by JAN KRIKKE
Talk of war is getting louder in the West. The German minister of defense proclaimed this month that Germany has to rebuild its army, as did his British colleague.
At the start of the war in Ukraine two years ago, the Western media depicted the Russian military as hopelessly ineffective, outdated, and corrupt. Yet in recent weeks, Russia has become an imminent danger that requires the rearmament of Europe.
On the other side of the world, we see a similar transformation. In 1972, the West signed up for the one-China policy. Last year, high-ranking Western government officials made widely publicized visits to Taiwan in support of “pro-democracy forces.”
Earlier, in 2020, the US Congress passed the Hong Kong Autonomy Act that imposed sanctions on officials and entities in Hong Kong and mainland China that violate “Hong Kong’s autonomy.”
The West, of course, has a 500-year history of involving itself with countries far from its borders. While it no longer has physical control over the world, it still has financial control thanks to the US dollar system and SWIFT, the global clearinghouse for international financial transactions.
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