Pelosi Visit Just Pushed Beijing Closer to Moscow
There was close to zero chance Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei would bring about war between China and the USA. China’s economy would collapse under an embargo of their exports similar to what was imposed on Russia. America would do better if that happened. But soon the Walmart shelves would be bare, Amazon would go out of business and American seniors and others would start dropping dead because they couldn’t get their meds, 95% of which come from China.
But China is seething right now. Which means Beijing is moving even closer to Moscow. This may have been allowed because Washington figures the Ukraine war was lost anyway, something I predicted in this space back when it started five months ago. So Russia getting more help from China wouldn’t matter much.
What it does, though, is encourage China and Russia to keep establishing a second global financial order. The dollar won’t be displaced as the main world reserve currency, but it will be reduced somewhat. And in the future?
Much of the problem is there’s nobody at the switch in the White House. Biden is a whisp of a man, barely able to speak, let alone control the vast US government. Here’s the government’s organization chart from the GSA:
Can you make sense of it? I can’t.
And anthropologist David Vine tallies 750 U.S. military bases round the world.
For the Russians, it’s much simpler: Protect the “near abroad,” as they call neighboring countries, by making sure those countries don’t cozy up to the US and its NATO puppet. For China, it’s similar, except their economy is a lot larger than Russia’s, indeed about equal to America’s, so they have a lot more money to throw around.
What these events show is America is a late-stage empire, like the Ottomans in 1914 or the Soviet Union in 1990. We just can’t sustain the perpetual global meddling. And the tired excuse of “promoting democracy” doesn’t sell anymore, especially when the salesman is someone like Pelosi who has spent four decades doing nothing but enslave her own people.
Europe, thanks to Biden’s somnolent folly, faces a frigid winter and hunger. The leaders who backed him — Draghi, Johnson and “Sergeant” Schulz — are gone or out. The EU is a tyrannical joke that mainly hamstrings producers with absurd regulations. What started out six decades ago as a sensible free-trade group turned into a bureaucratic monstrosity.
As Col. MacGregor pointed out recently, NATO has no command and control, only the US military does. The Europeans, at Trump branded them, are bunch of freeloaders on defense spending. Soon they’ll have two more freeloaders, Sweden and Finland.
By contrast, Russia has been perparing 20 years for this moment, and China at least as long. They certainly also have their weaknesses. But as Clint Eastwood said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” They largely do.
America’s leaders believe they are bound by no limitations. But we are. And regular Americanos now will be paying the penalty for our leaders’ willful ignorance.
John Seiler blogs at: johnseiler.substack.com
