Two initial observations made at the beginning of the war in Ukraine were that first, this was actually not an aberration, but a return to the historically normal way of doing things among European people. They are very “warlike”. It was pointed out that in its last two-hundred plus years, Europeans had spent more time being embroiled in a conflict, than not.
Second, that these conflicts were usually the training ground for a bigger war. For example, the “Great War” (or now so-called First World War; 1914–1918) was in a sense a political continuation of the Franco-Prussian war (1870–1871). And of course, the so-called Second World War (1939–1945) was a development of the unfinished business of the first one.
A third point, only merely touched on, was the likelihood of a severe body blow to the entire array of what has become known today as international diplomatic and humanitarian law. The politics around these conflicts have undermined the creditability of the very ideas, international laws and international bodies that flow from them which they have been using to control the behaviour of the less powerful peoples of the world.
Veteran Palestinian Human Rights lawyer Raji Sourani has made this point. At a recent public lecture, he called the bombings of Gaza “the graveyard of international law”. He could have gone further. The culture of impunity that the West nurtured in itself through supporting Israeli misdeeds over the last five decades has leached into a generally cavalier attitude with which the West now approaches conflict everywhere.
This is now the gravest and most ominous outcome. The whole system of international laws and protocols which they built and man themselves is now headed towards crisis. For example, the West has unilaterally seized all Russian state assets found in the West and will use interest derived from them to buy things Ukraine needs. This amounts to some US$300 billion.
But more critical to the value is the implications for international order. This was essentially a decision taken by the European Union and that club of the richest seven (“G7”) countries on the planet. Ukraine is a member of neither. Nor for that matter is Ukraine a member state of NATO yet it is under the rubric of NATO that all this material support for the Kiev regime is being mobilised.
So, the world is now moving towards a situation of a wider number of intense and technologically advanced conflicts occurring all at once, and a severely diminished capacity for international law to stop them.
People around the world already experiencing dispossession and oppression will also draw their own conclusions about this: “International institutions, international order, international law, none of it can protect anyone. Memorize this… If you are weak, the world will not acknowledge you nor will it protect you, nor will it defend you… What will protect you is your power,” was the advice now slain leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrullah offered to such people not long before his death.
Many more people may come to the same conclusion. And the world as a whole will take on the culture that dominated the white American settlement of what became known as the “Wild West”.
In doing so, the earlier wars also become a laboratory for weapons development for the later ones. New systems are developed and also the diplomatic alignment of who is likely to be on whose side in the bigger war to come.
The 1914–1918 so-called First World War birthed chemical and tank warfare as well as aerial combat and submarine warfare.
The 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War enabled Germany, while supporting one of the sides in the conflict, to develop its aerial dive-bombing techniques that were to become part of its very useful blitzkrieg technique. The later 1939–1945 so-called Second World War II brought in rocket launchers, aircraft carriers, missiles, radar (and all electronic warfare) and even the jet aeroplane.
Strategic aerial bombing, in which large areas of production and transport infrastructure were targeted, really came into its own with the WWII emergence of large bomber aircraft. It is now getting replaced with self-propelled missiles, which was a development of all the technologies that emerged, particularly in Germany, towards the end of those conflicts and made German rocket scientists a very sought-after commodity among the victors.
Vietnam developed the role of helicopters as troop transport and aerial tanks in combat, which then became standard for many conflicts thereafter.
And so on and so forth.
The Ukraine conflict has so far proven to be a very extensive testing ground for a wide array of newly developed systems: satellite-based electronic and signal warfare, cheap glide bombs, extra-powerful explosives, missiles, and land, sea and air drones.
This history of war as technological preparation means that the growing conflict in West Asia is going to unfold at a level of intensity and technological terror not previously seen. The technological attacks on Hezbollah, the willingness to sacrifice a few hundred people so as to kill a few key leaders, the growing overlap between civilian and military technology and the normalisation by all sides of the issuing of nuclear threats all point to this.
What is left now is to identify the location of the main event to follow, and to understand what this may mean for the Black African.
