globalresearch | GR: I think that resolving Ukraine is sort of like a short-term deal, but the longer term is going to be in fact shaking Europe away from NATO and the United States degree of influence.
MH: United States is thoroughly in control of European politicians. The only opposition to NATO and the US in Europe is the right wing. The nationalist wing. The left wing is fully behind the United States and has been ever since, really the National Endowment for Democracy and other US Agencies really took control of the left-wing parties throughout Europe. They’ve Tony Blairized the European left, the Social Democratic parties in Germany and the rest of Europe, the labour parties in England, these are not labour and not socialist, they’re basically pro-American neoliberal parties.
GR: I know that Russia is very rich in mineral deposits, its rich in oil and gas as well. Russia and Ukraine form part of the breadbasket of the world. And as they control the important minerals like lithium and palladium and so forth, so they’re dealing with Ukraine, part of that plan, as a result you’re going to see, as I mentioned, a lot of impacts worldwide including food, and we’re probably going to start to see even food shortages pretty soon.
MH: That is the intention, You have to realize that this was anticipated. Without gas, already German fertilizer companies are going out of business because fertilizer is made out of gas, and if they can’t get their Russian gas, they can’t make the fertilizer, and if you don’t have the fertilizer, the crops are not going to be as prevalent and abundant as they were before. So all of this, you have to assume that, it’s so obvious, they knew this would happen, and they expect the United States to benefit from the cost squeeze that it’s imposing on food importers to the US benefit.
GR: I just want to get a sense of what the United States has to fight back with. I mean, they had the prestige of the dollar in their ability to make up things, but they also have control, through using, confiscating, for example, the gold and the deposits of the Russian government, the Russian Central Bank. Are these efforts going to be, is that the sort of thing that they have, I mean we could also talk later on about the actual military, but could you talk about those sorts of tools that the United States has to fight back against Russia?
MH: Well, the obvious tool is that’s used for the last 75 years has been bribery. European politicians especially are very easy to bribe. And most countries, just simply paying them money, and backing their political campaigns, meddling in other countries by huge financial support of pro-US politicians is the obvious way. Targeted assassination ever since World War II when the British and Americans moved into Greece and began shooting all of the anti-Nazis because they were largely socialists, and England and America wanted to restore the Greek monarchy. You have Operation Gladio in Italy, you have the targeted assassinations from Chile all the way through the rest of Latin America and its wake. So, if you can’t buy them, kill them.
Then there are various military forces. And the main tool that the US has tried to use is sanctions. If they can’t get their oil, or finance it in gas or food from Russia, then America can simply turn off their food supply. And turn off critical raw materials and interrupt their economic processes because there are so many different components that you need for almost any kind of economic activity…
The United States was looking for pressure points. And it is going to try to work on the pressure points, sabotage certainly, is another tool that’s being used, as you see in Ukraine. So the question is whether this attempt on pressure points is going to force other countries to, certainly it’s going to cause suffering. In the short term for these countries.
Over the longer-term, they’re going to see, we’re going to have to become self-sufficient in the main pressure points. We’re going to have to produce our own food. Not import our wheat. We’re going to have to shift away from growing export plantation crops and have our own grain, maybe return to family size farming to do all this. We’re going to have to produce our own arms, we’re going to have to have our own fuel sources, and that would include solar energy and renewable energy to become independent of the American-dominated oil and gas and coal trade. So the longer-term, even medium-term effect of all of this is going to make other countries self-sufficient and independent.
There will be a lot of interruptions, even starvation, a lot of property transfers and disruption, but over the long term, the United States will, is destroying the idea of a single interconnected globalized order because it’s separated Europe and North America from the whole rest of the world.
GR: How is… When it comes to dealing with the oligarchs in Russia, and what they’re facing with these sanctions, do they want the sanctions to be ended so they can get involved with the United States, or are they taking to Putin and a “let’s do it on our own approach?”
