there will be a lot of pleas from different borrower states to the IMF to grant them the same terms as Ukraine. How will the IMF possibly refuse them?[22]

And there the matter stands. On December 16, 2015, the IMF’s Executive Board ruled that “the bond should be treated as official debt, rather than a commercial bond.”[23] Forbes quipped: “Russia apparently is not always blowing smoke. Sometimes they’re actually telling it like it is.”[24]

Reflecting the degree of hatred fanned by U.S. diplomacy, U.S.-backed Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie A. Jaresko expressed an arrogant confidence that the IMF would back the Ukrainian cabinet’s announcement on Friday, December 18, of its intention to default on the debt to Russia falling due two days later. “If we were to repay this bond in full, it would mean we failed to meet the terms of the I.M.F. and the obligations we made under our restructuring.”[25]

Adding his own bluster, Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk announced his intention to tie up Russia’s claim for payment by filing a multibillion-dollar counter claim “over Russia’s occupation of Crimea and intervention in east Ukraine.” To cap matters, he added that “several hundred million dollars of debt owed by two state enterprises to Russian banks would also not be paid.”[26] This makes trade between Ukraine and Russia impossible to continue. Evidently Ukraine’s authorities had received assurance from IMF and U.S. officials that no real “good faith” bargaining would be required to gain ongoing support. Ukraine’s Parliament did not even find it necessary to enact the new tax code and budget conditionalities that the IMF loan had demanded.

The world is now at war financially, and all that seems to matter is whether, as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had put matters, “you are for us or against us.” As President Putin remarked at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly regarding America’s support of Al Qaeda, Al Nusra and other allegedly “moderate” ISIS allies in Syria: “I cannot help asking those who have caused this situation: Do you realize now what you have done? … I am afraid the question will hang in the air, because policies based on self-confidence and belief in one’s exceptionality and impunity have never been abandoned.”[27]

The blowback
America’s unilateralist geopolitics are tearing up the world’s economic linkages that were put in place in the heady days after World War II, when Europe and other countries were so disillusioned that they believed the United States was acting out of idealism rather than national self-interest. Today the question is how long Western Europe will be willing to forego its trade and investment interests by accepting U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Russia, Iran and other economies. Germany, Italy and France already are feeling the strains.

The oil and pipeline war designed to bypass Russian energy exports is flooding Europe with refugees, as well as spreading terrorism. Although the leading issue in America’s Republican presidential debate on December 15, 2015, was safety from Islamic jihadists, no candidate thought to explain the source of this terrorism in America’s alliance with Wahabist Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and hence with Al Qaeda and ISIS/Daish as a means of destabilizing secular regimes in Libya, Iraq, Syria, and earlier in Afghanistan. Going back to the original sin of CIA hubris – overthrowing the secular Iranian Prime Minister leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 – U.S. foreign policy has been based on the assumption that secular regimes tend to be nationalist and resist privatization and neoliberal austerity.

Based on this assumption, U.S. Cold Warriors have aligned themselves against democratic regimes seeking to promote their own prosperity and resist neoliberalism in favor of maintaining their own traditional mixed public/private economies. That is the back-story of the U.S. fight to control the rest of the world. Tearing apart the IMF’s rules is only the most recent chapter. Arena by arena, the core values of what used to be American and European social democratic ideology are being uprooted by the tactics being used to hurt Russia, China and their prospective Eurasian allies.

The Enlightenment’s ideals were of secular democracy and the rule of international law applied equally to all nations, classical free market theory (of markets free from unearned income and rent extraction by special interests), and public investment in infrastructure to hold down the cost of living and doing business. These are all now to be sacrificed to a militant U.S. unilateralism. Putting their “indispensable nation” above the rule of law and parity of national interests (the 1648 Westphalia treaty, not to mention the Geneva Convention and Nuremburg laws), U.S. neocons proclaim that America’s destiny is to prevent foreign secular democracy from acting in ways other than in submission to U.S. diplomacy. Behind this lie the special U.S. financial and corporate interests that control American foreign policy.

