Today, we start with a history lesson. But don’t be too quick to move along just yet. There’s a bigger message coming—patience beats power.
And the patient are already positioning for a power shift.
We’re going back to 218 BC. Carthaginian general Hannibal and his army have crossed the Alps on those elephants and have arrived in Italy. The Romans, who to this point had never lost a serious land war to anyone, meet him on the battlefield.
And like all-you-can eat breadsticks at an Olive Garden, Rome got eaten up.
Roman legions wilted like soggy lettuce. In one single say, they lost upwards of 70,000 legionnaires.
The Roman Senate, in a panic, appoints a new dictator, a real office in ancient Rome—a temporary, emergency leader holding absolute civil and military power to handle severe crises.
The dictator: Quintus Fabius Maximus. We’ll just call him Fabius.
Fabius looks at what Hannibal is doing, looks at what the Romans have been trying to do (and failing miserably), and he concludes that Rome is screwed. No one in Rome wants to hear that of course. This is Rome! Ruler of the world! Ain’t no interloper going to change that… ever.
But no worries. Fabius has a plan.
He methodically shadows Hannibal and his army, marching alongside them, just out of immediate reach, up on the ridgelines. A constant, nagging reminder to Hannibal that, “Hey, yo! I’m here. Watching you. Waiting patiently. You’ll give up soon enough; we both know that.”
Fabius burns the countryside so that Hannibal can’t feed his troops. He picks off foragers and stragglers from Hannibal’s army. He cuts supply lines.
And he waits.
The Romans hate this. They give Fabius a new moniker: Cunctator—”The Delayer.” In ancient Rome, it’s an insult.
Fabius cares not.
For more than a decade, he refuses to fight Hannibal. And as Hannibal wanders Italy, his army rots. His mercenaries go unpaid. His Italian allies drift away.
By 203 BC, Hannibal heads back to Carthage, in modern day Tunisia.
Fabius has won a war… by refusing to fight it.
He was operating by the standards of Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu, who wrote that “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
In other news you can use…
The People’s Bank of China has completed its 21st consecutive month of buying more gold.
It’s the longest streak on record.
Why?
Because China’s is reprising the role of Quintus Fabius Maximus.
It’s content to track Hannibal—i.e. America—from the ridgeline. Never really out of sight. Doing all kinds of things that damage the great power… but never really engaging the enemy on the battlefield.
It’s building a parallel payment system that’s taking power from the dollar. It’s selling US Treasury bonds, allowing America’s own profligacy to weaken internal systems. And it has been absorbing the bulk of the global crude oil import contraction that emerged with the Iran war, quietly but oh-so visibly demonstrating that Beijing, not OPEC, now controls how much the world pays for oil.
It’s similar to Fabius picking off Hannibal’s foraging parties here and there.
All the while, China is happy to let the enemy undermine itself.
And perhaps most interesting is that the Western press is telling us the dollar is fine, the debt is manageable, the Treasury has this under control, $40 trillion in debt is just a number, and China will never rise up to defeat the Hannibal States of America.
The man up on the ridgeline loves it.
He’s just not saying anything about it.
Because he’s too busy buying more gold in preparation for what he knows is coming.
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