(MENAFN- Asia Times) The US, with its EU vassals in tow, has carried out a two-pronged attack on Russia.
The first is President Joe Biden's cruel proxy war on Russia, with its cynical use of Ukrainians as cannon fodder.
The second prong is the sanctions war designed to destroy Russia's economy.
The economic war is a failure.
Russia has won. This verdict comes not from a Russia-friendly source but from two well-known British publications.
One is the UK's oldest Political magazine, The Spectator.
The other is The Telegraph, a British broadsheet that supports the Ukraine war and has always endorsed Conservative politicians. Former Tory prime minister Boris Johnson was once the editor of the former and a columnist for the latter.
This writer was made aware of both pieces by Alexander Mercouris, who discussed the articles on his YouTube channel both here and, together with his partner Alex Christoforou, on The Duran channel here .
(I cannot recommend these sites highly enough for their daily posts on geopolitics, with a focus on the crisis in Ukraine and Europe.)
Here are some selections from those articles.
Spectator admits failure of economic war
The spectator article , titled bluntly“Why the economic war against Russia has failed,” reads in part:
The brutality of the phrase“impoverished into surrender” slips so easily on to the page of this piece, because it is standard Western imperial behavior, now normalized. The article continues:
Telegraph op-ed also admits failure
The second article , this one in The Telegraph, paints an equally grim picture:
Mercouris describes the tone of these articles as bitter.
And indeed, it seems that the Anglo-Saxons have gotten the taste of some very bitter fruits of defeat.
Russia heads East
This is the third time since the end of Cold War 1.0 that the US has tried to destroy the Russian economy. The first was carried out by then-president Bill Clinton in the 1990s and resulted in a deeper and longer-lasting depression than the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s, with a decline of Russia's GDP by 43% and a shortening of lifespan by four years.
Such is the cruelty of economic warfare.
The second came after the US-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 and the shelling of the Donbas, with the subsequent referendum in Crimea and its reincorporation into Russia, providing the perfect excuse for brutal sanctions against Russia.
Russia learned how to handle those sanctions, one reason it has succeeded in evading the present ones. The present failure is the third attack.
It is hardly surprising that Russia has had quite enough and has turned decisively to China and the other dynamic economies of East Asia.
Both articles, but especially the one in The Telegraph, blame China for Russia's successful evasion of the Western imperial maw.
The Telegraph article is titled,“Xi Jinping is running out of time and he knows it.” According to this view, although China (leading the rest of the Global South) was the Great Enabler allowing Russian President Vladimir Putin to pivot to the East, its time is running out. Soon China will reach its peak and start to descend, a prediction we have heard repeatedly for the last quarter-century but is yet to be realized.
In this telling Russia always comes out as a haplessly colonized nation with China as the cunning overlord.
The only possibility is a win-lose outcome, which tells us more about the West's worldview than anything else.
The idea of a win-win multipolar world with respect among nations as sovereign equals is simply not in the vocabulary of the West.
Let's hope that changes before we consume ourselves in nuclear war or in so busying ourselves with war and conflict that we fail to address the looming threats to our survival.
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
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