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Major economic powers are turning inward.  In other words, they are turning away from globalisation in favour of economic nationalism. The shift away from hyper-globalisation poses huge questions for Globalists.

Officially, the Council on Foreign Relations (“CFR”) is an American foreign policy think tank.  In reality, CFR is a long-established deep state milieu.  Although perhaps the most public of all such groups, it is nevertheless highly influential within the US deep state and is often mentioned in conjunction with the Bilderberg group and the Trilateral Commission. Its influence may extend to de facto control of the US State Department.

On Tuesday, CFR published a video during which Peter Trubowitz discussed the reasons for the rise of anti-globalism in Western countries and its consequences for world order with James M. Lindsay.

Lindsay is senior vice president, director of studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg chair at the Council on Foreign Relations.  He is also the host of CFR’s podcast ‘The President’s Inbox’.

Peter Trubowitz is a professor of international relations and director of the Phelan US Centre at the London School of Economics and an associate fellow at Chatham House. Chatham House, also known as the Royal Institute for International Affairs, is an important organ of the UK deep state.  In his 2012 book, ‘The true story of the Bilderberg Group’, Daniel Estulin wrote that some say the Bilderberg Group was a creation of MI6 under the direction of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In the same book, he said the Royal Institute of International Affairs is the foreign policy executive arm of the British monarchy.

Noting there’s been a turn to “economic nationalism,” Lindsay asked Trubowitz why he thought it was important to try to salvage the liberal international order or the rules-based order.

After World War II world leaders created a series of international organisations and agreements to promote global cooperation based on a system known as the liberal world order. The phrase “liberal international order,” although widely used, is far from self-explanatory.  Theorists understand it as an “open and rule-based international order” that is “enshrined in institutions such as the United Nations and norms such as multilateralism.”

It has become increasingly apparent that support for the liberal international order in Europe and the United States is declining. This became particularly clear after the British vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016.

In his response to Lindsay’s question, Trubowitz said: “In the nineties when the US and other Western democracies embraced what economists call hyper-globalisation [they] made a huge bet on supernationalism … in opposition is frustration with the sovereignty costs that supernationalism entails.”

Sovereignty costs are the loss or the sense of losing control to international institutions. For example, in the European context, it’s losing control to the bureaucrats in Brussels.

“We’re not going to be able to go back to the post-war, World War II, liberal international order. And those who are pining for it, I think are kind of barking up the wrong tree. What we need to do is to re-imagine the relationship between foreign and domestic policies,” Trubowitz added.

The interview was originally released by The President’s Inbox on 21 November but was published on YouTube on 5 December 2023.  You can watch the interview titled ‘The Anti-Globalisation Backlash’ HERE and read a transcript HERE.

The next day, 6 December, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (“IMF”), discussed international economic leadership at CFR’s Stephen C. Freidheim Symposium on Global Economics with CFR President Michael Froman.  You can watch the 60-minute session on IMF’s website HERE.

Before joining the IMF, Georgieva was CEO of the World Bank and before that was European Commission Vice President for Budget and Human Resources, during which time she helped shape the agenda of the European Union. She serves on many international panels including as co-chair of the Global Commission on Adaptation and as co-chair of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing.

Georgieva acknowledged that the global economy was performing much better than economists at the IMF and elsewhere expected.  “We have gone through unthinkable events – covid, then Russia’s war in Ukraine, then the cost-of-living crisis, now a very serious crisis in the Middle East,” Georgieva said. “And yet, we are not experiencing a dramatic economic shock.”

But three things keep her up at night, she said.  Slow global economic growth over the medium term.  Predictions are growth will be 3% compared to a pre-pandemic average of 3.8%.  “Secondly, what worries us even more than that,” she said, “is a very dangerous divergence that is taking place in the world economy.”

The divergence that worries them is some countries’ economies, for example, the US are doing very well while others are not recovering very well. “As this divergence accumulates, what we should fear is not only economic trouble but also security trouble.  And really what worries us is that we are not quite yet seeing an understanding that in a world of more frequent shocks, the only way to build resilience is to work more together,” she said.

In short, what Georgieva and her colleagues fear is global fragmentation.  In October, Georgieva wrote an essay published in CFR’s Foreign Affairs magazine.  Writing about this essay, IMF Blog wrote: “In a shock-prone world, economies must be more resilient – individually and collectively. Cooperation is critical, but greater protectionism could lead to fragmentation.”

The fragmentation that keeps Georgieva up at night is deglobalisation, the breaking of the world into blocs instead of all countries coming under the sole control of a single agency.

