Kermit Heartsong - Ukraine - ZBIG's Grand Chess Board & How The West Was Checkmated

What is the truly tragic predicament of the West and the United States, in which they find themselves? And why all the Western media and leading Western economists are silent about this, as a well guarded military secret? Let's try to understand the essence of current economic events, in the context of the economy, setting aside the factors of morality, ethics and geopolitics. (Kalinichenko 2014)

Currently, the US Government intentionally suppresses the price of gold via a special department called the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), with the intended aim of stabilizing the dollar. This suppression has, in fact, become law in the US (Kalinchenko 2014):

Right now the West spends much of its efforts and resources to suppress the prices of gold and oil. Thereby, on the one hand, to distort the existing economic reality in favor of the US dollar and on the other hand, to destroy the Russian economy, refusing to play the role of obedient vassal of the West. (Kalinchenko 2014)

As a result, both gold and oil are artificially undervalued, while the dollar flies high against other currencies and the aforementioned commodities.

This brings us to Putin’s final gambit. In short, President Putin is quietly selling Russian oil and gas for “physical” gold. And though he still accepts the over-valued dollar in payment, these dollars are then immediately exchanged for under-valued physical gold. This is where the trap becomes “magnetic” and pulls in a West that begins slowly to understand what’s happening, but can do literally nothing to change its fate. As Kalinchenko states:

Thus, the Western world, built on the hegemony of the petrodollar, is in a catastrophic situation. In which it cannot survive without oil and gas supplies from Russia. And Russia is now ready to sell its oil and gas to the West only in exchange for physical gold! The twist of Putin's game is that the mechanism for the sale of Russian energy to the West only for gold now works regardless of whether the West agrees to pay for Russian oil and gas with its artificially cheap gold, or not. (Kalinchenko 2014)

So, the US artificially props up the dollar and the Russians use the artificially high dollar to buy the artificially lowered gold and then sells its oil to all other Western players for physical gold. What Russia has, in fact done, is reopened the “gold window,” closed by Nixon in 1971 without asking for Washington’s permission” (Kalinchenko 2014). Kalinchenko sums that:

This truly brilliant economic combination by Putin puts the West led by the United States in a position of a snake, aggressively and diligently devouring its own tail. (Kalinchenko 2014)

With limited worldwide gold reserves and the West currently hemorrhaging gold eastward to buy oil from Russia, this begs the question: how long will the West be able to buy oil and gas from Russia in exchange for physical gold?

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and, perhaps, a host of others, have had their gold reserves renditioned to the US, so that the US might attempt to stall the inevitable.

But then there is the most important question: what will happen after the West runs out of physical gold (Kalinchenko 2014)? Checkmate.

The above facts do bring clarity to the fact that a number of Western European countries are asking to repatriate their gold, currently being held in the US.

The combination of the above with regard to imperiling Western hegemony via the dollar as the reserve currency can certainly not be overlooked. Alone, any one of the recent development — BRICS Bank and Investment Bank, historic trading deals executed in currencies other than the dollar, a concerted move away from the SWIFT system, and the current gas bourse — would have been enough to, at least, seriously wound the dollar. Taken together, they represent an ominous and near-term disaster for economies still tied to the dollar.

When the dollar will fall is anyone’s guess. That it will fall with an aggressive de-dollarization campaign underway by, arguably, the largest economy in the world, China, and rising Eurasian powers in Russia, India, Iran, and now Turkey, is a certainty. And as Michael Hudson, research professor of economics at University of Missouri — Kansas City, states:

Turkey already is moving out of the US-European orbit, by turning to Russia for its energy needs. Iran also has moved into an alliance with Russia. Instead of the Obama administration’s neocons dividing and conquering as they had planned, they are isolating America from Europe and Asia. Yet there has been almost no recognition of this in the US press, despite its front-page discussion throughout Europe and Asia. Instead of breaking up the BRICS, the dollar area is coming undone. (Hudson 2014)

If one believes the point made by Leonid Ivashov, the former joint chief of staff of the Russian Armed Forces, that one of the reasons the West, led by the US, invaded Iraq (banned dollar circulation) and Libya (oil and gas to gold-backed Arab currencies) and has been threatening Iran (Euro-denominated oil bourse) is that each of these countries openly defied dollar dominance. Of course, if these countries were threats with comparatively tiny economies, the current de-dollarization by major countries is assuredly driving the West stark-raving mad.

It may be argued by future historians that this was the greatest and most notable incident of the West shooting itself in the foot over and over again, despite its best aim at its intended victim.

CONCLUSIONS

The Church of the Grand Chessboard

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”

— Zbigniew Brzeziński, from his book Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technotronic Era (1976)

Perhaps the above quote provides a bit of insight into the heart and soul of the highest of high priests responsible for constructing the Church of the Grand Chessboard.

US foreign policy has, indeed, become a fundamentalist religion as defined by the canons of the Grand Chessboard and the monks of its accompanying sect, the Project for A New American Century. Its priests, priestesses, and monks are zealots in every respect, undeterred by logic, pragmatism, reality, facts, forensic evidence, morality, and even Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

The Church of the Grand Chessboard’s canons are simple — the universe revolves around the US (more specifically, its financial elite) and the US is “exceptional” standing head and shoulders above all others. Anyone opposing said belief is a heretic, heathen, Hitler, conspiracy theorist, or a candidate for regime change. Further, they of the Grand Chessboard, and their congregants who are incapable of wrong-doing, believe that they are the smartest guys/gals in the world, that their lives are the only lives that matter (though congregants can be expendable in a pinch) and that their god, Mammon, is subordinate to none.

Thus Neocons and Neoliberals are the fanatical high-priests and priestesses of an anachronistic doomsday religion that now holds the fate of the world in its hands. And, unfortunately, the church of the Grand Chessboard has the means to bring about doomsday. Welcome back to the “Dark Ages.”

The one thing religious fanatics and zealots fail to realize time and again is that the world is a highly complex, dynamic, and multi-variant system. It is ever-changing. If one were to merely consider the social, political, and economic interactions taking place among nation states from year to year, those changes alone would be nearly impossible to predict. In this same vein, if one were to hold fast to a rigid set of ideological models and attempt to predict the relationship between nation-states some two decades hence, the odds of a successful prediction (even if one were actively engaged in its consummation), would be a non-zero finite sum, approaching zero at light-speed.