In response to the NATO summit in Washington, political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson discuss how Western governments are losing elections and ignoring their own people in order to expand the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and beyond, while seeking to impose control over the majority of humanity in the Global South.
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RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 30th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. I’m Radhika Desai.
MICHAEL HUDSON: And I’m Michael Hudson.
RADHIKA DESAI: And working behind the scenes to bring you our show every fortnight are our host, Ben Norton; our videographer, Paul Graham; and our transcriber, Zach Weisser.
We record this show as NATO leaders have gathered in Washington, D.C., to mark the 75th anniversary of NATO. The occasion, planned more than a year ago, was to be grand, for sure, though much has changed in the past year, and the rhetoric has, as a consequence, come to sound rather grandiloquent, rather than grand.
Ringing declarations have been made about the most successful alliance on Earth, delivering 75 years of peace. Yes, they are saying that while bombs are raining on Gaza and in Ukraine and other trouble spots. They call it the bulwark of global security. Those were the words loudly shouted by President Biden to convince the world against all evidence, of his youth, mental agility, and vigor.
There is also talk of how urgent it is for members to recommit themselves to mutual defense about the threats they face, particularly from Russia and now from China, about how its operations must expand to the Pacific. Perhaps they will rechristen the organization NAPTO, the North Atlantic and Pacific Treaty Organization.
They are talking about how much more money members are willing to spend on defense and, of course, how much more money and arms they are going to pledge to Ukraine, even as the battle-fatigued President Zelensky looks increasingly uncertain about whether to display gratitude at these gifts or to express resentment and disappointment at their paltriness in comparison with the scale of the ambition, the stated ambition, which is to defeat Russia.
However, this rhetoric is going to be a thin, gauzy, and even tattered veil that will barely be able to cover the weakening of the alliance itself and the shambles of its members’ domestic politics, which are directly related.
Just consider some major facts. The alliance is definitely losing the war in Ukraine. Ukraine is farther away from being NATO’s 33rd member state than ever. The French face a long-drawn-out political crisis that will prevent them from playing any major role in NATO or in Europe. In good part precisely because of their government’s overblown commitment to the war in Ukraine. The equally enfeebled German government is bound to be replaced in a year. The British government may appear to be an island of stability, but its huge parliamentary majority rests on just a third of the popular vote, and that would be a fifth if you take into account the 40 percent of the electorate that did not show up to vote. So, given that it promises no more than continuing austerity, it too could be rocked by popular protest.
Opposition to NATO’s war is spreading fast among the citizenry of member countries, and the host President Biden finds himself under pressure to withdraw from a presidential race, which even if it fails, even if they fail to make President Biden withdraw, the pressure itself and the factionalism that he shows in the party is only going to contribute to the election of Donald Trump, an eventuality which the NATO leaders gathered in Washington dread the most.
So just how the international politics of NATO and war have penetrated the domestic politics of elections, and how domestic politics of what the public can support, will support, is increasingly constraining the international actions of NATO members, is remarkable. The late Arno Maier, historian of the First World War and the 30 Years’ Crisis, that’s his label, that it set off the crisis from 1914 to 1945, he insisted that international relations of what’s called in German, Außenpolitik, cannot be understood without understanding Innenpolitik, or domestic politics of the belligerent countries and vice versa.
This struck him particularly clearly because he was a scholar of the early 20th century, when mass politics became a reality in Europe and elsewhere. Maier documented the waning of the old diplomacy, which was an elite diplomacy of secret treaties and alliances, territorial acquisitions and dynastic rivalries, in which the ordinary people did not matter and governing elites made all the decisions.
He also traced the rise of the new diplomacy of rational, open, legitimate and peaceful relations among nations. Though in Western discourse its chief architect is usually regarded as Woodrow Wilson, with his idealist plans for the League of Nations, Arno Maier forcefully clarified that the real architect of the new diplomacy was the Bolshevik Revolution, and the October 1917 peace decree that published all the secret treaties may expose them all, and demanded that, quote, all belligerents open negotiation without delay for a just and democratic peace, a peace without annexations and reparations.
Wilson’s 14 points were, Maier forcefully argued, just a hurried and far less radical response to this earth-shaking declaration.
The interpenetration of the domestic and the international is particularly evident today as NATO, which is more or less the imperialist world’s bulwark against the full realization of the new diplomacy, turns 75, and European and US elections threaten that very imperialist orientation. And they do so precisely when the world majority, led by China, Russia and the BRICS, continues to battle the old diplomacy and tries to take forward the project of the new diplomacy through new institutions.
Michael, I’m sure that you have a lot to say. I know you want to talk about NATO, but what do you think about this interpenetration? Please go ahead.
MICHAEL HUDSON: The first point you mentioned was that the alliance is using it more against Russia, but what are they going to do about it? That’s really the question.
Well, NATO, or at least the United States, is desperate. They’re doubling down and launching their F-16s with missiles against Russia. And Biden’s speech at NATO, I think, it turns out that there’s more meaning in that than we first realized.
