Link fixed fyi

It’s worse than that. It’s the US thinks what China thinks because they took the wrong lessons from the book. Truly a “chain of suspicion” if you ask me.

They already exist:

The ASAT test in November is the latest in a series of such actions by Russia. The missile used in the test, Nudol, has been tested several times in the past without a hit-to-kill mission. At the 2021 Reagan National Defense Forum, U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.) noted that Russia had attempted to test its ground-launched ASAT missile “several times in recent years and failed, so it was predictable that they would keep trying until they scored a hit.”12 The latest hit-to-kill demonstration indicates that Russia may have perfected its ASAT missile.

In 2014, the Russian Olymp-K satellite demonstrated co-orbital ASAT capabilities in the geostationary orbit where several critical military command-and-control satellites operate.13 Additionally, Russia has fielded ground-based lasers and a range of satellite-jamming systems to deny and degrade the capacity of weapons that rely on satellited-enabled information. These weapons are detailed in Russian military literature as a vital mechanism to eliminate Russian vulnerabilities to Western precision weapons.

Russia has also tested co-orbital ASAT systems that target satellites beyond low-earth orbit. In October 2017, three Russian satellites—Kosmos-2519, Kosmos-2521, and Kosmos-2523—conducted high-velocity orbital maneuvers. In January 2020, two Russian satellites, Kosmos-2542 and Kosmos-2543, performed coordinated, close-approach orbital maneuvers in the vicinity of a U.S. military reconnaissance satellite, the KH-11. Six months later, in July 2020, the Kosmos-2543 satellite fired a high-velocity projectile into outer space. Such a projectile could act as a potent ASAT weapon. U.S. Space Force commander Gen. John Raymond has described the orbital experiments performed by these satellites as “Russian nesting doll” satellites and claimed they “exhibited characteristics of a weapon system.”

The primary objective of the war in Ukraine was to break Europe. That objective has been largely achieved. The unexpected consequence was that Russia did not fold under sanctions, and it backfired through inflation in the US domestic economy. This was why the Fed hiked rates for the past two years, placing the dominant status of the US dollar under unprecedented risk.

The last two years have been the Biden administration adapting to this new reality and gambling that China would not take advantage of this exposed weakness of the dollar, and their gambit worked. The US dollar has more or less restored its strength and now it’s time to turn against Iran before the entire Middle East fell to China’s influence - which is only a matter of time if the US doesn’t do anything.

You are assuming that capitalism cannot adapt to failures (which happen all the time), but in fact capitalism is infinitely adaptable to new dynamics, which is why Marxist-Leninist theories are so important - these opportunities that expose the weakness of the imperial power occur only once in a while, and if they are not seized upon, the gap would be filled in short notice.

The US and Israel both want to destroy Iran. There is no “provoking US entry”, both their strategic goals are completely aligned at this point. This is their last chance to get the damage done before the opportunity is lost forever. The war in Ukraine threw a wrench into their long term plan and they’re simply adjusting to the reality of having to accelerate the war before it is too late.

They’re willing to take the gamble, because the alternative is Israel losing its ethnostate dream and America losing its control of the Near/Middle East to China forever.

Both outcomes present an existential crisis to their respective ideologies: the Zionists are never going to give up the ethnostate dream because that would be the end of their ideology; the American imperialists are never going to let their control of the periphery slip away without putting on a real fight because that would also be the end of their imperialist ambitions.

This is not the correct assessment, unfortunately. As Lenin laid out clearly in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, imperialist wars are qualitatively different from wars of the previous eras in that they are fundamentally rooted in the expansion of finance capital.

We no longer live in Lenin’s time, when finance capital was still largely subservient to industrial capital before the rentier class launched their own counter-revolution after WWI against industrial capital. The post-Bretton Woods world turned the US empire into a fully financialized empire that leverages its now fiat currency to extract surplus values from the rest of the Global South. Michael Hudson described this new form of imperialism as “Super imperialism” in his book of the same name in 1972.

