Over the past decades, countries worldwide have become more willing to reject dollar transactions in their foreign trade settlements. Russia has shifted to foreign exchange in national currencies with China and Eurasian Economic Union members. Additionally, Saudi Arabia clinched a deal with China to sell oil for yuan in December 2022.
French geopolitical expert Renaud Girard has warned of this incoming de-dollarization, caused by none other than the US itself. The expert said that Washington had overused the greenback as an instrument of political pressure, and nowadays more and more countries are starting to flee from the US-made global financial system. The alternative is to set up a bilateral foreign exchange in national currencies. Some states like Russia and China have gone even further and made their own payment systems.
"By turning their currency into an instrument of political pressure on other nations, the US has unwittingly launched a worldwide movement to overthrow the 'king-dollar'. Total de-dollarization will not happen overnight, but it is clearly an irreversible tendency," Renaud Girard told Le Figaro.
China has suspended several 2025 export controls on strategic materials — including rare earths, superhard materials, and lithium batteries – for a year. Is this a concession to the US, or a move in a far more complex game?
"The first aim of China’s export controls was to consolidate its leverage in negotiations. The second was to establish a long-term framework for managing such controls," says Yana Leksyutina, deputy director at the Institute of China and Contemporary Asia, Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).
Сhina could activate this mechanism at any moment, and now everyone knows it’s a lever it holds, she explains to Sputnik.
Balancing the Mineral Market
"The moratorium on export bans to the US essentially resets the rare earth market to where it was previously," Jeff J. Brown, author of 'The China Trilogy' and founder of Seek Truth From Facts Foundation, tells Sputnik.
In the meantime, there will be a global rush by the US and its NATO allies to acquire as many rare earth ...
The Israeli regime has reportedly signed contracts worth millions of dollars in recent months to sway American public opinion as part of attempts to launder the occupying entity’s genocidal war crimes against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Friday that the multimillion-dollar campaign aimed to reshape US public opinion, both online and offline, through coordinated influence operations combining digital marketing, AI, geotagging, and religious messaging.
The contracts, signed between the Israeli regime and firms linked to US President Donald Trump, reveal a “hasbara [propaganda] campaign” and schemes to target millions of US churchgoers, deploy bots, hire influencers, and try to make ChatGPT more pro-Israel.
The largest contract, worth $6 million, was signed with Clock Tower X, owned by Trump’s former digital campaign chief Brad Parscale, to produce and distribute roughly 100 core pieces of pro-Israel content per month and thousands......