This is not how the Enlightenment was supposed to turn out. Industrial capitalism a century ago was expected to evolve into an economy of abundance worldwide. Instead, we have American Pentagon capitalism, with financial bubbles deteriorating into a polarized rentier economy and a resurgence of old-fashioned imperialism. If and when a break comes, it will not be marginal but a seismic geopolitical shift.

The Dollar Bloc’s Financial Curtain 
By treating Ukraine’s repudiation of its official debt to Russia’s National Wealth Fund as the new norm, the IMF has blessed its default. President Putin and foreign minister Lavrov have said that they will sue in British courts. The open question is whether any court exist in the West not under the thumb of U.S. veto?

America’s New Cold War maneuvering has shown that the two Bretton Woods institutions are unreformable. It is easier to create new institutions such as the AIIB than to retrofit the IMF and World Bank, NATO and behind it, the dollar standard – all burdened with the legacy of their vested interests.

U.S. geostrategists evidently thought that excluding Russia, China and other Eurasian countries from the U.S.-based financial and trade system would isolate them in a similar economic box to Cuba, Iran and other sanctioned adversaries. The idea was to force countries to choose between being impoverished by such exclusion, or acquiescing in U.S. neoliberal drives to financialize their economies under U.S. control.

What is lacking here is the idea of critical mass. The United States may arm-twist Europe to impose trade and financial sanctions on Russia, and may use the IMF and World Bank to exclude countries not under U.S. hegemony from participating in dollarized global trade and finance. But this diplomatic action is producing an equal and opposite reaction. That is the Newtonian law of geopolitics. It is propelling other countries to survive by avoiding demands to impose austerity on their government budgets and labor, by creating their own international financial organization as an alternative to the IMF, and by juxtaposing their own “aid” lending to that of the U.S.-centered World Bank.

This blowback requires an international court to handle disputes free from U.S. arm-twisting. The Eurasian Economic Union accordingly has created its own court to adjudicate disputes. This may provide an alternative to Judge Griesa’s New York federal kangaroo court ruling in favor of vulture funds derailing Argentina’s debt settlements and excluding that country from world financial markets.

The more nakedly self-serving U.S. policy is – from backing radical fundamentalist outgrowths of Al Qaeda throughout the Near East to right-wing nationalists in Ukraine and the Baltics – then the greater the pressure will grow for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, AIIB and related institutions to break free of the post-1945 Bretton Woods system run by the U.S. State, Defense and Treasury Departments and their NATO superstructure of coercive military bases. As Paul Craig Roberts recently summarized the dynamic, we are back with George Orwell’s 1984 global fracture between Oceania (the United States, Britain and its northern European NATO allies as the sea and air power) vs. Eurasia as the consolidated land power.

Footnotes:

[1] The SCO was created in 2001 in Shanghai by the leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. India and Pakistan are scheduled to join, along with Iran, Afghanistan and Belarus as observers, and other east and Central Asian countries as “dialogue partners.”

[2] “Putin Seeks Alliance to Rival TPP,” RT.com (December 04 2015). The Eurasian Economic Union was created in 2014 by Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, soon joined by Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. ASEAN was formed in 1967, originally by Indonesia, Malaysia the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. It subsequently has been expanded. China and the AIIB are reaching out to replace World Bank. The U.S. refused to join the AIIB, opposing it from the outset.

[3] Anton Siluanov, “Russia wants fair rules on sovereign debt,” Financial Times, December 10, 2015.

[4] Richard Koo, “EU refuses to acknowledge mistakes made in Greek bailout,” Nomura, July 14, 2015.

[5] Ian Talley, “IMF Tweaks Lending Rules in Boost for Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2015.

[6] Anders Aslund, “The IMF Outfoxes Putin: Policy Change Means Ukraine Can Receive More Loans,” Atlantic Council, December 8, 2015. On Johnson’s Russia List, December 9, 2015, #13. Aslund was a major defender of neoliberal shock treatment and austerity in Russia, and has held up Latvian austerity as a success story rather than a disaster.

[7] Ian Talley, op. cit.

[8] Anders Åslund, “Ukraine Must Not Pay Russia Back,” Atlantic Council, November 2, 2015 (from Johnson’s Russia List, November 3, 2015, #50).

[9] Anders Aslund, “The IMF Outfoxes Putin,” op. cit.

