In mid-December, I had the opportunity to make a short trip to Moscow and Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, that is 4000 kilometres from the Ukrainian front. Enough time, after ten months of war, to assess the mood of the Russian population. What strikes foreign visitors first is the normality of everyday life. Since such visitors have become rare since 24 February, they are heavily courted by Russians eager to know what people in the West think about them.

Reading and listening to our media, one gets the impression that Russians are living in a state of siege, spending their time surviving our merciless economic sanctions, digesting their military defeats and burying the countless dead that the victorious Ukrainians inflicted on them. None of this is true.

Normality in everyday life – despite …

In the big cities, the streets are full of lights and Christmas decorations, the ice rinks and outdoor markets are virtually stormed despite the cold and snow, and the avenues are still clogged with columns of 4x4 SUVs trying to make their way through the traffic jams. It is an atmosphere that contrasts with the flashing lights in our unadorned cities with their drab shop windows and reduced street lighting imposed due to energy shortages.
  This normality of everyday life is confirmed by economic statistics, showing that the decline in Russia’s gross national product in 2022 will be limited to 2.5-3 %; this is less than the loss recorded in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 crisis. There are hardly any closed shops, and if there are, they are mostly of luxury brands, and here and there posters calling for support for the soldiers fighting in Ukraine – the only reminder that a war is taking place on one of the country’s immensely long borders.

… awareness around the duration of the conflict

Is this normality not only apparent? Does it conceal a deep confusion among the population, a dull hostility towards the “regime”, a fear of expressing oneself, as is so often suggested in our country? In this respect, too, I did not have the feeling that this was the case. On the contrary, I had the impression that the Russians have become aware that the conflict in Ukraine is set to last and that, whether they like it or not, they will have to live with it for a long time.
  Like everyone else, Russians, too, were initially surprised and taken aback by the “special military operation” in Ukraine, especially in the very many families – there are tens of millions of people being talked about – who have been isolated or divided in two by this conflict because they have relationships in Ukraine. After the initial shock was overcome, it was thought that the fighting would drag on but not last forever. The first setbacks at the end of August and especially the partial mobilisation in September dampened these hopes. Several hundred thousand mobilizable persons fled abroad – their number, taking into account those gradually returning, is estimated at between 300,000 and 400,000, or 0.3 % of the population – while concern became palpable. Three months later, the concern has not disappeared, but has greatly decreased.
  Did they fall for the propaganda? I don’t think so either. A friend who works in the cultural field told me, “Since the Soviet era, Russians instinctively know how to decode state propaganda and tell things apart. They do not even pay attention to it. Whereas you in the West trust your leaders and institutions so much that you do not even consciously notice their propaganda.” Food for thought!

Support for government, army and soldiers at the front

In any case, the poll ratings for Vladimir Putin have not changed since the end of February and are still very high at around 70 % approval, with the approval rating higher the further away one is from the three largest cities of Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. Support for the soldiers at the front, if not for the army at all, has even increased. Russians are not fooled by the incompetence of some operational commanders – as was just made clear in the tragedy of Mareevka on New Year’s Eve – nor by the logistical mismanagement that characterised the first weeks of the war, and they have not been sparring with criticism in private. They know that they must rely first and foremost on themselves and expect nothing from the state. In any case, the bad news has not changed their support for the military operation, and they now stand behind their soldiers, even if they leave out the hierarchies. It is worth noting that hundreds of civilians in far-flung Siberian villages are mobilising to organise convoys to bring food, chocolate, warm clothes and parcels to the soldiers fighting NATO forces in Ukraine. In contrast to the reluctant urban conscripts, the number of voluntary conscripts is also unbroken.

For the majority of Russians,
it is about the survival of their way of life

Since autumn, the majority of Russians have begun to realise that their country is fighting not only against the Ukrainian nationalists, but against the entire West under the NATO banner, and that this is a vital, existential and protracted struggle for the survival of their way of life and their culture, even if this struggle was started against their will.
  The realisation that the war and hostilities would continue was initially borne by the army; it was forced to fundamentally restructure due to the difficulties on the ground. The strategy was completely revised. There was a shift from improvised offensive mode to organised defensive mode, to more secure defensive lines, with a unified and integrated command under the order of an experienced general, Sergei Surovikin, and with the aim of conserving human resources and equipment as much as possible. The disorderly withdrawal from Kharkov region was followed by the orderly and successful withdrawal of troops and equipment from Kherson region. Investments were made in drones and small mobile units.

