Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). When the master whistles in Washington, the docile lapdog EU in Brussels gets up on its hind legs and barks at the Chinese elephant. A lot like that was the case at the G7 summit just come to an end.
There is no other way to explain the EU Commission’s behavior regarding new tariffs against imports from China. This image of a common front against China was repeated at the G7 summit in Apulia (southern Italy) at the end of last week, albeit with a larger number of lapdogs, with the Japanese, British and Canadians demonstrating that they have mastered the same Washington dressage as the Germans, French and Italians.
The fact that China was mentioned 28 times in the communiqué of the G7 heads of state and government is no surprise to Chinese analysts. The English-language Global Times, which is published in Beijing, states for example that “the artfully crafted hypocritical statement” (in the G7 final communiqué) reveals the US-led West’s attempts to blame China in order to lay the groundwork for a future bloc confrontation between the West, which has been declared a haven of democratic virtue, and the evil autocracies, epitomized by China and Russia.
Indeed, the G7 leaders’ communiqué published on the White House website last Friday named China as the main target. In it, the G7 baselessly accused China of the worst offenses across a broad spectrum:
- that Beijing does not condemn Russia in the Ukraine crisis
- that Beijing is not following Western guidelines in the (allegedly man-made) climate crisis
- that China is not pulling together with the West in the areas of cyber security
- that Beijing insists on its national sovereignty in the Taiwan issue and on the legal validity of the US-China agreement on the “one-China policy”
- that China alone is responsible for the tensions in the South China Sea
- that the leadership in Beijing is guilty of serious human rights violations in Xinjiang and Tibet, among other places.
At the same time, a plan allegedly agreed by all seven countries to warn and sanction small Chinese banks because of their links to Russia was announced on the fringes of the G7 summit. But according to initial reactions from Beijing, this will not work either because – according to Charles Liu senior fellow at the Taihe Institute in Beijing, in the Global Times, “these banks do not conduct many transactions in dollars, so any sanctions against them will have a very limited effect”.
On the other hand, these regional banks, which were small until recently, now process a huge and growing volume of transactions in yuan and roubles. Their main problem is that the volume of these transactions has increased so much in the last two years that problems can arise during settlement. But as we know, the Chinese are quick learners and where there’s a will, there’s a way, so the problem is temporary at best. On the other hand, the switch away from the dollar will remain in place in the long term.
Meanwhile, the democratically unelected EU elites, who are hoisted to the helm of the EU institutions in political backroom deals by the US vassals in the European governments, will adopt measures and laws at the expense of the peoples of Europe that primarily serve US goals and their own US-dependent interests. This includes positioning Europe against China, no matter how many European jobs are lost as a result of a trade war with China.
A few weeks before the G7 summit, Washington decided unilaterally, i.e. without consulting its EU vassals, to provoke Beijing with another escalatory round of political and economic measures. This included imposing tariffs of 75 to 100 per cent on the import of technologically far superior and cheap e-cars from China for flimsy reasons. At the call of Washington, the EU Commission followed suit as an obedient US poodle and also imposed an import duty of almost 40 per cent on Chinese e-cars.
Neither the people of the member states nor their national parliaments were consulted by the EU Commission, because the national parliaments had already surrendered their national sovereignty in international trade matters, including decisions on sanctions against other countries, to the democratically unelected grey eminences of the EU Commission years ago in an act of idiotic European euphoria.
At the head of the EU Commission is the unspeakable Mrs von der Leyen, who has so far survived all the old and – in connection with the pharmaceutical company Pfizer – still pending corruption allegations unscathed. And if Washington has its way, von der Leyen will remain in office for the next five years and make Europe “war-ready”, continuing to use the money that flows into the “European Peace Fund” set up in 2019 to buy weapons for Ukraine. Orwell sends his regards.
To conclude this article, let us briefly return to the G7 summit, with which Washington obviously also pursued the plan to create the aforementioned basis for a bloc formation against China and Russia. To this end, a number of important countries from the Global South were invited to talks on the fringes of the summit. Among others, the BRICS founding members South Africa, Brazil and India also organized their participation in the G7 summit in Apulia.
But all attempts to draw these three BRICS countries or other countries of the Global South – with the exception of bankrupt Argentina – into the G7 bloc have failed miserably. This is evidenced not only by the G7 outcome in southern Italy, but also by the result of the immediately subsequent major US/NATO/EU propaganda show at the “Ukraine Peace Conference” on the Swiss Bürgenstock with the ex-president and butcher of his own people, Vladimir Selensky.
The failure of the G7 to win over the BRICS members present at the summit in Italy was not least due to the fact that the US hegemon, together with the “collective West”, was in unprecedentedly poor shape in terms of domestic policy, diplomacy, geo-strategy and military power. At the same time, many countries of the “Global South” see China, Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa as the beacons of hope for a New World Order based on voluntary international cooperation for mutual economic and social benefit. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has defined this as follows: “BRICS is such an association in which the principles of equal cooperation – mutual respect, openness, pragmatism, solidarity, continuity and, of course, consensus – are not only implemented in words, but also in reality.”
Accordingly, the list of new candidates for BRICS+ membership or partner status has grown to a further 28 countries: Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belarus, Bolivia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Honduras, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, Nicaragua, Palestine, Pakistan, Senegal, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Chad, Sri Lanka, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea and South Sudan. This will be decided at the BRICS summit, which will take place in October in Kazan, the capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan.
As part of the cultural preparations for the BRICS Enlargement Conference in October, the opening ceremony of the BRICS Sports Games took place for the first time in Russia on 12 June in Kazan. Around 4,000 athletes from more than 90 countries around the world are taking part in the games. It is quite conceivable that the BRICS Sports Games, which are free of political sanctions, will gain in importance in large parts of the world compared to the Olympic Games, as the latter are all too often misused by the collective West for political power and propaganda purposes.
