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Europe Must Learn To Cheat On Its Sanctions (Just Like The U.S. Is Doing It)
The European Union and China will hold a virtual summit today. Before the summit started Brussels has strewn rumors that it would pressure China to not support Russia.
China is of course rejecting any pressure and retaliates by pointing out Europe's weak strategic autonomy:
Hours before the China-EU leaders' meetings on Friday, Chinese analysts warned that China-EU relations cannot be kidnapped by the Ukraine crisis, and Europe should no longer be abducted by the US in foreign policy, as it will greatly undermine the EU's own interests, making it difficult to ensure economic recovery and people's livelihood, and runs counter to Europe's aim of pursuing strategic independence.
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As the Russia-Ukraine conflict stretches to over a month, Europe has sustained great pressure resulting from sanctions against Russia and its over-reliance on US-led NATO security structure.
"The EU is now kidnapped by the US on security, but that does not conform to the strategic independence EU has pursued," [Cui Hongjian, director of the Department of European Studies at the China Institute of International Studies] said.
To avoid being caught in hot water again, the EU must take control of its own destiny. And developing ties with China provides the EU an opportunity to develop in a more balanced and comprehensive way in the long term, he said.
Its reliance on the U.S./NATO is Europe's core strategic weakness. The U.S. has used it to infiltrate Europe's decision making structures.
When the current Ukraine crisis began the U.S. announced that it had activated certain sanctions against Russia and told Europe to do the same. Europe then decide to deliver even more sanctions than it was told to do. With that done the U.S. has quietly buried or circumvented some of its own sanctions after it had used them to push the Europeans.
On March 8 the White House announced:
Today, President Biden will sign an Executive Order (E.O.) to ban the import of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas, and coal to the United States – a significant action with widespread bipartisan support that will further deprive President Putin of the economic resources he uses to continue his needless war of choice.
The United States made this decision in close consultation with our Allies and partners around the world, as well as Members of Congress of both parties.
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Today’s Executive Order bans:
- The importation into the United States of Russian crude oil and certain petroleum products, liquefied natural gas, and coal. Last year, the U.S. imported nearly 700,000 barrels per day of crude oil and refined petroleum products from Russia and this step will deprive Russia of billions of dollars in revenues from U.S. drivers and consumers annually. …
The Executive Order is here and it does seem to prohibit crude oil imports from Russia.
However, three weeks later the U.S. is still importing Russian crude oil. The U.S. Energy Information Administration publishes a weekly list of crude imports by country:
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In the week ending March 26 the U.S. still imported 100,000 barrels per day of Russian crude oil.
I explained on March 7 why the U.S. needs the Russian oil:
Some U.S. refineries at the south coast are designed to only process heavy oil variants. Since 2019 the U.S. has blockaded heavy oil imports from Venezuela and replaced them with imports of heavy Ural variants from Russia. It has now send two officials to Caracas to try to get Venezuela's oil flowing again. That would of course require to lift all sanctions off Venezuela and to return all confiscated companies and the gold that is owned by that country. It is not going to happen anytime soon.
Diesel and heating oil consist of long hydrocarbon chains. Lighter types of crude oil lack these. There are ways to create longer hydrocarbon chains from shorter ones but those processes are expensive. It is much easier to start off with heavy crude oil and to break it down when needed.
Without heavy Russian Ural crude oil the U.S. has no efficient way to create diesel and heating oil. This while we are in a global diesel crisis:
Diesel is what freight transport uses to deliver goods to consumers, but it is also what industrial transport uses for fuel. With Russian refiners cutting their processing rates in the wake of several waves of Western sanctions, already tight diesel supply is going to get a lot tighter.
"Governments have a very clear understanding that there is a clear link between diesel and GDP, because almost everything that goes into and out of a factory goes using diesel," the director general of Fuels Europe, part of the European Petroleum Refiners Association, told Reuters this week.
As Vitol's Russell Hardy noted earlier this week, "Europe imports about half of its diesel from Russia and about half of its diesel from the Middle East. That systemic shortfall of diesel is there."
Europe is not the only one feeling the diesel pinch, however. Middle distillate stocks are on a decline in the United States, too, Reuters' John Kemp wrote in his latest column.
The Biden administration announced yesterday that it would release 1 million barrels of crude oil per day from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR). While this voter bribe will likely lower elevated gasoline prices it is doubtful that the SPR includes enough heavy crude to make a difference in the diesel market.
It is diesel, more than gasoline, that is driving inflation.
The U.S. is therefore likely to continue to cheat on its own sanctions. Europe should recognize that and should likewise handle its sanction in a matter that lessens the economic effects on itself. It will otherwise ruin its citizens.
It should also handle its relation with China, its largest trading partner, aside from the U.S. and the Ukraine-Russia mess up. Not doing so only increases the size of the recession it is soon likely to experience.
“…when will europe recognize how this works and stop being manipulated??….” james @3
It is very simple. And the fact that it hasn’t occurred tells us something very sinister about both European and, to a lesser extent, US society.
The central reality in all our lives is that the Permanent Arms economy, with its concomitant permanent security/secret police state, lowers living standards everywhere in a dramatic fashion.
