Uncontrolled Chaos in the Empire of Chaos
Tap News | TapNewsWire.com
Pete Fairhurst
A Russian perspective. Sobering words for the West from Dmitry Orlov.
Dmitry Orlov
It was a disaster 80 years in the making. At the end of World War II, the United States stood virtually alone as an economic power. Accounting for 50 percent of global GDP, it held 80% of the world’s hard currency reserves. Fast-forward to 2024 and the share of the US in the world economy has shrunk to 14.76% (calculated from figures provided by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund).
But even this number is misleading, for fully 20% of the US economy is made of what goes under the acronym FIRE: finance, insurance and real estate. These are unproductive parasites on the productive economy. Another unproductive parasite is health care: ridiculously overpriced, it amounts to almost a quarter of all spending in the US. Neither the resources consumed by FIRE, nor by health care spending, contribute much of anything to the standing of the US within the world economy.
Adjusted for these, the US share of the world economy dwindles to just over 8%. While hardly negligible, this share is nowhere near sufficient to give the US anything like a majority vote or veto power in world affairs. The tragedy of the situation is that the mindset of Americans, particularly those occupying positions of authority in Washington, has been unable to adapt to this development. Their mindset appears to be fixed for all time: they believe that they can still dictate terms to the whole world and finding it increasingly awkward to cover up for the fact that almost the whole world (with some notable exceptions) now feels free to ignore them.
Starting just after World War II, when much of the world’s industry lay in ruins, the US was able to make use of its industrial power, supported by its military might, to tilt the economic playing field in its favor. With the US dollar used as the main currency in international trade and, crucially, in oil trading, it was able to maintaining a chokehold on international finance and trade by alternately tightening and loosening the supply of dollars. While initially making it possible to exchange dollars for gold, this option was cancelled in 1971. In 1986, the US went from a net creditor (a position it had held since 1914) to a net debtor, making its continued ability to borrow from the rest of the world in its own currency a matter of survival. At the same, the dwindling share of the US in the world economy eroded the effectiveness of US financial warfare, inevitably shifting the emphasis to warfare proper. Maintaining its unrestricted borrowing ability, along with the value of the US dollar, has been made possible through increasingly oppressive and violent means, earning the US the title the empire of chaos.
Starting with the staged terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the US attempted to unleash its military might in a contrived “war on terror” in order to sufficiently terrify its adversaries to once again tilt the playing field in its favor. This mission has not been a success. Here is a quote from Le Monde Diplomatique, describing some of its successes.
“From the moment of the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, in fact, everything the U.S. military touched in these years has turned to dust. Nations across the Greater Middle East and Africa collapsed under the weight of American interventions or those of its allies, and terror movements, one grimmer than the next, spread in a remarkably unchecked fashion. Afghanistan is now a disaster zone; Yemen, wracked by civil war, a brutal U.S.-backed Saudi air campaign, and various ascendant terror groups, is essentially no more; Iraq, at best, is a riven sectarian nation; Syria barely exists; Libya, too, is hardly a state these days; and Somalia is a set of fiefdoms and terror movements. All in all, it’s quite a record for the mightiest power on the planet, which, in a distinctly un-imperial fashion, has been unable to impose its military will or order of any sort on any state or even group, no matter where it chose to act in these years. It’s hard to think of a historical precedent for this.”
What is notable in this quote is what it omits: that the US has failed even in producing chaos. Most nations across the Middle East and Africa (with the exception of Israel/Palestine and Lebanon) are at least superficially stable; Afghanistan is doing much better under the rule of the Taliban and working out large development plans with China and Russia, Iraq is weak but allied with Iran; Syria hasn’t collapsed and once again controls much of its territory. But the conclusion is correct, and uncanny: the US has failed even in imposing chaos.
The failures of the US to foment chaos were not limited to the military sphere: its attempts at sowing political chaos have been similarly ineffective. The color revolution syndicate, once quite successful in overthrowing governments that the US foreign policy establishment found uncooperative, has misfired all around the world — in Russia, Venezuela, Belarus, Georgia and other places. In each case, the US-supplied replacement leader was abandoned as a political corpse: Alexei Navalny (now an actual corpse) in Russia, Juan Guaidó in Venezuela, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in Belarus and Mikheil Saakashvili in Georgia. But such failures were to be expected and the level of resulting political chaos was controllable. This changed, at first imperceptibly, with the US-instigated Ukrainian coup in early 2014 and then abruptly and permanently with the launch of Russia’s Special Military Operation to demilitarize and denazify the Ukraine in early 2022. That was a signal event for the whole world: it is no longer necessary for anyone to obey the United States!
Examples of disobedience are by now many and varied. The US asked Iran not to ship ballistic missiles to Russia — and Iran does ship them. The US asked China not to supply Russia with manufactured goods and technologies that allow it to skirt sanctions and to conduct its Special Military Operation — and China does supply them. After Nicolas Maduro was reelected in Venezuela, the US asked for this result to be reconsidered and the request was denied. The Houthis in Yemen pay no attention to US efforts to stop them from interfering with Red Sea shipping. US military bases are being asked to leave by several African nations which now prefer to deal with Russia and China. Even Israel no longer bothers to coordinate its actions with Washington, never mind whether or not they hurt Washington’s interests.
