Over the last week, Sri Lanka has been hit by their worst national natural disaster since the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Over 2 million people (about 10% of the population) were affected; the death toll is currently climbing past 600; nearly a hundred thousand homes have been damaged or destroyed, transport infrastructure is heavily damaged; industry has been damaged; and farmland has been flooded. The cost of damage so far looks to be about $7 billion, which is more than the combined budget spent on healthcare and education in Sri Lanka.
While there is plenty to say meteorologically about how this yet another concerning escalation as a result of climate change (Sri Lanka does experience cyclones, but they are usually significantly weaker than this), it’s important to note that such disasters are, to at least a certain extent, able to warned about and their impacts somewhat mitigated. However, this requires both access to early detection and warning equipment, and an economy in which development is widespread - in this case, particularly in the construction of drainage systems and regulated construction, which has not generally occurred.
The IMF, on its 17th program with Sri Lanka, is doing its utmost to prevent such an economy from developing, as they instead promote reductions in public investment. On top of this, the rebuilding effort for Sri Lanka is already being planned and funded, and such donors include, of course, many Sri Lankan oligarchs, who will rebuild the damaged portions of the country yet further according to their visions, while sidelining the working class.
Perhaps neoliberalism’s decay into its eventual death occurring concurrently into the gradual intensification of climate change and renewed wars signifies the rise of the era of disaster capitalism.
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.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
US forces stormed cargo ship travelling from China to Iran: Report Al Jazeera
Of course, both Iran and China are quiet about it.
It may seem as though China and Iran have ongoing strategic partnership if you only listen to the “anti-imperialist” alt media news, but anyone paying attention to their relations will notice that China (together with Russia) is pulling their strategic influence away from the Middle East since June 2025.
Trump’s B-2 stunt on the Iranian nuclear facilities killed this partnership. The real message being sent by Trump is that economic investment in the Middle East is far too tenuous for the Chinese investors.
Remember the Iran-China 25 year cooperation program signed back in 2021 that promised $400 billion investment in Iran? Four years on and not even 1% of the investment has reached Iran.
Not only that Chinese investors are pulling away, trade has also gone down, with Chinese customs statistics reporting -25% import and export with Iran in 2025.
On the international stage, China has been quietly abstaining on the UNSC resolution votes on issues pertaining to the Middle East since June 2025 (see my comment here).
Therefore, it is no surprise that the Chinese MFA is keeping quiet on the US seizure of their cargo, for China does not want to get dragged into a bottomless defense for what will turn out to be unprofitable investment in the Middle East.
But most significantly, Trump’s B-2 stunt had smashed the whole Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard scam about a Russia-Iran-China axis, which unfortunately many “anti-imperialists” on Twitter are still regurgitating about.
It has fully exposed that China’s foreign policy that emphasizes economic cooperation is far inferior to the USSR model of military protection when it comes to mitigating Western imperial advance.
Turns out that economic cooperation contracts can easily be thrown into the dustbin the moment a country is threatened with war. The recipient country is too busy preparing for war to honor whatever contracts they have signed, while the investing country sees too little profit to made if their all investment is sunk by the drop of the first bombs.
There is no Russia-Iran-China axis until they are serious about military alliance and reviving the USSR-style foreign policy. Don’t be fooled by the “alt media” telling you that China’s “strategy” is providing economic partnership to those countries. Trump’s B-2 stunt showed unequivocally the harsh reality that the fist speaks louder than the wallet. Anything else is cope.
Isn’t the 25 year agreement mostly about China getting cheap oil from Iran? China invests in Iranian oil production and transport, and then China buys lots of oil. At least that’s what I thought about it.
The Russia-China-Iran alliance is less of an actual alliance and more of a transactional co-operation, as you’ve said. China and Russia aren’t going to risk direct confrontation with the US over Iran.
That’s a very important point. China could give more military support to Iran, but the extent of what’s required to stop an Israeli or US air raid would be very expensive for everyone involved. The US has shown some of the capabilities it has, and Iran’s existing ground based air defences were not adequate to stop them. Implementing some sort of anti ballistic missile defence system at key sites in Iran to stop Israeli air launched ballistic missiles would be extraordinarily expensive. Systems capable of engaging modern stealth aircraft with their array of sensors, lots of questions around how to do that from a technological perspective. China is building lots of interesting technology there, but none of it is cheap.
