Image is of the Preah Vihear Temple on the Cambodian border. Image sourced from the UNESCO World Heritage website.
Over the last few days, Thailand and Cambodia entered into a heightened stage of conflict due to a long-running border dispute. Like many problems on this planet, Europeans are ultimately to blame - specifically France. Certain sections of the border drawn up by France about a century ago were not fully agreed upon by both sides, with the ownership of some Khmer temples being the most visible points of disagreement.
Despite interventions in favor of Cambodia in the 1960s and later 2010s by the ICJ - one of the mainly mostly useless global institutions that liberals periodically disown - the border conflict has simmered at a generally low level. Of the two countries, Thailand is significantly more militarily and economically powerful.
Last Wednesday, a Thai soldier lost his leg by stepping on a landmine, prompting a rapid escalation between Cambodia and Thailand that has since resulted in dozens of deaths and tens of thousands displaced. Cambodia was willing to come to the negotiating table fairly quickly, but Thailand was more hesitant. International pressure on the two countries by Malaysia, China, and the United States eventually forced Thailand to the table, and they have recently agreed to an immediate ceasefire courtesy of ASEAN.
Notably, Trump refused to hold trade talks with either country until they agreed to peace, which suggests that he really wants a Nobel Peace Prize - which he seems a shoe-in for given that he's met the two most important requirements that several Nobel Peace Prize recipients have needed to meet in the past, which are: 1) start at least one war, and 2) accelerate the genocide of millions of people as billions more people watch on. His policies vis-a-vis ICE creating a domestic terror regime only further increase his chances of winning the prize.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I'm seeing that as a cope from many eurocucks and from benjamin studebaker as well
Neoliberalism has to go, otherwise everyone is just going to get stuck in a loop with no way out.
The EU itself is the prime example of a neoliberal institution, and so obviously it has to go as well. (I’m not going to go into the details since we’re talking about trade here, but we all know how strong exporting economies e.g. Germany is built on taking advantage of poorer economies e.g. Greece and Portugal running deficits, and the ECB has no mechanism to settle the large imbalances between those member states. The eurozone member states also cannot issue their own currency, which makes them more like a state/local government, and therefore even worse than many countries with their own central banks)
Within international trade, you cannot have everyone running a trade surplus with one another, as it is mathematically impossible. So a trade pact that tries to cut out the big spender but does not resolve the question of who then is going to buy all their stuff, is not going to work.
Here’s the situation: we have a large importer country freely printing billions and billions of dollars every year to buy stuff from the rest of the world, and directly keeping many of the industries and workers employed in those exporting countries, at the expense of its own de-industrialization (which is a policy choice in itself, a neoliberal policy choice to crush the leverage of its own working class, as it can just as easily run a trade deficit while protecting its key industries and its workers).
Its trade deficit (those it does not earn back by exporting goods of its own) thus play the role of absorbing the surplus export capacities of the world.
Now, that large importer country suddenly wants to cut back on its trade deficit and hence its own consumption demand from the rest of the world.
However, many countries have already bought into the IMF export-led growth model and orientated their economy towards relying on export revenues. They have sent their best and brightest students to Western universities and they all came back brilliant economists with some very smart ideas about how the economy should be run:
See, the exporters first sell their goods to earn foreign currency (e.g. dollar), then sell those earned dollar revenues to their central banks, who will place them on the asset side of its own balance sheet, and then creating an equivalent amount of their local currencies to credit to the bank accounts of the exporters (this goes on to the liability side of its balance sheet).
To adhere to the IMF “balance the budget” playbook, these countries therefore rely on earning export revenues to keep their budget deficits low (3% per IMF recommendation, the Maastricht criteria of the EU also specified 3%) as adding foreign currency to the asset side balances out its own government spending.
(By the way, those dollar assets that the central banks bought from their exporters? They ended up being used to purchase US treasuries and became the US national debt, since there is nothing else to do with those accumulated dollars except to buy treasuries to earn some interests. Therefore, the scary numbers of the US national debt is really just a measure of how much the US government has spent but has not been taxed back yet)
As a result, no country dares to run a large deficit because they have been ideologically indoctrinated to believe that government spending is like managing household expenses - you have to earn the income before you are allowed to spend, or else you have to borrow. They have fully bought into the idea that the US running large deficit is actually bad and will somehow bankrupt the country in the long run, so they all avoid doing so. Funnily enough, the US has been telling everyone “look I am getting free lunch from y’all, but don’t learn from my example, because it’s bad example and it will bankrupt your country”.
And because no country wants to run a large deficit, they cannot increase their consumption demand to import from each other and replace those of US consumers, and instead choose to keep the purchasing power of its own working class low in order to boost their trade revenues. The end result is mercantilism where they try to undercut one another because the pool of export income becomes smaller when the big spender that freely prints the money walks away.
As you can see, this neoliberal free trade mentality has to go. If everyone still wants to run a world trade like this, then the US will continue to take advantage of them.
