For the past more than 80 years the US has been obsessed with imposing its financial and military hegemony throughout the world. In 1973/74 Henry Kissinger negotiated a deal with Saudi Arabia to protect the royal family from domestic insurrection against the provision that all Opec oil would henceforth be priced only in dollars. Since then nonoil producing countries, including SA, have been funding US wars, and its budget deficits.
SA’s Robert Smit and two prominent German financiers, who were formulating a gold-based European currency, were all murdered in 1977 because of the threat their alternative gold-based currency could pose to the US. Smit and his wife, Jean-Cora, were reportedly killed by an identified Cuban CIA squad.
Likewise, when Venezuela, Iraq and Libya sought payment for their oil in gold instead of dollars. The US’s criminal response was “regime change” in Venezuela. Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi in Iraq and Libya were murdered. The US possesses only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, hence US President Donald Trump’s bizarre intention to annex Canada, which, after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, has the world’s third-largest oil reserves.
Nicholas Woode-Smith deludes himself that the quality of US products eclipses Chinese products (“Axe expropriation law to save US ties”, February 13). Other than its war business armaments, the US is essentially deindustrialised, but even US armaments are now substantially inferior to those manufactured in either Russia and China.
The US is no longer a superpower, as is illustrated by the loss of its proxy war in Ukraine to weaken Russia. Thanks to its obsessions with wars, the US federal government is $37-trillion in debt, and America’s infrastructure is falling apart. Former US president Joe Biden was demented, and Trump and his chum, Elon Musk, are both lunatics. China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and other countries are dumping their Treasury bonds, and are investing in gold.
Nor, per Woode-Smith’s delusion, does “the US look after its friends”. About 700,000 Ukrainians have needlessly died, millions are refugees and Ukraine is devastated economically and environmentally. As Kissinger infamously declared: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
The US complicity with Israel’s genocide in Palestine has also backfired, both Israel and the US now being described as “rogue states” and menaces to the rest of the world.
Terry Crawford-Browne
Via email
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