Yup, actually the entire Belt and Road Initiative, which started in 2013, is highly dependent on (and presumed) regional stability.
Why did the Ming empire turn to sea-based trade routes (e.g. Zheng He’s treasure fleet in the 15th century AD)? Because the Ming empire did not have the military capability to ensure the security of the Silk Road, and also because the Mongols had pretty much devastated much of the civilizations along the Silk Road in the 13th century.
The whole Eurasian strategy requires military alliance in the form of security guarantees. Economic cooperation, especially when driven by private sector lending for investment projects, is far too volatile. As is evident, the US simply has to sow discontent and create regional instability to scare away the investors.
EDIT: And this is not to mention that the Belt and Road infrastructure lending was mostly conducted in dollars, so the US already has a foot in the door. So contrary to Western narrative, it’s not a China debt trap, it’s China creating debt trap for the US to benefit from! A true Russia-Iran-China axis would mean Chinese investors losing value on the trillions of US dollars they have accumulated, so there’s the financial obstacle as well.
China’s economically focused foreign policy has served its purpose thus far since the gap between its military and the US’s was (is?) far wider than between the SU and the US. The SU had more nukes than the US at various points in its history with a peak of 39000+ nukes while the PRC has <700 nukes. The SU by 1965 has more than 10 times the number of nukes the PRC has right now. Now let’s compare navies. The SU had 5 aircraft carriers while the PRC only has 3 (the US has 11). The Red Navy had more ships and more personnel than the PLAN. Until the 2000s, the PLAN wasn’t even a blue water navy.
The frank assessment is that the PRC doesn’t have the military muscle to do what the SU did, so it does what virtually every competitor in any competition does: it leverages its strength, in this case its economy and manufacturing capacity, and it hides its weakness while bidding its time to develop and train itself to patch up that weakness.
Right now we are at a critical transitional period where the PRC has economically surpassed the US but has not militarily surpassed the US, so the US will lean hard on its military might as a form of hard power that is still stronger than the PRC. But the PRC is militarily developing as well, from rapidly increasing its nuclear stockpile to developing its shipbuilding capacity to the point where it has far exceed what the US has right now to being ahead of the US in developing 6th generation fighters. The US is still ahead of the military race, but the PRC is quickly catching up.
The PRC restricting rare earth exports is the PRC leveraging its economic might to hurt the US’s military might while the US using B-2 bombers to blow up Iranian nuclear plants is the US leveraging its military might to hurt the PRC’s economic might. The PRC will flip countries towards them by making itself an economically attractive partner to do business with and the US will push countries away from China by dropping the military hammer on them and exacting a human cost on them for doing business with China.
If we get to using nukes, then it’s already over. This is truly the last resort.
China in the 1950s fought the Americans and won in the Korean War without owning any nukes at all.
Similarly, the USSR provided extensive military support during the Vietnam War.
Since the reform and opening up, China’s foreign policy in terms of military has taken a drastic turn. Its first major operation was to invade Vietnam.
So, it’s not that China is not capable of a military alliance. The main reason has more to do with ideology since the reform and opening up era, which will entail heavy economic costs for China if it were to commit to such strategic defense alliance, as others have also wrote.
As for China’s economy, I don’t know if you have noticed, but China is going through a deflation and low consumption problem right now. This has paradoxically made China more reliant on its export sector, hence the $1 trillion trade surplus which is simply a number in their bank accounts but will never translate into real benefits. China could use those dollars to pay off the Global South’s dollar debt, but it’s not doing so.
What is worse is that Trump’s tariffs is forcing China to dump its products on other countries that also want to run a trade surplus, and it is only going to deepen the Global South’s reliance on US consumer market to make up for the trade deficit they are taking from China, and making it harder for those countries to earn the dollars to service their dollar-denominated debt (since China is not making any moves to repay their debt with its vast dollar reserves). As a result, those countries become even more vulnerable to US imperialism, NOT less of it!
With the US ramping up its sanctions, it is in China’s interest to steer away from such export-led growth strategy and prioritize on its domestic consumer market, which as I have written before, requires solving the massive wealth inequality problem. However, China’s adherence to neoliberal ideology is preventing exactly that, therefore you have a socialist country with the world’s greatest economy (as you have noted yourself) yet cannot provide full employment for its own people. Again, it goes back to ideology.
It was a stalemate. If the PRC actually won, there wouldn’t be an ROK unless you’re one of those people who thinks that the PRC actually wants Korea to be forever divided into two countries. And in any case, the Korean War is over 70 years ago. US GIs were still running around with M14s. Much has change since then.
