The Trump Delusion
After almost one year of the Trump 2.0 presidency, what initially began as encouraging signs of American self awareness of previous failures changed abruptly after April’s ‘Liberation Day’ declaration of economic war against the entire planet, ally and foe alike. The weaponization of the US consumer market by punishing domestic US voters with inflation, shortages, eroding their purchasing power and the absurdity of 145% tariffs on China was never sustainable policy – but not according to the pseudo-economist team whispering into the ears of the US president. There seems to be a gross misunderstanding of basic economics in Trump’s steering team – or perhaps the 11-dimensional chess move was to destroy faith in the US all along. Tariffs are born by US importers and passed down to consumers, not foreign exporters. Foreign exporters can be affected by lower volumes due to this demand shock, they do not pay the actual tariffs as claimed – it is US citizens that pay tariffs. In effect, the tariffs are a wealth re-distribution mechanism that siphon wealth from the bottom up to the US Treasury. Any subsequent handouts back to US consumers in the form of stimulus checks are thus an illusion, – the money was robbed from them in the first place. The immediate sugar rush from tariff-mania for the US Treasury was evident since Trump’s inauguration:
The sheer scale of the international blowback to ‘Liberation Day’ took the Trump administration by surprise. The move towards global multipolarity had accelerated and gaping cracks emerged with the US position, most notably first order effects caused rising input inflation and supply chain shocks, while second order effects created an uncertain investor climate and dampened foreign worker interest in the US economy. Some pronounced blowback and policy mishaps worth mentioning are below.
Chinese Retaliation & Intermediate Input Inflation
China retaliating with tit-for-tat tariffs on US exports especially agriculture products like soybeans and curbs on rare Earth exports, dealt a strong blow not only to Trump’s ‘MAGA’ farmer base, desperate for bailouts after a collapse in export volumes, but also to critical national security sectors hampering the dream of re-shoring industrial capacity. The Chinese tariffs were a double whammy of pain on the US beside American tariffs on Chinese goods, making the notion of re-shoring a competitive manufacturing base to the US prohibitively expensive. Manufacturing in the US still overly relies on imports of cheap Chinese intermediate goods in the value-added supply chain. There is no way the US can produce goods cheaply without upstream supply chain cost-effectiveness, which it simply cannot do at the present moment. Slapping tariffs on intermediate goods is akin to shooting oneself in the foot while trying to run a marathon. It causes inflation, as measured by the producer price index (PPI), which is reflected in the final price.
An interesting case of blowback from Western anti-China sanctions has been the curious case of Nexperia, a world-leading Chinese chips producer, powering chips for over 50% of the global automobile industry and 25% of all global legacy chips. ‘Legacy chips’ typically refer to chips greater than 28nm, used in many retail electronic applications. China dominates the legacy chips market, while the cutting edge chips market refers to chips below 7nm, having mostly AI and military-grade applications. Here, China is trailing the US, Taiwan and Japan in the race, by an increasingly smaller margin. Parity is expected in the near future. Nexperia’s Netherlands operations were commandeered illegally by the Netherlands, through the invocation of an obscure piece of legislation to justify the expropriation, mostly on US orders. China swiftly sanctioned all chips exports to the Netherlands and the supply shock backlash forced the Netherlands to buckle and revert the seizures. The case proved the increasingly effective clout of Chinese economic power and the inefficacy of US ‘advice’.
To make matters worse for Western consumers, in the aftermath of the 2019 Global Pandemic, the frenzy of money printing and fiscal spending to unseen levels spiked inflation while self-defeating sanctions were hammering global commodities markets, adding further strain to inflation. As inflation slowly came back down after a period of aggressive interest rate hikes, Western consumers were squeezed yet again. This time by Western corporate greed pushing ‘shrinkflation’ to shameless new bounds in order to keep shareholder pockets flush with cash while boosting profits to obscene margins as consumers were facing smaller products for the same if not higher price – a stealth tax in effect. It appears that one option the Trump presidency is exploring to ‘address’ the persistent inflation problem is a grand plan to control Venezuelan oil and flood the market with excess oil capacity to keep inflation tame. The folly in the approach glosses over the agency of any OPEC+ counter-reaction of course, but more significantly, that a weaker USD will actually serve to increase domestic inflation regardless of oil prices, as the US is a net importer of much more than just oil.
Repudiation of Green Energy
The US under the Trump administration has repudiated the global green energy initiative and swung back towards the fossil fuel industry. By doing so, it effectively hands the mantle of global green energy champion to China, soon set to overtake the EU as world leader in green energy production. The second problem is the US fossil fuel industry is driven by independent shale producers (outside OPEC+) which have relatively higher break even costs than their OPEC+ counterparts, therefore they require much higher fossil fuel prices and this is inflationary for a greater portion of the economy. Inflationary pressures make the Fed balk at rate cuts and everybody and their dog knows the Trump administration is keen on ultra low interest rates. Thus high oil prices are a hard constraint on the US economy, at least with what Trump is trying to achieve in the medium term.
The AI boom has also changed the landscape of processing power and imposed increasing hardware limits due to thermodynamic constraints. GPUs are in general more energy hungry than traditional CPUs, but the GPUs needed for AI are up to 20x more hungry. Their lifespans are also far shorter than CPUs, rendered obsolete in as little as a year or two. The most advanced Nvidia GPU chips require direct-to-chip liquid cooling and soon enough, immersion cooling into non-conductive fluid. These are recent advances in cooling dictated by the hunger for AI processing. Thermodynamics stipulates that an increase in efficiency is achieved by having a higher temperature differential between the cold and hot sink, so AI GPUs are running extremely hot and noisy, requiring new and advanced cooling technologies. Simple fans simply do not work anymore on top-end GPUs. The West has spent decades weaning itself off coal and nuclear energy, and recently off gas and oil, only to be now staring down the barrel at having to scramble for precisely those same energy sources to fuel the AI boom. What initially began as the right idea about transitioning to green energy was turned on its head after the NATO terrorist attack against Nordstream II, sanctions on Russia and the reckless pursuit of industrial warfare against peer rivals. It was not the walk in the park as Western elites had imagined. As such, global players like India, China and the EU and US have ramped up fossil fuel usage, especially dirty coal as a stopgap measure to address the jitters following the events of 2022. Black and grey markets ballooned as natural market reactions to Western sanctions, tariffs and price controls – policies ironically completely at odds with free market principles that Western elites spent decades lecturing the world about. Western elites have totally miscalculated their place in the multipolar world with hubris and complacency. Russia and China today dominate nuclear, battery and commodity sectors. Atlanticist liberal elites thought they could print their way to victory with their financialized economy, ‘tweets’ and American-Jewish confidence tricks. Unfortunately, you cannot print commodities and hard industrial power. To add further strain, China dominates rare Earth element mining and refining as well. These are still critical inputs to the world of tomorrow. And the West has imposed tariffs and sanctions on them. Tomorrow’s economic winners will be shaped by how cheap their input costs are and their output capacities. Data centers will likely require their own small modular nuclear reactors once the strain on retail utility costs becomes unbearable, and China is the world leader in these reactors. The US is actively looking at emulating the very same solution.
