Lies, Cheating, and Stealing or Accepting Reality?

No one else but former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly declared when he was still CIA Director during Donald Trump’s first term in the White House that  “We lied, we cheated, we stole.”  This is just one example of what kind of team Trump assembled that ruined his Presidency and sabotaged rather than implemented his foreign policy instincts.

When Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, said the former president met the definition of a fascist and said admiring things about Hitler, Trump responded, “This guy had two qualities, which don’t work well together. He was tough and dumb.” However, Mr. Trump forgot to mention that it was he who hired him and many others who sabotaged or betrayed him. Still, some of them, including Mike Pompeo or Nikki Haley, are now circling around Washington hoping to return to the palaces of power.  Even the New York Times noted that Trump “pulled together all these people he didn’t really know, most of whom were classic Republican and military people who spent most of their time trying to convince him not to do what he wanted to do.” The big question is, if Trump wins, who will he choose to be on his team this time: saboteurs or those who want to turn his instincts into policy?  He would need the latter, ready to replace liars, cheaters, and thieves with those searching for friends instead of enemies and win-win mutually beneficial cooperation instead of elusive U.S. hegemony.

EU lawmaker from Slovakia Lubos Blaha:  “The freezing of Russian assets is theft and robbery. You can find hundreds of justifications for this, but this is theft.”

Trump kept changing his foreign policy and security advisors, but all of them outright ignored his strategic vision that “getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.” Had they followed the President, not only would the war in Ukraine that now threatens nuclear WWIII have been avoided, but indeed, it would have made America great again. For example, by investing close to $300 billion, the Biden-Harris administration spent on this war to solve the U.S. homelessness problem for around 650,000 people, including war veterans.

The liars want to continue funding the war and suffering in Ukraine by endlessly repeating that if Putin is not stopped in Ukraine, he will go on to the Baltics, the Caucasus, Moldova, or Poland. The thieves froze about $300bn of sovereign Russian funds and keep transferring the accrued interest to Ukraine to use its people as cannon fodder on the battlefields in a proxy war against Russia. The White House has announced that the Group of Seven (G7) will offer Ukraine a $50bn loan backed by interests accrued on frozen Russian government assets. President Joe Biden said on Wednesday that the United States would cover $20bn of the loan, which “will be paid back by the interest earned from immobilized Russian sovereign assets.”

EU lawmaker from Slovakia Lubos Blaha has questioned the move against Moscow, noting that U.S. funds were not targeted when it attacked Iraq on false pretensions. “The freezing of Russian assets is theft and robbery. You can find hundreds of justifications for this, but this is theft,” Blaha said at a European Parliament plenary session in Strasbourg last week. “Europe didn’t steal American assets at the time of unjustified aggression against Iraq.”

The BRICS countries are building a new independent economic system that is less susceptible to the harmful influence of Western financial institutions.

Christopher Caldwell warned that “the very act of seizing Russian assets would pose dangers to the U.S. economy because other countries, not just Russia, would view it as an act of brigandage. This could weaken the dollar’s status as the main global reserve currency.”  Other experts are expressing similar misgivings about this theft, stating that many countries will decide they can no longer trust the dollar as a means of exchange, which would tremendously blow U.S. financial and political standing on the world’s stage. This is precisely what happened last week during the BRICS+ Forum in the Russian city of Kazan. Thirty-six countries were present, and twenty-four of them were represented by top leaders to prove the arrival of a multipolar world order and to come up with viable alternatives to the global dominance of the U.S. dollar. Keith Jonson is correct when he says that outside of Washington, the G-7, and the European Union, it is hard to appreciate the resentment of Western hypocrisy, hegemony, and the dollar’s exorbitant privilege.

At the BRICS+ summit, a new banknote featuring the flags of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa was passed among participants to symbolize the collective ambitions of these nations to explore alternatives to the U.S. dollar in cross-border transactions. This banknote was not genuine, but it highlighted the growing effort within BRICS countries to establish a more independent economic system less reliant on Western financial institutions.

All eyes are now on the upcoming November 5 U.S. presidential elections. America has a historic chance to abandon its present course, claiming the world leadership that brought us to the edge of the abyss and chose the new one, ready to live in peace in a multipolar world where there are no hegemons and the security and economic interests of each nation are considered.

This is the course suggested by the BRICS+ nations, which represent the global majority of people on this planet.