Image is Israeli interceptors trying and failing to intercept missiles over their cities.
Israel just carried out a widespread bombing of Iran, which has killed a number of senior officials inside Iran (though it seems the leadership is more-or-less intact) as well as a number of civilians. Important facilities have been targeted, but the amount of damage is unknown so far (note that many important Iranian facilities are deep underground, making them both hard to damage but also hard to determine if they are damaged from just satellite imagery, so reports of damage will be he-said-she-said).
It appears the attack took Iran by surprise, given that a residential block was targeted that contained some senior officials - if one saw an attack coming, one would imagine they’d be in bunkers. Nonetheless, like the rest of the Resistance Axis, I suspect that Iran has adapted their military structures to be resistant to decapitation strikes by ensuring that replacement figures are ready to take the place of killed officials.
Iran has delivered a massive missile barrage in response to Israeli aggression, even though Israel is continuing to bomb Iran. Iran is now aware of the location of many important Israeli sites, including secret nuclear sites, due to their recent intelligence haul, giving them a distinct edge.
Last week’s thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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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.
The problem with the Chinese strategy of geopolitical neutrality for the sake of “building the productive forces”…is that when the US and the west in general is finished destroying and crippling the rest of the world, you in turn dont get to cry foul when the bystander syndrome is turned on you by the whole world, when the US embraces its inner nazism and destroys itself while it smashes your precious infrastructure
China is not building productive forces lol. As I have written before, China already has 31% of global manufacturing share, compared to 18% in the US and 5% in Germany and Japan each. In fact, China is undergoing through an overproduction crisis right now where excessive competition has caused the rate of profit to fall to razor thin margins.
China has made many statements that it vowed to defend the global free trade arrangements, and has accused Trump’s tariffs and protectionism as violating the sanctity of the free market. In other words, China wants the Washington-led neoliberal consensus to persist. Both the US and China have benefited tremendously from such an arrangement at the expense of the entire world. This is made very clear by China’s silence when it comes to call for de-dollarization over the past three years - read the Russian proposal at the Kazan BRICS summit in 2024 to see how even Russia has largely scaled back on the entire de-dollarization effort because it does not align with the Chinese policy.
The US may think it can decouple from China, but China has just shown how many cards it can play - for example, the rare earth card that succeeded in making Trump coming back to the negotiation table. It’s a messy divorce but eventually the US will find itself unable to leave China, who just threatened to take away their child if the US insists on going through the divorce. They will come to some kind of a renewed status quo, as I have been saying before.
Hard truths. I’ll always defend China against western imperialist propaganda, but your metaphor of a toxic relationship seems quite fitting.
I also don’t enjoy reading again and again so many different and partially contradictory variations of the “China is playing the very long game” argument. There might be a lot of truth to that, sure, but we can’t really know in every case what the rational is. It’s also a very easy way to speculate and pull out of a hat new justifications for almost every concrete action. What a lucky coincidence for Chinese and US capitalist, that all the very different long term strategies China is said to pursue usually favour capital in the mid term.
Also long-term arguments can always be turned around to the past. The US empire wouldn’t have survived this long if Nixon hadn’t gone to China to make a deal. Global capitalism might not have survived the financial crisis of 2007/2008 without China jumping in with the biggest government spending program ever to prop up demand. Iran is forced to attack the harbor in Haifa, that China built. If rumors about Pakistan drawing a red line and threatening nuclear retaliation in case US/Israel escalate beyond a certain point, can have an effect, than just imagine how effortlessly a single short statement from China could have lessened Palestinian suffering.
Isn’t the point being made above that Chinese exports to the rest of the world is building the world’s productive forces? As in, a big part of the current American imperialist apparatus is that developing countries have to be kept underdeveloped and reliant on Western exports and generally not allowed to create populaces that consume significant resources, so it’s good if China is flooding the world with useful products (like, building materials and trains and railways and ships and phones and cars and eventually computers and chips) while also being careful to not consequently destroy the domestic manufacturing of developing nations (e.g. with how China said a while ago that they’re totally fine with African nations setting up tariffs on them but also a couple days ago removed their own tariffs on every African country so as to set up mutual trade instead of African countries just being indebted to China).
and I think this is the correct play, otherwise all you’re really doing is creating a new hegemon that is totally focussed on a big domestic population consuming all the spoils of the world but with a hammer and sickle on the flag instead of stars and stripes. Like, I want China to succeed, absolutely, but if in 50 years what they’ve created is more-or-less the same system as the United States but a little kinder to the rest of the world and less bombing and with a billion Chinese citizens in a domestic consumption economy with great social welfare and flying trains and fusion and shit, then there hasn’t been any real overturning of the imperialist world system, it’s merely China that’s benefitting now rather than the US.