Slightly adjacent but can you do a write up to further explain how the US benefits from being the world debtor? And how our 'debt' is used to further monetary imperialism?
Not them, but this is somewhat related. Where Britain appropriated real resources to obtain foreign exchange, which back then was actual commodities or tied to commodities like gold and silver, in modern fiat economies there is a very similar parallel. Every Dollar, Euro, etc. accumulated by central banks of third world countries is actually held at the U.S. Fed or Treasury. The electronic entries themselves are controlled by the Fed or the Treasury.
The U.S. runs persistent trade deficits while not owing anyone anything, since the U.S. Dollar is a floating currency with no guaranteed convertibility. In the og colonialism, there was a real drain of goods with no compensation for the colonized, achieved through extremely high taxation. In the new colonialism, there is a similar real transfer of goods and services, with compensation existing only as electronic entries. During the gold standard era, there was simply no way for any country to run consistent large trade surpluses or deficits while accumulating financial claims in gold/commodities, since all trade had to be settled in gold. Instead, extreme taxation was used to extract real wealth at low market prices.
There are parallels with convertibility too. The U.S. Dollar is a non-convertible (you can only buy or sell it in the market, the government doesn't guarantee anything) floating currency, and this is what allows it to extract so much surpluses from the rest of the world. Similarly, the Indian Rupee in the British era was non-convertible for most people. Indians were taxed in Rupees, and the Rupees were used locally for payment, but the Rupees themselves weren't convertible to gold or sterling, etc. The value of Indian exports never got back to India in the form of gold or sterling. The U.S. Dollar case is similar. No taxes are demanded in most countries in U.S. Dollars like in the colonial era, yet countries "want to" accumulate U.S. Dollars, and the big way to do so is by giving the U.S. real goods and services.
https://monthlyreview.org/2021/02/01/the-drain-of-wealth/
@FuckyWucky@hexbear.net already explained very well, and I’ll just add another angle here by directly walking through the accounting steps of how foreign central banks end up holding US debt, and why in real terms, the US benefits from it and is therefore a form of colonial exploitation and monetary imperialism.
First, the accounting part:
spoiler
Let’s say you are Dongfang Optical, an eyeglasses manufacturer in Guangzhou, China. A pair of eyeglasses costs about 12 RMB to produce, and after marking up for profit, you sell for 15 RMB per pair (~$2 USD).
An American retail wholesaler placed an order of 50,000 pairs with your company, and you get paid for the quoted price of $100,000 (~720,000 RMB). We’ll skip through how the American wholesaler earned that $100,000, but let’s just keep things simple by saying that they earned it through a contract with the US government.
So, how does Dongfang Optical gets paid in USD? First, you need to open a US bank account, say an account under the name of Dongfang Optical in Chase bank. The American wholesaler then makes the payment to your Chase bank account.
Now that your bank account has been credited $100,000, there are really only two things you can do: spend them or save them.
Let’s say you spend $50,000 on importing new machine tools and raw materials, and another $20,000 investing in US index funds, you are still left with $30,000. You still need to pay your workers back in China in RMB.
So, to exchange that $30,000 USD into RMB, you sell the USD to the Chinese central bank (the People’s Bank of China), who also has a US bank account at the Federal Reserve. This $30,000 gets added to the asset side of the PBoC’s balance sheet, while it creates an equivalent amount of 215,000 RMB at the domestic bank in China that holds your company’s Chinese bank account (this goes to the liability side of the central bank’s balance sheet, therefore the net deficit is zero). Dongfang Optical can then spend that RMB in China, to pay your workers, to pay off debt, to invest in new factory expansion, or to save them somewhere.
So what happens to the $30,000 USD at the PBoC? Well, the Chinese central bank has to face the same two options: to spend or to save. It can spend some of that money to invest in dollar-denominated securities deemed safe for investment, and save the rest by purchasing US treasuries to earn some interest, since there is nowhere else to spend those money. And by purchasing US treasuries, it gets added to the US national debt.
As you can see, the entire sequence looks like this: US government first creates the money into existence to buy some stuff from American wholesaler -> American wholesaler spends the earned money to import eyeglasses from Dongfang Optical -> Dongfang Optical sells its dollar earnings to the PBoC to exchange for RMB back home -> PBoC takes the dollars it bought to purchase US treasury bonds to earn free interest -> the purchased treasury bonds get added to US national debt.
—-
So, the US government debt that the Chinese government holds is really just money the former created and already earned by the latter, but simply has nowhere else to spend, so the latter puts those money into a savings account (think of Treasury Bond as a Certificate of Deposit in a commercial bank, except far safer) to earn risk-free interest.
More importantly, foreign government debt holders do not finance the US government. The US government spends, and the money comes back and being held by foreign governments as US treasuries.
But then we come to the question - why then, do foreign governments want to hold the US dollars so much? What makes the US dollar the global reserve currency, and what gives the dollar such hegemonic power?
