It seems to me like the current European leadership is way too Russophobic to ask the Russians for help. And who says Russia is interested anymore in helping Europe? I wouldn't discount the possibility that, even if Europe comes begging, the Russians will just tell them: that ship has sailed. Their oil and gas flows have been redirected to China, and that's not the kind of thing that can just turn on a dime. They're building serious infrastructure that will lock them in for decades.

You assume that the blob is all knowing geniuses who would have done way better than Trump. The fact is it's failsons all the way down. They are also not internally united. The tariff strategy had significant support from a certain segment of the blob which genuinely believes this is the correct strategy. They make these mistakes because they genuinely believe that the US is powerful enough to get whatever it wants if it just threatens and coerces enough. They have drunk their own koolaid.

Guyana is tiny. Almost their entire population is concentrated in and around Georgetown on the coast. They probably don't have much more than 200,000 adult males. A country like that makes for poor cannon fodder. Venezuela is a country of almost 30 million people with patriotic and well organized communal militias. And as you say, there are other regional players that do not want to see a conflict in their region. Not just Brazil but Colombia as well.

Not that rare. This is the second time that she has sided with literal Nazis just to be anti-Russia.

Unsurprising. Anyone who has been to Denmark can tell you it's a strong contender for the title of most racist country in Europe.

First Trump dodges a bullet by a couple of centimeters and then the universe smites Biden with the plague? Can you imagine how insufferable evangelicals will become if that happens?

The US is absolutely cooked:

Dialectics teaches us that real systems are never static, that they change over time. The western post-war model of industrial capitalism by the late 1970s had already ceased to be viable and entered into crisis. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall over time, which Marx correctly analyzed, had made it impossible to continue to maintain the high wage industrial economies and welfare states established in the wake of WWII as a means of placating the masses and staving off socialist revolution. There were only two ways out of this predicament: socialism or neoliberalism.

Of course capital picked the latter. And now things have deteriorated even further and even the illusory boom provided by the financialization glut of the 80s and the cannibalization of the industrial base which occured in the 90s has long since evaporated, at least since the great recession of '08 which in many ways is still ongoing. It is impossible to turn back the clock on capitalism and return to the pre-neoliberal model short of a global black swan event like a world war which would destroy much of the existing base of production.

It is very likely that the capitalist ruling class understands this otherwise unsolvable dilemma they are facing and the fact that on the current trajectory their situation will only get worse, and this is precisely why they are so frantically trying to accelerate the timeline for war with Russia, China, Iran, etc. whoever really just so long as they can get a sufficiently big and destructive war before it is too late and even this would no longer save them but only bring about their demise faster.

Unfortunately for them i think that we have already passed that inflection point and they just don't see it yet. Russia is probably the country that understood this first, hence why it dared to launch its SMO. Following that the Axis of Resistance in the Middle East seems to have caught on as well. Now it only remains to see what China does.

And "not adding fuel to the fire" is just a nice way of saying "stop sending them weapons you idiots!".

Unfortunately i think there is a cultural barrier here at play in that the Chinese are used to being very polite in their speech and using symbolism and metaphorical language, whereas the West is too blunt and barbaric to understand that kind of subtlety so they misinterpret it as China being timid and on the fence.

This isn't just a problem when it comes to the Ukraine conflict and China's stance toward it, it also affects how the West perceives China's stance toward the Taiwan issue. Because China is oftentimes being too diplomatic in its language the West looks at that as a sign of weakness and thinks it can continue to push even further up to or beyond China's red lines, which is very dangerous.

Here's where i have to criticize China and say that i think they need to do better in understanding the mentality of the West. I get the impression that sometimes they just can't believe that anyone can be this barbaric and uncivilized, but unfortunately we are.

They assume too much that everyone thinks like them, that their interlocutors understand culturally complex symbolic gestures, and that everyone ultimately will be reasonable and respond to politeness in kind. Things may work that way in Asia but that's not how Europeans are.

When you're dealing with the kinds of racist, genocidal lunatics who are in charge in the West the only thing they understand is naked force, both in rhetoric and in action.

Economists say you're wrong for wanting to be able to afford more stuff, don't you know that's bad for the economy? Economists say you're wrong for wanting to live longer, don't you know that's bad for the economy? Economists say you're wrong for not wanting to be a slave, don't you know that's bad for the economy?

The sanctions are still there and the US will never allow them to be lifted, but this is just yet another step along the way to making said sanctions effectively meaningless. Russia has been trading extensively with the DPRK again for a while now and while they are careful to not outright violate UN imposed sanctions which are binding according to international law, they have pretty much managed to find alternative ways of doing the same thing just without strictly speaking going against the letter of the sanctions. And since Russia will not allow the US to strongarm the UN into imposing any additional sanctions to shut the alternatives down, these sorts of loopholes are just going to get bigger and more numerous until the existing sanctions are all but irrelevant.

Glenn Greenwald says a lot of cringy libertarian shit but this isn't one of those instances. It doesn't make the truth any less true just because who is saying it has dumb, awful opinions on other things.