Free Republic

America’s decline is not irreversible. Media coverage of world events focuses on one crisis at a time, as if each was a separate phenomenon. But Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas war, the assaults on shipping in the Red Sea, China’s threats on Tawain, the closing of the Red Sea by Yemen’s Houthis, and even Venezuelan plans to conquer much of oil-rich Guyana are not separate events, but highly related. All follow patterns laid out in Samuel Huntington’s 2011 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order which predicted the rise of “revanchist” powers seeking to recover perceived past glory....

The oil producing nations basically told the U.S. to "shove it", furthering the case that the BRIC nations are moving away from the U.S. dollar and separating economically from the West. ... OPEC humiliated Biden on a global stage by cutting oil production after he specifically lobbied them not to. There’s no “nice” way of putting it - they straight-up snubbed the U.S. and have now, in my opinion, made it officially clear that they 1) are not our friends, 2) do not care what we want, 3) do not take us seriously and 4) are not here to help...

The latest action from the Mexican president stands in contrast to the international sanctions imposed on Russia for President Vladimir Putin’s actions. Mexico will not impose any economic sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Tuesday. He also criticized what he called censorship of Russian state-sponsored media by social media companies. “We are not going to take any sort of economic reprisal because we want to have good relations with all the governments in the world,” López Obrador told a news conference. López Obrador’s position stands in contrast to the international sanctions imposed...

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Sunday, adding that Brazil would "adopt a neutral stance on Ukraine" and will not impose sanctions on Russia. He also pointed out that Brazil is dependent on Russian fertilizer, and that action against Moscow "could bring serious harm to agriculture in Brazil." He added that he was in support of peace — "but we don't want to bring more problems to Brazil."

Today Russian President Vladimir Putin declared war against the hegemony of the U.S. Dollar. Of course, he couched the declaration in a statement saying Russia would work to counter the ‘excessive domination’ of certain reserver currencies. The comments were published in an article in the runup to the BRICs summit scheduled to begin Sept 3 in China. “We are ready to work together with our partners to promote international financial regulation reforms and to overcome the excessive domination of the limited number of reserve currencies. We will also work towards a more balanced distribution of quotas and voting shares within...

Dilma Rousseff has squandered Brazil's commodity boom, but the country is not in meltdown and is unlikely to set off an emerging market crash Brazil’s currency plummeted to all-time lows and borrowing costs have tightened viciously after Standard & Poor’s slashed the country’s debt to junk status, warning that the budget deficit has reached danger levels. The downgrade is a painful blow to a nation that thought it had finally escaped the Latin American curse of boom-bust cycles and joined the top league of rich economies. It is the second of the big emerging market economies to be stripped of...

Throughout history, in most cases of economic collapse the societies in question believed they were financially invincible just before their disastrous fall. Rarely does anyone see the edge of the cliff or even the bottom of the abyss before it has swallowed a nation whole. This lack of foresight, however, is usually not the fault of the public. It is, rather, a consequence caused by the manipulation of the fundamental information available to the public by governments and social gatekeepers. In the years leading up to the Great Depression, numerous mainstream “experts” and politicians were quick to discount the idea...

Brazil's economy is now bigger than the UK's, say economists, booming on the back of exports to China. Brazil has overtaken the UK to become the world's sixth-largest economy, according to a team of economists. The banking crash of 2008 and the subsequent recession has relegated the UK to seventh place in 2011, behind South America's largest economy, which has boomed on the back of exports to China and the far east. Russia and India are expected to benefit from a surge in growth over the next 10 years and push the UK into eighth place. Like most economies, India...

It was known already that the death of Osama bin Laden would be the biggest news item in the world whenever it happened. It happened on May 1. On May 2, here’s what the opinion pages of the biggest and most influential emerging markets had to say about it. In Russia’s Moscow Times, a Foreign Ministry spokesman was quoted as saying that Vladimir Putin was informed of the raid and subsequent death of Osama bin Laden before President Barack Obama went public at 23:35 eastern standard time. “The Kremlin welcomes the serious success achieved by the United States in the...

.. inadequacies and deficiencies of the existing international monetary and financial system.. In 1998 Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, a strategist and master spy, conceived of an economic alliance between Russia, India and China. The purpose of this combination was to counter the international influence of the United States. By now it should be apparent that Russia and China intend to launch an attack against the U.S. dollar. Do we yet realize that such an attack is possible? And have we reckoned the political consequences?

