by Jeff Thomas, International Man:
Imagine you’re in mid-flight on a passenger jet, and the captain flies directly into a Category Five hurricane.
The flight attendant calmly says, “The captain has turned on the ‘Fasten Seat Belt’ sign, as we may be expecting some turbulence.”
Of course, the above situation is absurd, as no passenger jet pilot would ever put his passengers in such danger.
But, tragically, governments sometimes do exactly that.
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Sometimes, they do it on a small scale, such as when a small country adopts collectivism, only to discover, decades later, that collectivism doesn’t actually work and, eventually, as Maggie Thatcher said, “You run out of other people’s money.”
Then, there’s a period of depression, followed by a rebuilding period, during which the electorate decides whether to be sensible and dump collectivism or whether they choose to be foolish and begin the collectivist conundrum anew.
(As absurd as this latter choice might seem, it is all too common. Argentina, in particular, has been doing it for nearly eighty years.)
But the larger the country, the greater the catastrophe when it all falls apart. And it, therefore, stands to reason that when it’s the world’s foremost empire that’s passed its sell-by date, the damage will be catastrophic. The damage from the hurricane will be centred on the empire itself and those within the empire will be most directly impacted, but the effects will be felt well outside its borders.
The more closely a country is connected to the empire economically, the greater, the lesser country will feel the damage. For example, at the present time, if the US is a country’s major trading partner, that country will experience damage significant enough that its economy might well collapse along with that of the US.
But why should we be talking about this now? Yes, the US is indeed troubled, both internally and externally. Still, the news media have regularly presented national leaders and other pundits who assure us that the storm that’s being flown into will only result in temporary turbulence and that “Category Five” is a gross exaggeration.
Well, let’s have a look at that for a moment.
In the last half-century, the US has gone from being the foremost creditor nation to the foremost debtor nation. At that same time, its wage level has risen so high that the US can no longer sell American-made goods, even to Americans, and its factories, predominantly in China and Mexico, are producing the vast majority of goods. Unfortunately, relations are on a steady decline between the US and these countries. The US has even been engaged in sabre-rattling with regard to China.
But the US empire has always had an ace in the hole with Europe. Although it’s self-destructively on a campaign to end fossil fuel production domestically, it has for decades provided liquified gas to Europe, shipping primarily into Hamburg harbour and distributing from there.
In the meantime, Germany formed an alliance with Russia, from whom it also receives gas to power the German industry. In recent years, Russia has been building a direct pipeline from Russia to Germany to provide gas more cheaply than any other country can provide (at roughly 11% of what US gas can be provided for).
With the understanding that this gas line would come on stream in 2022, Germany foolishly shut down all of its nuclear power plants, thus painting itself into a corner.
Clearly, the opening of the Nord Steam II valve would have been a major, major event, as it would not just mean cheaper gas for Europe, but an end of US hegemony over Europe and a shift in the balance of trade to Russia.
But the pipeline was sabotaged before this could happen.
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