Tag: imperialism

Why BRICS Can’t Replace the G7

The new organizations will not be carbon copies of their Clown World predecessors:

We can state with certainty that groups such as the BRICS and, at the regional level, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, cannot replicate the model that has made the Western world so successful. Firstly, the objectives of its members are not to exploit the rest of humanity. Consequently, the level of coordination of national policies also cannot reach such a high degree. Simply because, by participating in BRICS, for instance, countries do not address the most fundamental issues of survival or achieve development objectives. In other words, everything the West creates is aimed against the rest of the world, and there are no exceptions. Those who now oppose the West, whether through confrontation like Russia or through the pursuit of softer alternatives like India and the Arab countries, do not initially orient their policies towards combating all humanity. Therefore, they will find it difficult to create an alternative form of institutional cooperation.

Second, the organizational structure of new alliances of countries from the Global South cannot be based on a ‘single leader’ model. Thus, large countries such as Russia, China, and even India have not joined the Western bloc because, due to their structural differences, they cannot accept the unquestioned authority of another major power to fulfil all of its demands, as Western Europe does with the United States.

Now the Global South is seeking to establish its own institutions but, for objective reasons, it still has a long way to go in understanding how these institutions can function without being replicas of Western models. This applies even to more specific areas of cooperation, which are strictly regulated within the West in accordance with internal power hierarchies.

However, the theoretical aspect of the issue is equally interesting. In this regard, even the very concept of “international order” may prove to be controversial and even unacceptable in some respects in the future.

The fact is that the entire conceptual framework which allows us to discuss international politics in a relatively consistent manner, was developed under specific conditions that were inherent in world events over the past five hundred years. This implies that we cannot currently determine how relevant well-known concepts of international reality will be in the coming decades.

For instance, the “Westphalian order” is a concept that emerged as a result of the legal resolution of an intra-European conflict between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, with little relevance to the rest of the world. However, due to the dominance of Western powers, this order — as a mechanism for interstate relations — has since spread across the globe.

In essence, the current system has been imposed on other countries. A notable example is China, which became “connected” to the Westphalian system through the military aggression of European powers in the early 19th century. This could lead to a situation where the words used by political leaders and scholars become meaningless.

This is another good sign that the most powerful of the sovereign nations, China and Russia, harbor no objective to replace the USA. But we already knew this; if China wanted to replace the USA, it would not have cancelled the planned “jump to China” in 2015 that was intended to accomplish precisely that.

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Terminal Stage

The Ukrainian opposition is speaking out against what the foreign Clown World regime has done to its people ever since it gained independence:

One of the most important reasons why states collapse is the degradation of their elites. Historians argue that the Roman Empire fell not so much from the onslaught of barbarians, but rather that it rotted away from the inside. If we take our own history, roughly the same thing happened with ancient Kiev. For centuries, Kiev was the capital of the Russian early feudal state, but lost its significance as a result of civil strife caused by the princely elite.

Political clown President Zelensky has irreparably damaged the foundations of Ukraine’s statehood and may very well end up being the country’s last president. Every Ukrainian president, having received power from the hands of the people, tried to sell it, and each time was more and more successful. At the moment, Ukraine has already been sold in a global political auction, and when it is finally used up, will be thrown into a landfill.

Does this suggest that the people of Ukraine are flawed? No, it suggests that a flawed elite has formed which cannot and does not want to govern the people.

Today, Western propagandists work to convince Ukrainians that they will not succeed without their own statehood, but in reality this statehood was sold to international corporations a long time ago. In its present form, such statehood does not correspond to the national interests of Ukrainians. Today, Ukraine’s elite has not only sold the interests of the country, but sold its people into becoming cannon fodder for other, more powerful countries’ geopolitical ambitions.

The process of the country’s collapse has already begun, and is at the terminal stage.

The same thing has happened to Americans too, but most of them don’t realize it yet. The main reason no foreign elite should ever be permitted anywhere near the center of national power and influence, regardless of the system of government, is because they will inevitably utilize it against the interests of the the nation itself.

This is why we see the same process playing out again and again regardless of whether the national government is organized in the form of a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy. The nominal form of the governmental structure doesn’t actually matter very much when the interests of the elite are fundamentally at odds with the interests of the people.