Military reorientation

Logistics lines have been revised and reserve divisions reorganised to respond to emergencies. The bulk of the army entrenched itself and delegated its offensive capabilities to Wagner forces, to drone pilots and missile launchers against neuralgic Ukrainian targets, in response to Ukrainian attacks on civilian Russian targets – such as the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, the attack on the Crimean bridge, the bombing of hospitals, schools and supermarkets in the Donbas, killing civilians every day, all this is never reported in our media.
  Russia has taken note of the strategy of NATO and the USA, as pronounced by Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin in spring, namely to weaken the country until it can no longer stand up, and it is trying to turn this strategy in its favour. By concentrating and sparing its troops, Russia is allowing the Ukrainians and NATO mercenaries to exhaust their forces and material. More than on General Winter, the Russian army is now relying on the generals time and space. Like Suvorov and Bagration in their time, one has become wise through harm and learned that patience is better than strength and anger if one wants to win in the long run.

Economy – the West has got it all wrong

After the border closure forced by the natural partner Europe, the business community also very quickly became aware that the entire production and trade cycles had to be redesigned from scratch. In Europe, there has been much mockery of the oligarchs and their alleged opposition to Putin. They were completely wrong. Even though the oligarchs regretted the outbreak of hostilities, they quickly understood that the confiscation of their property and bank assets in Europe and the USA – yachts, luxury residences, suites in Courchevel and St. Moritz – and the personal sanctions imposed on them made them pariahs for the West and condemned them to lose everything should they entertain the idea of defecting. The sanctions and Russia’s exclusion from the SWIFT payment system and Western banking relations even had a positive effect on the Russian economy, because for the first time they stopped the capital flight – about 100 billion US-Dollar a year – that had been bleeding the economy for 30 years. From now on, people will have to think twice before depositing their money in a Swiss, European or American bank.
  For some months now, the Russian economy has therefore been trying to adapt to the new circumstances. The distribution channels for oil, gas, minerals, wheat and fertilisers are being reorganised towards Asia, China, India, Iran, Emirates and Saudi Arabia (because of OPEC+ and banking easing). The same thing is happening with the import circuits. Parallel imports are created to supply industry with spare parts, superconductors and chips, and the population with household appliances, clothing, luxury goods, furniture and other consumer goods that the Russian economy cannot produce in large quantities.
  The example of Belarus, being familiar to sanctions and, despite everything, recorded Europe’s best performance in dealing with COVID-19 thanks to its health system and pharmaceutical resources, shows that the Russian industry is absolutely capable of taking up this challenge, provided it directs its investments towards industrial conversion and no longer relies inertly on oil and gas revenues.
  The spectacular successes achieved by agriculture, the food industry, the aerospace sector and the defence industry after the sanctions imposed on them in 2014 also point in this direction. The transition will take several years, and experts expect two to three years of negative growth and lean years before growth picks up again. No reason to panic, especially since one can fall back on inexhaustible and very cheap energy resources, unlike Europe, who has to pay a high price for its energy imports.

Ostracism and injustice leave bitter traces

What is the mood of the population? How is it adapting to this new situation? To sum it up in one sentence, I would say that despite everything, they are not discouraged. You have to remember that most Russians took the measures taken in the West against Russian culture and against themselves very badly. They felt deeply humiliated by the censorship of artists, musicians, athletes and scientists, by the cancellation of academic colloquia, the abrupt termination of exchange programmes despite long-standing personal relationships, the rewriting of history regarding the Russian contribution to the victory over Nazism, the “cancel culture”, even the destruction of monuments undertaken not only in Ukraine but also in the Baltic States and Poland. When one has counted 26 million dead in the fight against Nazism, it is unbearable to hear that the Normandy landings (50,000 dead) were the great event of the Second World War.  This ostracism and these injustices have left bitter traces in the living memory of Russians, made worse by the closure of borders and the de facto ban on travel to the West as a result of the suspension of direct flights. They can understand Europe’s criticism of the armed intervention in Ukraine, but they cannot understand why Europe, calling itself civilised, is attacking Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, conductors and the population in general in a banishment campaign unprecedented in history. The censorship of all Russian media in a European space that prides itself on defending its democratic “values” in Ukraine is also perceived as duplicity.
  For us, these seem to be trifles that we forget as quickly as possible. But not for the Russians, who after the fall of the Iron Curtain finally felt part of the big European family. This rejection of Russia and of Russians as human beings since February last year has been painfully experienced. The country, especially in the cities, is painfully experiencing that it has to mourn for Europe because Europe decided all this because of a war that, although unfortunate and regrettable, has nothing to do with the extent of devastation caused by the armed aggression of the West in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, in Yemen, or even in Eastern Congo (6 million victims completely ignored by the Western media). This hypocrisy is felt very negatively.
  The first fault lines came to light at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 and during the war in Georgia carelessly unleashed by Saakashvili in 2008. Then came the Maidan coup in 2014 that toppled the democratically elected President Yanukovych, the ostracism of the Russian-speaking population in the Donbas and the wave of sanctions in response to the takeover of Crimea. However, these differences had remained political and geopolitical in nature and had not yet turned into a cultural, human and civilisational war. Now the cut is clear, deep and radical.
  Until now, the Russian ruling elites had tried to combine both sides: they adopted from the West the principles of neoliberal capitalism, its cult of material progress and its democratic institutions, while at the same time nurturing the idea of an independent, sovereign Russia free to develop its own values – inspired by the conservative tradition – and to choose its partners. The war has made this dual path obsolete. It forces clear choices.
  NATO’s increasing involvement behind Ukraine, as well as the statements of former Ukrainian President Poroshenko and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, confirmed by François Hollande, on the fact that neither Ukraine nor NATO had any intention of keeping the Minsk Agreements and that they were only a ruse to buy Ukraine time to rearm, have made any prospect of negotiations uncertain from the Russian point of view, as it has become clear that neither the word given nor the agreements signed by the West have any value.

