Comment by cladopa
6 hours ago
Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world.
Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.
Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.
The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.
That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.
The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.
The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.
If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.
How does the "petrodollar" exactly prop up the US dollar? The price of a barrel of oil has oscillated quite a bit in dollar terms, so it's not like there's anything like a fixed or artificially-maintained 'exchange rate' there. There's, what, a 10x swing between highest and lowest USD price of oil in the last 10 years alone? The dollar has fluctuated vs other currencies too. I've never fully followed how trading for a dollar just to sell that dollar immediately for oil would only help the USD. It all gets turned into oil quickly, so wouldn't that mostly balance out in how demand for oil then relatively-weakens the dollar against the value of toil itself? The "medium of exchange" need has some effect, but I don't see it by itself driving "store of value." If there was a better store of value for the people selling the oil, what prevents them from swapping out those dollars essentially immediately? And then switch to taking payment in those other things as well?
And "just printing dollars" has well-documented inflationary effects inside the US too.
Given the immense capabilities of the United States government, I don't think there is going to be a war inside the US. Or at least not one that lasts any amount of time.
IMO, invasion of Iraq was to support Israel.
Except America went to war with Saddam Hussein a full decade before the move to the Euro and was largely a reaction to the invasion of Kuwait.
Saddam was their man for a full decade prior to that war, to go against Iran. Even the Kuwait invasion was given the go ahead by the us with false assurances, until they sucker punched him for it. It's not as if they us gave a shit or two about Kuwait's freedom or not (which was partitioned from traditional iraq teritorry in the past anyway, and a monarchy itself).
Then they'd let him mostly be after 1991 until we made the mistake to push for the Euro in early 2000s.
To add, the primary reason the US supported Iraq was because it didn't want Iran to send oil to the USSR.
This was because the US didn't want a communist nation to have a good economy.
That's the story of a bunch of the CIAs operations.
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