Yes, because the SU had a much more dangerous military. Compared with the US/NATO, the SU had more nukes and had a larger standing army among other things. It can make various military alliances through the Warsaw Pact because it had the military muscle to back up those alliances. The only thing worse than not making military alliances is making military alliances but lacking the military muscle to back it up.
You mean the same invasion where the PLA got owned by a bunch of Vietnamese border militias and how the PRC pushed for negotiations when the actual Vietnamese army started to march back from Cambodia to Vietnam?
Like I said earlier, a frank evaluation is that the PRC doesn’t have the military muscle. I honestly don’t even think the PRC is a military superpower now. It’s more like a really strong regional power within its sphere of influence within eastern Asia than a military superpower that can project its power throughout the globe like the US. The PRC has nukes, but so does India. So does Pakistan. And France and the UK and the DPRK and the Zionist entity. Like, India technically became a nuclear triad before the PRC.
But of course, the PRC is investing resources in improving its military. The PRC being able to build warships at a much faster pace than the US is the PRC leveraging its economic and manufacturing muscle to improve its military muscle. Everything is interconnected after all, and the good thing about an economic superpower is it can quickly improve its military due to superior procurement and manufacturing.
Erm… A poor country fought the most advanced military in the world at the time to a stalemate, and protected the DPRK.
Are you telling me that China today can only competently protect its interest in Eurasia only if it has numerical advantage to the US? And if we’re being honest, China already has that in various aspects of its military.
War isn’t always about conquering your enemy’s territory, you know? It’s about imposing significant costs - political, economic, social costs - to your opponents such that it makes it harder for them to intervene in your affairs.
By your standards, the US should have steamrolled their enemies in Korea and Vietnam, but they didn’t. And the latter did not win decisively against the US military either. It was the mounting costs that made the US withdrew.
China can certainly protect its own territory and its immediate vicinity - but what capacity does it have to actually deploy forces further away, like, say, to Iran, or even further away, to some Latin American country now that the US is flexing its muscle in that region more visibly? There’s a reason the US fields literally tens as many times worth of heavy transport aircraft compared to other countries (https://hexbear.net/post/6836613/6714558#%3A~%3Atext=massive+transport+aircraft+like+this+are+a+very+US-specific+niche).
The Soviets back in the day made major investments in their airborne forces precisely because they realized, especially after Cuba, that they didn’t have much capacity at all to project power outside of Europe - if the Americans actually had done a ground invasion, there wasn’t much the Soviets could do (other than escalate to nukes, of course, but that’s not exactly the ideal scenario). However, that capacity has of course substantially degraded in the post-Soviet years. China, on the other hand, never had such capacity in the first place, although they have been building it up recently - even so, their heaviest airlift aircraft, introduced a little over a decade ago, has less capacity than the lighter American one. I posted some time ago about some (alleged) deal with the Russians focused precisely on the development of airborne forces, so if that’s true, it’s a further indication of China working towards improvements in that area, but it’d still be a long way off from actually bearing results.
We can mock the US for its corrupt MIC and decaying equipment and recruitment crisis all we want, but at the end of the day, they are still the only power actually capable of deploying and sustaining large military forces at great distances. There are different kinds of military power - life isn’t a videogame, where we can just quantify militaries as some abstract number of points and say “well, country A has more points than country B so they’d win” (although honestly, even strategy games still have the concept of different factions with different strengths, so even that isn’t the best comparison… now that I remember, Red Alert 2 literally had America’s faction-unique power being free paratroopers they could drop anywhere).
Whatever capabilities Russia and China might have, they simply cannot compete with the US when it comes to faraway deployments. It’s unfortunate, but such capacity is very expensive to build up and sustain (in fact, the US itself is now struggling with it - USAF plan to fly C-5, C-17s even longer elicits concern), and countries that aren’t imperial hegemons will find it pretty difficult to justify such investments - the Soviets could, since they were competing with the US, but even still, they couldn’t reach anywhere near the American levels of airlift capacity, and of course Russia today is no USSR.
I guess we can hope that with American reindustrialization unlikely to happen, their airlift capacity will slowly wither away and eventually China will end up superior just by virtue of actually continuing to build planes (as has pretty much already happened with sealift capacity). But in the immediate moment, the US is still ahead.
