GLAZYEV´S TAKE ON THINGS AND WW3 / MACLEOD FINANCE

Glazyev’s take on things and WW3

“The west declared a war against us… And now we are going to distribute nuclear weapons to anyone who can use it against the west” — Aleksandr Dugin 

ALASDAIR MACLEOD

The reaction in Russian government circles to the cluster bomb attack in Sevastopol last Sunday clearly shows that the Russians are losing patience with NATO’s direct involvement in Ukraine. 

Having resisted the temptation to rise to the bait of NATO’s increasing belligerence, will Putin now respond like with like, his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov having said that there will be consequences?

It is always a good idea to spend some time trying to understand how others see things. 

And nowhere is this more important today than in the misunderstandings between Russia and China on one side, and America and Europe on the other.

Looking for clues, this led me to read Sergei Glazyev’s book: The Last World War: 

The US to Move and Lose, published in Moscow in 2016. 

This is not a critique of that work as such, rather a commentary on our differences with Russia in the context of today’s geopolitical conflict.

Events have moved on in the last eight years since the book was published. 

It followed the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, which we know from US statements and Wikileaks was backed by the US. 

In a sense, the book is prophetic, in that as the title suggests events in Ukraine were propelling us towards a new world war.

Glazyev is one of two leading Russian economists regularly contributing to the Izborsky Club, a conservative think-tank of which philosopher Aleksandr Dugin is a prominent member. 

The Club looks back to the days when Russia was great, with its writers supporting the state’s control of public morality. 

There appears to be little condemnation by the Club of Stalin’s methods of ideological control, the absence of which is also reflected in Glazyev’s book.

It is said that members of the Izborsky Club influence Putin’s thinking. 

And we certainly know that Glazyev, Dugin, and other names less familiar in the West are or have been in Putin’s inner circle. 

Therefore, we can probably assume that the ideologies of Glazyev and other Izborsky Club members are broadly shared with Putin.

The philosophical basis of the Izborsky Club is that the state is supreme and that the people have a duty to serve the state. 

Russia’s sovereignty is all. 

It rejects political, moral, and economic liberalism. 

It seeks to promote a Russian order based on traditional values. 

It rejects western influences in education, Russian institutions, and in public morality. 

It has denounced Russian government policies in 2016 as being too centrist, harking back to the days of firm state control, the re-establishment of Russia’s welfare state, and of state planning.

This is precisely the opposite of the American constitution, where the federal state’s role is to serve the people — at least that was the original mandate.

Writers for Izborsky glory in the past —Peter the Great, even Ivan the Terrible’s control through secret police lauded by some, and perhaps Stalin and his methods as well. 

They appear to be influenced by two factors. 

Tsarist Russia remained feudal until 1861 when serfdom was abolished, and it remained a generally closed society to outside political influences until the revolution. 

And communism ensured it remained an autarkic nation until perestroika in the1980s.

The objective of foreign policy under Lenin, Stalin, and Khruschev in cold wars was essentially to protect the Soviet by undermining its enemies. 

The distinction between this objective and the west’s assumption that the Soviets were out to dominate the world is important. 

The expansion into Eastern Europe was simply a gift from Hitler’s failure. 

Soviet society and its institutions remained insular and isolated from the rest of the world.

The free market basis of economic development was therefore unknown to Russian economists. 

I remember well the one exception: a Russian economist who discovered the writings of Ludwig von Mises. 

Yuri Maltsev was an economic adviser on Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms, eventually escaping from the KGB in the boot of a car across the Finnish border. 

He told me that he had found Mises’s works overlooked in a Russia library. 

And for him, it was truly a revelation.

Maltsev was an exception. 

Economists such as Glazyev and his Izborsky Club fellow member Mikhail Deliagin were educated under the old soviet system, without the free market influences Maltsev discovered by accident. 

Today, Glazyev supports the Chinese model, whereby under state direction and regulation entrepreneurial activity is encouraged but always in the context of the furtherance of the state’s objectives. 

It shares the Russian philosophy that the state is both above the law (it cannot be prosecuted and there is no redress) and the Russian people.

Glazyev’s version of money

Glazyev came to our attention when he was appointed by Putin to advise the Eurasian Economic Union of ex-USSR states on an alternative trade settlement medium to the dollar. 

He followed this by up by writing an article for the Moscow business paper, Vedomosti, recommending that Russia re-adopt a gold standard, which had been dropped by Khruschev. 

Furthermore, there was strong evidence that Russia tried to get a gold backed trade settlement medium onto the BRICS agenda at the Johannesburg summit.

Given that there is next to nothing in Glazyev’s book which suggests that he has a true understanding of the difference between gold and credit, be it currency or bank deposits, one is left wondering if Glazyev’s promotion of gold is driven by an unstated understanding, or a reversion to earlier Russian gold standards as a means to an end: the end being to topple the dollar. 

