How the sanctions are going
As ever, it’s the unintended consequences that dominate
How are the sanctions on Russia working out? Bloomberg reports that Russia has done more oil drilling than in the past decade. RussiaBriefing tells us that Russian rail-freight volumes heading east exceeded westbound freight for the first time. The reversal is no surprise given the sanctions, but it does symbolise the extent of the “pivot to Asia” Russia has gone through in little under 12 months.
This is what the sanctions have wrought: a whole new ballgame is taking shape. Not only has a 40-year trend of rising asset prices and lowering interest rates finally reversed itself, so has a two-centuries trend of growing US imperial power. And now the combination of bad money and bad policies will set off a whole “cluster” of terrible things. One of them is the creation of a huge new rival – India, China and Russia combined – aiming to take the US down a peg.
The US is not the republic it was, but an empire. Citizens do not influence it; they are influenced by it. They do not control it; they are controlled by it. And they don’t use it to pursue their own happiness; they are used by it, for the happiness of others. The others are the elite. From universities to the Deep State, they form what Antonio Gramsci called a “hegemon”. That is, they all believe more or less the same things and work together, the great and the good, to expand the imperial power.
They do this no matter who you vote for. A new book by David Rothkopf, American Resistance, inadvertently lets the cat out of the bag. Donald Trump was clearly elected president in 2016. The People spoke; the feds didn’t listen. Rothkopf is grateful to the Deep State for thwarting the president. Instead, according to Peter Spiegel’s review of the book, in the Financial Times, Deep State functionaries “stood up for their institutions and made sure they did the important and sometimes difficult work of governing properly”.
“Governing properly” means getting the results the Deep State wants. Rothkopf was appalled when
Trumpers contested the results of the 2020 election. He, along with almost all elite commentators, rushed to tell us how the protestors “endangered democracy”. Perhaps they didn’t want to admit that US democracy had already been corrupted, by themselves.
Fiona Hill, a “Russia expert” on the US payroll, had to prevent Trump from “warping US foreign policy”. Hill describes how she and Rex Tillerson, Trump’s secretary of state, manipulated what Trump saw and was told to manage his own desire for civilised relations with Russia and an arms-control deal. Thanks to them, we didn’t get an arms control deal with Russia. Instead, we got sanctions, and war. They are not ashamed of having perverted democracy. They’re proud of it. Because they know better than “the People”. It is the will of the Deep State elite that matters.
“Sanctions have created a huge new rival to American imperial power”