Mr. Donald J. Trump, the 47th President of the United States, has redefined the concept of democracy and sovereignty. And of course, the definition of allies is subject to change at any time by his administration. A country needs neither democracy nor sovereignty to trade with Mr. Trump’s USA as long as it follows his diktats.
In the modern age, there are dime-a-dozen woke politicians in countries all over the world who want to invoke Trump’s mercy in order to wrest power in their home country. In exchange for that, they could be totally unashamed and willing to sign off on whatever collateral costs, however detrimental, including betraying their own country and countrymen.
In India, we have the leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, and his band of politicians, equally unashamed, who want to usurp power from the sitting democratically elected third-term Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Gandhi family can’t defend itself in several legal cases across various courts, despite high-profile Members of Parliament who double up as their lawyers.
Mr. Trump has recently effected regime changes in several countries, the latest being in Iran and Venezuela. The new interim government in Venezuela has opened the country’s trillion-dollar worth of oil, minerals, and other resources to the US for exploitation. Mr. Trump has declared that the US will “run” Venezuela practically like a corporation owned by the US government.
The US administration is known to have carried out very deadly, highly costly, and prolonged missions aimed at regime change in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, and many other countries. Clearly, their goal is to install a puppet as the head of state to extract trade privileges and other advantageous contracts in favour of the US.
The US is funding billions of dollars to the actor-turned-president of Ukraine in its long-running war with Russia. The payback would be multi-fold for the US and its corporations. After all, Mr. Trump is a businessman first.
But this is ironical of the largest and oldest democracy to shake the democratically elected governments elsewhere in the world. No country in the world has been involved in covert and overt operations in as many countries as the US has since the end of World War II. And with its latest back-to-back intervention in Iran, just two months after the regime change in Venezuela, the US has almost started World War III.
In retaliation for the US-Israeli combine’s assassination of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has started firing missiles at US forces based in the Middle Eastern countries that outsource their military from the US.
The US and Israel knew and anticipated with certainty Iran’s retaliation, its extent, intensity, and direction. Because war is the industry that serves the US and its elites. Every war is a profitable business opportunity, and trillions are made while countries bleed. It’s a system to preserve US financial hegemony. Through dollar dominance, the US leverages its monetary power to create and sustain an empire and to extract wealth from countries that host friendly US military bases.
To preserve dollar dominance, the US military adventures worldwide and consequential spending are central to the US economic policy – a geopolitical tool to create a self-sustaining dollar demand recycling. “The US uses a ‘money-pump’ mechanism to run a balance-of-payments deficit, flooding the world with dollars that foreign nations must hold, thus funding US military endeavours and consumption while undermining their own economic sovereignty,” Michael Hudson writes in the book Super Imperialism (Pluto Press, 2003).
That system had come under attack by the BRICS countries, notably China, India, and Russia, which were trading among themselves, with others, and with Iran, bypassing the dollar system. The falling share of USD in trade and the rising share of the BRICS in global trade and GDP made the US increasingly insecure. The US-Israel air attacks on Iran are intended not only to target Iran but also China, India, and Russia, as well as the rest of the world, in an effort to prevent the collapse of the dollar payment system.
Forcing trading partners to fund ever-rising US deficits, imposing tariffs to reduce the same, and then attacking sovereign countries to preserve dollar dominance is a sign of Mr. Trump’s frustration at the impending failure of the con system built 80 years ago. The countdown has begun.