As I mentioned to the other user, I think we’re talking past each other. Russia and China are certainly capable of forming defense networks to secure the Silk Road. If they cannot do so, then China’s entire Belt and Road is vulnerable.
I certainly agree with your assessment here. But as I’ve said, war isn’t about annihilation of the opponent’s forces (although Russia is being forced to do so in Ukraine and is seemingly capable of holding off the entire NATO/Collective West, so I wouldn’t write them off just yet), it’s about exerting the high costs to make your opponent think twice about freely roaming the Iranian airspace and dropping bombs as they wish.
Even the promises of a security guarantee, which would drag the US into a long war and exert high political and economic costs at home, would make the US think twice about their decisions. It is the lack of such cooperation between the countries that emboldened the US.
So, yes, I won’t deny that the US is still ahead, but that doesn’t mean China and Russia cannot provide the defense cooperation that they did more than half a century ago. What made the US imperialists feared Mao was his willingness to fight a “10,000 years war with the imperialists”. This kind of mentality does not exist anymore in today’s China, who has since benefited much from the dollar hegemony and a US-led neoliberal free trade model.
The thing about defense networks is that they have to be reciprocal - Iran entering into such a pact would benefit their defense, but also potentially drag them into other conflicts. Military alliance between co-equal partners (rather than a hegemon and its vassals) inherently involves the sacrifice of some degree of sovereignty - and not all countries are willing to do that. The DPRK weighed these aspects and accepted a treaty with Russia, and did indeed end up having to deploy troops to fight Ukraine, as well as in more ancillary roles (I think there was something about them helping with mine-clearing?). Would the Iranian government have been fine with sending soldiers over to Kursk? How would the Iranian populace have reacted?
This is what always annoys me about the “China/Russia should have aided X country” discourse, it seems to ignore that the X country in question kind of has to ask for aid in the first place - has there been indication that the Iranians asked for such support and were rebuffed? You generally can’t just start leaving missile systems at someone’s doorstep like a cat with dead mice. You can’t just walk up to another country and go “we’re in an alliance now” (again, unless you’re the hegemon and just giving your vassal an order). There’s a reason the US did so many coups and interventions and other schemes - the actual populaces of many of the countries in which the US has a presence didn’t exactly agree with the idea, and had to be suppressed. Would the Iranians accept Chinese or Russian bases on their territory?
Alliances are a fraught affair, and their history is full of switching sides, refusing calls when war actually starts, and lots of ass covering (even NATO’s famous Article 5 that bloodthirsty chuds love to meme about is deliberately phrased as “such action as [the country] deems necessary”, because no-one sane would actually sign onto absolutely irrevocably having to fight WW3 because some Baltic dipshit started shit, they want to keep their options open).
Fighting off an enemy close to your home-turf is very different from being able to sustain a military campaign on the other end of the world. The logistical strain is much lesser, reinforcements can be brought in much faster, troop morale can be kept up more easily as they have a very direct and easily comprehensible idea of why they’re fighting which they wouldn’t necessarily have overseas. Ukraine has also conducted this war in a rather sub-optimal manner for political reasons (although admittedly, given the glacial pace at which NATO militaries are learning lessons from it, they’d probably perform even worse).
Okay, but treaties for defense cooperation are meaningless without the actual military capacity to provide said cooperation. The Soviets could, conceivably, deploy a decent amount of troops and assets to help protect some faraway country, because they had made substantial investments to develop that exact capability. They were still far behind the Americans even after all these investments, and this clearly did not help to stop a wide variety of American military interventions.
Today, Russia and China have way less capability than the Soviets had (although fortunately, as mentioned above, American capability is decaying as well). There’s simply not much they can actually promise any prospective alliance partner - they can sell them equipment (which both countries are in fact doing, although Russian exports have somewhat slowed down due to the need to prioritize arming their own military), but as for sending allied troops (or air-defense systems, which would still involve personnel to staff them) over in an actual war? They just don’t have that much capacity for it. The only viable thing would be a full-hog “you invade Iran, we invade Taiwan and the entire Pacific” (or in Russia’s case, “we invade, uh, Europe I guess?”) type deal - which is:
A type of deal that no-one’s actually entered into since WW1. As mentioned above, even NATO isn’t this kind of deal - and if, God forbid, we do get a real escalation into WW3, that “such action as deems necessary” part is going to be tested pretty hard, and we’re going to see a whole lot of interpretations of “deems necessary”. The fucking Axis in WW2 wasn’t that kind of deal - Bulgaria didn’t join the war against the Soviets, and Hitler had to do a whole diplomatic charm offensive of “just one more offensive bro, this time we’ll finish them, I promise” to get Italy and Romania to commit troops for the push into the Caucasus.
