The Slap Heard Around the World

The slap heard around the world. No, I'm not talking about that sissy slap Will Smith meekly threw at comedian and presenter, Chris Rock, at the Oscars. I'm talking about the verbal slap President Biden threw at Russian president Vladimir Putin while visiting Poland. Biden referred to the Russian president as a "butcher".

The head of state of every nation is expected to act with a certain amount of decorum when speaking to or about any other leader, especially one in which they are not at war with, and particularly when they are trying to bring hostilities between two warring factions to an end.

Referring to Putin as a "butcher" is not going to make him take heed to anything else Biden says, whether it's about peace or not. In fact, the only reason to call names like that is if you're actually trying to provoke a fight, which some think Biden is. What's more is that President Biden had previously referred to Putin as a "war criminal".

Whether or not Putin is a "war criminal" is not up to Biden. It's a charge that only the International Court of Justice ("World Court") at The Hague can determine. Secondly, Biden's comment  completely dismisses Putin's reasons for the invasion, which for those not paying attention, was entirely about national security and NATO's disruption of the region would bring should the Ukraine be admitted into the NATO and be permitted to station troops, tanks, aircraft. Most of all, the missiles which would be placed on Russia's border or pointed at point blank range towards Russia's largest naval base in Sebastopol.  All this begs the question, what's going on here?

A few weeks ago, President Biden mentioned at a meeting of the U.S. Business Roundtable that a "New World Order" was inevitable, and added that the U.S. "must" lead it. As we explained in a earlier article, a New World Order is all about creating a single global economic system with the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency, meaning that all global trade would use the dollar as the preferred currency.

This increases the value of the dollar on the world market and strengthens the U.S. economy. However, it also weakens the Euro, the Russian ruble or the Chinese yuan, which devalues the U.S. debt (the U.S. is world's top debtor nation). It would also control the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, meaning that the U.S. would be central power player when it comes to loans to various governments.

The New World Order also creates a single world legal system, which includes trade agreements. It would require nations to subjugate their national authority to this supranational agency, which would be under the auspices of the United Nations. Naturally, the U.S. would be the dominant power leading this arrangement if Biden has his way.

Some would say that's totally fair. After all, the U.S. is the primary guarantor of money loaned to the IMF or World Bank. It's also the nation most responsible for keeping the UN afloat. In 2020, the U.S. alone gave the United Nations 22% of its entire budget. China was second with just 12% while Japan donated 8.5%. The way the New World Order is presently configured, other nations like China, Russia, or the EU, would be regulated to second tier status on financial matters.

However, not everyone is willing to play along. Some nations, while willing seeking economic trade, don't want to go along with these rules. They don't want to subjugate their national sovereignty to any other country or supranational organization. It's worth noting that those nations just so happen to be on our economic "hit list" and often labeled as "enemies of democracy". We're talking nations like Iran, China, Venezuela, and Russia.

Let's take China for instance. It is the second largest holder of U.S. debt behind Japan (and it's worth noting, that China is Japan's largest creditor). It doesn't want to subjugate its currency to the dollar. In fact, it's quite happy with the present economic system. Why? Because it's winning.

The U.S. is declining as a world superpower. China is poised to surpass the U.S. as the world's largest economy by the end of this decade. Its infrastructure is continuing to grow (albeit at a pace some economists say it can't sustain), and massively updated its military. It's done this through a system of controlled capitalism in which the State maintains a sustainable interest in each business. It oversees any international agreements to ensure that they meet China's long term goals.

Nevertheless, it is acquiring control over resources throughout the world. It has been hyper-aggressive in its intrusion into fishing waters claimed by India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. It has warned these and other nations (including the U.S.) to stay out of the South China Seas.

China has not only reiterated its claim to the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, which had been Japanese since 1895, but also territory on the Chinese/Indian border around Tibet. China has even gone to the extent of actually building islands in the South China Sea which appear to serve as military fortifications or listening sites.

In terms of international resources, Chinese corporations are aggressively expanding nearly everywhere. However, it's in Africa and South America that its interests are particularly focused. China depends on imports for over half of its key mineral needs such as gold, silver, zinc, copper, and more exotic minerals like germanium and rhenium. The trouble is that the U.S. as well as some other countries, need these same minerals too. Control of these minerals control innovation, which in effect controls economies.

The U.S., while mineral rich, still must import about 24 key minerals to meet its needs. Of these, we are in competition with China for 11 of these. In addition, China is a primary importer of 9 out of 13 minerals, which include cobalt, indium, bismuth, and 17 rare earth elements ("REE"); all of which are important in the manufacturing of batteries, computer chips, automobiles, and electronics. China is also going after timber, farm land, and fresh water, which is becoming increasingly more scarce.

