The U.S. "intelligence" establishment apparently failed to recognize that stealing Russian reserves would give Russia the motive and opportunity to do harm to the dollar. Or maybe they did and are themselves only using the Russia-Ukraine conflict to create chaos and distract the U.S. population as their Wall Street partners buy up U.S. real estate and resources. Time will tell. Whatever the case, the Russians probably had to pinch themselves when they saw how stupidly the U.S. was willing to act. It is now clear that because the U.S. treated Russia like a vassal and seized Russia's Forex reserves, Russia has successfully broadsided the petrodollar.
The U.S.'s theft of Russian reserves not only gave Russia motive and opportunity, it also recklessly gave Russia the ethical high ground in a global monetary war.
On the kinetic war front, thanks to the U.S. theft of Russian Forex reserves, there is now little need for Russia to militarily occupy or control any physical area of Ukraine beyond the ethnic Russian areas and the Black Sea coast. Because of the U.S.'s financial miscalculation and blindness to ethical casuistry, Russia has already achieved much more. By successfully pulling off the Russian roubles for Russian oil play, Russia has simultanously: (1) weakened, and perhaps crippled, the petrodollar's international reserve currency status; (2) exposed the economic fault lines (one currency, multiple sovereign budgets) in the unsound EU structure that will likely expedite the EU's breakup (note that Hungary is not on the Euro and appears to be on it way out of EU, a la Brexit); and (3) shed light on irresolvable economic conflicts of interest within NATO (Germany needs affordable heating fuel) that will likely expedite its breakup. A Russian three-fer thanks to either U.S. incompetence or corruption, or perhaps a combination of the two.
Russia has flipped the script and U.S. leadership appears to be unaware of the consequences. Russia will likely drastically limit its territorial ambitions in Ukraine and spend the next few years ropa-a-doping as long as an angry, bankrupt, and flailing Leviathan continues to support a bloody kinetic battle when it has already lost the much bigger economic war. Russia would be smart to defend the ethnic Russians in Ukraine for a time and absorb punches while the U.S.--standing on a shaky petrodollar foundation, facing a debt-to-GDP of 135 percent and possibly double digit domestic inflation--pours its remaining treasure into a military industrial complex black hole.
As weakened petrodollars flood back into the U.S. looking to buy things that hold value, we can expect currency controls that will further alienate the U.S. internationally. The weakened petrodollar turns the tables and makes Ukraine a potential tarbaby to an already economically weak U.S. The biggest losers here are, of course, the Ukrainian Average Yuri pawns with Nazi bayonettes in their backs and U.S. Average Joes with MTGLQ servicing their mortgage loans.
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