my understanding is this: us dollar is propped by pretty much only the petrodollar. the saudis play ball and sell their ultra cheap oil to the world in petro dollars. the saudis want to sell their oil to the european market. but they actually have to deliver it by oil tanker. that is slow and expensive and so even if the saudis can pull the oil out of the ground the cheapest. it's more expensive by the time it gets to europe than the other big player russia. saudis want to build an oil pipeline to europe through syria. syria's prime minister is good friends with putin. putin tells him don't let them build that pipeline, as if you do... russias primary export of oil to europe gets cucked. the saudis don't like this. so they look at the us and say, can you topple assad so we can get that pipeline built. if you don't so this... we will drop the petrodollar and the us dollar will crumble. so neocons like hillary go ahead and try. but russia puts missle boats in the black sea and supplies them through ukraine thwarting the us attempts. thus neocons get the idea to push ukraine to join nato thus they can cut russia off from the black sea, and trigger article 5 if they try to help syria again. putin realises he has been cornered and goes apeshit on eastern ukraine... and we're in the current predicament. no one is evil here. everyone is trying to just secure their economy.
Australia