Global Wars To Come:

Guns Of April And Global War

 J.B.Shurk via AmericanThinker.com,

War between Russia and Ukraine looks imminent.  Israel and Iran are engaging in tit for tat maritime altercations.  And China is ratcheting up provocative incursions into the airspaces and waters of Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines.

Any one of these regional conflicts is incendiary enough to ignite World War III (or, more accurately, each one is capable of transforming the cold, hybrid warfare of cyberhacks, technology thefts, financial markets manipulation, and perhaps even biological attacks that has been underway for many years into total and unrelenting global bloodshed), yet trading markets and news media are largely ignoring what’s unfolding.  It’s as if the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 1999 Kargil War between nuclear-equipped India and Pakistan, and the Soviet and Nazi Invasion of Poland were all happening concurrently, and the world decided it was too busy enforcing face mask mandates upon religious congregants and following the turmoil of Khloe Kardashian to care.

Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August paints a vivid pictureof European elites so mentally imprisoned by the mores and cultural etiquette of the nineteenth century that they failed to grasp the reality of the geopolitical chessboard before them or the likelihood of the monumental carnage of WWI.  Something eerily reminiscent of those miscalculations is going on today. 

Instead of broadly integrating a shaky post-communist Russia into European and trans-Atlantic institutions, the U.S. has wobbled between treating Russia as an ally in the “war on terror” and as a Cold War adversary that must be contained by driving the expansion of NATO-allied member countries all the way to Russia’s borders.  One moment Hillary Clinton is promoting a “Russia reset,” and the next moment Barack Obama and Victoria Nuland are orchestrating a Ukrainian coup d’état to swap a Russia-friendly government with a fiercely anti-Russian replacement.  In order to prevent Russia from becoming a thorn in the side of New World Ordertypes utilizing the IMF, WTO, and World Bank as engines for maintaining American-led global governance, U.S.-controlled NATO and E.U. technocrats intent on building a European superstate have kept Russia relegated to the sidelines.  And in recent years, Democrats in the U.S., “Remain” Brits opposed to Brexit, and European integrationists who have taken umbrage at Central European countries such as Poland and Hungary defending their own sovereignty have tried to scapegoat lost referendums on illusory “Russian disinformation” campaigns.  The effect of this intentional ostracism has been to push Russia closer to communist China and into adversarial brinkmanship with U.S.-E.U. interests.

Likewise, by largely ignoring China’s decades of human rights abuses and normalizing trade relations at the turn of the millennium in an effort to tame a large but poor communist country through globalization and cultural assimilation, the United States has instead elevated China to an economic powerhouse increasingly capable of bending the West to its will. 

After hollowing out America’s manufacturing and industrial capabilities and orchestrating the largest intercontinental transfer of wealth in history from America’s post-WWII middle class to China’s emerging middle class, the U.S. now finds itself in a defensive geopolitical posture with a combination of national debt, crumbling infrastructure, and dependence on Chinese raw materials and imports endangering America’s rules-based international order. 

Both China and Russia are deleveraging from American dollars, increasing their gold stores, and preparing for a future when the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency.  Without that ace in the hole, the U.S. loses not only its ability to continue printing and spending money without enduring the normal consequences of monetary devaluation and collapse but also its ability to inflict financial sanctions as a way to “club” other nations into obedience.  A Sino-Russian alliance that utilizes Russia’s oil, coal, and natural gas leverage over Europe and its outsized military capabilities; China’s manufacturing dominance and Belt and Road Initiative extending across and linking Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America; and both nations’ wealth of natural resources puts them in a strategic position to forge a stable gold-backed digital currency that will instantly interconnect most of the world’s population.

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