How sanctions on Russia boomeranged

11 Oct

Sometimes I feature pieces whose authors’ worldviews differ significantly from mine. Take the last post but one, in which Richard Murphy’s starting point is that all-mouth-and-no-trousers speech by the UK’s newly imposed but terminally ailing PM. From there he goes on to nail the problems – some political, 1 some philosophical – ignored by her “growth, growth and more growth”  vacuous grandstanding.

(That post sparked exchanges below the line which expose some of the deepest rifts within the ranks of those opposed to a political-economy which must – though few of us truly get this – prioritise profits over people; the few over the many; ‘growth’ over sanity.)

And here I go again. Patrick Cockburn is a journalist I disagree with on a few major things, while admiring his truthful reportage. Which is all I need say as preface to a post appearing yesterday in CounterPunch.

How the West’s Sanctions on Russia Boomeranged

When President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February, he began two very different wars. One was a military conflict in which the Russian armed forces have suffered repeated defeats, from the failure of the initial invasion to the successes of the Ukrainian counter-offensive.

This is where Mr Cockburn and I part company. As I indicated, also yesterday, in my intro to a piece by Caitlin Johnstone, I do not accept that Russia’s move of February 24 (or of February 21, with its recognition of Luhansk and Donbass independence) “began” anything. Rather, it was a consequence of three decades of Russian attempts at reason and diplomacy being rewarded by lies, insults and gross provocation.

(I could open up another debate here: on why liberal writers of talent and integrity – Richard Murphy, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot even 2 – make devastating errors of judgment through failure to see how their humanist perspective leaves them highly vulnerable to manipulation by the West’s sophisticated propaganda systems. See my 2017 post on ‘universalism’.)

Nor do I take at face value that quasi-military assessment of Russia suffering ‘repeated defeats’. First, questions of who has the upper hand are no less politically charged – with truth the first casualty – than are those of who is culpable. Second, as others have said – Moon of Alabama, Andrei Martyanov and Alex Mercouris – Western assessments of Russian strategy are (at best) guesses informed not only by the very different (and very unsuccessful) strategies of NATO, but by questionable assumptions as to what Moscow is trying to achieve. 3

Nevertheless, and as if to remind me of why I rate Mr Cockburn as highly as I do, he continues:

But the Ukrainian conflict also saw the start of an economic war waged against Russia by the West whose outcome is far more uncertain. The US, UK, EU and their allies have sought to impose a tight economic siege on Russia, focusing primarily on its oil and gas exports, to weaken it and compel it to give up its assault on Ukraine.

This second war, in contrast to the situation on the battlefield, has not been going well and the West suffered a serious setback this week when the Opec+ group, which includes Russia, decided to cut its crude exports by two million barrels a day in order to force up prices. The decision came despite intense lobbying of Saudi Arabia by the US where President Joe Biden is desperate to prevent the price Americans pay for petrol at the pump going up just before the midterm congressional elections in November. Reacting furiously to the news, the White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre said that it was “clear” that Opec+ was “aligning with Russia”.

Embarrassing aspect of oil sanctions

The desire among Democrats to keep oil prices low is so intense that they have led to a little-noticed and – from the point of view of the US and many of its Nato allies – embarrassing aspect of oil sanctions on Russia. It is only because the sanctions have largely failed that the price of benchmark Brent crude fell 24 per cent from $123 a barrel in mid-June to $93.50 a barrel earlier this week.

This fall in prices, which is now going into reverse so the price may reach $100 by Christmas, happened in large part because Russia was able to reroute two-thirds of its lost sales to the West to countries such as India and China through which it entered the world oil market. This has been hugely convenient to the US because the slide in the oil price has prevented the rise in the cost of living being even higher

Read Patrick Cockburn’s piece in full …

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The above notwithstanding, I attach a caveat even to Patrick Cockburn’s conclusions on those failed sanctions. What he overlooks, again due to limits inherent to his worldview, is that for a fast declining US Empire, 4 drawing Russia into a costly quagmire on her borders was never the sole aim. At least as important, given the business opportunities for Europe in Eurasia rising, is that of preventing Europe from moving closer to Russia and, ipso facto, China.

Europe’s sanctions on Russia have forced her to do what she should have been doing all along, which is to turn away from the West – God knows, the messages have been clear enough from that quarter – and look eastwards and southwards. While Europeans shiver and businesses go to the wall, Washington gets what it wanted; a Europe bound ever more tightly to its orbit.

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  1. An opinion piece in the Guardian yesterday, and well worth reading in full, offers this on the practical aspects of Truss’s plight. Under the header, Commanding no loyalty, with no winning moves, Liz Truss is facing her endgame, ConservativeHome deputy editor Henry Hill tells us: “Beneath the  [Tory] dismay is a growing suspicion that there simply isn’t a viable Truss project at all  … to calm the markets, Kwarteng has pledged to balance his £43bn of unfunded tax cuts with cuts to public spending. Yet no politically viable path to cuts on that scale exists.”
  2. As if to underline a more general point, Polly Toynbee – not that I’d call her a radical of the Murphy/Klein/Monbiot stamp – has a Guardian post out today on the dreadful state of Britain’s NHS. I do not believe her any more desirous than Starmer of getting behind real change. Her manage-capitalism-better worldview precludes her from seeing why the West’s FIRE economies, in which Britain takes joint first place with the USA, require the running down of the NHS. Nevertheless Ms Toynbee, armed as ever with the facts and in full attack mode, is a force to behold.
  3. Take the much trumpeted “failure of Russian forces to take Kiev”. Since NATO’s wars of subjugation require the seizure of cities to take over vital infrastructure, this objective is projected onto an army with the very different aim of securing territories whose large ethnic Russian populations are embroiled in an eight year civil war blissfully ignored in the West, because it wasn’t in the papers, but which has killed over 10,000. Yes, that these aims may change is a given in the fluid and potentially Armageddon situation Washington has spent decades engineering. (Some call us Putin apologists for saying such things, though none engage us on core specifics – how could they?) But I’ve yet to hear an account in Western media’s propaganda saturated coverage (again, see that Caitlin piece) which sets out how these columnists and reporters got to be such talented mind-readers. (Unlike me, they go not on what the Kremlin says and does but on what they  say it wants to do.)
  4. A strikingly recurrent flaw in the perspective of otherwise progressive humanists is their failure to recognise that the US Empire is indeed “a thing”.

