The US and Russia follow different philosophies for the respective development of F-35 and Su-57.

The F-35 was mostly built to make money, they have to start selling the products even when the product is not ready yet. Because the supply chain is spread across several investing countries, if the plane is stuck on a prototype mode for too long, then some factory in another country will not get their job order and the production of certain critical components will have to be placed on hold.

To ensure that profit can flow, they have to sell the planes first then fix later. This is why you get so many issues with the F-35s, because unlike the Cold War planes, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project was commissioned at a time when the USSR was no longer a threat and after the 1991 Gulf War when the US crushed the Iraqi military, politicians no longer saw a need to fund more weapons projects. So for the military industrial complex to survive, the F-35 became a grift project that tied the government into a spiral of endless spending that would end up costing trillions.

On the other hand, only a handful of Su-57 prototypes were built and rigorously tested to work out the kinks and defects, and only then did the project enter serial production phase as more or less a complete product. This is both because Russia is a poor country that cannot afford to build too many prototypes at once, and also because it actually has to work in order to carry out its intended military purposes, so unlike the US, they cannot afford to waste money building military equipments that have fundamental defects (corruption not withstanding).

Trotsky was literally his godfather lol!

Hudson’s father was a labor leader in Minneapolis and a lot of Trotsky’s supporters who fled the USSR ended up being their family friends, who would tell stories about how Stalin was the literal devil. He grew up in that kind of household. His father was jailed for being a socialist leader and I also heard second hand that his aunt was “disappeared” by the feds for doing labor activism.

Also, a lot of what we know about Stalin today only became available after Putin fully rehabilitated Stalin in the 2000s. Before that, both the Soviet and Russian texts were a lot more murkier about Stalin, and these were the materials that historians had to work on. I don’t blame someone in the West who became politically aware in the 20th century for being anti-Stalin simply due to how much propaganda there were against Stalin since the 1950s.

The US has no industrial capacity to compete with China, that’s why if they needed a war, it has to be soon (seems like they’ve decided it’s going to be 2027).

However, it’s not about military engagements, it’s about the control of global supply chain.

US submarines can disrupt shipping lanes vital for Chinese exports. Blowing up a few container ships and the global trade gets stunted to a halt. This will significantly damage both the US and China’s economies. The US has food and fuel, China needs to import food and fuel (and a lot of them came from America too), so the question is: who can survive longer?

Meanwhile, the global supply chain gets reshaped. China desperately needs to get the inland Belt and Road trade routes going to divert its exports away from the sea shipping lanes under threat by the US navy. This is also why you’re seeing the Fed reducing rates, because it has pretty much exhausted the harvest of international capital into US shores over the past two years, and now it’s time to reverse the valve to unleash the dollars back into the Global South including the Belt and Road. The war in the Middle East is yet another vector to stop the Chinese expansion of Belt and Road.

In fact, we’re even seeing that the Chinese libs are already succumbing to saving the stock market and the property market by (re-)inviting foreign capital into China’s financial sector, undoing the advantage handed to them when the Biden admin increased the interest rates in 2022.

It’s very clear that the US long terms strategic plan is to buy up the entire Belt and Road that China had built. However, the Chinese libs (trained in the West with neoclassical economics theory) believe that the US cannot possibly print unlimited deficits, so the US economy would ultimately crumble under the trillions and trillions of dollars of reckless spending. This view is actually very mainstream and even criticized by many neoliberal economists in the US itself, but it came from a faulty understanding of how the financial system functions based on how the gold standard used to work, so this would be a disastrous strategy to rely on the US tripping over itself over huge deficits.

China’s only means of defending against this is a currency war, to clear the world of US dollar dependence (which we all know as dedollarization), but it seems as though nobody (except maybe Russia) has realized just how urgent and important this key task is to survive the onslaught by US imperialism in the coming decade.

The Syrian Civil War, however devastating it has been, is not even close to the scale of the conflict that is about to erupt. This is threatening to turn into a full scale regional war where many more innocents will die with full US backing. Maybe they’re secretly coordinating with Russia or something for a response, but I feel like everyone tries their best to avoid direct confrontation, and choosing to pretend as though Israel will stop on its own once it has tasted enough blood, that cooler heads will somehow prevail.

On the other hand, it is clear that the deterrence has failed and the Zionists have realized that their ethnosupremacist project is doomed once the Iran and Syria eventually obtain the newer Russian air defense systems. It really is a now or never situation for Israel, which is why they are willing to risk it all, because if they don’t fight now, even a losing one, that chance is even slimmer give it another decade.