Empires rarely fall on the battlefield; they implode under the weight of their own arrogance and corruption. The hubris radiating from the White House suggests that this old imperial truth is once again asserting itself. 

Unable to compete in the global economy it once championed, Washington now weaponizes its economy turning trade, finance, currency, and credit into instruments of blackmail. Washington has changed the “rules-based international order” into tariffs, sanctions, asset seizures, secondary penalties, and financial intimidation. Economic power morphed from competition and as a means of exchange into a tool of retribution. Nowhere this tool is used more obsessively by the US government than in service of Israel.

Long before Israel’s genocide in Gaza, successive US administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, abandoned any pretense of restraining the increasingly unhinged Jewish supremacist state. Instead of enforcing international law, Washington built a parallel system of economic and diplomatic power to shield Israel from accountability. The US vetoed UN Security Council resolutions demanding ceasefires, or end the starvation of 2.3 million human beings in Gaza, sanctioned international courts, punished UN officials, pressured humanitarian organizations and national leaders who dared to insist that Israeli crimes be judged by the same standards applied to all nations.

At the center of this economic war is the overstretched US dollar. Because global trade, energy markets, and financial clearing remain,........

© Middle East Monitor