Geopolitical Shift
We are in the middle of a massive geopolitical shift that will affect the future of the entire world. We should not be distracted by Ukraine, as it is just a sideshow in a much greater and more significant transition.
The United States empire has overreached itself, and its weakness is now being exposed to the world.
The invasion of Iraq cost the lives of nearly a million civilians, but that outcome has been a disrupted economy and a government that is hostile to the interests of the United States. It has remained in the country against the will of the Iraqi government, so it can steal the Syrian oil, but this obstinancy makes it look weak.
An attempted regime change in Syria failed. United States efforts to topple the government created and released the forces of ISIS, which has done incredible harm in many places.
After a twenty-year invasion of Afghanistan, the United States has had to admit defeat and withdraw. The retreat was a shambles in which panicked troops fired at civilians trying to escape when a bomb exploded (serious empires don't panic).
NATO bombing and missile attacks to bring regime change in Libya looked impressive in the first few weeks, but have released a civil war that is recking the country with the best education and health system in Africa. All the United States can do is pretend that they were not there and hope that the flood of refugees that have invaded Europe will go away.
The United States has been unable to stop the cruel Saudi invasion of Yemen, the poorest nation in the world, with weapons it has supplied.
The United States has flipflopped been support and rejection of the JCPOA with Iran, but has been unable to change the Iranian government or prevent it from developing an arsenal of missiles and refining uranium.
Recent attempts to effect colour revolutions in Kazakhstan and Belarus have failed because governments have worked out how to defeat them, no matter how much money the National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA throw in.
The Russian military operation in Ukraine is the latest example of the powerlessness of the US/NATO empire. It had trained and equipped the Ukrainian troops and encouraged them to assemble on the easter border, ready to invade the independent republics in the Donbas. When President Putin asked NATO for negotiations about new security agreements for Europe, the United States and the UK mocked him and challenged him to war if he was serious. They assumed that he was like them and too scared to take serious action, but he called their bluff and invaded. The United States has been powerless to prevent this from happening. This is just another example of the United States urging a nation to rely on it for security and then betraying it when the going gets tough.
All the United States has been able to do is to impose sanctions that punish its partner nations in Europe and spread inflation around the world. The full consequences of these actions have not been seen yet.
Attempts to topple the socialist government in Venezuela have failed. Now the United States is pleading with the Venezuelan government to supply oil to the market where prices are shooting up.
China now has sufficient economic and military strength to ignore United States demands and is pushing ahead with its efforts to expand its economic influence through its Belt and Road Initiative. Unlike the United States, which tends to give military aid to its clients, the Chinese build economic infrastructure for the nations it works with.
The United States sails freedom of navigation voyages in the South China Sea, but it knows that China now has sufficient military strength to blow American aircraft carriers and destroyers out of the water if it chooses.
Wasted Opportunity for Peace
When the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO should have been shut down because its reason for existence had gone. It should have been replaced with a security agreement that covered all of Europe and entrenched the peace that had overtaken the continent. The United States should have gone back to America and focussed on blessing the nations of that continent.
Instead, the United States wasted a huge opportunity to release peace in the world by acting like a world hegemon, doing what it liked and expecting all other nations to submit to its dictates. It bullied weaker nations and stirred up troubles in others. Economic resources that were needed elsewhere have been wasted intervening in situations that could not be changed. Successive presidents tried to change governments that they did not like, but their intervention usually made the situation worse. The United States has invaded nations and fought wars in countries for no-ones benefit, except the weapons manufacturers.
The nations of Europe wasted the opportunity to establish peace by expanding their vain efforts to create a United States of Europe into numerous ethnically and religiously diverse nations that cannot be united. This will cause the entire project to fracture and fail (the UK has already gone).
Push Back
Unfortunately, the world has now woken up to United States weakness. Governments everywhere are tired of being pushed around and are thumbing their nose at the United States.
Saudi Arabia has ignored President Biden's instruction to end the war in Yemen.
Saudi Arabia is doing deals for oil in Yuan.
Russia has decided to push back against the encroaching military force of NATO.
India has decided to continue importing Russian military equipment and oil.
The UAE is inviting Syria back into the Middle Eastern fold, despite United States opposition.
Character Exposed
The United States has always claimed that it is a good nation, and that it would only use its economic and military dominance to enhance democracy and free enterprise. Unfortunately, its actions in the international domain have exposed this as a lie.
