The American Internal Division is not only American!

The Global Role of the US

There is an increasing practical need to understand the American internal conflict, due to its impact on Washington's global policies, especially those that push towards the brink of major global eruptions, wars, and endless crises. Conceivably, the most important starting point to this understanding is the shifts taking place in the United States global political and military role in terms of the outcome, but also the economic shifts in terms of foundation, in light of a new international balance, the manifestation of which is enhanced in all field and regions, and on a daily basis.

The unique position of the US as a pole that is solely ruling the entire world, which emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for just under two decades, where the stormy ascent of China and Russia began, and before that the expulsion of the dollar from European space through the euro. This unique position has its roots neither in the collapse of the Soviet Union nor the end of the Cold War, but precisely in World War II and its outcomes. In that war, from a broad political point of view, it could be said the victor was the "allies" led by the Soviet Union. However, from a purely economic point of view, the only victor in that war was the US, in which it did not lose anything, while all of Europe was destroyed, including the Soviet Union, which suffered the greatest share of destruction – human and economic, a share far exceeding that of Nazi Germany itself.

Beyond seas and oceans, the US reaped economic benefits from the victory, especially from the mass flight of European capital to the US, as well as the escape of the most important European minds thereto. In fact, the US was nearly absolutely a solo victor, where its GDP reached nearly half of the capitalist world GDP, according to several estimates. The Bretton Woods Agreement, which turned the dollar into a global currency, translated that reality.

Beginning in 1944, the process of redesigning international relations as a whole started. First through the economic sector, followed by the political and military sectors, on the basis of the dollar’s absolute dominance of the entire global trade. This led to the affirming a new economic colonial format – unequal exchange through various mechanisms – which in itself harbored within the seeds of the current crisis. The process of historical plunder by the dollar, which reached astronomical limits, not only included plundering other countries – including allies – but also led to a deep distortion in US economy itself, which gradually turned into one of the most rentier global economies and furthest from actual production.

In addition to the decrease of the US absolute share of the capitalist world’s GDP from approximately 50% at the end of World War II to around 23% today, even more notable is the magnitude of deformed tendency towards rentier-based economy in the US. The share of real production (i.e., agriculture, industry, and construction) constitutes 20.1% of the US GDP, compared to 56%, 42.1%, and 35.4% in China, Russia, and Germany, respectively. This means that the contribution of 23% to the global GDP is reduced to around 10% of the true global GDP, and China's share of that is significantly greater than the US share. This is in stark contrast with the current global political weight of the US, and objectively pushes towards redrawing international relations as a whole.

The Collapse of the Dollar’s Supremacy

Although the US set out in 1944 from a sweepingly advanced platform in an economic sense, the changes did not take long to appear. Along with the recovery that Europe witnessed during the decades following the war, the process of questioning the dollar’s global role began to appear, and the first person to publicly ask the question was de Gaulle, who accused the US of printing a dollar without having gold coverage. This was enough to put the dollar’s role under historical scrutiny, which the US avoided by terminating Bretton Woods and defining the role of the dollar by pricing oil therein beginning in the seventies of the last century, in parallel with expanding the spread of US military bases around the world.

Nevertheless, the actual disparity between the US share of the real GDP across the world and the role of the ravaging dollar – thus the overall political role of the US – persisted and worsened. Consequently, it has become nearly agreed upon among economic and political experts in the eighties of the last century that both the US and the Soviet Union were racing toward collapse. The Soviet Union’s “victory” in that race gave the US dollar a small breathing room by commoditizing nearly $5 trillion through directly plundering the Soviet Union. Said “victory” also gave the dollar something possibly even more important through political victory and its effects, which appeared at the time in the form of an ideology of "the end of history".

However, reality proved that racing toward collapse did not stop with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but accelerated it – the transformation in the role of the stock market in the mid-nineties is an important indicator in this context, where the situation reversed from 10% speculation and 90% real exchange, to 10% real exchange and 90% speculation, as one of the mechanisms to conceal the massive inflation of the dollar.

In other words, the process of reassessing the global role of the dollar, and consequently the role of the US, was avoided once in the seventies through oil and again in the nineties with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Starting on 11 September 2001, and through the "war on terror", began the third attempt to avoid that process – still ongoing to this day – and is mainly based on "creative chaos", which aims to keep competitors occupied on their frontiers and in their own countries, if possible, to paralyze their ability to question the global role of the dollar.

Internal Strategic Division

The plunder process that developed due to the dollar’s unique position, in parallel with objective transformations within the global economic and political structures driven by the laws of capitalism itself, produced a new historical state that transcends the initial form within which imperialism emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. One indicator of the development of the imperialist form is the emergence of a new ideological cover composed of: globalization, neoliberalism, and postmodernism, which can be exaggerated by the fact that global financial capital is without production identity, and has irreversibly gone beyond the national level through transcontinental and transnational companies, and banks – particularly the federal bank. Implicitly, it has transcended the nation-state and has become a global authority that uses states and their apparatuses – particularly those of the US as well as the European states – as a political and diplomatic tool, and a large stick that is constantly waved to maintain its hegemony and interests.

This implies that the global financial capital authority will not hesitate, in serving its interests, to sacrifice even the US state apparatus itself, or even the US as a whole, opening the door to division thereof – something the prediction of which has become quite common by economists around the world, including the bourgeois economists. This is not entirely new in the historical sense; Germany was previously sacrificed by developing the fascist monster to confront a deep economic crisis, and to confront its general ways represented by appearance of an alternative, at the time embodied by the Soviet Union.
What we are witnessing today of fascism of creative chaos with its various names and tools, is not very different in essence from what happened in the twentieth century, except that the possibilities of direct war have diminished nearly to none, with the possession of nuclear weapons in the hands of emerging countries, led by Russia and China.

