People are always triumphantly explaining to this benighted blogger that the dollar is the driving factor behind U.S. foreign policy. The dollar is a variable that is important, and it is true that Saddam Hussein, the Iranians, and Gaddafi all made noises about getting rid of the dollar.
I think U.S. foreign policy is largely about global hegemony. I think this goes back to the neoconservative agenda that began to be made more public more noisily in the person of William Kristol and his circle who wrote in Foreign Affairs and published articles calling for benevolent hegemony, and that agenda of theirs has roots that go back before them. They made up the list of countries to topple, and that was prior to those countries talking much or even at all about the dollar.
The dollar is a concurrent variable. In other words, it accompanies the resistance to global hegemony. They are linked. The dollar in and of itself is not the big end. The big end is the hegemony. The big ends are connected to geopolitics. The US doesn’t want Iran to be a regional hegemonist, and the latter would support Russia’s power, by the way.
The dollar as driving factor doesn’t explain the U.S. presence or connections in South Korea, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uganda, Europe, Taiwan, and many other countries and places.
Nuclear weapons are a very real matter in this, not simply the dollar. This is not to say that the undermining of the dollar would not seriously undermine the global hegemony ambitions of the US as influenced by the neoconservatives. It would. I think the dollar part of what’s happened and happening has to be placed in a wider perspective.
