The Russia-Ukraine Subterfuge Continues: What Comes Next?
There is an unwritten rule in geopolitics - that which is most unlikely to happen, is most likely to happen. Humans are naturally apt to view events through a binary lens - good-bad, black-white. While this position is generally true for much of public discourse, it poses the danger of limiting the options available when assessing complex situations by floating only two absolute choices when there could in fact be more. This phenomena is known as the false dichotomy (or false dilemma), and nowhere has this fallacy manifested itself more today than in the ongoing Russo-Ukraine debacle.
By fixating on a Manichean mindset which portrays Ukraine as the "good guy", Russia as the "bad guy" and the United States & Company as benevolent actors with a white knight complex, the media echo chamber has overlooked a third possibility and a more menacing prospect festering beneath the hood.
At its onset, I suggested that Russia's military campaign in Ukraine was an enterprise that would insidiously and fundamentally alter the American-led world order of the post-world war II era and set in motion a sequence of events to serve as primers for a new kind of global economic order in which America’s preeminence, both as a global economic and geopolitical leader, is significantly diminished - a first among equals - if not altogether obliterated. While the dollar's primacy has been in freefall since at least 2008, America's increasingly short-sighted and antagonistic foreign policy posture has accelerated the process, and absent a strategic reversal of policy by the collective west, the war remains poised to upend the entire global economic complex.
Economic power is the linchpin of geopolitical clout, and deteriorating economic prowess is the sure harbinger to geopolitical demise. The conclusion of the Russo-Ukraine war will to see a weakened America and a relatively strengthened far eastern bloc. My initial hypothesis on the war was that it would be used as a smokescreen to facilitate the controlled demolition of the global economic order through a covert power transfer scheme. Whether this program of power transfer is unintentional and owing to incompetence on the part of American strategists, or deliberate and malicious, is up for debate, but the dynamics of the war tip the scale of possibility towards the latter. Specifically, I stated:
It may sound counterintuitive at present, but the United States' and the west's sanctions against Russia will in the long-run do more to cripple the U.S. dollar than they ever will to harm Russia’s economy or that of Eastern nations. It is the dollar that is poised to be the real and foremost casualty of the west’s sanctions war against Russia. Effectively, the west is at war against itself and the Russia-Ukraine war serves as a form of decoy to conceal this fact.
Sanctioning Russia and restricting it access to its dollar-denominated assets has forced Russia into alternative means of continuing trade with its partners, specifically the BRICS nations. Due to the tight sanctions, Russia and its trading partners are essentially being forced to develop a roadmap for circumventing these sanctions. Effectively, this means isolating from the U.S dollar in favor of bilateral agreements based on currencies other than the U.S dollar.
For the globalists who seek to forge a new economic order to marshal their new world order, the war in Ukraine is the “perfect storm” and they will want to extend it as long as possible before they ever think of taming it.
This position was premised on the simple and documentable fact that the process of complete internationalization (one world government) as described by global power brokers, requires the active and gradual weakening of American global leadership as defined by America's economic supremacy via the dollar's reserve currency status, upon whose ruin a new international order will be forged. As CFR alumni Richard Gardner phrased it:
In short, the house of world order will have to be built from the bottom up rather than the top down. It will look like a great “booming, buzzing confusion” to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.
The disintegration of Pax Americana and a dollar-denominated global economy through spontaneous and manufactured power transfer avenues are necessary ingredients in the establishment of a new centralized global architecture; and conflict is the catalyst that propels the new world order voyage to its envisaged destination.
The dynamics of the Russia-Ukraine war have provided the perfect cover to supercharge the process of power redistribution from the global west to the east. It is by no accident that the events of the past two decades have mostly benefited eastern proponents such as China, while undercutting the sway of established western powers, primarily the United States. It is also no secret that globalists have a conspicuously pro-China bent; from Soros to the Rockefellers, and Klaus Schwab to the Rothschilds, all have exhibited an eerie desire for China’s rise as a player of equal standing to the United States. The real question is, why?
The East-West Myth
The concept of the east-west paradigm suggests that the world is ideologically divided into two competing blocs with divergent objectives. Today, this concept serves as the thrust of the unipolar vs multipolar world order debate; with the east (emerging powers) contending for a new and burgeoning multipolar world order over which it exercises more power, and the west (established powers) assiduously scrambling to maintain the unipolar world order. But this dichotomous conclusion presents an oversimplified account of a far more insidious scheme established through years-long machination and maneuvering.
