{"id":62165,"date":"2022-03-09T20:33:37","date_gmt":"2022-03-10T01:33:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62165"},"modified":"2022-03-09T20:33:37","modified_gmt":"2022-03-10T01:33:37","slug":"the-american-empire-self-destructs-but-nobody-thought-that-it-would-happen-this-fast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=62165","title":{"rendered":"The American Empire Self-Destructs, But Nobody Thought That It Would Happen This Fast"},"content":{"rendered":"

The American Empire Self-Destructs, But Nobody Thought That It Would Happen This Fast<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photograph Source: Phil Dolby \u2013\u00a0CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Empires often follow the course of a Greek tragedy, bringing about precisely the fate that they sought to avoid. That certainly is the case with the American Empire as it dismantles itself in not-so-slow motion.<\/p>\n

The basic assumption of economic and diplomatic forecasting is that every country will act in its own self-interest. Such reasoning is of no help in today\u2019s world. Observers across the political spectrum are using phrases like \u201cshooting themselves in their own foot\u201d to describe U.S. diplomatic confrontation with Russia and allies alike. But nobody thought that The American Empire would self-destruct this fast.<\/p>\n

For more than a generation the most prominent U.S. diplomats have warned about what they thought would represent the ultimate external threat: an alliance of Russia and China dominating Eurasia. America\u2019s economic sanctions and military confrontation have driven these two countries \u00a0together, and are driving other countries into their emerging Eurasian orbit.<\/p>\n

American economic and financial power was expected to avert this fate. During the half-century since the United States went off gold in 1971, the world\u2019s central banks have operated on the Dollar Standard, holding their international monetary reserves in the form of U.S. Treasury securities, U.S. bank deposits and U.S. stocks and bonds. The resulting Treasury-bill Standard has enabled America to finance its foreign military spending and investment takeover of other countries simply by creating dollar IOUs. U.S. balance-of-payments deficits end up in the central banks of payments-surplus countries as their reserves, while Global South debtors need dollars to pay their bondholders and conduct their foreign trade.<\/p>\n

This monetary privilege \u2013 dollar seignorage \u2013 has enabled U.S. diplomacy to impose neoliberal policies on the rest of the world, without having to use much military force of its own except to grab Near Eastern oil.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The American Empire Self-Destructs, But Nobody Thought That It Would Happen This Fast Photograph Source: Phil Dolby \u2013\u00a0CC BY 2.0 Empires often follow the course of a Greek tragedy, bringing about precisely the fate that they sought to avoid. That certainly is the case with the American Empire as it dismantles itself in not-so-slow motion. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[124,130,5493,6279,553,694,827,839,3142,5482],"class_list":["post-62165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-central-banks","tag-china","tag-counterpunch","tag-michael-hudson","tag-nato","tag-russia","tag-united-states","tag-us-dollar","tag-us-empire","tag-world-reserve-currency"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62165"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62166,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62165\/revisions\/62166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}