In Afghanistan, the United States sided with the Northern Alliance warlords, who were proven murderers and rapists. The government they imposed on the ungrateful people was full of thieves who stole much of the economic aid being supplied.
In Syria, the United States trained and equipped rebels who were aligned with Al Qaeda.
The United States empire has revealed its true character by stealing $9 billion of central bank reserves from the Afghani people and shoving on sanctions that will cause many Afghanis to suffer from starvation and ill health. That looks like sour grapes, not liberality.
In Ukraine, the CIA has trained and equipped the neo-Nazi Azov battalions.
The Saudi government is an ugly autocracy, but it is a United States ally because it is a big buyer of weapons and supplier oil.
The US has used the Kurdish people to fight its wars, but then betrayed them by refusing to allow them to have their own independent state.
The United States cannot help itself. It demanded that China support the economic pressure it is putting on Russia but then slapped sanctions on it in support of the Uyghur people, although there are probably as many black people in United States prisons doing slave labour as there are Uyghurs in Chinese re-education centres. I am sure that the Chinese see the hypocrisy.
The needs of the United States Military Industrial Complex almost always trump any desire for peace.
When push comes to shove, the interests of United States business are put ahead of the efforts to advance liberal democracy. In various parts of the world, corrupt oligarchs and crooked businesspeople are usually the loudest voices in favour of United States involvement. The entreaties of ordinary people are usually ignored.
A recent estimate suggests that the Bush's War on Terror has displaced 37 million people in various parts of the world. Yet the US has accepted very few of them, probably because they are Arabs and Africans. This is not the response of a compassionate nation.
The United States has funded and provided political protection for Israel to bomb, torment, maim and starve the people of Gaza (half of whom are children), and steal the land of Palestinians on the West Bank.
The United States has imprisoned people without trial at Guantanamo and tortured those who refused to comply.
Journalists like Julian Assange, who have exposed United States war crimes around the world, have been imprisoned without a fair trial.
Large numbers of blacks are imprisoned in the United States without fair trials. Too many innocent prisoners end up spending years on death row.
When nations do things that the United States opposes, it happily imposes economic sanctions that steal their wealth and destroys their trade. The belief in free trade and liberal democracy seems to only apply when the United States will benefit.
Unfortunately, the American people still believe the lie.
Vulnerable
At the same time as the United States weakness is being exposed in the international sphere, division is making it vulnerable at home.
Inequality has increased significantly as rich bankers have been bailed out and protected from prosecution by the federal government, while poor people have been left to survive on what they can scrounge.
The United States seems to be incapable of running a presidential election with universal acceptance of the result. This is the inevitable consequence of the election process being run by political appointees.
When Hillary Clinton lost, she claimed that Russia had stolen the election, despite most of the evidence for Russian interference being manufactured by her supporters and paid for by her election campaign.
Donald Trump claimed that he lost because the votes were incorrectly counted.
We can assume that whoever loses the 2024 election will claim that the election was stolen. This is dangerous because it leaves the United States looking incompetent, and the person elected to be president appear impotent because they only have limited support.
The United States is incredibly divided between regions and across social classes.
Groups on both sides of the political, economic and social divide are now willing to use violence to advance their causes, or when their demands are not met.
Poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction are rife, making a mockery of claims that the United States is a kind and caring nation.
The strength of the United States church is being weakened as clergy scandals, political division, failed eschatologies, and a distorted gospel are undermining willingness to participate in church life.
A massive division exists between the people who see Donald Trump as a political saviour and those who hate him. That will not go away while he is around and will persist after he disappears from the political scene.
In the short term, the United States will continue to be weaker. However, in the longer term, I expect the United States government to become more autocratic and reassert its position of dominance using military force to impose its will on the nations that stand in its way.
Economic Shift
At the same time as this massive geopolitical realignment is taking place, a massive economic shift is occurring in parallel.
During the last thirty years, the shift of industrial production to low-wage economies, such as China and Eastern Europe, has produced an endless supply of cheap consumer goods that has flooded the entire world.
Cheaper consumer goods have allowed most people to maintain their living standards despite a sharp drop in real wages.
Lower production costs have eliminated inflation, allowing central banks to keep interest rates low.
Low interest rates have fuelled a boom in prices of assets, such as housing and shares, which has massively increased the wealth of the rich at a time when the poor are struggling.
Low interest rates have made it easy for households and governments to borrow, so debt ratios are now much higher than normal.