ICE Deportations and Scaling Back of Foreign Visas
The huge upswing in deportation flights of illegal migrants, scaling back of visas such as the H1-B (notably affecting Indian migrants) and general anti-migrant climate in the US, as demonstrated by ICE raids on hundreds of South Korean workers at a US Hyundai plant, serve to constrict the US labor pool. The US labor pool cannot meet the domestic demand for jobs without migrant workers due to skills shortages and American attitudes towards low-paying jobs. US farming relies 75% on foreign migrant workers, with deportations already straining the industry with farm bankruptcies and increases in government spending on farm bailouts. The US does not produce the level of STEM graduates as China, and its education system is debt-based, which is very stifling on students, especially when personal credit lines need to be drawn with private banks rather than government subsidized loans. The initiatives in question constrict the labor market and do not decrease wages – they raise them. While good for US workers and undermining the Democrat party, if the US wishes to compete with China as the Trump administration is set out to do, it is paramount to keep input costs down. An unintended consequence of the H1-B visa restrictions on Indian migrants is actually helping India slow down its brain drain. The major impact will be positioning the US as less attractive to foreign talent, hurting it with skills shortages and helping Global South nations retain their talent. So overall, the policy itself is not the worst of the Trump administration, but the more latent longer term cost will be social – families ripped apart and infighting between Democrats and Republicans on the issue will only strain internal US social stability.
Business Uncertainty
This is perhaps the greatest unspoken consequence of US policy under the Trump administration. The flip flopping around tariffs, public statements and trade policy in general plays a very negative role on business confidence and future planning. The unpredictability of US foreign and trade policy under Trump creates an uncertain investment climate, with many domestic and foreign companies scaling back investment and long term production decisions in the US economy. Why open a factory in the US when business input and operating costs can vary as much as the wind on any given week? A 2025 Yale business survey of CEOs revealed 62% of respondents would scale back US investment citing tariff and anti-immigration policy along with economic woes as main concerns. Almost 50% in a separate KPMG survey said they would scale back Capex spending in the US. Other business sentiment surveys confirm that the majority of respondents regard tariffs are detrimental to their business and most view tariffs as illegal. As such, Trump’s pseudo-economic advisors have a very antiquated worldview of trade policy, favoring a return to 19th century America. For a president who claims to be a protege of Reagan, protectionism totally flies against Reagonomics, with Reagan himself vehemently opposed to tariffs and protectionism. The consequences of tariffs, sanctions and policy flip flopping is crushing medium and long term US business planning. It is also why foreign companies such as TSMC refuse to bring the bulk of their business operations on US soil – knowing full well that supply lines to the Asian market over-extend from the US, and are subject to more shocks and tit-for-tat tariff tennis than on operations from Taiwan.
Sacrificing US Financial Power
Under Trump, the politicization of the Federal Reserve bank is also shaking confidence in the US – with the much vaunted ‘independence’ of the Fed under question with open meddling in the Fed chair selection process already underway by the administration towards an ultra dovish position to buttress loose fiscal policy and promote less transparent forward guidance to financial markets. Such politicized decisions undermine US financial influence and the staying power of foreign funds in US markets, through less foreign demand and a weaker USD. To the Trump administration, the trade-off may be acceptable – a weaker dollar to boost manufacturing and lower interest rates to ease borrowing costs, as opposed to a stronger US dollar that attracts foreign capital and props up US financial power and beneficiaries of the financialized US economy. This is in line with a mercantilist posture, whereby the US plays a zero-sum game with its trading partners hoping for a weaker dollar to boost American exports to foreign buyers while currencies of foreign buyers rise and stifle foreign exports to the US. For the Trump administration, the risks might be worth saving his voter base in the Rust Belt states but this would be incredibly short-sighted if left at that. Therefore, there must be medium term gain at stake – hopes of re-invigorating American manufacturing capacity. Perhaps weakening the reserve currency status of the USD is the ultimate play to wean the US out of Triffin’s dilemma but this would be a very long term play and an unlikely move for a short-sighted political system hooked on instant gratification, bipartisan bickering and 4 year selection cycles. The policy is highly risky due to the sheer number of moving parts involved in a complex global economy involving many players, the time window for all parts to ‘move together’ in perfect harmony to benefit the US at the expense of everybody else is extremely small and unlikely to persist for very long. It bears repeating that this is precisely the underlying complexity of the world we now live in and why any one country can no longer monopolize it in ways that were once possible hundreds of years ago or even last century.
Further evidence of the US under Trump shedding its financial prowess in favor of mercantilism, is the encouragement of Japan to hike interest rates (as of late 2025) and reducing the interest differential between Japan and the US which powers the famous ‘Yen carry trade’ underpinning significant foreign demand for US financial instruments, especially stocks and Treasuries during eras of monetary easing – an era the US is on the verge of entering. With over $1 trillion in annual interest payments on US debt and a near-record federal deficit of $1.8 trillion in FY25, the debt-crazed Fascist alliance between the US government and AI tech companies is living on borrowed time and demands cheaper financing, hoping for the miracle of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to save the US economy from stagnation. This is a risky bet to say the least – not in principle on the 4th industrial revolution but on hoping for a quick-fix miracle breakthrough without first laying the groundwork. The US has gone ‘all-in’ on AI on a tsunami of debt, more than any other industry in the economy. Evidence is mounting that without the massive Capex spending boom by Big Tech on the AI bubble in 2025, the US economy would be almost stagnant at 0% growth. Almost 40% of the S&P500 stock market capitalization is driven by a handful of tech companies in 2025, dubbed the ‘Magnificent 7’. Some of these companies are fundamentally insolvent like OpenAI, where borrowing is in the hundreds of billions of dollars while revenue is shy of $20 billion annually. Many also have astronomical stock P/E ratios in the hundreds, a clearly unsustainable position given the long term stock average P/E ratio is between 20-30. The massive borrowing by the AI industry demands cheaper financing, hence the obsession to lower interest rates.
Another hidden impact of the AI bubble is that data centers and hyperscalers (large data centers) are raising water and electricity costs for local communities, as is the nature of these water and power-hungry enterprises. Thus by eroding US financial prowess in favor of chasing the manufacturing illusion, demand for US denominated assets on US soil will fall while its far less regulated and unofficial sister ‘Eurodollar’ offshore USD market picks up the slack for US denominated asset demand. The pitfalls of an expanding Eurodollar market means higher systemic risk migrating to foreign balance sheets, especially if a big player in the shadow banking system blows up with a default, such as Credit Suisse or Deutsche Bank for example. Cracks are thus insidiously moving towards the global shadow banking system, raising the chance of any future global financial crisis being ever more chaotic and less confined to geography – unless the nascent BRICS+ alliance decouples from the Western shadow banking system which is indeed happening and therein lies the ultimate irony of US sanctions: they end up protecting the sanctioned economies from any future financial crisis made in the West. Meanwhile, business in the US is becoming prohibitively expensive and risky. The explosion in yields on longer term Treasuries on the yield curve and sovereign credit downgrades attest to the investor community’s lack of faith in the US economy over the longer term. The next years will most certainly see a very dovish Federal Reserve bank captured by the Trump administration in favor of keeping the AI bubble afloat and debt financing affordable for a debt-addicted government and tech sector. It will come at the cost of higher inflation and weaker US financial power, something investors have already priced in.
Multipolarity and Global Decoupling
In my articles and book I have already covered in great detail, the trend towards multipolarity. Suffice it to say that US behavior under the Trump administration is accelerating the trend. Despite tariffs, the Chinese net export surplus with the world hit record highs of near $1 trillion in 2025, demonstrating resilience. Most of it is unsurprisingly in goods. Both the US and China have 8-11% of their exports going to each other’s respective markets, a figure far lower than most people think. The US runs an annual $300 billion net export surplus with the world in services, mostly IP and software – which can make a juicy counter-tariff target not so much for China but for the EU, Japan and other American trade partners. Trade between Russia and China is already 99% settled in non-USD currencies. The reckless decision to use the last Ukrainian to fight Russia goes against all military logic and really throws into question the mental sanity of Western elites. “Never fight a land war against Russia” – the many cases of Russia chewing up Western imperial projects passing through Ukraine – from the Swedish empire, Napoleonic France, the Third Reich and more recently the Fourth Reich (NATO). The learning slope of Western elites thus appears flat to past history. We can give the Trump presidency credit here for attempting to reverse the Atlanticist liberal establishment’s craze to war with Russia – but this is not done out of altruism for saving Russian or Ukrainian lives. For the US to pivot towards a war posture against China or even retreat to the ‘Western hemisphere’, the war in Europe and West Asia must first wind down. The US is under pressure to catch up to China and it is lagging. Open global fronts drain resources and deliver little in return – there is some hope that Israel and Britain may finally be viewed as liabilties by the realist camp in America. This is what is really driving the desire to end the war – China takes note.
