International outcry a wake up call to Russia. “COLD WAR” a thing of the past.

International Relations

https://www.laestrella.com.pa/nacional/220327/guerra-ucrania

A necessary reflection

The editors of the Monthly Review are right when they point out that the war unfolding in Ukraine “represents a turning point in the New Cold War and a great human tragedy.” Understanding the origin and impact of this situation is a necessary task for those of us who, following Martin Luther King, think that “war is a bad chisel to carve tomorrow”.

Clausewitz, in his classic work On War, defines war as “an act of violence to compel the other to do our will”. This leads to several questions: what are the motives that lead one party to try to impose their will on the other? What specifically constitutes an act of violence?

To think, as an essayist from La Estrella de Panamá did, that it is a problem of purely ideological contradictions, giving neoliberal globalization a pacifist interpretation, aimed at multiplying the positive impacts on the well-being of the population, is a fundamental error. .

It is also important to consider that these are contradictions encapsulated in the political sphere, unrelated to the framework of economic interests. Worse still is the blunder of the essayist for the Star of Panama, when he proposed that the mortgage crisis of 2008 was the simple result of corruption, without taking into account the relationship between it and the financialized model of the US economy.

Interests and contradictions

The end of the Cold War, with the defeat and dismemberment of the Soviet Union, meant the beginning of a unipolar world, dominated by what Samir Amin called the triad, made up of the United States, Japan and Europe, the first of these countries being the basic hegemon. The neoliberal economic policy of this triad represented, contrary to what the essayist from La Estrella thinks, the attempt to build a global economic model at the service of their interests.

At the end of the Cold War, Gorbachev was promised at the time of the reunification of Germany that NATO would not advance “one centimeter” beyond the border lines that existed at that time. This promise was broken, given that NATO has now integrated 15 more countries.

In the development of the neoliberal globalization model, however, the so-called Law of Unequal Development did not stop working, giving rise to important contradictions. The first of these was the development of the People’s Republic of China, which now appears as an emerging power capable of challenging US hegemony in economic, technological and military terms.

This has led US foreign policy to view China as the main strategic competitor. John Bellamy Foster, in an interesting article entitled “The New Cold War on China”, argues in a documented way that a basic objective of US foreign policy is “to force China to accept the political-economic order imposed by the alliance of the great powers under the leadership of the USA”.

In the case of Russia, the contending power of the United States during the Cold War, a different policy was followed, as highlighted by Brahma Chanelly in an article entitled “America is Focusing on the Wrong Enemy”.

The first difference has to do with the fact that the victorious power, unlike what it did after the Second World War, instead of helping the economic development of the losing power, imposed, with the help of international financial organizations, , a program of rigid, deep and rapid structural adjustment, which generated great hardships in Russia, where, to give an example, the life expectancy of the population was reduced. This, of course, was felt by the latter country as a national humiliation from which it should recover.

Second, at the end of the Cold War, Gorbachev was promised at the time of the reunification of Germany that NATO would not advance “one centimeter” beyond the border lines that existed at that time. This promise was broken, given that NATO has now integrated 15 more countries. It has an aerial presence in Estonia, Lithuania and Romania; also have missiles in Poland and Romania. To this must be added that the United States maintains troops deployed in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Romania.

What brings these contradictions to their boiling point is Ukraine. For the United States, according to the Brzezinski doctrine, based on the geopolitical ideas of Mackinder and developed in his book The Great World Chessboard, the checkmate against Russia should take place in Ukraine. For Russia, for its part, NATO’s advance towards Ukraine would imply an unacceptable level of risk, which is why it declares that such an advance would mean crossing a red line. The chessboard was used for war.

The Maidan coup and Ukraine’s treatment of its Russian-speaking population then give rise to an eight-year war, which ends up intensifying, becoming the spark that causes current events. It is, as Henry Kissinger himself warned in an article published in The Washington Post in 2014, something that could be prevented through proper diplomacy, which managed to balance the interests of the parties.

a turning point

The current conditions constitute, without a doubt, a turning point in the world order, which can have diverse results.

To begin with, it is clear that Russia will have to bear a high economic and social cost, and must seek greater economic independence.

It is also obvious that Europe, although it appears more unified, will suffer serious economic costs that will weaken it against the United States, which will reaffirm its influence over it. Just think of the high cost of energy decoupling and the rearmament process. Germany, for example, has announced that it would double its military budget, which will necessarily imply a relative reduction in social spending.

The United States will not be cost-free either. While it is true, as Robert Reich points out, that the oil companies of that country will benefit from the situation and that the military-industrial complex will also benefit from it, it is no less true that cost inflation, as Nouriel Roubini has insisted, will generate pressures towards stagflation, in conditions in which the Federal Reserve does not have many possibilities to intervene. On the other hand, the imposition of sanctions on the use of the dollar can, as Barry Eichengreen has pointed out, lead several countries and economic agents to consider reducing the use of the dollar in the structure of their reserves.

In the case of China, it can be pointed out that it is probably closer to Russia. A resounding victory for the United States would be risky for her, since the way would then be open to confront her as her most important strategic competitor. It could also benefit from cheap Russian oil and gas. Very likely it will do so cautiously to defend its exports to the West.

In this complicated scenario, Panama, prioritizing our national interests, must follow the path of neutrality and multilateralism.

Some Peculiarities of the Financial Reports
About the war in Ukraine

MISSION AND VISION

Social Thought (Pesoc) is made up of a group of social science professionals who, through their contributions, seek to promote and satisfy needs in the knowledge of these disciplines.

Its purpose is to present the population with analysis topics on the main problems that afflict them, and contribute with the strategies of solution programs.

The author is an economist and professor emeritus at the University of Panama

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