The West is alienating itself from the culture of Russia and the global South

Moreover, the ideological rift between Europe and Russia has deepened to the point of becoming almost unbridgeable. The Russians, like the rest of the Arab-Muslim, Asian and African world, understand the social development of the West less and less. The liberalism propagated by the West appears more and more as a subterfuge that serves it to disguise its constant interference in the affairs of others. The identity derailments based on sex and gender, anti-racism escalated to the point of racism, the dictatorship of ever smaller and more extremist minorities over the majority, the historical revisionism imposed by “cancel culture”, the multiplication of the sexes advocated from a very young age, wokism and the rejection of traditional humanist culture – all these have become increasingly alien to the culture of Russia and the global South in general.
  The change in tone in Putin’s speeches since last summer is, by the way, very revealing in this respect. For the first time, the Russian president made direct allusions to traditional values, criticised the Western fashion for sex changes, surrogate mothers, parent 1 and parent 2 to refer to father and mother, advocated a return to traditional humanist values in the face of the transhumanist temptations popular with us, and pleaded for a multipolar world where every country and culture has an equal right to preserve its values without fear of being bombed or invaded because its choices displease the West.
  For the majority of Russians, the separation is a drama because it ends their dream of being recognised as full Europeans. They grieve painfully for Europe, but have resigned themselves to carrying the burden, however heavy it may be.  •

(Translation Current Concerns)

* Guy Mettan is a journalist and member of the Grand Council of the Canton of Geneva, which he presided over in 2010. He began his journalistic career while studying political science; he then worked for the “Journal de Genève”, Le Temps stratégique, Bilan, “Le Nouveau Quotidien” and later as director and editor-in-chief of the “Tribune de Genève”. Since 2005, he has been President of the Union of Swiss-Russian & CIS Chambers of Commerce. He was President of the Geneva Red Cross from 2006 to 2014 and a member of the Council of the Swiss Red Cross until 2019. In 1996, he founded the Swiss Press Club, of which he was President and later Director from 1998 to 2019. He is the author of several books, including «Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria» (2017), published in seven countries, including China and the USA.

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by Yannick Colleu

For decades you have read and heard authors telling you that the dollar would lose its luster and its planetary dominance and that gold would regain its former luster. The failure of these authors was to suggest that this perspective could, when they evoked it, translate immediately into reality. To their credit, audiences often tend to take the anticipations presented to them for immediate effect.

I was writing myself in my last book in 20131 « Triffin's paradox triumphs. The worst anxieties of this economist [Robert Triffin] have come true. The viability of the current non-monetary system is untenable both because the floating of currencies against each other is used to offset imbalances without ever attacking their roots and, on the other hand, because that the distortions of monetary exchanges by the link between dollar and yuan on the one hand and the introduction, on the other hand, of a single currency, the euro, on countries presenting a great disparity from a point of view economy, amplify the chaos. »

A few years later, it seems that we are now at a major turning point which suggests a strong comeback for gold in the global monetary game after more than seventy years of unchallenged domination of the dollar.

To understand the magnitude of this reversal, it is necessary to first look at some data, at first sight austere but essential for a good understanding of what follows.

Except for a few travelers on their way to Mars, everyone knows that the American federal debt has reached and continues to run in the upper layers of the thermosphere. In 2000 this debt totaled 5,674 billion dollars for a gross domestic product (GDP) of 10,250 billion dollars. Twenty years and one year later the federal debt has multiplied by 5.2 to reach, in 2021, 29 617 billion dollars and the GDP was only multiplied by 2.3 to 23 315 billion.

In summary, the indebtedness, colossal as it is, generates less and less wealth gain in the American economy.

This gigantic debt is held by the public (residents and non-residents) at 78% and by American “intra-governmental” organizations (Social security, etc.) at 22%. In this 78% of debt held by the public a significant part is held by foreign countries and international organizations. This share weighs approximately 7300 billion dollars in 2022 or 26% of the public debt held by the public against 1015 billion in 2000 or 18%.

Nevertheless, taking a step back on the history of this percentage, it is notable that in 2014 a certain disaffection emerged among foreign buyers of American debt, their participation having fallen quite suddenly from 34% to 24% (figure of the 3rd quarter 2022).