He kept saying that Russia is going to attack Poland, and it’s going to go on from Poland further just into Central Europe. Well, he made the same point when he was debating with Donald Trump. And at the time, this seemed crazy. This seemed to be the old domino theory of the Vietnam War. If you don’t stop now, you’re going to have to stop them in Brooklyn, and they’re just going to march right over the country.
But it turns out that there seems to be some truth in the matter. A few days ago, Poland and Ukraine signed a defense pact, and the Polish Minister Tusk said that Poland was going to shoot down Russian missiles over Ukraine if it looked like they might be headed for Poland. And of course, anything from Russia headed west looks like it might somehow be headed for Poland, which is a big country. Well, that makes Poland an active player in Ukraine against Russia because they’re essentially joining their two armies.
The dream of NATO, or at least of Biden, is now that you’ve fought almost to the last Ukrainian, now you can fight to the last Polish person. And Poland already houses, as you know, many storage bases for arms. The whole transition of Western arms to Ukraine is all just piling up on the Polish border.
Well, it seems very probable that Russia is going to bomb any missile bases that are ready to shoot down its missiles. It’s going to begin to bomb these arms bases that are all trying to arm the Ukrainians. And so there actually may be a war between Russia. Well, Russia will draw Poland into the war, or Poland will draw Russia into the war. That seems to be the NATO idea.
And the center point leading up to NATO and to all the meetings is, we want more money to provide arms to Ukraine so they can fight. That’s what Zelensky’s saying, just to give us more money for arms. Well, this doesn’t make sense on the surface of it, because there aren’t any soldiers to use the arms. What on earth is all this money for arms going?
Well, on the one hand, NATO’s role is to promote the military-industrial complex in the United States. So we know that there’s going to be a lot of arms orders. Where are these arms going to go? Are they going to go to Poland? All of a sudden, the last few days, especially the Polish treaty, has sort of opened up the whole argument. What do you think?
RADHIKA DESAI: No, absolutely. And I think that this whole, you said that essentially the treaty between Poland and Ukraine has essentially specified that if it looks as though Russia is going to attack Poland, then Poland will be aiding Ukraine and so on and so forth.
The fact is that the West has always claimed that NATO is a defensive alliance, when in fact it is offensive.
Now, how do they manage to make what is essentially an offensive alliance look defensive? Well, they do it by massively, hysterically magnifying their threat perception. So the slightest thing that the enemy does constitutes a major threat. Whereas they can continue, the United States can establish over 800 military bases around the world. It can place missiles and so on right on the doorstep of its target countries. Whereas if they do anything in retaliation, then they are starting the war.
So this has always been the recipe. You can see it at work in Poland. But what’s also remarkable as well is that the ordinary people in all these countries, I mean, so the governments are doing this and they are playing by the old copybook, the old imperialist Cold War, post-Cold War, it’s all the same copybook.
But increasingly, ordinary people on the ground are not in favor of this. That is why Macron suffered such a defeat in the European elections. Then he called these snap elections and is essentially to try to convince French voters that if they don’t somehow get behind him, that all hell will break loose. But French voters refused to get behind Macron.
So essentially, the pursuit of this belligerent policy, this militarist policy on the part of the West, of which NATO, of course, is the main instrument, this is proving increasingly popular to the domestic constituency.
There are many parties that have been elected in France, a couple of parties anyway, that are explicitly against NATO. They want to get out of NATO. So this is the situation where at the 75th anniversary of NATO, you actually are not so much celebrating its great successes or anything. Quite frankly, NATO has not had that much success. We can discuss that too. But in fact, you are basically poised on the threshold of its unraveling, final unraveling.
MICHAEL HUDSON: You make two very important points. First of all, NATO began as a defensive alliance against the Soviet Union. Now it’s an offensive alliance from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But also, the point you just made that the voters of Europe, Germany, France, all over, all the polls show that most people are against extending the war, largely because they want the European budget to be spent on social programs, not on war.
And that brings up one of the most interesting joiners of the NATO meeting, Viktor Orban. Now, as the head of Hungary, he happens also to be the head of the whole EU. Well, you can imagine how furious the EU, anti-Russian, virulently anti-Russian, pro-military leadership is.
The head of the EU, von der Leyen, Callas, and the rest do not represent the voters of Europe. This is why there’s such a nationalistic anti-EU arising throughout European voters, because they realize that the EU is governed by NATO, basically. NATO’s running European politics, not the national elected leaders.
And you have Viktor Orban there, at his six-month term as head of the EU, saying, look, I just went to Russia, and I just went to China. And they’re right. It’s NATO that forced Russia to defend the Russian speakers. It’s NATO, the aggressive, that you should stop, you should pull back, and NATO should no longer be part of the fighting in Ukraine, so that we can end the war, give Russia whatever the military battlefield is going to result in, and just stop all of this.
Well, he’s somebody who is part of the meeting and just sort of upsets everybody. That’s his role. And they’re saying, well, he doesn’t speak for the EU, but he does speak, as he pointed out, for the voters of Europe.
