Security Council veto power probably has prevented additional world wars, possibly nuclear ones, so I guess it's nice in that respect, but it does definitely come with the inability to punish a Great Power diplomatically.

In this vein of discussion: I'm honestly unsure what the stage after the United Nations looks like in this regard. Until global socialism, there will be nuclear-armed countries with differing interests; even relatively close allies can have major problems. The UN is (more-or-less) the diplomatic arm of American hegemony, so perhaps it falls as the US falls, but the US (and the UK and France etc) will still have nukes even as a regional power, so perhaps not. Maybe the UN will stay approximately how it is until the breakdown of capitalism, with a declining US hegemony only making other parts of the UN a little more functional? It's not really high on my list of priorities to care about though.

revving up the electric cattle prod and only dust comes out

"fully" is hard to define; I think Bangladesh's "problem" is that Hasina tried to develop domestic industry gradually with the idea of moving up the manufacturing chain, and the US wasn't fooled. She did have legitimate problems as well but the US supports literally dozens of terrible, unpopular, and genuinely tyrannical leaders around the world at any given moment so that wasn't the thing that got her overthrown

Alternatives to Western financial institutions are, admittedly, still fairly embryonic; BRICS is not remotely as rigidly constructed and imposed as, say, NATO (regardless of NATO's declining actual strength). However, it is also far from the only organization based on international cooperation and development; others include the SCO and ASEAN.

All of these dynamics could, potentially, be part of a Chinese master plan to destroy American hegemony and replace it with their own. This is essentially the position of many imperialist academics and analysts. They project America's settler-colonial history and ambitions onto China, believing all nations to be just as chauvinistic. The author lists many quotes from Chinese diplomats painting them in a good light (with contrasting hostile quotes from American diplomats), but China's actions are the most meaningful thing to study here.

Analysis of unequal trade from Kyle Ferrana's Why The World Needs China reveals that China has not merely become another imperialist harvesting from neocolonies. China is the largest trading partner of every African country, and yet the terms of the trade are only very slightly in favor of China. This is actually a substantial issue for China: they buy commodities from African countries (which, due to Western influence that China is so far unable to reverse, are grossly underpriced), and then refines those commodities and sells them for prices lower than in the West (which is how it has achieved manufacturing dominance). That is: rather than overwork African labourers even more than the West is to drive raw commodity prices down, China is instead using Chinese labour.

This places China in the semi-periphery - wealth overwhelmingly flows from Africa to the imperial core rather than to China, but what little China does get is used in state-led production to compete with the imperial core, as well as investment in the periphery to raise their level of development. In fact, Chinese net investment income from abroad is negative (they are losing money by investing in the developing world), whereas for Western countries, it is very positive. China either has unbelievably incompetent investors, or they are doing something sneaky and clever. The Belt and Road has invested over a trillion dollars into the Global South, with ports, rails, roads, and pipelines being constructed all over the world.

Is this merely cynical? Didn't the British also construct railways in their colonies? No, because:

This omits how imperial projects were purely extractive endeavours and came at the expense of colonial peoples, even to the point of purposively de-industrialising nations like India. The neo-imperialist period saw active efforts by the West to prevent infrastructure from being built, with mechanisms of debt peonage and indiscriminate bombing, such as the U.S’ destruction of Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory. China’s participation, in contrast, has been to build infrastructure providing power, transport, medicine and education.

What about Chinese debt trapping?

This is another example of flattening real differences: as shown by repeated papers and investigations, Chinese debt-trap is an outright myth, with even Western newspapers such as The Atlantic and Bloomberg admitting as much. In fact, in 2022 alone, the country forgave “23 interest-free loans for 17 African countries, after already cancelling $3.4 billion and restructuring $15 billion of debt from 2000-2019.” This practise of forgiving loans is a stark contrast to the activities of Western institutions, as covered in many sources.

In 2024, at the Forum on Africa-China Relations, Xi Jinping announced that all Least Developed Countries that have relations with China, including 33 countries in Africa, will gain zero-tariff treatment, and intergovernmental interest-free loans due at the end of 2024 will be waived, while those same countries are perfectly allowed to put tariffs on Chinese imports to build up their domestic industries.

China is, therefore, not becoming the new imperialist hegemon. They are working to end the fundamental structures of imperialism altogether.

Part 2: Why Have Hope?

