–“Feasting on allies” as the west loses dominance to the east, south
Opinion and reporting by Mathew Carr
15 Aug, 2025 — Instead of working with other nations to share the world’s wealth and protect it from climate change, America is going to brutal lengths to get an even bigger unfair share of the wealth by stealing from other nations using rigged markets and systems.
It’s forcing so-called allies to invest in itself instead of investing in emerging nations to ensure they don’t go down the road of dangerous unabated fossil fuels.
Those poorer countries have seen America ruin their climate and it’s weird they are not calling this out.
Here’s how America is doing it. It’s forcing countries with trade surpluses to invest in American clean industry…or pay huge tariffs.
This was money meant to help the climate fight…and win climate justice… + deal with adapting to USA-provoked climate change (obviously not all climate change is due to the US, which has only 4% of the global population).
The USA is abusing its role as provider of the most traded currency.
America can’t seem to share, because of greed and addiction to unbridled power.
See Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, on Fox:
Bessent: “Other (rich) countries, in essence, are providing us with a sovereign wealth fund.”
… Fox: “They’re going to build our factories. They’re going to help us to build new factories, which Mr. Trump loves?”
Bessent: “Exactly. So the way to think about it is … these huge surpluses accumulated offshore. Let’s take Japan. We’re going to have $550 billion (from Japan) and they (Japan) will be reinvesting that back into the US economy, and we will be able to direct them … as we reshore these critical industries. We are trying to de-risk the US economy from what we saw during Covid”…(when global supply chains were interrupted).
It was America’s decision to offshore its factories in the 1980s and beyond.
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand on X
This is, without exaggerating, one of the most extraordinary things a US Treasury Secretary ever said. It should be mandatory viewing for all citizens of US “allies”, Europeans first and foremost. What Bessent is saying is that the US will now treat US allies’ wealth as an American “sovereign wealth fund” (his words), “directing” them, “largely at the [US] president’s discretion”, how to use their money in order to build American factories and reshore American industries. Even the Fox News host can’t believe it, calling it “offshore appropriation”, another word for theft. That’s exactly what it is: straight up unabashed colonial plunder. That’s the pattern we see emerge: unable to extract wealth or win wars against an increasingly strong Global South, the US has turned inward to feast on its own “allies” – who can’t resist precisely because they depend on their exploiter for military “protection”. They’re as defenseless against American wealth extraction as any 19th-century colony was against its colonial “protector.” That’s exactly what I wrote in my latest article on “Europe’s colonial moment”: https://open.substack.com/pub/arnaudbertrand/p/not-at-the-table-europes-colonial?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4r0pw
Bessent, above
My tech went very weird while writing this story
I’ve been calling this unfairness out for months:
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