The end of the one superpower world.

Posted by Pointman on January 15, 2023 · 5 Comments 

That long interlude between Christmas and New Years affords an opportunity to consider the last year in the rear view mirror and what’s likely to happen in the new one coming at us. Most years are pretty much business as usual with nothing spectacular or Earth shattering occurring, but some ones do have some big fracture point in them you know will have historic impact. I’m thinking here of years like Pearl Harbor in ’41, the Berlin Wall coming down in ’89 or the Twin Towers in ’01.

Having said that, there are some years where a slow glacial change that’s been going on quietly in the background for sometimes decades finally starts to make its effects felt, if you’re sharp enough to notice the resultant realignment of global allegiances. The year 2022 has been one of those years. If there’s one thing for sure in the coming year, it’s that there’s no going back from those changes.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, which I’ll roughly date as ’89, the world found itself in a geo-political situation it hadn’t been in for about two millennia – it was ruled by one superpower with not much in the way of any realistic opposition. I’m thinking here of the Roman empire which had a pretty decent run of about three hundred years before it finally imploded from a combination of its once virile culture being systematically degraded and ineffectual leadership. In the end, it could not survive the weak if not insane leadership of despotic rulers like Caligula and Nero.

In the three decades since the Soviet Union collapsed, the golden opportunity to integrate a willing Russia fully into Europe has been squandered by a succession of broken promises about NATO expansion, economic pillaging and military brinkmanship emanating from America and its shrinking fanboy club of vassal states. America has had of late too many leaders of the latter Roman types previously mentioned and in 2022 the corruption, decadence and incompetence caught up with it big time in the execrable Biden administration which managed to lower the competence bar to levels never before seen in what was once regarded by the people of many countries with someone’s jack boot on their necks as the shining city on a distant hill to be aspired to.

It pains me to be so blunt but someone somewhere has to say it. America is slipping and has been doing so since the beginning of the Clinton administrations. The Trump years were a contra-trend interlude that was soon stamped out by the swamp. The decay accelerated in the Obama years and now under the present administration the twin evils of the self-destructive mismanagement of its own economy and the abrasive petulance in foreign relations have combined to severely weaken its influence in the world. If you’ve ever wondered why the meme of MAGA just won’t go away, it’s because the ordinary American, ignoring and fed up of the whole MSN woke propaganda, feels instinctively that their country has somehow taken a wrong turn into decay and wants it back on course.

There are a lot of numbers I could throw at you to back up that assessment but if you look at the changes in the raw economic statistics over that thirty year span, the decline becomes obvious. In that period the share of world GDP by West block, comprising the US and Europe, fell from 70% and is now heading for 40%. In that same period, look at the manufacturing powerhouse China has become and its voracious appetite for raw materials is now being satisfied by the seemingly inexhaustible resources of Russia.

There are a number of important things to note about that massive flow of commodities being switched from western Europe to Asia. Contrary to popular opinion, it’s been China assiduously courting Russia to get access to that wealth of raw materials but Russia never had any reason before to make such a massive change – they were doing very well exporting everything westward into the EU, most especially Germany. The CCP must have been leaping up in the air in joy when West block effectively declared war on Russia, forcing them into a shotgun alliance with China and obliging them to switch the vast majority of their resource exports away from Europe.

Relations between Russia and West block have been thoroughly poisoned for several generations ahead of us. At the start of ’22, most Russians and especially the style setters were very much in favour of moving towards a western type of Russia but that’s all gone now. The hybrid war was an attack on mother Russia which will always evoke a unifying response but what really engendered the current bitterness towards the West was the petty vileness of the anti-Russian propaganda.

It’s estimated Russia suffered somewhere in the region of 25-30 million deaths before finally defeating Germany in WWII. The vast majority of those deaths were civilian and is half of the estimated 50 million deaths in WWII. Even the horrors Japan committed in China pale into insignificance against systematic murder on that scale. Last year on 9th May the day when the Russians remember the sacrifices of the Great Patriotic War, Putin said in his annual speech that there was barely a family in Russia that wasn’t effected. His own extended family was devastated by it.

At the same time, Russian representatives to similar commemorations across Europe were for the first time not invited, monuments to the Russian soldiers who’d broken the back of the Wehrmacht at terrible cost were being torn down and one of the liberated countries actually proposed digging up and removing the remains of Red Army fallen from mixed war grave cemeteries. Can you imagine the deep hurt and outrage it would cause if it was the remains of American, British or Canadian soldiers that were going to be dug up?

I won’t even touch on the cultural cancellation of all things Russian, but I’d remind you of a famous saying from the war about Germans which was the work of the propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg – we’ll never forgive, we’ll never forget. That’s now the prevailing sentiment in Russia about the West. So, if you’re expecting things to go back to normal with Russia in a year or two, forget it. Realistically, you’ve got to be looking at three or four generations because the West has yet again attacked Russia (is this the fifth or sixth time?) and the spirit of rapprochement with the West that existed at the start of ’22 no longer exists. The old sentiment of deeply mistrusting the West and its motives is firmly back in the saddle. Not a bad year’s work by the neo-con and neo-lib warmongers that’ll herald a boom for the military-industrial complex.

