In one of the great ironies of history, Richard Nixon failed to grasp the new power he created by his decision to unmoor the dollar from gold. Most tellingly, he failed to make the connection between this historic decision and the new dynamic it injected into the historic Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. Arguably, this is the most significant of the many apparently unrelated effects of the now dominant and unmoored dollar. The Cold War The 1970s were a difficult decade for the United States. From wearying stagflation to the humiliation of Saigon, the sordid shame of Watergate…

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