By Mandelaw Bageru
mandelawb@gmail.com
Lessons Learned from NATO’s Proxy War Intents
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has provided a clear-cut ‘lessons learned’ situation for China, as China itself is seriously involved in a long-running dispute with Taiwan. China has long rejected the twisted British colonial legacy that left its residue perpetuating Taiwan to claim sovereignty, and continue to fuel unreserved Sino-phobic speculations by the Western nations that China would ultimately invade and annex Taiwan entirely.
Therefore, these days, it is vividly noticed that China is preoccupied to protect its overseas assets amidst fears that both the US and NATO could impose the Russia-style sanctions on it. In light of this, it has been officially reported that:
- The Chinese officials held preparatory meetings with various leading banks to figure out about ways on to protect the national overseas’ assets.
- China is planning optional means in case both the US and NATO could impose any likely economic jurisdictions and militaristic sanctions similar to those hastily and unfairly imposed on Russia.
- China is also planning to set-aside about $3.2 trillion in foreign reserves just in case the US and NATO attempt to violate i in defense of its territorial integrity and national unity
Reportedly, amidst likely fears it could be subjected to sanctions similar to those types imposed on Russia, China has been taking cautionary steps to protect its overseas assets in timely fashion.
Throughout the Cold War, U.S. officials were driven by an extreme anti-Russia, anti-Soviet, anti-communist, anti-Cuba animus, an animus that actually never went away to this day. Russo-phobia is quite chronic with no healing means. Anyone who didn’t come on board and embrace this animosity was considered a grave threat to U.S. national security.
The US and NATO-pact Western nations have imposed sanctions against Russia in a bid to provoke Putin to invade Ukraine in their preplanned protracted proxy war devised to weaken Russia. Sanctions include a SWIFT ban, a full blocking on large Russian financial institutions, measures targeting Russia’s sovereign debt, and even sanctions against Russian wealthy individuals and their families who are suspected to side with Putin’s regime in Russia.
The question to be asked here is: Are the U.S. and NATO officials simply using Ukraine as a way to weaken or even destroy Russia without directly participating in a war against Russia? Yes. For instance, the US Secretary of War Lloyd Austin on April 25 stated surprisingly clearly that the US goal in this war between Russia and Ukraine is not to defend a free Ukraine, or a partially independent Ukraine. Rather it is to “see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do these kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
Hence the main plan is to bleed Russia, costing it as much in dead soldiers, destroyed military weapons and wasted economic assets as possible, not to achieve a peaceful, independent and prosperous Ukraine so much as to win a geopolitical victory in the US’s long-standing goal of global dominance. This intent sounds a lot like what critics of US policy in Ukraine have said all along; that the US wants to engage Russia a long war of attrition down to the last Ukrainian.
As initially intended, it is now clear that U.S. officials have been training and arming Ukraine, knowing full well that when the day came when they would threaten to absorb Ukraine into NATO, they would be placing Russia in a position of making a choice between letting Ukraine be absorbed into NATO, which would mean U.S. nuclear missiles on Russia’s border, or invade Ukraine to achieve regime change, with the aim of preventing the U.S. from installing its missiles on Russia’s border.
Contrary to popular pronouncements, the Russo-Ukraine war crisis is not about freedom as such, but rather about the U.S. and NATO desire to absorb Ukraine into NATO, an old Cold War dinosaur that could have — and should have — gone out of existence when the Soviet Union voluntarily dismantled itself.
The immediate future of Europe may feature prolonged fighting in Ukraine without any clear outcome. That eventuality means further increases in military spending and armed forces throughout Europe, deeper political divisions within countries, and the dashing of hopes for combatting climate change and other social problems. In short, Ukraine will be a basket case after the war, dependent on the West for many years to come and constantly facing threats from Russia.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials, from President Biden on down, have made several Freudian slips regarding the conflict, such as removing Putin from power, trying Putin as a war criminal, weakening and downgrading Russia’s military especially by killing large numbers of Russian troops, destroying the Russian economy, and impoverishing and possibly even killing the Russian people with an extreme set of protracted economic sanctions.
Besides, the Biden administration has recently proposed $33 billion aid package for Ukraine, including the $20 billion in weapons and ammunition. Actually this has become a nice shot in the arm for the US arms industry, on top of the record $1 trillion the Pentagon is administrating on this proxy war (more than half of which will go to the bloated arms profiteers).
On the other hand, Russia is trying to forge its own new global order, an order in which China, India, and Russia dominated east faces the US-NATO-dominated west. In the West, the neutrality aloof song has become a thing of the past as Sweden and Finland seem ready to join NATO; Germany has broken with its tradition on military aid in a conflict, and Switzerland has contributed to Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. The whole conflict is about ‘us-versus-them’ once again.