Russia and China have been pushed together, back-to-back in what is an unmitigated strategic failure of the West. While losing a potential 55bcpm of gas per year through Nordstream II that was destroyed by Western sabotage, Russia will have clawed back 50bcpm once Power of Siberia II is operational, a landmark pipeline with China that hard-wires their relationship. This is in addition to Power of Siberia I that delivers 44bcpm of gas to the Chinese market, the Far East Sakhalin region that pumps 12bcpm of gas to Asian customers and 32bcpm of gas per year from Turkstream, its last major artery into the European gas market. BRICS+ accounts for least a quarter (25%) of all global international trade, set to grow further as its membership base expands. BRICS+ is lowering tariffs among members and increasing intra-bloc multilateral trade. As of 2025, 30% of China’s trade is with BRICS, the same combined total for its trade with both the EU and US, with China being the main trade partner for about 100 countries. The rise in central bank gold holdings is further testament to de-dollarization trends in the transient era of post-US hegemony, tumult and uncertainty as nations scramble to diversify and hedge their futures. Even within the West itself, a spike of interest in crypto-currencies as strategic assets offers a glimpse into de-dollarization hedging within an increasingly inflationary outlook for the USD.
With the US pressing allies to make great sacrifices and commitments for the ailing US economy, many companies are balking at the idea of onshoring to America, especially Asian firms who see rising tensions with China as deleterious to such moves. Why move production to the US when operations could be subject to more tariffs, logistics and supply chain shocks? If China lowers tariffs and increases incentives with neighboring Asian nations, it further entices firms to stay in Asia, not re-locate to the US. Its why the US will ultimately struggle to re-shore and accept friend-shoring in ASEAN instead. Part of the Trump administration’s plan to boost falling global demand for USD and Treasuries especially from the Global South, is to mandate US-based stablecoin issuers through the ‘Genius Act’ to match every crypto stablecoin one-for-one with USD fiat via liquid short term US bills. The intent is to conjure up a new market (read: demand) for US debt, especially short term funding. While the US government may regard the crypto-ecosystem as a useful bagholder for US debt, such a move is more a trojan horse that undermines the original idea of crypto-currencies as a safe-haven alternative to failing fiat currencies, not a tool that works hand-in-glove with the destroyers of fiat currencies. In the longer run, the infiltration of the US government in the stablecoin market is more of a risk to the crypto-currency ecosystem than the crypto-currency ecosystem is to the US government. West Asia is now hosting multiple, competing trade corridors in a sign of growing multipolarity. The West’s ‘India Middle East Europe Corridor’ (IMEC) is envisioned to pass from India through UAE and KSA, Israel and finally towards the EU. But this project is falling behind China’s BRI which already links Istanbul to Beijing by rail. There is also Russia and Iran’s North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) and a Turkish-Qatari-Iraqi ‘Development Road Project’ (DRP) which has garnered Chinese interest as complementary to its BRI, given heavy Chinese investment in Iraq. We thus no longer see one dominant trade route monopolized by one hegemon, but rather, cooperative initiatives which is ultimately good for everybody.
Reputational Damage From Associating With Allies of Western Hypocrisy
The Western bloc has greatly discredited itself consistently since the 9/11 Zionist-Wahhabi false flag attack. Not counting all the war-mongering barbarity since then, the 2008 American Financial Crisis revealed cracks in the US financial system, the 2016 election of Trump and Brexit exposed internal fault lines in the Anglosphere but it was the 2022 failed proxy war against Russia and 2023 genocide against Palestine that were the final nails in the coffin for the G7 ‘rules based international order’. The inflection point from former global leaders to global pariahs with no self-awareness, is the transient period of re-alignment that we find ourselves in, heading towards a more stable global configuration. Once the dust settles and the string of wars against the Global South delineates new boundaries with declining Western hegemony, a modus vivendi can be made among the 3 superpowers. The American unipolar pipedream and 500 years of Western dominance is coming to an ugly end, with the West refusing to let go graciously by spilling blood and stealing anything within reach on their way out. The US and its umbrella of useful idiots (‘allies’) have been broadly announcing to the world with actions, that they can operate with a sense of impunity, above international law, while their foes must be bound by international law and operate within limits. This has been a terrible public relations image to uphold that has seen the Global South walk off a Western plantation that demands nothing but humiliation and subjugation. While the US still retains its own sphere of influence in the globe, with firm control over Europe, the Arab world and peripheral parts of Asia-Pacific, one can study the bad behavior of the US umbrella and question how this approach is helping to win any more sympathy from the rest of the world. ‘Allies’ of the US are allowed to conduct themselves with wanton brutality, hypocrisy and shamelessness – and get away with US cover. There is a sick marketing ploy to it – it attracts and rewards those who wish to indulge with the criminal crew. Obvious examples include the pariah state of Apartheid Israel and Arab ‘orbiters’ like Jordan with their genocidal ways, the EU and Britain with their Russophobic bloodlust destroying Ukraine in the process but also a less obvious shadow actor that can be regarded as a somewhat middle power straddling East and West: the UAE.
The UAE is a key node in the Western umbrella, both as a financial hub for money laundering and as a regional contractor for sub-contracting proxy wars. But it is also a key node for Iran’s re-export market, Israeli tech companies, Russian shadow oil trading and Indian and Chinese investments. Having an outsized influence relative to its size, the UAE’s chief sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed and his brothers have consolidated the emirates into a regional ‘middle management’ power – relying on proxies and controlling events at a distance rather than getting directly involved itself – much like middle management. There are many parallels with the UAE and Israel in their approach to the region – holding selfishly rogue positions, repudiating cooperative alliance-building and leading the charge against political Islamism in the region most notably against the Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) and against the cause of Palestine. To most Gulf Arab absolutist monarchies in the region, the reason why they implicitly support the Zionist settler state is the threat they perceive from political Islamism embodied by the Ikhwan, the notion of civil society where citizens can vote for candidates (Islamist parties would dominate in such a scenario) and an independent Palestine, a cause which rallies Muslims more than their regimes ever could. The monarchic regimes in question are relics of the Anglo-American control matrix, they are living on borrowed time and are deeply distrustful of their own populations and Islam itself. In fact, they are quite anti-Islamic. It is for these reasons of paranoid self-preservation which brings together the likes of Britain, Israel, USA and the Arab monarchies on the same side. The Gulf monarchies quietly support Israel in taking a heavy-handed approach towards forces threatening their own sense of power – Palestine, Iran, Hamas and Ikhwan – as they would rather let Israel do the dirty work they are unable to do in the eyes of their own populations who stand at odds with these positions. The Gulf Arab monarchies are at odds with other regional Sunni powers Turkiye and Qatar, who back the Ikhwan. But the UAE’s rogue ways go further, defying its bigger brother Saudi Arabia, a kingdom that values stability, and shunning cooperation with Saudi Arabia within OPEC+. The UAE has joined the Abraham Accords, a trojan horse agreement to help the isolated pariah state of Israel with ‘friends’ and influence in the Arab world. The Saudis expect much more compromise from Israel before considering joining the Accords. Saudi Arabia has taken a more mature and distant position vis-a-vis Israel, at least officially, than the UAE. The UAE is a big user of Israeli military and surveillance technology and a hub for Western money laundering operations.