Among foreign debt holders, three countries particularly stand out for the volume of US federal debt securities held (countries holding more than $600 billion): Japan, China and the United Kingdom. The trend of the portfolio held by Japan is steadily increasing, while that of the United Kingdom jumps at the same time as the amount of debt held by China stagnates and then falls significantly.

From these few observations, let us retain for the following:

Since 2014 China has undertaken to reduce its portfolio of US federal debt. This disengagement was also carried out on the entire securities portfolio (US. Securities) in US dollars held by China.

Despite the significant increase in acquisitions of federal debt by the United Kingdom, this was not enough to offset the decline in the participation of foreign debt holders after the significant decline initiated by China in 20143.

The enormous weight of American indebtedness and the low interest rates for several decades provided no significant leverage effect on the creation of wealth in the United States.

These findings are surprising, especially since not a day goes by without the United States making it known that it is the dominant force and the regulator, even the policeman, of the planet.

How did they acquire this dominance?

Why does their debt today seem to burn the fingers of certain countries?

The cultural influence of the United States has become major since the end of World War II. His cinema, for example, often rewrites history to highlight the benefits of American society and claim first place in “the fight for democracy”. This all-out influence is gradually dissolving the secular habits of Europeans in American culture. The European languages ​​themselves are nibbled by the influence of a gloubi-boulga from across the Atlantic. This influence has extended since the Reagan years to international law. From now on the United States dictates its law in international relations and pronounces on its own initiative sanctions against such country4, such a company or such a personality without any international body being able to oppose it5. The militarization of finance andextraterritoriality of US sanctions poses serious threats to countries, businesses6 even on the leaders7 business themselves.

The "champion of democracy" gradually transformed into " Judge and Gendarme of the world ". To establish its global hegemony, the United States has two pillars: currency et military power.

Few people understand that the nuclear heart of American domination over the world lies in the coherence between these two pillars. The two are inseparable.

Annual defense spending in the United States represents nearly 40% of all military budgets on the planet, or $773 billion for fiscal year 2023 (March 20228).

The planet has no shortage of countries where democracy, by Western standards, is trampled on or even where the word itself is considered an insult to the government in place. However, only a few countries have suffered the wrath of Western armies. These countries had violated a major principle: worship the god dollar !

Iraq made the mistake of announcing in October 2000 to the United Nations that the Euro would henceforth be accepted for Iraqi oil deliveries. On February 5, 2003 at the United Nations, the American Secretary of State Colin Powell brandished in front of all the representatives of the Security Council a small bottle supposed to contain anthrax. Within a decade Colin Powell admitted the lie. In the meantime, Iraq has been ravaged and its population sent back to the Middle Ages, at least for the part that managed to survive the bombardments perpetrated by the armies of the coalition.

In 2009, the Guide of the Libyan revolution, Muammar Gaddafi, an admittedly strange and whimsical character, presented before the Assembly of the African Union a project for an African monetary union offering the countries of the continent rich in raw materials to carry out their transactions outside the dollar and to set up an African sovereign fund like that of OPEC or Norway. This project upset not only Washington but also France, and its CFA Franc9, but also the City of London, which hosts the world's benchmark stock exchange for the listing of raw materials10. Based on a 1973 UN Security Council resolution, Western countries intervened in 2011 and brought chaos to Libya. Thanks to the publication by Wikileaks in 2016 of messages from the State Department, and more specifically of the correspondence of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her adviser Sid Blumenthal, we have since known that the "missionaries of democracy "had other goals including for France to seize 243 tons of gold and as much Libyan silver11.

At this stage the reader is entitled to ask these two questions: "why shouldn't we touch the dollar?" What problem can it potentially cause for the United States that commodity transactions are made in a currency other than the dollar? ".

Let's make some history!

In 1944 a new monetary system12 was born putting gold and the dollar on the same first step of the podium of monetary reserves. The dollar was as good as gold: dollar as good as gold ! In this monetary system, parities being established against the dollar, foreign central banks had to intervene by selling/buying dollars to ensure the stability of the parity of their currency. Consequently, the US dollar has become the source of international monetary liquidity and the dominant base of reserve assets in the international monetary system.

Oil was, and still is, the essential raw material, including for extracting other raw materials. In this context the demand for dollars by all the countries of the planet would become exponential. That's what happened13.

The United States therefore had to find a way to provide the world thirsty for greenbacks with this sesame giving access to oil. They responded by financing their exuberant growth through deficits and debt. In this way, at least at first, everyone was delighted: on the one hand the United States showed insolent growth and on the other the industrialized countries had access to abundant liquidity in dollars.

Then as the years passed the level of US debt began to raise doubts. The countries most worried about the sustainability of the situation demanded the transformation of their dollar reserves into gold. President De Gaulle in his famous press conference of February 4, 1965 analyzed that this situation " causes Americans to get into debt and get into debt for free vis-à-vis foreigners because what they owe him, they pay him at least in part with dollars that he only wants to them to issue and not with gold which has a real value, which one possesses only to have earned it, and which one cannot transfer to others without risk and without sacrifice ».