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Why the Empire Always Falls

Philip K. Dick called it The Empire That Never Ended. Miles Mathis called them the Phoenecian Navy. I call them the Prometheans. Most people today call them globalists, but Jesus Christ called them the Synagogue of Satan. We don’t know what they call themselves, but they a) often appear to identify publicly as Jews and b) always criminalize expressions of Christianity and antisemitism.

And the latter points toward why they always fail, and why they have never, in more than 1,500 years, been able to successfully establish or maintain their own society or civilization despite occasionally possessing all the necessary instruments of power and influence in societies as powerful as pre-Imperial Spain, Tsarist Russia, post-Imperial Britain, or the post-Cold War USA. This cartoon sums up the essential cause of the failure.

For some inexplicable reason known only to themselves, the Prometheans always insist on a completely subjective law. And while that’s very useful for acquiring power, it is absolutely fatal to preserving it, because subjective law necessarily imposes the very sort of inequality that renders a society unstable. This is why every society that has successfully developed into a civilization has an elite that not only practices some form of noblesse oblige, but holds the members of the elite fully accountable to objective laws that are not substantially different than the laws the plebs must obey.

In short, to rule, one will be held responsible. To rule successfully, one must be capable of responsibly looking after the interests of the ruled.

Any elite that does not do so is viewed, correctly, as parasitical and illegitimate, and in Chinese terms, does not hold the Mandate of Heaven. And if there is one thing that is clear about the current Clown World super-regime, it is that it is illegitimate by its own self-proclaimed standard of democracy and its laws are entirely subjective. Which is why Clown World, like Babylon, is going to fall.

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The Empire Enters the Doom Loop

Ahnaf Habib, writing at The Tree of Woe, implicitly contends that that my decades-old prediction of the collapse of the USA as a singular political entity in 2033 is too optimistic:

This is a Doom Loop. All signs presently indicate that The US has entered said Loop. The gravity of the moment we are in cannot be merely dismissed on a whim of ‘hope’.

There was a time when the United States and its peoples could safely hide behind two Oceans, a robust economy, a homogenous society (ethnic, cultural and religious), technological prowess, etc. However, none of those are extant today.

America had its chance. It had an opportunity to pursue Empire in some “benevolent” capacity. It had its shot at leading the rest of world in a manner that could have been dignified, measured and temperate. It had all of that and much more.

But that is all in the past. What remains today is nothing more than “inertia”.

Men; men more clever, wise, and capable than any of the sorry lot of soy-drinking fools who claim to be “men” today in CONUS and the European satrapies; such men have long passed on. With their passing, what they built can only endure for a bit more at most.

Make no mistake: The Empire of Lies will not go down without a fight.

There are however, too many “small brushfires” worldwide to extinguish. Ergo, “Death by a Thousand Cuts” is the name of the game. Defeat is only a matter of time.

Doubts have already arisen in the Empire’s ability to secure World Trade.

This is magnified by a loss of deterrence in West Asia, in spite of the multiple carrier battle groups sent to the region to dissuade regional players.

The de facto blockade of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait by Yemen’s Ansarallah is shaping up to be the “Suez Moment” of American Empire: If the Hegemon cannot lift said blockade and guarantee the safety of global shipping, it is no longer a “Superpower.”

The fate of America was sealed by two things. First, the Civil War that established the empire. Second, the notorious 1883 poem of Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”, that to all intents and purposes replaced the Constitution of the United States.

The Republic belonged to Americans. The Empire belonged to those who adopted the foreign “Melting Pot” ideology that was introduced to denationalize the new empire and sever it from its British roots. Everything that has happened since, including the largest invasion in human history and the concomitant takeover by the same ethnic elite that ruled the Soviet Union, was a direct result of those two fatal events.

This latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended appears to be approaching its end. There is, I think, some comfort in the knowledge that there was essentially nothing that anyone living today could have done about the historical trajectory of the United States. But all empires inevitably come to an end, and it is eminently clear that the bells are tolling for the imperial USA. And while it may not seem to be the case, the collapse of the imperial USA may well turn out to be the best thing to happen for the American nation in decades, if not quite centuries.