8 Replies to “How sanctions on Russia boomeranged

  1. … failure to see how their humanist perspective leaves them highly vulnerable to manipulation by the West’s sophisticated propaganda systems.

    Such manipulation involves conspiracy and so to see it is to be a conspiracy theorist. It is a condition of their employment not to be conspiracy theorists. Lizz Truss is being set up to fail in order to usher in the real neo-liberal hatchet man, Sir Kier Starmer.

    Here is Mainbot presenting the psuedo-opposition as the solution. That’s his job.
    https://twitter.com/DoubleDownNews/status/1577574544478507009

    As Mr.Leninology said:

    I don’t know. It’s a good video but generally, when you’ve got a government working for the oligarchs, the pound doesn’t tank and the markets don’t panic, and ratings agencies and the IMF don’t scold or warn, because the circulation of power and capital is not disrupted.

    • Lizz Truss is being set up to fail in order to usher in the real neo-liberal hatchet man, Sir Kier Starmer

      Agreed. The Tories can sit it out a term or at a push two – given the very different circs, economic and psephological, I can’t see Starmer lasting as long as Blair – while they regroup, prior to finding a “unity” leader of Cameron stamp. But whatever happens, the problems for British capitalism (and the West’s at large: some different from the UK’s, many the same) are more deeply rooted.

      • I just remembered that bevin made much the same point in a comment below this October 5 post. He wrote:

        The natural political division in the UK right now is between Blairism and Socialism. Truss is not the first Tory PM to dissolve in contact, she is the fourth in less than a decade. The Tory ‘brand’ is no longer fit for purpose- Blairism serves the ruling class far better. And when it is opposed by Toryism it is unbeatable because the only alternative is a clumsier version of itself.

  2. Given the list of unimpeachable journalistic reporting, with links, set out at the Moon of Alabama blog here …

    https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/10/russia-having-run-out-of-missiles-launches-barrage-on-ukraine.html#more

    … it surely cannot be too long before Russia is reduced to using real boomerangs? Pity Charlie Drake is no longer around to show them how to lob the thing without it coming back

    No wonder the current street joke in Russia today is: thank God, we ran out of missiles in March, so nobody will blame us for attacking Ukraine (courtesy Andrei Martyanov)

    Meanwhile, one of the key topics of conversation below the line over at ex-CIA operative turned poacher Larry Johnson’s blog …

    https://sonar21.com/what-a-difference-a-day-makes/

    ..is just where the Russians are getting all their washing machines from to cannibalise the chips to install in their non-existent missiles which they clearly ran out of multiple times over the past six months?

    Maybe someone over at foggy bottom needs to seriously look at the dangers posed to Western civilisation arising from the very obvious Washing Machine gap? Mark my words, heads will roll. Or, at the very least, tumble.

    Apparently the latest line from The Official Narrative is that the Russians are actually using missiles supplied from Iran or maybe even North Korea. It cannot be too long before the Western media are seriously selling the line that ‘Putin’ is trading Russian oil for the latest Indian ECM (Exploding Cow Missile).

    Please don’t mention the fan.

    The one question which does occur is how long it is going to take (if ever) for the penny to drop with the Western Commentariat class that this is an existential struggle between two completely incompatible systems, only one of which can survive:

    https://thesaker.is/putins-september-30-2022-speech-a-commented-reading/

    Meanwhile, the West continued and continues looking for another chance to strike a blow at us, to weaken and break up Russia, which they have always dreamed about, to divide our state and set our peoples against each other, and to condemn them to poverty and extinction. They cannot rest easy knowing that there is such a great country with this huge territory in the world, with its natural wealth, resources and people who cannot and will not do someone else’s bidding.

    “Comment: Here Putin confirms something which I have been writing about for years: the West and Russia are locked into an existential war simply because Russia wants to be truly sovereign, which is something which the West considers and existential threat.”

    “The West is ready to cross every line to preserve the neo-colonial system which allows it to live off the world, to plunder it thanks to the domination of the dollar and technology, to collect an actual tribute from humanity, to extract its primary source of unearned prosperity, the rent paid to the hegemon. The preservation of this annuity is their main, real and absolutely self-serving motivation.”

    “Comment: here Putin is basically saying that the West is a kind of “international hyena” who lives by robbing and murdering anybody else. Furthermore, Putin clearly indicates that the West will not agree to even consider another developmental model, hence is conclusion that preserving this state of affairs is the West “main, real and absolutely self-serving motivation”.”

    This looks like going the distance.

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