If Israel has tarnished itself with Palestine, the Europeans have tarnished themselves with Ukraine, then the UAE has tarnished itself with the genocide in Sudan. Again we see fellow members of the Western alliance give cover to themselves, with the EU and US failing to condemn the UAE in what is now clear evidence of UAE-sponsored Sudanese militias conducting genocide in Darfur and El Fasher, through their support of Hemedti’s RSF (Rapid Support Forces) comprised of mostly Arab and Chadian mercenaries. The UAE has meddled heavily in Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Yemen and Sudan to support various strongmen, taking sides in civil wars. The reason is geopolitical – the emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai both seek influence and launder blood diamonds and gold stolen from Africa. Sudan hosts large gold mines in regions where the RSF is vying to control. Sudan in 2019 overthrew longtime leader Omar Bashir in a popular revolution, with the ensuing government warming up to Iran and Russia. The West could not tolerate popular events and had to intervene. The Sudanese government fractured into civil war between 2 camps – one led by a warlord called al-Burhan leading the main Sudanese armed forces (SAF) with Iranian and Egyptian support and another led by a warlord called Hemedti, leading the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Janjaweed militias in Darfur previously implicated with genocide against black Christian and Animist Sudanese Africans. It is Hemedti who is strongly backed by the UAE and Chad, – Chad for logistic reasons providing local and foreign mercenaries coming from the UAE and pushing them into Sudan from the west. With the RSF committing genocide and war crimes around Darfur and El-Fasher, the Emirati intervention in Sudan has gone horribly astray with international condemnation and attention focused on UAE involvement. By the same token, other Western associates are sinking too. Events in Ukraine are turning dire and pointing towards a British and European defeat, as the Zelensky regime falls apart, many Jewish-Ukrainians implicated in corruption embezzlement scandals are eloping off to Israel, the place that refuses to extradite any Jewish criminals holding Israeli passports. There have been many documented cases of Jewish pedophiles, rapists, fraudsters and murderers escaping from the US, Europe and Asia to Israel, where they are protected from extradition. In addition to the Israeli and religious Talmudic establishment having issues with morality, the Apartheid state accumulates the world’s Jewish criminal class, second only to the USA. With friends like these, who really needs enemies? The Global South is wising up to these pariahs.
Motivation For Hire
The West often prefers to wage covert operations at a distance, relying on proxy stooges to do the fighting rather than deeper commitments in their own blood. There are exceptions of course, such as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, in recent history. Western populations are seldom ready for war – while thoroughly brainwashed and gullible, they lack the motivation to do so, given the West has not yet faced a real existential crisis since WWII on the homeland. All the wars the US imperium has waged in the post-WWII era have been mostly proxy wars. It is why weak pawns such as Ukraine are recruited to sacrifice their futures at the altar of Western hegemony instead. The Western foreign policy establishment are very adept predators in hunting down cannon fodder victims led by easily corruptible goons. This is their bread and butter business. Existential wars rally people and the economy like no other – we see this with China, Russia and Iran in their hybrid wars against the Western foreign policy establishment. It is the same reason why these countries are careful not to provoke the US into such a position yet why the West is unable to defeat them decisively. Some pawns may be lost in the war to the predators, such as Syria for example, but their fate is far from guaranteed in a region highly adapted to fluid allegiances. The West relies overly on foreign proxy stooges and paid mercenaries with no honor as opposed to having their own skin in the game. The fundamental problem for the West is the lack of motivated fighters to do its dirty work. Fighting for money and plunder is a luxury – a dishonorable game. When conditions turn, allegiances are as fickle as the wind. Moreover, blowback tends to be heavy – especially with the Western support of impostor Islamic extremist groups. The Global South can leave the dark arts to the assassination nations of Israel, Britain and the US. They are discrediting themselves with their sadistic displays of shock-and-awe power and dishonorable plunder, while the East opts for attrition and commitments to existential battles. As such, real motivation favors the latter, while the former is only as strong as the collective effort of their stooge networks, and one can only be as strong as its weakest link.
There are far too many weak links in America’s chain of pawns and surrogates. A pawn is a dispensable ‘allied’ nation while a surrogate is a more enduring ‘mini-America’. Pawns like Lithuania and Ukraine for example, are emboldened to make questionable and aggressive decisions under the impression of endless US backstop. Such a backstop is an illusion as it ultimately depends on the interests of US hegemony and the interplay between the 3 superpowers, often at odds with the narrow motivations of its rogue satraps. Thus, many satraps will be hung to dry as Kissinger once quipped, – it is more dangerous to be a US ally than a foe. Surrogates like Britain and Israel are less likely to be ditched as the pawns are, they are chiefly tasked with the most abject dirty work the US cannot openly conduct for fear of losing allies and influence. Israel and Britain frequently conduct ruthless assassinations, terrorist attacks and subterfuge antics – the assassination of Hezbollah figures, Russian generals, attacks against Iran, the Nordstream II pipeline attack and the undermining of the 2022 Istanbul agreement between Ukraine and Russia for example. Surrogates nourish the US with plausible deniability while still being fully present in the planning and execution of aggression. Some surrogates especially Apartheid Israel, cross so many boundaries shamelessly, ruthlessly and remorselessly, that they are ultimately long term liabilities for the US empire, but most pro-Israel victims within Congress are paid not to understand it. The US would not be an empire without Europe under its thumb, but if Europe is weakened by Atlanticist policy then this too will weaken the US. A rotten appendage of the US imperium serving the anti-Russia agenda yet economically and socially in deep malaise may seem like a good asset to have, but in reality, it undermines long term American credibility. But in the end there are no good options with Europe, a place that has ceased to be civilized, therefore keeping it subdued among the 3 superpowers is probably a less bad option than allowing it to run wild with its ‘ideas’ and deranged elites. On this, hopefully Russia, China and the US see with the same eyes.
Illusion of Power
By 2025, it has become apparent that the US is not as powerful as it seems. There are many indicators that point to this conclusion. Firstly, the war in Ukraine has exposed the limits to US power, influence and logistics. Despite the combined might of NATO training, arming and funding its Ukrainian Bandera proxies, even contributing to thousands of NATO officers and mercenaries on the ground, it was not able to stop the Russian war machine from chewing up the trench lines established by NATO since 2014 around Donbass. The Russian war machine slowly saddles at first but gallops swiftly once saddled, we have seen yet again this maxim ring true since the time of Bismarck. Despite all unprecedented sanctions pressures, the Russian armed forces have ballooned to 1.5 million, the economy has successfully stabilized into a dual civilian-war economy and Russian military industrial capacity is in overdrive, outproducing the collective West and sustaining all of Russia’s needs for the Ukraine war – plus a surplus for stockpiles. This brings the West problems – most definitely the problem of Russian armament overcapacity, meaning that an even greater military threat looms should the West double down against Moscow. Moreover, Russian armament overcapacity from the war can later be used to arm China, Iran or any other global theater – a card that brings great leverage against the US in the future. Logistics wins the wars, and the logistics gods do not favor NATO in Ukraine, Europe is in no position to replace the US as chief backer of the Kiev stooge statelet. The major conclusion of the failed NATO-led proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is that the US is not potent enough to sustain more than 1 major global conflict within an attrition warfare context. Throw in an Israel-Iran war that depletes Western anti-air defenses and crowds them out of European and American stockpiles, and any hot showdown with China becomes completely off the table. Israel running out of interceptors for THAAD, Iron Dome and Arrow against overwhelming Iranian ballistics, cruise missiles and drones was why the war lasted a mere 12 days. Iran showed the greater strategic depth and no lion rose during ‘Operation Rising Lion’, even with combined British, French, Jordanian and US air forces flying sorties to protect Israeli skies. If the US wishes to even entertain a war with China, it must first wind down the European and the West Asian fronts against Russia and Palestine/Iran. It cannot sustain more than 1 major conflict at the same time with even the slightest chances of winning and then again, all simulated Pentagon war game scenarios in Asia-Pacific point to a resounding Chinese victory.
