Furthermore, any disposition to welcome Russia into a common European space is dead. That applies to economic dealings, including critical natural resource trade, as well as politically. Russia has been severed from Europe definitively for decades if not generations. If that leads to a less economically robust industrial Europe, so be it, that's their problem.
The American economy, too, may suffer some collateral damage. It will get a boost, though, from privileged access to Europe's energy markets and the weakening of a competitor in goods and services.
The serious, systemic threat to the American economy looms down the road. Washington's radical weaponizing of the mechanisms for managing international finance has accelerated the move away from dollar supremacy.
A markedly diminished role for the dollar as the world's principal transaction and reserve currency will erode the United States "exorbitant privilege" of running a deficit/debt economy, without constraint.
Admittedly, on the other side of the balance scale, a confident, intact Russia will find its economic and political future pointed Eastwards. The already deeply entrenched Sino-Russian partnership is the key geo-strategic development of the 21st century.
That hardly should have come as a surprise; after all, just about all American actions in regard to both powers over the past 15 years have led inexorably to that outcome. That includes, of course, the blunder of trying to use a Ukraine crisis as the lever to bring down Putin, and Russia with him.
Whatever trajectory the contest between the West and the Sino-Soviet bloc takes, it now will demand ever greater imagination and skill to manage without tempting fate, than if United States had been inclined to pursue a more constructive course.
One can argue that the historic choice that America has made by deciding to follow the Wolfowitz Doctrine as a user's guide to strategy in the 21st century has been made for reasons lodged deep in the country's psyche more than those that are the product of reasoned deliberation.
Collective American self-esteem, belief in being Destiny's child, the ordained No. 1 in the world, has been our society's foundation stone.
We have not matured beyond that magical dependence on myth and legend, to our, and the world's misfortune.
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