Robert Moriarty & Patrick Highsmith return as this week’s guests. When Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that countries unfriendly to Russia would have to pay for their oil and gas in Russian rubles, he pulled a chapter out of the U.S. playbook. In the early 1970s America arranged a quid-pro-quo agreement with Saudi Arabia whereby the U.S. used its military might to ensure the Saudi Royal family remained in power so long as it required OPEC (which it controlled) to sell oil only for U.S. dollars. The U.S. also used its military to force nations not to buy oil with euros.
When the U
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