I suppose it might just be a quibble of strategy; basically: do you focus on trying to end the dollar first and then manage the consequences and opportunties of that, or do you say that maybe we should instead work within the dollar system for now (for the most part), with all the problems and risks which that inherently possesses, that you have talked about a lot, and hope that raising the development of the whole planet will create the material conditions for the dollar system to be undermined? And if your analysis is correct, then maybe China and friends have decided that they’re trying the second option, for better or worse. And then if that second option fails (idk, maybe America just buys out all the world’s property conveniently built for them by China anyway and then charges rent on it), then they’ll be forced to return again to the first option.
Unfortunately, no, in order to help develop the productive forces in the Global South, China has to institute a Marshall Plan with the yuan.
Simply channeling their surplus exports to other countries to compensate for the loss of US imports will start a mercantilistic war that destroys the economies of the other exporting countries and prime those economies for IMF bailouts and mass privatization. Exactly what the US finance capital wants.
In fact, it is already happening to Europe (I wrote about it here the other day):
Now, allow me to explain in detail:
First of all, China’s central bank does not issue new RMB simply with the government running a deficit, like what the US does. New RMB emission primarily comes from accumulation of foreign currencies as reserves (exporters sell their USD to the central bank, who in turn create an equivalent of RMB in their domestic bank accounts) or through issuance of collateralized debt (such as MLF, SLF, repo etc.).
This allows China to keep their deficit spending low for the most part (below 3% of GDP per IMF recommendation), by taking advantage of its huge trade surplus to “balance the budget” (standard IMF neoliberal policy that killed many Eastern European countries who opened up after the USSR).
There are two main implications here:
First, the yuan is tied to the accumulation of USD, and this means even the Chinese investment in the Global South countries (e.g. Belt and Road initiatives where 70% of the loans were denominated in USD and the rest in RMB) would require those countries to earn USD to pay back their Chinese creditors. And that means selling goods to the US to earn the USD. When the US puts up global tariffs, it’s killing those economies.
Second, China does not want other countries to save in RMB. They are always on the fence about internationalizing the RMB. If they internationalize, the RMB loses its competitiveness in the exchange rate critical for its export industries, but if they don’t, they will have to continue to rely on the current neoliberal status quo arrangement that Trump is seeking to upset.
For the most part, China wants you to earn RMB to import from Chinese exporters, and is happy with the USD as the global reserve currency that other countries use to save in. But where do you get the RMB in order to import from China? This goes back to the point above: it is tied to the accumulation of USD.
And clearly, because China wants to prioritize its exporters, it’s not going to want to import from you if you make the same products (like, why would China import cars made in Mexico when it wants you and others to import Chinese-made cars?).
Because of the lack of mechanism (or unwillingness) for China to run a large deficit spending, much of the investment in China were actually made through bank lending. This is why after the 2008 GFC, when China turned inwards to invest heavily in construction and infrastructure building, the broad money supply (M2 per IMF definition) began to overtake that of the US.
Because the money to invest in infrastructure came from borrowing from banks, instead of the central government simply creating new money out of thin air, many of the local governments are now saddled in debt and are in serious financial constraints, and the plunging property market (a main revenue for the local governments i.e. the landlords in China) together with the ongoing deflation have also made the debt increasingly difficult to pay off.
This is also why China is desperate for the Fed to lower its interest rates, because it is not in China’s interest for the inflation in the US to go up.
Now, let’s look at how the Marshall Plan worked in the post-war period and the genius behind it:
As WWII was coming to an end, the demand for military equipment and munitions began to plunge, and placed the US industries geared for military production at serious risk of large scale unemployment, which could cause yet another recession in the US (it just came out from the Great Depression with full employment under the war economy).
Now, did the US flood the war-torn Europe with cheap American goods at the expense of the American workers? No, it would not work by squeezing the wages of the American workers.
To keep the US industries going, and to keep the workers employed, the US instituted the Marshall Plan by literally giving post-war Germany the USD to spend on American imports. This helped preserve the US industries, kept their domestic wages high, which in turn created new demand from the American workers to import from the other countries. This new spending, in turn, helped rebuild post-war Europe as American workers can also afford to purchase goods made in Europe. Eventually, Germany and Japan would industrialize much further and caused a new round of tension in the 1970s during the oil crisis, but that’s a story for another day.