The world is unlikely to return to the period of hyper-globalisation that existed in the 1990s, Froman said and asked Georgieva what the new principles going forward would be that reflect the shift to economic nationalism while maintaining as much of the “benefit” of globalisation as possible.

“In our view,” Georgieva said, “ what must be done is concentrate on the areas where, without working together, we are doomed.”  The examples she gave as “we are doomed” without globalisation were “climate change,” the “green transition”  and debt, the loaning of money to countries from public and private sector lenders.

Georgieva suggested debt requires globalisation even though the G20 and Paris Club’s Common Framework for Debt Treatment is not working, as proved in Zambia’s case. Georgieva explained the situation with Zambia away, essentially, as a learning-by-trial-and-error exercise.

“I hear many people saying ‘Oh, the Common Framework doesn’t work’ … My question is: Tell me, what is the alternative?  If we don’t succeed to get a commonality in approach, what is going to happen? What is going to happen is, countries are going to be stuck,” Georgieva said.

Well, Georgieva, Zambia is stuck. Zambia’s debt became unsustainable, causing the country to default on its external debt in 2020.  It was one of the first countries to apply to restructure its sovereign external debt under the Common Framework in early 2021. The country won approval from the IMF Board for a $1.3 billion assistance package more than a year later on 31 August 2022.

In March 2023, CFR noted that negotiations with China were not going well due to a disagreement on interest rates, among others, and that the IMF’s technical work made it more difficult than it should be to reach an agreement.  In December 2023, almost three years after making its application to the IMF, the issues still haven’t been resolved and Zambia is still waiting.

“Let us remind everybody,” Georgieva said, “it is hard to be a low-income country, always.  It has become much harder.  Interest payments have tripled for these countries from 4% to 11% of their revenues.”

“If we don’t find a pathway to debt resolution, how are they going to feed their people, to transform their economies to green and digital,” she added.

But if low-income countries de-globalised and did not have to pursue “green and digital” economies, it would save them a lot of money – including the interest they would pay on the debt incurred to pay for the transformation of their economies to “green and digital.” 

The discussion then turned to COP28, which Georgieva had attended, and the finance needed for the “green transition.”  There’s still a pretty big gap between what’s needed and what’s currently available, Foreman said. Adding, “IMF has this magical way of creating money … for investments” in the new climate economy.

IMF’s major contribution, Georgieva said, was to come up with policies to “help” countries drive the reduction and elimination of “fossil fuel” subsidies and accelerate decarbonisation by adopting carbon taxes so green technologies are more competitive.

Why would Georgieva repeatedly emphasise the transition to “green” economies and highlight “green and digital” economies as a priority for low-income countries when clearly it is not? To answer, we turn to an Al Jazeera article which describes how policymaking in the World Bank and IMF works:

To put it simply, rich countries have disproportionate influence when it comes to setting the rules of international trade and finance – and they tend to do it in ways that serve their own economic interests, quite often at the expense of everyone else.

Nowhere is this problem more apparent than when it comes to the distribution of power in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (“IMF”), two of the key institutions that govern global economic policy.

The problem starts at the top. The leaders of the World Bank and the IMF are not elected, but are nominated by the US and Europe.

Moreover, voting power in these institutions is skewed heavily in favour of rich countries. The US has de facto veto power over all significant decisions, and together with the rest of the G7 and the European Union controls well over half of the vote in both agencies. Middle- and low-income countries, which together constitute 85 per cent of the world’s population, have a minority share.

Voting power in the World Bank is allocated according to each country’s financial shares. In the IMF, it is primarily according to gross domestic product (“GDP”), with some consideration also given to a country’s “market openness.”

These imbalances in voting power help explain why the World Bank and the IMF have been able to impose neoliberal structural adjustment programmes across the global South over the past 40 years. These programmes – focused on privatisation, austerity, and forced market liberalisation – have created lucrative profit opportunities for multinational companies, but have had a devastating effect on the South.

Apartheid in the World Bank and the IMF, Al Jazeera, 26 November 2020

To sum up the message the deep state is promulgating through CFR and the Royal Institute for International Affairs: The rise in anti-globalisation cannot be ignored so, pay lip service to it while pushing forward with Globalists’ plans – this is what Froman referred to when he said “maintaining as much of the benefit” of globalisation as possible. 

What is the “benefit” of globalisation? The final paragraph quoted from Al Jazeera’s article sums it up – it is whatever benefits self-appointed elites regardless of the cost to everyone else. 

Featured image: Pro-Brexit supporters take to the streets as the day finally arrives for the United Kingdom to exit the European Union, 1 February 2020