That’s the tension we have, the fact that the EU and the military-industrial complex do not represent the voters. What does all this mean politically?
RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. And just two points for now. Firstly, the EU, of course, especially with the Maastricht Treaty and so on, it has essentially become the enforcer for the last several decades. It has been the enforcer of neoliberal austerity all over Europe.
So, in that sense, of course, the EU was already a hated organization. And you have to remember also the number of times various treaties were rejected by the people of those countries which were of a referenda on these treaties. And then they simply kind of modified the treaty a little bit and forgot about referenda and so on.
So, the EU has been the enforcer of neoliberalism, but there’s also another mechanism. As these governing elites increasingly pursue an agenda, which is an open violation of the wishes of ordinary people, they also resort to the EU, saying that the EU requires this, you know, blah, blah, and so on. And so, the EU becomes, therefore, doubly unpopular. So, that’s the first thing.
The second thing is that I just wanted to have a slight clarification when you said that NATO began as a defensive alliance. NATO didn’t even begin as a defensive alliance. We have to remember that NATO was started in 1949. As you know, this is the 75th anniversary. NATO was started in 1949. And it really what it was, was an expression of the dissatisfaction of the imperialist Western countries with the structures of the United Nations. Because the structures of the United Nations, essentially, thanks to the fact that it was the big moment of decolonization, there were two major communist powers in the world. On top of that, there was the decolonizing world. A number of big countries and many countries were becoming members of the United Nations because they had just become independent and so on.
So, in this context, the United Nations was really not where they could prosecute their agenda. So, as a consequence, they created NATO as a sort of a backstop measure, really a club of the rich countries in order so that they may have their own independent foreign policy. And of course, this was also tied up with the existence of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc more generally, the Cold War, etc. But NATO was created first.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Oh, you’re talking about the reality, not the stated…
RADHIKA DESAI: Sorry?
MICHAEL HUDSON: You’re talking about the reality of NATO, not what its stated purposes were.
RADHIKA DESAI: Well, exactly. So, NATO even began as an offensive organization and the Warsaw Pact was not created until 1954. So, five years were to pass. So, all this time, the allegedly belligerent expansionist communist bloc, which was just about to invade Europe, according to the rhetoric of NATO and so on, it did nothing. It did not create a counter-alliance.
The only moment at which it created a counter-alliance was the moment when Germany joined NATO. And at that moment, having been at the receiving end of the German assault during the Second World War, such a brutal and vicious German assault, the Soviet Union and others had had enough and they created the Warsaw Pact. So, really, it was never a defensive alliance.
And you see, people say that for 75 years it kept peace. But honestly, first of all, for the first however many years it is, 30 odd years, so 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, 40 plus years, but until the Soviet Union existed, it was not NATO that kept the peace. It was the fact that the Soviet Union essentially was forced to spend a lot of money on the military in order to protect itself. And therefore, it made the cost of the West trying to invade it, trying to destroy it, too great.
When the United States decided to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic weapons, the principal purpose was not to win the war against Japan. Japan was already on its knees. Japan was already suing for peace. The real reason was that they wanted to demonstrate to Stalin that they had these terrible weapons of mass destruction and thereby somehow to gain the upper hand.
What they never realized is that within four short years, the Soviet Union would acquire its own nuclear weapons and then eventually delivery capabilities and so on and so forth.
So, in all of this and throughout the history of the Soviet Union, its posture militarily, as well as in terms of nuclear weapons, has always been a defensive one. It has never been an offensive one, whereas the West has always had the offensive posture.
The Soviet Union kept saying, let’s please all sign a no first use treaty. And the West kept refusing. And if you were really, your purpose on having nuclear weapons was defensive, that’s what you would do. But it refused to sign. And finally, in 1981, I think it was Brezhnev who simply said, forget it, we will simply proclaim a no first use policy. So, this is the kind of context. So, NATO has always been, and of course, the second part is that after 1991, basically NATO has done nothing other than being part of explicitly or implicitly part of Western aggression throughout the world. There has not been, I mean, there’s been hardly a year in which has been absent of conflict, essentially driven by the United States and by NATO.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’re right about the continuity of aggression. Stalin was so worried that right after NATO was formed, that it was going to be aggressive, that he was worried about a war on Russia’s Western Front. And that was one of the major reasons that he pressed Mao to get involved in the Korean War.
Stalin thought that if he could tie down the American army in Korea, that that would somehow tie it down there, and it would not be threatening Russia on the [west]. People hardly remember that anymore, but that was one of his major fears.
He was always worrying of, needless to say, he was traumatized by the Nazi attack on Russia in World War II, and he kept worrying again and again, that as soon as World War II was over, everyone from General Patton to General MacArthur said, wait, don’t stop the war. Let’s now finish the job and move against Russia.
America came in and recruited as many of the Nazi leaders as they could and put them in charge of American policy throughout Latin America and throughout the rest of the world. Project Paperclip was taking over the Nazis, and there was always that, from the very beginning, that anti-Russian feeling.
