After WWII, the US GDP was a large majority of the world GDP. Europe was in ruins, the European colonies had been robbed blind for a century or more, and there was a video made in 1949 called "King Joe" that the typical American factory worker earned $10 a day while a Chinese coolie earned 10¢ a day.
Right after WWII, the £ and the ₣ were no longer the strong currencies they had been, and a US$ could be exchanged for 889 mg of 24K gold, so the US$ became the World Key Currency, the currency most often used for international transactions since a US$ was as Good as Gold.
The US worried that Western European and Japanese peasants might be attracted by the promises of the USSR, so the US pumped money into Europe and Japan to help them rebuild. The US share of the world economy fell below 30%, but the US and their close allies, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan formed the G7, which still had 70% of the world GDP.
Then, in 1971, President Nixon announced that a US$ was just a US$, no gold. But there was no alternative, so the US$ remained the Key Currency.
More and more Americans bought cars and flew on jets, and the US soon needed all the oil it could produce, and then a lot more, mostly from the Middle East, so the US and Saudi became locked in an economic embrace. The US desperately needed Saudi oil and were Saudi's biggest customer, and Saudi desperately needed US $$$ and protection. And when the US asked Saudi to take over their Yemen war as proxies, Saudi were happy to oblige. Saudi are not fond of Shi'a, so killing the Shi'a in the Yemen with advanced US weapons was a pleasure.
But then came fracking, and the US are now a net exporter of oil. The US have no need of Saudi oil and are no longer pumping huge amounts of US$$$ into the Saudi coffers.
But the US control the World Key Currency, so they can ban anyone buying or selling in US$, and did this to Iran. The US said it is illegal for anyone to buy Iranian oil or to sell anything to Iran. The Iran economy fell by 50%, and Iranian lifestyles were reduced, with some hardship, but Iran did not agree to regime change to be able to engage in international trade. If the US wanted to blockade Iran, they put up with the poverty that produced. The Ayatollahs figured poverty was better than capitulating to The Great Satan.
The US Navy enforced the blockade of Iran. Any oil tanker carrying Iranian oil would be seized by the US Navy and the oil and the tanker sold with all the money going to the US government.
But times change.
That Chinese coolie now earns enough to buy a car and petrol, and there are a lot of Chinese coolies buying far more oil than the US ever did. Enough that, in 2021, a fleet of PRC tankers guarded by PLANavy warships began pulling empty into Iran and loaded with Iranian oil out of Iran, and all that oil made it safely to the PRC.
The G7 are sure their GDP is still at least 70% of the Global GDP. But the G7 leadership can't count. At PPP, the BRICS GDP is larger than the G7 GDP.
So when Brandon went to Saudi Arabia recently to ask for more and cheaper oil, he got a very cool reception.
And when Xi Jinping went to the PRC, he got the reddest of carpets, and was told Saudi would be very happy if the PRC paid for their oil in 元.
So when the PRC demanded that Saudi and Iran end their conflict and make peace, they both said, 'Yes, Sir! Whatever you say, Sir.'
Prof. John Mearsheimer says the world now has 3 Great Powers (and only 3). Russia are in 3rd place, and are far, far weaker than #1 and #2. He puts the US as #1 with the PRC a very close #2. The PRC agree with this assessment, and hope to have the PRC military the equal of the US by 2027, so the US are desperate for a war that will end with regime change and Balkanisation of the PRC before 2025.
I'm not sure Russia are really that far behind. Russia have no hatred for the ordinary Ukrainians, only for the ones who are convinced they are ethnic Aryans and much better than ethnic Russians who should all be eliminated for Lebensraum. This is unlike the US who were told that every Afghan, Iraqi, Yemeni, and Libyan worked hard to plan, engineer, and execute 9/11, and all must be destroyed. Reliable reports are that Kiev has a great night life and no one is worried about being carpet bombed the way the US carpet bombed their perceived enemy jihadist terrorists.
Of course, the US leadership figure this is because the feeble Russian military lacks the capability to carpet bomb Kiev, they have already lost more than 300,000 dead Russian soldiers, cut off from weapons by the sanctions, forced to use Czarist weapons against NATO weapons, the most advanced weapons in the world. Only a few are left of the invaders, and they sneak into undefended villages, kill all the villagers, and leave before the Ukraine military (or even the Ukraine police) can come to stop them. This is the only version allowed in the Western media (Tucker Carlson was fired for saying something else), so Western leaders and ordinary citizens read it and watch it and believe it.
In fact, Tucker Carlson read from a classified TS/SCI/NOFORN/BBR report that the Ukraine are losing 7 to 10 times as many soldiers as the Russians, along with at least 30% of all the materiel that NATO sent them. NATO say the Russians ran 100 pictures of one Western tank that was briefly stuck and called it 100 NATO tanks destroyed. Just Russian Photoshop, don't believe your own eyes.
NATO are losing, even though NATO 'know' they must be winning a decisive victory, since that's all they ever read in the newspapers or see on the broadcast news.
And the G7 still think they are 70% of the Global economy and the PRC are a bunch of coolies earning 10¢ a day, with a Navy that's just junk(s) and an air force that's just coloured kites, and the US plan to drag the rest of NATO along as they force the PRC to go to war over Taiwan, after which the sanctions will destroy the PRC economy, putting it back to where it was in 1970, and the advanced NATO weapons will quickly destroy the entire PLA.
Good luck with that, NATO.
