The biggest catalyst to transforming the current world order is not the ramshackle BRICS coalition but the marauding United States, Declan Hayes writes.
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The biggest catalyst to transforming the current world order is not the ramshackle BRICS coalition but the marauding United States which was, far and away, the biggest winner of the Second World War, an epoch changing event which allowed Uncle Sam harness the entire world, its commanding heights in particular, to serve its own selfish needs.
The Second World War lifted the United States out of the 1930s doldrums and the Marshall Plan and other gimmicks were utilised to stop the westward march of the Red Army, resulting in Europe enjoying some of the crumbs of America’s good fortune. The Korean War not only helped to stop China but, more to the point, enabled Japan to achieve economic lift off.
Though this seemingly pleasant state of affairs, and the bastardised Keynesian economics which underwrote it, came to a halt when the 1973 oil crisis heralded in our current Age of Economic Uncertainty, things have not changed all that much for those who really count. The G7 countries still, as these links here, here and here suggest, largely control the world economy, its banking and financial sectors in particular, and the Bretton Woods institutions are still very firmly in the hands of Uncle Sam and his despicable little toadies.
While the wars on the borders of Russia and Iran are a profitable nuisance and the Palestinian Israeli issue is far more than that, MI6 and the CIA can sleep soundly, knowing that the warped system they are paid to defend and promote is under no imminent threat.
The same cannot be said about Iran and Russia, which must deal with an ever growing range of NATO threats, emanating not just from Ukraine but from Turkey, the southern Caucasus and now even central Asia, that are crystallised in America’s Zangezur Corridor, which cuts through Armenia and which gives the United States and its Turkish and Azeri running dogs unhindered access to the borders of Iran. When David’s Corridor is added to the mix, the Iranians are right to feel they are in a pickle and no wonder they are prepared to go to war there and in southern Lebanon in futile attempts to reverse the Anglo-Israeli tide. God bless their simple minds.
Given that money is famously.a coward, investors are best following the examples of Germany and Japan and handing their crown jewels over to America. Not that they have any choice in this offer they can’t refuse for, as U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has clearly declared, the Yanks now treat their allies’ wealth as an American “sovereign wealth fund” (Bessent’s words), “directing” them, “largely at the [U.S.] president’s discretion”, how to use their money in order to build American factories and reshore American industries. Though even Fox News found this unabashed colonial plunder, “offshore appropriation”, as they called this blatant shakedown, hard to stomach, MAGA Trump is not so much a return to American school economics but a regression to more primitive and draconian forms of colonial taxation policy.
These links here, here, here, here and here all assert that the consensus is that, outside of China, Russia and a few largely irrelevant hold outs, the Yanks rule the roost. Think of our civilised world as a giant Guantanamo Bay, with American sharpshooters perched on the watchtowers, prepared to mow down anyone who makes a dash for freedom and you get the picture of our dystopian world. There will be no mass break out from this America First cage.
Though China must wait for another day, the West can feel confident it can give China a run for its money by stoking up old enmities with Vietnam and newer ones with India, which must compete with China for access to resources and markets. If the Chinese tree can be shaken, who knows what succulent fruit may fall off it? And, if the Chinese economy can be made to implode, who knows what repercussions near and far that may have in both the long term and the short term?
Lowry‘s matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs, who can only see Trump’s shenanigans in the simplest of terms (5D chess, Chinese checkers etc), do not have the grey matter to appreciate what else is happening. Trump’s bullying has kicked all of America’s allies into line and, where he leads, the ducklings will have to follow or be heavily penalised for daring to criticise their owner and master. If there is a Charles de Gaulle, a Gough Whitlam, a Willy Brandt or a Jacques Chirac anywhere out there, I am unaware of him/her/zer.
As regards NATO’s home front, all we can say is to the victor the spoils, and that victor is the America of Donald J Trump and his billionaire backers. Three cheers for apple pie and world wide wrestling, which is all most of the MAGA hat wearers have left to cheer about. Outside of arms, pornography and whatever is left of Hollywood, no one is hiring.
