• xiaohongshu [none/use name]
    ·
    1 day ago

    This is why the US is doing the slow trickling method, sending a few tanks and planes at a time to Ukraine to have them blown up by Russia.

    It can do this for a very long time as long as it is not American servicemen who gets killed, and as long as it is not in direct open conflict with Russia and China. Instead, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from foreign countries will fight each other to their death while the US just watches by the sideline, providing materiel support and intelligence/targeting feed as needed.

    • birdcat@lemmy.ml
      ·
      1 day ago

      i get that viewpoint but isnt there a moment where they go like am i testing my weapons and make money, or am i just training my enemy and improve their capabilities?

      • xiaohongshu [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        24 hours ago

        The true power of US imperialism lies in its financial warfare.

        Every equipment blown up means new contract for the defense industries, it means GDP goes up. Doesn’t even matter if the equipment works or not - for example, F-35 is plagued with problems but still a trillion dollars were spent on it. All these contribute to the strength of the US dollar, which it can then leverage to wreck the Global South countries.

        The reason the US can do this is because the fight for industrial capital had ended in the 1990s with the dissolution of the USSR. The US and Europe were able to financialize the entire un-monetized Soviet industries that they accumulated so much finance capital that it made possible the hyper-leap into fully financialized economy. This allowed the European Union, the eurozone, the WTO (previously GATT) to be formed, and the rise of Europe as a financial adversary to the US had resulted in the endless Balkan conflicts at the European peripheral (to check the European growth), the Iraq War (to prevent Saddam from selling oil in Euro), and the Ukrainian Civil War in 2015 and the current Russia-Ukraine War since 2022 (to prevent Nord Stream 1 and 2 from the provision of energy sovereignty to Europe).

        Think of it this way: just as the Northern industrialists prevailing over the Southern semi-feudal slaveowners during the American Civil War enabled the proliferating industrial capital to gain so much capital from consolidating the wealth of the Southern plantation owners that it allowed America to hyperleap into the plane of fully industrialized economy. The South had made fortunes supplying raw materials like cotton to England and France that were undergoing Industrial Revolution in the 1800s - the real reason for the American Civil War because expansion of industrial capital was threatened by the reinvigoration of the slave economy thanks to the Industrial Revolution.

        The American Civil War allowed the North to hyper-leap into the plane of industrial capitalism, just as how the end of the Cold War allowed America to hyper-leap into the plane of finance capitalism. War machines are no longer made to fight wars or even to be functional as were the days of industrial capitalism, but as products to make fictitious GDP goes up, which then transforms into actual American diplomatic and economic leverage over the Global South.

        And the US is never going to get invaded as long as it has nukes. Any hot war necessarily means nuclear exchange, because the US military simply does not have the capacity to fight against Russia and China.