Everybody here understands that America is engaged in staggeringly colossal crimes all over the world. This demonstrates that staggeringly colossal effort is required to maintain imperial domination and capital accumulation. Imperialism is a process which physically cannot last forever. The violence should not be thought of as maintaining the system for capitalists, as much as it is buying time against its inevitable destruction. The current generation of bourgeoisie does not want to be in the generation in which the profit bonanza ends.

In the essay, the author here describes the logic of capitalist breakdown, such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. To summarize paragraphs of Marxist theory, this is a problem of capital overaccumulation. The aftermath of major crises can lead to temporary relief for capitalists, but future crises will be on a yet larger scale for a variety of reasons, and so capitalism is unsustainable in the long run. They can only delay the decay up until the point at which a crisis will grow so large that it will rend the whole system asunder. Political revolutions will both take advantage of and exacerbate these economic crises, with the quantitative number of revolutionary situations transforming into a qualitative change for the whole system.

The main method for delaying the final crisis has been through neocolonial extraction, which is now rapidly eroding. In the past, the imperial core used direct colonialism which financed and industrialized both the core and periphery to varying degrees. After the wave of national liberation movements in the 20th century, capitalism had to find a way to maintain cheap extraction in order to survive as a system. How this has been done has been studied by many scholars, all the way to the current day via Jason Hickel's studies, and can all be put under the broad category of "unequal exchange." The dollar can be thought of as a commodity all its own - the US "produces" it, and other countries compete to "buy" it by selling their natural resources. This international competition pushes the price of their commodities downwards. They need those dollars to service their debts, which are in dollars, as well as to sustain the exchange value of their currencies. In order for the system to be at least somewhat sustainable and keep countries on the treadmill, the debts must keep increasing. Countries that outright refuse to pay these debts, or accumulate them in the first place, are sanctioned, invaded, and/or couped.

This process of wealth accumulation requires that poor nations are kept underdeveloped. The greater the development, the more capacity they possess to consume their own resources, which raises the prices of resources and labour, which then pushes imperialist profits downwards. Contradictions in the imperialist process mean that neocolonialism must necessarily end at some point, as outright colonialism once did.

Before the 20th century, the main threat to imperialist nations was competing imperialist nations, with WW1 and WW2 exemplifying this. The battle was between competing imperialist nations using similar technologies of repression and exploitation, with e.g. Nazi Germany inspired by American segregation and genocide of the Native Americans. The USSR was, however, not an imperialist power. The Bolsheviks were a uniquely anti-imperialist leftist force at a time when national left parties sided with their own countries during WW1, and maintained support for anti-colonial movements across the world in the decades after taking power. The US aggressively opposed this, encouraging an arms race that purposefully drew resources away from national development, which created the conditions for a stagnation of the USSR's economy and eventually a coup and collapse in 1989. Russia was then demoted to the periphery, unable to be incorporated into Western alliances for the same reasons that many third world countries also could not.

After a period of shock therapy and massive increases in poverty, Putin has established and strengthened the national bourgeoise of Russia and turned the country into an energy-self-sufficient regional power. After the 2014 Maidan coup, a pro-US government was implanted into Ukraine, and Russia later invaded in 2022 for the purpose of establishing long-term defence against a NATO military, diplomatic, and economic offensive that had marched gradually eastwards over the years. Russia's position in the world-system makes the diagnosis of the Ukraine War as "inter-imperialist" inaccurate; Russia has lost over the years even more wealth through unequal exchange than India or Indonesia on a per-capita basis.

China has more ideological motivations than Russia and less political contradictions, but are in a somewhat similar position. The Communist Party's anti-colonial civil war led eventually to their ascension, but without massive economic development, their independence would remain only nominal. Deng Xiaoping's policies led to economic development and technological advances, keeping banks and industry under socialist state control. As a consequence, their development did not follow the same pattern as the dozens of other poor nations kept under imperialist economic relationships: with domestic wages and consumption increasing; development becoming higher-quality and more technological (up now to parity with the West in some areas, and even exceeding them in others); Western capitalist interests suppressed; and the financial system kept firmly under state control. China's development path has been mystified; some on the left see no difference between this and neoliberal capitalism, while those on the right see all this as communist authoritarianism.