As competition grows, so also grows the need for military might to protect the production and shipment of these products. The military has become key to the acquisition of these and other resources like oil and gas ("might makes right"). Closer at home, while we continue to pick up the lion's share of the costs to keep the UN going, China has been focused on acquiring control of key UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).  

China has been actively pursuing control of groups like the World Health Organization (which has been aggressively investigating the origin of the Covid-19 virus), the World Bank, the IMF, UN's Higher Commission on Human Rights, and the World Intellectual Property Organization. It is also attempting to expand its influence into Interpol. China now controls four of the 15 most important agencies within the UN, whereas no other country controls more than one. 

Although China and Russia have been "frenemies" , China is not likely to let Russia sink under all the massive sanctions imposed on it by the U.S. and EU. However, it will not try to alienate the West either. For the moment, that's where its economic bread and butter lies.

Both countries have echoed each other's claims of secret U.S. intervention around the world aimed at reducing Russian or Chinese influence. One of Putin's original claims was that the U.S. was behind the 2013 "Maidan Uprising" in the Ukraine which coincidentally removed a pro-Moscow government and replaced it with the current pro-West and pro-NATO Zelenskiy government.

Russia has expressed its opposition  to a "New World Order" government since the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in 1989, a reiterated again in 1991 with the implosion of the Soviet Union. In 1989, the Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev sought assurances from Western leaders not to expand NATO into former Warsaw Pact nations. 

Gorbachev was seeking to rebuild the trust broken in 1946, following the end of WWII, and find ways to reintegrate Russia into Europe, even applying to become a member of the EU and NATO, which included accepting that, at least for the time being, there would be one global superpower (Russia joined the "Partnership for Peace" in 1991).

Although Gorbachev was promised by President Bush that NATO wouldn't advance "one centimeter", by 1991, all of the Eastern Europe was a member of the EU and NATO. Russia has fought the advancement of a "New World Order" ever since.

Fyodor Lukyanov, one of Putin's foreign policy advisers, has stated that this "unipolarity" of a single world superpower gave the United States an rare historic opportunity to remake the world in its image; an opportunity it squandered. Today, according to Lukyanov, the world must become "multipolar", with multiple spheres of influence. 

He makes the point that rather than trying to create a world modeled on American styled democracy, that nations and their cultures be allowed to develop in their own way, whether its democratic, theocratic, or whatever.  The U.S. notion that "one size fits all" has failed just as surely as Soviet style Communism.

Others in Putin's circle argue that Russia should stop trying to integrate into West and, instead, focus on being a hybrid between East and West, while, as was pointed, China increasingly views itself a merger between communism modeled on Stalin and Mao plus Confucianism which made the collective  stronger than the individual.  Reminds me of the Borg.

President Biden's name calling will solve nothing. His verbal slapping of Putin will have no positive impact on the crisis in the Ukraine, nor will it help the Ukrainian people. It does, however, make him look like an outdated old fool. The war in Ukraine may prove to be mistake. It certainly hasn't gone as Putin's advisers had planned. But it does demonstrate Putin's frustration over his nation's security and the attempt by the U.S. led West to impose its stamp on the world...and Russia. America's time in the sun is coming to end as it has with all great empires before.  

However, Russia and China are governed by autocrats while America, and by extension the West, is ruled by its own Oligarchs who have transformed the U.S. from a constitutional Republic into a growing neo-fascist Corporatocracy.  None of this bodes well for the masses. The ordinary people of the world, who made the riches of the Oligarchs possible, must ensure than any change serves our interests first.

The future will not be dominated by one or even two or three superpowers. The world will once again splinter into perhaps many "points of light" to borrow from President G.W. Bush, and with it, we will see a reordering of alliances---political, economic, and military--- as well as ethnic, racial, and religious, which will hopefully bring humanity closer, but that will only happen if everyone has a seat at the table.

If you want to know more, please take a look at the links below. If you enjoyed the article, please consider passing along to others and don't forget to subscribe. It's free! Lastly please be sure to "like" us on whatever platform you use to read A/O. It helps with the algorithms and keeps our articles in circulation.  