As a direct consequence of a disastrous sanctions policy, the economies of West block have been devastated, especially those of western Europe. The EU is as usual living in its own arrogant delusion of being a world player and is coping very badly with rampant inflation and the growing perception by the former Soviet client states that they might have jumped on the wrong economic bandwagon by joining the EU and are eying the exit door to points east. While member states are being crucified by a soaring cost of living rises and inflation running at 11% and higher inside the inelastic straight jacket of the Euro, Russia is cutting interest rates and cost of living rises are modest.

America is probably further along the road to stagflation hell but because of the rampant massaging of the economic numbers, AKA lying, of any government issued economic statistics, it’s impossible to tell. Perhaps after eight quarters of negative GDP they might concede the possibility the country is in a recession, but all the bad anecdotal signs are already there. Government spending totally out of control, shortages and empty shelves, discretionary spending cut back to the bone by hard-pressed consumers and Joe Public deeply pessimistic no matter how much smoke the government propaganda machine blows up his butt. He who has to chase the work for some money to pay all the household bills tends to have a very based and accurate opinion of the true state of the economy.

Last year the financial world was hit by massive change the effects of which are ongoing. At the start of the year, large amounts of money were always parked in New York, London, Tokyo or Frankfurt because they were seen as safe. With West block freezing $320 billion of Russian central bank cash, those locations are obviously regarded as no longer being safe, anything but in point of fact. As I write this, ways to sequester, a fancy name for stealing the frozen funds, are being worked out by the various thieves to seize the money permanently if they could only find a loophole in international law. Rest assured, they’ll find some pretext since international law has been set aside when it comes to the Ukraine.

The big effect of all this freezing and sequestering of another country’s cash on deposit has, as I predicted some months back, caused a stampede of the big money out of those four supposedly safe deposit havens mentioned previously. While that’s bad news for those financial centres, it’s even worse news for the currencies concerned. The US dollar is on the brink of losing its status as the world’s reserve currency while the petro-dollar is almost certainly doomed outside West block trading. It’s being replaced by the petro-yuan or petro-ruble. There’s a lot more to be said about the brutilisation of the world’s financial system that occurred last year, but I’ll kick that can down the road for the present.

These are all what I consider a selection of some of the significant changes that occurred last year and whose ramifications and interactions we’ll see more clearly in the coming year, but they’re all dwarfed by the tectonic change in the geopolitical landscape. That long predicted shift of power from America and Europe to some pan-Asian political entity finally got underway and it has a huge momentum. West block forcing Russia into a war in the Ukraine and then mismanaging that hybrid war catastrophically accelerated that development which has resulted in a fracture point in the world order. We’ve left the familiar situation of a one super power world, or a unipolar world as it’s now called, to a multipolar world, those poles being America, China and Russia.

You could see it as the Biden administration’s bungling over-aggressive foreign relations policy only succeeded in pushing the latter two together to replace American influence but I think the disaster runs a lot deeper than that blunder. It created a political grouping under the loose banner of the BRICS, SCO or G20 countries to which the smaller countries scurried to in order to protect them from a bullying America trying to force them into a proxy war with Russia.

West block has remarkably few supporters in demographic terms. From memory, the USA, Canada, the UK, the antipodes, the EU, Japan and I think one South American country. The rest of the world are banging on the BRICS door to gain admittance, which they’ll be given with alacrity by the Chinese and Russians. The rest of the world, by which I mean South America, Africa, the Far East, the Muslim world and seemingly everyone from Bulawayo to Brigadoon want in because it’ll provide fairer trade terms and protection from the Neo-colonial aspects of the current uni-polar world.

The abject failure of America to browbeat big countries like India or even smaller countries like Hungary into joining their proxy war of sanctions and military assistance to the Ukraine has revealed to the world that the big bad emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Once you’re in the BRICS club, you’ve got protection and it’s okay to say no to America. The exact shape of this new political grouping, which I think will be based on the BRICS membership, is at present unclear but one thing is for certain. It’ll be led by a China supported by Russia.

You can never write off America. Someone once said of it that the business of America is business. If it can make a comeback from the Washington swamp corruption by electing a competent administration who know how to make a deal with other countries, then it’ll be on the road out of the current mess created by the Biden bunglers. Smoothing over the ruffled feathers of the bruising foreign relations policies of the previous administration has to be high on the agenda, but making deals with and building bridges to the emergent BRICS or perhaps BRICS+ countries or whatever the new power block will come to be called is the priority.

The year 2022 was a disaster from a humanitarian viewpoint. Thousands were killed as cats paws in a deliberately contrived war. The old, the poor and blue collar families suffered needlessly in what should have been a benign year. A lot of the people responsible for that have got indecently richer and unless there’s some serious bottom of the pyramid push back, 2023 will continue in the same vein.

Of late, I see some lights coming on in that city on a hill.

©Pointman

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Remind me again, which country’s economy was sanctions going to devastate?

The Ukraine war – the military realities.

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