Base document of the intervention at the Pío Tamayo Chair of the UCV on June 23, 2025 - Theme: Where is this dead world going?
Buenas tardes,
Antes que nada, de nuevo mi agradecimiento a la Cátedra Pío Tamayo y al Profesor Agustín Blanco Muñoz por la invitación a reflexionar temas que son parte del sentido crítico de una universidad como la nuestra. Echaba mucho de menos encontrarme aquí, en la Sala E, donde nació esta Cátedra que es un orgullo para nuestra Universidad y el país.
De nuevo, la interrogante planteada para hoy es retadora. A la pregunta ¿Hacia dónde va este mundo muerto?, yo me conformaría solo con poder contestar para dónde va nuestro propio país. De hecho, creo que es pesimista decir que ya el mundo está “muerto” a pesar de todos los esfuerzos de fuerzas que día a día no descansan en su interés de llevarlo a la guerra, habida cuenta de que ese es el mejor negocio del mundo, históricamente hablando. Se han forjado fortunas en muchos países para aprovisionar a los participantes de las guerras de la humanidad. Pero si ahora se trata de una guerra de aniquilación total, veo difícil que tengan la oportunidad de disfrutar los beneficios que puedan lograr.
But beyond the discussion of war as a business and the conflicting interests that revolve around it, whether political, cultural or economic, I believe that the current situation of global confrontation that we are witnessing is not the simple clash between the Judeo-Christian civilization of the West and the Eastern civilization, which we are inundated with on social networks. It is the result of many processes and variables that are coinciding and that no one believed could combine to provoke what is happening today. I will try in these few minutes to outline some of what I believe may be the main keys.
The US ceased to be what it was
The U.S. was the only country that was not wiped out after World War II. Japan and all of Europe were destroyed and China was nothing more than a poor country with a rural economy. After the conflict in 1945, the US emerged as the world's leading economic power, with a strong and stable economy. The war boosted industrial and technological production, and many industries expanded to meet wartime demand, leaving a solid foundation for the peacetime economy that followed.
In addition, the U.S. experienced a period of prosperity known as the "Economic Miracle of the 1950s," characterized by increased consumption, job creation and the growth of the middle class. Although the country also faced challenges such as the transition from a wartime economy to a civilian economy, the recovery was ultimately swift and successful, and the U.S. established itself as a global economic power.
That situation only improved by the second half of the 20th century, sparking ideological rivalries between the U.S. and the other power that survived World War II and was fighting for supremacy, the former Soviet Union. This low-intensity conflict came to be known as the Cold War, which pitted ideology, politics, economics and power against each other. The difference between capitalism, championed by the U.S., and communism, promoted by the Soviet Union, generated tensions and mistrust for many years. Each sought to expand its influence in different parts of the world, which led to an arms race, military alliances such as NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and several international crises. The Cold War occurred because of the struggle for global hegemony and the ideological differences between these two powers.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, together with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, gave the US an undisputed technological, economic and military position for the latter part of the 20th century. But the years did not pass in vain and that same US growth worked against it in the long run.
Few of us are witnesses of this transformation. In the early 1980s, the United States realized that its economy was being transformed, due to a number of technological reasons resulting from its growth, into a service economy and took an unexpected step within the framework of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, later replaced by the World Trade Organization, WTO) to include services in the negotiations on trade in goods, something that had never been studied in depth in the economies of developing countries.
Later, countries learned why this step had been taken. The US was moving by leaps and bounds towards an economy based on the production of services, increasingly supported by the application of new information and communications technologies (ICTs), leaving the production of goods in the foreseeable future to countries with a lower development index (such as China). Global companies began to relocate their industrial production to countries such as China and Taiwan, especially technology companies.
USA, consequences of a natural tendency
The above was merely the natural product of the trends of the moment and the political and practical exploitation of the dictates of classical theory, which indicates that: "...regarding the role of services in the economy, it has tended to suggest that the growth of the service sector has been a consequence of the development process. According to this view, the development process in industrialized countries has involved three main stages; a) the "pre-industrial" stage, in which the economy is primarily extractive; b) the "industrial" stage, in which manufacturing plays a dominant role; and c) the "post-industrial" stage, in which the economy becomes primarily a service economy" (see UNCTAD, TD/B/1008/Rev.1, Services and the Development Process, United Nations, p. viii).