The US Treasury's gold reserves, at their highest in 1945, began to dwindle. Thus in 1967 the gold balance in the United States had shrunk by almost half in 10 years. Finally, after going from crisis to crisis, in August 197114, the US government unilaterally announced the end of the conversion of the dollar into gold. In other words: the United States was doing defaut on their external debt. From then on, a period of floating exchange between all currencies began.

This default of the dollar concretized the doubts expressed by some economists and summarized in a book15 by Robert Triffin published in 1961 but better known by the small name of " Triffin's paradox ».

This paradox can be summed up as follows:

« The dollar must satisfy two objectives irreconcilable :

- There stability, because the dollar serves as a standard of measurement for currencies and goods,

- L 'abundance, since it constitutes a means of international settlement and an instrument of reserve. "

In other words, the status of reserve currency, even alongside gold, leads the country issuing this currency to maintain deficits in its balance of payments in order to be able to fuel the growth of other countries by international currency. The paradox arises from the fact that this situation, initially desired by economic actors, gradually leads to a loss of confidence in the issuer of the reserve currency by these same actors.

Moreover, and contrary to gold, whose stock is tangible and limited, and whose flows impose a " discipline [which] is based on the reality of the facts and on objective needs »16, the monetary system built on a currency-currency (whether it be the gold-exchange standard system or the free trade system that succeeded it) depends entirely on political will for its regulation.

In 1976 the Jamaica agreements formalized the establishment of an international monetary “non-system” based on floating exchange rates. However, with confidence no longer there, an incentive had to be found to support the dollar by all the foreign central banks.

This incentive will see the light of day in 1979 within the framework of the American-Saudi economic cooperation agreement: “oil against dollars”. Indeed, in this agreement, Saudi Arabia undertook to sell its oil to the rest of the world only in American dollars, as well as to reinvest its excess reserves in American currencies in American Treasury bonds and the shares of American companies. The petrodollar was born17.

The attentive reader will immediately understand that we are falling back into a situation close to that which led to the crisis of 1968-1971 and the abandonment of the gold exchange standard. In this new context, which is the one in which we are at this time, gold is simply replaced by US Treasury bonds. The only difference is that, in the context of the gold exchange standard monetary system, an exchange of dollars for gold made it possible to settle definitively a situation ; the country presenting its claim left with its bullion. In the new (and current) context, the country presenting its claim in dollars “leaves” with US Treasury bonds held by the Federal Reserve of New York18 and whose nominal value is in dollars. In summary, he arrives with greenbacks and leaves with an account number given by the bank. So the exchange does not pay anything! United States19, represented by the Bank of New York here, remain debtors vis-à-vis the countries that have transformed their greenbacks into American bonds. In other words, the United States hold hostage the assets of their creditors. If an example is needed the reader can find it in the recent confiscation20 3,75 billion dollars of American bonds held by the Federal Reserve of New York on behalf of Russia and a few hundred billion dollars seized21 by the United States and the European Union. After this new show of force, which resembles a theft, which country can still place its trust in the American word? (or European!) The amount and nature of securities and currencies are not clearly mentioned in the press. According to the latest financial statement for 2021 produced by the Central Bank of Russia, it held $630 billion in reserves, including $311 in the form of securities, and $152 in the form of foreign currency deposits (100 with other central banks and BIS as well as the IMF). A priori securities and deposits with the Bank of China will escape sanctions.

For the United States to continue to use the dollar as an instrument of development, it is imperative that its debt can be exchanged for greenbacks circulating in excess of reserves in the world. If this debt finds no taker, or finds it difficult, the interest rates on US bonds would increase and, mechanically, the service of the debt as well, which would lead to a further widening of the federal deficit and the debt itself.

And ... repeated !

Consequently, the objective of American governments, of whatever political persuasion, has been since the 1970s to silence dissent, ie to prohibit any country whatsoever from excessively transforming its greenbacks into anything other than American bonds or from trading in anything other than dollars.

To achieve this they need a big stick, and even a very big stick ! This stick takes different forms depending on whether the dissident country is powerful or weak geopolitically and militarily.

Panama, Grenada, Serbia, Iraq or Libya have seen the armed wing of American power unleashed on them which, it should be remembered again here, accounts for at least 40% of all military budgets of the planet, i.e. 773 billion dollars for 2023. 

When dissent proves too strong the punishment takes the form of confiscation of assets22, banishment of personalities, operations of political destabilization, measures of financial, economic and diplomatic isolation, prohibition of overflights, misinformation, etc... The originality of these punishments is to be decided most often from unilaterally within the legal framework of American law (except for operations carried out by the CIA such as in 1968 in France). They apply not only to dissident states but to those who would dare to help them.23.