And now that Russia’s looking back at the big picture, how did it all begin? They’re putting it in exactly the context that you described.
This is part of a long danger, and that’s why it’s finally time for us to realize that there’s not going to be a linkage between Western Europe and Russia, as Putin said, for the next 30 years. There has to be a separation. That’s really what it’s all about.
And NATO now is trying to prevent this separation. It’s trying to isolate Russia, but what it’s really doing, of course, is isolating the West from Russia, China, Iran, and the whole BRICS-plus. The war in Ukraine, sort of catalyzed by the war in Israel and Palestine, has just vastly accelerated this world split that we’re seeing right now and what you and I are always talking about.
RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. And there are two levels of this split. I mean, the one is a split between the governing classes of the imperialist countries of the NATO countries and their own electorates.
And then the second split is, yes, between an essentially ever shrinking and possibly ever more fractious cabal of imperialist countries, which is NATO, and what the Russians are beginning to call the world majority, which is an expression I really like because it’s not just the global South or the third world. It is actually a bigger category than that. It’s basically the implicit alliance that already existed during the Cold War between the socialist countries and the third world countries. So now a similar alliance is there between the successors, well, between socialist countries like China, the successors of former socialist countries like Russia, and the various developing countries.
So that’s really the two, as I said, two levels. And these levels are increasingly interpenetrating one another.
But there are also, I would just like to throw in a couple of other questions. I think one should really discuss the extent to which the Western countries are really, they have the economic and financial means to prosecute their agenda, which I believe they don’t.
And then the other really interesting thing as well is that, you know, this whole, I mean, I’ve always wondered about this, and I’ve just been rooting around to try to find, you know, what’s the issue. But basically, the West has always resented Russia in whatever form, Tsarist Russia, Soviet Union, and now post-Soviet Russia, because Russia is big and the size of Russia. And that’s why you got, you know, going back to Halford Mackinder, who in the early 20th century came up with this idea that whoever controls the heartland, and the heartland is basically Russia plus maybe a few other countries, but whoever controls this heartland, this vast, big landmass at the center of the Eurasian landmass controls the world. And so that was essentially his guide to British foreign policy.
Then later on, people like Nicholas Speakman sort of came and said, well, no, you know, Mackinder is wrong. It’s all right to control the Rimlands. So essentially everything outside the heartland, but it was still a kind of a consolation prize because he was saying, well, we can’t control Russia, but you know what? It’s fine. We still control the Rimlands.
But now with Brzezinski, especially as soon as the Soviet Union expired, you have Brzezinski writing his book, The Grand Chessboard, which already envisages a scenario of the breakup of Russia. They’ve already broken up the Soviet Union. So the successor state to the Soviet Union, namely the Russian Federation, is already much smaller than the Soviet Union was. Now they want to break Russia up too. And he says explicitly in his book that it will be the best for Russia.
Of course, nobody’s going to say that we’re doing this for our own good. So they claim that there’s the good of Russia. If it were divided into four or five, maybe three or four, I forget the exact number, different entities. And that has been the aim right the way through.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, for the last 75 years, it did seem that the Rimlands were really taking over. And the reason is that after World War II, the international trade vastly expanded. But the international trade was really raw materials and low-priced labor from the global South up to the US and Europe. It was a trade.
Now, what has finally been the nightmare for people who believe in Mackinder is China’s Belt and Road Initiative. All of a sudden, what this initiative is trying to do is ignoring the whole foreign international trade and focus on trade within Asia itself.
That’s the investment that was sponsored by the World Bank since 1945 has been mainly a port development. Let’s empty out the raw materials of South America and Africa. Let’s make them plantation crop exporters, and they’ll import things from the West.
But there was almost no development at all by the World Bank of mutual trade and investment and transportation and communications contacts within Asia, within Latin America, within Africa.
All of a sudden, this is the whole essence of the Chinese development. China has not pressed the ideological wrapping for this that you and I have been discussing, but Russia certainly has, saying, you know, they’re looking back.
You’re having many Russian writers like Karaganov, but also Lavrov has been mentioning the speeches. He said, look, it all began a thousand years ago. It began with the Crusades. The Crusades were from backward Europe. Norman warlords were attacking Constantinople, and they ended up looting it, destroying it, completely wrecking it. That’s what led to the invasions of Asia. That’s what led to the shift of the Christian church in Constantinople to Russia, which for Putin especially is very important.
He’s looking at a thousand years war of the West against Russia, not only geopolitically, but religiously. Russia has been developing this whole broad context of the logic of how we’re having a new view of geopolitics. Instead of cutting up the specialization of labor and dependency of the global South on the former colonial powers, replacing political colonialism with financial colonialism, all of a sudden this has all changed.
Since America, in fighting Russia, has driven it together with China, driven China and Russia together with Iran, and now you have this Shanghai Cooperation Organization that’s just been meeting in Kazakhstan.
You’re having the whole Western dream of domination, the end of history falling apart right before our eyes.
