US grand strategy

Faced with an economic blockade and continued aggression the USSR “credit union” became bankrupt. This led not only to the US accepting Russia as a “franchisee” in the G8 it also accelerated the globalisation of deregulated financial markets. The US dollar became the primary reserve currency internationally as petro-dollar recycling morphed into dollar hegemony in 1993.

The US world venture capitalist’s “profit” or the US Empire’s tribute was astronomical. In 2004 alone the returns on its assets and the offsetting its risk to the rest of the world via external adjustment of its liabilities earned it an estimated dividend of $462 billion (PDF 489KB)!

The US’s marketing division utilises the services of five main worldwide media conglomerates, which are dependent on revenue from the “major shareholders”, to deliberately mask the true purpose of US interventions, initially marketing the Cold War marketing campaign and today marketing the War on Terror campaign. They help to mask the US’s rejection of international law and environmental standards through vetoing or refusing to ratify agreements with the UN, including the ICC. Controlling 90 per cent of US information flow the “marketing” department consists of NBC (General Electric), ABC (Disney Co.), CBS (Viacom), FOX (News Corp.), and CNN (AOL Time Warner).

The US Empire’s grand strategy is therefore quite simply to maintain its economic supremacy by maintaining its position as world banker turned world venture capitalist. This economic supremacy is dependent on the ever increasing control, sale and consumption of oil - primarily Middle Eastern - in US dollars.

The current “War on Terror” was designed to not only “head off” a possible competitor, in the shape of a future petro-euro, but to also secure US military bases in the heart of Middle Eastern energy reserves and control the oil pipeline in Afghanistan that links up to the former USSR’s black-gold reserves in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea.

The maintenance of petro-dollar hegemony and the enforcement of, what has been termed, the Washington Consensus militarily is not the only price to pay. With so much petro-dollars flowing into the US financial system, high inflation, systemic corruption and wholesale financial deregulation have led to cyclical boom-bust cycles. Severe global financial crises have become a recurring theme most notably in the 1987 crash, the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the recent 2008-9 Global Financial Crisis.

The other price to pay has been environmental. The US’s acknowledged “addiction to oil” is a direct result of its petro-dollar based economy and has greatly contributed to the Greenhouse Effect - a crisis that threatens all the world’s nations with severe environmental repercussions.

Using an eco-political model to define the US grand strategy shows not only how interconnected the world’s problems of empire, economy and environment truly are, but it also highlights the system’s weakness and provides a strategy and tactics that the rest of the world can take to rebalance the world.

Table 1: Eco-political breakdown of the US as it morphed from the world banker to the world venture capitalist.