With the downing of the Malaysia Airlines plane in Ukrainian territory and the attempt of the US to attribute the responsibility to Russia, the event has escalated through commercial, economic and financial sanctions. These have achieved little more than to facilitate and empower multipolarism and to weaken the unipolarist strategy.

 

Under pressure from the US, on July 29, the European Union, agreed to impose sanctions that affect various sectors of the Russian economy, such as petroleum, defence and dual-use products, limiting access of Russian banks and governmental agencies to European and US markets. Europe added an embargo on the sale of arms and electronic products destined for military use and the US added a Russian naval construction firm to its list of banned military technology enterprises.

 

The Putin government has responded by closing its domestic market to agricultural production, vegetables, fruit, meat and milk products from the Union, causing problems in member countries and their industry. Losses are estimated at 1.2 billion euros (it should also be noted that Russia not only closed its markets to the EU but also to products of the US, Japan, Australia and Canada). The Russian government ordered the Federal Agency of Veterinary Supervision to consult a number of Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Ecuador) in order for these countries to increase their part in the provision of food supplies, while the EU attempted to dissuade Latin American countries from supplying Russia.

 

However, it is not only food markets that are affected. Some analysts and even directives of important US banks were preoccupied. Joseph Quinlan, chief market strategist of the Bank of America indicated: “The crisis created a rethink of the dollar-denominated world that we live in,” and referred to “this nasty turn between Russia and the West related to sanctions, that can be an accelerator toward a more multicurrency world.” As China accumulates gold bullion and intends to make the yuan acquire increased importance in international commerce with the Swap (futures in monetary exchange), extending its lines even to Switzerland, they are concluding an agreement for transactions based on the yuan with the stock markets of London, Frankfurt and a number of Latin American countries.

 

In the face of these events it appears that the US is closing its claws on all the interests based on the military industrial complex, big pharma and the dollar and petroleum in order to uphold their currency.  But this only shows that they have lost influence and that it is no longer enough to count on the destabilizing of the Middle East, provoking a genocide in the Gaza strip or in Iraq in order to sell arms, or on increasing the price of oil to uphold the dollar, or on attempting to impose a default on Argentina, upsetting the global financial system, nor on an infestation of the world with Ebola to restore the profits of their laboratories.

 

All these movements and skirmishes (Syria, Iran, Ukraine) result in increased relations between China and Russia, all of which implies a shift of the strategic axis of the world economy towards the Orient.

 

The latest agreement on strategic cooperation between Russia and China makes it possible for China to expand towards the West. If we add the agreements signed in Brazil, at the BRICS Summit (Contingency Funds, Development Bank), plus the presence of UNASUR and the directives of CELAC, of bilateral agreements of Russia and China with Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina and Brazil, in addition to the declarations made in Bolivia in the G77+China Summit, we can assume that the West and the unipolar strategy can no longer make their economic sanctions effective against anyone.

 

What is now being seen is that the thrust of investment funds of the transnationals, with their process of fragmentation of productive processes through direct foreign investment, has weakened the old powers of the triad (US, Germany and Japan) by displacing the axis of the economy and politics. This allows for the ascent of new actors: the so-called emerging powers and new regional blocs, which then become new centres of power, establishing a new equilibrium in global power, with the emergence of new institutions, questioning the centre and periphery and institutions born of the previous established order (Breton Wood). This crisis offers a framework in which peoples can organise ourselves as a social force and find an alternative to the current social relations.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

 

- Carlos Rang. Lecturer with the Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, UNRC, Argentina.