Bye-bye, US dollar

Those who want to peep into the future know that it is completely useless to look into current conflicts in order to get to the future.

Indeed, wars are usually failed influence operations, but they cannot serve as an elevation, from which future equilibria can be foreseen. Geopolitics is only interested in superficial factors. In order to be able to foresee what will happen, it is necessary to dive into the depths, into geo-economic movements. This is associated with certain challenges, because meta-banking processes occur in silence. Nevertheless, these quiet changes govern the turbulent surface of the world.

So, what happened during this decade?

In the early 2000s, the geo-Asian powers opposed to the West came up with the idea of dividing in order to rule. As a result, they began to play with the euro against the dollar. However, this strategy was quickly abandoned in favor of the internal structuring of the continental bloc. This was done in three stages: in 2017, India, Russia, and China combined their digital systems for remote clearing of financial transactions using two tools: the Chinese international payment system and the Russian system for transmitting financial messages, while carefully taking into account the competing interests of the SWIFT system. At the second stage, their monetary systems were connected using three tools: UnionPay for China, MIR for Russia, and UPI for India. At the third stage, the BRICS countries launched their own cryptocurrencies: in March 2023, India tested its digital national currency, the digital rupee, in 15 major cities of the country and signed an agreement with the United Arab Emirates on developing a fiat currency. Starting July 2023, the Chinese can make transactions in digital yuan. Finally, on August 15 last year, the first stage of testing a digital ruble based on blockchain technology started in Russia.

Thus, networks for remote clearing, remittances, and cryptocurrency exchange have been joined to form the nervous system of the BRICS economies. This digital system will be extended to new club members. Before our eyes, an operation of monetary electrolysis is being carried out. It is an advanced tool for Split Internet (Splinternet). It will gradually separate competing networks while increasing connectivity within geo-economic zones. Although there have been some loud statements, this movement is designed for the long term and will develop with all the slowness intrinsic to the structural reorganization of the world economy. The dollar remains the dominant currency, but is gradually losing territory. A long chess game of failure began.

Players are in no hurry, because they know that the outcome of the game will be a sudden U-turn. Indeed, since 1944, the world economy has been structured by the Bretton Woods agreements. The latter have undergone a number of changes and adjustments to allow the dollar to remain the international reference currency. However, the game now is to create a new, more multipolar monetary order, in which investors would be required to diversify their investments, while exercising great diplomatic hunch. We do know that a multipolar world will mark the return of political intelligence to business.

How is it that, in this context, the issue of de-dollarization, which worries investors, remains unnoticed by the educated public? René Guénon gives us the key to the answer in his work “East and West,” published in 1924. He wrote, “Modern Western civilization, among other things, claims to be highly scientific; it would be nice to clarify a little how we understand this word, but this is not usually done because it is one of those words, to which our contemporaries seem to attribute some mysterious power, regardless of their meaning.”

The consequence of the scientific division of labor is hyperspecialization and the subsequent drying up of thinking. Thus, Western science is “analysis and dispersal.” In their huge towers of steel and glass, statisticians predict the coming world using numbers. The more banking instability increases, the more often these figures are revised. But it would never occurr to them to compare this data with geocultural indicators. For their part, geopoliticians, in their arrogance, refer the economists to Alphonse de Lamartine, who declares that “numbers do not think.”

Considering the constant factors, they tend to over-culturize the world. In fact, only a reasonable dialogue between banking, historical, and technological indicators can sketch a realistic picture of future times. However, starting this dialogue requires the will to break out of the digital bubble.

One thing is certain: history knows no eternal empires. Like living beings, political structures grow and one day disappear without a trace. In the struggle between the New Mongol Empire, the alliance of Eurasian continental powers, and the Western maritime democracies, the most important question (if we want to educate investors) is certainly this: we know that entering digital levitation mode takes us partly out of history. In this context, will the artificial intelligence revolution in the hands of the United States be enough to ensure the triumph of a weakened dollar? Such an assumption can be considered.

That’s why great powers have entered into a parallel battle with meta-banking rivalry to take over digital infrastructure, be it cable networks or satellites. Thus, we have a material indicator to assess the balance of power between the immaterial empires that are fighting for the world.