There is an even deeper problem for the US that became apparent by 2025 to the world – China has eclipsed the US in industrial capacity, supply chain insulation and competitiveness. Without industrial capacity and shaky supply chain insulation, the West is easily called out on its bluff and bravado. Thus, the West is waking up to an uncomfortable reality – it lags China in terms of real non-financialized economic and social capacity by a long shot. I will later expand on exactly where China is leading. The US reaction to this embarrassing notion for the supposed global hegemon has been a total lash out against friend and foe alike. A very palpable desperation is in the air for the US to go ‘warp speed’ on catch up – throwing around tariffs, sanctions and hastily conjured up schemes clumsily, especially at its satraps. And this is where America’s illusion of power is exposed yet again – shaking down allies for spare cash like a beggar. Nothing screams desperation more than shaking down supposed trillions of dollars in future investments from Arab, European and Asian allies. It signals to the world how far the US is behind China. Promises of building future US production facilities and making huge portfolio investments into the AI bubble, are non-binding and subject to change at a whim based on an ever-changing global political climate. We can question whether US allies are actually sincere in investing more cash into a risky US economy than the total annual value of their GDPs. Perhaps they are playing the Trump administration with “you pretend to be our ally, we pretend to invest in your economy”. In the end, only a small fraction of the promised trillions will likely end up into the US economy. By late 2025, the US suing for peace in Ukraine and West Asia indicate a looming Western defeat in Ukraine, a public image collapse from a Zionist genocide, imperial overstretch and industrial incapacity, taking their tolls on failing Western Hollywood-style narratives. China coming out the biggest winner through the self-exhaustion of foolish Western policy is now fait accompli. As for the new kids on the block among the US military-industrial complex, Palantir, Anduril and SpaceX, they hope to win contracts at the Pentagon edging out old players like Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. How they plan to do this is using global conflicts to tweak and update products like agile software development. As per an Anduril source: “Ukraine was a financially unprofitable but necessary project. We gained knowledge that we can use against China”. Yet little did it ever occur to the source that the Russians also gained knowledge of NATO systems, knowledge that is very much shared with China.
Internal Rot
The US system is a ‘pay-to-play’ bordello where Zionist, foreign, military and corporate parasites eat into the American electorate’s lunch for free, while skipping the queue. The US government in turn, outsources its dirty work to ‘private’ interests or foreign surrogates, expecting a cut in return. Importantly, China does not suffer from a British and Zionist infestation problem unlike America, eating its insides and rotting its soul. This is an extremely taxing burden that retards growth, social cohesion, public image and competitiveness. Britain lacks the economic clout to sustain its imperial pipedreams while Israel lacks the strategic depth to sustain any peer blowback arising from its extremist posturing. Together they piggyback off US resources, ungratefully. The market serves the government which serves the people in China and profit-maximizing nodes in the value-added chain are not hampered by selfishness to the extent that it impacts greater harmony – these are Confucian and Taoist principles in action sprinkled with Socialism with Chinese characteristics. And China most certainly does not have any such ‘piggybacking’ dynamics especially foreign commitments. In the US, the government serves the market which serves the Plutocracy and profit-maximizing nodes in the value-added chain are hampered by selfishness to the extent that they inevitably collide with greater harmony – these are Fascist principles pretending to be Capitalist, since most of these ‘too big to fail’ private corporations are rent-seeking monopolists in bed with the US government through insider deals where the US government picks and chooses winners based on nepotist ties: “I’ll scratch your back while you scratch mine”.
Their sense of entitlement is encapsulated by Peter Thiel, a Big Tech Oligarch whose book ‘Competition Is For Losers’, best sums up that mentality. Moreover, there is nothing special or meritocratic about the Zionist infestation of America, especially Jews. They are known for nepotism and looking out for each other through insider cliques, exclusionary practices and favoritism. The reader may wish to analyze the management structure of Palantir and its relationship to the US government, for a typical case study. As of 2025, there finally appears to be a break within the ‘MAGA’ movement about the dangerous pro-Israel fetish among the established conservative movement. As I have said many times before, support for Zionism ‘no matter what’ will be the downfall of the West if left unaddressed. This is pure treachery and negligence. Supporting a supremacist Apartheid death cult has no place in the 21st century. AIPAC and ADL must be registered as foreign agencies and their blackmail kompromat rings dismantled. Support for Israel must change from ‘no matter what’ to ‘except when genocide and ethnic cleansing is conducted’. Its called evolution.
Democratic Instability
The first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is the most popular brand of electoral voting in the West, but this system produces phenomena such as ‘hung parliaments’, under-representation, tactical voting and false majorities where the plurality of the ‘winner’ can be only 30% of the vote, resulting in social resentment. If the culture at hand is prone to bickering, which includes most Western political systems, ‘democracy’ breaks down to either a popularity contest or kayfabe boxing match, reducing the collective IQ of debates down to infantile soundbites. In the last 5 years, there has been tremendous political gridlock across the West: the UK has had 4 Prime Ministers in 5 years, Israel has had 5 elections in 5 years and many European countries have easily had 2 or 3 turnovers. Italy has had 68 governments in the past 76 years. This system does not produce stability or long term planning, especially when Western politicians also excessively ‘tweet’ and use social media, reflecting the underlying need for instant gratification, attention deficit disorder and low attention spans at play. Flip flopping, dishonesty, short-termism and betrayal are baked into these systems, especially in ‘high trust’ societies that often equate to gullibility and naivety. The driving force in Israeli society is not to be a ‘Friar’: a dupe that does everything right and follows the rules, only to fall behind the cunning scoundrel who cut corners and undercut his fellow man. Unscrupulous behavior is viewed as noble and defines ‘Israeliness’ – which is not so surprising for a society that defends raping Palestinian prisoners on a land given to them by god, celebrates the murder of unarmed women and children and refuses to extradite Israeli pedophiles, killers and rapists for their crimes abroad. Europe has similarly degenerated to extreme levels of infantilism, militarism, paranoia and fear-mongering from the big bad Russian bogeyman blamed for almost everything wrong on the continent, – a continent that birthed the dark ages and two world wars while calling itself the ‘garden’ looking out at the jungle. Israel is stuck on repeat with similar tropes about Palestinians and a debilitating ‘Chosenitis’ syndrome. Many people with jobs, families and voting rights in these countries are living in mass formation psychosis societies. If one throws in codependency with Uncle Sam’s conditional largesse and de-industrialized economies or economies with no strategic depth as in Israel’s case, handcuffing themselves to the Titanic after it has hit the iceberg is not exactly the salvation they need to be competitive in the 21st century.
