A French analyst is one of the few quasi-mainstream thinkers who appears to understand the true scope of the current conflict.
Emmanuel Todd was not at Davos. But it was the French anthropologist, historian, demographer and geopolitical analyst who ended up ruffling all the appropriate feathers across the collective West these past few days with a fascinating anthropological object: a reality-based interview. So here’s Todd’s concise Greatest Hits.
- A new World War is on: By “switching from a limited territorial war to a global economic clash, between the collective West on one side and Russia linked to China on the other side, this became a World War”.
- The Kremlin, says Todd, made a mistake, calculating that a decomposed Ukraine society would collapse right away. Of course he does not get into detail on how Ukraine had been weaponized to the hilt by the NATO military alliance.
- Todd is spot on when he stresses how Germany and France had become minor partners at NATO and were not aware of what was being plotted in Ukraine militarily: “They did not know that the Americans, British and Poles could allow Ukraine to fight an extended war. NATO’s fundamental axis now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.”
- Todd’s major give away is a killer: “The resistance of Russia’s economy is leading the imperial American system to the precipice. Nobody had foreseen that the Russian economy would hold facing NATO’s ‘economic power’”.
- Consequently, “monetary and financial American controls over the world may collapse, and with them the possibility for the US of financing for nothing their enormous trade deficit”.
- “The fundamental dilemma of the American economy: it cannot face Chinese competition without importing a qualified Chinese work force.”
- And that bring us, once again, to globalization, in a manner that Davos roundtables were incapable of understanding: “We have delocalized so much of our industrial activity that we don’t know whether our war production may be sustained”.
Of course he wasn’t at Davos. Davos isn’t listening to anyone who is capable of seeing the situation with clear eyes. Todd is not even remotely wrong. But if he’s selling 100,000 books in Japan based on those entirely obvious conclusions, I should really consider finding myself a Japanese publisher.
Anyhow, if you’re wondering why some of the more historically perspicacious intellectuals appear to be so wildly off-base with regards to their observations of the current situation, a recent conversation I had with one individual proved very illuminating. My impression is that it mostly comes down to the elder generation not being able yet to comprehend any sort of conflict between a) a regional war of the US and its allies against a single regional power, and, b) mutually assured nuclear destruction.
As a general rule, they believe that the USA of 2022 is still, more or less, the USA of 1950, only with momentarily ascendant leftists and better ethnic food. They see the qualitative problems very well, but don’t recognize the scale of the quantitative and issues, which is why their analyses, and their solutions, tend to rely upon some sort of 1980s Reagan-style renaissance that isn’t even a possibility anymore.
From centenarian clowns like Kissinger to twenty-something Republicans who read Victor Davis Hanson, all of the proposed “solutions” to the global war between Clown World and the other 80 percent of the planet led by the Sino-Russian alliance are comically irrelevant. Failing to understand either the nature or the scope of the conflict, it is their reliance upon their familiar axioms and the continuation of the current global infrastructure that is leading them astray.
But very important structural things, have fundamentally changed, as I pointed out on Monday’s Darkstream following a highly unusual statement by the Saudi Finance Minister.
Andy told me back in September 2022: “The dollar hegemony is right about ready to break when you realize that Saudi Arabia is about to join the BRIC nations. Do you think Biden is going to fly there to ask for more oil? He went there to beg them not to join BRIC.”
“The dollar was made reserve currency only because of our protection of the Saudi kingdom,” Andy continued. He then noted astutely that Saudi Arabia had signed new protection agreements with Russia. “All of the Eastern European countries that have repatriated their gold. They’re all part of the EU but they all trade their own currency. They’re all going to break away from the Western system,” he added.
And now it looks like Andy was right: it appears Saudi Arabia has just issued a death knell to the exclusivity of the petrodollar as we once knew it – the first of several dominoes that needs to fall before the U.S. is exposed financially as an emperor with no clothes.
Saudi Arabia Just Killed The Petrodollar, 18 January 2023
It may be worth noting here that my original prediction of 2033 for the end of the political entity known as the USA was predicated on the expected lifespan of the post-Bretton Woods dollar. I don’t recall anyone taking that timeframe very seriously at the time, but if it was an option, it would probably be considered in the money now.