Leer en Español
Global Security expert specializing in transnational threats in the Western Hemisphere, Joseph Humire, participated in the 21st Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum organized at the National Congress of the Republic of Guatemala earlier this week, where he exposed the global economic consequences and the attack on the US dollar behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
According to Humire, the world failed to take into account a key calculation Vladimir Putin made before invading Ukraine: he knew that there would be no military response from the Western world and that, instead, the response would come in the form of heavy economic sanctions.
This, according to the expert, came as no surprise to Putin, who had anticipated the need to reform the international financial architecture with the aim of “collapsing the US dollar.” Given the active involvement of the United States and the European Union in Ukraine, Humire believes that Russia’s invasion sought that goal.
“And the best way to do that, the way they want to approach that is to build an anti-dollar alliance,” Humire told the Guatemalan Congress. “In my humble opinion, this is what the invasion of Ukraine is all about. It’s not just an attack on the sovereign territory of Ukraine. It’s an attack on the international financial system that is intimately tied to the international order after World War II.”
The “international alliance” against the US dollar
Over the years, Humire explained, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and China have discovered an “antidote,” a “vaccine” against U.S. and European sanctions: disinformation.
“Disinformation has become the number one weapon used in 21st-century warfare,” Humire expressed. “Since 2014, specifically, when Russia was sanctioned because of its annexation of Crimea, Vladimir Putin has more than tripled the budget of the communication apparatus of the Kremlin. This includes both Spanish and Portuguese state media or state owner-controlled media outlets.”
He added that, in just four years, the RT in Spanish channel went from having 7 million viewers to amassing an audience of more than 25 million people. “This is a serious megaphone in Spanish that Vladimir Putin has,” he said, and he uses it to spread a narrative of “joint victimization,” branding international sanctions as a “crime against humanity.”
Having established that narrative, it is in Putin’s interest to promote more sanctions against it and essentially use his enemy’s economic strength to his advantage, an opportunity he clearly saw on Ukrainian territory.
“Putin wanted the sanctions because he wanted the opportunity to accuse the West and the international financial system to say that it’s a weapon of warfare, rather than a mechanism for commerce in an international trade, as it is,” Humire explained.
Thus, Vladimir Putin, in convenient partnership with Xi Jinping, seeks to convince countries around the world to abandon the US dollar as a reserve currency.
This would also explain why China made Russia its main oil supplier and established with Putin a one-year contract to buy one hundred million tons of coal denominated in non-US dollar transactions.
It would also explain why, after American Express, Visa and Mastercard were banned from operating in Russia, the Kremlin-controlled state bank replaced them with China’s payment system, UnionPay.
Thus, with the invasion of Ukraine, Russia and China declared a war that is just beginning against the US dollar and the international financial system.
