Thomas Fazi

I’ve written for UnHerd about the most important economic story since Bretton Woods: de-dollarisation — or the world’s gradual disengagement from the dollar. The dollar’s demise has been endlessly — and wrongly — predicted since the Sixties, so scepticism here is justified. This time, however, there is good reason to believe that it’s happening for real. De-dollarisation comes in many forms, but three are particularly easy to spot: the settling of international transactions in currencies other than the dollar, primarily the Chinese yuan; the reduction of the dollar in global foreign-exchange reserves; and the decline in foreign holdings of US Treasury bonds. On all counts, the trend seems clear: countries are slowly moving away from the dollar. This is good news not only for the world but also for America. By attracting capital to the US and allowing it to help itself to foreign goods and resources such as oil simply by printing its own currency — in what Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, de Gaulle’s Minister of Economy, called America’s “exorbitant privilege” — dollar dominance has undoubtedly benefited America’s imperial elites: Wall Street, large global corporations and, most importantly, the national security establishment. It’s what has allowed the US to sustain a regime of perpetual war, on top of exercising financial dominance over much of the world. But this has come at a significant cost not only for the rest of the world but also for American workers, farmers, producers and small businesses. Read the article here.

I’ve got a new column up at UnHerd about what is shaping up to be the new geopolitical paradigm that will dominate European politics in the coming years: the shift of the EU’s centre of gravity to the East and the return of the East-West divide — and why it matters. Until recently, the turn towards “illiberal” or “post-liberal” democracy in various Central and Eastern European countries — most notably Hungary and Poland — was described as one of the greatest threats to the EU, with those nations branded as the bloc’s bêtes noires. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed everything. It has greatly enhanced the geostrategic importance of those countries that border Ukraine, Russia or Russian-controlled Belarus (or overlook the Northern Sea Route), thus dramatically tilting Europe’s geopolitical balance of power from the West to the East (and partly to the North). This will have momentous consequences for the EU, given that most Central and Eastern European countries are staunchly pro-US and pro-NATO — a position that is fundamentally incompatible with the aspirations of France and other Western European countries for greater “strategic autonomy” from the US. The East-West divide is back with a vengeance — and has the potential of bringing down the entire bloc. Read the article here.

In my latest column for UnHerd I chart the rise of private military and security companies (PMSCs) — the modern version of mercenarism. There’s much talk these days about the infamous Wagner Group, Putin’s “private army” that is playing a leading role in Ukraine. But Wagner is just the tip of the iceberg. The corporate security and military industry is a global and growing phenomenon, with the West leading the way. In 2022, the PMSC sector — whose largest businesses are American and British — was valued at $260 billion and is projected to reach a value of around $450 billion by 2030. Ultimately, the growth of the PMSC sector is just another example of how economic transformations in recent decades have blurred the boundary between the public and private-corporate sphere to the point of making it indistinguishable.

I also have a new piece up at Compact, where I argue that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may be immoral, but it cannot be considered irrational or unprovoked, as the Western narrative contends. In fact, it may be seen as a rational response to the Western encirclement of Russia’s borders that began during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and continued to the eve of the war. By that point, events in Ukraine had reached a tipping point, and were plausibly understood by Russia’s leadership to represent an existential threat to its survival. The point is not to justify Russia’s actions in Ukraine; the point is to understand how we got into this mess, because that’s the only way of getting out of it. Appreciating the rational motivations that drove Russia to invade, and acknowledging the responsibilities of all the parties involved, including the West, are preconditions for reaching a solution capable of putting an end to the humanitarian disaster in Ukraine — which must necessarily involve credible security guarantees for both Ukraine and Russia. Read the article here.

It’s been 75 years since the signing into law of the Marshall Plan, which laid the groundwork for a mutually beneficial North Atlantic alliance that offered Europe several decades of economic prosperity and military security. Today, that world no longer exists. Indeed, the contrast between the Marshall Plan and America’s approach to Europe today couldn’t be more jarring. The Marshall Plan may still be regarded as one of the pillars of America’s post-war mythology, but under Biden, America is pursuing an isolationist economic policy and a ham-fisted foreign policy that both run counter to Europe’s vital interests. In my latest UnHerd column, I argue that today the costs of the transatlantic alliance, for Europe, far outweigh the benefits. It’s time for European countries to grow up, get out of this abusive relationship with Washington and embrace the emerging multipolar world order.

I’ve got a new piece up at UnHerd about the way in which small/medium farmers across the world are being forced to shut down in the name of “sustainability”, to the benefit of Big Agro and the world’s food oligarchs — and the catastrophic consequences this could have at a time when the world is already facing a food and resource shortage.

A few days ago I also wrote a short post about a latest poll showing that 30% of British people think lockdowns were a mistake. These people are unlikely to feel represented by either of the two major parties — on issues ranging from immigration to globalisation to the war in Ukraine. This silent (for now) but sizeable minority shows that there’s a potentially large space for a new populist party in Britain.

During his recent visit to Moscow, Xi Jinping reaffirmed the two countries’ strong ties and emphasised that Russia has not been isolated by the global community. Indeed, China isn’t the only country Russia has strengthened ties with since the start of the conflict. Despite the West’s attempts to “globalise” the conflict, only 33 nations — representing just over one-eighth of the global population — have imposed sanctions on Russia and sent military aid to Ukraine: the UK, US, Canada, Australia, South Korea, Japan and the EU — in other words, those countries that are directly under the US sphere of influence, which in many cases involves a significant US military presence. The remaining nations, comprising close to 90% of the world’s population, have refused to follow suit. If anything, the war has actually strengthened Russian relations with a number of major non-Western countries — including, besides China, India, South Africa and Turkey — and accelerated the rise of a new international order in which it is the West that looks increasingly isolated, not Russia. As I write in UnHerd, it is not China and Russia that are decoupling from the West; it is the West that is decoupling from the rest of the world.