How and Where China Is Leading
China’s advantage over the US is colored by several indicators, most notably social, political and economic. The CPC regards itself as a ‘workers’ State ideologically, with egalitarian initiatives lessening social inequality and improving prosperous Socialist culture, at the forefront of China’s 5 year plans alongside sovereign security and economic-military strength. While collectivist, hive minded social standards work well with Han Chinese, they can be questioned from the perspective of hyper-individualistic Western standards. Such criticisms do not render them any less effective for Chinese society or many societies around the world for that matter. Western societies too, are inexorably moving towards a collectivist position, given the failures of late stage imperialism and crony capitalism. We must remember that Western hyper-individualism is not the global trend, it is the exception. Where China shines brightest is its superiority of a far more intelligently engineered – rational and stable, political and economic system compared to the West. Firstly, it is apparent in late 2025 with all the wild and desperate lash outs by the Trump administration, that the US has fallen behind China in terms of supply chain independence, industrial capacity and internal stability. The realization has quietly dawned on both allies and adversaries alike. The US is far too over-financialized, hijacked by parasites, degeneracy and burdened by inequality at alarming levels. The Chinese system born from Deng Xiaoping’s vision has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and has never resorted to barbaric displays of power as a strategic pillar to convince the world of its might, as the West likes to do. The preference for mutual trade over violent plunder has returned the Middle Kingdom high yields on its patient investments. The mere fact that China is forcing the US and the West to compete on the economic development and diplomatic front signifies that it is leading over the West, compelling the West to depart from its long-standing position of escalations, brutish bouts of destruction and zero-sum mentality. It highlights who has the stronger foundation for the 21st century – and China’s system is the winner here. ‘Win-win’ mutual partnerships are superior to childish one-sided zero-sum entitlement complexes in a rational world wide awake. A culture lacking patience and self-control not only suffers from infantilism, but creates and celebrates monsters – cases in point: Israel, Britain, the EU and the US. This is one difference between a civilization on the ascendancy and a civilization in decline.
Let us now explore the degree to which China is leading. China’s near-fully indigenous technology stack means global technology is no longer dominated by the West and this has serious geopolitical implications – more countries are becoming impervious to Western pressure. In response to trade escalations from the US side, namely tariffs and sanctions against Chinese goods and firms, China surprised everybody by banning Nvidia chips, even the watered down H20 export version of the more powerful Nvidia H200 series already blocked with export restrictions by the US. The banning of H20 chip imports by China not only signals growing confidence in its strong bargaining position, but acts as a way to stimulate domestic innovation to replace US chips with Chinese made chips spearheaded by Huawei’s Ascend series and beyond. Currently, the US still leads China by about a generation ahead in GPU chips, with the US focusing its efforts on maximizing individual chip performance and relying on foundries in Taiwan and Japan for design and restricting key cutting edge technological know-how to China, specifically lithography from AMSL. China compensates for this disadvantage with synergistic approaches that involve clustering many of its chips to work in tandem to out-process US chips per unit advantages. Huawei has patented a technology called a ‘SuperPod’ whereby it aggregates its cutting edge Ascend chips into clusters for enhanced performance based on synergistic principles. On a unit chip basis, US chips are more powerful, but when clustered together, the throughput of Chinese clusters can match the most advanced US chips at a much lower cost due to economies of scale and hardware efficiencies. A recent paper by the research arm of Ant Group, one of China’s largest fintech and payment systems companies behind Alibaba Group, has laid out the case for clustering in effectively scaling a 300 billion parameter mixture-of-experts AI LLM running on less powerful Chinese chips to be just as powerful and cheaper to run as a Western rival without the need for premium GPUs.
In early 2025, DeepSeek applied this theory and broke the monopolist dreams of American tech firms by giving away all the online data that was stolen and siphoned up by US AI companies to train their closed sourced for-profit models, and gave it back to the world for free in the form of distilled open-source AI models. Normally, tens of thousands of chips would be needed to power a top-of-the-line AI supercomputer but DeepSeek did it with only thousands of chips using clustering techniques. DeepSeek’s mantra of “doing more with less” prompted Microsoft, Amazon and Google to scale back data center expansion plans. The genius of the move not only forced US companies to re-think their business models and investments in AI, but China was establishing its tech stack at the vanguard of the ‘open-source’ AI market ahead of the US. The US company ‘OpenAI’ is not even open-source. Their expensive models were now having to compete against far cheaper and just as effective Chinese open-source AI and this has given them serious competition, eating away at their market share, at least in the open-source space. Today, China dominates the open-source AI market, with Alibaba’s Qwen flagship models leading in popularity and surpassing Meta’s Llama in number of users. Even large US companies such as AirBnB power their AI needs with Qwen highlighting that Western firms are not all driven by politics but more practical considerations such as price and security. It is worth mentioning that China’s open-source AI models are also available in premium paid versions for high end users needing that extra performance, business support and integration and similarly, American closed source models such as OpenAI also offer open-source versions to the public. The end result of this competitive environment is a far better outcome for global consumers and retail users – they have more choice and flexibility to use AI without spending exorbitant costs on hardware. This was possible thanks to China.
China has a clear advantage in State project management, having a tightly integrated stack of project planning, financing and construction which operates with economies of scale unmatched compared to the Western model of private contracting and contract skimming. As an example, the Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge project, the world’s tallest bridge, was built in 4 years for $300 million. A conservative estimate of the same project using the US project model would take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars. Another typical Chinese great feat has been the ‘Great Green Wall’ project, an ongoing project launched in 1978 going until 2050 to address China’s growing desertification problem in the west and north of the country. The Gobi and Taklamakan deserts have been shifting with the wind towards urbanized regions, threatening provinces with depopulation. The Politburo decided to take on the unimaginable task of turning the desert green by growing vegetation to stop the shifting sands. Initially as expected, the project faced hurdles and much trial and error occurred with only limited success to the point of domestic and international backlash being hurled towards the project. But the Chinese government weathered on and engineers persisted with novel solutions. Today, the project is succeeding in stemming desertification and has added tens of billions of new trees, increased 300,000 square kilometers of green vegetation, tripling the area since 1978. It is a truly remarkable project in scope of collectivist involvement in millions of people from all social strata, ranging from the military to government teachers and children lending hands to plant trees in the deserts. These sorts of projects will never see the light of day in the West without a fundamental change in social attitudes. China’s greatest strength no country in the world can rival is its manpower when rallied towards a great cause. The scale is quite simply unmatched.
Chinese brands are already household names, some examples include: TP Link, Temu, Lenovo, BYD, ZTE, Huawei, Oppo, DeepSeek, Qwen, Xiaomei, AliExpress, JD, Nexperia, Great Wall Motors, Didi, TikTok, Binance, DJI and Luckin Coffee. Less known conglomerates are Baowu – the world’s largest steelmaker, Nexperia – producing 40% of automotive chips worldwide, CATL – world leading EV battery producer (supplying Tesla) and Cosco Shipping – one of the world’s largest shipping companies. Cosco not only builds bulk, LNG and container carriers, it owns and operates a vast network of ports around the world through subsidiaries, helping its logistic supply chains and cost competitiveness. Tencent is China’s most valuable company with a market cap at $600 billion and its Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is the largest bank in the globe by AuM. As of 2025, China leads the globe in steel production, high speed rail, commercial shipping, EVs, lithium batteries, solar panels, rare earth refining, robotics, quantum encryption, legacy chips, nuclear plant production, 5G and 6G telecommunications, gold production, civilian drones and many other goods, remaining the world’s top manufacturing powerhouse. This is partly due to the economic dynamic with the US and its entry into the WTO in 2001 but mostly due to careful strategic planning such as the ‘Made in China 2025’ initiative and cumulative gains from rolling 5 year plans. Robotics in China are advancing, with China leading in number of operational ‘dark factories’ – nearly fully automated production lines using robotic workers. Advances in quantum encryption has seen China sustain coherent quantum channels over record-breaking distances of 13,000km between South Africa and China using satellites. Emerging advances in photonic chips, solid-state batteries that can run 1000km on one charge and thorium-to-uranium fuel conversion, could one day revolutionize semiconductor chips, EVs and power China with domestically-sourced energy for 1000 years. We are only scratching the surface of what China could bring global civilization in the near future. And this is good for humanity.