The main point is that China cannot simply flood the Global South with cheap Chinese goods through mercantilist warfare because those would not translate into increase wages for the Chinese workers, who will need them to consume both domestically and through importing foreign goods.
The easiest way is for China - who is now economically and financially strong enough - to weaponize the RMB and flood the Global South with newly issued RMB (not tied to USD accumulation) simply by running a large deficit (who cares about keeping it under 3%, just because the IMF says so?). By creating a new demand zone to absorb the global export surpluses, and by giving up its net exporter status, China can keep the other exporter countries from falling prey to US financial imperialism and actually help industrialize those countries.
Remember, in order to develop industrial capacity, you need to have demand (somebody has got to want to buy stuff from you, whether it is domestic or foreign consumption), and China can leverage its huge domestic population’s demand to displace those of the American demand if it actually wants to.
Entirely in agreement. Given the 2 options, and the complex relations, it’s the more strategically sound course. I hate that that’s true, because if it weren’t I could be more upset at a lack of action. But option 2 has a lower risk now and the more successful that strategy is (the longer they can maintain that course) the lower the risk of BOTH option 1 and option 2 in the future. The direct risk associated with option 1 is very high (war and destruction of China as a possibility) but they are accelerating ahead in a way which is constantly lowering that risk. Option 2, of course, has risks, but those are mostly risks associated with a loss of soft power in the Western Left. Global southern groups are generally more receptive to China’s help than they are to our pleas for China to take over the world order and destroy the US.
this is the correct analysis. the triffin dilemma still applies under the XHS strategy and shortly down the line we will have a 1.4 billion strong great satan equivalent. there are accelerationist arguments to be made that this is actually the fastest route towards communism, or at least world revolution, but that’s neither here nor there.
the historically prevalent ‘strategy’ (it should be thought of more as a natural phenomenon) within western capitalist development has been to bait (usually you just have to wait) the hegemon into a conflict while courting its capital with higher returns on investment.
capital also has a sort of hierarchy of needs, of which security is among the more basic. this is why a us/chinese dual hegemon system where china acts as the productive host for the american financial parasite is an unstable dynamic equilibrium at best: capital will inevitably choose stability and security over higher returns in the long run. this was demonstrated most notably by the elimination of the iberian (dual genoese/spanish+portuguese) system by the dutch (all three of the atlantic powers actually), who were able to better economize on security of production (starting from bog standard piracy, the most primitive of accumulations) within its system of political economy. later transitions did not deviate from this trend, but rather climbed up the hierarchy of needs with respect to where capital would place the imperial core.
this is where the higher returns come in, and can be seen in the dutch/british transition as well as the british/american transition. the fact of the matter is that the mechanics operant within financial hegemony are only able to parasitize the third world due to third world countries’ atomization and relatively tiny economic size. when faced with competitors of equal or larger size, investment loses much of its lethality, perhaps the most hilarious example being the glorious revolution (iirc the dutch ended up owning like 40% of english debt and still got btfo’d afterwards). while it occurred without the presence of a global reserve currency (debt was in pounds), it also occurred without one of the parties being able to leverage ~30% of global production to such a comprehensive degree. the point is that capital will naturally flow towards new ascendant and coherent cores, cores who will notably NOT all in on a maximalist push against the extant system until they are forced to do so.
last thing i would like to note is that there is much precedent for overproduction and depression being a precursor to financialization, which itself is commonly linked to a perception of hegemonic ascent (as good marxists we obviously all know financialization is the most obvious symptom of hegemonic decline). we see it in dutch shipping pre 1650, british steel pre 1870, and obviously gilded age amerikkka. transition periods are stochastic almost by definition, and it would be prudent to discount anyone quick to jump to hard conclusions.
I do not agree with this. It first of all implies a level of rational thinking and conscious decision making that just doesn’t exist in reality.
“Security” is very poorly defined e.g a war on my enemy’s border is better than my own, even if we know such event could further de-stabilize the global economy or cause all those “blowback” memes. History shows is dozens of such examples. You may as well de-stabilizing and creating chaos is the goal actualy since it keeps the global south always in a precarious position.
Second I think the preference for short term high returns at the expense of long term stability is extremely obvious, specialy in our modern period. Perhaps its different in conservative investment circles e.g the PR shit some investment bank says to their clients but even then its a white lie.