RADHIKA DESAI: Again, two things in response to these very interesting points you make, Michael. First of all, this is really interesting. You absolutely hit the nail on the head when you said, what was the West’s purpose for the last couple of hundred years of its domination? The West’s purpose was to essentially drain the resources and the cheaply produced commodities from the various colonies and semi-colonies and bring them out.
The entire infrastructure of transport, when railways were built, they were not built in order to unite the country to make it a more complete market or anything. They were built in order to take out whatever was produced, whether it was raw materials or finished commodities or whatever it may be. As long as it could be taken for cheap, that’s what they wanted.
That imperialism rested on sea power, the ability to cart away vast quantities of things from these poor countries. Developments in maritime technology were of course key to it.
Now what China is doing is that China, Russia, they are all focusing on developing their own economies in such a way that they then become worthy partners of other economies. In this sense, of course, Russia is talking about Siberianization. You were mentioning Karaganov’s article, Michael, which we have both been reading, and it very explicitly talks about Siberianization. That is to say, Russia must develop Siberia and all its resources and process them and all these sorts of things.
Meanwhile, China wants to develop her own underdeveloped west, and that underdeveloped west of China and the underdeveloped east of Russia are essentially contiguous. By creating these railway links, for example, from Vladivostok to Amsterdam and so on, they are reducing the travel time for things essentially between these two points.
If you go by sea around, even if you use the Suez Canal, etc., it is like a month or so, and you can bring it down to a week of transport time. So, this is the kind of technological development they are looking at, and this is the kind of economic development you are looking at, which is not about draining away resources and surpluses, but rather building up these communities, making them by putting a railway through them, making them part of this corridor which will be developed, etc., etc.
So, in that sense, the whole sea power, land power thing is really quite important.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, this attempt to develop Asia internally leads to a whole shift in diplomacy, the kind of diplomacy. The western diplomacy with a foreign country is that of settler states. We will conquer you and we will take control of everything we want, your raw materials and infrastructure. We don’t care about the people, just that. And they’ve achieved western dominance by military force.
But China and Russia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, realizes that, well, we’re not able to integrate Central Asia and other countries, all the Asian countries by force, because we’re not going to waste our army on that. The time of militarily invading a country is all over.
There’s only one way that we can integrate Asia into a common framework with Africa and with Latin America, and that’s voluntarily. We have to offer them something to make them want to join this. And what can we offer them? Well, we can offer you a non-exploitative form where you gain as well as us.
We will build up your ability to broaden your economy on the basis of your raw materials, so we can all interact in a way that we can all grow together, instead of our basic philosophy being, how much can we take from you, which is the western philosophy.
So you’re having a whole different kind of economic model stemming from all this, because of the necessity of achieving this new union voluntarily, instead of by military force.
Now, that’s what’s frustrating NATO and America so much. All they have is military force. They don’t have anything to offer the global majority, because they’ve already de-industrialized. They’ve shifted industry to Asia. They’ve shifted raw materials dependency to Asia, refining of the raw materials to Asia, technology to Asia.
So all of a sudden, the West is left not only with nothing, but with the impossibility of trying to recover western industrial growth, because of the huge debt overhead resulting from financialization, Thatcherism, Blairism, Reaganomics, and now your wonderful new Labour Party in England.
The West does not really have a problem. It has a quandary. There is no solution.
RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. And you know, this is why, let’s shift to, because we don’t want to ignore that entirely, let’s shift to talking about Karaganov’s article. I mean, this article is really very interesting, because, you know, it basically says that there are a number of challenges which we face. I mean, basically, it is doing a survey of the world from the Russian point of view. It says that there are a number of challenges that we face. And from these challenges, an actual fair assessment, objective assessment of these challenges suggests that Russia should pursue a certain kind of foreign policy and a certain kind of security policy.
Now, before we go into that, I just want to say that, you know, earlier I had mentioned Arnold Mayer, how he traced the development of the new diplomacy. Then I pointed out that, you know, the United Nations itself was deeply unsatisfactory to the imperialist West, precisely because it embodied too much of this new diplomacy.
And now, everything that the Chinese are proposing, everything that the Russians are proposing is really taking the agenda of this new diplomacy forward. And what is the agenda? I mean, basically, you know, it’s a bit like that group that has been created, of which both China and Russia are members, as are countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and a host of other countries.
What they are basically saying is that the original principles of the United Nations, which is respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, you know, all these, you know, essentially, you know, equality of representation, et cetera, all of these are the foundations of a peaceful world. And that’s what they are creating. So I just wanted to point that out.
Now, one of the things I absolutely love about Karaganov’s article is that he begins, the first challenge he names is the challenge of the decay of Western capitalism. Now, he associates it with a surfeit of consumerism, which is fine. And I don’t think he’s wrong about that.
But I would, of course, go deeper and say that it is really the decay of monopoly capitalism, which has become neoliberal, financialized, et cetera. And that is his first major point, the first major challenge. And I absolutely agree because that lies at the heart of the sickness that assails the Western countries, the sickness that is creating the divide between the people and their governments, the sickness that is driving European, driving Western countries to be so aggressively militarist.