In this regard, the Russo-Ukraine protracted invasion scene is increasingly becoming not only a defining moment for the US and NATO pact Western nations’ future status, but also for the rest of the global nations’ mutual and economic relationships among one another on mutual respect and equal footing.
Moving NATO’s ambitious expansionism from Berlin to Sino-Russian Borderlines
Currently the Biden administration and NATO jointly continue to manifest they have little concern about the world’s well-being. But then again, they are totally furious about China’s emergence as a threat to the superb recklessness of the 1990s – with the Soviet Union in shambles and the US alone doing almost anything it wanted to entrench its hegemonic global dominance. In fact, the Biden administration and NATO have acted “war-like” in their joint attack on China: crafting and fomenting human rights issues in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, carrying out provocative activities against China in the South China Sea—using it as “pretext for building regional and international coalitions against China.
Likewise, unreasonably, having for two decades steadily moved NATO’s military presence from Berlin to Russia’s borders, and these days escalating it, Washington and Brussels accuse Moscow of ‘provocations’ against NATO. But who is ‘provoking’— ‘aggressing’ against-whom? The NATO buildup can only stir in Russians memories of the Nazi German invasion in 1941, the last time such hostile military forces mobilized on Russia’s frontier.
To our dismay, since the 1990s, the NATO-pact nations pursued a double-aged plan, in which they exerted their huge weight behind the so-called: “liberalization of trade relations and financial markets, the expansion of GATT to the World Trade Organization, the protections of intellectual property, and the disastrous results of the imposition of free elections and market-based development strategies in a host of countries—the second item on the plan.
The GDP rose and the gap between the rich and the poor in any society increased, reducing countries like El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala into the hellish wretchedness of gangs, drugs, and endless livelihood-hardships. Nothing much trickled down to the poor and the vulnerable. Wages declined and taxes were not increased for the urban middle classes and corporate and financial elites. The bitter pills of Structural Adjustment—cut public services, privatize anything one can, de-regulate production, lower taxes for the wealthy and diminish wages—and the problem of war, civil or otherwise, will be solved. Yes, some wars may have stopped; nonetheless the UN strategies of peacekeeping did not get to the root of most social conflicts. Horrendous and serious inequities of distribution of goods necessary to live reasonably well and safely became apparent.
The NATO pact pushed the Russo-Ukraine proxy war to the situation it is today, knowing full well that the war in Ukraine is not between Ukraine and Russia but between The Western expansionist intent and Russia. That west is waging the Russo-Ukraine proxy war to subjugate the non-western part of the globe by humiliating, if not defeating. It wants to subjugate the principal power opposing major nations like China and Russia, and then making the incidences as remarkable examples for other aspiring challengers of the NATO alliance dominance.
The NATO-pact’s demand of world nations’ unprecedented ganging up behind its hasty measures against Russia is a dream situation and Washington and its NATO-gofers will fight to the last Ukrainian to keep the war industry’s profits rolling in through the protracted proxy way for longer time just like the war in Afghanistan that lasted twenty years.
The Chinese Emergency Meetings
According to the Financial Times (FT), Chinese officials recently held an emergency meeting with domestic and foreign banks to discuss how the state might protect its assets, should it ever face similar penalties.
People familiar with the conference, which took place on April 22, told the FT the meeting was made up of officials from China’s central bank and finance ministry, executives from dozens of local and international lenders such as HSBC, and representatives from other domestic banks operating in China. According to the FT reporter: “If China attacks Taiwan, decoupling of the Chinese and the Western economies will be far more severe than [decoupling with] Russia because China’s economic footprint touches every part of the world.”
Meanwhile, both China and Russia are working on a homegrown alternative to the SWIFT payment system – Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages, and China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System.
According to the South China Morning Post, China has already allotted $3.2 trillion in foreign reserves. The FT reported that senior regulators including Yi Huiman, chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission, and Xiao Gang, who head the CSRC from 2013 to 2016, asked bankers on how they could protect their overseas assets just in case similar sanctions are to become effective on China.
As stated by Douglas H. Paal, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the NATO officials are attentively observing the whole lots: “They are watching with great interest to see how effective sanctions applied to Russia might be effectively applied to China. If there is an invasion of Taiwan, China would expect the US to summon as broad a range of sanctions as possible.”
Likewise, Andrew Collier, the managing director of Orient Capital Research in Hong Kong, told the Business Insider Newspaper: “Chinese government was right to be concerned because it has very few alternatives and the consequences [of US financial sanctions] are disastrous.”