But the economic reality is vastly different. Corporations gambling it all on shitty meme trends. The AI hype, the bubbles, buying their own stock just for executives to sell the top. Then you have the MIC and everyone else begging for more wars and conflicts just for a quick contract, the Blackrock and friends who dominate everything because they’re not afraid to do things e.g hostile takeovers. Google and the tech companies that went beyond their niche towards global dominance and now have destroyed their own core business by chasing fads etc.
Like I do not know what is the context youre pulling from to say Capital prefers stability and security. Its quite the opposite and perhaps only true in PR material maybe?
Point being, this is not a reason to reject a US/China bond for the long term imo. As long as China is willing to be friendly there is nothing unstable in this relationship, its rather all on the US own neocon delusional ambitions to blame.
i’m not here to argue theory of mind but imo it’s pretty arrogant to make the assumption that only ‘organisms’ that exist around human level complexity are capable of ‘rational thinking and conscious decision making’ when we aren’t even able to quantitatively assess the mechanisms behind the concepts in the first place.
security is defined as the structural ability to guarantee returns. it appears as things like shipping lanes, consistent legal frameworks, property rights, and the ability to enforce thereof. this applies to the imperial core and the areas where it performs extraction. you can see empire destabilizing regimes that threaten extractive capacity through nationalization or labor laws, but you don’t see empire destabilizing their own cobalt mines by giving workers fpv drones and off days. capital that does not prioritize a significant degree of baseline stability will get optimized out, which leads into your second point:
you can’t build an empire through meme stocks; in fact, financialization heralds the end of empire, which is why you see so much of it today. the abandonment of productive investment (as in, investment that produces things as opposed to investment that produces a return) is necessarily precipitated by systemic conditions that make other forms of accumulation easier. moving into rentierism, speculation and asset inflation does not contradict my earlier claims regarding stability (no one said anything about an endless pursuit of stability), as under the initial conditions established by the MC phase of accumulation, things are stable enough. this is what i meant by going up the hierarchy of needs, i think david harvey calls it capital switch. because financial short termism plays out as economic cannibalism where the logical end state is an imperial core that has been hollowed out by all the value being reallocated upward, capital is eventually forced out by socioeconomic collapse towards a more stable and conducive environment.
i’m not sure if you were intentionally misinterpreting security, but if i were to make a similar logical leap along your lines of reasoning then capital should by all means be flooding into real estate on the donbas border right now. a dualist us/china relationship has precedent in the genoese iberian condominium that was eventually superseded by the dutch internalization of both production (of which security is a prerequisite) and finance. the dutch were able to do this because returns, security and political control were all vertically integrated into a more coherent imperial core. moreover, the condominium was a historical aberration: spain lacked the administrative capacity while the genoese financiers were structurally restricted from political autonomy. neither is true in the us/china situation, which is why dualism will inevitably give way to competition. the ambitions of the american gerontocracy have little to do with it, the logic of capital is the primary driver of the transition.
It’s kinda funny watching everyone argue with phantoms in their head; I’m talking about the long term, yes the US can’t decouple in the year of our lord 2025, but I hate to break it to you, by ten years time it will, even if it has to give the global economy a long term stroke to achieve it
The Americans are not gonna settle for the status quo with China because Trump’s dumbass tariff policies failed in the first six months of his second dumbass term
Also you can’t have an overproduction crisis if you’re not activity building productive forces, you kinda contradicted yourself in that first sentence
You can be in an overproduction crisis because you’ve overbuilt. You can remain in an overproduction crisis after you have ceased to make capital investments for some time.
The “China overbuilt” take is a dumb neolib take, it assumes the main drivers of the Chinese economy are speculation and fictitious capital casing after imaginary consumers
The problem in China is under consumption, which can appear to the untrained eye as the textbook narrative on overproduction, but in reality it only remains a problem because the Chinese believe some very liberal and silly things about markets and inflation
Please read Capital Vol. 3 Chapter 13.
Overproduction is a very real problem that is happening in China right now. The increase in productivity has not translated into wage growth, exactly as Marx predicted.
The property market is imploding, the solar panel industry made record losses last year as investors fled, and the price wars in EV and cell phone sectors are causing the manufacturers to devour each other that threatens to kill off the entire supply chains. In fact, the systemic risk can no longer be ignored as even state media including the Global Times are starting to warn exactly what many people have been warning for the past couple years.
It is not just under-consumption. There are literally not enough people in China to purchase (and actually dwell in) all the housing that have been built over the past decade. Similarly, the solar panel industry is pumping out dirt cheap solar panels at twice the global demand in just a single year!
The most fascinating part is that Marx predicted all of that nearly 150 years ago! And the irony is that it turns out to be socialist China that will become the first industrialized country that embodies Marx’s principle of “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall”.
