The US president-elect is hazing BRICS with threats of 100% tariffs to be slapped on all members of BRICS unless they swore allegiance to the US Dollar as an international medium of transactions and a global currency.
Trump says keep business as usual or face US wrath in the form of tariffs. The problem for Mr Trump is that those tariffs will hurt the US economy more than the BRICS’.
This discourse interrogates the key variables that are niggling the Trump incoming administration and whether the threats are a solution or a catalyst to dump the US Dollar.
The US Dollar was a convenient and efficient global medium of transactions, but over decades, the US has abused its pole position, condemning many nations into untold poverty.
Through the US dollar, America has recklessly borrowed over $31 trillion and counting—most of the US debt funds excesses such as security, welfare systems and healthcare.
Those three items are killing the US economy, and no American politician has the guts to tell voters that America is done.
The US is now running deficits, and deferring a total collapse of the US as a nation depends very much on how it relates to the rest of the World.
“American exceptionalism” was an outright deception, as I will articulate. The US is unwilling to dump its defence contractors, who have been allocated closer to three-quarters of a trillion dollars this year alone.
Part of the challenge to American politics is the role of money in the running of elections.
Defence contractors contribute hefty sums to almost all politicians of major parties, and by doing so, politicians become the contractors’ hired hands.
Defence contractors push for global military adventures to justify the US Federal government’s purchase of military contraptions.
If you look at the recent conflicts that the US has been involved in, you will see that there were no American national interests to begin with.
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Afghanistan, for example, the Soviet Union, was determined to end its role in international terrorism, but the US sided with the terrorists!
The US armed Al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden for almost two decades.
When the Soviets saw the US was strengthening the hand of international terrorists, they opted out of the conflict.
On 911, the US paid dearly for her meddling in the Russian-Afghanistan conflict, which wasn’t hers.
Instead of dealing with Afghanistan as the source of their pain, the US opted to pick a soft target, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, a peaceful nation nursing no global terrorism inclinations.
The US invasion of Iraq was loudly over an Iraq- Kuwait conflict that the US ambassador in Iraq had brewed when she had advised Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, and the US would look the other side.
Saddam Hussein, whose country was recuperating from a nine-year war with Iran, deluded himself the US was on his side at a time the Russians were the ones drilling oil in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein thought by decimating the Iran forces, he was doing the US a favour, but the US was angling for a bigger fish to fry: ownership of Iraq oil wells.
So, the US invaded Iraq on the pretext of rescuing Kuwait from Iraq’s clutches, but behind the scenes, the US was determined to elbow the Russians out of the Iraq oil wells.
Anglo-American conglomerates, together with their defence contractors, were salivating at the thought of seeping the Iraq oils for a song.
They knew Russia was economically and militarily too weak to interfere and stop the piracy. Paradoxically, the now-Ukrainian war was an upshot of the Iraq war, as I will soon demonstrate.
Once the Russians were kicked out of Iraq, the US then remembered Al-Qaeda, whom they had nurtured to limit the influence of the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Then, for the next two decades, the US spent two trillion dollars and counting to replace the Talibans with Talibans!
The US unsuccessfully perspired to install her puppets in Afghanistan, but the vassals were too corrupt to run a country and later were dislodged by the Taliban.
Now, the US has no influence in Afghanistan and even in Iraq, where for almost a decade and counting, closer to $757 billion may soon be shown the exit door.
This year alone, the 32 members of NATO will burn closer to $1.47 Trillion, with the US remaining the world’s largest military spender by far.
In dollar terms, the US represents about two-thirds of NATO countries’ annual defence spending, budgeting an estimated $967bn.
This represents about 3.4 per cent of the $28.7 trillion US economy. It is a reckless expenditure that is sustainable by the dollarization of the global economy, massive borrowing from many countries worldwide, and individuals who buy US debt.
The United States has one of the highest healthcare costs in the world. In 2022, U.S. healthcare spending reached $4.5 trillion, which averages $13,493 per person.
By comparison, the average cost of healthcare per person in other wealthy countries is less than half as much.
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This was a 4.1% increase from 2021 and accounted for 17.3% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The US cannot pay this health bill, so, like in defence, it keeps borrowing to keep up its unhealthy lifestyle of reckless living.
As of September 30, 2024, the U.S. Ukraine response funding totals nearly $183 billion, with $130.1 billion obligated and $86.7 billion disbursed.