The process of power consolidation in international relations is accomplished primarily through the use Hegelian Dialectics: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. In other words, the differences between two opposing concepts, ideas or entities can be used to reach a third concept (synthesis) that unifies the first two via compromise and concessions. In geopolitics, conflict between the west (thesis) and east (antithesis) can be used to generate a desired and predetermined outcome (the synthesis). To put this into perspective, world war I birthed the League of Nations, while world II culminated in the United Nations to supplant the now-defunct League of Nations. In each case, far-reaching strides were taken towards the ultimate goal of absolute global centralization. In essence, west and east are two sides of the same coin and two wings of the same bird whose “differences” can be used to pit them against each other to achieve objectives which are expedient to process of power consolidation. Proponents on both ends of the geopolitical spectrum are witting or unwitting participants in this grand game of global maneuvering.
As previously outlined, the war in Ukraine could have been diffused within its first two month, sparing not only countless lives but preserving the current so-called "rules-based world order" that America is supposedly clamoring to maintain, but that prospect was swiftly torpedoed by western proponents because belligerence is more beneficial than peace in the pursuit of objectives of the global establishment elite.
Power shift from west to east will likely continue until the eastern bloc is established as a counterweight of equal proportion to western dominance, and world order is without any outright hegemonic leader. The reason? To lay the groundwork for the introduction of a more centralized global political, economic and even religious architecture.
Rather predictably, Russia has so far managed to defy the onslaught of American-procured sanctions, and the ensuing decline in dollar-denominated trade has been offset by a commensurate surge in yuan-denominated bilateral trade deals. The confluence of all these forces is poised to reshape the global economic cauldron.
The prevailing rhetoric surrounding the events in Ukraine has mostly been at odds with the reality of the situation on the ground. As a matter of iteration, there are no good guys in this war; Russia being "bad" does not make Ukraine "good", and the lesser of two evils is evil nonetheless. Ukraine's political ranks are infested with corrupt politicians motivated by financial gain at the expense of a reeling population and maimed soldiers who have dedicated their sweat and blood for a grossly misrepresented cause.
Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, despite his strongman exterior and well-established reputation as an anti-western renegade, is on board with the same endgame globalist ideals many believe he is opposing; and yes, he could have done more to restrain the current situation, or prevented it from happening altogether. America's political establishment, as ever, seems bent on bowing at the altar of foreign objectives to the detriment of its national interest. The U.S. and its western counterparts have unreservedly backed NATO’s expansionist policy eastward, only to cry fowl when Russia seeks to counter the national security threat posed by such expansionism.
Recently, the flimsy propaganda touting Ukrainian resilience and a stalled Russian offensive on the battlefield has begun to unravel as even mainstream outlets are quietly reversing course to collectively voice Ukraine's narrowing odds of rebuffing Russian advances. For perspective, NATO's secretary general recently gave the most honest review yet of any NATO-aligned proponents.
The situation on the battlefield is extremely difficult. The Russians are now pushing on many frontlines. And of course, the big offensive that the Ukrainians launched last summer didn't give all the results we all hoped for. And we see how Russia is now building up.
Barring some dramatic turn of events on the battlefield, the most plausible scenario is a continued consolidation of Russia’s military advantage and along with it, the geopolitical heft to undermine NATO’s clout and deal a blow to America’s credibility on the international stage. American funding of Ukraine is becoming increasingly untenable, more so in the face of the Israel-Hamas war which has seen record Israeli dependence on the taxpayer-financed American money spigot.
With Biden's proposed Ukraine bill currently hamstrung in the U.S. House, it is unclear how much longer Ukraine can endure the onslaught of Russia's incessant pounding. The west’s overt interventionist policy in Ukraine is reaching a strategic cul-de-sac, with its only way forward being backwards to inflict irreversible damage on the American economy, and by extension - the global economy. The longer the war drags on, the more acute and rapid will be the fracture to the dollar's hegemony, and something will eventually give.
A Different Balance
It may be argued that, by relentlessly funding and arming Ukraine against Russia, whether pre-emptively or retrospectively, western actors were and are hoping for a repetition of “Operation Cyclone”, which ensured the former Soviet Union's humiliating failure in its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, in which a persistent insurgence of American-funded and CIA-organized Islamist reactionary forces, the Mujahedeen, bogged the Soviets down in the Afghan quagmire for a decade, culminating in a sound defeat and the eventual withdrawal of demoralized Soviet forces. This event is widely credited in foreign policy circles as a key tenet in the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
But geopolitical calculus has changed dramatically in the four decades since this event, and global foreign policy balance has since been reconfigured in ways which largely negate the possibility of Russian defeat at the hands of America and western actors. Chief among the reasons for the Soviet's thorough defeat in Afghanistan was the expediency with which the United States was able to coalesce both allied and non-allied states, loathsome of the Soviets for varying reasons, effectively isolating the Soviets and compounding their militaristic and economic losses, rendering the invasion a misadventure of monumental proportions. The same strategy today can only result in a flammable scenario in which further gestation of the situation mortifies the collective west and threatens to deal a lethal blow to its credibility, rendering it more vulnerable to be supplanted by eastern-aligned emerging powers predominantly scattered across the global south.
