The War Economy Pushed in the West, a Dangerous Illusion
It suddenly seems to have dawned on the geniuses in the City of London that it helps to have an industrial economy if you wish to wage a proxy war against Russia. The transatlantic governments have either not yet realized it, or prefer to continue churning out empty promises.
Thus, the current frontman for the war hawks, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has made himself a spokesman for the “heroic” Ukrainians who are dying on behalf of London’s strategic interests. He now claims that, backed by the “iron resolve” of a unified NATO, they are defeating Vladimir Putin, whose “imperial design for the total reconquest of Ukraine has been derailed.”
His flight forward was reflected in a message given to his troops by General Sir Patrick Sanders, the new chief of the British Army, who said there is a “burning imperative [for the UK] to forge an army capable of fighting alongside our allies and defeating Russia in battle….We are the generation that must prepare the Army to fight in Europe once again.”
But is Great Britain prepared for such an undertaking? Not according to two reports by military officials, who warn that the British economy is inadequate for such a war. In an article published by the Royal United Service Institute (RUSI), a pre-eminent defense think tank, retired American Lt. Col. Alex Vershinin pointed to the declining industrial economies in the west as showing that, in contrast to Russia, the West lacks the industrial capability to sustain a prolonged war. His article, titled “The Return of Industrial Warfare“, concludes that the “arsenal of democracy must radically improve its approach to the production of materiel in wartime.”
His concerns were echoed in testimony delivered to the House of Lords by Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the Chief of the Defence Staff, who decried the constraints imposed on the military by the decrepit condition of the UK’s industrial capacity.
The collapse of the physical economy in most of the West is due to the effect of the neoliberal economic policies of the last fifty years, exacerbated by the anti-science dogma of the “Green” ideologues and the utopian military policies embodied by the “revolution in military affairs”. Already in the early 1980s, Lyndon LaRouche intervened to reverse this course, when working with the Reagan administration to eliminate the danger of nuclear war, by implementing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) based on new physical principles that would advance economic productivity.
In his negotiations with the Soviets in 1982-3, he warned Soviet officials that their economy would collapse “in about five years” if they rejected the offer of President Reagan to jointly share and deploy the SDI and chose instead to conduct an arms buildup without deploying the new technologies to revolutionize manufacturing. At the same time, he consistently warned the West of the catastrophic consequences of their neoliberal economic policies.
Some strategists today still seem to believe that a war buildup can overcome the overall economic degradation of the last five decades. That would be a devastatingly wrong conclusion. What is needed is a new global economic architecture, based on mutual benefit by cooperation among sovereign nation states.