Russia and China are struggling against the US for economic sovereignty. Interimperialist aspirations and conflict (in the form of taking control of foreign countries currently under American control) would be very difficult, with the US possessing over 700 overseas bases and massive military funding; even the most generous definition of a "Chinese overseas base" puts that number in the single-digits, and that number has not been increasing particularly quickly. If China and Russia want to be the new ruling imperialists, which implies (as with past and current empires) a great deal of military domination, they are not doing a very good job at starting that process. China remains remarkably reticent about even invading Taiwan, let alone conquering the rest of the island chains, while Russia has kept the war in Ukraine simmering with attrition rather than doing shock-and-awe campaigns, and has not declared outright war in order to keep resources and manpower focussed on other domestic tasks. China also does not seem interested in setting up a yuan hegemony to replace the dollar hegemony and has only increased manufacturing, the opposite of the US's offshoring.

So, what are they doing a good job at?

The Imperialist Breakdown

Imperialism is both imposed and undermined via sanctions. A small number keeps troublemakers isolated. But once enough sanctions are imposed, countries eventually begin to create alternative trade systems. More than 60% of all low-income countries are now under some form of financial penalty.

Sanctions also act as direct economic incentives. Venezuela has near-total food self-sufficiency despite US pressure. Cuba has developed one of the world's best healthcare systems despite, and because of, the embargo. Sanctions on Russia have not only not collapsed the economy, but have arguably been a gift to it; the withdrawal of Western companies forced them to sell assets back to Russian companies for favourable prices. Sanctions on China's semiconductors is leading to them more fervently aiming for self-sufficiency, with domestic chips powering domestic smartphones and computers; electric vehicles flooding the world; and they have a near-monopoly production of renewable energy generation.

Meanwhile, US military failures are becoming increasingly meaningful. The withdrawal from Afghanistan; the failure of Syrian regime change; the DPRK rising economically and militarily despite a near-comprehensive economic blockade; Venezuela's continued free existence; Iran beginning to overcome American sanctions and power projection; Hezbollah and Hamas' resistance of Israeli genocide and war; the US's inability to wrest control of the Red Sea from Yemen...

The result of this can now be witnessed in the Red Sea. If the US Navy cannot even lift a blockade by Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, the idea of lifting a blockade around Taiwan is a complete fantasy. If the US cannot compete with the arms production of Iran, then the notion of somehow out-competing China should be put to bed immediately.

But this is also why the Red Sea defeat will be met with silence. More than any other conflict raging today, it highlights the crisis within the West’s military organisation, as well as the fact that there is no real way to fix it. To admit our powerlessness is to admit that the era of Western hegemony is already over. Faced with little alternative, we will continue to let the Houthis blow up our ships – and then pretend that none of it really matters.

Inside the imperial core, American allies are growing increasingly discontent even as they are asked to sacrifice more to keep American hegemony afloat. Europe's political alliance is becoming disconnected from their economic interests of maintaining a cheap supply of natural gas from Russia and large amounts of trade with China. Similar dynamics exist with South Korea and Japan. Even within America, thousands of corporations are highly reliant on their factories within China and will resist true decoupling.

curiosity for what comes next, as we are going to live through what may be the most turbulent times in human history and I wanna see how things go

Russia opening up the conflict to one with NATO makes less than no sense. It would be actively detrimental to their goals in Ukraine. I could see Russia striking some covert NATO forces inside Ukraine in retaliation, but anything major would allow forces from e.g. Poland to enter into the conflict and extend it at a time where Russia is cruising towards inevitable victory, and outright military defeat of NATO would either take decades or result in nuclear war. Neither of which would be sensible.

Russia is boiling Ukraine's and NATO's frogs far more effectively than they are boiling Russia's. There's a similar dynamic at play with Iran and Israel, where Israel is like Ukraine and Iran is like Russia. Iran has no need to imminently strike Israel and destroy them because Hezbollah, Hamas, and Ansarallah are (however unfairly to the populations of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen) are boiling Israel's frog far better than Israel and the US are boiling Iran's.

Ukraine's constant attempts to get the US and Europe involved in the war mirror Israel's constant attempts to get the US involved in the war, and Russia's willingness to be patient and accede to a degree of humiliation in return for a successful long-term plan also strongly mirror Iran's patience and somewhat embarrassing moments (trying to make a deal which delayed the strike on Israel a month or two ago). Neither Russia nor Iran can simply put up with countries constantly trampling over their red lines and so have to make big displays occasionally, but otherwise are content with how the geopolitical situation is progressing, I think.