Gevorg Mirzayan, Associate Professor of Political Science at Financial University in Moscow, has offered three reasons for this pandemic of disobedience.
The first is the rapid shift of national governments toward reasserting their national sovereignty. With Western-style globalization discredited by actions of the United States, along with a major weakening of international institutions (again, due to them having been discredited by the US), governments have been forced to rely on their own resources for achieving their goals. In the process, they became much more active in defending their national interests, inspired by the understanding that nobody else will do it for them.
The second reason was that they were quick to realize that defending their national interests is not as complicated or difficult as it might have seemed at first. Initially, they were fearful of various methods of US retribution — sanctions, humanitarian interventions, bombings, invasions and political ostracism. But Russia demonstrated that they need not fear US and Western sanctions, presenting an example of a developed, internationally integrated economy that could withstand the most powerful Western sanctions in history; all that’s needed is political will and national unity. This unity, in turn, can be achieved through demonstrated correctness of political decisions multiplied by feelings of national pride. Looking at Russia’s results, other nations, such as China, which until now has tried to avoid open conflict with the US, is working up to a level of political determination needed for direct confrontation.
And then there is the third reason, which is that political figures in the US have, to put it politely, gone completely stupid. The ascent to power of batshit-crazy liberals spouting radical feminism, Critical Race Theory, LGBT nonsense, climate catastrophism, borderless policies, transhumanist nightmares and globalist fantasies has squeezed out the better informed, more practical-minded contenders. As a result, we are seeing the fifth election cycle in the US when none of the candidates are capable of controlling global processes — unable to maintain what various Russian analysts have termed controlled chaos. The controllable chaos they had once tried to create, be it Arab Spring or the color revolutions or attempts to keep Africa and Latin America from drifting away, has rather swiftly spun out of control — out of US control, that is, leaving plenty of room for controlling events from the point of view of more thoughtful, better informed and quicker-thinking politicians in China, Russia, Iran and so on.
But losing control of its adversaries is, to some extent, to be expected and is not even the worst of it. What is even worse is that the Washingtonians are losing control of their allies, upon whose resources they have relied in their now frustrated quest for global dominance.
• Turkey, a large NATO power, is seeking to join BRICS, is working with Russia’s Rosatom to build its Akkuyu nuclear plant and is serving as a major transshipment point for Russian natural gas exports.
• Saudi Arabia has refused to extend its Petrodollar Agreement with the US, which expired on June 9, 2024, and is now trading oil with China in yuan instead of dollars while closely cooperating with Russia as part of OPEC+ and also looking in the direction of BRICS.
• Israel — the closest US ally — has essentially taken the US hostage. Its genocidal operation in Gaza has dealt a serious blow to US relations with the entire Moslem world. And now Israeli leader Netanyahoo is attempting to pull the US into a military conflict with Iran.
• Even smaller countries, such as Hungary, Slovakia and Georgia, are refusing to accede to various US demands.
• The worst mutineer of all, from the US perspective, is the Ukraine. The Kiev regime, deprived of sufficient US military and financial support and sensing Washington’s weakness as it negotiates a period of severe political uncertainty due to Biden’s senility, Harris’s manifest idiocy and Trump’s unpredictability and tempestuousness, are attempting the same gambit as Netanyahoo — to embroil the US in an armed conflict, but not with Iran but with militarily invincible, nuclear-armed Russia. Just as with Israel, the Washingtonians are demonstrating their complete inability to prevent Ukrainian crimes against humanity, nuclear provocations and war crimes.
Given these developments, what would make the most sense for the US is to attempt to cut its losses. It should try to find a mutually agreeable compromise with its allies and to allow its adversaries to deal with those who are completely out of its control. But such geopolitical stewardship requires sober, pragmatic, well informed leadership — which does not exist in the US.
The alternative is to wait for the inevitable worst case scenario to unfold. Deprived of sufficient US support, the Ukraine and Israel will both fail. Taiwan will rejoin China. Countries around the world will go on ignoring the US. Meanwhile, the US will continue borrowing more and more money (over a trillion every three months) to finance its huge and growing budget deficit (now a third of the federal budget) while rolling over its longer-term, lower-interest debt as shorter-term, higher-interest debt. Newly generated dollars, representing nothing of value, will disappear like water into sand, generating negligible economic activity. No matter how the Washingtonians cook the numbers, pretending that dollar inflation is under control (it is not) or that the US economy is still growing (it is not), the American Empire is at an end. During the end game, it will be not just the adversaries and not just the allies but also US states that will start to splinter off. Perhaps the last place where chaos will become uncontrolled will be Washington, DC. The American dark age that will follow will make an interesting case study for future research.
Original Article: https://tapnewswire.com/2024/10/12/uncontrolled-chaos-in-the-empire-of-chaos-a-russian-perspective/
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