Seizing the World Bank

As part of the “crusade” against world stability, Donald Trump has demanded that the World Bank stop lending to China. Like the entire economic and technical cold war unleashed against China, this expresses almost the only anti-Chinese consensus fractured by the brutal enmity of the American establishment.

Elected to liberate the United States from the occupation by liberal globalists and, therefore, subjected to constant attacks from them, Trump is being forced to use every single one of his few opportunities to present himself as a unifier to a stunned nation.

Therefore, this demonstration of hostility toward China is not only economic and strategic, but also the most important domestic political priority of the U.S. president, even if he falls asleep with a volume of Confucius or Mao Zedong in his hands every night (although he can only read them under the covers with a flashlight – such is the power of American democracy, which degenerated into tolerance long ago).

The reason for this new conflict – lending to China by the World Bank – is insignificant in scale. Last week the World Bank approved (despite resistance from the United States, which has the largest share in its authorized capital – 16%), China’s five-year loan plan, until the end of June 2025, which provides loans at a symbolic rate in the same symbolic amount of $1 billion-$1.5 billion per year. This is for institutional reforms that will increase the openness of China’s economy and improve its environmental situation.

For the second largest economy in the world, which has the largest international reserves and constantly holds more than $1 trillion in U.S. government securities, these loans (to a large extent even spent according to the colonial traditions of international organizations, on representatives of the World Bank itself) literally don’t mean anything.

They seem to be an obvious bureaucratic relic, since the most developed economy in the world (including today’s important social technologies, which, among other things, they say eradicate terrorism in Xinjiang), even if it meets the formal criteria of a “low-middle income country,” is itself the most important world creditor. Moreover, the effectiveness of Chinese infrastructure loans provided under the concept of ”One Belt, One Road,” as it showed during merciless criticism from the West, significantly exceeds the efficiency of smaller loans from the World Bank – and this is on a clearly larger scale.

At the same time, if Trump’s warning forces the World Bank to reconsider its decisions and cancel lending to China (even U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin doesn’t want to stop lending to China completely, but rather limit the amount of payments on previously issued loans), this will be an extremely painful political blow.

The World Bank, unlike the International Monetary Fund, is not a helpless and dumb puppet of the U.S. Treasury, and sometimes has a significant degree of freedom.

So, in early 1999, when the U.S. treasury secretary poked his nose into negotiations (not as a sign of contempt for middlemen, but rather a sign of his strongest personal values) to block the allocation of a post-defaulted IMF loan to Russia, it was the World Bank’s leadership that expressed readiness to support the policies of Yevgeny Primakov, Yuri Maslyukov and Viktor Gerashchenko. This, in turn, allowed the Russian delegation to break with the IMF, having obtained consent to directly contradict the liberal dogma with public investment in the real sector.*

If, 20 years later, the World Bank surrenders to the onslaught of the U.S. president and abandons its decision, it will not only discredit itself as an international body but will also open the way for U.S. pressure on other international organizations not yet subordinate to the American bureaucracy, in all spheres of human activity, with the goal of seizing control of them and turning them into instruments of anti-Chinese politics – much like the International Olympic Committee and the notorious World Anti-Doping Agency have already become instruments of anti-Russian politics.

For China, this is will be a serious challenge, since it doesn’t have the developed skills and infrastructure for a behind-the-scenes struggle for influence in international organizations, and in many ways, simply doesn’t imagine how they can be used against it.

For the world, this will mean the formation of a much more polarized system than during the U.S. confrontation with Soviet civilization, which had incomparably weaker “checks and balances.”

For Russia, the actual seizure of the World Bank by the U.S. (or even an attempt to seize it) should be, first of all, a signal for revising its interactions with international organizations and all international law, which the West long ago turned into an instrument of legal terror against its victims. It’s time to single out its recognized weaknesses in development and security, and abandon the rest of the mass treaties long ago destroyed by the West and unilaterally implemented by Russia – at a loss.

*Translator’s note: The “real sector” is the flow of goods and services in an economy compared to the circulation of money (the monetary sector).