INTERVIEW: Alex Krainer

A Multinodal World Is Emerging,
500 Years of Western Governance Is Over

Aug. 9—Alex Krainer, financial analyst and author, was interviewed Aug. 2, 2024 on the “Harley Schlanger Update” program (M-F) on The LaRouche Organization website. Krainer is the author of Grand Deception: The Truth about Bill Browder, the Magnitsky Act, and Anti-Russian Sanctions (2018). Krainer writes regularly on Alex Krainer’s Trend Compass: https://substack.com/@alexkrainer.

Schlanger, a regular commentator for The LaRouche Organization, is EIR U.S. Intelligence Director, and Vice Chairman of the Board of the Schiller Institute—United States. The program was titled, “Overcoming Fear of the Unknown.” EIR has edited the transcript, and added subheads.

Harley Schlanger: I have a very special guest joining me today, a colleague and a friend. He is Alex Krainer. Alex is a financial analyst, a blogger. You may have seen him, because he’s frequently interviewed on podcasts. He’s also an author, and he wrote an extraordinary book which explains a lot about why the West has villainized Vladimir Putin. The book is called The Grand Deception: The Truth About Bill Browder, the Magnitsky Act, and Anti-Russian Sanctions, published in 2018.

I invited Alex to join us today as we’re in the midst of epochal changes, what some people are calling tectonic shifts. And very little of this is understood in the West, because you don’t have access to the information, the intelligence of what’s actually going on. But Alex has been very much involved in this. He’s attended some of the [development] conferences, and I think he’ll have a lot to offer.

Before I begin, I’ll just say that my view and that of the Schiller Institute is that the nearly daily shocks that we’re seeing are the result of the end of an era of a neo-colonial system that’s been on the planet for almost 500 years and, in fact, has dominated the planet. Alex, like us, takes a long historic view of these changes, which today include the demise of the unipolar order and the emergence of what some call the multipolar order, or what [former U.S. Ambassador] Chas Freeman calls the multinodal order. So, Alex, welcome to our program.

Toward Multipolar Integration

Alex Krainer: Thank you for having me, Harley. Greetings to your viewers and listeners and it’s always good to join you. I think that the moment couldn’t be more interesting for us to witness. And I think that we’re looking at the end of the Western-centered flow of history, which has had a continuation of, I would say, at least 500 years. And so we are now at a juncture where this is about to be replaced with something very, very different. We’re going from Western civilization to a multipolar integration. And you know what? To what [Russian President] Vladimir Putin himself calls “a symphony” of civilizations. To authentic development, in—again, as Chas Freeman says—a multinodal world that is emerging.

Schlanger: Now, you could say that we’re seeing the decline of the West, but I think it’s more than that: An economic, moral collapse of the West and the rise of the East, because there’s a different perception of both the role of the sovereign nation state, and the importance that the nation state must serve the interests of the people, not private special interests. I know you’ve been at some of these conferences. What’s your view of the emergence of the Global South and how this is coming into the scene?

Krainer: Well, what you sense in those conferences is that these people, representatives of countries like Russia, China, India, Belarus, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, they are dealing with concrete problems of development. They are discussing how to allocate capital to improve the human condition, to build out a productive economy, to build out the infrastructure, to develop trade between nations, develop the payment systems, and so forth. There is no hint of ideology. Almost. There is none of this discussion of climate change, and the things like, you know, gender ideology, gender identity.

And it feels almost like a breath of fresh air when you step into this world. Because in the West, we have been so steeped in this hysteria that keeps rolling with the next “thing,” always the next thing. Witnessing people discussing normal things and practical solutions to pressing problems is almost like remembering what humanity is all about. And so that’s what, I gather, multipolar integrations are about. That’s the way they feel. And the contrast with where we are in the West couldn’t be greater.

Schlanger: A lot of people are very nervous in the West about the term de-dollarization; they don’t really have much of an understanding of what and why there’s a shift toward trading in national currencies, a new settlement system. Catch us up on that. Why has that become an important issue?

Krainer: Well, it’s become an important issue because, just as there was the case with the [British] pound and all the trade having to flow through London 100 years ago, today we have the [U.S.] dollar dominating global trade. All the trade was having to go through New York banks and European banks with eurodollar accounts, which allowed the global hegemon to coerce countries into kowtowing to their agenda and their policies. We’ve seen that different countries were sanctioned if they didn’t follow the policy directives of the IMF, of the Western powers. Countries practically lying next to each other had to trade using U.S. dollars through Federal Reserve Banks in the United States.

So, this gave the United States and European powers a lot of different ways to sanction those countries, to destabilize their economies, to impinge on their trade. And so now the reaction is that people want to throw this control mechanism off, and to trade between themselves freely, according to a one-on-one basis, according to terms that are most advantageous to both.

At the moment, I think we’re not yet on the verge of having a new trade currency or a new reserve currency, but we are certainly seeing a trend of countries using their own national currency on a bilateral basis to trade with one another.