Of the five countries listed below, four, Brazil, South Africa, Russia and China are led by current, or former communists – in the case of Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, former communist terrorists. From Cuba’s Prensa Latina. Beijing, Apr. 14 China repeated its call for reform of the international financial and monetary system, with better representation of emerging economies and developing countries. Fair, inclusive, and well-managed systems must be established to support global economic development, President Hu Jintao sid during a summit meeting of the BRICS bloc in Sanya, on the southern island of Hainan. The meeting...

The bad blood started, or so the story went, when Lula refused to listen to the administration of George W. Bush and isolate Venezuela's populist leader, Hugo Chávez. Before long, Brasilia was opposing or, worse, offering alternatives to Washington's position on a growing number of issues: climate change, opposition to the 2009 coup in Honduras, Cuba, trade and tariffs. Lula declined to criticise Iran and opened up a separate negotiating channel, outside of Washington's influence and much to its annoyance, with Tehran to discuss Iran's nuclear ambitions. The former Brazilian president also welcomed the president of the Palestinian National Authority,...

Russia proposed to China that the two nations should sell Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds in 2008 to force the US government to bail out the giant mortgage-finance companies, former US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson has claimed. The allegation is in his memoir On the Brink in which he also suggests that Alistair Darling, the UK chancellor, blocked a rescue takeover of Lehman Brothers by Barclays Bank when he refused to support special treatment by UK regulators. “Russian officials had made a top-level approach to the Chinese, suggesting that together they might sell big chunks of their GSE holdings...

SNIPPET: "Lula and Chavez have established a "strategic relationship," and recently agreed upon a joint Brazilian-Venezuelan oil venture worth billions of dollars. Lula and Chavez have joined with Daniel Ortega, the returned Nicaraguan Marxist dictator, to form an anti-U.S. Latin American military alliance - all with Russian assistance - funded by the region's abundant oil reserves. Brazil is engaged in its own arms build-up and Lula is determined that Brazil will become at least a first-rate regional power. Unfortunately, Lula is establishing Brazil as an anti-American military power by aligning with nations hostile or potentially hostile to the U.S. Lula...

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for a revamp of the global currency system, saying Thursday that the dollar's supremacy is outdated. "We need to ask the question: shouldn't a world that is politically multi-polar correspond to a multi-monetary world economically?" he said in a news conference during a summit of world leaders in L'Aquila, Italy. Sarkozy compared an overhaul of the global currency system to the enlargement of the Group of Eight structure to encompass fast-growing emerging economies, which were invited to join the Italian summit. He said the supremacy of the dollar belongs to the post-Second World War era...

In the past several weeks, three of the four BRIC nations — Brazil, Russia, and China —have expressed doubt over the dollar’s reserve status and expressed worries over the U.S. debt. India had been the only BRIC nation that had remained silent on the dollar issue, but that’s changed. I wasn’t sure if India was going to hop on the bandwagon or not. However, they recently started singing with the rest of the BRIC choir in a chorus against the U.S. dollar. In fact, on July 6, both Russia and India collectively said that the world economy is too reliant...

The US spent more than $607 billion on defence in 2008 according to SIPRI statistics and this constitutes 41% of global expenditure on defence. This far exceeds what the next nine countries spent during the same year. The Chinese spent $85 billion, the Russians $59 billion and the Indians $30 billion. The Brazilians, the fourth member of the newly founded BRIC, spent even less. There are others who calculate that the US spends far more than this in its endeavour to maintain global primacy. America maintains about 750 military and intelligence bases world-wide and its intelligence budget exceeds India’s defence...

NO wonder that Russia was so keen to host the summit of the Bric countries, the giants of the developing world. Brazil, China, India and Russia are a would-be club in search of a common cause. Out of the four, it is Russia which is the weakest - and which has the most to gain from the others' solidarity. Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, left, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh line up for a group photo at the first Bric summit Picture: Reuters We can credit Goldman Sachs, not...

The global financial crisis has reduced the differences between nations and created the opportunity to form a new world order, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said Wednesday. Speaking after a meeting with Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev in the Kazakh capital Astana, Lula called on the global community to seize on the crisis to create a fairer world for developing nations.... "I want to say that before the crisis, there were many countries which had greater significance than others, and some countries which had no significance at all," he said through a translator. "After the crisis, everyone has become...

Globalism: Four emerging economies met in Russia Tuesday to seek an alternative to the dollar. It's futile. But it shows how Washington's spending binge harms the world's prospects.The Bush administration took a lot of flack for its supposed "unilateralism" in global affairs. But there's a new breed of go-it-alone "unilateralism" in the unrestrained U.S. fiscal spending that's causing trading partners to worry about the value of their dollar assets. It's hitting Brazil, Russia, India and China in the pocketbook as they fret about the value of their $2.8 trillion in dollar holdings, about 42% of the world's total. So it's...