by F. William Engdahl, New Eastern Outlook:

At this juncture it’s clear that the attempt of the Trump Administration and related circles in the US military industrial complex have failed in their prime objective, that of driving a permanent wedge between Russia and China, the two great Eurasian powers capable of peacefully ending the Sole Superpower hegemony of the United States. Some recent examples of seemingly small steps with enormous future economic and geopolitical potential between Russia and China underscore this fact. The Project of the Century, as we can now call the China One Belt One Road infrastructure development–the economic integration on a consensual basis by the nations of Eurasia, outside the domination of NATO countries of the USA and EU–is proceeding at an interesting pace in unexpected areas.

1971: America’s Twilight Begins

It’s very essential in my view to appreciate where the post-1944 development of America’s role in the world went seriously wrong. The grandiose project dubbed by Henry Luce in 1941 as the American Century, if I were to pick a date, began its twilight on August 15, 1971.

That was the point in time a 44-year-old Under-Secretary of the Treasury for International Monetary Affairs named Paul Volcker convinced a clueless President Richard Milhous Nixon that the treaty obligations of the 1944 Bretton Woods Treaty on a postwar Gold Exchange Standard should be simply ignored. Volcker rejected the express mandate of the Bretton Woods Treaty which would have seen a devaluation of the dollar in order to rebalance world major currencies. By 1971 the economies of war-ravaged countries such as Japan, Germany and France had rebuilt at a significantly higher level of efficiency than the US.

A devaluation of the dollar would have given a major boost to US industrial exports and eased the export of dollar inflation in the world arising from Lyndon Johnson’s huge Vietnam War budget deficits. The de-industrialization of the USA could have thereby been avoided. Wall Street would hear none of that. Their mantra in effect was, “Nothin’ personal, just bizness…” The banks began the destruction of the American industrial base in favor of cheap labor and ultra-high-profit manufacture abroad.

Instead of correcting that at a point it could have had an enormously positive economic effect, Volcker advised Nixon to in effect spit on America’s international treaty obligations and to brazenly dare the world to do something about it. On Volcker’s advice, Nixon simply ripped the treaty in shreds and ended Federal Reserve redemption of dollars held by foreign central banks for US gold reserves. The US dollar overnight was no longer “as good as gold.”

A serious dollar devaluation against currencies of America’s major trading partners, while it could have given a new lease on life to America’s industries, would have greatly reduced the power of the Wall Street banks. It was from David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank that Volcker came to Washington.

Paul Volcker’s unilateral suspension of gold-dollar redemption began a series of moves, as I document in The Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century. The floating dollar allowed the increasingly more powerful and more unregulated banks of Wall Street to destroy the industrial base of the United States, the world’s once-great economy, and to create a debt burden that today is so out-of-control that it perhaps can only be managed through a possible war or countless wars everywhere, failing some variation of a US national Chapter 9 bankruptcy reorganization.

That a new war so readily can be considered a solution by the American oligarchs behind Wall Street and the huge military-industrial complex should not surprise us. We need only realize that since the nation’s founding in 1776, the United States has been at war with someone for 214 of her 235 years of existence as a nation. That’s impressive, at least in the negative.

The American Century is crumbling before our eyes, and has been doing so for the near-five decades since August, 1971. That willful ignoring of the health of the economy of the United States over decades has created a vast moral, political and economic vacuum in the world today.

Into that vacuum other nations outside Washington’s NATO control are building what I have termed a Eurasian Century, a very lawful and positive response to an increasingly totalitarian Washington role in the world.

The contrast between what China, together with Russia, and the other nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Eurasia are doing to build up their common economic space, and what the United States, Britain and other NATO nations are doing to destroy, could not be more stark.

A Eurasian Century Advances

I’ve often written about the 2013 initiative of China’s far-sighted President Xi Jinping, the project called One belt, One Road (OBOR), or the New Economic Silk Road. I’m now preparing a book dealing with the various levels of its strategic global impact. The three strategic partners in the economic projects around OBOR that are transforming the economic potentials of the world economy in a positive direction are China, Russia–including Russia’s partners in the Eurasian Economic Union–and Iran. Here I want to take a selection of game-changing projects going forward, with almost no appreciation by mainstream Western media, involving Russia and China.

The huge and ambitious infrastructure development of high-speed Trans-Eurasian railway connections together with a network of deep water ports from Asia to the Middle East and on to Greece and other parts of Europe, is a huge project creating over the next several years millions of new skilled jobs and economic spending in the trillions of dollars. This will take place over the next two or more decades.

OBOR is transforming the industrial geography of the world in a tectonic shift away from more than five centuries of European and later Trans-Atlantic domination. The shift is to a new world ordering in which the nations with the largest populations are emerging and expressing their rightful national sovereignty, and rightly demanding their sovereign right to decide how to develop their own vast resources for their own development. In effect it contrasts with a de facto imperial US-controlled globalization to the alternative defense of national sovereignty. This is a very serious difference between West (NATO) and East (OBOR).

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