There are good and easily made arguments for our states to enter into security guarantees which will save us the costs of disfiguring our societies by endlessly preparing for war.
After 1945 most of Europe was eager for peace with the Soviet Union, the great majority of the electorates of France, Italy, Scandinavia, Greece, Yugoslavia and the United Kingdom not only wanted but expected peace and a new era of development in which Unemployment and Depression, poverty, disease, inequality, injustice and profiteering be put behind them. And the enormous problems caused by colonialism and imperialism, everyone saw was outmoded and immoral would also be tackled.
That was what common people the world over expected from the United Nations.
What happened instead, and almost entirely because of the United States’ ruling class, was the Cold War, which took the form of dozens of hot wars- almost every country in the Far East from Malaya and Indonesia, to Indo-China, Korea, the Philippines and China itself were embroiled in wars in which the former colonial powers-invariably at the behest of the US, which dominated the economy- sought to preserve imperial rule, either directly or through neo-colonialist regimes.
This vast complex of conflicts, almost all of which was given a racial (Divide and Conquer) veneer whilst in reality being naked class war to prevent popular power, spread throughout the entire world. It tore apart swathes of South America, it was the history of Africa for decades and it was the central fact in every region of the world.
In the metropole, north America, Europe and the ‘lucky’ outposts of imperialism like Australia and New Zealand the war took a different form- that of McCarthyism. A long series of assaults on working class institutions, the expulsion of communists and other radical activists from the Trade Unions and the transformation of the socialist mass parties, which in terms of numbers and organisation were the most powerful political forces everywhere except in north America, although they were very powerful in Canada and locally in industrial US states too.
So much for the history and the tragic proof of historian GDH Cole’s warning that the greatest threat to Europe’s future welfare lay not in the possibility of Communist power but in the danger of US dominance. A domination that has only reached its full flowering today in the neo-liberal politics of privatisation, of castrated Unions and Judicial systems that are utterly biassed- vicious attack dogs at the foot of tyranny’s throne.
It has been in the last few years that the tomb of european freedom has been sealed.
Because, despite decades of set backs and defeats a genuine left had survived in the form of powerful factions within the political world. In Italy a country virtually occupied by the US, working together with the old fascist base, the state institutions and the Roman Catholic church, the Communist Party, marxist socialists and the Trade Unions preserved the possibility of winning electoral office at any time. In fact it took considerable plotting, much illegality, including assassinations, false flag terror attacks and kidnappings- together with the expenditure of billions of dollars- to prevent the left from progressing electorally towards power. In France, where the emergence of a Gaullist nationalist tradition which regarded the arrogant successors of the government that Louis XVI had empowered with contempt and enmity, resistance to the New Empire was even stronger. And more successful.
And then there was the UK. And here we have seen, are watching, the endgame: so long as Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party, there was a real chance (it would not have been easy but it was well within the bounds of political possibility) that a socialist government would take the few bold steps that are needed to divorce the Empire and to join with Eurasia and the growing web of ‘rogue’ states, such as Iran and Venezuela, Syria, Lebanon in commercial and diplomatic alliances.
The de-fenestration of Corbyn involved the open alliance of Finance, the enormously powerful and deeply rooted Security Services, the United States and the media/academy on the ludicrous pretext that he was anti-semitic (this is a man whose parents met at the famous battle of Cable Street!).
It is an indication of the contempt with which the populace is viewed by Britain’s arrogant and thoroughly unpatriotic Establishment that this ruthless operation was carried out so transparently. It was a demonstration of sheer power: “Killing the chicken to frighten the monkeys.”
Elsewhere in recent years and days we have seen the rise and swift collapse of Syriza in Greece, of Podemos in Spain, of Die Linke in Germany (Oskar Lafontaine recently resigned) and similar ‘defeats.’
But the simplicity and clear appeal of a political programme in which the people of Europe are given a choice between NATO, subservience to the US and plummeting living standards and, on the other hand, peace, prosperity and membership of an international community ready and able to deal with the great problems of our era- the rapid deterioration of the natural environment and the real prospect of billions dying in successive disasters.
The surprising thing is that the forces of Empire and reaction, of greed and social anarchy, the 1%, are still in control. And it is taking so long for the people to choose an alternative to their certain suicide.
But perhaps all is now changed with the apparent splitting of the world into two parts, of the sort that Brecht would have recognised: the United States is an old syphilitic roue, rotting away in luxury and surrounded by successive generations of whores, painted, overfed, dripping diamonds and furs, permanently drunk and living in an atmosphere stinking of opiates, a hypodermic syringe is ready in the hands of a provocatively uniformed nurse (who bears a distinct resemblance to Tony Blinken in drag) and the crumbling palace in which they are is surrounded by puzzled, even angry looking people holding their ears to muddle the loud sounds of bad music and cheap rhetoric, extravagant falsehoods and obvious lies blaring out from banks of loudspeakers in sound trucks, low flying aircraft and fixed on posts.
Sadly, these crowds have to pick their way gingerly over thousands of corpses, the fruit of an epidemic nobody can agree to pay for treating.
Posted by: bevin | Apr 1 2022 19:11 utc | 86
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