Ukraine’s Not The Only Front Falling Apart. U.S. Rejected In The Middle East.

Media headlines and viewer attention have been focused on the War in Ukraine and rightly so. Still, that’s not the only hotspot with trouble brewing around the world.

The list of problem areas is well known, but the new stories emerging are not. North Korea has launched an ICBM. This breaks a ban on such tests that has lasted since November 2017. Kim Jong Un stopped testing ICBMs early in the Trump administration but feels free to do so under Biden. He knows there will be no response from a weak administration.

Iran is rejecting Biden’s feeble efforts to reinstate Obama’s awful deal on building stockpiles of highly-enriched uranium and working on a nuclear weapon. Trump tore up that deal and slapped maximum sanctions on Iran. Now that Biden’s in office, the sanctions are coming off and the centrifuges are spinning faster than ever.

Venezuela has rejected U.S. efforts to get them to pump more oil to replace Russian oil subject to sanctions. Iraq did the same. And so it goes.

Perhaps the greatest damage to U.S. interests is occurring in the Middle East. Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, refused to take a phone call from Biden. Other Sheikhs in the UAE also did not take Biden’s call.

Now, the Arabs are building bridges to Syrian ruler Bashar Al-Assad, as reported in this article. Al-Assad is a client of Russia, which has been the military backer of his war on revolutionaries and terrorists. Al-Assad was attacked several times under Trump and was completely isolated from the Arab world.

With Biden in power, the Arabs are now turning their back on the U.S. and patching up relations with Syria and Russia. This comes on top of a recent discussion between Saudi Arabia and China about allowing China to pay for Saudi oil in yuan. If that happens, other Gulf states will likely follow and one of the main props of Nixon’s 1974 petrodollar deal will be knocked out from under the U.S. dollar.

Weakness encourages actions by your enemies and adversaries. The Biden White House offers nothing but weakness. It should come as no surprise that Russia, North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, and others are all on the march against U.S. interests.

Investors should expect this to continue until Biden leaves office. The economic fallout will include inflation, slow growth, and declining stock markets. That’s the price you pay for an absence of leadership at the center of power.

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