India and Other Non-Allied Nations Refused to Back U.S. & NATO Sanctions
Already, India has joined China in refusing to honor the US sanctions rules. And India kept to its resolve despite enormous pressure exerted on its leadership including calls from Biden to Modi and a train of high level US, UK and EU officials trekking off to India to bully, threaten and otherwise attempting to intimidate India. It was told that that: India would face “consequences,” the tired Biden administration’s threat went up. Yet, India did not move away from its persisting initial stand. At this juncture, it is worth to remember that India and China alone represent 35% of the global humanity.
India’s close military and diplomatic ties with Russia were forged during the anti-colonial struggles of the Soviet era. India’s economic interests in Russian exports could not be countermanded by U.S. threats. Now India and Russia are now working on trade via ruble-rupee exchange. In fact, Russia has turned out to be a factor that put India and China on the same side, pursuing their own interests and independence in the face of U.S. diktat. Moreover, with trade in ruble-renminbi exchange already a reality and with ruble-rupee exchange in the offing, are we about to witness a Renminbi-Ruble-Rupee world of trade – a “3R” alternative to the Dollar-Euro monopoly in the global exchange of currencies. India is but one example of the shift in power. Other non-allied countries that refused to join the US and NATO complotted sanctions include, among others: Most of the nations within Africa, Latin America (including Mexico and Brazil), East Asia (excepting Japan, South Korea, both occupied by U.S. troops and hence not sovereign, Singapore and the renegade Chinese Province of Taiwan) have refused.
In revenge to their refusal, 40 different countries are now the targets of US sanctions and there is a powerful constituency to oppose the thuggish economic tactics of the U.S. by the non-allied nations.
Furthermore, at the recent G-20 Summit in New York, a walkout led by the US when the Russia delegate spoke was joined by the representatives of only 3 other G-20 nations, with 80% of these leading financial nations refusing to join! Similarly, a US attempt to bar a Russian delegate from a G-20 meeting later in the year in Bali was rejected by Indonesia which presently embraces the G-20 Presidency.
Of the top 10 countries, China (number one) and India (number 3) economies stand against the US and NATO on sanction matters. Russia itself is number 6 on the G-20 list, about equal to Germany, which is the number 5 economy.
In the Western bloc of the globe we often hear that Russia is “isolated in the world” as a result of the crisis in Ukraine. If one is speaking about the NATO-Pact Euro-vassal states and the Anglosphere, then, that may sound to be true. But then again, considering the global humanity as a whole and among the currently rising global economies, it is the US that stands isolated. And even in Europe, heavy cracks are emerging. Countries like Hungary and Serbia have not joined the US-NATO joint sanctions regime and of course, except for Finland and Sweden, many European countries cannot simply and hastily turn away from Russian energy imports that is crucial to their economies. It appears that the grand scheme of U.S. global hegemony is facing unexpected hurdles from the non-allied countries around the world.
Conclusive Remarks:
At this historical turning-point, the claim to global dominance of the US is under assault. The overall desirability of liberal internationalism has profoundly eroded. Most critics currently speak about the emergence of post-liberal societies; and the king is no longer wearing robes. Ultimately, the globalized community is becoming evidently aware of NATO’s expansionist and ambitious intents. Consequently, the global community is refusing to accept the hegemonic, unipolar and universalistic claims of Western economic and geopolitical interests in favor of the upcoming multipolar, non-allied mutual interests that gives way for mutual respect and economic bargaining power with no dominance among member states.
That leads me to suggest that: (a) a ceasefire between the warring parties, (b) a Russian withdrawal, (c) a halt to arms shipments from the NATO-pact bloc, (d) a negotiated peace and (e) an end to NATO. This is what the global community, especially the non-allied global nations should be organizing instantly in regards to the proxy Russo-Ukraine war crisis. That means, the NATO pact bloc should stop its war mongering and proxy-war provocation by grooming neutral western European nations to join NATO. The US and NATO shouldn’t be aggravating by calling for stepped up arms shipments to Ukraine’s military. When all is said and done and this congoing Russo-Ukraine war crisis is stopped, the most likely situation for the vast majority of Ukrainian working people will be one where their greatest enemy could well be the Ukrainian government that was utilized for NATO’s Staging of the unwanted proxy war at the cost of devastating loss of Ukrainian lives and demolishing of their everyday livelihoods.
For every day that goes by, it is becoming solidly clearer to more and more people around the globe that this war is truly a NATO-provoked and installed proxy war and that Ukrainians are being sacrificed by Washington and NATO officers (including the government in Kyiv) while Russians are being sacrificed by their government. Neither position—Ukrainian or Russian—is one to be resented.
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