Image is of the Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline, which transports gas from Russia to China. This isn’t an oil pipeline (such as the ESPO) but I thought it looked cool. Source here.
Trump has recently proposed a 500% tariff on goods from countries that trade with Russia, including India and China (who buy ~70% of Russia’s oil output), as well as a 10% additional tariff on goods from countries that “align themselves with BRICS.” Considering that China is the largest trading partner of most of the countries on the planet at this point, and India and Brazil are reasonably strong regional players, I’m not sure what exactly “alignment” means, but it could be pretty bad.
Sanctions and tariffs on Russian products have been difficult to achieve in practice. It’s easy to write an order to sanction Russia, but much harder to actually enforce these sorts of things because of, for example, the Russian shadow oil fleet, or countries like Kazakhstan acting as covert middlemen (well, as covert as a very sudden oil export boom can be).
Considering that China was pretty soundly victorious last time around, I’m cautiously optimistic, especially because China and India just outright cutting off their supply of energy and fuel would be catastrophic to them (and if Iran and Israel go to war again any time in the near future, it’ll only be more disastrous). Barring China and India kowtowing to Trump and copying Europe vis-a-vis Nordstream 2 (which isn’t impossible, I suppose), the question is whether China and India will appear to accede to these commands while secretly continuing trade with Russia through middlemen, or if they will be more defiant in the face of American pressure.
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.
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.
Why is there this atmosphere of “the coming war with China”?
Unless they mean Taiwan — and maybe even then — it just seems absurd.
Same reason war with the Soviets was always just around the corner.
We can only hope so. I’d hate for the kool-aid drinkers in charge of the US to actually believe their own bullshit enough to start a hot war with China.
In practice they are fucked if they don’t do something about China and multipolarity broadly. They don’t have to per se fight China directly but they must stop multi-polarity and ensure most of the world’s resources and markets are for the benefit of the west and China is isolated to a regional power.
Yeah, their options seem to be a slow decline into irrelevancy on the global stage, or a big dramatic war that could cause humanity to go extinct. And I honestly don’t know which option the US ruling class would rather choose.
The principal contradiction for the US is mostly internal, in that its persistent trade deficit strategy has caused led to its own deindustrialization and the disenfranchisement of its own working class.
The surge in populism after 2008 GFC prompted the US capitalist class to react, and Trump has chosen to reduce the trade deficit with China and the world as a means of resolving this contradiction, most likely because these are the executive powers conferred to him as the President and the strategy does not require extensive approval from the Congress.
Besides, China has shown no interest in challenging the dollar, and has in fact been the greatest beneficiary of the dollar hegemony. If you think about it, while only the American bourgeoisie benefited from the dollar hegemony and not its working class, Chinese workers have at least benefited just from the US consumers persistently buying their goods, even with the exploitation going on.
More importantly, the US is not interested in re-industrialization despite what Trump says.
First, the American capitalist class does not want to deal with giving workers the leverage that will happen when the country re-industrialize (that’s the whole point of exporting its own manufacturing capacity to the developing world).
And second, despite talks about re-industrialization, the US has yet to announce its industrial policy. This shows that whatever Trump says, it’s not serious.
Besides, who’s going to build the supply chain for the US if not China? It is far more likely that Trump’s global tariffs are a means to engineer recessions in the Global South exporter countries, prompting a harvest by American finance capitalism. If the US plays its cards right, it will be able to transition the primary form of dollar export from running persistent trade deficit to exporting dollar in the form of foreign investments and IMF bailout loans - most crucially, it preserves dollar hegemony and reduces trade deficit while allowing the US to reshape the global supply chain to its interests.
The true challenger to American finance capitalism is the euro. This is being taken care of with the Ukraine War and the Europeans will be properly disciplined. And it seems increasingly likely, as Yanis Varoufakis has been predicting, Europe will end up being the one to purchase American goods to reduce America’s trade deficit (euro will appreciate and Europe will deindustrialize in the process).
The US has been jumping from war to war for a century. They have recently started flirting with full scale war on nuclear powers (Russia). History gives no reason to think they will suddenly stop, and China is indeed next on the list.
In a few years China will be unstoppable, so that means the logical time for war with them is ASAP.
Absolutely, and this is how the US military establishment sees it. US House Select Committee on the CCP article from earlier this year: “The Window to Deter War with China is Closing Fast”. This is not an empty threat, they are afraid.
They release these types of reports all the time to funnel a few extra trillion dollars to Lockheed Martin to develop the latest shitty prototype that doesn’t work. Any US government report about how the military is behind and war with xyz is imminent is released for the express purpose of justifying military funding increases. If they have any relationship with reality and the actual intentions of the powers that be, that would just be a neat bonus. Any meaningful US government report on how the military is behind and war with xyz is imminent would never be seen by you or me.
An actual war with China would immediately end civilization.
My entire adult life we have been “pivoting to Asia”, and I don’t think we will be able to remotely take on China militarily when that pivot is finally complete
They’ve been doing that for ages because they have a hard on for how effective their propaganda was during the cold war
There isn’t going to be a war with China.
It is too late to stop China’s rise, and a hot war with China will trigger the end of human civilization within an hour.
Both the US and China are dealing with their own internal contradictions and cannot afford to keep the animosity going for too long. What’s most likely to happen is a renewed status quo, with new boundaries established, after Europe and the Global South have been properly harvested.
In other words, the US and China will be the big winners in this new global reconfiguration.
Sometimes I wonder if the ICE militarization is partially to say, “look, we have the domestic front locked down, we could crush antiwar dissent and stop draft dodgers from fleeing the country — we’re ready for war” as some kind of leverage to negotiate and maneuver. Maybe there’s a reason why capital and the natsec state continue to tolerate this extravagance by the fascist true-believers, even as it slowly radicalizes the population and torpedoes America’s reputation.
Or maybe this is just the unhinged desperation of a failing empire. I have no idea.
There’s been a lot of buzz in the past few years around being ready for war with China by 2027 (framed as “China is planning to invade Taiwan in 2027”) amongst US militarist thinktanks and much planning revolves around this timeline. It remains to be seen whether the political wing has the balls for it, but that is the timeline that military planners and hawks have been insisting upon. The largely-unspoken (but not always) logic behind this is that the US believes the late 2020s will be their last chance to halt Chinese military expansion while they still have an upper, or at least, equal hand.
One article here on it. If you google “war with China by 2027” you’ll find a number of pieces that mention the date. It might come and go without action, I think it depends on how other conflicts have gone by then and how the domestic situation is looking within the US.
There’s no other country that can be used to justify the current rate or expansion of spending US military assets, especially naval assets.
What if Trump replayed his recent success: drop one bomb on something insignificant, run away, declare victory? Has anyone gamed that one out?