This is, without exaggerating, one of the most extraordinary things a US Treasury Secretary ever said.
It should be mandatory viewing for all citizens of US “allies”, Europeans first and foremost.
What Bessent is saying is that the US will now treat US allies’ wealth as an American “sovereign wealth fund” (his words), “directing” them, “largely at the [US] president’s discretion”, how to use their money in order to build American factories and reshore American industries.
Even the Fox News host can’t believe it, calling it “offshore appropriation”, another word for theft.
That’s exactly what it is: straight up unabashed colonial plunder.
That’s the pattern we see emerge: unable to extract wealth or win wars against an increasingly strong Global South, the US has turned inward to feast on its own “allies” – who can’t resist precisely because they depend on their exploiter for military “protection”. They’re as defenseless against American wealth extraction as any 19th-century colony was against its colonial “protector.”
That’s exactly what I wrote in my latest article on “Europe’s colonial moment”: https://open.substack.com/pub/arnaudbertrand/p/not-at-the-table-europes-colonial?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4r0pw
This is, without exaggerating, one of the most extraordinary things a US Treasury Secretary ever said.
It should be mandatory viewing for all citizens of US "allies", Europeans first and foremost.
What Bessent is saying is that the US will now treat US allies' wealth as an… pic.twitter.com/IdNFMW33P7
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) August 13, 2025