Some might not have noticed, but Saudi Arabia has single-handedly dealt a big blow to the strength of the US dollar in the world’s economy:

Saudi Arabian Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan said on Tuesday that his government is willing to consider alternatives to the U.S. dollar for international trade.

Saudi Arabia’s currency has been pegged to the dollar since 1986. The link was forged after the Arab-Israeli War and the OPEC oil embargo against the United States in the early 1970s.

The process of reconciliation between the Saudis and the U.S. included a deal for the Saudis to invest their oil profits with the U.S. Treasury, and to price their oil in U.S. dollars on the international market.

This created the mighty “petrodollar,” from which both the Saudi and American economies drew great benefits. The Saudi riyal formally married the U.S. dollar in 1986, completing a financial fusion that provided much-desired stability to the rather volatile Saudi economy of that time.

Decoupling the riyal from the dollar would be a major change for both countries and for the global oil market. Analysts have long considered such a change potentially cataclysmic but unlikely, especially while the Saudis are embarked on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Vision 2030, an ambitious reform agenda to diversify their economy away from petroleum.

Al-Jadaan said at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos that Saudi Arabia is open to considering other currencies.

This is more evidence that a new geopolitical configuration is coming into existence.  Countries around the world have had enough of the Yankee-liberal-globalist order that has dominated since the end of WWII and more so since the collapse of Soviet communism.  During this time, most of what they have gotten from the US/NATO is bombings and assassinations when they didn’t follow the commands of the West, and empty materialism and propaganda promoting sexual perversion (LGBT ‘rights’) when they did.  Most of these places aspire to more traditional ways of living.  The Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar, quoting the French analyst Emmanuel Todd, explains, seeing the war in the Ukraine as one of the main drivers of this realignment:

– On a more erudite interpretation of that “clash of civilizations” fallacy, Todd goes for soft power and comes up with a startling conclusion: “On 75 percent of the planet, the organization of parenthood was patrilineal, and that’s why we may identify a strong understanding of the Russian position. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a reassuring moral conservatism.”

– So what Moscow has been able to pull off is to “reposition itself as the archetype of a big power, not only “anti-colonialist” but also patrilineal and conservative in terms of traditional mores.”

. . . the overall sentiment across the Global South characterizes the war, “described by mainstream media as a conflict over political values, in fact, on a deeper level, as a conflict of anthropological values.”

The post-WWII West, however, has been wedded to the opposite, to what Dr. Steve Turley calls ‘emancipatory politics’:

Emancipatory politics is a globalist-inspired idea that re-envisions the state as a grand liberator of people groups who are considered to have been otherwise disenfranchised from the political process. So what emancipatory politics does is it views societies and races and genders in light of power discrepancies, where a dominant identity or culture, that’s usually designated as white and male, disenfranchises and discriminates against minority identities and cultures.

The key here is that this is forever the permanent state of society unless or until cultural Marxist liberals come to power. So emancipatory politics is a Marxist political idea that re-envisions the state as a grand liberator of individuals from traditions and customs . . . that are now deemed oppressive and discriminatory.

To those who think Southern culture is irrelevant to global politics, they are dead wrong.  Dixie’s traditional way of life, free from Yankee corruptions, is highly patriarchal and very respectful of tradition (the most important being her adherence to older, medieval forms of Christianity), which would put us in good standing with much of the rest of the world.  It is not a stretch to say that old-fashioned Southern charm and neighborliness, as opposed to Yankee bombs and bossiness, would go a long way toward establishing the Southern States as a viable bloc in world politics if they decided to part ways with the federal city.

In the shorter term, however, some States, both inside and outside of Dixie, are acting prudently to counter the economic headwinds of a declining dollar.  Mississippi’s, Wyoming’s, and several other State legislatures are preparing legislation to make precious metals legal tender in their States, and to establish bullion depositories to facilitate the use of gold, silver, etc., as money.

If folks think inflation is hurting the value of the money in their pockets now, they probably ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  The Saudi currency decision will touch all of us eventually.  The good news is that the States are not bound by unbreakable bonds to the sinking ship of the federal government.  They can either rein it in with acts of nullification or leave it altogether.

Changes are coming, though, one way or the other.  We had best be ready for them.