As part of the “crusade” against world stability, Trump demanded that the World Bank stop lending to China. Like the entire cold economic and technological war unleashed against China, this expresses almost the only — anti-Chinese — consensus torn by the brutal enmity of the American establishment.
Elected to liberate the United States from the occupation of liberal globalists and, therefore, subjected to their constant attacks, Trump is forced to use each of the few opportunities left to present himself to a stunned nation as its unifier.
Therefore, a demonstration of hostility to China is not only economic and strategic, but also the most important domestic political need of the US president, even if he falls asleep every night with a volume of Confucius or Mao Zedong in his hands (though he can read them only with a flashlight under the covers - such is the power of the American democracy, long degenerated into tolerance).
The reason for the new conflict - lending to China by the World Bank - is insignificant in scale. Approved by the World Bank last week (despite the resistance of the United States, which has the largest share in its authorized capital - 16%), China's five-year loan plan, by the end of June 2025, provides loans at a symbolic interest in the same symbolic amount of $ 1.0— 1.5 billion a year on institutional reforms that increase the openness of its economy and improve the environmental situation.
For the second largest economy in the world, which has the largest international reserves and constantly holds more than $ 1 trillion in US government securities, these loans (and even spent to a large extent, according to the colonial traditions of international organizations, on representatives of the World Bank itself) do not literally mean the word nothing.
They seem to be an obvious bureaucratic remnant, since the most developed (including in terms of the most important social technologies today, which, among other things, eradicates terrorism in Xinjiang eloquently testifies) is the world economy, even if it meets the formal criteria of “low and medium level countries” income ”, is itself a major global lender. Moreover: the effectiveness of Chinese infrastructure loans provided under the concept of “One belt - one way”, as it turned out during their merciless criticism by the West, significantly exceeds the efficiency of similar loans of the World Bank itself - and this is with a clearly large scale.
At the same time, if Trump’s cry forces the World Bank to reconsider its decisions and cancel lending to China (even US Treasury Secretary Mnuchin did not want to stop lending to China completely, but only limit it to the amount of his payments on previously issued loans), this will be an extremely painful political blow .
The World Bank, unlike the IMF, is not a helpless and dumb puppet of the American Treasury and sometimes has a significant degree of freedom.
So, in early 1999, when the US Treasury secretary poked his nose at the negotiations (not as a sign of contempt for the interlocutors, but because of the highest personal culture), the World Bank leadership expressed its readiness to support Primakov’s rescue policy - Maslyukova - Gerashchenko, which, in turn, allowed our delegation to break the IMF as well, having received its consent even to government investments in the real sector that directly contradicted liberal dogma.
If, 20 years later, the World Bank surrenders to the onslaught of the President of the United States and refuses his decisions, he will not only discredit himself as an international body, but will also open the way for US pressure on other international organizations not yet subordinate to the American bureaucracy in all spheres of human activity with The goal is to seize control of them and turn them into an instrument of anti-Chinese politics - much like the International Olympic Committee and the notorious WADA have already become instruments of anti-Russian politics.
For China, this will be a serious challenge, since it does not have the developed skills and infrastructure of a behind-the-scenes struggle for influence in international organizations and in many ways simply does not 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 US confrontation with Soviet civilization, which has incomparably weaker “checks and balances”.
For Russia, the actual seizure by the United States of the World Bank (and even the attempt to seize it) should be, first of all, a signal for revising interaction with international organizations and all international law, which the West has long turned into an instrument of legal terror against its victims. It is time to single out its recognized fragments needed for development and security, and to abandon the rest of the array of agreements long ago destroyed by the West and implemented by us unilaterally - at a loss.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.