Being Ignored Can Be A Blessing
By Tyler Durden
Submitted by Robert Gore via StraightLineLogic.com,
Billions of people around the globe would like Americans to put America first.
The largest infrastructure project in the world is China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative, often referred to as the New Economic Silk Road. This effort spearheads the economic integration of the physical center of the world: the contiguous nations from China across Southeast and Central Asia, Russia, Belarus, Iran, and Turkey. The area has large percentages of the world’s land mass, population, and resources. Under construction is a huge network of new linkages: ports, roads, highways, high-speed rail lines, electricity transmission facilities, and petroleum pipelines.
To date China has also invested more than $51 billion in the countries along the present OBOR route. The new land rail routes will greatly reduce transportation costs across Eurasia, enable formerly isolated regions to connect efficiently to sea and land markets and ignite tremendous new economic growth across Eurasia.
“The Eurasian Century Is NOW Unstoppable,” William Engdahl, 10/11/16
US companies and US-led multinational institutions have been excluded from both the construction and financing, and the world’s reserve currency is getting the boot. Transactions are denominated in yuan and rubles, including oil and gas deals. Bye-bye petrodollar, the anchor for the dollar’s reserve status since Nixon abandoned the last dollar-gold link in 1971.
The war lobby ceaselessly conjures threats to US interests and conspiracies to dominate the world. All which must be met with US intervention—overt, covert, or both. How do you conjure a threat when a big part of the world decides to ignore you, who at best sees the US as irrelevant, at worst, a dangerous nuisance? One of life’s joys, all too rare, is telling self-important, pompous people that nobody cares what they do or say, or even if they live or die. It’s been a long time coming, but the rest of the world is starting to tell the US to keep its opinions and interventions to itself, and that’s a good thing for all concerned.
Two men who have caught the new mood are those Best Friends Forever, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Putin watched the Soviet Union crumble, and Trump has been a vocal critic of the US’s Middle East follies. They both see the dark side of empire. Neither man has ever been accused of selfless concern for humanity. They are both unabashed proponents of national interests—putting America and Russia first—but they’ve redefined national interests in ways that vex the Western elite status quo.
Despite the best efforts of the US government and its mainstream media arm to portray Putin as bent on offensive expansion, to date his efforts outside of Russia have been directed towards securing what fair-minded observers would concede are vital interests. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine after a US-sponsored coup installed a hostile regime there. In a referendum, Crimean citizens voted overwhelmingly to leave Ukraine and join Russia. Sebastopol, on the western Black Sea coast of Crimea, is the Russian navy’s warm-water base.
Russia has provided aid to eastern …read more
Source: Being Ignored Can Be A Blessing