First of all that chapter has nothing to do with anything, you’re confusing the tendency of the rate of profit to fall with the artificial constraints of an export led economy
Again the problem isn’t profit-seekers chasing imaginary consumers, it’s the fact hundreds of millions in China need a consumption stimulus to complete the transition from export mindedness to domestic consumption
Huh? The 2024 statistics from the Chinese government claim that GDP grew by 5% and purchase power grew by 5.5%
I’m not so sure about that. That’s kinda exactly what the US did for WW2: stay away from conflict until the very end, join the winning side, and use your immense productive forces to promote yourself as the generous rebuilder (Marshall plan) while solidifying your geopolitical position. And western countries definitely fell for it and every lib loves the US, consumes American products and entertainment, etc.
China can promote itself as a generous builder all it wants, won’t stop the US from sacrificing its massive air force trying to level Chinese cities
The attack on Iran has shown once and for all; the US empire will choose total war over peaceful managed decline
Mao was right the first time, power grows out of the barrel of a gun
I fully agree, but isn’t that more of an argument for China to play the slow and patient game? China is ever growing in industrial might and therefore military capabilities. The more time it can gain until a clash against the US, the more of a power difference it will gain. The alternative to confrontation tomorrow is confrontation today, and seeing China’s growth at easily 5% consistently (in actual industrial capability and not just meaningless financialization of the economy), it can only get more of an advantage.
This is not to say I don’t disagree morally with China’s stance, I wish China would have closer relations with Iran and cut all ties with Israel or even arm the Palestinian and Yemeni, but I honestly can’t claim to know better as a white European than the people behind arguably one of the most successful communist project in history so far.
You should really start seeing this as a global hot potatoe game to decide WHERE the US will drop a nuke before it collapses, the longer China waits the more likely the unlucky winner for the first 21st century nuking is China
The war in the middle east has bought China more time, but 10-15 years will come and go in the blink of an eye and by that time China will be facing an even more vicious and deranged American empire which may or may not have won the war in the middle east
What are they gonna do then, try to sell the American holographic TVs for cheap for another 25 years? No, they’re gonna get bombed and a war will start
You are misunderstanding the Mao quote. Power grows out of the barrel of a gun but it is not the only way to pursue power after deterrence has been established.
China has about three cards to play, that they have been good faith negotiators for the last 40 years and the entirety of the 21st century, they control a plurality of the worlds manufacturing production (and the labor force to back it up), and while the capabilities of it have not been tested, likely one of the most advanced anti-air and anti-missile arsenals in history which unlike Iran’s is fully networked and will not be the subject of internal cyber attacks and failures, even if it cannot protect the entirety of China. They have the power that grows from the barrel of a gun.
The U.S. on the other hand, globally, has about two cards to play, both of which have been shown to only have limited effect. Sanctions and bombings. Both of which have been shown to be basically ineffective at achieving your geopolitical aims in the 21st century outside of mindless destruction.
Much like with Russia, it doesn’t matter if you destroy all of China’s allies, eventually even your allies will trade with them and fill the market gaps left. As long as they can prevent internal dissolution and discontent, their path towards being the premier global trader and cultural power is assured. And this is besides the fact that the U.S. would have to face a massive internal civil war of their own bourgeois if we were to ever actually go to war with China. Our entire petite bourgeois economy would grind to a halt within three to four weeks, which is the other gun has to the U.S.'s head.
Deterrence is meaningless to a madman and all your other points are reasons the US WILL GO TO WAR with China, the US is going for mindless destruction and it’s not gonna cause a civil war in the states, that would require a third party free of the DC neocon blob
What would you have China do? March out to another country to assist them, because that went swimmingly for the USSR? Profusely arm them with the latest and greatest despite them having no other common cause than some replaceable trading relationships and a common enemy?
There was already massive amounts of internal fighting going on in DC when just the rare earths ban was threatened. It literally was enough to bring Trump back, tail between his legs, to the negotiating table.
It does not require a third party. It requires the interests of the massive lobbyists in the retail service and finance sectors to be at odds with the interests of the massive lobbyists in the manufacturing and military-industrial complex. One of them is in control of the vast majority of the U.S. economy, and it’s not the manufacturing and military-industrial complex. If the military industrial complex chooses to pursue this, it would be a lobbying coup that would permanently wreck the U.S. domestic economy, destroy the remainder of their financial imperialism, and they would still lose to China. A war with China would cause the leadership in this country to eat itself alive, and the leadership knows this, otherwise they already would have done it. They have been deterred, and the longer they are deterred, the stronger China becomes.
