Trump has fired a broadside at BRICS, but his rhetoric about tariffs isn’t likely to even slow the BRICS countries down as they develop new payment systems.

Morgthorak the Undead

Nov 30, 2024

President-elect Trump has been very busy with appointments, but he recently found time to post about BRICS and the possibility of a new currency edging out the dollar in international trade:

I’ve been waiting for Trump to turn his attention to BRICS, and his post didn’t disappoint me. I expected him to open up full throttle on the idea of an eventual replacement for the dollar, and that’s exactly what he did. Trump is not known for subtle social media posts with obscure messaging. He is known, however, for bonking whoever has pissed him off over the head in a very direct way.

Sometimes those sorts of messages on social media from Trump also contain the seeds for other possibilities later on. Remember when he trolled North Korea? That was his way of getting Kim Jong-un’s attention, and it resulted in Trump stepping over the DMZ line between North and South Korea. No other president has done it, but Trump did, and it started with a tweet.

Unfortunately for Trump, there isn’t much he can really do to stop BRICS. Right now, he is huffing and puffing, but he has no real weapons to blow the BRICS house down. Sure, he can threaten the BRICS countries all he wants with tariffs, but that is about all he can do because the damage that has been done cannot be undone by anyone, including Trump. Not even a president can turn back time.

When the idiot Neocons in Biden’s administration decided to throw Russia off of SWIFT, the long-term fate of the dollar was sealed. Before Russia, sanctions had been used against Iran, North Korea, and other countries. The US government got away with it because none of those countries is on the same level as Russia, and none of them possess the resources, scientific know-how, and weapons that Russia does.

Throwing Russia off SWIFT communicated to every sovereign country on the planet that if you piss off the US government, it might seek to utterly destroy your economy. How do you think that played with many leaders around the planet? How much faith and trust do you think they have in the US government and its SWIFT system now? They would be fools to blindly trust the US government again, even if Trump is president for the next four years. The next president or the one after that or the one after that might throw them off SWIFT to punish them for one offense or another, and they all know it.

The SWIFT card could only be played once on a great power like Russia before the game was up. It has been played, and no country will ever fully trust the US-based financial system again. This does not mean that the dollar is going away in the next year, five years, or even ten years. A sudden fall of the dollar-based system would be a disaster for the world. But the dollar is going to be slowly minimized over a period of time as the BRICS countries begin trading with each other under a new system. The work to achieve that is underway, and it is not going to stop because of Trump’s threats.

Sure, Trump can put as many tariffs as he wants on the BRICS countries. But tariffs can work both ways, and the US is not so powerful that throwing 100% tariffs at every BRICS country won’t hurt it too when they retaliate. Russia, however, is already outside the SWIFT system, and the ludicrous sanctions imposed by the US haven’t even slowed down the Russian economy. It is humming along nicely, doing far better than the US economy, thanks to Biden’s idiotic policies.

Russia, of course, is now tied directly to China in an informal alliance against the US and its vassal states in Europe. China’s leaders aren’t stupid; they know they are next on the sanctions/war hit list of the Neocon scum and filth. They have been quietly doing everything they can to support Russia, and that includes lending China’s financial power to support BRICS and to create a new system of trade that is not controlled by the US government. The Chinese know they are on borrowed time in terms of the US financial system, and they know the groundwork must be laid for a new system where they cannot be threatened with economic destruction by the US government.

I cannot convey here how blindingly stupid the Neocons in the Biden administration were for throwing Russia off of SWIFT. It was one of the dumbest financial and foreign policy decisions of all time, in any historical epoch. In a single retarded move, the Neocons began the process of the US losing the greatest privilege any nation can ever have: reserve currency status. When the history of the US dollar is written, throwing Russia off of SWIFT will be viewed as the single greatest error ever made by the US government.

Back to Trump now.

As I noted above, however, Trump uses such social media posts to get the attention of certain people. I believe that is what he is doing now with his BRICS post. He came out as aggressively as possible, using the stick in a big way. But he is also smart enough to have some carrots in his other hand. I expect he will use those carrots to try to seduce some of the BRICS countries away from BRICS and pull them back into the orbit of the US.

Trump’s post about BRICS also has the stink of desperation on it. He knows how vulnerable the US economy is to a competing reserve currency, and so he will try to strangle that currency in the crib, before it is allowed to grow up and become a direct threat to the dollar monopoly controlled by the US. Stop and think for a moment about what the US would look like without reserve currency status. Trump understands this, and he isn’t wasting any time trying to protect the dollar at all costs.

Will he succeed? That remains to be seen, but BRICS is obviously on his radar, so we shall see what happens over the next four years.

Trump will also try to use the carrot of Russia reentering SWIFT, along with the removal of sanctions, to get Russia to agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine. That effort will fail utterly because Putin no longer trusts anyone in the West, not even Trump. The Ukraine war will be finished in due time, and it will end on Russia’s terms, not on Ukraine’s or Trump’s. The deliberate killing of the Minsk accords showed Putin how much he could trust the West: Not at all, not in any way.

I believe the BRICS countries will continue developing new payment systems at all costs because the BRICS countries know that the US government cannot be trusted. For a time, these payment systems will coexist with the dollar in international trade. But as time goes by, slowly but inevitably, the dollar will have to give way to the new system. That is not going to happen in the short term, but neither can it be avoided over the long term.

If Trump is smart, he will begin laying the groundwork now for the day that the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, because that day is coming and no one – not even Donald Trump – can stop it.

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