I also wrote about Germany’s health minister Karl Lauterbach’s change of tune on vaccine injuries: Lauterbach, a pro-lockdown and hawk who infamously claimed that Covid vaccines were “without side effects”, has now admitted he was wrong. It’s the biggest vaccine-injury scandal to have emerged since the pandemic.

On March 8, 2014, at around 1:20am, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished from radar screens just off the coast of Malaysia, never to be seen again. Nine years later, the Boeing 777’s disappearance remains the most astonishing, and terrifying, mystery in aviation history. In this age of constant real-time monitoring of everything that moves through the skies, in which even an unidentified balloon can cause the scrambling of fighter jets, how could a massive high-tech airliner carrying 239 people vanish into thin air? Several experts have tried to answer this question — many of whom are featured in a new three-part Netflix documentary, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared. In my latest article for UnHerd, I explain all the problems with the official narrative — including all the things left out in the documentary — as well as look at the alternative narrative proposed by Le Monde journalist Florence de Changy in her book The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370.

I’ve got a new piece out in UnHerd about the plans underway to give the WHO sweeping powers of intervention in the public health affairs of nation-states. This is problematic for a number of reasons — not least the WHO’s disastrous handling of the pandemic, which I talk about in the article — but first and foremost because the organisation has largely fallen under the control of private capital and other vested interests, most notably Bill Gates, the second-largest funder of the WHO. By transferring even more power to the WHO, we would effectively be transferring it to Gates and his corporate partners. It would mark the definitive transformation of global health into an authoritarian, corporate-driven, techno-centric affair — and risk making the Covid response a blueprint for the future.

A few days ago I also published an article in Compact which I consider to be one of the most important articles I’ve written in a while. In it, I trace the decades-long rise of “health security” or “biosecurity” as a new authoritarian paradigm and ideology of social control — and of the massive biosecurity complex that it engendered, which by 2020 had burgeoned into a mammoth of terrifying power and proportions, encompassing the world’s largest pharma and biotech companies, the biometrics industry, social media giants, traditional media conglomerates, national security (military and intelligence) apparatuses, global and national public health organisations such as WHO, the World Bank’s health division, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health and their equivalents in other countries, private philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation, and trans-Atlantic planning groups-cum-think tanks such as the WEF as important intermediaries between the various actors.

Finally, I also wrote a short piece about the extraordinary revelations contained in the Lockdown Files, based on more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between the then-UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, and other ministers and officials at the height of the pandemic. The conversations relating to the management of care homes (the site of around 30% of all UK Covid deaths) confirm what we’ve been saying for some time, and that is that a huge number of Covid deaths, particularly in the first wave, weren’t caused by the virus itself, and certainly weren’t caused by the decision not to lock down sooner. They were caused by the decision to abandon the kind of focused protection of at-risk groups championed by all pre-2020 pandemic plans, in favour of a completely untried and untested “lockdown” model. This didn’t just have a devastating impact on people’s livelihoods, physical and mental health, education, and civil and democratic rights. It also failed disastrously in achieving the one thing it was supposed to achieve, as the Lockdown Files make clear: reducing Covid deaths.

A little update on my latest pieces. I’ve got a new article out about the UK’s Covid-19 Inquiry, which begins its preliminary hearing today. In it, Toby Green and I look at some of the questions the Inquiry should ask — and answer — if it’s serious about addressing the true causes of the pandemic catastrophe. Such as:

• How and why did Britain’s and the world’s political-scientific establishment cohere around a completely untried and untested model — “national lockdown” — for dealing with the Covid outbreak, which had not only never been implement but had never been conceived of before 2020?
• Why was the UK’s pre-2020 pandemic planning — which emphasised balancing the costs/benefits of interventions according to the principles of proportionality and flexibility, minimising the disruptions to everyday life, and protecting the vulnerable — thrown out of the window?
• Why was no risk/benefit analysis conducted in relation to lockdowns given that the collateral damage of the shutting down of society — in terms of physical and mental health, education, culture, the economy, incomes, etc. — was easily predictable and indeed had been predicted?
• Why were schools and universities closed despite early evidence that Covid was not a risk for children/young adults and that schools were not major sources of spread, and the obvious damage the closure would have on the education and mental health of children/young adults?
• Why was there an almost exclusive focus on Covid to the detriment of all other aspects of public health, including cancer screening and treatment, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, childhood vaccinations and mental health — all of which have worsened since the pandemic?

You can read the rest of the article here.

I had two more pieces out last week. One was about the surge in anti-migrant protests in Britain, where I argue that it’s not primarily driven by racism — but by a desire to have a say over the form, pace and scale of immigration.

The other one was about the New York Times’s decision to take the European Commission to court over Ursula von der Leyen’s refusal to release the text messages she exchanged with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in which she personally negotiated the purchase of up to 1.8 billion doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. This is the latest episode in what is shaping up to be one of the most colossal political-corporate scandal in the EU’s history.

I’ve got a new piece up over at UnHerd about the push — in the UK and elsewhere — towards central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The official explanations don’t add up, while the risks of giving governments and central banks such sweeping powers of surveillance and control are being seriously downplayed.