This will be either Iran, the Middle East more widely, or an expansion into more of Central Europe. If the worst comes to the worst, it may well be a combining of all of the above into one big conflagration.
But the real challenge is to understand the issue behind all of this. In my view, it is actually the changing status of the United States dollar, whose printers are increasingly struggling to retain its central place in global economics.
Having long abandoned physical industrial production as the primary source of its GDP in favour of taxing financial speculation, the West in general, and the United States especially, have been wading deeper and deeper into a crisis of value. By this, I mean a situation in which it is increasingly difficult for them to convincingly justify the stated values of their currencies because the value of their economies is increasingly theoretical.
While they continue to have the largest stakes in overseas economies and assets, as well as the greatest advantage in global trade treaties and the biggest voice in global trade organisation, this is no longer enough to shield the West from the reality of having been living well beyond their actual means, based on the actual value of their economies. So long that they rely on credit – personally, and at national level.
But there is a twist when it comes to America. Because it borrows money from the world in American currency, the value of which it then determines going forward by artificial (as opposed to trade or economic-based) policy methods such as printing more money or simply raising its legal debt ceiling. So it pays or owes you a value artificially determined by itself, the borrower. Therefore, instead of measuring its value in terms of money made from making things, it measures it increasingly in terms of money made from other money; “I print, therefore I am”.
In effect, American monetary policy shrinks the actual value of their debt to you, while making you accept it is the same original value.
How is this possible? Well, one has to go back to at least 1974. But to be really thorough, it is 1944, when the new global financial architecture was set up in anticipation of the end of the War through the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which formally adopted the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, standardised to the price of gold.
1974 is significant because that simply was the year when the US made the emerging oil giants to all agree that they would use the US dollar as the currency in which to sell oil to any customer. So, to buy oil, one has to first buy dollars, thus cementing the place of the dollar in world trade and therefore also artificially propping up its value. In return, the United States was basically offering certainty of demand through guaranteeing the world trade system, by force, if necessary.
This was doubly useful to the United States since the huge economic strain they faced following their loss in the war they took to Vietnam had forced America to abandon that original gold standardisation in 1971. Basically, in order to inflate the paper value of their dollars so as to cover their debts, they had to delink it from the price of gold but pretend that was still as valuable.
With a budget deficit standing at US$1.8 trillion today, America owes the world (as well as its ordinary citizens) more money than any other economy on the planet. This it has done by selling Treasury Bills to the world, and constantly postponing the payback date through offering extensions to the lender. The debt on Treasury bills alone is now US$12.1 trillion externally, and US$26.5 trillion within government.
There is simply not enough physical value being created within the American economy to cover this gap. Nor can there ever be. This is the very essence of the crisis. Whatever other calculations (such as debt-to-GDP ratios, etc.) learned economists may wish to take into account flow from this core issue.
Thus a system of theft-by-credit, which has had a good run since the 1970s, is now teetering on the brink of collapse as today’s dollar is no longer actually as valuable as yesterday’s was, and tomorrow’s will be weaker still. Dollar-traded oil, in that sense, became their new gold standard, and this may explain why the US holds onto the Middle East like grim death.
What should have happened is that US economic planners should have worked to retire these debts to the rest of the world responsibly during the time their currencies were still being taken completely at face value. However, the country has increasingly run into difficulties due to the culture of gangster banking now entrenched among US elites, which meant that whatever temporary advantages they were gaining from the strength of the dollar were then being squandered by further schemes to turn public expenditure into private profit (through the sale of arms and vaccines, etc., to the government) all backed up by more irresponsible borrowing against that nominal value.
Now they are approaching a moment of reckoning. And, therefore, the means of artificially propping up the value of the United States dollar have become increasingly crude and brazen, even by the initial crude and brazen standards it began with.
This is where these new wars stem from.
Over the last four decades especially, as much of the West has been economically hollowed out, it has become a matter of open seizing of land, minerals and other assets. Already, America had expanded this system of credit theft far beyond the traditional areas of the formerly colonised parts of the world. But now it has begun openly eating even those European partners it had drawn into the umbrella of its security arrangements after “World War II”, using protection from Russia as bait.
