Western journalists might denounce it as stump rhetoric. But I don’t think Vladimir Putin is beating a drum or rattling a sabre. I think he is deadly serious: what’s more, I think he is in a position of strength, not weakness.
From Bloomberg:
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is stepping up rhetoric against the U.S. as his campaign for the March 4 presidential election intensifies after the biggest protests against his rule.
The U.S. “wants to control everything” and takes decisions unilaterally on key questions, Putin said on a campaign stop yesterday in the Siberian city of Tomsk, 3,100 kilometers (1,900 miles) east of Moscow. “Sometimes I get the impression the U.S. doesn’t need allies, it needs vassals.”
Putin, 59, is seeking a new term in the Kremlin amid the biggest challenge to his 12-year rule after fraud allegations at parliamentary polls sparked mass protests. The Russian leader, who has repeatedly accused the U.S. of interfering in other countries’ affairs, said last week that reports by a state-owned Moscow radio station supported American interests.
“The No. 1 reason Putin is doing this is elections,” Jan Techau, director of the European Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Brussels, said yesterday in a phone interview. ‘‘It’s pre-election saber-rattling. This is vintage Putin.’’
Alas, it is all about context. This isn’t 1992; the end of history is finished. America is not an invincible hegemon, but instead has been taxed and weakened by two big wars and a myriad of small ones, a huge financial blowup, and the fallout of losing a huge hunk of its manufacturing sector to Asia. America’s monopoly over the global oil trade — and its ability to acquire oil and components with newly-printed dollars — is threatened by the current shape of Eurasia, where a coterie of authoritarian leaders, united by their shared anti-Americanism is moving to displace the dollar as the global reserve currency.
Vladimir Putin was very explicit about this.
From Rianovosti:
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused the US of hooliganism on Monday [July 2011] over the US government’s efforts to ease its financial problems by injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy.
“Thank God, or unfortunately, we do not print a reserve currency but what are they doing? They are behaving like hooligans, switching on the printing press and tossing them around the whole world, forgetting their main obligations,” Putin told a meeting of economic experts at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The Russian authorities have said they would like to see a basket of currencies including the ruble replacing the dollar as the main reserve currency, although most analysts have said a more realistic target for Russia would be if the ruble became a regional reserve currency for the CIS.
Regular readers will know that this is not just rhetoric. These Eurasian leaders are taking direct action to displace the dollar.
From Zero Hedge:
Yuan bonds have spread across the planet, China has dropped the dollar in bilateral trade with Russia, the ASEAN trading bloc has formed into a tight shell of export partners, and that is just the beginning. Two major announcements in 2011 have solidified my belief that a complete dump of the dollar by eastern interests is near…
First was the announcement that China was actively and openly pursuing the establishment of a central bank for the whole of ASEAN, with the Yuan utilized as the reserve currency instead of the dollar:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/27/us-china-asean-financial-idUST…This news, of course, has barely been reported on in the mainstream. As I discussed at the beginning of this article, the terminology surrounding economic developments has been diluted and twisted. When China states that an ASEAN central bank is in the works, we need to point out what this really means; the ASEAN trading bloc is about to become the Asian Union. The only missing piece of the puzzle is something that I have been warning about for at least a couple years, ever since my days at Neithercorp (see “Migration Of The Black Swans” as a recent example). This key catalyst is the inclusion of Japan in ASEAN, something which many said would take five to ten years to unfold. News released this Christmas speaks otherwise:
Japan has indeed entered into an agreement to drop the dollar in currency exchange with China and has expressed interest in melting into ASEAN. Japan has also struck somewhat similar though slightly more limited deals with India, South Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines almost simultaneously:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-28/japan-india-seal-15-billion-currency-swap-arrangement-to-shore-up-rupee.html
This means that the two largest foreign holders of U.S. debt and Greenbacks will soon be in a position to tap into an export market far more profitable than that of America, and that all of this trade will be facilitated by currencies OTHER THAN THE DOLLAR. It means the end of the dollar as the world reserve and probably the end of the dollar as we know it.
America might well be expected to throw a wrench into the changing chape of the global system. A (messy, prolonged and expensive) war with Iran — to disrupt Eurasian co-operation and re-assert American hegemony — might suffice in the minds of hawks, but will in reality do more harm than good, perhaps driving Russia and China into explicitly and directly defending their ideological ally. Even if this was not the case, American military power runs thin on manpower, and is funded not by American productivity, but by debt acquisition. More debt will just strain the status of the dollar as reserve currency even more.
azizonomics 