Friday, April 25, 2014: Tarpley Discusses US Sanctions Against Russia

Tarpley Discusses US Sanctions Against Russia

Press TV: The West keeps on threatening Russia with more sanctions. In the case of a serious sanctions war, who would have the upper hand from an economic perspective?

Tarpley: I think it would be a disaster all around but I think the question of sanctions has this potential. Today we have S&P's fund rating agency downgrade the Russian debt to one notch above junk. What this is doing is destroying or potentially destroying the entire apparatus we call globalization. Globalization is a nice way to describe the unipolar financial arrangements of the world which have prevailed since about 1991.

And really the only way this could be torn down which I think is the imperative interest of most of the people in the world would be to have a very large country such as Russia be forced out of it, perhaps responding with capital controls, exchange controls, nationalizing, confiscating foreign investments and things of this sort, the kinds of things that happen in a war or near war situation.

The people here in Washington don't quite grasp it. In Washington we have a kind of psychosis of Russophobia. We have a bullying class which is so obsessed with the idea of hegemony the unipolar world that they're blind to the fact that this not tenable in today's world. So, they are hysterically pushing ahead with these sanctions.

I don't think the sanctions will work and my estimate is a large military escalation cannot be more than seven to ten days away. The date that's circulating now is the second of May. And that would be a large Russian move. Not necessarily the classic cross-border invasion but something spectacular maybe the defection of several brigades of the Ukrainian forces or something along those lines.

But essentially we have a civil war; it was guided by the Brennan of CIA and Biden the Vice President. And Russian speakers are being killed and Russia has been issuing these stern warnings all week but the US and the British and the NATO command don't seem to get it. So, Ukraine so to speak is asking for it.


Press TV: Of course speaking of Ukraine, I mean, how much and why is Ukraine important for the West, that is, decided to pick a fight with the Russia, was it worth it?




Tarpley: Well, we have this apparatus of the colored revolutions. We have the United States AID, we have the national endowment for democracy and they've sunk five billion dollars into essentially fomenting fascism in Ukraine which is what Madam Nuland has told us. So, they've invested five billion dollars. They would like to loot the Black Earth Region of Ukraine, they would like to asset-strip the coal and steel potential we have at Kryvyi Rih, in Donetsk, and Donbas region in general. They'd also like they would have liked to eject Russia from the Black Sea. I think it's more likely when the smoke clears that the entire belt of the territory along the northern shore of the Black Sea from Russia all the way over to Transnistria in Romania all of that will be in the hands of Russia.

So, I think the main thing going now though is this hysteria; the idea of not wanting to tolerate a power that is strong enough to say no and has the cultural and historical capabilities to say no which Russia certainly does do.

Press TV: Of course we know that the European Union is highly dependent on Russian gas. How much do you think EU would suffer from this dispute?




Tarpley: I think it would be disastrous for two countries in particular: Germany and Italy and some other smaller countries would suffer. But these are the two that are most reliant on exporting to the Russian market and also the most reliant on the Russian gas. So for them it would be a disaster. There is a lot of bad faith going on.

The United States would like to con the European Union into going for these sanctions and then being hit by them. We have to remember that the campaign of London and Washington against the Euro against the European Union, this has not gone away this is being conducted.

And from the British point of view, of course, they want to see Germany and Italy sacrifice. So there's a lot of treachery going on within the Western camp but certainly if most of this overland gas would cut off, this would be very serious. And in particular Madam Merkel is playing with fire. She has got an industrial base for the CDU, the Christian Democratic Union, which is largely made of industrialist and people who are highly interested in East-West trade. And if she crosses them the Merkel era may end much sooner than we think.