Among the coalesced nations that opposed the Soviets were Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, coupled with America's diplomatic advantage in the form of a relatively American-leaning China owing to normalized relations with America earlier that year in addition to the the Sino-Soviet split precipitated two decades earlier, which rendered the Chinese mostly unsympathetic to Soviet objectives and aspirations. The present situation is different for the following reasons:
Pakistani involvement in 1979 resulted largely from its geographical proximity to Afghanistan. Fearful of a Soviet incursion further eastward, Pakistan's strategic default was to cast its lot with the American-led coalition. Presently, none among Ukraine's neighboring states have neither the appetite nor the capacity to unilaterally - or even jointly - mount any meaningful resistance against the Kremlin. Pakistan has since migrated towards the China-Russia orbit in the form of its SCO membership. To Ukraine's north is a Russia-friendly Belarus, as resentful of the west as its erstwhile Soviet Union leader, and amenable to having Russian nuclear warheads stationed in its territory as a buffer against such NATO-allied neighbors as Finland, Estonia and Latvia.
Saudi Arabia, the nation which for all intents and purposes serves as guarantor for the petrodollar status, has gradually gravitated towards the China-Russia axis, whilst maintaining diplomatic relations with the United States, albeit precarious. This balancing act has recently seen burgeoning ties with Russia as symbolized by the Saudi's accession into BRICS and observer status in the SCO mixed with relatively soured Saudi-American relations. A combination of the aforementioned factors disincline the Saudis from exercising as firm a posture against Russia as they did against the former Soviets in 1979.
Over the four-decade period since, China, thanks to a deluge of American capital, has morphed into an economic powerhouse now energized by superpower ambitions and aspirations to global leadership, all gilded by its credentials as the world's largest importer/exporter. Its voracious appetite to curb American influence, secure Russian backing for a possible reunification with Taiwan (though unlikely to be achieved militarily), reprisal for America’s antagonism, and cheap Russian energy to fuel its economic hydra have resulted in a partnership of convenience with the Kremlin and burgeoning China-centric alliances such the BRICS and SCO. Relations which prompted Xi Jinping to declare to his Russian counterpart that they are driving changes "not seen in 100 years".
Russia is a commodities powerhouse; its vast and relatively cheap energy reserves are an allure few states, predominantly in the west, can resist. States desirous to join the BRICS, SCO, CSTO and players with an immediate commodities need might wish to toe the geopolitical divide by pursuing non-alignment to secure their own future prospects, especially in anticipation of progressive western decline.
All these factors conspire to make for a dramatically different game than that played in 1979 by affording Russia a contingent of sympathizers united mainly by anti-American sentiment coupled with a dose of self-interest. This, in part, is what has rendered anti-Russian sanctions ineffective, if not an outright failed enterprise, and unless the West catches a wake-up call soon, western interests and economies remain on the chopping block. Even high-ranking officials of the western war machine have emerged from the woodwork to declare the reality of eroding western dominance. European Commission Vice President, Joseph Borrell, recently asserted that, “the era of Western dominance has indeed definitively ended” and that “while this has been theoretically understood, we have not always drawn all practical conclusions from this new reality".
Sanctions
Putin, fully aware of western disintegration, and the dollar's bleak future compounded by the reverse impact of the anti-Russian sanctions, recently said in an interview:
Using the dollar as a tool of foreign policy is one of the biggest strategic mistakes by the US.
But, what if this enterprise was not a strategic mistake? What if it is a deliberate and methodical program aimed undermining the dollar's primacy from within and to sully its allure in the international currency pecking order? This is a commonly overlooked possibility, but the quantity and nature of the "strategic mistakes" America has amassed over the years warrant an assessment of events from a different angle. Much of the discourse on U.S. hegemony and the emergence of the multipolar world order revolves around the assumption of America jockeying for self-interest and assiduously preserving its primacy to the detriment of an "equitable" and "fair" world order in which power is equally distributed among a growing concert of players. But in the arena of geopolitics, there is such a thing as insidious policy.
Restrictive economic measures by the United States have had the impact of herding an ever-growing concert of nations into non dollar-denominated bilateral trade deals. The reason is two-fold. First, nations, fearful of future economic disenfranchisement resulting from America's draconian exercise of its economic heft, may want to insulate their economies from the dollar, should they find themselves on the receiving end of the United States' sanctions regime or other protectionist policies. Secondly, the immediate need for Russian commodities to ease pressure on domestic markets has forced nations to willingly or unwillingly forge trade deals that circumvent dollar usage. Either way, slowly or rapidly, dollar-denominated trade is diminishing worldwide, and so is America's margin to enforce sanctions, whether "morally-motivated" or as a tool for foreign policy struggle. A waning proclivity for dollar trade may incline state actors, both hostile and friendly, to offload more of their dollar reserves.