Failing to position itself in a framework of extraterritoriality of its law, the United States then uses its influence to impose sanctions via international organizations, United Nations, IMF, AEIA, OSCE, WHO, etc. or vassals who are unable to refuse them a favor (European Union, Japan, New Zealand, Canada, Australia or the United Kingdom).

But why is the United States pulling out the big stick to punish Russia today? What crime of lèse-majesté vis-à-vis the dollar would Russia have committed?

Like a band-aid that sticks to the fingers of Captain Haddock, Russia has inherited the deep and justified hatred left by the memory of the exactions of the former communist regime of the USSR. Although the current political system of Russia has nothing to do with the one that prevailed in the Soviet Union, and even if the current regime is not perfect, Western minds remain imbued with it as the French in 1914 were steeped in the myths of the 1870 Prussian soldier eating children and Cossacks with gouged out eyes, no noses and no tongues. Of course Western propaganda plays a lot on this theme to assert its right to restore democracy, even if it has never gained a foothold for a single day in Ukraine.24 since this country has existed as an independent state.

Therefore in the Ukrainian conflict the roles were distributed from the beginning. Russia is the bad guy and the West, led by the United States, is the good guy. In the middle the Ukrainians who pay with their blood a confrontation which lasts since 195325 but which has taken an almost frontal turn between Russia and the United States since 2014.

Western countries' charts reveal that these have also played on the side of the villains quite often and it took a few decades to pass each time.26 for this truth to come to light.

Today like yesterday Those responsible for wars are not those who start them, but those who make them inevitable »27.

In fact, Russia's crime is elsewhere. Russia along with China is leading the dissent. The graph below reveals a first clue.(SEE GRAPH) 

The data included here are those of the US Treasury on the one hand (US Treasuries) and the annual report of the Russian central bank (reserves). The US Treasury Department regularly publishes the amount of federal debt held by each foreign country. It is therefore the amount of greenbacks that each country has transformed into support for the American debt by transforming them into federal bonds. The graph reveals that since the overthrow of the legitimate president in the Maidan coup of 2014, staged with the financial and more support of the United States28, the amount of US bonds held by the Russian central bank has decreased considerably, from around a hundred billion dollars to around three billion dollars at the end of 2021. In short, an almost total withdrawal.

In addition, since 2014 and the Western sanctions taken in retaliation for the annexation of Crimea, Russia has developed at a forced march a set of tools to no longer depend on Western financial mechanisms. Since the decision of the networks managing VISA and MasterCard cards to no longer authorize the use of their credit cards on Russian territory, Russia has implemented its own network at the end of 2015, MIR (in Russian Мир). This card can now be used in the vast majority of former USSR countries, in African countries, and in many Asian countries including China and Japan, in the UAE, and, surprisingly, in Turkey. Finally, Russian banks announced in March 2022 the issuance of payment cards using the Chinese UnionPay card system coupled with the Russian MIR network. The Chinese network has existed since 2005 and today represents a higher volume of transactions than the VISA and Mastercard networks. 

As for the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT payment messaging system29 it was mitigated by the development by Russia in 2014 of its own system, SPFS30, and its commissioning in 2019 and its interconnection with the Chinese CIPS system31 and finally its extension to the countries of the BRICS group32 and even beyond33.

Ultimately, the militarization of finance by the United States and the European Union in 2014 to sanction Russia pushed the country to acquire its independence from the Western financial and monetary environment by developing its own tools and turning to the east.

This turn towards the east of the continent has also taken on considerable importance after the agreements made between Russia and Iran for the construction of a Russia-Iran-India road (INSTC34) and more recently after the visit to Saudi Arabia at the end of 2022 by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

In a few years two blocks have now been formed:

– on the one hand, the Western world with the United States as the lead and the dollar as cement (I will discuss the hopeless case of the Euro a little later);

– on the other, a group of countries around China (and its strategic New Silk Road project), Russia and other BRICS countries which intend to shape their own future without the constraints imposed by the West: Iran, Argentina, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and potentially Algeria, United Arab Emirates, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Senegal, Thailand, Mexico, Syria, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan.

China and Russia are the two main drivers of this coalition. During his trip to Saudi Arabia, the Chinese president, in front of all the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council, developed his vision of a partnership35 baptized " Work together based on past achievements to build a brighter future of China-GCC relations ».

At the end of these exchanges, the commitments made by each other sound like real declarations of war on dollar hegemony, a funeral of the 1979 oil-for-dollar deal.

The Chinese proposal suitably serves Saudi Arabia's ambitious plans for the future, drawn up under the leadership of Mohammad Bin Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, which aims to raise from the sands of the desert a modern country with innovative infrastructure and an efficient industry to limit its dependence on Western know-how. As an example in this project, Vision 203036, Saudi Arabia aims to allocate 50% of its military investment budget to local production whereas today this production is limited to only 2% of the defense budget37, the rest being imported. This project therefore finds the ideal partner in China: China will pay in yuan38 but will invest in many of the Vision 2030 projects. A win-win partnership.

