Backfired! U.S. New Cold War Policy Has Backfired – And Created Its Worst Nightmare

[KoKo]

By Michael Hudson

Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and author of The Bubble and Beyond (2012), Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1968 & 2003), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971).

December 11, 2014 "ICH" -

1. The world’s geopolitics, major trade patterns and military alliances have changed radically in the past month. Russia has re-oriented its gas and oil trade, and also its trade in military technology, away from Europe toward Eurasia.

The result is the opposite of America’s hope for the past half-century of dividing and conquering Eurasia: setting Russia against China, isolating Iran, and preventing India, the Near East and other Asian countries from joining together to create an alternative to the U.S. dollar area. American sanctions and New Cold War policy has driven these Asian countries together in association with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an alternative to NATO, and in the BRICS moves to avoid dealing with the dollar area, the IMF and World Bank austerity programs.

Regarding Europe, America’s insistence that it join the New Cold War by imposing sanctions on Russia and blocking Russian gas and oil exports has aggravated the Eurozone’s economic austerity, making it even more of a Dead Zone. This week a group of Germany’s leading politicians, diplomats and cultural celebrities wrote an open letter to Angela Merkel protesting her pro-U.S. anti-Russian policy. By overplaying its hand, the United States is in danger of driving Europe out of the U.S. economic orbit.

Turkey already is moving out of the U.S.-European orbit, by turning to Russia for its energy needs. Iran also has moved into an alliance with Russia. Instead of the Obama administration’s neocons dividing and conquering as they had planned, they are isolating America from Europe and Asia. Yet there has been almost no recognition of this in the U.S. press, despite its front-page discussion throughout Europe and Asia. Instead of breaking up the BRICS, the dollar area is coming undone.

This week, President Putin is going to India to negotiate a gas and arms deal. Last week he was in Turkey diverting what was to be the South Stream pipeline away from southern Europe to Turkey. And Turkey is becoming an associate of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization integrating the BRICS in a defensive alliance against the United States, now that it is obvious that it has no chance of joining the EU.


A few months earlier, Russia announced the largest oil and gas trade and pipeline investment ever, with China – along with a transfer of missile defense technology.

More At......

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40442.htm

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Wow. I find I can't even think through what this will mean

on the domestic political scene. Both short and long term.

Short-term, there might be a short little boomlet driven by lower fossil energy prices at the retail level.

Long-term, our half-dead infrastructure is going to make it increasingly easy for the rest of the world to ignore us, especially after the Internationalists move on to whatever end awaits them at the hands of the thoroughly modernized Asians.

[jtuck004]

4. "thoroughly modernized Asian" < As opposed the "Patriots" from here. lol

Heck, they may be better off.

[rhett o rick]

2. k & r. Thanks for posting. nm

[Downwinder]

3. Necessary to develop a European market for oil sands petroleum.

Have to take them off Russian oil and gas.

[Purveyor]

5. Thanks for posting this KoKo. I had it up on my browser this afternoon but

was called away.

Noticeable silence from the McCarthyites on this read, indeed.

+1

[bemildred]

6. Yeah, we seem to be antagonizing both Russia and China in hopes of driving them apart.

I've been trying to figure out how that is supposed to work.