In all: if you have time on your side, then tread carefully. If you do not, then flail wildly and go for million-to-one odds.

yeah, there's videos around on various accounts.

looks to me like a successful interception of a Hezbollah missile via new and advanced Iron Shopping Center anti-missile technology

It's taken from Wikipedia. I'm flattered that you think I could have done it though, considering I've been in the "badly drawn stick figure" art phase since I was 5

Next thread is up.

Israel is simply following the Ukraine 2023 Counteroffensive Playbook.

1. Prepare the poorly-trained and shattered remnants of your army to try an offensive against an enemy you deem weak.
2. Announce the offensive in advance for months on end, giving time for your enemy to prepare for it.
3. Spend a few weeks making basically no progress.
4. Cope by saying that you're actually just probing and that progress is indeed being made because you captured a couple small villages and that was the goal all along (we are here).
5. Eventually be forced to stop and retreat due to untenable losses while declaring victory, and then
6. Try even shittier versions of this in the future while your Nazi state disintegrates in a dozen different ways.

when Iran sinks an aircraft carrier, we're gonna get the Trump version of that Bush photo where he's being told about the 9/11 attacks, and I cannot fucking wait. it's probably gonna be a photo of Trump looking shocked in his golf cart next to a 114-year-old guy who owns all the orphan-crushing factories in Kansas

we get like three cosy moments per year when Iran hits Israel or a pro-American candidate eats shit in an election, and we're so deprived of good news that we've adapted to these crushing conditions and now only need those three cosy moments to be energized

Declaring wars has been out of style for decades. Nowadays you just start bombing and everything floats in this quasi-space where everything (and nothing) is possible and everybody writes strongly-worded letters to each other and sets up red lines that exist in quantum superpositions of existence and non-existence, broken and unbroken.

So, with that said, I reckon the US will start bombing West Africa and just not talk about it, ever, because nobody in the media will give a shit. It'll be like how the US bombed (and/or helped bomb) Yemen for a decade and it was one of those conflicts where once a year, you got a patronizing NYT article headlined like "In This Forgotten War, There is Both Hunger and Hope" (they literally do this with Sudan) and no other coverage. And so everybody was/is baffled why Yemen is so pissed off at the West not knowing that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by Western-backed forces, and so they just start doing body language analysis on Abdul-Malik al-Houthi to try and explain shit, just like Roman haruspexes.

So we'll have US forces dropping JDAMs on Nigerien government buildings and hospitals but the media will be too busy asking Karoline Leavitt about Trump's tweets

It is completely unacceptable if Putin should get anything at all out of his adventure. Because then Xi Jinping (China's president, red.) will conclude: "If Putin can take the Crimean peninsula then I can take Taiwan". That is why we must make sure Putin is not successful in Ukraine.

I assume that Rasmussen has spoken at length about how Israel must be prevented from trying to annex Gaza, the West Bank, and Southern Lebanon, for the exact same reason as above?

To briefly expand on this, the US is the world's single largest oil producer, making 13 million barrels every day. That being said, the US only recently became a net exporter of oil and has been massively stepping up that oil production since the pandemic; it's why the presidential fights over the oil industry and climate change is pretty laughable, if you didn't know the figures you'd get the impression that Biden is sending agents to close down oil rigs when the exact opposite has been true.

So while a war in the Middle East would have massive repercussions, the US still stands to get fairly rich from oil price increases and may be - depending on Trump's policies - somewhat insulated from such a war, until the impact of having Arab Light be scarce truly sunk in. And it's not as if the world would "run out" of oil entirely. Five of the top ten countries by oil production are not in West Asia. Additionally, the global recessions and hardship has brought down/stagnated oil prices and demand over the years.

So my verdict is that it would be Very Bad (potentially 2008 recession levels or greater, depending on how far it spreads) but not Catastrophically Bad (developed countries start collapsing into anarchy; developing ones might be fucked though)

I think it's possible that Trump's team is suggesting hilariously awful/unpopular people for certain positions because they're trying to negotiate it. It's the art of the deal! You suggest Gaetz as Attorney General, then they refuse, and you go "Well, okay, I'm a mature adult in the room who's willing to compromise, here's [the choice I wanted all along]."

globalization really did go from like "This is the TOTALLY UNSTOPPABLE FORCE that will ravage through every economy like a behemoth" in the late 1990s, to "Well, we need to cultivate globalization like a delicate flower in the face of adversary" in the 2000s under Bush, and now to "Actually we never liked free trade, all my homies hate free trade, let's put tariffs and sanctions on everything." The economic ideology of the imperial core is utterly unchangeable, until it isn't (because an alternative formulation benefits the capitalists).