Xi's offer was made, by design, in front of the full GCC membership. These projects range from the development of oil research, to the processing and refining industries, but also to the construction of infrastructure or the development of innovative industries (in Silicon Valley, data hosting centers, 5G and 6G, cooperation in artificial intelligence and even space exploration, etc.).

Iran and China already have a special relationship since March 2021 – the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership39 – a 25-year deal in which China pledged to invest $400 billion in the Iranian economy in return for a steady supply of Iranian oil. The deal includes $280 billion for the development of downstream petrochemical sectors (refining and plastics) and $120 billion for Iran's transportation and production infrastructure. Here too the partnership is win-win. Iran will receive yuan for its oil and China will help develop Iranian infrastructure.

In summary, Iran, Saudi Arabia soon, but also Venezuela (since 201940), and others sell or will sell their oil or gas in yuan to China. For its part, Moscow sells its gas and oil in rubles to China but also accepts payments from India in United Arab Emirates dirhams.

The experience inherited from the hegemony of the dollar was used to establish a mode of operation allowing the various protagonists to preserve their monetary sovereignty. It is precisely this mechanism that arouses the ire of the United States. It is built around two simple but structuring principles:

- a money exchange platform between central banks: the mBridge or m-CBDC Bridge project41, based on a new blockchain – the mBridge Ledger42 to ensure secure exchanges between digital currencies;

- a international reserve currency like DTS43, whose name, R5, takes up the first letter of the name of each of the currencies of the five founding countries of the BRICS group: Real, Ruble, Rupee, Renminbi and Rand. This new “BRICS currency” will be sitting on gold reserves and raw materials from participants in the BRICS community.

The platform is made by the Bank of Thailand44, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates and with the support of the Bank for International Settlements45 (BIS). The project, which entered its pilot phase in 2022, will enable secure cross-border transactions and currency conversions between central banks, in real time, without involving the dollar American or any network of western banks.

In the end, it is a complete and autonomous environment that is looming for in less than five years:

– Transactions for gas and oil trading will take place on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange. THE Shanghai International Energy Exchange has been operational since 2015 and is already used by some countries in the context of the sanctions that have been imposed on Russian exports.

– Payments will flow in digital local currency through the m-CBDC Bridge gateway.

– The conversion into BRICS currency (R5) of foreign currency surpluses.

The crime is obvious : in this environment the dollar has no more place. The dollar is no longer used for payments which are made, and will be made more and more, in local currencies. Oil futures are, and increasingly will be, denominated in renminbi on the Shanghai International Energy Exchange, and the renminbi is convertible into gold on the Shanghai and Hong Kong gold exchanges since 2016 and 2017 respectively.

Beyond the monetary and commercial aspects, the partnerships between China and Russia have strong political impacts. China is at the center of a real geostrategic upheaval. It is well on the way to bringing the sworn enemies Iran and Saudi Arabia to the table. To do business you need peace in the region.

By joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 202146 (SCO), often presented as the eastern counterpart of NATO, Iran has joined the existing members47, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, India and Pakistan. However, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have obtained observer status (as well as Turkey, a member of NATO!) could soon join the organization.

The Russia-China-BRICS project now overshadows the dollar. For the United States, the success of the BRICS project becomes a existential question. The two promoters of this project are therefore in the sights of the United States: Russia today et tomorrow China … unless !

The 2014 sanctions used against Russia triggered a global awareness of the insecurity of holding dollar reserves, facilitating the rallying of many countries to the Sino-Russian project for a new international monetary, trade and political architecture.

Economist Ousmene Mandeng in a paper48 published in the Financial Times points out this feeling as follows: If they can be denied access, central banks around the world can reconsider the usefulness of foreign exchange reserves and the conditions under which they are held. ».

In his last report49 World Economic Outlook the International Monetary Fund (IMF) makes an observation that echoes this point of view: The war in Ukraine and related international sanctions aimed at pressuring Russia to end hostilities divide the world economy into blocks and reinforce earlier geopolitical tensions, such as those associated with the U.S.-China trade dispute. Fragmentation could intensify – with more restrictions on the cross-border movement of capital, labor and international payments – and could hamper multilateral cooperation on the provision of global public goods. The costs of such fragmentation are particularly high in the short term, as replacing disrupted cross-border flows takes time.. »

The same IMF emphasizes50 in a report of January of this year the attraction that gold represents in this context of insecurity inherited from the prerogatives that it is arrogated the Western countries to sanction such or such country. Gold becomes not only an important asset in an uncertain economic or geopolitical context, but also the best way to secure its reserves against possible sanctions from the United States or the European Union: “ Aggregated evidence suggests that some reserve managers react to relative costs and returns: they increase the share of gold when the expected return is high while that of financial assets, such as US Treasuries, is low. They regard gold as a hedging against economic and geopolitical risks : gold shares in advanced countries and emerging markets increase with a measure of economic uncertainty, and those of advanced economies additionally increase with a measure of geopolitical risk. Furthermore, we find that the reserve managers of the emerging markets increase share of reserves held in gold in response to sanctions risk. Many of the largest year-on-year increases in gold holdings by individual central banks occur at times when those central banks are, or have reason to believe that they might be subject to financial penalties. »

This reflection would not be complete if the question of the euro vis-à-vis the dollar was not addressed.