Russia cannot be imperialist simply because their financial capital is far too weak to even be a player in the game. Russian oligarchs all stored their wealth in dollars and euros, lived lavishly and owned assets overseas in Western countries - the result of the Ukraine war was the sanctions against Russian oligarchs and confiscation of all their assets overnight.

Why would the Russian oligarchs launch a war against NATO and have their assets confiscated almost immediately? The anti-West “nationalist” capitalist in Russia is simply far too weak to play a major role. This is why the Russian state had to practically take over the economy themselves since 2022 and utilized the power of its fiscal policy to stimulate domestic economy under heavy sanctions.

Who are the imperialists then? It is between US and the EU - the two major financial blocs that are competing for domination through their respective currencies: the dollar and the euro. The war in Ukraine is an inter-imperialist war between the US and the EU and, as it has now become clear, the defeat and the end of the EU economic prosperity and the eurozone financial bloc. Russia and Ukraine are the sacrificial pawns in this game.

In terms of Russia, it is more helpful to think of what is happening in Russia today as a confrontation between industrial capital and finance capital, with the Cabinets of Minister (the state representing industrial capital) opposing the far-reaching influence of the central bank (representing finance capital). This is a thesis that Hudson had proposed and it paints the US-China conflict as exactly in this relation: with the US representing finance capital that sought to defeat China representing industrial capital. Only the latter can create the conditions that will lead to socialism. This is an ideological clash where the contradictions have been intensified in recent years, and it has to be resolved somehow… most likely through war.

As Lenin had observed a hundred years prior in Imperialism:

Thanks to her colonies, Great Britain has increased the length of “her” railways by 100,000 kilometres, four times as much as Germany. And yet, it is well known that the development of productive forces in Germany, and especially the development of the coal and iron industries, has been incomparably more rapid during this period than in Britain—not to speak of France and Russia. In 1892, Germany produced 4,900,000 tons of pig-iron and Great Britain produced 6,800,000 tons; in 1912, Germany produced 17,600,000 tons and Great Britain, 9,000,000 tons. Germany, therefore, had an overwhelming superiority over Britain in this respect. The question is: what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other?

It’s not that they think they can turn it around, but that the window of opportunity is rapidly closing.

You have a 10% chance of success today versus a 1% chance in 5 years, you’d rather bet on that 10% chance.

The same with the US. Once Iran gets Russian air defenses (a process accelerated by the Ukraine war), then the US-Israeli air superiority in the region is over. If Iran gets its own nuclear weapons, they can actually retaliate against the US. They have to do this now before that opportunity is closed forever.

Hollywood has been extensively financialized over the past few decades. Just like the other industries, once finance capital is finished with hollowing out the core and stripping everything down to the bones, they simply jump ship and latch on to the next industry to parasitize. No incentives to keep an industry well developed and sustained. It’s all pump and dump to make quite profits and for the line to go up.

Boeing, Intel, Cisco and many other once world leading American corporations all went through this, and Hollywood is no exception.

This is the price America has to pay for its ability extract vast amount of surplus value from the Global South simply through printing money - its own deindustrialization. But it’s the working class that gets screwed, never the wealthy class.

Hexbear has many good teachers I guess

Going by this logic, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and many many other Global South countries all deserve to be victims of imperialism because they are all capitalist countries and not nearly as progressive as the Western countries who have had several decades of prosperity and allowed to develop in peace without being threatened by foreign powers.

Or is it that only countries that cannot fight back against the empire “deserve” critical support because they are no threat to the imperial core itself?

If you really want to know how fucked Russia was by imperialism, look no further than the Shock Therapy in the 1990s. The economic and societal devastation isn’t something that you can recover in a short few decades. You cannot name a single country that has ever recovered from neoliberal shock doctrine over the past 50 years. Millions of excess death in Russia ever since the 1990s, leading to a steady pace of population decline that it has no hope of recovering. No wonder Russia is extremely concerned about being surrounded by a NATO-backed Ukraine and NATO itself that is infested by descendants of the Nazis after the war.

