EIR LEAD EDITORIAL FOR MONDAY MAY 29, 2023

U.S. Escalates Illegal Economic Attacks on China, as China Expands Economic Cooperation in the Rest of the World

May 28, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—The Biden government today denounced China’s tit-for-tat response to the U.S. illegal ban on Chinese purchase of U.S.-manufactured microchips—policies which typically do more harm to U.S. businesses than to China. China on May 21 banned certain Chinese companies from purchasing chips from the U.S. company Micron, the world’s largest chip producer. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, following a meeting in Detroit of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, an explicitly anti-China group set up by the Biden administration, said of the ban on Micron chips in China: “We see it as plain and simple economic coercion and we won’t tolerate it.” The U.S. is also actively trying to prevent cooperation with China by Brazil and Argentina to counter the economic coercion by the U.S. and the IMF against the South American countries.

The irony which must be recognized by the population in the U.S., is that the sanctions policy of the U.S. against Russia and China, and against many other countries, are both illegal under international law, and do more damage to the U.S. economy than to those targeted for destruction. The rest of the world is experiencing a resurgence of new institutions and an expansion of older institutions linking the countries of the world in new trade and economic cooperation agreements, including the dumping of the “weaponized” U.S. dollar in favor of trade in local currencies.

Both China and Russia are, for instance, expanding cooperation with the nations of Africa. The New Development Bank, set up by the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), is now expanding its membership and working on ways to provide a new source of credit to developing countries, including those under austerity pressure from the IMF. The BRICS nations are also increasing their collaboration with the Eurasian Economic Union (Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO, joining China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan). Nearly all of the countries of the “Global South” are rejecting the demands from their former colonial masters in London and Washington to demonize Russia and decouple from China—choosing not to ally with militarism and sanctions, in favor of development, especially in league with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Even several leading Western voices, such as London’s Financial Times, are sounding the alarm that the Global South is not going along with the dictates from the imperial centers in the City of London and Wall Street, noting that the West is not offering the needed development projects which are being provided by Russia and China. While they verbally suggest that the West must come up with some real development proposals rather than military threats and austerity policies presented under the guise of useless green projects and monetary dictates, the increasingly obvious fact is that the entire Western banking system is in a state of collapse after decades of printing press money issued to finance wars and bank bailouts, while the real economy crumbled.

The Schiller Institute will soon issue an invitation to the June 10 International Day of Action on the 60th Anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s famous Commencement Address at American University on June 10, 1963, just five months before his assassination, in which he issued a clarion call to prevent nuclear war, by rejecting geopolitical demonization of America’s adversaries in favor of peaceful cooperation. He noted that we had differences with communism and the policies of the U.S.S.R., but that “we can still hail the Russian people for their many achievements—in science and space, in economic and industrial growth, in culture, in acts of courage,” including the fact that over 20 million Russians died fighting the Nazis in World War II, and that we share the “mutual abhorrence of war.” Is that any different today?

Poetically, Kennedy concluded that “we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” Is that less true today? Have American’s adopted the British Empire’s madness of the bestial ideology of superiority? Sign and promote the Schiller Institute’s “Urgent Appeal by Citizens and Institutions from All Over the World to the (Next) President of the United States!”