By Prof. Silverio Allocca (DIPLOMATICINFO.COM GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST)
The knots finally came to the boil, and after yet another bluster these past two years, the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive was the straw that broke the camel’s back and the bath of reality that the United States should have taken long ago turned into a cold shower.
The Western press was keen to read the handshake between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Xi Jinping today, June 20, 2020, as something that symbolized and sealed the search-expressed to be bipartisan-for a truce in the diplomatic and trade “war” that the two superpowers have been waging for years now: too bad that it is the U.S. and not Beijing who now have the pressing need to demand it: those U.S. who have had to suck it up to the point of finding themselves forced by the contingent need to catch their breath to formally and publicly reassure the Chinese president, by the mouth of their influential emissary, that the U.S. will not support Taiwan independence.
China thus capitalizes on the painstaking work, diplomatic and commercial, done over the years while the U.S. boastfully continued to pursue the dream of a New World Order all under the banner of U.S. world supremacy and the USD in a context that was supposed to perpetuate all the insane pretensions, hitherto fulfilled by vassal allies, valvassors and valvassins, European and otherwise, at once prone before the wishes of their overseas master father (whose Western-style rhetoric of values they have continued to espouse by pandering to him right up to the latest villainy represented by the self-defeating policy conducted against Putin through sanctions) – and harassers of every right of others where they have had the opportunity and license (and it matters little whether it has been Africa or the Balkans) to pick up the crumbs.
Bringing the U.S. down to earth has been the heavy debt whose cost to date has been passed on to the ‘allies’ and not only because of the lack of an alternative currency to the U.S. dollar for everything related to world trading in energy products and commodities in general.
More than a few people today wrote, commenting on today’s meeting, that this is just a pause, a moment of reflection since the USD is strong currency: wrong!
Wrong because the currency has today, as it does today, only a fiduciary value precisely because of what the U.S., accustomed all too much to doing the good and bad thinking exclusively of its own exclusive interests, in 1971 unilaterally denounced the Bretton Woods agreements by cancelling the convertibility of the Dollar for the sole purpose of offloading the burden of the consequences of its political and financial mistakes on its European and non-European ‘allies’: a practice that they have probably finally understood even if , unfortunately with serious delay, to no longer be pursuable.
The decline of the U.S. as the absolute global Hegemonic Power is now a fact and today’s move is only the first step conducted in order to somehow try to maintain a comprimario role in a polycentric world geopolitical system: and little does it matter if the EU is in serious political, economic and financial ambasms.
Will the Europeans finally understand what kind of trouble they have gotten themselves into for almost a year and a half?
Will Zelensky understand what a dramatic situation he has put his country into in order to give credence to the White House and continue to brag about impossible victories from a war he helped provoke by pandering to Washington’s geopolitical aims?
Perhaps for him the ultimate bath of reality will come next month at the NATO summit that in the dreams of Zelensky and the Baltics-but only in theirs, it seems-should decree the launch of the construction of his “highway to NATO.”
And again, will the European parrots a la Meloni, Monti or von der Leyen understand this?
One hopes so, but I highly doubt it.