The AI race is impacting both Chinese and American economies in similar ways. But the two behemoth economies are prepared differently to deal with the energy requirements of the 4th industrial revolution. In the US, rapid expansion of data centers and hyperscalers is taking a strain on local communities with higher prices through voracious appetite for water and electricity consumption. The Chinese economy is far better prepared to handle contemporary and scaled future AI demand due to its cheaper, modern and better integrated energy mix. Over 30% of China’s economy is electrified as of 2025, and since 1985 electricity production has jumped 20-fold from 500 TWh (terrawatt hours) to 10,000 TWh while electricity production in the US has largely flatlined at 4000 TWh. The surge in electricity production has prepared China with spare capacity to deal with the AI boom while the US lags behind with an electric grid increasingly under strain. China’s electricity mix is composed of 30% renewable energy including solar, wind, bio fuel and hydro, making it more green than the US economy and almost as green as the EU. With China dominating wind, solar and hydro power in the world, its green energy mix is only set to grow. The massive hydropower dam on the Yarlung Zangbo river will be the world’s largest by the 2030s. China has already installed 900GW of solar energy, more than the EU and US combined, making it on track to becoming the most green economy in the world. Part of this is to alleviate one of the greatest risks to its economy – the potential chokepoint of Malacca where 80% of its oil transits – a weakness subject to US embargo in the event of a war over Taiwan. It is for this reason along with de-risking from Western fossil fuel sanctions, as to why Beijing has signed pipeline agreements with Russia and has its sights set on global leadership in renewable energy.
China keeps energy inflation low with excess capacity and government subsidies, it produces the equivalent of over 100 nuclear power plants (NPPs) per year for 900GW of solar energy produced. The US relies more on gas and nuclear power, after the nuclear power boom in the US during the 1960s and 1970s saw the construction of many nuclear reactors, placing the US alongside France as most dominant in nuclear energy power. However, the US no longer plans to build new nuclear reactors while China is racing ahead with new constructions. China is set to outgrow US dominance in nuclear energy. The main concern for China vis-a-vis its electricity mix is that 60% comes from coal, a highly abundant energy mined in China but very dirty. From the 1980s until the mid 2010s, the Politburo accepted the social health risks and environmental pollution as the costs of powering its economy towards catch up with the West. The costs were indeed great, with infamous images of thick smog covering Beijing for many years, bottled fresh air and ubiquitous use of masks. Dirty coal and refining of rare Earth elements have been extremely toxic endeavours due to heavy metal contamination and other toxic byproducts. Some studies estimate that 1 tonne of rare Earth elements processed come at a cost of 2000 tonnes of toxic waste byproduct. China took this risk onto itself for the sake of its development and came out the global leader in rare Earth elements, dominating 60% of global mining and over 90% of global refining. 45 years of patience and pollution later and this has become one of its greatest weapons against the US.
Nowadays, the smog around the tiered cities has drastically reduced, but pollution remains an issue so long as coal still accounts for 60% of electricity production, – something China is hoping to substitute with nuclear and green energy in the next decade. Dominance in critical mineral mining and refining is one of China’s ‘bazooka’ cards it holds against the US, which as of 2025, has pulled the trigger at the US in response to tariffs, and slapped export restrictions to US and EU military supply chains, a clever and proportionate punishment against Western bullying. Why supply a military that intends on warring with China? The message was clear: sanctions and export controls will be deployed against the West, and nobody could really do this as effectively as China could, only Russia in second place with its commodities and fossil fuels. The US has finally found its match. Restrictions on silver, tungsten and antimony into 2026-2027 in addition to restrictions on rare Earth magnets, gallium and graphene are aimed at dealing a blow against the US military-industrial complex. As a result, the West is scrambling to find alternative supply chains, something it understands may take decades to perfect. Even then, reliance on ‘friend-shoring’ partners like Malaysia, Congo and Australia will be more likely rather than genuine all-American supply chains. China in this regard has truly independent and integrated rare Earth supply chains located solely within China. One third of silver demand nowadays goes to photovoltaics (solar panels) and lithium is critical for EV batteries. The race to secure the future’s supply chains is underway, and the US fell behind China, too busy pandering to Zionism and attacking West Asian countries with little to no air force. The price of that folly has finally dawned on its elites.
After taking Hong Kong back under effective Chinese control in 2019 when CIA front groups were dismantled and arrested among the ‘pro-democracy’ student movement, Hong Kong is playing an increasingly vital financial window for China and the world. The Renminbi (RMB) is China’s currency but confusingly also known as the Yuan. This is because there are two parallel Yuans that make up the RMB. While capital controls are in place within China, as a consequence of a policy mix centered on a fixed exchange currency regime, the ‘onshore’ Yuan (CNY) is the domestically traded RMB while the ‘offshore’ Yuan (CNH) is mostly conducted in Hong Kong as the international RMB. The Hong Kong dollar (HKD) is an equally important currency for traders interfacing with China. As a key pillar of de-dollarization and internationalizing the RMB, China has developed important exchanges over the years. The Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) now rivals Comex and LBMA for vault storage and gold price discovery, enabling China to eat a large market share in a once Western dominated market. The SGE is headquartered in Shanghai but its offshore vault storage has recently centered in Hong Kong for international investors. Investors wishing to trade or redeem gold at the SGE pay in RMB, not dollars or euros. The mechanism helps create global demand for RMB. Additionally, the Shanghai International Energy Exchange, a subsidiary of the Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE), is another attempt to move price discovery in energy toward China. In 2018 China offered ‘Petro-Yuan’ derivatives as a product for Asian refiners and nations like Iran and Russia to bypass Western sanctions in their oil trades with the Chinese market. RMB payments are increasing within BRICS+, with Russia recently issuing Yuan denominated bonds in Russia and China, tapping BRICS+ investors as alternative funding sources to Western investors. Moreover, the growing Russia-China trade turnover of over $200 billion which is 99% denominated in RUB and RMB, means Russia’s accumulation of Chinese currency makes sense for it to be recycled back into Yuan-denominated bonds, in turn boosting the internationalization of the RMB.
Like Russia invoicing its commodity exports in RUB, China has successfully hit USD market share with two significant developments: invoicing imports in RMB and issuing foreign bonds that eat away at US Treasury market share. China has used its out-sized consumer leverage in the global iron ore market to negotiate with BHP Billiton the invoicing of 30% of its iron ore imports in RMB as a way to boost the internationalization of the RMB while also reducing exchange rate risk. Moreover, issuing Eurodollar bonds in Saudi Arabia, a long time client state of the US, denominated in USD but in Saudi markets to Gulf Arab investors, is a gentle way to offer the Global South credit instruments without direct exposure to the credit-risk of the US government. The issuance was over-subscribed, highlighting strong demand for Chinese debt. These trends and developments are expected to grow rapidly in the coming years as the RMB internationalizes and eats a growing share of foreign exchange demand, a pre-requisite for the ultimate decoupling of the Yuan-Dollar peg. Once China develops sufficient global demand for the RMB, a long term project that will take decades, it can only then entertain the notion of unpegging from the USD and floating what is generally deemed an under-valued RMB. The RMB in such an event is expected to strengthen significantly from valuations today, so the Chinese domestic consumption base must be strong enough to offset reliance on exports to make room for a stronger RMB. There would be no more need to hold hundreds in billions of dollars of US Treasuries – but unwinding these toxic assets has already began and will likely happen before any future de-peg. China has already liquidated 40% of its US debt holdings, from a peak of over $1.2 trillion in the early 2010s to $700 billion as of 2025. In late 2025, Chinese foreign currency bond issuances in Hong Kong and Luxembourg were 15-25 times oversubscribed, €4 billion euros were raised but over €100 billion euros in orders were submitted. The strong demand suggests falling faith in American debt and rising confidence in China’s economic system.
