The World Realigns

Sanctions have never felt like effective foreign policy. When we decided to cut off Russia from world commerce, and also to confiscate their dollar holdings, people thrilled to the notion that we were going to hit them where it hurt.

A lot of nations thought that the Biden administration was involved in bullying. They did not like it.

The result was a series of new alliances, between Russia and China and Middle Eastern countries, one that was designed to circumvent the American sanctions. 

Now Ryan McMaken of the Mises Foundation has declared that one of the results of the American approach has been to enhance relations between Russia and China and the nations of the Middle East. That means, in Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Now, Saudi Arabia has welcomed Syria back into the Arab League, without consulting America.

This represents a reversal from years of isolation placed on the regime, and a break with US policy which remains staunchly opposed to Assad. Indeed, the League’s rapprochement with Assad should be seen as a repudiation of US policy, and especially as a sign of how Washington’s influence among League members—the most powerful of which are Saudi Arabia and Egypt—has waned.

Waning influence… hmm. 

McMaken continues:

Moreover, this is just the latest bad news for Washington’s influence in the region coming mere weeks after Iran and Saudi Arabia reestablished diplomatic relations.

In both cases, we find regimes that Washington had sought to isolate and sanction, but both states have instead been expanding their relations with other states in the region with the help of China. Meanwhile, both Beijing and Riyadh have increased their ties with Russia. These development help illustrate how growing US attempt to impose—or threaten to impose—hard line sanctions against a growing number of regimes has only accelerated a global movement away from the US dollar and away from Washington’s orbit. 

Evidently, a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, brokered by China, is not good news. Not having informed the United States represents a diplomatic failure for America. Then again, the Biden administration alienated Saudi Arabia by ranting about Jamal Khashoggi, and by threatening the nation’s oil revenue.

As for the effort to isolate Russia, to punish it for its incursion into Ukraine, that is not working out according to plan:

Both the Saudis and the Chinese have shown growing efforts to forge ties directly with the Russian regime as well. At a Chinese-Russian summit in February 2022, both regimes stated they plan to forge even closer ties. This has apparently not changed even after a year of heightened hostilities from the US and NATO aimed at Moscow. In fact, it is likely that Russia-China relations are closer than they’ve ever been in the post-Soviet era. This has clearly been a problem for Washington as China continues to provide an important market for Russian exports in the face of US sanctions. Both states have also made efforts to move away from the US dollar and settle international trade in other currencies. 

More important is Saudi Arabia:

The Saudi regime has grown closer to Moscow in the wake of US sanctions against Russia. For example, “Saudi Arabia and the UAE, traditional Middle Eastern allies of the United States, are not shying away from importing, storing, trading, or re-exporting Russian fuels despite American efforts to persuade them to join a crackdown on Russian attempts to evade the Western sanctions on its oil.”

In other words, US efforts to get the Arab world to isolate Russia are failing, and Russian ties with the Middle East are actually improving. 

As you know, de-dollarization is being widely discussed in the press. The general impression is that it will never work, and that finding an alternative currency for international trade is a fool’s errand. Such is the situation today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

The enemies list that the Biden administration has accumulated, the alliances that it has broken or damaged, is long and is getting longer by the day.

McMaken concludes:

At this point, a trend has clearly emerged: as the US further attempts to tighten its geopolitical grip on the global economy through economic sanctions, fewer and fewer states worldwide appear interested in playing along. 

The next time anyone cheers the Biden administration approach to Ukraine, the sanctions war that it has initiated, consider the alternative perspective. We seem, effectively, to be promoting a strategic realignment of work powers, of powers that seem no longer to be our friends.

Yet, it appears that the US’s ongoing sanctions war against a growing percentage of the world population is having the opposite of its intended effect. The US threatens to sanction Saudi Arabia and China, and in return, both countries become even more willing to seek cooperation with some of the regimes Washington has attacked the most.

While Washington pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy throughout the Middle East, Beijing brokers deals to increase regional stability. While the US ratchets up efforts to isolate its many enemies, the Chinese, the Saudis, the Arab League, and OPEC all shrug and look to increasing international communication and trade.  The Washington foreign policy establishment shows few signs that it is even noticing. The US regimes foreign policy “tool box” continues to be centered on sanctions, violence, and making demands on both its allies and its professed enemies. The rest of the world is moving on, however, and Washington may be among the last to accept the new reality.

We have a clueless president leading a clueless administration. Serious politicians have not been lacking in rants about China. They have been lacking in an effective foreign policy that will defend American interests.

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