A New Eurasian Perspective

Schlanger: President Putin recently has been talking about a new Eurasian perspective, a security and economic perspective. But he said it’s open to NATO countries to join, as opposed to what the West has done, which is to try to exclude countries. Do you see this as a possibility? Is it possible that, for example, Germany, which has been long targeted to stay away from Russia, that Germany or France or Italy or possibly Serbia, that these countries in Europe could be part of the Eurasian security and economic alliance?

Krainer: I think that this is coming. It may not seem plausible today, but if we take the long view of history, if we take the view of the long cycles in history, it is [plausible]. Germany, for example, always ended up in a close relationship with Russia at important historical junctures. Today, with Olaf Scholz in power and the Greens, this doesn’t seem likely. But those people will not be in power forever. Circumstances will change in the near term.

I think it’s more likely that we might see countries like Hungary jumping ship, and Serbia. Obviously, Serbia is not a NATO member country, but it is a part of the Eastern European community of nations. Slovakia could be a candidate.

I think it’s all but certain that NATO will collapse, that the European Union will collapse; and that the future resolution of the war in Ukraine will almost certainly make it easier for nations that lie along the flow of the Danube River, as they gain independent access to the Black Sea through the Danube. We’re talking about Serbia, Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia. These countries will no longer be landlocked in the same way. And it will not be possible for them to be embargoed or blockaded. So they will have free reign. They will have the maneuvering space to simply exit the European Union and to exit NATO. And the Western powers will not be able to punish them for this in the same way that they could do now.

Schlanger: At the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting, Putin laid out this perspective for Eurasia. What’s interesting to me is that the SCO includes China, India, Pakistan. So it’s a broad-based, cooperative effort. Is this your sense of it?

Krainer: Yes. Absolutely. And if you look at the agreements that were signed—Iran just became a member of the SCO—Iran has been designated, pretty much by China, as the pivot-point of the security architecture for the Middle East. And they, in their security documents, specifically address the fight against extremism, against terrorism, and against secessionism.

I don’t know exactly how they put it, but, basically their language exactly counters the strategy of British geopolitics, which has always been relying on secessionist movements, on terrorism, and on violent extremism to destabilize countries.

So basically what the SCO documents say—without saying it explicitly, but for everybody who knows how to read between the lines—is that they have pretty much announced that they will take on this British geopolitics of divide and conquer. They will take it head on and they will fight it. And to me this is an announcement that the Western powers are about to get squeezed out of the Eurasian continent as power players.

China Involved in Southwest Asia

Schlanger: You mentioned China’s discussion of Iran. The Chinese played a major role in bringing together a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and they were also involved in unification of the various factions of the Palestinians, which I think was just thrown into chaos by Netanyahu’s decision to kill [Hamas leader and lead peace negotiator Ismail] Haniyeh, and the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon [Fuad Shukr]. Iran is part of, or could be part of, the Belt and Road Initiative, Do you see China becoming more involved in Southwest Asia and also in Europe?

Krainer: Well, China already participates in annual naval exercises with Iran and Russia, which are usually held in the Indian Ocean outside of the Persian Gulf. But the signal is clear—you know, we are here, we are active in this region. And China has signed cooperation agreements that include mutual security with Iran, and so has Russia. So, we see a coordinated effort to turn the Eurasian continent from this.

The whole southern underbelly of Russia was basically a series of flashpoints that could always be triggered to destabilize any region: whether it’s between India and Pakistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Balochistan, the Caucasus region, Syria, Lebanon.

It seems to me that Russia, China, Iran, and increasingly with India’s cooperation, they are working proactively to return the whole region, the whole continent, to peace, to peaceful development and to a completely different geopolitical and security architecture than what we had for the last few centuries.

Schlanger: In her discussion of this, Helga Zepp-LaRouche has been making the point that it’s not just a question of making political agreements, but you need to have an agreement on fundamental principle, that it has to be a principled alliance, a philosophical approach. And in her Ten Fundamental Principles, she talks about the return to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which, of course, Tony Blair famously said no longer is valid. But the key there was that nations act for the benefit of the other. Is that something you see in terms of this Eurasian security initiative?

Krainer: Yes. And I think we have heard similar things from various Russian thinkers and writers who are close to Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin himself has spoken to this effect.

The term that struck me from Vladimir Putin is “symphony of civilizations.” Because not only do the Russians regard all these nations as sovereign nations, in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia. But they also regard these nations as authentic civilizations that should be free to develop according to their own values and faith and principles and traditions.

So, I think that’s a future to really look forward to, because it seems like a world of peace that’s about to blossom into prosperity and economic development and peace. Most importantly, is the fact that they’re leaving the doors open for Western powers to join in, including the United States, as equal partners rather than as hegemons, who wish to pretend to direct the policy of development and the arbitration of rules to themselves. I think that’s a future to look forward to, and it’s definitely coming from these multipolar integrations. It’s not coming from the West.

