Pivot from the US dollar is huge. Who could have foreseen unilateral harmful economic action by the west resulting in the rest of the world no longer wanting to be subject to it’s actually unstable economic order?
Biden about to go down in history as America's Gorbachev :biden-nibble:
:liberty-weeping: But you don't get it, we couldn't just do nothing as Putin (very bad man) did the bad thing.
-Trump re-elected (but now he drinks like a fish) (30% chance)
-Jay Leno (10% chance)
-Eileen Gu (60% chance)
they are both non-starters; as soon as they announce Trump will just call them "losers" and they will crumble
in this fashion the only way to get a non-Trump republican into the oval office is to assassinate Trump
the Saud family owes everything to the USA. We set them up decades ago for an oil colony and anti-communist bulwark, outfitted their whole army. The empire is getting weak when we can't even get these guys to pick up the phone lol
They are just playing hard to get, they are negotiating for the US to deal with Yemen for them since they can’t seem to win with trillions of dollars of weaponry
I have a sneaking suspicion that they want Biden to fail hard to get a more friendly admin like Trump back.
US government is about to get very concerned with human rights violations and war crimes that Saudi Arabia has been committing openly for years.
Or quietly acquiece to their demands to wade into the Yemen dumpster fire, trusting corpo media to cover for them.
:doomjak:
this is worse than the frontier, this is a core pillar of US hegemony popping a major fracture
Chris Hedges writes about the fall of the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency INSISTENTLY, and I used to think "yeah, I can see that happening in a couple of decades", not like, 8 or 9 months after reading it.
Seeing the first chip of your proverbial pillar fly off into the sun feels kind of like witnessing the first atom split in a nuclear bomb.
witnessing the first atom split in a nuclear bomb.
That might be a more apt analogy than you intended :yea:
:top-cop: Uh-oh, is someone about to be experiencing a little public dissent? Someone got some NGO-funded "grassroots" organization thinking about a little color revolution?
Question: what are the odds this is an attempt to get a better deal from the US vs. actually making a deal with China? Seems like the former (or something similar) since they're telegraphing it.
Little of both probably. As someone else said in the thread, watching Russia's foreign currency assets get frozen, less than a month after the US stole billions from Afghanistan, means that Saudi Arabia needs to diversify their holdings.
Don't US Presidents routinely kiss the Saudi ring after taking office? I would think that if anyone had anyone by the balls, it would be American politicians at the mercy of Saudi royalty.
I feel like this has far more to do with Prince Salman's vision of a Saudi techno-utopia hinging on actual manufacturing and trade capacity. That's something a Chinese BRI brings to the table. Not something an American government - on the other side of the world and hopelessly hobbled by partisan infighting - really advances.
I'm sure they sanctions carry their own weight. But the US simply doesn't make shit anymore. If the Saudis want to continue doing business on the global stage, what are dollars worth beside the industrial might of Beijing?
Excellent point as well. Hopefully we see more and more of this as people realize how useless the US is when they don't even make anything.
Remember how OPEC refused to subsidize American imports if we sanctioned Russian oil? Guess everyone’s starting to see the writing on the wall
I mean no shit. They pretty much slammed Russia with sanctions over a single war when they themselves have done far worse.
They did their usual playground bully shtick and are now :surprised-pika: that nobody wants to play by their rules anymore.
They see that piling up huge stockpiles of $$$ brings them no security from the US/west, since all of that can be taken away. So now they need reserves in multiple currencies and gamble on the fact that if one side (China or US/west) takes away their reserves, the other side won't, since it will most likely be on the other side of the conflict/sanctions.
Bout time to call for free and fair elections to oust the Saudi authoritarian
Theocratic monarchies are famous for their free and fair elections.
:theory-gary:
The biggest thing I'm concerned about is China letting the Saudi's continuing their bombardment of Yemen.
Well they can’t do anything about it without enough leverage.
They won't do anything about it. We know how China operates. Their foreign policy is trade and trade alone.