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It’s Official

House Democrats splintered on Tuesday over a resolution condemning the rise of antisemitism in the United States and around the world, with more than half of them declining to support a measure declaring that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” The resolution denouncing antisemitism, drafted by Republicans, passed by a vote of 311 to 14, drawing the support of all but one Republican. Ninety-two Democrats voted “present” — not taking a position for or against the measure — while 95 supported it.

— The New York Times

Next up for House Republicans: A resolution declaring that a refusal to discuss, or even mention in any way, Literally Where, is antisemitism.

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France Retreats From Africa

The French President has announced that it will remove its troops and its diplomats from Niger as per the request of the new Nigerien government:

France will pull its military and diplomats from Niger after a successful coup by anti-French forces, President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday. The move will see around 1,500 soldiers leave by the end of the year.

“France has decided to withdraw its ambassador. In the next hours our ambassador and several diplomats will return to France,” Macron told France 2 television on Sunday. “And we will put an end to our military cooperation with the Niger authorities,” he continued, adding that French troops would return home in “the months to come.”

Niger’s pro-French president, Mohamed Bazoum, was ousted in a military coup in July. Capitalizing on widespread public dissatisfaction with France’s decade-long anti-insurgent operation in the region, the coup leaders immediately suspended a military cooperation agreement with the French government and demanded that French troops leave the country.

This is a small, but serious defeat for The Empire That Never Ended. Clown World is imperial and it’s European satrapies are economically dependent upon draining the resources from Africa without paying full price for them. The growing BRICSIA alliance is quickly winning over the allegiance of the African nations in part because they are offering genuine trade rather than corruption and parasitical neo-colonialism, although it will be interesting to see if China can resist the temptation to stake a similar claim to Africa’s rich natural resources when it has the power to do so.

Russia, of course, has no need for them.

In either case, this will probably not be the last African country to demand European or US troops to leave. And it probably won’t be too long before Asian countries start following suit, although it is unlikely that the USA will politely accede to any such demands from Japan or Korea.

And, of course, France hasn’t actually withdrawn them yet…

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The Rude Awakening

Victoria Nuland and her fellow neoclowns were not prepared for Russia to defeat NATO, for the rise of BRICS, or for the second great wave of anticolonial revolutions in Africa:

When US Acting Deputy Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, traveled to South Africa on July 29, her reputation as a blunt instrument of Washington’s hegemonic interests preceded her.

According to a veteran South African official who attended meetings with the senior US diplomat in Pretoria, however, Nuland and her team were demonstrably unprepared to grapple with recent developments on the African continent — particularly the military coup that removed Niger’s pro-Western government hours before she launched her multi-stop tour of the region.

“In over 20 years working with the Americans, I have never seen them so desperate,” the official told The Grayzone, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Pretoria was well aware of Nuland’s hawkish reputation, but when she arrived in Pretoria, the official described her as “totally caught off guard” by winds of change engulfing the region. The July putsch that saw a popular military junta come to power in Niger followed military coups in Mali and Burkina Faso that were similarly inspired by mass anti-colonial sentiment.

And now Gabon has similarly overthrown its US-funded French colonial puppet government:

The United States has invested millions of dollars in foreign assistance to an African country whose military staged a successful coup against the sitting president on Wednesday. The U.S. has sent roughly $100 million in direct foreign assistance to Gabon, a country located in the Sahel region of Africa, since 2001, according to ForeignAssistance.gov. Additionally, Gabon has separately received approximately $42 million in direct foreign aid to improve and protect its national parks service.

A number of Gabon’s military forces arrested President Ali Bongo Ondimba in a successful coup that sought to overturn the results of a highly contentious election on Wednesday. Ondimba was arrested for “high betrayal of state institutions, massive embezzlement of public funds [and] international financial embezzlement,” according to the soldiers, who also declared on Wednesday that they would “dissolve all institutions of the republic.”

Imagine how these self-styled makers of reality are going to fare when they actually have to go up directly against China and Iran and their reliable weapons of debt money, corruption, and nepotism will avail them literally nothing.

Clown World, like Babylon, gwan fall.

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Et tu, Argentina?