As regards the ordinary American Joe, what about him? He has never been of much importance and in this day of AI and cheap Chinese gadgets, he is of even less importance than he ever was. No wonder he is taking to the crack pipe and the fentanyl (blame China and Mexico) with a vengeance.
And, as regards GI Joe, the ultimate function of those American soldiers AI has not yet made obsolete is to die in action with minimal; impact on the national consciousness. The Ukrainian muddle has shown us there is no end to foreigners, Ukrainians in the main, prepared to fill the body bags American Gis might otherwise be filling and what is good enough for dead Ukrainians should be good enough for Georgians, Azeris and Armenians too. As Lindsay Graham previously explained, stacking up dead Russian bodies at the expense of others is the best value money can buy and he’ll find no argument there with me, given that the name of the game is to retain control and for the Skull and Bones lot to reap the benefits that control begets. As long as wars rage, Wall Street and the City of London cannot come under scrutiny. That is, as war criminal Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, a known known.
Wall Street is the world’s best consumer of information and, happy to say, it is currently enjoying a bull run, as the Trump bump gets the S&P to scale ever new heights even if, as our Trot friends eloquently explain, those records are being achieved by new tech firms, which don’t create rust bucket jobs and, as often as not, prey on America’s most vulnerable through predatory lending enabled by compromised legislators.
This is not to say that the basket cases of Brazil and South Africa, which not only form the alpha and omega of the BRICS acronym but were synonymous with the dependency theory of development up to when its practitioners adopted this latest BRICS grift, will supplant the Pax Americana but that a new and hybrid global order (or disorder if you will) is emerging in this age of monsters.
Vietnam is important in this regard as opposition to its war of national liberation led to Rostow‘s idiotic stages theory of economic growth, which only saw the light of day as a means to stave off the liberation demands of Ho Chi Minh, General Giap and their millions of tooled-up mates. Whatever fruits of victory Vietnam now belatedly enjoys are the fruits of their own huge sacrifices and hell will freeze over before they ever surrender to the Americans, the French or especially the Chinese, who ruled them for 1000 years and who will only ever rule them again, if they first kill the lot of them. Not, for the record, my words but those of Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh.
Although Vietnam’s growth has been spectacular, mercantilist China’s has been even more so but that comes with its own problems, which attacks on Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines will do nothing to solve but might well instead accentuate. Though BRICS members India, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates are all either just along for the ride or, in the case of the UAE, hedging its military and financial options, the bottom line is that all those countries are at the periphery and America and its vassals remain at the centre. Not, for the record, my words but deductions from these authoritative sources here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
Cut to its core, BRICS is a Chinese neo mercantilist outreach program with Russia riding shotgun, and with Brazil and the equally pathetic case of South Africa being along just for the freebies. Vietnam and, much more so, India, will be reluctant partners, given China’s land grabs and arms deals with the likes of CIA client state Pakistan. Although simpletons need simple scenarios, life is complexity personified and China will find that at every step along its various hub and spokes highways. America has made her intentions crystal clear regarding the defence of Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines, and it is inconceivable that India and Vietnam will oppose the Yanks on that. Once other fronts settle down, China can expect a lot more trouble coming its way.
The key to slaying the dragon has already been clearly spelt out. It is to cause dissent in Hong Kong, Occupied Tibet and Xinjiang, where Sultan Erdoǧan’s Uyghurs can be expected to stir the plot with some well placed suicide bomb attacks. Add in CIA operations in Pakistan, the Pakistani-U.S. MOE to develop oil fields in Balochistan (where the CIA’s ISIS proxies have been busily whacking Chinese engineers), worldwide attacks on China’s diaspora and some well placed blockades and sanctions and China will most likely spit the dummy, thereby falling further into NATO’s carefully set nets.