What Is Behind Western Targetting of Russia?

Schlanger: Now, I want to take advantage of your knowledge of the targeting of Russia, on which, of course, your book on Browder and the Magnitsky Act is very clear. But we know that the proxy war in Ukraine is not about freedom and democracy in Ukraine; not about the idea that the Ukraine crisis was an unprovoked attack by Russia; not about that it began in February 2022 and so on. This leaves out the Maidan coup. It leaves out, of course, the longer continuity which you took up in your book, the shock therapy, and the effects of that on Russia in the 1990s.

Do you see a connection between the discussion of NATO expansion going back to 1992, ’93, ’94 and the looting of the Russian economy during the ’90s, and the fight today? That this history makes it clear that it was not unprovoked, but that Russia has been provoked for a very long period of time?

Krainer: Yes. There’s definitely a continuity of policy in all of that, including, you know, the CIA role in Ukraine that goes back to practically the period in the aftermath of World War Two, not only with the United States, but also Britain. The day-to-day events might be difficult to comprehend unless you take the broad context of it into account. And I think that the broad context is given to us by the very people who are in charge of formulating policy, like George Soros or Kurt Walker, who was a former Trump ambassador to NATO.

And they basically say that what we’re observing today is not simply a clash between Russia and the West or NATO, but it’s a clash between two systems of governance. And then they say, well, it’s democracies versus tyrannies or autocracies. But this is very misleading.

What it is basically, is the conflict between the Western oligarchic, colonialist order versus pretty much everybody else, including the domestic populations of Western countries. And basically, the colonialist world order seeks to subjugate nations, to turn them into sources of cheap resources, and the local populations into a cheap pool of labor.

And then the objective is to turn those resources into financialized flows through Western banking institutions, and Russia is a major component. This is not only because it’s the world’s wealthiest nation in terms of resources, estimated at $75 trillion. It is also a major power on the Eurasian continent. And it’s a rival for control of the Eurasian continent for exactly the same reasons, that Russia is interesting to them [the West—ed.], namely for resources, and cheap labor.

And so, with a rival, they’re capable of saying, “no”. Crafting an independence policy is a problem for the Western empire. They seek to break up Russia, and destroy it and turn it into a number of small pieces and regime changes. So, if instead of Vladimir Putin you have somebody more like Boris Yeltsin, who signed off on whatever they told him to sign off on, then the Western powers again gain control of Russia’s resources, as they did during the 1990s.

Russia simply believes that Russian resources belong to the Russian people, that they should be used to improve the lives of the Russian people. And this same idea should be true for every other country. And this is where the conflict between these two systems of government is actually based.

Grounds for Optimism

Schlanger: So, you would say that the Russian support for the nations of the Global South finding their own voice and their own economic development models and so on, is not just an opportunistic attack on the West, but actually comes out of a knowledge of what it’s like to have been a victim of this? And of course, the same is true of China: China was a victim of Western colonization. So this really is a moment of maybe the end of colonization on the planet. That should be very liberating for people in the West to think about. We don’t have to be slave masters anymore.

Krainer: Well, exactly. We don’t have to be slave masters. We don’t have to waste our wealth and our substance on policing the world. We could instead concentrate on developing productive economies, producing goods and services that we can trade with the rest of the world, and mutually building prosperity for ourselves and for them, and for the future generations. It is the current system of governance that is embraced by the West that has turned us into slave drivers all around the world.

And this is why the American people today still have to be paying for these hundreds upon hundreds of military bases all over the world, which are not there to protect anybody’s freedom and democracy; they’re there to protect the access to the resources and to make sure that those resources are collateral of the Western banking institutions, and not, say, Russian banks or Chinese banks.

Schlanger: I guess you would say that as we’re going through a very rough transition period from the era of empire to an era of multilateralism, you’re optimistic that we’re moving in the right direction.

Krainer: I’m very optimistic. To me, it’s clear as day that we’re moving in the right direction. And I think that maybe that’s not so easily discernible. But, you know, I lived through the outbreak of war in former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. You know what changed? What changed is that back then, we really depended on newspapers, radio, and television for our information, for what we knew was happening in the world. So the people in power were able to relatively easily control the narrative. And the narrative is pretty much what drives the public support for different policies.

Today we have the internet, we have social media, and we are able to have these types of conversations that are available to anybody in the world to join, and listen, and share their knowledge further.

So it’s become a lot more difficult, or maybe even impossible, for them to control the narrative. And we have seen at the last Davos meeting that Al Gore and John Kerry and Ursula von der Leyen—all three of them practically threw a tantrum about them not being able to control the narrative, and how the information, misinformation, and disinformation are now bigger problems for them than even Russia and terrorism are.

That to me is an indication that we are winning, and that they are not able to turn their agenda into policy in any effective way.