The globalisation of trade through container shipping and electronic communications has allowed a massive increase in the division of labour as work has been moved to where it can be done most efficiently. This has released a huge increase in productivity which has also contributed to lower prices for consumer goods (not higher wages for employees).
The people in low-wage countries are moving into the middle classes, so options for cheap production are disappearing.
National interest and sanctions are undermining the division of labour as nations attempt to become more self-sufficient. This will reduce efficiency and push up prices.
Inflation is becoming a problem all over the world, and it will get worse.
Governments usually control inflation by raising interest rates, but in the current environment, that will likely cause a recession in economies struggling to recover from covid.
Raising interest rates will push up the cost of government borrowing, exacerbating fiscal problems.
The combination of high debt levels and raised interest rates will make it difficult for governments to spend their way out of any recession.
Sanctions Push
The United States is speeding this economic transition by imposing economic sanctions on Russia and China. During the last three decades, the world benefited from the removal of tariffs and free international trade, but sanctions are doing the same job as tariffs did in the past to restrict trade.If these sanctions are kept in place (and sanctions are difficult to remove once they are put in place), the world will be divided into two trade blocs: US/EU and Eurasia. The decline in free trade and the collapse of the division of labour will make most nations worse off as goods become more expensive to produce.
The United States has pushed Russia into an alliance with China. Many nations in the Middle East are being pushed in the same direction. The Eurasian continent is going to become an economic powerhouse by combining the benefits of Russian minerals and oil with Chinese industrial production (The Soviet Union did not have the benefit of Chinese productivity). A permanent trade barrier is being raised between the United States and its clients and the nations of the Eurasian continent.
The nations of Western Europe are going to be caught in the middle. They will have to decide between submitting to the United States dictates and their need to import from Russia and China the minerals and energy necessary for its industrial production and the consumer goods that people need to maintain their lifestyles during a season of serious inflation.
Nations in Africa and South Asia are also caught in this struggle. They will be pressured to choose sides, but most will remain neutral. Very few will give their full support to the United States.
Israel will continue to be an ally of the United States because it relies on its military, economic and political support in its struggle to destroy the Palestinian people. It will become the last bastion of United States power and influence on the edge of Eurasia. The surrounding nations will tend to be ambivalent to the United States and unwilling to submit to its dictates. (Egypt will realise that it needs Russian wheat more than it needs American weapons).
International Reserve Currency
Since the emergence of the Breton Woods financial system at the end of the second world war, world trade has been denominated in US dollars. Most nations held their foreign currency reserves in US dollars because they can be used quickly to buy goods anywhere in the world.An unexpected outcome of this need for US dollar reserves was substantial demand for US Treasuries that has allowed successive United States governments to run budget deficits without any serious consequences. The current value of outstanding treasuries is upside of $20 trillion dollars. This debt will probably never be repaid, so it has been a massive free lunch.
This advantage allowed the United States to spend money on overseas wars without having to worry about paying for them, because they knew that the nations of the world would buy any debt instruments issued to cover the costs. Indirectly, the nations of the world paid for American invasions into their regions.
This privileged position is now coming to an end as nations stop trusting in the United States' integrity and the reliability of its currency.
In recent years, many nations have diversified their foreign reserves into other strong currencies.
The widespread adoption of floating exchange rates has reduced the need to hold foreign reserves to protect a currency peg.
Saudi Arabia has had an agreement with the United States since the late 1950s that it would only sell oil for US dollars in exchange for a security guarantee. This petro-dollar agreement significantly strengthened the role of the US dollar as a reserve currency. That agreement has now been broken due to United States hostility, and the Saudis are now negotiating to sell oil to China for Yuan.
The development of cryptocurrencies and digital currencies are providing alternative secure options for governments to store their reserves.
The United States has been shooting itself in the foot by freezing the reserves of nations like Russia and Afghanistan and pushing them out of the SWIFT system for international banking transactions. (The United States has just stolen $9 billion of Afghani reserves because it lost a war. It encouraged the UK to steel Venuzuela's gold). It is unwittingly giving out the message that a nation's reserves held in the US dollar might not be safe, if the current United States government gets a snitch against it.
Outcome
The United States economy has been massively inflated over the last couple of decades. The various problems listed above could be the trigger that causes an implosion. This would seriously undermine the ability of the United States to project political, economic power in the geopolitical domain.These economic headwinds will make life on earth more uncertain than we have been accustomed to.
