July 17, 2019, Strategic Culture Foundation http://www.strategic-culture.org (Russia)
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/07/17/thinking-fast-and-slow-why-west-cannot-see-rise-russia-china/
Martin Sieff*
Why do Western leaders, pundits and
academics all continue to despise the remarkable progress in economic and
strategic cooperation being made between Russia and China and with their
neighbors?
In the past six years, Presidents
Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China met each other for sustained
conferences on no less than 30 occasions.
President Xi paid a state visit to
Russia from June 5 to June 7 where he and President Putin held bilateral talks
which resulted in the two leaders signing an agreement to step up global strategic
stability in the modern-era. Then from June 8 to June 10, both leaders also
attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).
There was nothing sinister or secret
about these meetings. On the contrary, they were extensively covered in the
Russian and Chinese media. And they celebrated major advances in
the growing
cooperation two of the largest and most powerful nations in the world.
The trade volume between Russia and
China is expected to continue to accelerate and reach new heights, doubling the
current record level of $108 billion, the Russian economy ministry said.
Trade between Russia and China in
agricultural products and processed food alone rose by nearly 30 percent in
2018 to over $5 billion. Overall bilateral trade volume is now at $108 billion,
a rise of 25 percent in only one year and looks to rise even faster.
The significance in these
developments to the global balance of power and patterns of investment and
trade is very clear. Russia is fast becoming a food exporting superpower likely
to reach a level it has not experienced since before World War I.
Already, Russia succeeds in selling
wheat at a profit more cheaply and cost effectively to Indonesia than
Australia, Jakarta’s next door neighbor.
The economic sanctions slammed on
Russia by the United States and the European Union (EU) nations and Canada
after Crimea and the two eastern provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk opted out of
Ukraine following the Maidan coup in 2014 have backfired spectacularly.
They were meant to force Russia to
its knees and bully it into accepting the ongoing neo-colonization of Eurasia
by Washington, Wall Street, London and Brussels. Russia was meant to accept the
diktat of the Kiev coup d’état and many more or face being plunged back into the
hellish starvation of the 1990s.
(That dark era is still falsely
lauded throughout the West as a supposed “brief golden age of freedom” rather
than the horrific Great Depression on Steroids which, as I saw repeatedly with
my own eyes during those years, it truly was.)
However, instead, the sanctions
backfired. They proved the superiority of mercantilist industrial and
investment reality over the Free Trade, One World dreams of neocons,
neoliberals and the like that I sought to expose in my own 2012 book “That
Should Still Be Us.”
Following imposition of the
sanctions on Russia, domestic food processing and many other domestic
industries boomed to fill the demand caused by the end of unlimited processed
foods and other consumer imports. Russian agricultural production soared.
Inadvertently, US and EU bungling
created a vast domestic protected market across Russia and its Eurasian
neighbors. Now the maturing companies and industries created by that market are
poised to expand across the Middle East and Asia.
This astonishing development
explains why the St. Petersburg Forum continues to grow in scale and value so
rapidly every year. It also explains why the media and leaders of the West
remain so ludicrously blind to Russia’s growing prosperity and success.
They prefer to cling to the racist
contemptible fairytale that the Russian people are incapable of business,
industrial and agricultural success and excellence. They never visit Russia to
see the reality with their own eyes. They prefer to live in a ludicrous world
of their lurid imaginations. (And from Peter Pan to Harry Potter, who has been
better at creating dream worlds than the British or the Americans in
Hollywood?)
Also, Western leaders are blind to
the slow but steady and systematic achievements of Russia and China under
Presidents Putin and Xi because those leaders are literally invisible to their
Western counterparts.
Western democratic leaders with the
partial exception of US President Donald Trump are economic illiterates who
believe blindly in free trade, open borders and chaotic growth. They cannot
recognize the value of planning slowly, carefully and steadily with long term
investment strategies. From Abraham Lincoln to Lyndon Johnson, US leaders could
and did think, plan and act this way: But never since.
This is too slow for the instant
gratification, “make a quick profit and damn all the rest” mentalities of Wall
Street and the City of London and their political puppets today to comprehend.
Slow-but-sure moving long range industrial and communications infrastructure
development is simply invisible to them.
That is why the leaders of the West
today are literally blind to the enormous shifts in world power that have been
slowly, massively gathering momentum since the start of this century. But
blindness cannot prevent the Rise and Fall of Nations. Soon the true realities
of the New World will be clear to all.
*Martin Sieff During his 24 years as a senior foreign correspondent
for The Washington Times and United Press International, Martin Sieff reported
from more than 70 nations and covered 12 wars. He has specialized in US and
global economic issues.
The Return of Sammy Glick
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