With inflation rates driven to two-digit territories by soaring energy and food prices, the U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) and the European Central Bank (the ECB) are still in very early stages of their belated and hesitant efforts to restore price stability in their economies.

That is a very difficult policy process that inevitably leads to growth recessions, large job losses and rising poverty rates, with falling household and corporate incomes.

Stories that it is possible to stop and reverse accelerating price inflations without economic downturns of ex ante unknown amplitude and duration are manipulative fairy tales that serve recklessly speculative asset trades and losing political scenarios.

Sadly, America’s Democratic Party strategists are now calling for a monetary and fiscal tightening to speed up the inflation fight – a brutal blow to an already weak economic activity. But the proponents of such a quick “shock therapy” fix apparently hope for a short, “V-type” recession that would not negatively affect Democrats’ bleak outlook for November’s Congressional mid-term elections and the presidential contest in 2024.

Beat inflation with large energy supplies

“Snake oil” sells. And, predictably, its salesmen are high-profile and generously compensated economists who formerly served America’s vital national interests.

Incredible stuff, indeed, because it defies common sense to think that the top guns of monetary and fiscal tightness -- that hit everything in sight -- would be used to balance out the energy market and prevent their second-round spillover effects of rising energy costs on the rest of the economy.

But that’s the way it is: A logical solution of releasing adequate energy supplies from America’s huge reserves is giving way to suicidal macroeconomic policies.

And there is more: The eternal belief in the adage that “Americans will throw the rascals out” via ballot boxes, is no guarantee that the change will bring us to an inspiring new departure for the Biblical shining “City upon the Hill.”

The European Union, through its G7 linkages of party line loyalties has been put in a much more complicated, and totally unpredictable position, while only four euro area economies currently have an inflation rate slightly below the monetary union’s average of 8.6%.

So, is there anything other than a monetary-fiscal nostrum to stop, and possibly slightly reverse, the inflation gallop?

Yes, because a specific problem requires a specific remedy. And the remedy for an energy-driven inflation is more energy supplies to push energy prices down.

The U.S. – by far the world’s largest oil producer (double the second-ranking Saudi Arabia) -- can easily do that, but for some reason Washington is not only increasing U.S. energy supplies in the way it should, but it is also – absurdly, to put it mildly – forcing the E.U. to rapidly and completely cut out all Russian oil and gas supplies, which now constitute nearly one half of E.U.’s total energy consumption.

And, equally absurdly, Washington is asking the Saudis to raise oil output from their current 11 mb/d (11% of world oil production) to 13 mb/d – as if that would make much difference to world oil prices.

Don’t fight; try divide and rule

But, for Washington, lowering the oil price is not the point. The objective is to disrupt the OPEC Plus consensus on oil output quotas, where Russia, as the world’s second largest oil producer (with a daily output equal to that of Saudi Arabia) plays an important policy role.

Apart from that, the E.U. is forced to get off the Russian oil by the end of the year, and China is to be sanctioned for violating U.S. (nota bene: not the U.N.) unilaterally imposed slew of debilitating sanctions on Russia.

That’s what is going on. And that means that the good health of American and E.U. economies is taking a back seat to an ill-conceived – and losing – war based on an oxymoronic premise that the Western social, economic and political order (aka, “the rules based international order”), and its prestigious cultures and civilizations are being edged out by “despotic regimes” and “illiberal democracies.”

Hence the strategy: (a) Russia is to be destroyed and set up for an amiable and compliant regime change, (b) China is to be contained and softened up by trade and investment sanctions with mandatory universal applications to change its wayward behavior until it says: “Uncle!”

The evidence shows that is not going to happen, and the proverbial “facts on the ground” indicate that the U.S. and the E.U. will be big losers in an ill-conceived confrontation with Russia and China -- the West’s key “strategic opponents” – that Washington’s “wise guys” drove into a tight, vitally important and “unlimited” Sino-Russian alliance.

That’s something that America’s great geo-strategists like Brzezinski, an acknowledged “mentor” to the still-living Kissinger, never wanted to happen. Indeed, they were the great artists of “triangulation” – an old application of the maxim “divide et impera” (divide and rule) aptly used by the Roman Empire’s Julius Caesar, and popularized by the Florentine wickedly sage Niccolò Machiavelli.