By John Green

July 21, 2022: Information Clearing House - A DEFEAT, or at least weakening, of Russia is viewed by US military and big business circles as a necessary step in the attempt to isolate and encircle China.

The US is using Ukraine as its proxy, as it can’t just invade Russia as it has done in Iraq, Aghanistan and Syria, so an economic war in the form of draconian sanctions is seen as the solution.

It is the US that is the leading force behind the sanctions movement and its determination to arm Ukraine to the hilt. But why are the European countries following like sheep on this?

There are continued self-congratulatory assertions about the West’s new united front. We have seen summit meetings of the EU, G7, Nato and G20 one after the other, but under the surface there are rumblings of dissent.

In European business circles, and even in the military, there is a questioning of the sanctions policy.

Leading politicians, however, maintain we are living in a “time of change” as if there is no alternative.

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But is this true? As a comparison, 1990 was a real turning point because the world order that had prevailed until then, the division into two bloc systems that created a balance of power, based on mutually assured destruction with nuclear weapons, was dissolved in a non-violent way.

Today it is claimed that we have a new “rules-based world order” which Vladimir Putin is undermining with his war of aggression, violating international law.

This is why, it is argued, the world’s democracies must now stand firm and defend this order against the “eastern autocracies,” Russia and China.

Nato has been given a new lease of life as has the West’s claim to leadership of a new order.

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other Eastern bloc countries in 1990, Russia was pointedly left out of the new European order; it was marginalised and ignored.

The 1990s provided Europe with a unique opportunity for the creation of a new and stable European security system that would have given both the new post-Soviet states and Russia itself an appropriate place on a pan-European scale.

At the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev were asking: “What is a post-cold-war Europe actually offering the Russians?”

Despite promises given by the US, Nato has advanced right up to Russia’s borders, with the clear intent of encircling and intimidating it. Russia is now demonised as a rogue state with its invasion of Ukraine and its flouting of international law.

However, the Russian war in Ukraine is not the first war waged in disregard of the rules of international law since 1990. What about Kosovo, Iraq or Syria?

Despite the promise of a new and peaceful era and the end of cold war politics, we have seen the opposite.

While the UN and its role as peacekeeper have been totally pushed aside, Nato has been given a new lease of life as the world’s military policeman, under US domination.

This resurrection of Nato is thus part of a strategy that is once again dividing the world, not only militarily but also ideologically.

Without the public really noticing, we have returned to the old era of bloc confrontation and its logic of mutual threat.

But this new cold war seems even more dangerous — after all, this time it is not only about the “greatest threat to Nato from Russia,” as Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg put it, but about a future confrontation with China.

We find ourselves helplessly watching a war unfold in Ukraine with an untold number of victims, which is becoming ever more clearly a classic proxy war between Russia and the US.

There are a few courageous voices that are calling for a diplomatic solution that includes taking into consideration Russia’s genuine security fears.

We in Europe are, however, being warned not to jump off the moving train, not to allow ourselves to be split up by Putin because the people of Ukraine are fighting for all of us and for our freedom: “They are dying for Europe, they deserve to live the European dream with us,” said European Commision president Ursula von der Leyen.

The character of this war as a war of aggression in violation of international law and its media treatment suggests that we, the West, are only helpers, saviours and supporters in a just cause.

This obscures the fact that we are a party, not only with our sympathies for the attacked nation, but that we have our own economic and power interests in the game.

We are being drawn deeper and deeper into a geopolitical war, orchestrated by the US that will be fought in the future.

A well-targeted and all-embracing campaign of moral rearmament and permanent reiteration is under way: freedom versus tyranny, democracy versus autocracy and despotism, good against evil, the West against Russia and China.

Haven’t we heard this rhetoric not so long ago under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher?

The war in Ukraine is a direct consequence of the inability of the great powers to establish a multipolar world that recognises the UN as the arbiter of conflict and guarantor of peace.

We can clearly see that two things have contributed significantly to the aggravation of the conflict in Ukraine.

There is a widely propagated but erroneous view that the West emerged from the cold war as the “victor” and that its rules and values are now the desire of all the peoples of the world.

This viewpoint is however contradicted by the fact that many states in Africa, Asia and Latin America are refusing to go along with this interpretation of history and are refusing to buy into the “Russia as the axis of evil” scenario.

It has become of vital importance that those few voices (at the moment) calling for a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict in order to avert greater damage to Europe gain in strength.

Recent military action by Nato and a “coalition of the willing,” as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, has not exactly been a success. These wars have ended in defeats, endless proxy wars and the destabilisation of entire regions.

In the face of these defeats, the US, in collaboration with the economically dominant states in the West resorted to sanctions. However, such sanctions are not instruments of non-violent politics.

They are instruments of economic warfare and carry the danger that the conflict will escalate into open military confrontation, which is clearly evident with the current sanctions against Russia.

In the final decades before the collapse of the Soviet Union, a policy of detente based on realpolitik emerged, which presumed that economic, cultural and social networking across blocs would offer hope of change through rapprochement, overcoming tensions and leading to reform policies in the Eastern bloc.

This idea, always accompanied by mistrust, achieved its purpose, culminating in the Gorbachev era.

Such a concept is completely absent today. In the meantime, the EU Commission is planning its seventh package of sanctions — without even verifying whether this method will work.

Realpolitik and economic reason have shown time and again that the consequences of such a policy are increasingly endangering Europe as a whole and economic stability.

In Germany the populace is being exhorted to help out by taking shorter showers and using less gas for cooking. Fear is spreading, inflation is driving the wage-price spiral, insolvencies and unemployment are rising.

Germany, with its commodity-dependent and export-oriented industry, is particularly at risk — and its leaders know it.

The instability of the supply chains adds to this. We are already experiencing a high-risk experiment with an uncertain outcome in our economic relations with Russia and China.

In the last 30 years, as a result of unchecked globalisation, countless economic cross-connections, exchanges of goods and know-how, partnerships of every kind have been forged between West and East.

Now, with sanctions, expropriations, tariff barriers, this entire global web of raw material supplies, supply chains, trade routes is being torn apart.

We are already looking at two completely separate worlds in the future: the Asian-Russian world and the Western world. But until this separation is achieved, there will be years of chaos and endless economic crises. Who really wants that?

It is very doubtful that Africa, Latin America and the Middle East will be on the side of the West. We are already seeing a consolidation of the Brics grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and closer relations with Mexico.

If Europe is not prepared to break its subservience to the US and its membership of Nato, it will find itself in even more serious trouble in the near future.