The Ukraine war really is a litmus test for Western leftists. The stark contrast between how socialists and communists in Western countries perceive the Russia-Ukraine war versus the rest of the Global South really paints a striking picture of how many Western left either has no understanding of Lenin’s imperialism, or choose to interpret in their own ways that conveniently suits the neo-colonial agenda of Western imperialism extracting surplus values from the Global South.

That’s not a materialist understanding of how US imperialism works on the Global South.

Quoting Michael Hudson once again:

Among the BRICS+ countries, Argentina is a case in point. Its foreign dollar debt has grown largely by IMF sponsorship. The IMF’s main political function in US foreign policy has been to enable pro-American client oligarchies to move their money out of countries whenever there is a chance of a left-wing or simply democratic reformer being elected. Convert their Argentinean currency into dollars lowers the peso’s exchange rate. Without IMF intervention, that would mean that as the exchange rate falls, the wealthy classes engaging in capital flight receive fewer and fewer dollars. To support the currency – and hence, the hard-currency dollars that capital-flight actors receive – the IMF lends the right-wing government dollars to buy up the excess pesos that the client oligarchy is selling off. That enables Argentineans to move their money out of the country to obtain a much higher amount of US dollars than they would if the IMF were not lending money to the right-wing puppet government.

When the new reform government comes in, it finds itself loaded down with a huge foreign debt owed to the IMF. This debt has not been taken on in a way that helped Argentina develop its economy and earn dollars to pay back the loan. It is simply a result of IMF support of right-wing governments. And the IMF then tells the new government (whether Argentina or any other debtor) to pay off its foreign loans by lowering the wages of labor. That is the only way that the IMF recognizes for countries to “stabilize” their balance of payments. So the reform government is obliged to behave just like a right-wing government, intensifying the class war of capital against labor. The “cure” for their balance-of-payments deficits thus becomes even worse than the original disease, that is, its rentier oligarchy moving their money out of the country.

It’s never been more over for the UK:

Treasury asking ministers to draw up billions of pounds of infrastructure cuts

Ministers are being asked to draw up billions of pounds in cuts to infrastructure projects over the next 18 months despite Rachel Reeves pledging to invest more to grow the economy, the Guardian has learned.

Members of the cabinet have been asked to model cuts to their investment plans of up to 10% of their annual capital spending as part of this month’s spending review, government sources said.

The demands would mean big projects such as hospital improvements, road building and defence projects being slowed down or stopped altogether as the government looks for ways to repair what they say is a £22bn black hole in the public finances.

Economists warn that such cuts to capital spending could end up damaging the economy and Britain’s creaking public infrastructure.

It’s never been more over for the Euros:

Germany expects economy to shrink after cutting 2024 forecast

Germany is facing its first two-year recession since the early 2000s, as the government downgraded its growth forecast for 2024, predicting a contraction of 0.2 per cent.

“The situation is not satisfactory,” Robert Habeck, economy minister, said on Wednesday. “Since 2018, the German economy has not been growing strongly any more.”

Just a few months ago he had forecast the economy would grow by 0.3 per cent this year.

Germany has been battered by high interest rates, inflation and an increasingly uncertain geopolitical environment, which has suppressed consumer demand and investment activity.

Some companies, complaining of high labour and energy costs, a big tax burden and political turbulence, are considering locating some of their production to cheaper countries.

At the same time, consumer spending remains depressed, despite an increase in real wages and falling inflation. The government’s earlier forecast had expected a more robust rebound in consumer demand.

Political instability is also taking its toll on sentiment. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition is riven by policy conflicts and the rise of populist parties on the far right and far left is undermining business confidence.

Incredible how ideological entrenchment (neoliberalism) + a currency war from the US (Ukraine war) accelerated the destruction of the future of the UK and continental Europe in just a few short years.

Europeans who have been laughing at how Americans don’t have healthcare and social welfare are going to have to seriously think about migrating there over the next decade and get used to what it feels like to live without basic welfare guarantees.