After half a century, it was proven that the US was not wrong in its appreciation of growth. They derived the greatest benefit and advantages from the economic policy action taken by the administration of then President Ronald Reagan, after signing the Tariff and Trade Act of 1984 which gave the US President broad powers to "...stimulate the expansion of: i) international trade in services through the negotiation of agreements (both bilateral and multilateral) that reduce or eliminate barriers to international trade in services; and ii) international services enterprises in foreign trade" (see Cartagena Agreement, JUN/SEM. SERV/VE/di 107, July 1986, "The Internationalization of the Services Sector: Options and Risks for Latin America and the Caribbean, p. 4).
As a result, the United States is today the world's leading power in the tertiary sector of the economy: According to a recent report by the Santander Group, "The US economy is essentially based on services: the tertiary sector accounts for more than three quarters of GDP (76.4%) and employs 79% of the country's labor force (World Bank). The United States is home to the world's largest and most liquid financial markets. In 2023, the finance and insurance sector accounted for 7.3% of GDP (U.S. Trade Dept.). At the end of the same period, the U.S. banking system had $23.7 trillion in assets and quarterly net income of $38.4 billion" (see in Spanish Santander Trade Markets, United States: Politics and the Economy, in https://santandertrade.com/es/portal/analizar-mercados/estados-unidos/politica-y-economia).
However, this policy deindustrialized the U.S. for half a century, especially strengthening China, which localized the production of goods in its territory and grew economically with the help of U.S. companies and the U.S. market and its technology, generating a pole of indisputable development, unexpected for the U.S. as a power. The rest of the world has made use in more than 80 years of all the know-how of American universities and companies to compete in all sectors with the US in its own markets and step by step taking away hegemony in areas considered key that represent the sustenance of its economic and military power.
The Trump administration has detonated the reality of US decline
The U.S. has been paying the bills for the goods it stopped producing 50 years ago with public debt, to the point that the main creditors of the U.S. are Japan and the People's Republic of China (see Statista Major foreign holders of United States treasury securities as of December 2024, in billion U.S. dollars, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/246420/major-foreign-holders-of-us-treasury-debt/).
The amount of the U.S. national public debt projected to 2029 is 133.88% of GDP (see Statista National debt in the United States in relation to gross domestic product (GDP) from 2019 to 2022, with a forecast to 2029, in https://www.statista.com/statistics/269960/national-debt-in-the-us-in-relation-to-gross-domestic-product-gdp/). This situation has turned the US into an economic giant with feet of clay, but still maintaining military supremacy.
The new economic and tariff policy of the Trump Administration will not be able to reverse the policy initiated in the 80's because the rest of the world has advanced precisely to the globalization initiated by the US, causing the PRC and Japan, the two most important industrial goods-producing economies in the world, to pull the floor out from under the US, selling in retaliation their US debt papers, causing the US dollar to fall.
And although the dollar continues to be the reserve currency of most of the world's countries, the tendency is for it to cease to be so, as the world is taking positions in other currencies and assets in view of its probable devaluation. In all aspects, the world is provoking the North American giant to use the only thing in which it is more powerful than the rest of the countries, to respond to the challenge of its hegemony: its military power. And what better opportunity to do so than the endless war between Israel and the Arab world?
This is the best time to start a world war
For those interested in another world war, this is the best moment. A US with serious problems of internal social disunity due to the serious economic and political crisis, unemployment and debt, will not be able to find a short term solution to this situation. If to this is added a President with an authoritarian profile, the intervention of his military power to create an economy for war, as it happened in the past, begins to be justified. With that confluence of factors, it is not surprising that the order to attack Iran would have been taken, not only by Trump, but by any sitting US President, sooner rather than later.
The issue here is not whether someone is pro-Israel or pro-Iran for whatever reason. The issue is not that simple. It is about the fact that the political and economic conditions of the world and its main players, especially the US, are leading the world to a planetary conflagration for the reordering of political, economic and military power positions after that conflict.
To the final question of the Chair: "Will we be capable of sowing footprints in a future of true life and not of death, or will we follow the paths imposed on us by the mechanisms of capital, its profits and values?” I believe that neither one nor the other, in principle because these decisions do not depend on a particular person or even on a group of them, but on a whole historical evolution of processes that are already leading us to a war as an inevitable fact, in which it will be impossible not to take sides....
Thank you very much....
Caracas, June 23, 2025
Blog: TIC’s & Derechos Humanos, https://ticsddhh.blogspot.com/
Email: luismanuel.aguana@gmail.com
Twitter:@laguana
(*) The author is a Political Analyst, MSc in International Economics and PhD in Development Studies.
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