French Pension Riots are Result of EU Tailing US-Led Push Into Eastern Europe

France has been wracked by protests against President Emmanuel Macron's plan to raise the retirement age to 64. British author and economist John Ross, a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, linked that to the Europe-wide crisis caused by the USD-led proxy conflict with Russia in Ukraine.

French protests against rolling back pension rights are the consequence of European involvement in Washington's proxy confrontation with Moscow, an economists has said.

Economist John Ross, a founder member of the Socialist Action group within the British Labour Party, told Sputnik that Emmanuel Macron's "totally undemocratic" moves to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 over the head of an unwilling Parliament was just a reflection of a continent-wide economic crisis.

"Europe at the present time is in absolute chaos, the worst chaos since World War II," the ascademic noted. "We've got the inflation, which is basically the same as in the 1980s, except that the economic growth in Europe is only about one-third for the rate in the 1980s."

"We've got a major war going on," Ross continued. "And this is created by the desire of the United States to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, particularly into Ukraine. And this has created a terrible crisis in the continent, which I live. It's not very pleasant to experience."

European governments are pursuing a "terrible policy of capitulation" to the US, despite the huge damage that Washington's policies are doing to their economies

"What the United States is doing is terribly damaging for Europe, for Germany, for example," he said, "cutting off relatively well-priced oil and gas imports from Russia and imposing very high-priced oil and gas imports from the United States."

While the author said he would like to believe Europeans were "waking up" to the situation, "it wouldn't be the truth."

"What they are doing is they are reacting very strongly against the economic attacks on their living standards, which is created by the Cold War and what the United States is doing," Ross said. "It will take a bit longer for this to interrelate with the actual Cold War."