Yet another dogshit Krugman article. To summarize in one sentence:

trump bad, trump stupid, china bad, china stupid, china not growing, china failure, trump more stupid than china, trump bad

You can go read the article if you want but I promise you'll just say "Fuck, I should have just kept to the summary." It's article #438742 that says "Here's some advice to China, a country that has rocketed from utter poverty to the second (and really first) largest economy on the planet in less than a century, from a bunch of Western countries that have been in stagnation and depression since 2008." There's nothing of value here.

An interesting piece that tries to answer the question: "Why does everybody in the West think that China's economy is doing very badly when it demonstrably isn't?" from a very capitalist Hong Kong research group thinktanky place:

At an investment conference in Kuala Lumpur recently, I caught up with an old friend and Gavekal client. Over coffee between sessions, we talked about one of the most visible changes of the last few years in Asia: the Chinese cars that have so quickly appeared on roads across the continent. This led us to the comments made in September by Ford chief executive officer Jim Farley. Freshly returned from a visit to China, Farley told The Wall Street Journal that the growth of the Chinese auto sector poses an existential threat to his company, and that “executing to a Chinese standard is now going to be the most important priority.” By any measure, this is an earth-shattering statement.

Making cars is complicated. Not as complicated as making airliners or nuclear power plants. But making cars is still the hallmark of an advanced industrial economy. So, the idea that China is suddenly setting the standards that others must now strive to meet is a sea-change compared with the world we lived in just five years ago.

This led my friend to question how Farley and other auto industry CEOs could have fallen quite so deeply asleep at the wheel. How could China so rapidly leapfrog established industries around the world without all those very well paid Western CEOs realizing what was happening until two minutes ago?

The rest of the piece continues in that more informal style, so I'll just summarize the rest of the article:

During the pandemic, and especially as the Ukraine War was causing chaos, nobody from the West really bothered to visit China, and so haven't seen how things have developed. This is in line with a Dengist strategy of keeping a low profile and not flaunting their capabilities, but it wasn't as if China was stopping them from visiting - CEOs just had other things to worry about with supply chain disruptions.

The author then basically says that China is doing capitalism better than the West, and now the West is (rather hilariously) backing away from jerking off the very concept of globalization and now think tariffs are awesome again.

Next, he talks about how the West has been pretty consistently racist against Asia throughout history, and these racist impulses still very much exist, so they would naturally underestimate China. There's also the fact that China is a communist state, and everybody in the West is brought up on anti-Soviet propaganda (the author doesn't use that word, unfortunately).

He moves on to explaining how the West is assuming that China = Japan 30 years ago, with inaccurate similarities drawn between their economic situations. The West is saying to itself that China will need to do massive fiscal stimulus to keep growing and get out of its "rut", but they don't seem to be considering if this rut is actually intentional, in order to bring down Chinese real estate and focus on more productive endeavors. This graph says it all:

Show

There's no real conception that the collapse in real estate might actually be the policy and not the catastrophic consequence of like, communists not understanding Economics 101. The government explicitly said that this was the goal the entire time. Additionally, the property bust has hit the biggest cities the hardest, especially among millennials, but third and fourth tier cities are doing fairly well (the rural situation is complicated but dissatisfaction is concentrated in older people there). As the first and second tier cities are the most often visited by Westerners, their image of China is disproportionally negative. Meanwhile, in the third and fourth tier cities, there has been an industrial and transportation boom, which has gone almost unreported in the West.

Some more explanations for Western negativity include a general tendency to report bad news more than good news ("China is FIVE DAYS from TOTAL COLLAPSE!" gets more clicks than "Things are doing pretty good in China.") as well as China's lackluster stock market performance relative to its massive improvements, and Americans hyperfocus on stocks.

And, of course, the final contributing factor: that the US is pumping hundreds of millions of dollars to "...raise awareness of and increase transparency regarding the negative impact of activities related to the Belt and Road Initiative, associated initiatives, other economic initiatives with strategic or political purposes, and coercive economic practices.” via the Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund Authorization Act.