NATO proxy war in Ukraine serves a geopolitical Trade and Energy conflict

In March 2022, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.

Guterres said food, fuel and fertilizer prices were skyrocketing with supply chains being disrupted and added this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.

According to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, there is currently sufficient food and no risk of global food supply shortages. However, food prices doubled and stayed up since and during the Corona crisis.

We see an abundance of food but skyrocketing prices.

The issue is not food shortage but speculation on food commodities and the manipulation of an inherently flawed global food system that serves the interests of corporate traders and suppliers of inputs at the expense of people’s needs and genuine food security.

The war in Ukraine is a geopolitical trade and energy conflict.

It is largely about the USA engaging in a proxy war against Russia and Europe by attempting to separate Europe from Russia and imposing sanctions on Russia to harm Europe and make it further dependent on the USA.

Economist Professor Michael Hudson recently stated that ultimately the war is against Europe and Germany. The purpose of the sanctions is to prevent Europe and other allies from increasing their trade and investment with Russia and China.

Neoliberal policies since the 1980’s have hollowed out the US economy. With its productive base severely weakened, after the Vietnam War, the only way for the USA to maintain hegemony is to undermine China and Russia and weaken Europe.

Hudson says that, beginning a year ago, Biden and the US neocons attempted to block Nord Stream 2 and all (energy) trade with Russia so that the US could monopolize it itself.

Despite the green agenda currently being pushed, the USA still relies on fossil fuel-based energy to project its power abroad. Even as Russia and China move away from the dollar, the control and pricing of oil and gas (and resulting debt) in dollars remains key to USA attempts to retain hegemony.

The USA knew beforehand how sanctions on Russia would play out. They would serve to divide the world into two blocks and fuel a new cold war with the USA and Europe on one side with China and Russia being the two main countries on the other.

US policy makers knew Europe would be devastated by higher energy and food prices and food importing countries in the Global South would suffer due to rising costs.

It is not the first time the USA has engineered a major crisis to maintain global hegemony and a spike in key commodity prices that effectively trap countries into dependency and debt.

The USA is creating a new world order and needs to ensure much of the Global South remains in its orbit of influence rather than ending up in the Russian and especially Chinese camp and its belt road initiative for economic prosperity.

Post-COVID, this is what the war in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia and the engineered food and energy crisis are really about.

The USA has been able to dominate most of the Global South through agriculture and control of the food supply.

The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has transformed countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.

The oil sector and agribusiness have been joined at the hip as part of US geopolitical strategy.

The dominant notion of food security promoted by global agribusiness players like Cargill, Archer Daniel Midland, Bunge and Louis Dreyfus and supported by the World Bank is based on the ability of people and nations to purchase food.

It has nothing to do with self-sufficiency and everything to do with global markets and supply chains controlled by giant agribusiness players.

It entailed trapping nations into a globalized food system that relies on export commodity mono-cropping to earn foreign exchange linked to sovereign dollar-denominated debt repayment and World Bank/IMF ‘structural adjustment’ directives.

What we have seen has been the transformation of many countries from food self-sufficiency into food deficit areas.

Food security has led to the dismantling of food sovereignty and food self-sufficiency for the sake of global market integration and corporate power.

As for fighting back against the onslaught on ordinary people’s living standards, support is gathering among the labor movement in places like Britain.

Rail union leader Mick Lynch is calling for a working class movement based on solidarity and class consciousness to fight back against a billionaire class that is acutely aware of its own class interests.

For too long, ‘class’ has been absent from mainstream political discourse.

It is only through organized, united protest that ordinary people will have any chance of meaningful impact against the new world order.

of tyrannical authoritarianism and the devastating attacks on ordinary people’s rights, livelihoods and standards of living that we are witnessing.

Global Research / ABC Flash Point News 2023.