Columbia University Economics professor, and UN advisor, Jeffrey Sachs, on Bloomberg, yesterday, set out the evidence that the US sabotaged the Nordstream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. As I pointed out, a few days ago, it is only the US that has all three elements of motive, means and opportunity to have undertaken the sabotage. Now, as Sachs points out, there is actual evidence from satellite imagery, and radar and sonar that it was US helicopters based in Gdanks, in Poland that are likely to have undertaken the actual sabotage.
Sachs is one of those right-wing US academics that were sent to Eastern Europe, as Stalinism was collapsing. He was an advisor to Poland's Solidarity, when it was opposing the Stalinist regime there. When Yeltsin took over in Russia, with US backing, and became the poodle of US imperialism, Sachs who had also advised the West's latest favourite dead Russian, Gorbachev, was sent with IMF economists David Lipton to steer the rapid transfer of state assets into private hands.
So, he cannot be accused of being some kind of crypto-Stalinist dupe. The Friedmanite, free market solutions he imposed in Russia, and other Stalinist states, resulted in economic devastation, much as they did in Chile and elsewhere, as well as the experience of Reagnomics in the US, an experiment being repeated by the Brexitories today, with the same disastrous results.
In Russia, much as the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany after WWI, created he conditions for he rise of Hitler, so the robbing blind of post soviet Russia, and systematic asset stripping, created the gangster capitalism, and oligarchy it suffers from today, as well as creating the conditions for the rise of Putin. What Sachs seems to represent is the continuation of those same free market, liberal concepts on a global level, so that he see the actions of US imperialism, in those terms, as acting like a latter day colonial power, imposing all of the same kinds of protectionist and monopolistic methods to privilege its own economy and capitals over all others, using all means at its disposal, including the use of its military, and huge totalitarian media operations.
The US sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines, as Sachs says, significantly raises the level of its war against Russia and China, and is leading inexorably towards a new world war, and nuclear annihilation for humanity. So, far NATO/US imperialism has engaged only in covert military operations against Russia and China, using Special Forces alongside proxies, as well as the use of cyber warfare and so on. But the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines is an act of open military aggression by the US against Russian property, and by using its base in Poland to launch the attack, it has drawn EU countries into the war.
But, the reality is also that the US, in sabotaging the Nordstream pipelines, has not just waged a military attack on Russian property, but also on the EU, and the European masses. As I wrote the other day, the reason for doing so is clear. Nordtream offered the EU large amounts of cheap gas to meet its needs. That not only benefitted Russia, but it also benefitted the EU, and EU imperialism, facilitating its independence from US imperialism. That is why, as Sachs says, the US has always made clear that it would prevent Nordstream operating.
US imperialism acts against the interests of EU imperialism, which is the main economic competitor to US imperialism, and biggest potential competitor to US imperialism, were it to to separate itself from the US/NATO apron strings. US imperialism needs to keep EU imperialism subordinated to it. Its not just that the US benefits from the EU being dependent on US oil and gas, or that from the US's proxies in the feudal Gulf Monarchies, it is that, by making the EU, this dependent, it strengthens the US hold over them, and simultaneously weakens them economically, reducing the challenge they pose to US imperialism. It also prevents the development of a rational synergy of EU capital with Russian/Eurasian capital.
As Lenin and Trotsky pointed out at the start of the last century, the way single markets develop, and become single states is by trade between near neighbours. That is how nation states developed, and it is how the US developed, as well as the EU. Its how the EU expanded into central and eastern Europe, and was doing in MENA, before the US inspired wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria. The rational development of imperialism is via increased trade between the EU and Eurasia, i.e. Russia and China, and its that the US seeks to obstruct.
So, this was not just an act of war by the US against Russia, but was primarily ana ct of war against the EU itself. It was the US saying to the EU, we told you we would stop Nordstream, and we have. The US saw the fact that its sanctions against Russia had been counterproductive. They raised global energy prices to the great benefit of Russia. They saw that rathe than rolling over and accepting higher energy prices, workers across Europe were rising up and rebelling against them, striking for higher wages. They have seen that the result is that governments that had promoted those high energy prices by their backing of those sanctions were falling like nine pins, and that is before the Winter actually begins an the effects of energy shortages actually appear.
Already, in the UK, which does not import more than about 6% of its gas from Russia, but is reliant on gas from the rest of Europe, which may now disappear as a result of European shortages and hostility from Britain to Europe via Brexit, OFGEM has warned of gas shortages over Winter. The likelihood of the EU buckling and abandoning the insane sanctions on Russian energy are high, and by blowing up the Nordstream pipeline, the US must think that it has physically cut off that line of response.
In other words, it has not just engaged in a substantial escalation of the war against Russia, but has also carried out the equivalent of a punishment beating against its European allies, as a warning against desertion. It is an act of war against EU imperialism that it seeks to keep subordinated, and in the process, an act of war against the European masses who are being dragged into a world war that is not in their interests, and who will suffer as a result of US induced energy shortages closing down their jobs, and depriving their homes of heat and light over the coming Winter.
Yet, the social imperialists like Paul Mason, the AWL, Anti-Capitalist Resistance and so on, continue to apologise for US imperialism, and to operate their Popular Frontist alliance with it, against the interests of workers in Europe and North America, superficially at least, to protect the corrupt, oligarchic regime of Zelensky in Ukraine. They seem willing to follow that logic into the inevitable world war and destruction of humanity that will result just as their predecessors led the world into the slaughter of WWI and II, for the greater glory of imperialism.
Sachs comments come, not long after former Blairite, NATO Secretary General, George Robertson, repeated his claim, made back in February that NATO had goaded Putin into invading Ukraine, and after Britain's top soldier had warned UK service families to prepare for their sons and daughters to go to fight and die in Ukraine, in other words to go and fight and die to protect Zelensky's corrupt regime, along with all of the anti-Semites, and Nazis of the Azov Battalion and Right Sector upon which it depends.
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