What good does that do the invaded country? Like, yes, certainly some of the invader’s resources will be diverted to handling the other front that just opened up, but they’re still getting invaded! Again, referring back to WW1 - what happened to Serbia? The Entente wasn’t able to deploy forces to actual Serbian territory in time, they got defeated and occupied, and had a good dose of ethnic cleansing done to them for good measure. So again, bringing back the fact that a pact ought to be reciprocal - why would Iran, or any country for that matter, enter into an alliance which can only promise them “well, in the long run we’d win! (notwithstanding any brutal occupations you might have to suffer in the meantime)”. Ostensibly, there should be a deterrence effect, but you’re betting a lot on that - and, well, that was the deal with the whole network of treaties European powers had prior to WW1, and look where that got us.
And I again have to bring up popular support - it’s easy for Mao to make declarations about millennium long wars, but how would the Chinese people, after decades of civil war and warlordism, and an incredibly brutal war with Japan, have actually handled getting into one? Intervening in Korea’s one thing, this would be another. Like, we do the whole “Stalin shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin” bit, it’s a fun joke, but the reality is that war exhaustion is in fact a real thing, and the world war getting restarted and having to continue for years more would have rather disastrous consequences for the Soviet home front (there was literally already a famine happening!). Don’t we, in our efforts to counter anti-communist propaganda, constantly talk about how communist countries weren’t
totalitarian dictatorships and were, in fact, in a lot of ways more genuinely democratic compared to liberal “democracies”? Communist countries can’t just declare global anti-imperialist jihad willy-nilly, as much as we might think it would be cool and based for them to do so (the “we” here being a group mostly living in the imperialist countries that would, hopefully, be getting defeated, thus saving “us” the trouble of having to build an actual communist movement at home since millions of people from the developing world will instead have spilled their blood to win that battle)
Incredible sentence
Military alliance/serious materiel support seems on contingent on a foundation of joint training and interoperability. The US has gotten a lot of mileage out of all their training programs for locals in the areas they want to interfere with, like school of the americas. Does China do officer or elite soldier training, or much in the way of joint ops?
Agreed and no major disagreements here. It really shows how Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard was a total fraud and that Trump’s B-2 bombing completely shattered the illusion. Without military alliance, the Eurasian strategy is extremely vulnerable and doomed to fail.
Having said that, I still wouldn’t take it so far as to say that it is not worth mounting a defense just because the US has overwhelming military power. If so, then you might as well submit to the fate of getting steamrolled by the US military. Why bother put up a defense at all? I still believe that a willingness to provide security guarantee can at least make the US less emboldened with its operations in the Middle East.
Subjectively, it was extraordinary impressive for a country that bore the brunt of fascist extermination for 14 years to push back against an industrial power that didn’t do shit in the two world wars. Objectively, the ultimate goal of the war was to remove US presence from the Korean peninsula, which can only be completely accomplished with the overthrow of the ROK and the expulsion of the US military from the Korean peninsula.
It’s not about protecting its interests, which is a euphemism anyways, but about projecting military power. And the PRC currently doesn’t have that. The US has over 800 overseas military bases. The PRC has a grand total of 3, 1 of which is in a country that also has a US military base, so it doesn’t even count. It has two overseas bases, one in Cambodia and one in Tajikistan. How are two bases in central Asia and southeast Asia respectively remotely helpful in what’s going on in South America? What’s the Chinese equivalent of Guam? The Chinese equivalent of Guam is the PRC funding Hawaiian separatists to kick out the USians from their islands and making a deal with a once more sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii to build a giant Chinese military base. And the PRC can’t just manufacture their way into 800 overseas military bases, so in order to make up this gap, the PLA has to compensate by being better than the US military in other areas. That’s when the PRC having less nukes and less aircraft carriers starts to become concerning because the overseas military bases gap is far harder to overcome.