This decoupling would spark a crisis of confidence resulting in an even greater deluge of dollars being dumped as nations anticipate a downward valuation of the dollar, complemented by an upward valuation of other major currencies, particularly the Yuan, due to China's status as the single-largest importer/exporter. The result? A hyperinflationary environment that culminates in full-blown economic inferno in which the U.S. will be the frontrunning victim. This is the sequence of events similar to those which preceded the toppling of the pound sterling from its reserve currency status and the subsequent demise of the British Empire. Saudi Arabia, the only backbone to the petrodollar, previously signaled its willingness to trade oil in alternative currencies, threatening a 50-year old pact of dollar-denominated oil purchase in the international market. The end of the petrodollar status might be the straw that break the camel's back.
A confluence of these forces would cause an economic straitjacket for the U.S. dollar and the entire global economic at large; but who's to say that this isn't the endgame?
Jared Bernstein, who happens to be the Biden administration's chair of the council of economic advisors, has openly and on multiple occasions expressed his desire to “dethrone the dollar” by stripping it of its reserve currency status, citing U.S. protectionist policy as one amongst many potential routes to achieving this feat.
The idea is simple: As the United States turns more protectionist, other countries are stepping into the breach and making trade deals that leave us out. Could this process lead to the U.S. dollar no longer reigning supreme as the dominant currency in global commerce?
Dethroning 'king dollar' would be easier than people think. America could, for example, enforce rules to prevent other countries from accumulating too much of our currency....If fewer people demanded dollars, interest rates might rise
If one of the Trump era is that the loses some degree of its reserve status, I will consider that a good thing.
In other words, Biden's cesspool of economic advisors is fully aware of the potentially hazardous fallout that may result from the sanctions which they enacted. This puts to death the possibility of a benign "strategic mistake" yielding unintended consequences on the part of the Biden administration. Maybe the sanctions are not an ill-fated deterrence attempt - maybe they are part and parcel of a calculated, gradual self-destructive program of the dollar. The current geopolitical trajectory may see this program's objectives realized sooner rather than later. The notion that east and west are fundamentally at odds is fantasy at best and denial at worst, and siding with either is to automatically assume a losing position.
Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil.
-Proverbs 4:27
In reality, globalists control both ends of the chessboard, and the steady stream of saber rattling on display from both sides only serves to perpetuate and expedite the ongoing quest for the consolidation of absolute power while keeping the populace mesmerized with notions of “division” and “conflict”, when there is in fact none.
Special Drawing Rights (SDR): Reserve Currency in Waiting?
The international monetary rules need revision in two major areas. The Bretton Woods system was based on fixed exchange rates and relied on domestic policy actions to achieve balance-of-payments adjustment, and came to rely on the dollar to expand world liquidity. It is widely recognized that neither is suitable for the future. Much de facto reform has already occurred, primarily through the advent of flexible exchange rates and the creation of Special Drawing Rights in the IMF.
-Trilateral Commission task force reports 9-14, 1977
A digital version of the IMF's Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket of currencies is a likely contender to assume the helm of reserve currency in place of the the dollar's diminished global role. The SDR was conceived to serve as a potential reserve asset - designed to lie in wait until such a time when a conducive economic environment can be conjured to facilitate its ascent. Proponents of China’s economic policy have openly and even forcefully voiced their proclivity for an SDR-denominated international currency, citing vulnerabilities in the current system. Since the Chinese Renminbi’s integration into the SDR basket in 2015, the basket weighing has been adjusted only once in 2022 to reflect a 1.36% upward valuation of the RMB, 1.65% of the dollar, and a collective downward valuation for the euro, pound and yen.
The conclusion of the Russo-Ukraine war will coincide with the dollar's steady decline in its share as a foreign reserve asset, its burgeoning debt, and the increase in yuan-denominated bilateral trade deals, and will likely see the next weighing evaluation reflecting greater RMB representation and internationalization complemented by declining dollar dominance of the basket. If it happens, this would be yet another step in a long train of actions aimed at the slow motion train wreck of the western-centric world order and the gradual emergence of a “multipolar world order”.
Even with talk swirling of deploying NATO forces on the ground in Ukraine, the trajectory of the war is unlikely to change, and the damage to the dollar is irreversible. Any western “victory” against Russia would be a pyrrhic one as it would come at too large a human cost and too great an economic burden to set ablaze an already ignited economic dumpster fire. East and west are two different routes to the same destination.