When it comes to being smart about picking fights, the Trump Administration fails in spectacular fashion.



The United States is currently waging economic warfare against one tenth of the world's countries with cumulative population of nearly 2 billion people and combined gross domestic product (GDP) of more than $15 trillion. These include Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, North Korea and others on which Washington has imposed sanctions over the years, but also countries like China, Pakistan and Turkey which are not under full sanctions but rather targets of other punitive economic measures.

There is no wisdom in picking a fight with 2 billion people.

Our belligerent foreign policy has pushed Russia and China together, both politically and economically.

It's one thing to sanction Russia. It's an entirely other thing to sanction close and loyal allies.



U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley says allied countries like the U.K. shouldn't count on winning exemptions from sanctions against doing business with Iran stemming from President Trump's decision to pull out of the 2015 nuclear deal.

The UK? Seriously? You know something is seriously wrong if sanctioning your most loyal ally is part of the agenda.

While the American media is obsessed with Trump's idiotic tweets, real news out of Europe is getting ignored.



The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, said a few days ago in a speech that the euro should be elevated as a reserve currency in order to break European dependence on the U.S. dollar. Juncker noted that the EU paid for 80 percent of its energy imports in dollars even though only 2 percent of imports come from the U.S. “There’s no logic at all in paying energy imports in dollar not euro,” an EU diplomat told Politico.

If Europe stops using the dollar for its international trade, this would mark the end of U.S. dollar hegemony. The end of U.S. dollar hegemony would mark he end of U.S. military hegemony because it would become unaffordable.

Pakistani upper house lawmaker Sehar Kamran said this week that the United States has lost its "hegemony" over South Asia. Americans have failed to notice that Pakistan has fallen out of America's orbit of influence. Even less noticed is that India intends to defy our Iranian sanctions by buying Iran's oil and Russian weapons in rupees.

The Trump Administration doesn't do diplomacy. Instead it tries to bully everyone, and that creates enemies.



Trump is doing everything he can to bring on the end of the days when the US can borrow whatever it wants in whatever amounts it wants. To be sure, there is no recipe book. The dollar is now so entrenched as the world’s money that if your assignment were to bring the curtain down on that — and thus the ability of the US to borrow whatever it wants whenever it wants — it’s not at all clear what you would do. But you’d start by doing everything that Trump is doing — pick fights with all your allies, blow the government deficit wide open at the peak of an economic recovery, abandon any notion of fiscal responsibility, threaten sanctions on anyone and everyone who seeks to honor the deal Obama struck with Iran (thereby almost begging everyone to figure out some way to bypass the US banking system in order to do business), throw spanners into the works of global trade without any clear indication of what it is precisely you want for a country that structurally consumes more than it produces and thus by the laws of accounting MUST run trade and current account deficits. Murphy says of the Chinese, Russian, and European efforts, “They are building the groundwork for the day when they can overthrow the hegemony of the US dollar. The day that happens is the day the American imperium ends.”

Russia has moved into the diplomacy vacuum left by the Trump Administration, and has become the indispensable intermediary for all of Asia.

That's not the only way that our belligerent foreign policy has strengthened Putin's hand.



The Trump administration is helping Vladimir Putin achieve a goal that’s eluded him for almost two decades—getting Russia’s billionaires to start repatriating some of their assets. Relatively muted sanctions imposed during the Obama era over the conflict in Ukraine have only widened in scope and severity since Trump took office last year. The unpredictability of both the White House and Congress is forcing Russians to move money into state-run banks and rejig the offshore superstructure that’s sheltered fortunes here since communism’s collapse.

Washington is using economic imperialism on a global scale, while running huge trade and budget deficits. That's not a winning formula.