It is a conflict of supporting Western Ukrainians who have been committing genocide against the Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
Russia could not keep quiet over the deliberate killings of innocent Russians in Ukraine, so it proposed self-rule in Donbas. Donbhas is estimated to be worth more than twenty trillion dollars in natural resources.
The Ukrainians agreed to a self-rule proposal, but the US, knowing how rich in natural resources East Ukraine was and the whole of Donbhas, forced the Ukrainians to disagree.
The Ukrainians thought the US would help them when the Russians came calling and were shocked to see how the US feared the Russians.
The US swore never to bring boots in Ukraine, throwing a towel even before the bell rang.
In two years, Ukraine has been defeated, and what the Russians are doing right now is a mopping-up exercise. In two years, it is estimated more than a million Ukrainians have been killed or maimed, and the country is now living on handouts.
Ukraine has already admitted defeat and is willing to give the Russians almost the whole of East Ukraine a promise of joining NATO.
The problem is that NATO will never allow itself to have a member sitting on a tinderbox involving Russia. Forget China; Russia is the only country that defeated Hitler in Germany and can fight without fear of death or incurring disability.
All the so-called Nato countries lack gender, and this is why they do not show up in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian conflict has exposed how the US is weaponizing the dollar as a tool of war. The US has sanctioned Russia by withholding over $300 billion of Russian money.
Russia had sold the US goods and services, but the US parlaying the Ukrainian conflict as a lame excuse to nationalise Russian billions!
What the US was saying was that it was preventing Russia from using its money to wage a war against Ukraine. But now, the rhetoric has dramatically shifted.
The US is now propositioning that the Russian billions be used to rebuild Ukraine, which had committed wanton genocide against her people!
Of more significance, the US cannot decide what other countries can do with their money for a simple reason: it’s not the US money, period.
BRICS is a reaction to the US abuses of her global pole position, and Trump’s threats of 100% tariffs against members of BRICS will backfire on US consumers. They may tilt and slide the US economy into hyperinflation.
Tariffs are essentially sales tax; either retailers and consumers absorb it, or the latter impose it fully.
At the moment, US groceries are facing stickier inflation, which is unlikely to vanish because of Trump’s re-election. However, his extortionate tariffs will make groceries too expensive for an average American.
Such 100% tariffs may lead to social unrest in the US.
Unlike most members of BRICS, US citizens are almost 100% captured.
They cannot grow their own food but depend on a supply chain over which they have no control to bring food to supermarkets.
Once that supply chain is ricocheted by 100% tariffs, the US consumer will stumble into food stamps, and the US will spend more to keep hunger out of her country.
BRICS now see Donald Trump’s recent threat of punitive tariffs on his X page as an indication that they are heading in the right direction.
It will take some time to reorient the global economy away from the US Dollar, but once that is complete, we should not be surprised to see the US Dollar depreciate to the level of the Zim dollar.
Then, the US empire will come down, crumbling like a house of cards.
Hopefully, with its nukes, it will be a banana Republic with nukes just like the US used to mock Russia: that Russia was a petrol station with nukes.
And the US will not be laughing when it can no longer project power abroad.
Had the US not invaded Iraq, most likely, the Ukraine would not have been battered the way it is today.
Russia saw if the US took Ukraine under her orbit, Russia would be boxed into a corner.
So, Russians stopped the US belligerence at the right time, and the US’s inability to intervene in Ukraine showed the limits of a once unipolar world ruler.
The world has officially moved from unipolarity to multipolarity, and sadly, President-elect Donald Trump is still caught up in the lost glory of US power.
Therefore, threats of imposing 100% tariffs on members of BRICS will not deter BRICS from pursuing the de-dollarization of their economies but will spur them to speed up the process.
De-dollarisation is now a survival mode for all BRICS members, and the US will have to learn to live within its means and not expect other nations to keep up perpetually carrying its can.
Agoa will die a natural death after the Trump administration slaps BRICS with 100% tariffs, but nobody in the BRICS will suffer serious damage; only the US leverage will burn into flames.
Speaking of leverage, the US threatened South Africa of losing Agoa if they failed to arrest Russian president Vladimir Putin had he attended the BRICS annual meeting in Johannesburg following the Western-leaning ICC criminal indictments against him and others.
I haven’t addressed how the US prodded the EU to delink Russians from the SWIFT payment system, but it is the EU economy that is bleeding to death.
This is a long, meandering narrative reserved for another day.
