The Empire’s debt casino is unsustainable and the ruling oligarchy sees war as the only way to salvage their hegemony

by Sergey Glazyev

Originally appeared on Lenta.ru.

The author is a prominent economist, advisor to the Russian President on regional economic integration, and the mind behind the Eurasian Economic Union

Is there any reason to expect the lifting of American sanctions?
The sanctions are an element of the hybrid war that the US is waging against us. They are doing this not because they do not like Russia’s ‘annexation’ of the Crimea, but because of the objective and subjective interests of the American establishment.

The US is losing its hegemony: it is already producing fewer products and exporting fewer technologies than China. China is also catching up with America in the number of scientists and engineers, and many innovative Chinese technologies are capturing world markets. China’s development rate is five times that of the US. The international system of economic entities recently set up in China exemplify the new world economic order.

The economic entities that dominate in the US, serving a financial oligarchy, have destabilized the American monetary and financial system, which defaults about twice a year. The causes of the global financial crisis of 2008 have not disappeared and the American debt bubble — financial pyramids composed of derivatives and the national debt —are still growing.

According to systems theory, this process cannot continue indefinitely. The American oligarchy is desperate to get rid of its debt burden, which is why it is conducting a hybrid war, not only against Russia, but against Europe and the Middle East.

As always happens in a changing world economic order, the country that is losing its leadership tries to unleash a world war for control over the periphery. Since Americans consider the former Soviet space to be their financial and economic periphery, they are trying to gain control over it.

The American political establishment has been brought up on the chimeras of nineteenth century geopoliticians. American students study basic English and German geopolitical ideas of that time in political science classes. The main question back then was how to ruin the Russian Empire, and they still look at the world through the eyes of the XIX century ‘hawks’, when Great Britain tried to save its hegemony in the First World War, then lost its colonial empire after the Second World War.

This is what American geopoliticians study in the State Department and the White House, continuing to look at the world through the prism of both the Cold War and British confrontations with Russia and Germany in the nineteenth century, and now the US is unleashing another world war.

The combination of the objective problems of the American financial oligarchy, and the strange mindset of American geopoliticians threatens a world conflict. This has nothing to do with the Crimea. Any reason will do.

We need to act in terms of the contradictions leading the US to an aggressive stance fraught with the risk of a hybrid war with the whole world. They have chosen Russia as their main objective, and the Ukraine, occupied by them, as their main means of destruction.
To survive under these conditions, maintain our sovereignty and develop our economy, we need to build a broad anti-military coalition, pursue our priority development strategy, recover our financial and economic sovereignty and pursue Eurasian integration.

To prevent war, we need to realize the president’s goal of a common development area from Lisbon to Vladivostok. It is very important to convince our European partners as well as our partners in the Far East and in the South that we need to cooperate, not by blackmailing or threatening them, but through mutually beneficial projects, joining our economic potential while respecting the sovereignty of each state.

Can we mend relations with the EU and how?

To mend cooperation with the European Union, we need to restore its sovereignty. The sight of European politicians among the crowd of Nazis at Euromaidan showed how much European political culture has degraded. The EU leaders are not independent; they are US puppets.

The American media dominate Europe’s political space, embedding anti-Russian chimeras into people’ consciousness, intimidating them with a so-called Russian threat. Their politicians are forced to go with the media line provided by Washington in order to win votes. This has lead to the catastrophe we are watching today in Brussels and other European cities, which are gripped with fear as governments fail to provide security.

Unfortunately, the sovereignty of Europe cannot be restored just by booting up social consciousness. The problems did not appear out of the blue; they are the result of the European political class abandoning its national interest. Europe is facing a very difficult period of transition, during which it is not yet a partner, but Washington’s shadow.

Europeans have lost their sense of direction. They live in a mosaic, a fragmentary world that has no shared relationships. But life will force them back to reality, and I believe that eventually European democratic traditions and humanism will prevail.