The "world order" is certainly shifting, isn't it?

Since Obama's presidency, central banks have been reducing their holdings of U.S. dollars and increasing their gold reserves.  This trend began when the Obama administration used the dollar's status as the world reserve currency and U.S. leverage over international financial institutions (particularly the international payment system known as SWIFT) to punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea back in 2014.  Later, the Biden administration and the European Commission used these same financial weapons — while imposing widespread economic sanctions and asset freezes — to punish Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.  The message to the world was clear: The more that nation states depend upon U.S. dollars and Western-controlled financial institutions, the more vulnerable they are to economic coercion.

During this same period of time, U.S. national debt has continued to grow.  That debt will soon reach forty trillion dollars, while annual interest payments are approaching one trillion dollars.  When President George W. Bush was in office, there was a clamor among D.C.'s class of political and economic pundits about how the financial toll of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had pushed the national debt over six trillion dollars.  Some analysts argued that if the federal government did not immediately arrest its profligate spending, the global financial system would one day collapse.  Those warnings fell on deaf ears.  "Austerity" became a dirty word.  Government spending in the U.S., Europe, and throughout most of the world has continued unabated.  The stubborn arithmetic of the global debt bomb abides.

The economic system as we know it today is on wobbly footing.  Some people have been predicting economic Armageddon for two decades or more.  (Some have been predicting catastrophe since the Federal Reserve's stealthy creation during Christmas of 1913, or at least since President Nixon decoupled the U.S. dollar from gold in mid-August of 1971.)  Others point to the ability of central bank magicians to somehow conjure novel financial instruments — sometimes not much more than money-printing duct tape hidden behind the complexity of an economic Rube Goldberg machine — and keep the global system humming, notwithstanding the increasingly loud rumblings and unnerving vibrations shaking the whole funny money contraption.

Regardless of one's faith in the future of the U.S. dollar or the wisdom of allowing an elite cadre of central bankers to manage the not-so-free market according to the managerial class's "best judgment," one thing is clear: The powerful economic institutions that supposedly ensure the impartial operation of the "rules-based international order" are an essential part of the hybrid warfare being conducted on a global scale.  Along with information warfare (propaganda and censorship), industrial sabotage, the theft of trade secrets, artificially concocted "color revolutions," foreign-funded "protest" movements, agricultural ruination, influence operations (blackmail), attacks on civil infrastructure, digital infiltration, covert assassinations, and traditional espionage, economic warfare is an indisputable part of the threat environment that defines the modern battlespace.