Predictable consequences cannot also be unintended

After following US policy for over 30 years, and consistently seeing real-world outcomes that contradict the public rationales for the policies that caused them; I recognised quite some time ago that the official rationales have nothing whatsoever to do with the intention behind any policy. However, because the outcomes regularly bear no resemblance to the stated policy objectives, you will often see critics lambasting the US for incompetence. This characterization either reveals the incompetence of complicity of such critics. In other words, they are either so naïve as to believe that the outcomes of a policy are genuinely mistakes — in which case they are incompetent as critics, or, they are knowingly deflecting blame for malicious intent by writing it off as foolishness on the part of policy makers — in which case, they are complicit.

And this keeps happening. I am seeing so many commentators talking about de-dollarization, about the fall of the dollar, about the economic free fall of Europe, all as unintended consequences of the sanctions against Russia; and they are either cheering about it because they fancy themselves champions of the Global South, or they are lamenting it as a dangerous decline of US hegemony. But either perspective seems consistently to assume that no one could have possibly seen this coming, or that it was otherwise unintended. This, in my opinion, is absurd. These outcomes were not only entirely predictable, they were predicted; by myself and surely by others. What is happening with the dollar, what is happening to Europe, is exactly what was intended to happen.