The Western fight against the tide of history

Talk of war is getting louder in the West. The German minister of defense proclaimed this month that Germany has to rebuild its army, as did his British colleague.

At the start of the war in Ukraine two years ago, the Western media depicted the Russian military as hopelessly ineffective, outdated, and corrupt. Yet in recent weeks, Russia has become an imminent danger that requires the rearmament of Europe.

On the other side of the world, we see a similar transformation. In 1972, the West signed up for the one-China policy. Last year, high-ranking Western government officials made widely publicized visits to Taiwan in support of “pro-democracy forces.”

Earlier, in 2020, the US Congress passed the Hong Kong Autonomy Act that imposed sanctions on officials and entities in Hong Kong and mainland China that violate “Hong Kong’s autonomy.”

The West, of course, has a 500-year history of involving itself with countries far from its borders. While it no longer has physical control over the world, it still has financial control thanks to the US dollar system and SWIFT, the global clearinghouse for international financial transactions.

The dollar is still the international lingua franca. This explains why everything from oil and gold to Bitcoin is priced in dollars.

The West now is trying to find legal means to confiscate Russia’s $300 billion that is locked up in the dollar system. Doing so will permanently damage the reputation of the West as a neutral custodian of the financial system, and could increase the speed of an already ongoing process of de-dollarization, but the Western political and financial elite has shown that it is willing to bet the farm on subduing Russia.

Demonizing Russia

Turning Russia into an enemy was a