Ukraine Is In Crisis. Here’s Why the West Can’t Save It

[eridani]

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http://www.thenation.com/article/209329/ukraine-crisis-heres-why-west-cant-save-it

So Ukraine is hard up, unable to help itself and in no position to make demands. This development, say many scholars and experts, means that this crisis has become an especially attractive opportunity for foreign interests looking to expand their wealth, property holdings and geopolitical influence. Writing and speaking from the margins of the discussion, these experts say that the policy solutions proposed by the West through the economic agreement and the IMF loans threaten only to deepen Ukraine’s troubles—and with nuclear powers struggling on either side, they risk a world war.

In an effort to get a clearer view of these developments and a sense of their probable outcomes, I asked three experts to join me for a video-recorded discussion in the Brooklyn office of Verso Books. They are Michael Hudson, a former balance-of-payments economist for Chase Manhattan Bank, distinguished research professor of economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and an author of a major study of the IMF; Jeffrey Sommers, associate professor of political economy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a visiting lecturer at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga; and James Carden, a former adviser to the State Department on Russia and a regular contributor to The Nation. The three videos below are excerpts from our discussion.

Putin’s role in the current showdown between Russia and the West has no doubt been significant, but his actions have also been grossly distorted by the government propaganda and biased media of Western Europe and the United States. Hudson, Sommers, and Carden regard him with the same skepticism they would any contemporary leader, but here they are chiefly concerned with understanding what is driving Western involvement. They recognize, for instance, that Ukraine possesses an abundance of natural resources that, if developed, could produce vast fortunes for whoever held the claims of ownership. This includes reserves of oil, natural gas, and minerals, including uranium—the fuel for nuclear reactors and bombs. Two-thirds of the country’s surface is covered with a nutrient-rich “black earth,” soil which, despite being poorly utilized, has made Ukraine the world’s third-largest exporter of corn and fifth-largest exporter of wheat. US agricultural corporations Monsanto and Cargill have made no secret of their interest in this land.

[Wilms]

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