This is why we have seen the rise of increasingly empty-headed dramatists emerge as the “leadership” of Western Europe. The current foreign ministers of the United Kingdom and Germany, as well as all recent British Prime Ministers, are good examples of this. Western European politics has been fully debased by American influence.
Perhaps the last man standing was Germany which, over the last 15 years or so, has seen its manufacturing base shrink from 27 per cent to 18 per cent of its economic productivity.
But now we have seen American commercial interests in farmland and minerals entrench themselves in Ukraine under the guise of supporting the Zelensky regime; Ukraine has actually been parcelled out to major American mining and agribusiness interests. People may not be aware just how valuable a landmass Ukraine is in terms of having some of the most fertile soil in Europe, as well as large mineral deposits. Now, through a combination of war debts and arm-twisting, US commercial interests have established themselves here, just as they did in Latin/South America and elsewhere one hundred years ago.
American oil companies drilling oil in Syria under the protection of “Jihadist” organisations; an attempted grab of the oilfields to which an independent Palestine would be entitled off the shores of Gaza; rampant looting of Congolese electronic minerals by shadowy Western corporations shielded by warlords; the seizing of Iraq’s gold reserves; using more “Jihadists” to fight competition from France and the Gulf Arab elites to keep a presence in the Sahel, etc. The list goes on. It is no longer “trade”, or even the pretence of trade, but looting under occupation.
Logically, the United States simply decided to use the one thing it assumed it had in its favour – unmatched military might to organise the physical acquisition of similar riches in Eastern Europe. First in Ukraine, and then by using Ukraine as a NATO base to organise the breaking up of Russia into smaller, more digestible basket-case republics.
A number of analysts echo Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that the entire situation in Ukraine arose from the policy driven by Western corporations to seize the mineral and land riches inside Russia. Ukraine was simply the intended launchpad for this grand scheme.
It has not gone fully according to plan. This is how Ukraine’s armed forces – the largest, best trained and most extensively equipped by NATO at the start of the open conflict in 2022 – have been reduced to a badly organised force worn down to a few good brigades among a collection of ill-equipped, unwilling, over- and underage conscripts being pushed backwards for over a year now.
The West “found Russia awake”, as we say in my language. From the time of the 2014 American-backed coup that destroyed Ukraine’s democracy, Putin’s government had no illusions that, if permitted, their country was next on the Americans’ menu and began to prepare accordingly.
Also, with the war in Ukraine the West is learning that it can no longer assume that military technology and might will give it the advantages it once enjoyed over much of the rest of the world’s peoples.
A race is now on to see if the West in general and the United States in particular, will be able to use what is left of that financial and military might to properly recapture the weaker (but mineral rich) parts of the world before the long-awaited political-economic counterpoint of BRICS manages to create a whole new system of international trade based on any currency but the US dollar. Each new BRICS member’s announcement of a willingness to settle their trade bill outside the dollar weakens its prestige further. And should the US dollar ever become wholly delinked from the global trade in oil, then it may well be game over for the US.
Therefore, a defeat in Ukraine of what is essentially a NATO-wide army is going to force some serious self-evaluation of strategic partnering in all the capitals of Western Europe, and a fundamental re-ordering of Western European politics.
“As I have long predicted, among the downstream consequences of the Ukraine War will be: 1) the cessation of NATO as a credible military/political alliance; 2) the cessation of the EU as a functioning monetary/political union,” wrote the American contrarian war-blogger Will Schryver on X recently.
Poland in particular will have an immediate problem if a Russian victory were to bring the Russian army all the way west to the Polish-Ukrainian border. Much of this area is historically claimed by Poland already. Would the Poles see a collapse of the Kiev regime as a chance to get it back? Would the Russians pass up such an opportunity to deal a political-geographic blow to Ukrainian nationalism by parcelling out a good part of it to a neighbour? What new alignment of domestic political forces would have to emerge in Poland to make such a deal possible, and would Poland then be able to remain part of NATO if such a deal were to be made?
