Thinking more about this and these articles come to mind about the US military and the general unsustainability of how things are being run in terms of infrastructure:
If we also consider how coupled the US is to the world economy, a drastic drop in global power could mean the sort of sanctions the US state has been inflicting on other countries end up on it and I don't see people having enough loyalty to the country to fight such a thing meaningfully. Already, we know how the public feels and what gets implemented as policy has little connection. We are seeing right now people being willing to risk their futures or even lives now to protest genocide in another country, similar to the actions during the US violence against Vietnam. An encounter that the US ultimately lost, even if it did inflict barbaric harm on the Vietnamese people in the process.
Now China with BRICS is rising in influence, anti-imperialism appears to be overall strengthening and western imperialism weakening even if it is not always a straightforward "win" because even under the best conditions, it will not always go the way we want it to for the colonized.
And then there is climate change to contend with too, as well as the US's general poor handling of covid, where it sacrificed its own people in order to push for faster re-opening and just sort of say "the pandemic is over." That kind of cynically evil approach might work some of the time at a small scale, but the displacement climate change could cause is not going to be small and ignorable, and there will be no "just wait on a vaccine" moment for it.
All of this is to say that there is a lot levied against the US and western imperialism as a whole, both now and going forward, some of it plain old nature coming home with the consequences of mass ecological destruction.
And if the US loses its hold, I don't see what other wing of western imperialism would be strong enough to take its place. I hesitate to make any personal predictions on time, but I don't see western imperialism having any meaningful capability to navigate the consequences of climate change as a power figure, so I can't see it lasting as a global power beyond that getting bad. If we take covid as a preview, it's more likely for the violence to turn inward and deteriorate the conditions of the US further and China to be the one leading in acting pragmatically on a large scale.
If we also consider how coupled the US is to the world economy, a drastic drop in global power could mean the sort of sanctions the US state has been inflicting on other countries end up on it
Hell, nevermind sanctions, a drop in US power will mean- as we are seeing- the development of alternatives; the world simply won't need the US anymore, all their tools of extortion will be undone, and increasingly states will choose the alternatives- or develop their own- rather than deal with the US, which has always, always been a malicious, treacherous actor.
Countries will increasingly develop their own domestic agriculture, where the US had formerly shackled them to its own, discouraged such developments, and supported (in some/many cases, enforced) the development of export economies, wholly beholden on the imperial cores instead. Alternatives to western media, technology, to western institutions ranging from education to international justice or arbitration- will develop. Countries will move past the western chokeholds from all industries, from pharmaceuticals, to industrial development (within their own countries at that!), to developing infrastructure for their own inter-global southern trade (for instance, inter-African trade as a key example of where this is so clearly necessary, and where such struggles are undergoing), to finance, and so on.
And personally, I look forward to seeing it. Whatever is beholden to the west, owned by the west, should not be trusted, and countries are not only seeing the west increasingly once again go mask-off as the bad actors they are, but now, with viable alternatives, moving, slowly but surely, en masse away from it. The future of the west will be pariahs if they keep it up, but even in the hypothetical scenario of genuine communist revolution and establishment within the west- the levers of control the west has only ever abused so far, will increasingly be gone, and the rest of the world is never going to hand them back- it's all Joever for western hegemony, for western influence, for the western era (500 years of monstrosities, unprecedented terror and actual barbarism).
And if countries don't like the developing Chinese, Russian, BRICS alternatives- by all means, that's fine (well, I'd call it nonsense, but it's fine). For instance, India banned TikTok. More power to them, or whatever. But what we're moving towards is a world where India, and all these other countries, can make their own TikToks, their own Facebooks or whatever they want- a world where, hopefully, each and every chip of western capital will be lost. Frankly if you ask me? China should probably see about helping India break off from western tech, even if it's building up their own new competitors, surely an arrangement can be made- but it's a whole new world, and what is "west" is gonna be on the way out. Hopefully we live to see Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Ford, General Electric, Pfizer, Monsanto, Nestle, Amazon, Coca-Cola, Disney, etc.. (basically list any and every western multinational) kick the bucket, to see the west really hit its stride in either becoming irrelevant, or learning to come down to earth and join the rest of humanity (without the levers of coercion- they're never going back, and the west will never be trusted to develop them, ever) as equals- and as truly reformed, repentant, and thoroughly decolonized equals.