[10] Quoted in Tamara Zamyantina, “IMF’s dilemma: to help or not to help Ukraine, if Kiev defaults,” TASS, translated on Johnson’s Russia List, December 9, 2015, #9.

[11] I provide a narrative of the Greek disaster in Killing the Host (2015).

[12] Reuters, “IMF rule change keeps Ukraine support; Russia complains,” December 8, 2015.

[13] Anders Aslund, “The IMF Outfoxes Putin,” op. cit.

[14] Anna Gelpern, “Russia’s Bond: It’s Official! (… and Private … and Anything Else It Wants to Be …),” Credit Slips, April 17, 2015.

[15] Anton Siluanov, “Russia wants fair rules on sovereign debt,” Financial Times, op. cit.. He added: “Russia’s financing was not made for commercial gain. Just as America and Britain regularly do, it provided assistance to a country whose policies it supported. The US is now supporting the current Ukrainian government through its USAID guarantee programme.”

[16] John Helmer, “IMF Makes Ukraine War-Fighting Loan, Allows US to Fund Military Operations Against Russia, May Repay Gazprom Bill,” Naked Capitalism, March 16, 2015 (from his site Dances with Bears).

[17] “Ukraine Rebuffs Putin’s Offer to Restructure Russian Debt,” Moscow Times, November 20, 2015, from Johnson’s Russia List, November 20, 2015, #32.

[18] “Lavrov: U.S. admits lack of prospects of restoring Ukrainian solvency,” Interfax, November 7, 2015, translated on Johnson’s Russia List, December 7, 2015, #38.

[19] Quoted by Tamara Zamyantina, “IMF’s dilemma,” op. cit.

[20] Vladimir Putin, “Responses to journalists’ questions following the G20 summit,” Kremlin.ru, November 16, 2015. From Johnson’s Russia List, November 17, 2015,  #7.

“Lavrov: U.S. admits lack of prospects of restoring Ukrainian solvency,” November 7, 2015, translated on Johnson’s Russia List, December 7, 2015, #38.[21]

“In Conversation with Dmitry Medvedev: Interview with five television channels,” Government.ru, December 9, 2015, from Johnson’s Russia List, December 10, 2015,  #2[22]

[23] Andrew Mayeda, “IMF Says Ukraine Bond Owned by Russia Is Official Sovereign Debt,” Bloomberg, December 17, 2015.

[24] Kenneth Rapoza, “IMF Says Russia Right About Ukraine $3 Billion Loan,” Forbes.com, December 16, 2015. The article added: “the Russian government confirmed to Euroclear, at the request of the Ukrainian authorities at the time, that the Eurobond was fully owned by the Russian government.”

[25] Andrew E. Kramer, “Ukraine Halts Repayments on $3.5 Billion It Owes Russia,” The New York Times, December 19, 2015.

[26] Roman Olearchyk, “Ukraine tensions with Russia mount after debt moratorium,” Financial Times, December 19, 2015.

[27] “Violence instead of democracy: Putin slams ‘policies of exceptionalism and impunity’ in UN speech,” www.rt.com, September 29, 2015. From Johnson’s Russia List, September 29, 2015, #2.

http://michael-hudson.com/

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Zet dit eens af tegen de enorme berg VS propagandafilms (die Goebbels jaloers zouden maken) waarin de VS altijd de goede partij en het slachtoffer is, neem de film; 'Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit', hierin wordt de VS bijna het slachtoffer van o.a. financiële manipulaties door Rusland.... Uiteraard een belachelijk scenario, zoals in al deze films het geval is, maar wel met de bedoeling de kijkers te hersenspoelen met de idee, dat de de uiterst agressieve VS, dat in een flink deel van de wereld ongekende terreur brengt, de goede partij is, die continu het slachtoffer is van kwade manipulaties door landen als Rusland en China............

Voor meer berichten n.a.v. het voorgaande, klik op één van de labels,die u onder dit bericht aantreft, dit geldt niet voor de labels: AIIB, ASEAN, Aslund, CIPS, G. Rice, Hudson, Lavrov, SCO en Siluanov. Helaas kan ik maar een beperkt aantal labels plaatsen (maximaal 200 tekens.....).