It may be inevitable that the mad man pursues mad action, but they aren’t mad enough to do so yet, and there no reason to force them towards that when you are getting stronger and they are getting sicker.
You must be joking. No there is absolutely no way you can still think a deal in which China accepted 55% tarriffs is a win.
You also not following CHinese economic news either since the CPC has turned on to kneel and beg Wall St for investment since mid 2024. Who cares about “internal fighting in DC”, are we supposed to be happy when the CPC happily kneels and begs US capitalism for happy face investment? Does it sound or hurt less because we don’t get to see the internal “struggle” in the CPC that got them to do this? Not that the CPC struggled with this lol as far as they’re concerned its the correct choice.
There is absolutely no question who has the upper hand on the power struggle right now only because 1- China fully accepts neoliberal brainworm economic theory and 2- They always prefer to settle if given the option, even a worst deal is better than escalation.
Sitting here and pretending this tariff deal wasn’t a China L is insane.
You have this weird idea that tying up the US financial sector into Chinese assets would not be a win for China at the moment. You want to cause issues in a country, get everything directly aligned against the geopolitical projections of the military industrial complex. That said, to the degree that the English Chinese media portrays itself as wanting U.S. investment, it’s likely because much of the Chinese bourgeois financial assets are tied up in the U.S. and Canada, which was a poor decision by them, and places them right in the line of expropriation if an actual conflict pops off between the U.S. and China. If Wall St gets as involved in China as the U.S. retail and services market does, that limits the possibility of that happening, as the financial sector has massive political sway in D.C. specifically.
55% tariffs is absolutely a win. It does nothing to actually create an incentive for the U.S. to actually pivot towards rebuilding it’s domestic manufacturing base, since Chinese products are usually three to four times less than their competitors anyways, and is a drop in the bucket for what they actually trade globally. And this is besides the point that if they really cared, they would likely just redirect the trade through cut-outs in Malaysian.
The way we will know if this was actually a win for the U.S. is if Chinese companies start acquiring domestic manufacturers and then developing the domestic manufacturing production in the U.S. as has happened with the Saudi and UAE bourgeois in order to get around the tariffs.
Edit: Reading through this and other stuff you have posted, you make the assumption that the U.S. is going to somehow reverse it’s decline in the ability to militarily project force and that they will eventually be able to take out China militarily. I am on the opposite side of that speculation. We are simply not going to agree on this. I too hope that China doesn’t pull another China-Vietnam war and not learn from the mistakes of the U.S. in terms of understanding the changes and adaptations made in modern warfare. Historically, they have been very poor at it, and given how conflict adverse they are, they likely won’t have any real experience up until the big one happens.
2nd Edit: And none of this implies that this is ‘Good for Communism’. I think it is good for China, but I’m pretty unsure if continually entrenching yourself in the neoliberal world order will ever be a fantastic way to bring it about globally.
Stop doing business with Israel would be a start
The “latest and greatest” wouldn’t be necessary, capital investments and technology transfers to Iran’s native defense industry would be sufficient, also a couple dozen J-10s would be nice
It would be virtue-signalling for them to stop trading with Israel, of which my understanding is that many government owned entities have already as Israel is seen as a risky investment (which yeah). Sanctions would not deter anything that is going on in Palestine, as they have been completely ineffective elsewhere, and particularly ineffective with the U.S.'s full backing. They will make hay while the sun shines.
China is literally in range of Iran’s missiles who, while on friendly terms, is not, unlike Pakistan, an official ally of China, in relation to their permanent conflict with China’s major local geopolitical rival, India. In the same way, the less data that the U.S. has on any of the performance specs of Chinese anti-air capabilities, the better. The rewards simply do not outweigh the risks.
Capital investments and technology transfers are painstaking processes can take years to implement effectively, which by now would likely be too little, too late. If Iran is able to stand on it’s own through this I can see China seeking to strengthen their relationship, but it was unlikely before.