Nevertheless, in common with China Russia has decided that gold is the strategic escape from dollar hegemony. 

It has accumulated both declared and hidden reserves and is boosting gold mining output.

Glazyev’s understanding that gold is money appears to come as much from tradition as from the lack of counterparty risk. 

The ultimate cost of the latter has been demonstrated by America weaponising the dollar against Russia and others who resist US hegemony. 

China has been an accumulator of gold since 1983, encouraging its people to do so as well from 2002, long before the US publicly felt threatened by the rise of China.

Geopolitical implications

If we take America of the Founding Fathers and Britain’s historic relationship between their governments and citizens, then the difference from Russia is stark. 

Fundamentally, it is the Anglo-Saxon view that the state serves its population instead of Russia’s philosophy that the people are there to serve the state, which fuels geopolitical misunderstanding today.

However, America and Britain have become heavily socialistic, refuting free markets and personal freedom. 

Today, we are comparing different socialist systems. 

Russia’s and China’s are modified communism, while the Anglo-Saxons’ are socialistic capitalism. 

America’s socialism is driven by corporatism, increasingly serving the interests of the armaments, banking, and pharmaceutical industries. 

Brussels, the seat of EU power has become a business lobbying centre. 

In Russia it is the other way round: the oligarchs are tolerated so long as they toe Putin’s line.

Despite the socialist convergence or maybe because of it, it seems inevitable that the two sides are now drifting towards greater conflict. 

The Americans with their currency have dominated global affairs since the early-1920s, when the US became Europe’s principal creditor. 

As the world’s unchallenged hegemon, her position is now being challenged by China, and her arrogant treatment of post-Soviet Russia has driven these two Asian nations into a marriage of convenience. 

A more measured approach by America might have prevented this happening.

The Americans’ mistakes stem from over-maturity of power, as Glazyev points out in his book by repeating familiar theories of long cycles of political dominance. 

The US first abandoned its founding principles of minimal state and free markets under President Hoover in the late 1920s followed by Franklin Roosevelt and his new deal. 

Until then, politicians in the US and the UK knew to leave economic intervention well alone. 

Today, following the Keynesian revolution the US and its western alliance intervene every which-way to supress the free markets that made Britain and then America great during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Reasoned theories of economics, money, and credit, as well as subsequent performances of free-market economies such as post-war Hong Kong compared with communist command economies over the same timescale prove beyond doubt that if America had stuck to free markets and sound money, she would unquestionably have retained her global domination. 

Along with free markets and sound money, free trade guarantees harmonious foreign relations. 

The foreign policies of Lord Liverpool, Castlemaine, and Wellington following the Napoleonic wars laid it out: don’t intervene in other nation’s affairs except to protect your own trade interests. 

This is now being copied by Russia and China in their policies with trade partners today to their obvious mutual benefit, which is why compared with western hectoring the two Asian powers are attracting the global south into their camp.

The drift into a new world war

Some say that America’s attempt to topple Putin and take over Russia is in order to gain access to her vast resources. 

I think it is just as likely to be fuelled by a clash of cultures, with yesterday’s hegemon refusing to give way to a new Eurasian order. 

From this analysis, what is particularly concerning is the lack of common intellectual ground which is dangerously fuelling misunderstanding between nuclear powers.

America and NATO are being drawn into the Ukraine conflict increasingly overtly. 

Last Sunday, Russia was angered by a missile strike with illegal cluster bombs on Sevastopol, launched by Ukraine which they say was supplied by the US and guided by US satellite technology. 

For the Russians, this was a direct intervention by America. 

The provocation was all but a declaration of war.

In recent days, Putin renewed Russia’s arms supply agreement with North Korea, and reaffirmed her relationship with Vietnam — moves according to Aleksandr Dugin which recognises that

“The west declared a war against us… We are now at war, and the masks are off… We are now going to fight the west… And now we are going to distribute nuclear weapons to anyone who can use it against the west”.

As a leading contributor to the Izborsky Club, we can only hope Dugin’s seemingly extreme views are not shared by Russia’s leadership. 

But Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister indicated that he considers all actions by NATO in Ukraine as an ultimatum against Russia. 

And now EU countries and the UK are talking about conscription or national service, moves which surely anticipate the drift into a new European conflict.

This is a situation rapidly drifting out of control. 

The Americans appear to be escalating the overall conflict with Russia on other fronts, reportedly sending a carrier fleet to the Eastern Mediterranean. 

The objective can only be to protect Israel from Hezbollah, a situation likely to extend to conflicts against Iran, now a close ally of Russia and China.

Aleksandr Dugin’s comments that Russia will now distribute nuclear weapons to its allies better not be prophetic. 

But perhaps we are now passing the point of no return.