In a major provocation, the European Union on December 12 agreed to indefinitely freeze the remaining Russian assets held in European banks. They even managed to declare the situation an “emergency,” thereby sidestepping the dissenting votes of several EU member states, and paving the way for the actual seizing of the assets over the coming period for use by Ukraine.
The move clearly parallels the rising levels of desperation within European elites, who are viscerally experiencing the complete collapse of their worldview in the wake of the Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy. To make matters worse, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced on December 12 that it had successfully taken control of Seversk, one of the few remaining strongholds in Ukraine’s Donbass.
The tragedy that is continuing to unfold in Ukraine, with thousands more Ukrainian lives lost daily and the grinding down of European economies along with them, is, however, the product of a deeper problem. The so-called “liberal” worldview, which truly believed it could demand obedience from the rest of the world, and isolate or sanction into oblivion those who wouldn’t agree, is at the root of this failing policy. Therefore, when the Trump Administration released its NSS, declaring that neoliberalism was headed toward “civilizational erasure,” it was a useful turning over of the proverbial chessboard. However, just because the American administration realized the current path was failing disastrously, doesn’t necessarily mean they know what to replace it with.
Speaking to the December 12 meeting of the International Peace Coalition, former British diplomat and MI6 officer Alastair Crooke said the following: “The starting point, really, of the [National Security] Strategy is to acknowledge that sanctions have failed. … And it makes it plain that the attempt to lock China, and by extension, Russia, out of the economic loop, has failed precisely because they adapted.… [China has] indeed adapted in a radical way.” In return for enacting this policy of imperial unipolar rule, Crooke said, the U.S. was confronted with “economic structural contradictions,” which led to a “burgeoning debt and an out-of-control fiscal matrix, which, without a solution, portends essentially that the empire will fold, will implode.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took a similar stance in comments he made December 11 to the Russian Federation Council. Lavrov noted that Trump “is the only Western leader who … began to show an understanding of the causes that made the war in Ukraine unavoidable.” Trump also recognized the “profound crisis within the EU and the fact that it is heading in a direction that is clearly at odds with the realities of a multipolar world.”
But Lavrov had more to add. While Trump repeatedly spoke of the Biden Administration’s weaponizing of the dollar through sanctions, when he finally became President, “he strongly criticized BRICS, primarily for challenging dollar dominance,” Lavrov critiqued. “It was not we who abandoned the dollar; rather, the West, chiefly the United States, weaponized it,” Lavrov went on. “The process of insuring against the diktat of those who print dollars and euros and provide other Western ‘services’ in the global economy is picking up pace, because it reflects the legitimate interests of the World Majority…. This trend will get stronger moving forward.”
To state it clearly: The unipolar order is in its final death throes, and a new system in the world is already in the process of coming into existence. If the nations of the West not only give up trying to be the world’s policeman, but also decide to cooperate with the rest of the world in creating a new anti-colonial world system, then there is no problem that could not be overcome. In the same December 12 meeting of the IPC, Helga Zepp-LaRouche emphasized:
“The crucial issue is really, in my view, that, given the absolute disarray of the strategic situation, the fact that there is this break with previous security doctrines of the United States, and the fact that none of these papers addresses the legitimate effort by the BRICS, by the SCO countries—to build a new system based on the UN Charter, on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, and the idea of creating a world order worthy of the rationality and the creativity of the human species—this is why I think we need to really, in earnest, discuss how do we get to a new security architecture, which takes into account the interest of all.”