 

 

China, United States, and competition for resources thatenable emerging technologies

 

Russia's and China's plans for a new world order

China Doesn't Want a New World Order. It Wants This One

Rare earth element facts

'Creeping Capture' : How China is trying to 'control' global bodies like UN, WHO

Biden's "New World Order"

President Joe Biden recently spoke to the U.S. Business Roundtable, powerful non-profit lobbyist association, and made a rather interesting comment. He said "Now is a time when things are shifting. We’re going to — there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it. And we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it".  So, what are we to make of that?  

The first thing we should to note is the near silence by the corporate media to the comment. When President George H.W. Bush, speaking of the situation in the Persian Gulf, said "Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective -- a new world order -- can emerge...", the media pounced on it. Political talk shows were all over his remarks about a "new world order" and its projected meaning, and yet with Biden, the media's response is rather low key. Why is that, besides the obvious fact that Bush was a Republican and Biden is a Democrat?

President Bush's comment, made in 1991, was in regards to the growing situation with Iraq's invasion of the Kuwait (or more specifically, the takeover of Kuwaiti oil fields which impacted key oil companies with which Bush had close connections as a Texas oilman). He was speaking about an American led coalition of nations acting in unison in removing Iraqi President from Kuwait; the United States as the world's chief police officer and arbiter of all things sacred  just.

In this case with Biden, he was addressing some of the most powerful individuals in America, the presidents and CEO of the nation's largest corporations such as Ford, General Motors, Facebook, Amazon, Exxon, Twitter, and Alphabet, about  the current situation in the Ukraine.

He also went on to say that the world has reached a "inflection point" (which is a major change in direction) which only occurs every three or four generations. He added that it was up to the U.S. to determine the outcome of this global change and then lead it.

Unlike Bush's speech, in which the U.S. and its allies at the time had jointly used sanctions backed up with military operations, Biden was addressing the use of sanctions and the potential of NATO to contain Russia, which is, in itself, questionable given Europe's dependence on Russian oil and gas.

If, going on Biden's comment, we look back roughly three or so generations back to what he says was the last great inflection point in humanity's history, we're looking at World War II. That war, which was in truth a continuation of the first world war, marked the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and Fascism, the Holocaust, the creation of Israel and expulsion of Palestinians,  the beginnings of the Cold War, and with it, the change of the world's economy.

Following the end of World War II, America's global role did change. It became the dominate world economy. It also became, albeit briefly, the world's sole "superpower".  It helped lead the way to the creation of the United Nations in June 1945, just two months after VE Day and two months before VJ in the Pacific. It orchestrated the creation of NATO in 1955 as the Cold War between the three Western Allies and Soviet Russia begun (the Warsaw Pact, was formed in 1955 as a response to NATO).

But perhaps more important,  this "inflection point" created a new economic order out of the ashes of war which called for global trade on a previously unheard of level, a breakup of trade restrictions, the creation of global reserve currency---the U.S. dollar, and the eventual end of the gold standard. The post WWII period was seen as the "Golden Age of Capitalism".

However, all that glitters isn't necessarily golden. The economic colonialism it created led to the rise of OPEC and the use of oil and gas as an economic weapon (resulting in the oil and gas crisis of 1973/74) along with the stock market crash and subsequent recession of 1973 through 1975 (the joke at the time was "if it's a recession in Washington DC then it's a depression in the rest of America").

We also saw America first exert its attempt to be the world's policeman; enforcing what it saw as right and wrong, which included overthrowing of legitimately elected governments (almost always "socialist") and the installation of brutal right wing militaristic juntas. Many times it also included the assassination or imprisonment of leaders and political opponents. But, as long as they were "business friendly", that was all that mattered. So, what was President Biden implying with his comment?

If Biden was implying that because of the recent quagmire Russia has found itself in or that somehow Russia will emerge as a weaker and less effective economically or militarily, he needs to reconsider his opinion. There's no question that Putin's invasion of the Ukraine was ill-conceived, even though his reasoning---to avoid encirclement---was understandable.

Russia has incurred the wrath of the world. It is facing historic economic sanctions, but sanctions alone aren't going to be effective. Russia has developed some strong trade relationships with other countries; particularly China, which now finds itself in a unique position. Both countries have a long history of being "frenemies", not altogether too different than the one it has with the United States.  If forced to choose between the West and Russia, China's economic interests lays to the West and Russia knows it.

Militarily, the Ukraine hasn't proven to be the "marshmallow" Putin's military advisers envisioned it to be.  We can see Putin's growing frustration and impatience through the increase in his use of more and more destructive weapons like hypersonic missiles or  "vacuum bombs".  We've also witnessed his advances breaking down thanks to stiff resistance of Kiev's military and the tenacity of its citizens.