And again, Karaganov himself says, you know, which I again absolutely love, he says that the West is being so militarist because it is furious that it can no longer take it for granted that the surpluses of the rest of the world will naturally flow to it.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think that’s right. And what he’s done that’s so important, he’s translating these generalities, the statements that we’ve just heard from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of World Peace. He’s saying, well, what does that really mean? That really means separation.
And he said, of course, the United Nations is going to continue to exist, but then it’ll be maybe minor agencies. We really need a new global majority United Nations without a U.S. veto so that we can indeed coordinate in a peaceful way and create an international law instead of the arbitrary American rule of law. We’ll have real principles of international law.
We really need an alternative creation of a whole set of institutions.
Well, you’re seeing this break occurring right now, just yesterday and today. You’re having countries like Saudi Arabia and Turkey. They’re caught right in the middle of this. All of their linkages so far have been with the West. Turkey’s part of NATO. Saudi Arabia has all of its money in the United States. And yet they’re part of BRICS. How can you be part of two different groups at the same time for all of this?
Well, two days ago, Saudi Arabia told Europe, if you don’t give back the money that you’ve saved from Russia, we are going to withdraw all of Saudi Arabia’s monies in Europe. Turkey then said, we cannot trust Europe anymore. America may be afraid to grab our money, but you’re just the servants, literally the vassals in a feudal sense of America. You’re going to grab our money. Give Russia the money back now, or we’re pulling all of our money out.
So already you’re creating a break. The question is, how do you institutionalize this break? You need to create a new financial organization with a different philosophy of the IMF. The philosophy that you increase your economic surplus and labor productivity by raising living standards, not austerity programs. A whole different economic theory. You’re having a whole set of differences.
And I think that the Karajanov’s purpose is to put all of these particular points in the perspective of, there really is a break in the economic philosophy of the West and the global majority. That’s really the key. And that’s what we’ve been talking about in all of our shows.
RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. And by the way, we haven’t mentioned the name, the title of Karajanov’s article is Decades of Wars, and it came out in late May, 2024. So you can probably find it on the Russian Council website.
So the other thing I really like about it, and I agree with all these very important points you made, Michael. The other thing I really like about it is that he understands very clearly, you know, he’s not being anti-Western in any kind of simplistic sense. He’s not against the West. He’s simply against the aggressiveness of the West, the militarism of the West, and the refusal of the West to treat other countries with respect, with equality, et cetera.
And so, you know, he says at one point that, you know, part of the purpose of Russia’s foreign policy in the future, and that should, and that also, and he would urge such a foreign policy on all the world majority countries, says part of our purpose should be to allow the existing American and related comprador elites in Europe come to terms with their loss of dominance and agree to a much more modest position in the future international system.
So he’s basically saying, look, folks, if you would just settle down to an understanding of yourselves as, yes, powerful countries, countries with rich histories and all the things you may want to know, but also now an understanding that there is also, the rest of the world has also essentially become more powerful, more important, and instead of essentially throwing a tantrum at this development, they should welcome it, and they should be able to treat the world, you know, essentially engage with the world, not imperialistically, but cooperatively.
MICHAEL HUDSON: But they’re not able to do that. That’s the problem. The U.S. would rather destroy countries that don’t obey it than negotiating a trade and investment with them. That’s the real problem. And it’s, you could say it’s the fight of finance capitalism against socialism, and remember, go back to Russia. The fight basically is against socialism.
You’re having neoliberalism in the West be, it’s an anti-government theory. In other words, it’s against government regulating corporations, regulating the economy. It’s against government pursuing social investment programs. It’s for big government militarily and in a fascist way, but not in a socialist way. So just as the first response of America and Britain to the Russian Revolution was to send armies in to try to overthrow it, you’re having the same thing today.
The West seems unwilling to accept the logic that you just pointed out.
And when you and Karaganov and me say the West should realize the reality of the situation and say, okay, you know, you’re able to grab what you wanted for the last thousand years. It’s over. You’re having President Biden say, and the West say, it’s not over. You know, it’s the end of history. Don’t you get it? History doesn’t begin again. It’s the end of history. And they’re going to continue to, they’re unwilling to recognize this reality.
So what can Russia do in a situation? Well, you pointed out a few minutes ago that Russia had to spend a lot of its income militarily defending itself against the Western threat. And certainly the global majority is going to have to reach the military alliance. And that’s why most of the discussions that have come out against the economic diplomacy, the programs are at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the military.
They have to figure out how to, we have an idea of how we want to develop, but we have to get rid of the 800 U.S. military bases in our country. And Karaganov says, you know, essentially we have to drive them out. We have to say, if you don’t accept our socialist philosophy, he didn’t use the word, but that’s what it really means. If you don’t accept our philosophy, then let’s just separate. You go your way, we’ll go ours.