This complex equation generated two opposing trends at the global level (and we can find these two trends even within emerging countries themselves). The first trend is pragmatic, sees that there is no longer a possibility for the continued role of the dollar – not economic, political, nor military, and therefore this issue should be accepted and adapted to (adapting is profitable for those who are booming, and less disastrous than what the new fascism pushes for, from the point of view of those who are regressing and able to continue in the absence of the dollar).

The second trend is neofascist, whose profit, existence, and impact are not linked to real production, but mainly to the proceeds of the dollar plunder system; to these, the processes of retrogression and retreating from the role of the dollar mean nothing except total collapse. Therefore, those do not think about retreating, calming down, and accepting reality once and for all; instead, they continue to push towards escalation and persistence of global attrition and tension, which, in their opinion, will prevent the establishment of a new international relations system that eliminates them and ends their roles.

The paths of this conflict interweave in a very complex manner at the global level as a whole, and at each state’s level separately. It is natural and logical that its most severe form will certainly manifest itself in the primary center of the dollar plunder, i.e., in the US itself.

Nevertheless, it must be reemphasized that the struggle over the role of the US state apparatus is not merely an internal US conflict, but is precisely a struggle between a global government headed by banks and a counter trend that sees retreating from the dollar’s role and a policy of regression a necessary path to save itself and to implicitly save the US state apparatus. This trend receives indirect support from the pressure exerted by the emerging countries to defend their interests, and the pressure exerted by the owners of real production throughout the world, whether within emerging or clearly troubled economies (we say “clearly” because the crisis includes everyone, including emerging countries).

International Law and Regional Understandings

The two American trends agree, at least temporarily and despite the great contradiction between them, to prolong the existing state of international deadlock as long as possible. In the current situation, the US continues to enjoy an exceptional position within the prevailing international relations, whether through traditional institutions such as the UN, NATO, IMF, and World Bank, or through its spread via US military bases, which many statistics indicate have exceeded a thousand bases globally.

All this leads to a clear conclusion: accelerating the ending of the deadlock, and with it all the crises and disasters imposed on entire populations – more intensively, the people of the “Third World”. This acceleration goes through one path, which is accelerating the resolution of existing crises on the basis of international law and international resolutions on the one hand, and, more practically, on the basis of regional understandings (the Astana format is a very important example), in addition to effective help by emerging countries, with the aim of extracting the seeds of historical enmity that traces its origins back to British and French colonialism, in a manner that affects the combined efforts of these populations to serve their interests, and against US interest and Zionism in particular.

About the “Real GDP”

The prevailing economics depends on a set of indicators to measure economies, and the GDP (gross domestic product) ranks as the most popular indicator. Undoubtedly, there is an explanation for this. According to this indicator, the US occupies the first place globally by $21.44 trillion and a contribution of 23.6% of the global GDP, this is a significant difference from China, which comes second, by $14.14 trillion and a contribution of 15.5% of the global GDP.

The way the GDP is calculated depends on the adding the “product” of the various sectors within a country, including the financial and service sectors, which in a large part plays the role of redistributing the product, not producing it. This means that the total according to this indicator is necessarily inflated, according to which, for example, the value of a new machine that was produced is added again to the value of the machine itself as financial stocks, bank bonds, or debt bonds, which get traded.

Although this indicator is appropriate for continued US bragging and is suitable for media circulation, it is misleading to the extent that Western economists and politicians have been forced, in order to understand what is really going on in the world, to resort to a set of other less misleading indicators.

These indicators include the GDP (PPP) or GDP according to the purchasing power parity, which illustrates the goods that can be purchased using the GDP in the country in question. For this purpose, a basket of goods was selected to includes a wide range including all types of basic goods, and in each country the price of the basket is calculated in local currency.

In other words, comparing the US and China, the US GDP figure of $21.44 trillion buys in the US good of the same value (because the dollar is used as a benchmark for this indicator). While China's gross domestic product of $14.14 trillion buys in China goods worth $27.31 trillion dollars. That is, the real value of China's product exceeds the real value of the US product by about $6 trillion, or by more than 27%. That is, the GDP of China based on the PPP is more than 1.25 times the US’.

Nonetheless, even this indicator is not the most accurate, because it still includes an inflated account that reflects internal inflation in each country in the prices of commodities and goods in local currencies. Therefore, a third indicator that has been increasingly used in recent years is RGDP or the real gross domestic product. This indicator calculates the production of the industry, agriculture, and construction sectors, and leaves out the financial and service sectors. For a historical paradox, this method of calculation is precisely the method adopted by Marxist economics, after adding to it internal trade and productive transportation.

According to this indicator, the lead is withdrawn not only from the US, but also from all Western countries except Germany, which remains among the first, with Russia and India rising to the top.

The fourth most important indicator is the share of RGDP within the GDP. This indicator reflects the magnitude of the massive deformation in US economy, and Western economies in general, compared to the strength of the economic foundation of each of China, Russia, and Germany.

Following are some exemplary numbers for illustration:
China: 56% real, 44% services
Russia: 42.1% real, 57.9% services
Germany: 35.4% real, 64.6% services
United States: 20.1% real, 79.9% services