This is, in quick order I suspect, going to put Putin at his own "inflection point" of either facing a protracted war similar to the one Russia fought in Afghanistan; escalating the war to a nuclear or biological level which would earn more than mere condemnation or sanctions and a likely reprisal by NATO and the U.S., or concluding a peace which excludes a NATO presence in the Ukraine and annexation of the Donbass. 

We would also be amiss not to mention President Biden's call for Putin to be charged as a "war criminal" and held accountable by the Hague for war crimes. As an aside, the Nuremberg Trials following WWII, was the first time a country's leaders were ever had personally responsible for the policies and orders given during the conflict.

Since then,  few leaders have been arrested or voluntarily turned themselves in to faced a trial. It's highly unlikely that Putin will be subject to either. First of all, it's very difficult to determine what a political leader ordered and how their subordinates interrupted those orders, especially under wartime conditions.

If the extermination camps had not been discovered, and (to be brutally honest), had the Jews living in U.S., the UK, and elsewhere, hadn't had the clout they did, it's unlikely that any of the Nazi leaders would have put on trial, let alone executed. Don't believe me?  Consider the Roma gypsies.

More Roma were murder (based on percentage of population) than Jews or any of the other groups in Nazi camps, and yet what compensation or recognition have they received? Did these homeless people receive land for a country? How many museums or monuments exist for them? 

As an aside, there's no question that Japanese, Hungarian, Romanian, and Italian war leaders were just as guilty as were some of Nazis, and yet virtually none were executed in the numbers that the Nazis were, nor the fact that the Allies were guilty of war crimes too, though not to the same extent.

Lastly, let's consider the notion of a "new world order" itself. The concept was intended to the creation of a more integrated world, ranging from stabilized trade, global justice, and manufacturing to issues like poverty, disease control, education, and environmental issues. Some would include the spread of democracy. 

In truth, the "new world order" is nothing more than an illusion. It requires a central authority that requires the suppression of national sovereignty. It assumes that the nations are lining up to become "democratic", when in truth democracy isn't for everyone, least of all American style democracy.

Did you know that of all the world's democracies, none---not one---has modeled itself on the United States? Instead, they've chosen the British parliamentarian style principally because it doesn't rig the system with two "winner take all" corporate owned parties, but allows everyone to have a voice with multiparty representation.

For that matter, America isn't a democratic as it thinks it is. In fact, it's ranked #25 according to the Heritage Foundation, putting it in the lower half of the "Mostly Free" section.  In addition, America is listed as a "flawed democracy", which is one step above a failed democracy.

Officially the U.S. is still called a Republic, but is in fact a Corporatocracy, which is a sort of neo-fascist merger between government and big business.  So, who is the "freest country in the world? Singapore, followed by Switzerland and Ireland. Surprised?

America has also forfeited its role as the world's policeman and arbiter of what it defines as "good" or "moral". The world doesn't want to become mirror images of the U.S.. Perhaps this type of leadership was needed following the chaos of WWII where a certain guidance was needed, but no more. Nations don't want a "big brother". They want fair trade and to be treated as equals. They want to develop and embrace their own culture, traditions, and values, and with it, their own economies without being dominated or manipulated by imperialistic corporations.

So, where does the leave President Biden and his "new world order"? Well, other than stroking the egos of a few dozen powerbrokers who together own both political parties, not much. American hegemony is on the decline. Using the threat of economic or military muscle to force of open markets or gain access to resources will not be effected going forward.

Capitalism must constantly consume and innovate to survive or else it dies. In addition, it faces a growing competition from China. Therefore, it must find ways to create equitable and long lasting partnerships to succeed such as investing in its partner's education, job training, and infrastructure. Relationships can no longer be disposable or one sided.   

At the same time, America must encourage other nations to become their own regional policemen and assume responsibility for their own security. America can no longer afford to pick up the tab. It needs to invest in its own education, technology, and infrastructure in order to remain competitive.

If there is a "new world order",  it will have to be one of regionalization coupled with fair trade. There is a time for expansion and then there is a time for internalization. Now is the time for the later.

If you want to know more, please take a look at the links below. If you enjoyed the article, please consider passing along to others and don't forget to subscribe. It's free! Lastly please be sure to "like" us on whatever platform you use to read A/O. It helps with the algorithms and keeps our articles in circulation.  

 

Biden says U.S. must lead 'new world order'

Bush 'Out Of These Troubled Times...A New World Order'

Lists of wars from 1946 to 1989

2022 Index of Economic Freedom