With regard to my anticipated main event, Russia remains the common factor in three areas of actual and near conflict in the world today: there is the American sabre-rattling over the “sovereignty” of Taiwan versus China; there is the long-running Middle Eastern conflict centred on Syria in which Iran-allied forces confront jihadists of dubious origin who have been trying, since 2011, to overthrow the secular-Shia Assad regime there. And there is Ukraine where the West is, of course, Russia’s direct opponent.
China remains perhaps Russia’s most weighty close friend. And Russia has invested heavily in helping protect the Assad government either directly, or through its own serious alliance with Iran.
And, increasingly, the Russian Federation finds itself as the friend working with those regimes in conflict with Israel (Syria and Iran), which are themselves supporting the non-state actors also fighting Israel.
So, whichever conflict the West may choose to intensify, it will find itself against Russian know-how acquired during the three years of dismantling NATO’s Ukraine project.
It may sound cynical but I would suspect that the West’s own cynical use of Ukraine as an attempted bear trap for Russia, a site for weapons development, and a place to expand the landholdings of the giant agribusiness corporations, has run its course. They have gained what they have gained, and recognise that they may not be able to gain more. Therefore, the new project there may be to cut Zelensky loose and throw him to the angry wolves of his battered and bereaved population as they finally get a quiet moment to contemplate the scale of the con that has been carried out on them.
Both US President Joe Biden and Foreign Minister Anthony Blinken pulled out of a scheduled high-level meeting in Germany of what is known as the Ramstein group – a collection of those powers donating arms to Ukraine (formally known as the Ukraine Defense Contact Group). The meeting, scheduled for 10 to 13 October, was cancelled as a result.
Being the West’s wholly dependent fixed presence in the Middle East, Israel will continue to get their support even as they fight three countries and two large militias all at once. But war can produce strange outcomes, and therefore even stranger political settlements. After all, Israel is not the only country the West created in West Asia/Middle East, just the most favoured one.
Another way to look at it is to say that Russia and the West are confronting each other via allies and proxies in both West Asia and Central Europe, respectively. This means that any lingering feelings that the West may have about their defeat in Ukraine may be transferred to the variegated battlefields of northern Syria, the Red Sea, and now South Lebanon.
If we assume the intention to weaken Russia remains, then Russia’s commitment to its West Asia friends would be a new potential point of disturbance. The West and Russia will remain adversaries no matter what happens next in Ukraine.
As observed, Europe has kind of been here many times before. Even the medieval Christian Crusades, which seized control of the birthplace of Christianity from the Muslim powers of the time, also took place in central Europe between the 1100s and the 1400s.
Known as the Baltic Crusades, these were a series of wars the Christian Church and its states waged against the still pagan peoples in northern, eastern and south-eastern Europe. Parts of today’s Ukraine were caught up in this. Then, it was the Christians of Western Europe trying to conquer the pagan East. Now, it is the godless countries of Western Europe trying to conquer the still Christian east.
As I said, this tells us one thing: the white races like fighting and are actually also very good at it. What’s more, there may be no power, reason, body of laws or international treaties that can easily stop them once they have set their minds on war.
It would be wise to assume that things may turn out for the West even worse than they have so far done in Ukraine. And this will be worsened by the West’s commitment to the defence of Israel which, as I say, may turn Central Europe and West Asia into one large theatre, at risk of resorting to nuclear means.
Our concern as Africans should be how to prevent this latest world war of theirs from again spilling onto African soil, and eating up African lives.
And to have a plan for a postwar, possibly nuclear-bombed, northern half of the northern hemisphere that would cause a severe disruption to the global supply chains for fuel and manufactured goods, which will in turn give rise to fights over fresh water sources and agricultural land.
And also an influx of white refugees coming in such numbers that they will no longer be able to disguise themselves as “expats”, or “digital nomads”, or tourists as some do today. Just needy, and unaccustomed.
Just like before.