Indeed it is legitimate to ask the question of the cohabitation between these two currencies after having approached the mechanism by which the United States seeks to preserve the planetary hegemony of the dollar. Wasn't this domination of the dollar undermined by the introduction of the euro in world reserves? 

When it was introduced in 1999, the euro took the place occupied by national currencies in the reserves of foreign countries. The first place was before this date occupied by the deutschemark and the ECU (approximately 15% of the world's foreign exchange reserves). When the euro was introduced, the dollar represented 72% of foreign exchange reserves in central bank reserves and the euro 21%. Today the euro is still at 21% of foreign exchange reserves but the dollar at 59%. The latter has clearly suffered from the emergence of currencies from emerging countries and more particularly the yuan since its admission in 2016 in the constitution of the SDR and especially since the convertibility of this currency into gold in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

If the adversary to be defeated for the United States is the China-Russia couple, the fact remains that the latest events in Ukraine allow us to speculate on the hidden intentions of the United States in this conflict vis-à-vis of the European Union, that is to say beyond the obvious objective of bringing Russia to its knees in order to have only one adversary later in a possible second round in the far east.

Indeed the level of involvement of the European Union in this conflict is puzzling. The United States, in accordance with the action plan revealed in April 2019 in the report51 of 354 pages of the consulting firm Rand Corporation (an annex of the CIA) after submission to ad hoc congressional committees in the fall of 2018, dragged all European countries into economic sanctions against Russia. These were all aware of American intentions since the document had become public in 2019 and most European countries knew that the Minsk agreements were a disguised way to obtain a delay in arming and training the Ukrainian army.52 before engaging in open armed conflict53. OSCE reports from 2014 to December 2021 have repeatedly reported an unbearable situation of latent war for the inhabitants of Donbass.

It is incomprehensible that European states have agreed to shoot themselves in both feet by cutting themselves off from gas, oil, diesel and other low-cost raw materials coming from Russia and their exports to that country. It is incomprehensible that European rulers, under the false pretext of saving an imaginary Ukrainian democracy, agreed to knowingly lead European industries to ruin.

Only one country has an interest in seeing the industrial power of Europe and more particularly Germany heading straight for collapse due to overpriced raw materials coming from the United States (gas) or China (import of Russian LNG) or from India (diesel refined in India from Russian oil). When the recession reaches Europe, the country in question will benefit from the migration to the dollar of foreign exchange reserves currently in euros and will welcome with open arms European companies in search of cheap raw materials while allowing its industry to benefit from the armament of the frenzy of orders for equipment from European countries completely denuded by the transfer of their rare equipment to Ukraine.

By dragging Europe into its long-mature plan to destroy Russia, the United States not only erected a wall between Europe and Eurasia but also re-vassalized European states and shook international confidence in Europe. euro and the competitiveness of European industry for a long time.

Admittedly, the dollar will probably never disappear, but its decline is now well and truly under way. The struggle of the United States to maintain its hegemony on the planet will be long and ruthless. The country has tasted for 70 years the splendor provided by the status of the dollar, it will not give up on a single disappointment.

Nevertheless, there is little doubt about the success of this new multipolar order which is materializing more and more quickly before our eyes. The countries of this bloc have considerable demographic weight. Their economies are not yet able to compete with the West but the prospects are impressive when we look at the raw materials that these countries are able to exploit; moreover, their technical and industrial know-how is now at the level of the West.

The originality of this dissident block is to have patiently created an image, in their world, of the leading institutions of the world of the dollar. The LBMA54 of London has its counterpart in the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the Shanghai Gold Exchange55 ; the Shanghai International Energy Exchange handles part of the activities of NYMEX in New York; and of course a monetary exchange platform soon, then an IMF-bis?…

Beyond a “simple” monetary earthquake, the constitution of these two blocks reveals two conceptions of the world in total cultural and social opposition. The West annoys the other world by brandishing its banners in crusades for democracy, for minorities of all kinds, for the climate, for the defense of animals, plants, etc., seeking to impose its models of society on the other world without taking into account the cultural, social and religious contexts, customs, in short the identity and history of other peoples.

For the BRICS countries and the countries associated with them, it is probably also, and in a subliminal way, a kind of revenge, of the “colonized against the colonizer”. These countries, often rich in raw materials that the West has exploited to boost its prosperity, are raising their heads. They are tired of the lessons of democracy, of the threats and of seeing the slow erosion of their culture by an Anglo-Saxon globalist culture.

The dollar will still remain a dominant player but gold is now officially taking its place.

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