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Like just take Iran for example. It would greatly benefit irans capabilities and standjng if they had chinese air defences and jets and a couple of awacs , even if it was j-10c and downhraded versions of hq-9s and hq-17s. Its one of the more non science fiction ways that china could dorectly change the balnce in the axis of resistance against israel. First of all china only in recent years has gotten to the level and attitude of exporting such systems to whoever othe than pakistan but the important thing is to not assume that this hasnt happened or isnt happening because of china and not because of Iran. Sure china is to a degree lamely cautious as to where it would sell modern military equipment to not anger the us etc , or at least this was the case pre the intensification of this new cold war in recent years. But from whatever coverage from iranian and chinese sorces i have seen on the matter the iranian government factions, both reformers and to a lesser extent hardliners, where the ones more ambivalent and feet dragging in attempting closer alliances with China and earnestly attempting to aquire modern relevant military equipment beyond drone components and electronics. I really believe its possible iran could have had j-10c with pl-15s right now if they attempted that procurement especially when chinese equipment was still considered shit by the west. We should consider Irans agency here before whining about how china doesnt arm the axis of resistance and see if iran actually showed enough lack of naivity and willingness to be armed by china and prepare with the relevant ereas chinese military systems would make a difference other than waiting for a single su-35 and a s-300 to be available after every year of russian production.
To be honest in terms of what China should do, I was thinking more about sanctions against Israel, rather than China copy-pasting the US Ukraine strategy but for Iran
As you pointed out, the Iranians unlike the Ukrainians wouldn’t really go for that, or at least that used to be the case before last week
I took that angle because given Chinas global trade and foreign policy in the last few decades, its the way way more realistic way for China to make a decisive impact in the balance of power in the region in favor of iran and against israel. By taking advantage of and zeroing on what iran could buy, trade, smuggle and collaborate with china militarily, not hoping china to stop trading with Israel in commercially. Its much more realistic for iran to greatly strengthen their position against israel by taking advantage of china that way and chase that at all costs than to achieve an equal and sustained weaken of israels position by expecting china to sanction them while 95% of the arab world doesnt give a shit to
As far as the latter and the question of how much it would even work i had some thoughts here. https://hexbear.net/comment/6199174
You should take better notes of the current and future balance of forces and capabilities in the pacific theater. Your scenario hinges on the assumption that the US will have the capability to militarily cripple and destroy chinas economy and infrastructure while taking massive losses in a calculus where the non replenishable damage inflicted on US forces and force projection is lesser in importance as well as duration and impact by what they manage to inflict on China.
This calculus is barely true right now, let alone in 5 or 10 years from now. No matter who sits in or out of it, soon the hard military reality will be that even if the US went full kamikaze mode attempting maximum damage on Chinese mainland with the full might of what they can realistically muster in the region, they will still be lose the exchange and basicaly sacrifice the entire military arm of global imperialism to manage infastructure and military damage that china will rebuild in 5 years. Any attempt to do what you describe will more likely result in a decisive Chinese victory , which together with the amount of US loses and the context of a likely takeover of Taiwan triggering or following this , will practicaly dislodge the US empire from SEA and cripple its force projection capabilities and global standing for a generation.
The thought that f-35s and B21s and US missiles can be employed in large enough scales and depth close or within mainland china to seriously damage chinese cities and industry, even if they went full sacrifice mode, will be laughable within the decade if it isnt already. At best they could content with a chinese blockade of taiwan right now with ambiguous results.
If the grand plan china should be affraid of is that everyone will stand around and watch while the US sacrifices hundreds of gen4.5+ aircraft and a good chunk of their carriers , destroyers and subs in order to take out an equal chunk of chinas (who will rebuild and replenish them about 5 times faster ) along with idk 5% of major industrial and military facilities in a single chinese province while every us base east of guam turns into a smoking crater then ok i guess. There are more industrial facilities that are or can engage in military production and more major energy and infrastructure nodes in idk Guangdong alone than there are missiles and bombs in the US navy and air force inventory.
The fact the US will TRY is set in stone, whether China wins doesn’t depend on its inventory, it will of course weather the storm and decimate the US air forces; the win condition for China depends on the likelihood of the US dropping a nuke WHEN IT LOSES IT’S AIR FORCE in the Pacific
A mechanical analysis is fine, but you need to account for the deranged and delusional state of the American ruling class, which will get worse as time moves on
If the US hell-bent in instigating and getting into a hot conflict with china sooner or later no matter whatever else is happening around the globe and no matter the relative balance of forces in the pacific and they are also willing to push the “we nuke the earth button” when they start eating shit then nothing china can realistically do right now in the middle east, europe or elsewhere will change that. If thats not 100% set in stone, china’s should decide what their best bet is to make the us unwilling or unable to do the above. Based on that they will prioritize things like maximizing their military and industrial/economic expansion and energy transition, managing or accelerating the rate of US disfunction, decline and global military commintments , securing global supply chains and trade ties etc. Maybe you are sure on the right path and balance and time table for the above and that china is shitting the bet by not going harder in overstretching the us by openly supporting and sustaining the fronts the us is expanding military and diplomatic capital right now but i dont think its that clear cut
There’s nothing China (or any other country) can do if the US decides to nuke China outside of maybe nuking the US first (and this won’t work anyways because of nuclear submarines). The main deterrent is building an ever more threatening nuclear arsenal and the assurance that if a single Chinese city gets nuke, China will exterminate the US through nukes.