Argentina abandons the dollar in favor of the yuan for trade with China:

Argentina will aim to pay for the bulk of its monthly imports from China in yuan rather than US dollars, Economy Minister Sergio Massa announced on Wednesday. Buenos Aires and Beijing signed a currency swap agreement last year, aimed at stemming the outflow of foreign currency from Argentina’s central bank.

China is currently Argentina’s second largest trade partner after Brazil, and the second biggest destination for Argentinian exports. Argentina’s total imports from China was around $13.5bn in 2021, according to the United Nations database on international trade.

Massa said that Buenos Aires will pay the equivalent of $1 billion in yuan for Chinese goods and services this month, with $790 million of monthly imports paid for in yuan each month thereafter. The currency swap agreement, expanded and finalized earlier this year, also allows Argentinian exporters to make settlements in yuan or dollars, to help balance the flows of foreign currencies in the central bank.

Even the neoclown Robert Kagan warned of the potential consequences for the neoliberal world order if the USA were to abuse its privileged position, which it generally avoided doing between 1945 and 2020.

The success of the order, however, also depended on the United States abiding by some basic rules. Chief among these was that it not exploit the system it dominated to gain lasting economic advantages at the expense of the other powers in the order. Put simply, it could not use its military dominance to win the economic competition against fellow members of the order, nor could it treat the economic competition as a zero-sum game and insist on always winning.

The Jungle Grows Back, Robert Kagan, 2019

The decision to weaponize the dollar in lieu of challenging Russia directly in a military context may prove to be one of the more catastrophic errors in the history of empires. Astute historians such as Victor Davis Hanson have for some time been wondering exactly when, and where, the Imperial USA’s Syracuse moment of imperial overstretch would take place; in The Father of Us All, published in 2010, VDH argued that the Iraq War was not likely to be a serious candidate for the Moment.

Athens’s disastrous 415 B.C. expedition against Sicily, the largest democracy in the Greek world, may not prefigure our war in Iraq. (A hypothetical parallel to democratic Athens’s preemptive attack on the neutral, distant, far larger, and equally democratic Syracuse in the midst of an ongoing though dormant war with Sparta would be America’s dropping its struggle with al-Qaeda to invade India).

However, it increasingly appears that the attempt to control Russia using the leash of the dollar reserve system may have marked that long-anticipated Moment, as dropping its economic neutrality and putting pressure on the rest of the participants in the global economy in order to pressure Russia into withdrawing from Crimea and the Donbass, then doubling down on that mistake by financing the Kiev regime’s war appears to have been even more devastating to the neoliberal world order than an invasion of India.

UPDATE: The Global Times expresses China’s belief that de-dollarization is not merely desirable, but inevitable.

One of the most direct reasons behind the global de-dollarization trend is that the US has been increasingly weaponizing US dollar hegemony to impose economic sanctions as well as political repression. For instance, key Russia banks have been excluded from the SWIFT system, a service that facilitates global transactions among thousands of financial institutions.

What’s perhaps more surprising – and potentially worrying for Washington – is how expensive and scarce offshore US dollars are becoming. As the US Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest rate hikes hit global financial systems, an increasing amount of foreign capital flowed back to the US, leading to a global US dollar shortage. The US’ interest rate hikes and the resulting shortage of US dollars serve as another important factor driving more countries to push for a quicker pace of de-dollarization.

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Indonesia Leaves the Dollarzone

The largest Muslim nation in the world has abandoned the US trade dollar:

Indonesia is following the lead of the BRICS group in its policy of shifting away from the US dollar in trade and financial transactions, according to the country’s central bank.

Jakarta has introduced transactions in the local currency to settle cross-border trades, the portal SINDOnews has reported, citing Bank of Indonesia Governor Perry Warjiyo.

“Indonesia has initiated diversification of the use of currency in the form of LCT [local currency trading]. The direction is the same as the BRICS. In fact, Indonesia is more concrete,” Warjiyo said on Friday, addressing a press conference with the board of governors meeting.

Indonesia has already implemented the practice with a number of countries, such as Thailand, Malaysia, China, and Japan, he added. It also plans to sign a cooperation agreement with South Korea regarding local currency trading in early May.