The West doesn’t want to go its way. So all the global majority can do is say, well, we’re just going to keep you out, just stay away. Anytime you try to do what you’re trying to do with Russia and Ukraine, or any problem you’re trying to create between Taiwan and China, you know, we’re just going to have to slap you down. And we can do it, and you can’t because you’ve de-industrialized.
RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah. And, you know, the other thing is, and by the way, in case people don’t know, Sergey Karaganov last year became a little notorious because he said that, you know, Russia should go back to practicing a certain kind of nuclear deterrence. And he was generally seen as, you know, being extremely, you know, putting forward an extremely dangerous theory that, you know, somehow Russia should strike with nuclear weapons or anything like that. But he was not saying anything like that. And by the way, those of you who are interested will be able to see the International Manifesto Group’s webinar, which is an interview by me and Professor Richard Sakwa of Sergey Karaganov on precisely these theories.
But also, in this article, it becomes particularly clear exactly what Karaganov means. He’s basically saying that, look, the West has become, you know, as Michael, you said that, you know, they just don’t want to accept a more modest position. They seem to, the West seems to be incapable of reacting to the development of the world majority in any other way than hostility.
And the reason for that is very simple. It is that our governments are ideologically committed to a failing capitalism. Whereas, you know, in China or Russia, they are not afraid of having big capital, the capitalists, even big capitalists and huge corporations. But the key is, particularly in China and increasingly also in Russia, the key is that the priorities of the society and the state take precedence over the priority of the big corporations, whereas our societies, the Western societies, are increasingly run in the opposite way, where the priorities of the West, of the big corporations, take priority over the national good, the common good, etc., etc. This is the basic difference, and it has to do with the unreasoning ideological commitment.
You know, in the past, people used to say, oh, the socialists are ideological. But now we are increasingly living in a time when that is to say, they’re ideological and therefore not listening to reason. Now it is the West that is unreasoningly committed to a failing capitalism. And that is one of the key things.
But this also then, and there are some really wonderful passages here about how the requirements of trying to the requirements of trying to maintain the rule of an unproductive rontier elite over the rest of society has also addled the brains of the ruling elites.
So Karaganov, coming to nuclear weapons, Karaganov says, look, both Biden and Blinken have said that nuclear war is no more dangerous than climate change. Now, this is quite, you know, climate change is something that is happening. I’m not trying to minimize its dangers. We are suffering from them all the time. But a nuclear war could essentially put a stop to everything within, you know, a few days maximum, essentially.
And so he says, maybe it is time to remind them that the Russians have nuclear weapons. And I think that is no small matter, because the way in which they have been provoking Russia over the last several decades, and even longer, I mean, quite frankly, Michael, as you mentioned, the West has been running, waging a war against Russia, at least going back to back to the 1917, when they created the civil war and so on.
But anyway, certainly they are doing so right now. And so the way in which the West continues to provoke Russia, it is acting as though the nuclear weapons that Russia is sitting on, do not matter.
And Karaganov also points out that these guys are also talking about using tactical nuclear weapons, battlefield nuclear weapons, we know they have already used depleted uranium weapons in the recent past. So they’re not, they’re quite capable of doing these things. This will simply bring nuclear war closer.
So Karaganov’s problem is, how can you make this elite that has become so intellectually addled understand the dangers that they are themselves creating for their own societies? And honestly, I personally feel that he’s absolutely right on this, that we are led by people of extremely questionable mental and intellectual abilities.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think the context for what you’ve just talked about is the argument within Russia about the red lines. There’s a belief in the West that, well, Russia said that it has red lines, and we can’t do this, we can’t do that. But we’ve been doing this and that. Look at we’ve been, we’ve been using like the sausage, slicing, slicing, slicing away, as we’ve gone over one red line after another, including bombing Russia itself in the Ukraine, sending missiles into residential areas and oil refineries in Russia.
So I think Karaganov has said, we have to do something to shock the West into saying, look, we are going to fight back, we are going to stop it. So far, we’ve been able, the reason we’ve been going so slow is in Ukraine is, you’ve been destroying yourself internally in the West. Look, while we’re going slow, you’re tearing yourself apart.
We don’t want to interfere with that, you know, go right ahead, but we don’t have to do anything. Well, you’re acting in such a crazy way.
But you are becoming more and more belligerent. And now, your Polish attempt to bring Poland into the Ukrainian war, that’s the red line. At some point, Karaganov said, you know, look, we’ve got to give them a shock and show, look, if we do come back, we’re going to do very much like what Hezbollah did in Israel. It sent all of the harmless missiles to every major military site in Israel to say, look, if we really wanted to get you, we can wipe out all of these. You really want to do something.
Karaganov wants Russia to do something to let the West say, look, we’re really going to slap you down. We can slap you down instead of just letting yourself destruct. But if your self-destruction involves attacks on us, we’re going to knock you out.
But you also said something, you very often say two things in one presentation. You mentioned capitalism versus the global maturity. What you have today is no longer the industrial capitalism of the 19th century, it’s finance capitalism.
