In his inauguration speech, US President Donald Trump, that’s still standing somehow, announced that America is enriching the world at its own expense. During his time in office, he would repeatedly reiterate this notion, referring to the US trade balance with the EU, China and a bunch of other states. The Trump administration is somehow convinced that if you’re trading with America, you are duty-bound to buy its weapons in return, and a lot of it.
So is America enriching the world at its own expense? Or is it the other way around?
It’s been revealed that an American earns, on average, 130 dollars a day, which puts the US in the highest rank on the list of those states with high earning potential. In comparison, China sits at 20 dollars a day, when its currency is adjusted in real purchasing power, while India hasn’t advanced past the 10 dollars mark yet.
Anyone who knows a thing or two about the world economy will tell you that the balance of trade is the value of a country’s exports minus its imports. If you want to buy something from another state, you are bound to sell something of value to some third state first. However, the US has been in a rather unique position for the longest time in this game of trade. When Washington wants to buy something overseas all it has to do is to print more green paper rectangles and exchange them for goods. It goes without saying that this layout is extremely profitable for the US, as you can print any amount of these. That’s why its national debt sits at 22.5 trillion dollars and counting, as this is the amount of paper exchanged for real goods on the international market. It’s been recently revealed that the Republicans and Donald Trump are completely abandoning fiscal conservatism and working with the Democrats to make things much, much worse. What this means is that by year 2026, the US national debt can reach the mark of 30 trillion dollars. If you divide this figure by roughly a hundred, you will learn how many of those green paper rectangles are in use overseas.
That’s why the real decline in the purchasing power of a dollar is estimated at 18% a year. Haven’t you noticed gold getting more expensive, recently? It’s not the price of gold that grows, it’s the plummeting purchasing power of the dollar that you’re observing. This fraud scheme, on average, provides the United States with roughly 11 trillion dollars in profits year-on-year. For sure, this enrichment is being carried out at the expense of the rest of the world that feels that is being robbed by Washington, with the EU trying to provide a counter-balance to the dollar with its euro, but it hasn’t been particularly successful. And there’s a good reason why it hasn’t, as should the US lose its ability to buy real goods with its green paper rectangles, the US economy will find itself in shambles before long.
But it takes much more than just countering potential competitors for the US economy to stay afloat, as there’s a good ol’ capitalistic tradition of stripping economies of other states to the bone at gunpoint. There’s nothing left to Ukraine but the name. Syria, Venezuela and Afghanistan are next in line, together with minor powers that do not dare to say a word against the US.
However, in this business US guns are being brought to bear much, much later, if ever. First, Washington would abuse the subtle art of soft power in a bid to get access to foreign markets. In spite of the name, there’s nothing gentle about this tactics, as it will exploit every hole in the social fabric of a society to leave a country vulnerable to foreign takeover.
In this day and age, robbery doesn’t sound too compelling, instead you will see “democratically recognized” leaders coming to power as a result of “popular uprisings”, being praised by Western powers day and night. It’s only when the cameras stop rolling, special interests come rushing in with a greedy smile.
Basically, you can get anything through the use of soft power. Do you need yet another military base in the Central Asia? Start “promoting democracy” there! Should you decide that you want to control hydrocarbon transit routes, get a pitch-deck about the promotion of “rights and freedoms” in say Georgia, Turkey or Greece. Basically, there’s no country that couldn’t use some “foreign assistance” in the promotion of human rights or democratic values, or so the US thinks.
Once Washington knows where it wants to advance its agenda, it’s going to approach local elites, searching for those who can compromise their values for generous promises or some pocket change. Those people cannot be qualified as agents, but they are certainly useful for the US. Should local elites be weak and small to find enough people, Washington can bring its own useful people in. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of migrants in the US from most any state of the world. Do you need a new president of Ukraine, Afghanistan, Latvia or Lithuania? Just hold your breath. Does this Yushchenko bankster need a new wife? Sure thing.
Then, the US proceeds with establishing media control over a country by hiring a pool of journalists or simply educating them, if there’s not enough to go around. Those must be really young to be implanted with the system of values that USAID or George Soros funds are pushing down our throats. Then, train them a bit and voila! You’ve just got yourself a “monopoly” on truth in the sense of owning or controlling it in one separate country. Recently, the US has been spending a fortune on promoting “media freedom” in such countries as Ukraine, Moldavia, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and so on. This year alone, USAID has already invested some 15 million dollars on establishing “independent media sources” across Central Asia. It was planned that in total Washington would spend 850 on promoting media activities in the region this year. Out of those, 500 million dollars were to be sent to Afghanistan, 200 million dollars to Pakistan, 80 million dollars to Banghladesh, along with another 16 million allocated on the promotion of the C5+1 initiative. Additionally, 11 million dollars were pledged to facilitate the “professional training” of pro-Western media personalities.
The US State Department has recently announced that American journalists are going to train their overseas colleagues so the latter could “better counter disinformation.” Since 2014, this has been the primary goal of the self-proclaimed “group of volunteers and full time investigators” known as Bellingcat. Some sources claim that this group is formed of former American and British intelligence officers and employees of private intelligence firms. There’s no information about the sponsors of this group, but previously there were instances of US and British authorities pledging funds towards its activities, together with the Open Society Foundation owned by George Soros.
It’s clear that Washington has no shortage of green paper rectangles to promote regime change and the favorable media coverage of those. To facilitate this agenda, there’s thousands of so-called think tanks that have been perfecting their tools of trade for decades. And new ones are being created.
So, Washington breaks no sweat trading its green paper rectangles with the rest of the world.
Martin Berger is a freelance journalist and geopolitical analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
