America in 2025 and the British Empire in 1914
Two Peas in a deadly pod
Why is the United States drawn towards war?
PART THREE
The similarities between the situation in Europe in 1914 and that of today are striking, with the United States resembling Great Britain, or perhaps Germany, depending on one’s vantage point.
The United States has massive, unprecedented, national debt that is increasing rapidly under Trump. American banks are laden with bad loans, especially debt and questionable financial planning related to the massive investments in AI, all justified by wildly optimistic, even delusional, legends of a fundamental transformation of society. That AI optimism resembles the myths of massive profits from developments in colonies that were propagated by Britain and Germany in the early 20th century.
The value of the dollar has become shakier over the last decade, and especially over the last year. Its global authority is held up not by the health of the American economy, or even America’s cultural authority, but rather by raw American military dominance. That means that America’s ability to wage war is now the critical factor for maintaining the value of the dollar, and that ace in the hole grows weaker daily. That was similar to the how the authority of Great Britain waned in 1914 as its currency was increasingly challenged and its gold reserves diminished.
All major American banks and private equity firms have opaque financial structures, often tied to the value of stock (whose value is supported not by profits but by stock buybacks that are financed by those same banks). The entire system could fall apart at any time and that would take down all the banks at once. The massive investments by banks and private equity in the AI Ponzi scam run by Microsoft Word, Open AI, and Nvidia, are likely to irrevocably destabilize the American, and global, economy in the near future, perhaps in the next few months.
Although there is no gold standard any more, there remain regulations enforced by the Federal Reserve and the Department of Treasury on the use of the dollar which banks and corporations would like to escape from completely by employing cryptocurrencies whose value they can determine themselves using black box algorithms. The crisis of a world war would be a perfect excuse to force everyone to use digital currencies.
Just as the takeover by global finance of China and the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century was a warning for other nations of what failure would mean, the privatization of Iraq, Ukraine, Syria and other nations by banks and corporations seeking short-term profits warns all nations that failure in this competition will be catastrophic.
American banks assume that they will get assets from conquered territories they do not possess yet, such as ownership of farmland in Ukraine, or of oil wells in Iran or Venezuela. They assume the possession of these assets in calculations of their future growth—thus making war a necessity.
The interesting question is whether China might end up financing a world war and making profits off of it, while staying out of the worst of the fighting--just as the United States did in World War One. That question cannot be answered easily because the ties between Chinese banks and American banks are too opaque. We do know that multinational private equity firms like Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street, and Blackstone, the very ones who are pushing for a military buildup which is justified by exaggerating the China threat, also have massive investments in China. The United States depends on China to finance its debt, and that dependency will only increase as the value of the dollar is undermined.
That means that it is entirely possible, but not assured, that although the United States is spending all its money on a massive military build-up aimed at war with China, ultimately its catastrophic military debacle will be somewhere else, and not the war with China. In that case, China could walk away with the United States as its economic possession after a failed American war with Iran or Venezuela.
Why do elites in the United States think that they can win this insane buildup for war?
The United States may not survive the current crisis, but the bankers have their own ideas as to how America can still come out on top.
Although we do not have access to their secret plans, we can guess what their cynical strategy is for maintaining American financial dominance even when faced with such competition from China, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, India, and other nations.
The strategy, which dates back over thousands of years of empire building, is to find some way to get America’s rivals all deeply entangled in wars that will wear them down and destroy them, while leaving the United States out of the conflict. If the United States elites can do that, they can come out on top.
First, the United States must take steps to encourage Germany, France, Great Britain and other European nations to get caught up in a destructive war with Russia by using its operatives in Europe to bribe and threaten the leaders of those nations so that they prepare for war with Russia, while the United States maintains certain distance from that conflict, and even develops some ties to Russia that will allow the United States to step back from that war at the last minute. That seems to be precisely the plan being followed right now.
At the same time, United States can take steps to encourage Israel, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, maybe even India, and other nations to enter into a war with Iran with devastating consequences for those nations, while the United States prepares to step back at the last moment and stay out of that war as well.
There are signs that such a strategy is being pursued, especially as demonstrated by the doubtful bombing of Iran by the United States, and the minor Iranian response. However, the United States has not been so successful in promoting this plan because it is too closely tied to Israel and because Iran has managed to maintain good ties with many countries in the region. The United States’ support for the Gaza genocide has so weakened its standing in the world that a war with Iran looks like suicide for many nations. Such plans, however, are still there. The stupidity of the concept is not a reason to believe that it will not be implemented.
Finally, the United States can try to get Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand, and other Asian nations, wrapped up in a catastrophic war with China that will destroy them all, and greatly weaken China as well. The United States would step back at the last minute and avoid being caught up in the actual war—thus coming up on top in the end.
There are indications that such a plan is also in place. In the Japanese case, we need only look at the recent establishment of a new combined command at Akasaka for US Forces Japan and Japan Self Defense Forces which is supposed to prepare the United States and Japan to fight more effectively in a direct war with China on the ground, in Japan, in the near future.
This new posture actually makes Japan responsible for handling the war, and gives the United States the option to pull out at the last moment.
We saw an indication of how Americans might bait Japan into a war with China, and then pull out at the last moment, when the Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae was manipulated by the Trump administration into launching a vicious political fight with the Xi administration over minor diplomatic issues—a battle which did nothing for Japan’s benefit. Takaichi was encouraged to publicly declare that Japan faced an existential threat from any Chinese move on Taiwan—and implying that Japan must defend Taiwan militarily. This statement ignored all of Japan’s previous statements and Japanese foreign policy in a Trumpian moment. She created an entirely unnecessary conflict on direct orders from Washington DC.
Trump, however, called up Xi Jinping on the phone and then stated for the public that he had good relations with Xi. The United States has since even agreed to sell advanced semiconductors to China in a move meant to improve ties. Japan was set up to fight with China while the United States was given the option of pulling back.
All of the processes are designed to lure American allies into wars of destruction can be reversed, and the strategies being pursued by the bankers in the United States may not be successful. But we cannot make any progress until we recognize what the true problem is. As James Baldwin put it so succinctly,
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