The US losing in Vietnam is tangential to the fact that it can even wage war in Vietnam in the first place. The fact that the US could even wage war halfway across the world killing millions in the process speaks to its logistical capabilities and its ability to project power. This is something a lot of people forget. I am extremely skeptical that the PLA could do the equivalent today. I don’t think the PLA have the means to invade Peru or Bolivia. And I don’t mean a decapitation strike or nuking their capital, but boots on the ground occupying their capital and major cities. At its peak, the US had more than 500000 troops in Vietnam. Most of those troops had stops in Guam, Japan, and the Philippines (going back to the US having hundreds of overseas military bases) before being shipped out to the ROV. They didn’t all get shoved into a boat in California and sailed directly to South Vietnam.
Ignoring the political dimensions or the fact that the US will 100% never allow this to happen, can the PRC militarily invade Guatemala for the sake of overthrowing the current government that recognizes the ROC, install a new provisional government that recognizes the PRC, and wage COIN against a population that presumably will not take kindly to Chinese invaders? Forget whether it can prop up the pro-PRC government, can the PRC even do it?
I think we’re talking past each other. You mean more of a power projection across the oceans, while I am talking about Russia, China and Iran forming a defense pact to protect their Eurasian/Silk Road interests from Western imperialism.
I agree with you that China does not yet have the power projection capability, though that is not far off, but they can certainly form defense networks across the Eurasian continent to make it extremely difficult for the US to freely roam the airspaces and bomb Iran and the surrounding countries on a whim.
Again, we’re back to talking about the costs. The question isn’t about conquering a country, it’s about exerting high costs for the opponents to think twice about their military actions.
I’ve also noticed a lot of mental gymnastics especially on the pro-BRICS twitters on this matter, where on the one hand, Russia is single handedly holding back the NATO and the Collective West, on the other, they keep making excuses that Iran didn’t want to take China’s deal, so China shouldn’t help them. Well, an economic deal that doesn’t come with security guarantee isn’t going to worth much. Big surprise.
Counterpoint, if China saves us we don’t have to do anything ourselves to stop our nation’s warmongering!
Congrats, you have discovered Suburban Maoist Third Worldism.
If you dig deep enough into my posting you can catch me genuinely freaking out when I see some of those takes on here/grad lol
Yeah, I don’t even know if it’s considered a hot take around here at this point, but my long held “hot take” is that MTW should generally only be practiced by people in the third world, because for first worlders, it most often just ends up being used as an excuse to be the most insufferable do-nothing poster. It’s honestly surprising at times that the ACP didn’t adopt MTW. I actually agree with a lot of MTW theory, too, it’s just not really something you can practice in the West unless you either become like a Chinese spy or you move to the third world.
I mean, I think if properly considered and practiced by a westerner it would end in the demands of the ancient posters: to go and FB a WM. or some contextually suitable equivalent action to constantly disrupt profit incentives and make is so imperial-super profits and all of the logistics required to keep them running are denied, thus they are denied their ability to pacify the first world. These types always argue communists need to “go underground” or some equivalent when going underground always is accompanied by actions that only those forced into the underground have proper incentive to do, since they are forced out of daily life, and thus denied the comforts dolled out to pacify those still in “society” proper. They fail the basic call to bring about the change needed to radicalize the proletariat, or if such is truly impossible in their analysis, at least de-pacify into something disruptive that weakens imperial social fabric and thus weakening its apparatus but them by denying the global labor aristocrats, themselves included, their luxuries and take upon themselves the task of the disruptive guerilla to do so.
But they don’t do this because they don’t actually believe what they think past the most surface level analysis, as anything else denies them the ability to do nothing.
I think they believe it, they just prefer their comfort
I guess maybe I’m projecting a bit of how I would act if I reached the mental place of MTW. To me, belief is followed by ideologically informed action. I don’t fully believe in the most doomer interpretations of MTW but even then I struggle with the direct action question, so I couldn’t imagine it from that position where there is no potential for revolution or in some cases even a vanguard formation.
I think there is that potential given a bit more deterioration, or even now in some of the oppressed nationalities if properly organized. From this FB a WM can be detrimental in some cases, or outright murderous in places like a food dessert that has seen monopoly form there with a hegemonic corp being the only grocer, which is why I don’t currently support it. With the considerations I’ve seen from first world MTW I feel I would be mandated to FB a WM or if I couldn’t would probably succumb to some form of reactionary redacted if I couldn’t muster the conviction.
Idk, the position of that particular type of, “communist” utterly baffles me. With the succdems I at least understand how they arrive there, I see no positive of the first-world “nothing is to be done” MTW that isn’t better solved by being a bog-standard liberal or a succdem.