FLASH
Shkruar nga Federico Rampini
I cannot rule out that "unprecedented" things are happening. However, I notice that often those who use this definition are unfamiliar with history, or do not want to make the necessary effort to find precedents.
The panic mode that dominates the reading of events does not help to understand where the world is heading, much less to make important decisions: statesmen, businessmen, anyone with responsibility, must maintain calm and composure. Emotions impair the ability to judge.
One of the things that makes the times we live in so disturbing is the widespread belief that "unprecedented" things are happening.
The term was already overused, but it has exploded since Trump came to the White House. It is used systematically for everything he does, and especially the way he treats European allies.
I cannot rule out that "unprecedented" things are happening. However, I notice that often those who use this definition are unfamiliar with history, or do not want to make the necessary effort to find precedents.
I had already mentioned that in 2003, when Bush Jr. invaded Iraq and the Franco-German couple (Chirac and Schroeder) condemned it, the media dominated with verdicts declaring a terminal and incurable crisis in transatlantic relations. When you reread that analysis and those headlines today, you realize that they are repeated copies of what is said and written today. So Trump is not as "unprecedented" as one might think.
But I invite you to take an even longer look back. This is suggested by one of the greatest American economic historians, Barry Eichengreen, author of important works on the history of the dollar, international financial crises, and the monetary system.
Eichengreen thinks all that is bad about Trump, but he has the merit of seeing current events in a long arc of history. An article of his in the Financial Times brought to mind a crisis of the transatlantic alliance that even then was experienced as terminal, epochal, incurable, and endless. This is an event that happened 54 years ago, to be exact.
This is the year when Nixon declared the dollar non-return, a true turning point in modern history. This is the moment where one can even trace the distant origins of the euro project. From the end of World War II until that moment, the West lived under a regime of fixed exchange rates between the major currencies, and dollar-gold parity. The system of the fifties and sixties was an extraordinary system, with the American currency like the sun at the center and the European currencies like planets revolving around it, each in its own orbit.
The dominance of the dollar was unstoppable, unipolar, and unchallenged. In return for its imperial sovereignty, until 1971, America guaranteed that its dollars could be sold for gold at Fort Knox and the Federal Reserve in New York. This was the global order based on the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the Bretton Woods rules signed in 1944 under Franklin Roosevelt.
This system gave the United States considerable responsibilities and at the same time unique privileges. The dollar, tied to gold and used to buy or invest in the leading economy, was the currency in which everyone had confidence. The United States was the ultimate financier, the guarantor of this order. It was the sole holder of a universal payment currency. It could print dollars without limit, at least until someone decided to appreciate their deception by demanding "gold weight" in exchange for greenbacks.
This privilege was exploited by the Democrats, Johnson, and the Republicans, Nixon, to finance the huge military expenditures of the escalation in Vietnam. In order not to put the cost of the war solely on the shoulders of their taxpayers, they printed endless dollars and distributed them all over the world, and the liquidity created helped create inflation everywhere, even in Europe.
At this point, General/President Charles De Gaulle's (and always anti-American) France decided to "see through the deception" of converting dollars into gold and threatened to demand the return of dollars to gold. Nixon's response was simple: he canceled the rules established at Bretton Woods and decided that from that moment on the dollar would no longer be converted into gold.
This was a major shock, with violent consequences. With the abolition of the convertibility of the dollar into gold, the entire structure of fixed exchange rates that had been in place during the fifties and sixties also collapsed. The Europeans saw it as a betrayal, an "unprecedented" violation.
In response to the protests of European governments, America responded with a… familiar argument: we are the ones who bear the burden of protecting you from the threat of a Soviet invasion, or worse, from a nuclear Holocaust. This task, through the hundreds of thousands of American soldiers stationed in Europe at the time, and with nuclear support and the American military fleet in the Mediterranean, was paid for by American taxpayers, while Europeans contributed very little to the costs of their defense (even less today). / Corriere Della Sera
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