It matters not how much advanced technology one has if one does not have the energy capacity to power it. The US by the 2040s is expected to double its energy production to meet demand but China is already ahead by a long shot. There is much work to be done for America to upgrade its infrastructure. As of 2025, the US leads the world with over 90 nuclear reactors, albeit old reactors. China has approximately 60, with 30 new reactors under construction and another 70 planned within the next 10 years. China has also built the world’s first 4th generation nuclear reactor using novel Chinese innovation. The US has almost 0 new planned constructions in the foreseeable future due to environmental regulations and high costs. The nuclear race has thus been won by China, especially small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), an advantage that takes decades, if not generations to build. “To get rich is glorious but to stay rich, you must think in centuries” Deng Xiaoping once quipped. The fundamental difference between the American and Chinese systems is that the market works for the State which delivers for the people in China while the State works for the market which delivers to the Plutocracy in America. The US is unable to pull off bold 5 year plans, as the time horizon window is already beyond the 4 year selection cycle. Therefore, due to inherent political limitations, the US is forced into Fascism, a merger with private corporations to compete against each other for solutions to meet government demand. However, profit-driven incentives trump national harmony and long term strategic vision, therein lies the challenge in reliance on private corporations. This is largely why China is able to keep supply chains far better integrated and cost-competitive within its economy than the US. Moreover, the US government knows it is falling behind China and taking increasingly risky bets on miracle technological breakthroughs rather than the tried and tested bottom-up approach of building up education, skills, State-backed funding and industrial capacity needed to not only construct but streamline complex projects over time, lowering their costs while boosting output over time – a truly productive way of planning. To make matters worse for the US, China currently leads nuclear fusion and thorium reactor research, which are not yet operational, only potential breakthrough solutions in energy production. Its EAST fusion reactor in Hefei, dubbed the ‘artificial sun’ reactor, was able to reach 100 million degrees for 16 minutes – a world record. Any breakthroughs in feasible nuclear fusion and thorium would revolutionize the world.
While Trump may want to bring back manufacturing back to the US, the more imperialist camp in the Deep State prefers to maintain foreign supply chains to cement US influence abroad. They see isolationism and self-sufficiency as a bad thing, as it degrades their need to meddle abroad and lock countries into a Western sphere of influence, especially with trade. It is far likelier that Trump will flip flop on his promises and ultimately buckle to the imperialist camp – we already see the US invest heavily in Asian ‘friend-shoring’ production rather than US-based production. Perhaps the economics does not make any sense for the latter, especially with the only significant rare Earth refining outside of China done in Malaysia. So much for manufacturing coming back to the US either, with plans to boost investment in Vietnam and India as alternatives to China. Why not the US? The economics simply makes no sense. Therein lies the illusion of ‘MAGA’ – it was a great sounding slogan but sadly, the US is just not a competitive player. It used to be great, but its future looks increasingly to be grating against a debt time bomb, imperial overstretch and a world where demographics favors the Global South as the center of gravity. Moreover, the politicization of economics is a bad miscalculation by the Western elite, – ultimately Western consumers and firms will be driven by price, not ideology, just as the era pre-dating the Trump administration.
The Lesson of the Forest
Modern day society is underpinned by demographics growth, the unspoken social contract and debt-based economics no matter what part of the world we are referring to. In China’s case, the social contract goes much further than the West. The West on the other hand, races much deeper into debt. Both are at the mercy of their demographic trends. The fraud of interest-bearing credit is the source of all money supply, therefore the politics of ‘growth at any cost’ makes sense once you understand the need for economies to expand in order to service debt interest obligations but also their inherent demographic growth. Policymakers are incentivized to chase GDP even when environmental or social returns are negative. However, the 21st century is no longer the 20th century and social awareness and news travels at the speed of light through the world’s largest network called the Internet. Expectations of being more socially aware, collectivist and less ’20th century’ like our dear friends in the Western foreign policy establishment are rising, as the Global South inherits the world that Western imperialism once shaped. It is paramount that we move past zero-sum, cold war mentalities that the West wishes to foist upon a world that ultimately needs to cooperate more than compete amidst an increasingly crowded space. Lenin was correct in saying that imperialism is but a manifestation of Capitalism and Marx correctly diagnosed Capitalism as exploitative, leading to inequality and class struggle. But the example of the USSR also showed that Socialism when not properly implemented can lead to ruination. The solution is thus a compromise between both systems – a mixed market economy – and China is a successful embodiment of that hybrid system. At an international level, the BRICS+ vision of an alternative to Western imperialism as a global cooperative community of common destiny would be the idea of ‘win-win’ multilateralism. Neutral participants would follow a multi-vector foreign policy balancing act, while anti-imperialist participants would build a strong collective deterrent structure against predatory Anglo-American designs on non-negotiable national sovereignty. Together they would make up the bulk of the multipolar world. And should a miracle happen, with the West reforming itself, shedding its supremacist dogma and joining the democracy of sovereign nations as a co-equal, only then may we consider world peace as possible.
Zionism would be akin to a seal colony – nothing but raw competitive violence and breeding. But nobody sophisticated wishes to emulate a seal colony. If nature is our guide and we study her carefully, we will realize that forests are places where evolution has selected cooperation above that of competition. True Communism is found in the forests, therefore the argument that animals are wired to compete selfishly and fight incessantly, ergo humans and Capitalism should reflect just that, is only half the story. There is most definitely a place for Capitalism and competition, without them there would be less innovation and drive. But if humans are to rise above mammals and reptiles and distinguish themselves as a truly higher species, then humans have the responsibility to study the plant world and emulate billions of years of evolutionary success in that kingdom. Trees are highly social and most activity connected together into a highly aware and communicative collective at the subterranean level – root systems and symbiotic mycelium networks. When a tree is sick, it potentially spells trouble for the entire forest by exposing the canopy and spreading disease. Its roots communicate to the forest via mycelium networks helping to pump chemical distress compounds to other trees. Trees with excess nutrients respond and pump them to the sick tree in need. If the forest were far more competitive place, it would not survive as a forest but be a patchwork of aggressive individual trees surrounded by submissive orbiting trees, and the survival rate of the overall patchwork would drop, due to less connected social support structures i.e. root systems. There would be no rich forest ecology full of life and the outcome would be reflected in an atmosphere with less oxygen able to support living and breathing life. This is the moral of the story that is also applicable to complex human societies that necessarily need to evolve out of imperialism. China’s system most closely resembles that of the forest.
A tremendous uphill battle faces the West – not only in catching up to China, but in reforming its broken system politically, economically and socially. The hollowing out of Western power and credibility is real and elites in the City of London, Washington DC, Tel Aviv and Brussels have only themselves to blame. Western elites require a sea change in management and ideology but this will prove their stickiest challenge given the totality of the apparatus behind the ideology – perverse incentives, think tanks, media outlets, lobbyist networks, politicians and agency handlers embedded in private and public structures. As I have said before, unless the change begins with internal shifts in policy and mentality, it will be forced through either revolution, technological black swans or the Russo-Chinese military. The messianic Fascist Zionist usurpation of America is a foundational infestation. Russophobia is a foundational infestation in Britain and the EU. Imperialistic exceptionalism including the European ‘garden variety’ largely remains the over-arching sickness in need of remedy. The post-WWII system has collapsed and history did not end with glittery peace and stability after the demise of the USSR, – Western elites ramped up interventionism. It took a few decades before the interventionism blew back in their faces. The tale of China is both inspirational for the Global South and truly frightening for the West – an ancient civilization which has suffered at the hands of predatory Western imperialism yet re-invented itself to the point of leading the globe once again. There is little to fear from a system rooted in forest collectivism, rationality and common sense.