MH: In the past, the oligarchs were very western oriented because when they transferred Russia’s oil and gas and nickel and real estate into their own hands, how did they cash out? There wasn’t any money in Russia because it was all destroyed in the, after 1991 in the shock therapy. The only way they could cash out was by selling some of their stocks to the west. And that’s what Khodorkovsky wanted to do when he wanted to sell Yukos to, I think, the Standard Oil Group. And now that they realize that the United States can simply grab their yachts, grab their British real estate, grab their sports teams, grab the assets they hold in the west, they’re realizing their only safety is to hold it within Russia and its allied economies, not US-based economies where whatever they have in the west can be grabbed.
So yes today, or yesterday, Chubais left Russia for good and went to the west, and you’re having the oligarchs choose. Either they remain in Russia and look at their wealth by creating Russian means of production or they leave Russia, they take their money and they run and hope that the west will let them keep some of what they stole.
GR: Among the countries that are not going to be supporting the sanctions against Russia or China, India, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kurdistan, I mean all those countries in the Central Asian region. And that seems to be benefiting the Belt and Road Initiative, I think.
MH: You’d think so. The big question mark is India. Because it’s so large. And India has already positioned itself to be the intermediary for a lot of financial trade financing with Russia. India is also prone to be pro-American. And Modi in the past politically has been very pro-American. But the fact is if you’re looking at India’s implicit national economic interests, its economic interests lies with the region it’s in. With Eurasia, not with the United States.
So the question is, I think within the Pentagon and the state department, their big worry is, how do we keep control of India in the US hands? That’s going to be the big crisis areas for the next few years.
GR: Maybe I’ll, maybe get you to put on your glasses to sort of looking ahead into the future. Maybe a couple of years from now. Given the prevailing trends, how is this going to play out? Is this, is it going to have one side advanced more than the other or is it going to be a nuclear husk? What is your thinking?
MH: I don’t think it’ll be nuclear, although it could, given the crazy neocons with their Christian fundamentalists in Washington, people like Pompeo thinking that Jesus will come if you blow up the world. I mean, these people are literally crazy.
I worked with National Security people 50 years ago at the Hudson Institute, and I couldn’t believe that human brains were as twisted as they were, wanting to blow up much of the world for religious reasons. And for ethnic reasons, and for personal psychology reasons. And these are the people that have somehow risen to a policy-making position in the United States, and they’re threatening not only the rest of the world, but of course the US economy as well.
But I don’t think atomic war is likely. I think that the United States is going to try to convince other countries that neoliberalism is the way that they can get rich. And of course, it’s not.
Neoliberalism impoverishes. Neoliberalism is a class war against labour by finance, primarily, and a class war against industry. A class war against governments. It’s the financial class really against the whole rest of society seeking to use debt leverage to control companies, countries, families and individuals by debt. And the question is, are they really going to be able to convince people that the way to get rich is to go into debt. Or are other countries going to say, this is a blind alley. And it’s been a blind alley really since Rome that bequeathed all the pro creditor debt laws to western civilization that were utterly different from those of the near east, that, where civilizations take off.
GR: And just maybe a final thought, I mean, I’m based in Canada, and it seems when I’m hearing about de-dollarization at the sinking of the US economy and how things are going to go for ordinary individuals, and I’m wondering if Canada can somehow escape that trajectory next to me or are we kind of manacles at the wrists, where the United States goes, we’re going there too?
MH: Canada is completely controlled by the banking sector. I wrote an article for the government’s think-tank, Canada and the New Monetary Order, in 1978, detailing how Canada was dependant. It’s very debt-financed, financially controlled, and its government is utterly corrupt. The neoliberal party, the liberal party there is fairly corrupt, and so are most of the other parties, and they look at the United States as protecting the corruption and economic gangsterism that enables them to control Canada.
GR: Well, Michael Hudson, I guess we’ve got to go now, but thanks for that very large and interesting discussion on our survival, how we survive this war, and what the consequences will be. Thank you very much for being my guest on Global Research.
MH: It’s good to be here.
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