And industrial capitalism had a certain ideal. Marx pointed it out, and the American protectionist pointed it out. The capitalism was going to evolve towards increasing government provision of infrastructure, increasing protection of labor, to promotion of living standards, to raise productivity. That was what they expected capitalism to be. And everybody in the 19th century was using the word socialism.
Well, that didn’t happen. But it is happening. If we’re seeing a whole circle of history being picked up, now it’s being closed. Now, the dream of industrial capitalism, of evolving into socialism, is occurring in the global maturity, occurring in Asia. It’s not in the West. It’s in Asia that it’s developed. And the failure of the West to let its capitalism develop in the logical way towards a mixed economy, supporting living standards, the failure to do this means that’s why the West is lost to Asia.
And it’s not going to change this ideology, because the ideology is like an ideology of hatred, simply built in to the way they think. And as you know, the media don’t let the audience even understand what you and I are talking about, what Putin is talking about. They’ve closed down RT. Our audience is on the internet. It’s not on the New York Times.
RADHIKA DESAI: No, absolutely. And we should probably be winding down this conversation, because we are coming close to an hour, Michael. So, I just want to, in conclusion, make a couple of points, and then maybe you want to make a point or two, and then bring this to a close.
So, the first point I want to make is that, you know, I said at the beginning that I, on the one hand, love the fact that Karaganov zeroes in on the most fundamental issue, which is the decay of Western capitalism. And he’s absolutely right about that. Although I said that, you know, he attributes it to consumerism, whereas I would really focus much more on what I call neoliberal financialized capitalism, the inevitable outcome of the arrival of capitalism at the monopoly phase, which happened during the early 20th century already, and which is now being given free reign again under neoliberalism.
So, that sort of capitalism can only take a financialized form and a rentier form.
And, you know, I agree with you, of course, but I just want to make a small terminological clarification that, you know, right now we live in a world of a certain type of capitalism, and you called it finance capital. But I’d like to clarify that, you know, Hilferding, what Hilferding called finance capital was actually a very different beast than what we have now, which is kind of, shall we say, financialized capitalism, a rentier capitalism, whereas what Hilferding was describing with the expression finance capital was a type of bank industry relation in which the purpose of the bank was to expand productive investment rather than to unproductively suck out value from all sorts of producers, whether they are capitalists or workers or governments or what have you.
So, that’s just a small clarification.
And with that, you know, so alongside, so that’s one thing I disagree slightly with Karaganov about, although I still urge everybody to read this article, because it’s very good.
Number two, I’d like to say that, of course, he, because partly he is perhaps because of the post-Soviet condition within which he writes, he perhaps is actively avoiding talking about in any Marxist way, he doesn’t, he only uses the term imperialism to describe what he calls inter-imperialist rivalries, but there he gets things very muddled, because on the one hand, he says, for example, that if India and Pakistan went to war, that it would be a form of inter-imperialist rivalry. But then he quite rightly points out that these, if they did go to war, for example, that would be because of the legacy of colonialism, and he would be right about that. So, he understands the situation, but I think he misapplies the term imperialism.
And then the final perhaps clarification I would make, which I think is quite important, is that, you know, on the one hand, I completely understand that people like Biden and Blinken are completely bonkers if they think that nuclear war and climate change are just as dangerous, and that the West is suffering from what he calls strategic parasitism, that is to say that they have sort of been, they are unable to understand the implications of the nuclear confrontation of our time.
And his reasoning is very well put in this particular sentence, and just one sentence I’m going to read. He says, greater reliance on nuclear deterrence is necessary to cool the European leaders who have lost their minds, speak of an inevitable clash between Russia and NATO, and urge their armed forces to prepare for it.
This is what he’s saying is that, you know, once we essentially are a bit more active on the nuclear front, we begin testing, we may deploy them in various forward positions, etc., fine. And that this is what the result he expects.
But difficulty with making this argument is that if it is true, as Karaganov says, that the intellectual caliber of the Western US and European leadership has declined, then they may not be capable of absorbing the meaning of any nuclear activism on the part of Russia. And so really, I think that this does not negate anything Karaganov says, it only lands us in an even bigger quandary that, okay, so if we can’t even solve the problem of Western aggression by making them aware that other powers have nuclear weapons, what can be done to stop it?
And I think this is the big question we face. I think the fact that ordinary people in the United States, in Europe, are not behind their leaders when they are engaging in this kind of belligerence is the first and most important foundation of anything we can do. And that is the foundation, the popular foundation, the popular will to have peace on which we ought to build.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I think you’ve summarized the problem very well. It’s the United States that withdrew from all of the short-term missile agreements. The United States has withdrawn from all of the agreements that were supposed to prevent atomic war. And that, I think, is what’s prompted Karaganov’s point. You’ve summarized it very well.
RADHIKA DESAI: Well, I hope that you enjoyed the 30th Geopolitical Economy Hour. Please like, please subscribe, please share, and we will be back in another fortnight or so. Thank you very much and goodbye.
