The ‘All or Nothing’ Wars
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Alastair Crooke
- 11 Apr 2022 00:09
- 26 Shares
6 Min Read
The radical stance the West is taking against Russia is risking bringing down the whole economic system with which it has imposed its dominion over the planet.
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The ‘All or Nothing’ Wars
These ‘wars’ are becoming viewed in the West as existential -- ie. ‘all or nothing’ events -- and their scope is widening. Why wars in plural? Well, the Ukraine military clash is coming to its climax; the war over Russia’s radical shifts in the global monetary order is sending western states into a speechless whirl; Europe stands at the brink of economic abyss; and the Russia-China ‘war’ to re-engineer the global ‘rules’ is coming to a head too (albeit travelling on a slightly slower train).
The West's PSYOPS war however, truly stands in a class of its own. The wall of toxicity swelling, rising and crashing down onto the shores of Russia represents a sea-storm, such as we never before have seen. Its’ intent plainly is to blacken President Putin beyond ‘evil’, to make of him such a twisted satanic demon, that any sane Russian oligarch will rush to replace him with a more compliant, Yeltsin-like figure.
Only it isn’t working. The western officials behind the PSYOPS ‘curtain’ do not know when to stop. They pull levers harder and twiddle the dials ever higher until the outpouring of visceral hatred directed at everything Russian has created the opposite effect: not only is Putin more popular, it has launched a fierce backlash in Russia against the West in toto.
The net effect then has been precisely to drive the Ukraine issue into an existential Manichaean nightmare. Headlines are written in the Anglo-world that ‘the war is all or nothing’: If Putin is not defeated (in the sense of utterly vanquished in battle), the West simply cannot survive.
The problem of the West driving things to such a light or darkness ‘all or nothing’ climax, is that it also risks being ‘nothing’. For clearly, there can be allowed no talking with ‘evil’ demonic forces: No political dialogue therefore. All or nothing.
Then, derived from the casting of this confrontation in such binary good/evil terms is the obvious corollary that the rest of the world must be subjected to a Grand Inquisitorial mechanism to uncover, and then force, heretics to recant any lapse in their support for Ukraine versus Russia, or face the stake. Inquisitors are spreading around the globe: Euro-recalcitrants are first (the Orbàns); Pakistan, India, Turkey, Gulf States, etc., etc. follow.
Only again, it isn’t working. The non-West scents in the air a weakening empire that is faltering; flailing-about, like Hercules descending armed with his sword into Hades (the underworld) to fetch out the three-headed dog Cerberus, one of whose heads spreads human fear about what lays waiting for us, around the next corner. (Fear indeed is rising.)
And this is what is driving that fear behind ‘all or nothing’: The radical shift presaged by Russia’s insistence on receiving payment in roubles (for now, only in respect of gas supplies), and by an already resurgent rouble, now linked to gold and commodities.
By playing both sides of the equation: i.e. linking the rouble to gold, and then linking energy payments to the rouble, the Bank of Russia and the Kremlin are fundamentally altering the entire working assumptions of the global trade system (i.e. by replacing evanescent dollar trading, by solid commodity-backed, currency trading), whilst at the same time triggering a shift to the role of gold back as a bulwark underpinning the monetary system.
If a majority in the international trading system begins accepting roubles for commodity supply, this could propel what Wall Street guru, Zoltan Pozsar, foresees being the death of the petro-dollar and the rise of Bretton Woods III (i.e. a new world monetary order).
The World is watching intently. They can see the landscape shifting. When the collective West seized all the foreign exchange reserves of the Central Bank of Russia, the latter decreed that Russian sovereign reserve holdings in Euros, dollars, and US Treasuries were no longer ‘money good’. They were valueless as ‘money’ with which to pay debts to foreign creditors.
The message was plain enough: If even a prominent G20 state can have its reserves cancelled at a flick of the switch, then for those who still hold ‘reserves’ in New York, take them elsewhere (whilst the going is good)! For tomorrow’s trading currencies will be commodity-backed, and not in constant dollars.
Of course, of those watching another aspect (market oil prices) most closely will be China (with its huge gold reserves), and the large crude producers who will perceive that Russia’s actions – if they stick – could lead to Russia not only wresting gold price determination away from LBMA and COMEX (bullion exchanges) but who knows, in combination with other producers, a wresting of oil price determination away from US commodity exchanges too?
In a very real sense, the West senses existential danger. We are not talking just de-dollarisation, but something more fundamental. The western financial system consists of an inverted pyramid of highly-leveraged paper money ‘instruments’ (many known as derivatives), resting on the tiniest bottom, apex-base of the inverted pyramid. This is termed ‘inside money’.
It is of magnitudes greater than its collateral undergirdings at its base -- sometimes called 'outside money'. Outside money represents something real: oil, gas, energy, food, metals, etcetera. Collateral that is real.
Take the outside money away from the base of the upturned pyramid … and (potentially), crash.
Well, this is what is happening. Putin is whisking Russian gas away from under the pyramid by insisting that the entire payment process, and collateral value, stays within the rouble sphere. And, if many other states follow suit, and extend it to more commodities … Crash.
The irony is that the West brought this on themselves. Putin didn’t do it. They did it. They did it when the Russo-phobic Washington ‘hawks’ stupidly picked a fight with the one country - Russiam - that has the commodities needed to run the world, and to trigger the shift to a different monetary system -- an alternative system, anchored in something other than fiat money, backed by nothing but the Federal Reserve’s ability to print dollars ad infinitum.
And then they destroyed the ‘full faith and promise’ of the US Treasury to commit to contractual payment – by stealing the Russian reserves.