This is the thought process behind every “China is playing the long game.” China’s rise and the US’s fall are both inevitable, and when it happens, the US can either quietly concede defeat or go for nukes in a “if I can’t be on the throne, no one can be on the throne” way. No country is responsible nor is to able to do anything to stop US leadership from acting like a deranged anime villain.
The uncomfortable truth Israel is employing much of the lessons learned by Ukraine and by extension the US in the last 3 years? Drone attacks, cyber warfare, deep intelligence. What you write sounds and reads exactly like the Russian propaganda in 2022. “Oh the Ukrainians will never amount to anything” turned out to be wrong, embarrassingly wrong and its likely the worst is yet to come for Russia. Its true the ground war is already decided, but the cost is already completely outside everyone’s projections back then.
Your tone is of the same people who made the exact kind of confident projections about the Ukraine war back then. Its not convincing at all in hindsight. The US has not provided anything but intel and outdated European missiles and this is enough to make a difference.
Chinese military superiority should not be taken as a holy grail. The US will soon eventualy recognize the importance of hypersonic missiles too, they’re already working on it. This is one of the key areas of Chinese advantage that could be gone.
The worst possible mistake one can do is to underestimate the hegemon superpower. US incompetence is a meme until it isn’t. Nobody on hexbear is responsible for a whole country’s military so I definitely fear and hope China isn’t making plans on perpetual military superiority given they even refuse to fight a single war in decades.
I am very much afraid China is learning nothing from Ukraine/Israel tactics and right now all we have is speculation.
im not gonna lie and no offense this but idk to what i can respond to in this whole comment. “things may not be the way they seem because some other things also werent exactly like that and something opposite might have happened in another situations and some “bad” forces were underestimated and some good where underestimated and this tone sound like something some people who where wrong in another situation” is like, sure everything can and may be anything.
Any analysis that turned out wrong about some party’s relative standing in military and intelligence strength in a specific theater and situation may sound like any other analysis that turned out right. Should i not say and analyse things as i see them based on concrete hardware and tech trends and development and logistics ? If any positive and confident acessment china’s military development and relative balance of power (off its fucking shores no less) is unconvincing simply because Russia somewhat underperformed its “on paper” strength on some aspects of because mossad had spies and agents everywhere in shitass lebanese and iranian politics and everyday life and did looney tunes shit in incompetent, corrupt and split three ways arab states to fuck over axis of resistance groups i dont know if i can help that feeling and fear.
You can make your own judgements about the expansion, strength, hardware competency and technological edge of various PLA branches and PRC civil functions relative to american ones as it relates to a hot conflict on the pacific theater based on whatever you can find and on whatever assumptions and relavant lessons you think Ukraine or Israel teaches us. I never based anything of what i said in a percieved incompetence of the US military or any definite inferiority they hold on paper right now compared to China. On the contrary the US military holds many advantages on a lot if not most sectors still on paper. What i said relates to the specific most likely scenario of a US engagemnt with China and against some assumptions the original comments made. China would get its ass beat by the US 5 times worse in any engagement of american shores and in 80% of the world right now than what even an optimistic US defeat to china in the pacific theater in idk 2028 would look like. But it doesnt matter because my analysis only applies in a specific theater with specific innarguable advantages and disadvangaes, with armed forces and magazine build and massively expanded for specific purposes, based on hard numbers of trends in production, technology and all around capabilities
(exaggerating here) Sure the CIA could activate 10k shanghai and chengdu liberal secret cells and do operation spiderweb or whatever on Chinese airbases and ports and pla generals and pollituburo members may be car bombed by rigged BYD electric batteries. Sure the US navy lobbing tomahawks on Yemen and dodging drones and missiles a decade behind what China fields or them idk destroying some incompent arab state armies 20 years ago may actualy be the deciding experience factor against China. Or the US may reverse trends in missile development or any type of procurement with some big discovery and that makes some decisive chinese advantage or build up useless. I cant lie and do a disclaimer that china may in fact not be holding the decisive upper hand in the near future in any conlict in the pacific because of any of that