Why Russia is Celebrating Victory Day in 2023

In an important article on his Spoils of War sub-stack, veteran journalist, historian and political analyst Andrew Cockburn points out yet another Inconvenient Fact. Not only have nine years of savagely intended sanctions failed to work on the economy of Russia but they have backfired entirely. Russia now has a far more prosperous and extended agricultural and industrial economy than it did eight years ago.

The supermarkets in all of Russia’s major cities continued to be well-stocked with fresh and processed foods. Its currency, the ruble, trades almost the same value as it did nine years ago. Its gold reserves remain strong.

And Russia is certainly not isolated in the world. It enjoys excellent diplomatic, trading and even security partnerships with the three other main powers of continental Asia – China, India (together about one third of the total population of the planet) and Iran. Even Saudi Arabia, once again the key global swing producer that can set the planetary price of oil, is now seeking close association with Moscow and Beijing at the expense of Washington.

According to all the bluster, threats, worthless rhetoric and supposedly serious economic consensus of the free trade economists who continue to donate and dictate the intellectual life of the United States and Britain, this should have been impossible. So how could it possibly have happened?

An increase in foreign trade is indeed always beneficial to a nation’s economy and prosperity when it increases exports and often too when it increases valuable imports: But that is always only the case when the terms of trade overall are favorable to that nation. They must protect its domestic sources of manufacturing and wealth. 

The key metaphors are simple: The world is not flat, as the New York Times False Prophet Thomas Friedman has endlessly preached to such catastrophic effect over the past 40 years and to the ruin of his own country. And it never was flat. 

On the contrary, the idea of a theoretical flat and fair global pure free trade system is a fairy tale and an inherent absurdity. It never existed and it never will.

When any major nation decides to commit economic suicide by declaring the scrapping all its protective tariffs and opening its borders, to the devastating flood of unlimited and unregulated imports, what always happens? Other nations do not follow its shining example but instead they rush to take advantage of the move for their own immediate profit.

This is why France, the most prosperous, largest and strongest economy in Europe collapsed in three years after it signed its disastrous Free Trade Treaty with Britain in 1786. British manufactured products flooded into France. French industry and business collapsed. The result was the French Revolution and a quarter of a century of war that swept continental Europe – entirely to Britain’s profit.

Britain itself committed economic hara-kiri less than a century later in 1860 when under the leadership of William Eward Gladstone and Richard Cobden it proclaimed universal free trade in 1860. 

But the emerging national German economy was already protected behind the walls of the Zollverein, or Customs Union – a policy successfully expanded by Otto von Bismarck 20 years later. And in 1861, only a year after Cobden and Gladstone’s proud “achievement,” the United States Congress passed the first of its epochal tariffs that protected the gigantic emerging industries of the American continent from British financial domination and destruction. Within a decade, the United States and Germany had outstripped Britain in terms of wealth, growth rates and economic power and the British never recovered.

A century later, a generation of American free trade idealists through the 1960s obsessed with lowering tariffs around the world. The recovering defeated economies of Japan in Asia, South Korea and the Common Market nations in Western Europe applauded, pretended to follow but protected their own industry and soared to global wealth and technological leadership.

Forty years later, Democratic President Bill Clinton welcomed China into the World Trade Organization and his successor Republican George W. Bush eagerly embraced the policy after him. The result has been the collapse of the remaining US domestic industrial base and the long term doom of the US defense-technological-military complex which has now been vastly exceeded in scale and efficiency by China.

The key to what has happened within Russia over the past decade is found in the same inexorable process.

The more the Free Trade West has sniffily tried to ruin Russia with economic sanctions, the more it has forced Russia to adopt very different and vastly more successful economic policies that actually work. It is not Russian society, therefore, that is unravelling rapidly, as the lying elite media in London, New York and Los Angeles claim: It is the societies of the West instead.

That is the real, underlying reason Russia on this May 9 Victory Day can declare its economic victory over the United States and its allies over the past decade in the inept and suicidal, economic war that has been waged against it.