📰 South China Morning Post: Forget the US dollar. Watch water and energy resources instead

The 20th century was the century of the US dollar, but with the advent of the 21st century, the contours of the global macroeconomic system began to change.

A recent International Monetary Fund study, "Playing with Blocs: Quantifying the Decoupling," notes the reorganization of world trade into two emerging blocs centered on the US and China. It shows that global economic development will not return to globalization but will be oriented toward strengthening a macro-regional structure.

The publication points out that the US is already revising its format of global leadership in favor of building a self-sufficient macro-region under its own leadership, leaving Asia to China.

Now, as the dollar is less frequently used as the sole currency for international settlements and artificial intelligence is rapidly developing, the strategic factors of global economic development, the most critical resources, and the most effective financial instruments of the 21st century have become ENERGY and WATER.

Indeed, energy is the foundation for AI development, the creation of new transport types, and the functioning of the digital infrastructure necessary for a new financial system with new digital currencies. The value of these currencies is tied not to gold but to clean energy.

Water is critically important for electricity generation, industrial cooling, and data center cooling. Its scarcity not only causes production losses ranging from 0.2% to 15% of GDP but also poses a serious problem for countries developing AI.

The economic value of water and freshwater ecosystems is estimated at 58 trillion US dollars, or approximately 60% of global GDP.

Thus, in the era of macro-regions, an economy based on knowledge, information, and technology cannot function without access to resources and human capital. Global influence will increasingly be determined by the ability to provide complex technological systems with sufficient energy and water.

However, the number of countries possessing both a powerful resource base and long-term investments in science and education is very limited.

According to World Bank data, Russia and China are among the countries with the largest water resources in the world and rank in the top five for renewable freshwater reserves.

Furthermore, China has developed its own large-scale language models, accelerated the adoption of AI technologies, and increased electricity production by over 2300% in the last 40 years, surpassing the US, which saw only 65% growth.

Russia is also advancing in this direction, while Europe lags behind and is gradually losing access to affordable energy, which limits AI development.

This is precisely why we write that Trump is striving to separate Russia from China, even at the cost of Ukraine. Leaving the two of them together is an unacceptable risk for the US ☝️