In March, 2009, I joined a group of sixty officials from the armed forces, intelligence community, U.S. Treasury, think tanks and Wall Street at a top-secret weapons laboratory near Washington, DC to conduct the first ever war game in which the weapons were not missiles and bombs, but stocks, bonds and currencies. The Pentagon wanted to understand how adversaries could inflict harm on the United States and expand their own power using financial weapons.
My mission was to play for the China team, although I had recruited allies on the Russian and Swiss teams also. Over two days of moves and counter-moves, the Chinese and Russians played a gambit in which a new gold-backed currency created by them would replace the dollar as the medium of exchange for Russian natural resources and Chinese manufactured goods. Many of the established academic economists in the war room were appalled at the audacity of the move to gold, and some ridiculed it openly. That was then.
As a global-macro analyst, I am frequently asked if war with Iran will come and, if so, when. My answer is that the war has already begun. It's not a shooting war - yet. What the U.S. and Israel are now waging with Iran is what experts call unrestricted warfare. This is warfare that consists of sabotage, assassination, special operations, psychological operations, attacks on critical infrastructure, cyber warfare and - the most recent addition to the arsenal - financial warfare.
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