What happens here in real terms?
spoiler
There are many nonsensical explanations out there, like the Petrodollar: “everyone is forced to buy oil in dollar because of this secret pact with the Saudis to finance the US government!” which is nonsense since any country can exchange their local currencies with the dollar as long as there is a forex trader willing to purchase their currency and this means we come back to the real terms - whether that country has the economy to back up the strength of their currency? If that country makes something that other countries want to import from, then that’s what gives the currency its strength.
Similarly, some right-wing propaganda claimed that foreign governments are “buying up US lands in secret! they want to own America!” which can only happen if permitted by the US government. And if it comes to that, then it is a political decision by the national leadership.
Finally, the propaganda that “but our children will have to work hard to pay off our debt” is equally nonsense since as you’ve seen, that “debt” is simply the money the US government has spent and not been taxed back yet.
But still, why do foreign governments want to hold the US dollars so much? One answer is that some countries have borrowed dollar-denominated loans, and have to pay back their external debt by earning dollars.
This is entirely valid, but why do they want to accumulate so much dollars and purchase US treasuries? The answer is simple: because the US is the only country willing to run a large deficit to import stuff from those countries! And since they have nowhere else to spend those dollars they have accumulated, they buy treasuries. Simple as that.
Think of this in real terms: your country has listened to the IMF and learned that “balancing the budget” is sound and responsible finance. So, to invest domestically without running a large deficit, you first have to earn foreign currencies through exporting goods and services. But who is going to buy them, if everyone wants to balance their budget?
At this point, one country that has a very attractive currency - it’s stable, liquid and ubiquitously accepted by almost everyone in the world - comes out and tell you that they’d like to import the goods from you. And so your businesses expand, new factories are built, more workers are kept employed, and you keep collecting the dollars. You can’t really use those dollars, but you don’t care, you keep accumulating them because it allows you to keep your deficit low, and more importantly, it keeps your economy growing and the people have jobs.
We can even turn this around and say that the US is really only stable, liquid and ubiquitous - the key features of a global reserve currency - precisely because the US is the only country willing to run a persistent trade deficit and pump those money into the global economy.
In real terms, the exporting countries allocate labor and resources into producing goods and services to be consumed by the importing countries, which could have gone into investing on the wellbeing of its own people, making its domestic economy self-sufficient and resilient. Meanwhile, the US as the importing country simply prints the money and gets real goods and services for free.
This is why I keep saying that the only way to defeat dollar hegemony is NOT for countries to stop using dollars, it’s to have some countries willing to run the deficit to absorb the surplus export goods from the exporting countries across the world. And this requires them to give up their neoliberal-brained indoctrination.
In an ideal world, you only earn foreign currency just enough to import from other countries (goods you cannot make yourself), and perhaps save some as reserves for liquidity purposes. But the huge trade imbalance we have in our world today, mostly driven by the large US trade deficit and large China trade surplus, is what makes the dollar so powerful.
Michael Hudson wrote a fairly popular book called "Superimperialism" with exactly this thesis and it gets periodically updated with more recent examples. It is a common source for folks here speaking about debt and balance of payments and China, so I highly recommend checking it out. There was (is?) a recebt hexbear book club about it as well.
Europe can bail itself out by sending action movie protagonists back in time to stop the maidan color revolution from happening.
Even realignment with China won't save them. Their industries just wouldn'tbe able to compete against the Chinese. There's a limit to how much you can do with a fucked up energy supply.
In my estimation, the EU countries will limp along having been fucked 3 ways. They will seek trade opportunities amongst the emerging global south countries. And I don't think they will have any choice other than lowering prices to stay relevant on world markets. They either do it voluntarily on their own terms, or by force when the euro craters even further (it lost massively against the dollar after the Ukraine war started).
And by "their own terms" I mean that the Europeans adopt fascism to crush wages, thereby allowing competitive prices.
The EU could try to negotiate a graceful exit by seeking to keep their IP agreements and legalized tech advantage that is otherwise only enabled by US imperialism. The "designed in Sweden (made in China)" types of business and various cultural cottage industries like parma cheese etc etc. Obviously China will lap them quickly on this, and arguably already has in many ways, but China's leaders would likely see this as a win-win as opposed to the deindustrialization and cleaving off of Europe - and they continue to work to keep normal relations with the EU.
Whether the EU can politically functionally do this is a very different question, though.
Spoiler: no
As much as we like to shit on the EU, we have seen them make at least some efforts on some occasions to save their asses. And the enthusiasm with which they shot themselves in the feet, calves, thighs and kidneys after Feb 2022 shows that they still have some level of political willpower to do things, even if they spent it all on an atlanticist miscalculation.
Unless they somehow kick out all the us bases, west coast big tech, remove all atlantians like Von der Leyen -no its massive cope.
I mean they wanted to go against china & russia. They reap what they so eagerly sowed.