Trump’s BRICS Bluster May Backfire

As Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day approaches, he is becoming more strident in his foreign policy statements.  There wasn’t much nuance in his message to the BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) alliance:

‘The idea that the BRICS Countries are trying to move away from the Dollar while we stand by and watch is OVER. We require a commitment from these Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy. They can go find another “sucker!” There is no chance that the BRICS will replace the U.S. Dollar in International Trade, and any Country that tries should wave goodbye to America.’

Trump via his X account

But this kind of attitude, of domination rather than cooperation, may come back to haunt President Trump and all of us in the States.

There are two main factors at play in the desire of the BRICS alliance of countries (which includes several more than those listed above) to move away from U.S. dollar domination of the world financial system.  The first is, unsurprisingly, monetary, and the power that this grants the United States over most countries in the world:

‘What a French finance minister once called “the exorbitant privilege” of the global dollar domination that emerged out of World War II has allowed the U.S. to be profligate with debt. The basis of this anomaly is that, currently, almost 60% of all central bank reserves in the world are held in dollars, and nearly 90% of all foreign-exchange transactions are conducted in the U.S. currency.

‘As a result, Washington has also been able to avail itself of what The Economist recently labelled “an enormous lever of power” by surveilling and obstructing global financial flows as well as imposing outright almost-confiscation (euphemized as “freezing”), as has happened to almost 300 billion dollars of Russia’s national reserves. In short, the dollar-as-it-still-is allows the U.S. to live beyond its means at the cost of other nations and to make their lives miserable by the financial equivalent of blackmail, strangulation and, quite simply, robbery.

‘… To state the obvious, the president-elect’s sally squarely stands in the bipartisan US tradition of breathtakingly arrogant over-reach. Between sovereign states, to threaten other countries for potentially not using your currency, including in trades amongst themselves, is absurd. To demand that they promise not to even try makes you look like Tony Soprano on ecstasy, a weird mix between a bully and a crank.’

Tarik Cyril Amar, ‘Trump’s dollar threat against BRICS shows the US hasn’t learned anything’, rt.com

That kind of hubris, as we said at the outset, could do more harm than good in the long run:

‘Finally, Trump’s approach is also self-defeating because it offers further incentives to de-dollarize, as even some Western experts acknowledge. The president-elect has illustrated exactly the kind of brutal and dumb overreach and, to put it simply, flagrant disrespect of other countries’ financial sovereignty that has antagonized the world in the first place’ (Ibid.).

The other factor at play in this is the desire of the BRICS countries to maintain their traditional cultures and morality.  Dr Joseph Farrell explains:

‘… Telling more traditional societies and cultures such as India, or Brazil, or Russia, that they have to use the currency of a country that has a large segment of its own population that thinks it’s ok to allow men to use women’s toilets and play in women’s sporting events, to allow children to undergo “gender surgery”, and in general that wants to promote all sorts of cultural nincompoopery and codswallop (remember the American progressivist outrage when “Pussy Riot” was arrested for having unceremoniously staged a sacrilegious performance inside the rebuilt Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow, the one rebuilt after Stalin blew it up?) , probably should not be lecturing the BRICs countries on what they should and should not do amongst themselves before getting its own cultural house back into some sort of traditional order and sanity.

‘After all, it’s the very abandonment of that order and the insistence that everyone else be exactly like us that led to the formation of the BRICS bloc in the first place. Other countries just became sick and tired of being bossed around.

‘If the President-elect does not appreciate the cultural and traditional component behind the BRICs alliance and remains focused only upon the materialistic, financial, and economic issues, then he will have gravely miscalculated the geopolitics of what he is up against. To be sure, the BRICs bloc is about finance and economics. But that is most decidedly not all that it is about. It is also about the wish of the traditional cultures that comprise it to preserve their culture in the face of the materialistic money myopia that has led to the spiritual and aesthetic decline of the West.’

BRICS, USE THE DOLLAR, OR ELSE: TRUMP OVERREACH?’, gizadeathstar.com

Trump’s rhetoric and the reaction to it at home and abroad doesn’t bode well for the United States.  Significantly, there seems to be agreement that some kind of big shakeup is looming for the United States from the States themselves, as they continue to go about setting up parallel financial systems based on gold, silver, and other precious metals.  Dr Farrell, in a separate article about Texas’s proposed State legislation to issue paper currency backed by gold and silver (legislation introduced after Trump’s election victory; not exactly a vote of confidence in the long-term viability of the current union and its federal institutions), writes,

‘… why are states, and particularly Texas, doing this? To my mind there has always been a political and geopolitical calculation in Texas’s moves, a calculation revealed by that State’s governor’s attempt to woo various stock exchange data centers – the NASDAQ in particular – away from the New York City area and to Texas. Wooing the data center is tantamount – in these algorithmic trading days – to wooing the exchange itself. Texas has already opened its own stock exchange in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, and if any of the more established equity or commodity exchanges move to that state, or if the Texas exchange grows to be competition, then we’ll know a game is afoot, a geopolitical game.

‘In previous blogs I offered the speculation that the Texas stock exchange seemed to presage a “Latin American turn” in business and financial orientation. This was before Mr. Trump’s recent re-election and nomination of Cuban-American Florida U.S. Senator Marco Rubio to the position of Secretary of State, a move that seems condign to my previous speculation.

‘But there is a deeper and far more speculative reason I think these moves must be watched, and that is that not only does there exist a “federal level” deep state, but that each state also has its own “state level deep state” and those “state deep states” have, in my opinion, taken a very different assessment of the long term future prospects of the federal union, and that they are seeing deep fissures and fault lines that could potentially lead to a crack-up, and are taking appropriate long term steps for the ability to continue international trade in that event. And that trade, as the American experience in the War Between the States showed, required bullion to conduct and clear international trade, and this was true both for the Union and for the Confederacy. Texas is saying, in effect, that with, or without, the federal government cesspool in Swampington, DC., that it intends to be able to continue to conduct domestic and foreign trade.’

TEXAS BILLS FOR GOLD AND SILVER BASED CURRENCY INTRODUCED’, gizadeathstar.com

With all that swirling in the background, we sincerely hope that all of the State governments in the South, together with the other major institutions (churches, businesses, etc.), will gird themselves properly for action in the months ahead, to prepare the Southern people for whatever storms await us.  We could well be watching the prelude to the collapse of ‘America’ and the freedom of Dixie.