China’s switch from investing in U.S. treasuries to financing Africa developmental infrastructure and an incredible array of air freight routes in exchange for access to markets and political favours can be seen as their further adaptation of Japanese practices. But, given their own demographic melt down, Japan is probably best leaving the Chinese set the pace in the impoverished “Global South” and to leave much of her own surplus in various American fixed income assets, knowing that China will, in God’s own time, suffer the same demographic testicle squeezes Japan now labours under.
When the Wehrmacht swept through Europe, Steinbeck wrote in The Moon is Down that “the flies have conquered the flypaper“, and the same might apply to the Chinese, whose fundamentally invariant problems of multiplication and division remain, meaning that China has to divide its national cake 1.4 billion ways, and that a small, regional problem can become a massive 1.4 billion strong problem if it gathers traction, problems Switzerland, to take but one example, never has to worry about.
Perhaps the biggest threat China poses to NATO is in the open source technology of companies like DeepSeek, Zhipu, Alibaba and Huawei, which allows other counties to help in abolishing the technological and other rents the West has thrived on and, when coupled with the less than LIBOR rates China is able to lend at, undermines some of the West’s core competitive advantages. This has been seen most starkly in the recent Indian-Pakistani spat where India’s Rafale fighters, the best and most expensive the EU has, were lambs to the slaughter for Pakistan’s Chinese-made J-10C fighters, PL-15 air to air missiles, HQ-9 air defense system, and ZDK-03 AWACS. As it that was not worrying enough, China has 4th, 5th and 6th generation fighters, such as the J-20, J-35, J-16, J-15, J-36 and J-50, all of which far outclass the J-10C.and all of which have integrated Chinese weapon systems far superior than anything NATO’s far more expensive but increasingly obsolete weaponry can currently even dream about.
So, how stands the global chessboard, where Americans are the white hats and so call the play. Basically, to be even the humblest pawn for Team Trump, nations must allow free entry to American goods, buy hundreds of billions of dollars of obsolete U.S. weaponry, invest heavily in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and leave all accruing profits there. If you want a historical analogy, think how ancient Rome made its vanquished enemies walk under the yoke and recall this is always how America behaved.
Although China is offering far better terms to those who will trade with her, America has the deck stacked in such a way that countries cannot afford to wait until they can change horses in midstream. As far as Europe, Japan and many other key satrapies are concerned, it is advantage Trump. When we consider that countries like South Africa and Brazil are already explosive basket cases, when we add rigged Bolivian elections, $50 million Yankee bounties (!) on Venezuela’s Maduro, Brazilian and Colombian goons running amok in Ukraine and other “Global South” horizontal champions behaving like incontinent mice, some hard decisions regarding biting bullets have to be made there.
Much the same, of course, applies to China herself, which has seen overall exports grow, despite its shadow economic wars on multiple fronts. Although China’s full year trade surpluses are now exceeding an amazing $1.3 trillion annually, it is worth remembering that Putin’s Russia, Saddam’s Iraq and even Bashar Assad’s Syria were performing quite nicely until Uncle Sam mugged them.
Although China is rapidly expanding trade with the BRICS countries and China is now far and away ASEAN’s major trading partner, what if Trump, like Byzantium of old, cannot only hold these nouveau Ottomans at bay with his Greek fire but attack their rear front as the Romans did at Carthage to Hannibal?
Byzantium, with the help of the Pisans and Genoans, held out for centuries against the barbarians and, when it did eventually succumb, it was replaced by Russia in Europe’s east and the Holy Roman Empire in its west. And, as for Hannibal, perhaps Trump is the new Scipio, finishing off the West Europeans and further pressuring China by doing deals in Alaska with Putin regarding Siberia’s riches. Who is to know?
What we do know is that, when the dust over current tempests settles, Russia and China most likely will both be still standing, as will the shot callers of the United States, who have successfully disenfranchised and emasculated their own Doordash electorate and, thanks to their Europeans and other satraps, most of the rest of the world as well. Welcome to the abyss.
