patrick.net

I think that you could call the war in Ukraine since 2022 an American war against Europe, because the great loser has been Germany, Italy, France and the rest of Europe. The United States has seen the writing on the wall and decided that if there’s going to be a fight between North America along with NATO against the rest of the world, it had better start by solidifying its control over Europe as a profitable market and debtor instead of its turning to Asia and being lost by the United States.

Well, it’s more than just a geographic split. We’re really in a civilizational split, and it goes much deeper. What’s at stake is what kind of economy is the world going to have?

Is it going to be a financialized, neoliberal post-industrial economy, which is what the United States and Europe are pushing? Or is it going to be the kind of economy that textbooks talk about, where economies produce agricultural and industrial goods to feed themselves and make everybody prosper? I almost would use Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase, Barbarism or Socialism, because the West no longer has the means of real economic control over trade and production. It only has military force, terrorist violence and corruption to maintain its control.
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Essentially, U.S. strategists are acknowledging that they know that America is not able to produce a real industrial surplus anymore. Its neoliberal trade policy has outsourced its industry to Asia. The only new market that it can secure if the Global Majority breaks away is that of Europe. That explains why the United States arranged for the Nord Stream pipeline to be blown up, and convinced Europe voluntarily to commit economic self-destruction by not buying low-priced Russian gas, oil and raw materials. While this has driven Russia and China together with their Asian neighbors, the losers have been European.

German industry has been moving out of the country to the United States and elsewhere for lower-cost energy. It’s been emigrating largely to the United States, making it the beneficiary. If you’re a German industrial company, what else are you going to do if its economy is shrinking.
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The effect of this Cold War III so far has been to drive Europe back into the American orbit. The United States insists that there’s no alternative to this neoliberal geopolitics. Western textbooks indoctrinate students to believe that neoliberalism is the best way to run an economy efficiently – by not having a government to protect self-reliance and living standards, not to regulate against predatory monopoly and financial rent seeking. The aim is to let capitalism evolve into monopoly capitalism, which is really finance capitalism, because monopolies are organized by the financial sector as “the mother of trusts.”
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The idea of making other Palestinians take care of crippled children who had their legs blown off or lost their arms is so inhuman, so against the most basic principle of civilization, that it has acted as a catalyst for other countries breaking away. On July 25, 2024, Israeli President Netanyahu was invited to the U.S. Congress to ask for its military support for his planned attack on Lebanon and his hope to drag America into an attack on Iran. He put the issue in a way that I think you and I can agree on: Having killed or wounded as many as 180,000 Palestinians in Gaza and accelerated settler murders and destruction of Palestinians and their property on the West Bank, he explained that, in words reminiscent of Rosa Luxemburg: “This is not a clash of civilizations, it’s a clash between barbarism and civilization, between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.”

I think that this is precisely what is at stake. Netanyahu and his neocon supporters in the U.S. Congress who invited him indeed have thrown down the military gauntlet threatening the world with yet new U.S. and Israeli violence against the Middle Eastern oil-producing countries. Today’s buildup to such a war threatens the entire world with a new barbarism.

There already was a sort of tendency for the rest of the world, for Asia and the Global South to hope that somehow they could make do without making the enormous intellectual and moral break from the West. The feeling was that somehow they could survive through all this at least for the short run, as if things might somehow go back to some semblance of normal instead of continuing to polarize.

But what is happening in Israel the joint Israel-American attack on Palestine has shocked much of the world into realizing that this is what the United States might to do them, just as it’s what the US/NATO countries are doing to by fighting to the last Ukrainian. U.S. support for exterminating the Palestinians simply in order to use Israel as an arm to keep U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil is what is so abhorrent.

What is not to stop the Israelis from taking over Saudi Arabia and its oil, the Emirates, Kuwait, much as America did in Chile and Argentina to take over their minerals and land while assassinating labor leaders, land reformers and economics professors opposing Chicago School neoliberalism. The joint Israel and Ukraine wars have given a sense of urgency for other countries to realize that they have to act now in order to avoid a similar fate.

Other countries can’t simply be passive, because what is happening to the Palestinians can happen to all of them. That’s the degree to which Americans will go to maintain their global control. That’s why they are funding the Israeli attack on Palestine and the Ukrainian attack on Russian speakers. The Americans are providing the bombs and other weaponry, subsidizing their armies. This is what is creating the sense of urgency that is catalyzing the World Majority to realize that they can’t must act more rapidly and decisively to make a real break.
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https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/07/michael-hudson-speaks-to-luca-placidi-about-global-south-debt-peonage-and-the-inevitability-of-multipolarity.html