CROESUS DID INDEED destroy a great empire, but it was his own. (US is working very hard doing the same to achieve self destruction) 克洛伊索斯確實摧毀了一個偉大的帝國，但那是他自己的帝國。 （美國正在非常努力地做同樣的事情以實現自我毀滅） By Michael Hudson
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Fast-forward to today’s drive by the Biden administration to extend American military power against Russia and, behind it, China.
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The president asked for advice from today’s analogue to antiquity’s Delphi oracle: the CIA and its allied think tanks. Instead of warning against hubris, they encouraged the neocon dream that attacking Russia and China would consolidate U.S. control of the world economy, achieving the End of History.
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US NOW CONTROLS EU
A byproduct of this confrontation with Russia has been to lock in America’s control over its Western European satellites. The aim of this intra-NATO jockeying was to foreclose Europe’s dream of profiting from closer trade and investment relations with Russia by exchanging its industrial manufactures for Russian raw materials.
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The United States derailed that prospect by blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, cutting off Germany and other countries from access to low-priced Russian gas.
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That left Europe’s leading economy dependent on higher-cost U.S. Liquified Natural Gas.
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MASSIVE BOOST TO US WEAPONS INDUSTRY
In addition to having to subsidize domestic European gas to prevent widespread insolvency, a large proportion of German Leopard tanks, U.S. Patriot missiles and other NATO “wonder weapons” are being destroyed in combat against the Russian army.
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It has become clear that the U.S. strategy is not simply to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” but to fight to the last tank, missile and other weapon being deleted from NATO stocks.
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This depletion of NATO’s arms was expected to create a vast replacement market to enrich America’s military-industrial complex.
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GERMANY BADLY IT
Its NATO customers are being told to increase their military spending to 3 or even 4 percent of GDP. But the weak performance of U.S. and German arms on the Ukrainian battlefield may have crashed this dream, while Europe’s economies are sinking into depression.
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And with Germany’s industrial economy deranged by the severing of its trade with Russia, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the Die Welt newspaper on June 16, 2023 that his country cannot afford to pay more money into the European Union budget, to which it has long been the largest contributor.
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REVOLT AGAINST U.S. DOMINANCE
A nationalist reaction against U.S. dominance is rising throughout European politics, and instead of America locking in its control over European policy, the United States may end up losing – not only in Europe but most crucially throughout the Global South.
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Instead of turning Russia’s “ruble to rubble” as President Biden promised, Russia’s balance of trade has soared and its gold supply has increased.
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So have the gold holdings of other countries whose governments are now aiming to de-dollarize their economies.
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DRIVE FOR WORLD DOMINANCE
It is American diplomacy that is driving Eurasia and the Global South out of the U.S. orbit. America’s hubristic drive for unipolar world dominance could only have been dismantled so rapidly from within.
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The Biden-Blinken-Nuland administration has done what neither Vladimir Putin nor Chinese President Xi could have hoped to achieve in so short a period. Neither was prepared to throw down the gauntlet and create an alternative to the U.S.-centered world order.
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But U.S. sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and China have had the effect of protective tariff barriers to force self-sufficiency in what EU diplomat Josep Borrell calls the world “jungle” outside of the US/NATO “garden.”
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DOLLAR IS NOT SAFE
Although the Global South and other countries have been complaining about U.S. dominance ever since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, they have lacked a critical mass to create a viable alternative.
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But their attention has now been focused by the U.S. confiscation of Russia’s official dollar reserves in NATO countries.
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That dispelled the thought of the dollar as a safe vehicle in which to hold international savings.
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HUMANITY’S GLOBAL MAJORITY
What has occurred is a change in consciousness.
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We are seeing the Global Majority trying to create an independent and peacefully negotiated choice as to just what kind of an international order they want.
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Their aim is not merely to create alternatives to the use of dollars, but an entire new set of institutional alternatives to the IMF and World Bank, the SWIFT bank clearing system, the International Criminal Court and the entire array of institutions that U.S. diplomats have hijacked from the United Nations.
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CIVILIZATIONAL CHANGE
The upshot will be civilizational in scope.
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We are seeing not the End of History but a fresh alternative to U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism and its junk economics of privatization, class war against labor.
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The idea that money and credit should be privatized in the hands of a narrow financial class instead of being a public utility to finance economic needs and rising living standards is finally facing its reckoning.
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[This is an extract from an essay by Michael Hudson, President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Link to full text provided.]