Warjiyo’s statement comes as the BRICS economic bloc – comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – claims to be working on establishing a joint payment network to cut reliance on the Western financial system, and on the dollar in particular.

In related news, India and Bangladesh have dropped the dollar for use in their bilateral trade.

India and Bangladesh are moving away from using the US dollar in bilateral trade, the Bangladesh-based news website The Business Standard reported this week. According to the report, the two countries have reached a deal that will see a part of trade transactions carried out in their respective domestic currencies, the rupee and the taka.

It’s fascinating to see that the imperial overstep by the United States was not an invasion like Syracuse or even the suppression of a potential military rival like the World Wars fought between England and Germany, but the weaponization of its financial hegemony.

I always expected de-dollarization to follow both a) an economic crisis and b) a major military defeat, but instead, it appears to have preceded both due to the very rational fears of countries observing how Russia was attacked economically via the global dollar system.

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Contemplating De-dollarization

The Tree of Woe takes a victory lap concerning his prediction about the end of the US dollar hegemony:

In his novel Goldfinger, Ian Fleming famously said “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” We’re well past three events. This is not a “trend”. This is a globally coordinated action against the petrodollar and there’s no mistaking what it means.

It means the Petrodollar System that has served as the bedrock of world finance since the 1970s is over.

It means I’ve been proven right even faster than I expected.

What is altogether depressing, yet not at all surprising, is how the press coverage of these shocking events has (a) utterly misunderstood their causality and (b) grossly underestimated their gravity. I’m going to use article over at VisualCapitalist.com as my punching bag because it so perfectly captures everything that’s wrong with our mainstream elite… Being either ignorant of or unwilling to acknowledge the petro-military basis of our financial order, VisualCapitalist.com then proceeds to misdiagnose the reason for the dollar’s precipitous decline, writing:

Concerned about America’s dominance over the global financial system and the country’s ability to ‘weaponize’ it, other nations have been testing alternatives to reduce the dollar’s hegemony…

They have entirely confused cause and effect. Other nations have been testing alternatives to reduce the dollar’s hegemony since, well, since the dollar has been hegemonic. All prior “tests” have resulted in the destructing of whichever regime was performing the test. Ask Muammar Gaddafi how his gold dinar worked out.

As I documented in Running on Empty (now available as a book!), since 1971 America’s dominance over the global financial system has been based on America’s military dominance over the Middle East. Now that America’s military dominance has declined, athe country’s dominance over global finance has declined, too. Therefore, the honest way to report the news would be to say:

Unconcerned about America’s purported military dominance and tired of the country’s increasingly punitive attempts to ‘weaponize’ the dollar to make up for it, nations have been testing alternatives to reduce the dollar’s hegemony…

Because that is what is actually happening. Of course no one will say that.

And what will be the consequences of this global event? Our friends at VisualCapitalist.com assert:

Despite these movements, few expect to see the end of the dollar’s global sovereign status anytime soon.

And they’re right. Very few experts expect to see the end of the dollar’s global sovereign status anytime soon. That’s because the majority of experts are too stupid to realize it’s already ended.

He’s absolutely right. It’s already over, and every single day, we’re seeing more countries taking steps to free themselves of the economic chains imposed by the petrodollar. The key, as the Tree of Woe repeatedly points out, is that the decline of the US military combined with the rise of the Chinese and Russian militaries, means that the nations of the world are free agents for the first time in seven decades.

As I pointed out in a recent Darkstream, the reason all the Clown World intellectuals declared the absolute necessity of winning the war in Ukraine, much to the confusion of the people of the USA and Europe who don’t understand why Ukraine matters when Afghanistan didn’t, is because Ukraine clearly shows the limits of US military power. And the whole system rested on the idea that any nation that attempted to evade the dollar tax would be punished with military invasion and regime change.

But the global superpower is no more. Everyone can see that the Empire has no army. Which means the nations are now free to buy and sell as they choose, in whatever medium of exchange they choose, rather than having to pay a tax to the US bankers on every single transaction. And the rapidity with which each of the steps taken by countries from Argentina to India, and from Brazil to Malaysia, indicates the eagerness with which the peoples of the world seek to free themselves from their dollar chains.

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