Thinking more about this and these articles come to mind about the US military and the general unsustainability of how things are being run in terms of infrastructure:
https://indi.ca/nothing-to-see-here-just-the-wheels-falling-off-empire/
https://indi.ca/how-americas-military-has-fallen-apart/
If we also consider how coupled the US is to the world economy, a drastic drop in global power could mean the sort of sanctions the US state has been inflicting on other countries end up on it and I don't see people having enough loyalty to the country to fight such a thing meaningfully. Already, we know how the public feels and what gets implemented as policy has little connection. We are seeing right now people being willing to risk their futures or even lives now to protest genocide in another country, similar to the actions during the US violence against Vietnam. An encounter that the US ultimately lost, even if it did inflict barbaric harm on the Vietnamese people in the process.
Now China with BRICS is rising in influence, anti-imperialism appears to be overall strengthening and western imperialism weakening even if it is not always a straightforward "win" because even under the best conditions, it will not always go the way we want it to for the colonized.
And then there is climate change to contend with too, as well as the US's general poor handling of covid, where it sacrificed its own people in order to push for faster re-opening and just sort of say "the pandemic is over." That kind of cynically evil approach might work some of the time at a small scale, but the displacement climate change could cause is not going to be small and ignorable, and there will be no "just wait on a vaccine" moment for it.
All of this is to say that there is a lot levied against the US and western imperialism as a whole, both now and going forward, some of it plain old nature coming home with the consequences of mass ecological destruction.
And if the US loses its hold, I don't see what other wing of western imperialism would be strong enough to take its place. I hesitate to make any personal predictions on time, but I don't see western imperialism having any meaningful capability to navigate the consequences of climate change as a power figure, so I can't see it lasting as a global power beyond that getting bad. If we take covid as a preview, it's more likely for the violence to turn inward and deteriorate the conditions of the US further and China to be the one leading in acting pragmatically on a large scale.
Hell, nevermind sanctions, a drop in US power will mean- as we are seeing- the development of alternatives; the world simply won't need the US anymore, all their tools of extortion will be undone, and increasingly states will choose the alternatives- or develop their own- rather than deal with the US, which has always, always been a malicious, treacherous actor.
Countries will increasingly develop their own domestic agriculture, where the US had formerly shackled them to its own, discouraged such developments, and supported (in some/many cases, enforced) the development of export economies, wholly beholden on the imperial cores instead. Alternatives to western media, technology, to western institutions ranging from education to international justice or arbitration- will develop. Countries will move past the western chokeholds from all industries, from pharmaceuticals, to industrial development (within their own countries at that!), to developing infrastructure for their own inter-global southern trade (for instance, inter-African trade as a key example of where this is so clearly necessary, and where such struggles are undergoing), to finance, and so on.
And personally, I look forward to seeing it. Whatever is beholden to the west, owned by the west, should not be trusted, and countries are not only seeing the west increasingly once again go mask-off as the bad actors they are, but now, with viable alternatives, moving, slowly but surely, en masse away from it. The future of the west will be pariahs if they keep it up, but even in the hypothetical scenario of genuine communist revolution and establishment within the west- the levers of control the west has only ever abused so far, will increasingly be gone, and the rest of the world is never going to hand them back- it's all Joever for western hegemony, for western influence, for the western era (500 years of monstrosities, unprecedented terror and actual barbarism).
And if countries don't like the developing Chinese, Russian, BRICS alternatives- by all means, that's fine (well, I'd call it nonsense, but it's fine). For instance, India banned TikTok. More power to them, or whatever. But what we're moving towards is a world where India, and all these other countries, can make their own TikToks, their own Facebooks or whatever they want- a world where, hopefully, each and every chip of western capital will be lost. Frankly if you ask me? China should probably see about helping India break off from western tech, even if it's building up their own new competitors, surely an arrangement can be made- but it's a whole new world, and what is "west" is gonna be on the way out. Hopefully we live to see Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Ford, General Electric, Pfizer, Monsanto, Nestle, Amazon, Coca-Cola, Disney, etc.. (basically list any and every western multinational) kick the bucket, to see the west really hit its stride in either becoming irrelevant, or learning to come down to earth and join the rest of humanity (without the levers of coercion- they're never going back, and the west will never be trusted to develop them, ever) as equals- and as truly reformed, repentant, and thoroughly decolonized equals.
Well said!