A new battle of the “two systems”?
The US President Joe Biden recently made a landmark statement:
“I have spent more time with Chinese President Xi Jinping than any world leader. 24 hours of personal meetings only with him and the translator; 17 thousand miles of travel with him in China and here. He firmly believes that China will take over America by 2030-2035”.
Official Washington has not blamed anyone since the Cold War in its desire to “take over” the United States, but now an image of an enemy threatening the existence of the United States is being formed. As the Pentagon’s draft budget review says, “continued erosion could seriously undermine our ability to achieve US defense goals and protect the sovereignty of our allies”. We are talking about territorial disputes between China and some of its neighbors.
However, it is extremely unlikely that over these territories, China went to a military confrontation with America’s allies, and therefore with itself. There is a wide range of diplomatic tools to minimize this risk. The fact that the declared course of full-scale confrontation with the PRC is initiated by the United States itself. And the main reason for this is that China has already surpassed the United States as the first economy in the world and continues to widen the gap. And it already squeezes America as “the only superpower”, and the Americans treat this status with trepidation.
Back in early 1992, a few months after the collapse of the USSR, the United States adopted a new doctrine of national security, known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which read: “Our main goal is to prevent the emergence of a new rival both in the post-Soviet space and in any another place in the world, which will pose a threat similar to the one that the USSR posed for our country. This position is central to the new defense strategy. We must try to prevent the emergence of hostile regional powers, which with the help of their resources may be able to gain global control in international relations”.
This attitude persists, and it explains a lot in current US foreign policy.
One of the most important elements of superpower status is the dollar, which replaced gold as a means of international transactions. Simplifying, we can say that the world is forced to acquire American “paper”, paying for it with the real products of its labor. I will cite a comment from a person who can hardly be suspected of having a negative attitude towards America:
“To build such a financial pyramid, starting with the Bretton Woods agreement, can only be done by genius people. Putting the whole world on one injection in the form of the US dollar, printing dollars and buying up the whole world for pieces of paper – they are great. I really don’t know how it will develop further – 14 trillion have been printed”.
This is Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the former Ukrainian prime minister. You shouldn’t trust his last phrase: apparently, he meant the then (2012) size of the US national debt, now it reaches not 14, but more than 28 trillion dollars, while the size of the dollar mass walking around the world is classified. It is important that these “genius people” have firmly put the US economy on the “dollar needle”, but the built financial pyramid cannot grow indefinitely.
If the enemies call Russia a gas station country (despite the fact that oil is a product of the most important practical importance), then the United States can be called a printer country with much more reason. In 2019, U.S. exports totaled $ 1.64 trillion. dollars, imports 2.57 trillion. The deficit of the foreign trade balance is about 40% in relative values (in such proportions it persists for several decades), and in absolute terms it reaches an astronomical figure of 1 trillion. Doll.
That is, America’s main export commodity is dollars. If this product ceases to be in demand, “candy wrappers” scattered around the world will begin to return to their homeland. And the moment will come when the United States will have nothing to cover the budget and imports, including critical ones. After all, the geopolitical rival of the United States may well mature to the idea of refusing to pay tribute to America. The process of getting rid of dollar dependence is already underway – other currencies are also acquiring reserve status, gradually reducing the share of the dollar in settlements and savings (its share in Russian international reserves has dropped to background values). A number of countries are carefully and gradually making the transition to national currencies in mutual settlements. Thus, Russia and China have agreed to increase the share of the ruble and the yuan in mutual trade by several times.
Washington is ready to do a lot to reverse or at least slow down this process as much as possible. Apparently, a minimum program is being considered overseas – the preservation of the hegemony of the United States and the dollar, at least in part of the globe and the world economy.
With the collapse of the USSR, the factor that consolidated the “free world” disappeared, and America’s junior Western partners began to more actively defend their interests where they come into conflict with the American ones. The introduction of the euro in the early 2000s was an obvious attempt to create a competitor to the dollar.
It is worth paying attention to Biden’s words:
“We are in a battle between democracies and autocracies”, – and Xi Jinping “strongly believes that autocracies can make quick decisions”.
In these words one can see the emerging new “battle of two systems”; in the language of the ideology proposed by the new US administration, this is a battle of “democracies” and “autocracies”, but an alternative ideology is also in great demand.
Washington suggests that “younger democracies” should be prepared to incur costs in one form or another in order to prevent a critical weakening of the “leader of the free world.” In practice, this means that if the United States fails to secure the payment of “tribute” from China, Russia, and a number of other countries leaving the American sphere of influence, the burden of further maintaining the overseas power will be placed on its allies and satellites. The United States will not stand the loss of its hegemonic position as a state.
Anton Kanevsky, FSK