Reading Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism and this section caught my attention. He literally outlines a war between America and Japan in conjunction with national wars (as in wars against imperialism/hegemony, in our history this was resistance to Nazism in Europe) in Europe that delays the onset of socialism for decades.
He claims this is improbable, but he laid out it nonetheless. The predictive power of Marxism y'all; its wild to see it in action.
From today's standpoint, the last lines about how history can take giant leaps backward before advancing is surprisingly :bloomer: We've been unfortunate enough to live in a leap backward but that will change.
I think it will change regardless of the situation we have now, I get thr sense that as more people move away from dollars we will see a sudden collapse of the American state but maybe not before one last death screech war somewhere, its really looking like Taiwan these days.
The death drive flailing around as the empite falls will almost definitely be against China in some way. But if the plan is using Taiwan as a proxy à la Ukraine, I don't see how they possibly win. They will lose this Ukraine war; China is stronger than Russia and supplying a blockaded Taiwan across the Pacific would be much, much harder than supplying Ukraine over land borders with the EU vassals. They would need to commit more than that, and that could be the end of everything. Or at least WW3
Their is still some debate as to if Afghanistan and Iraq are the end all this other shit could very possibly be flailing problem is we dint know the depth of how bad a stare the deep state is right now Ukraine clearly was someone's pet project that has gone side ways hard, smol bean coup to the beging of the end of dollar supremacy. Other support evidence is beefing up security at home with propaganda, spook data collecting programs you dont nessarly do this if your not hedging your bets. All we can surmise really is things are not going well, cant say how bad but I'm willing to say this winter loyal nato ally are gonna buy Russian oil. If that happens it might give us more clues to how bad this system is understress
it seems quite stressed already and we're only in the very beginnings of this sea change. they're running out of effective options to counter antihegemonic states. with smaller states, there's no appetite for boots on the ground wars anymore, and they can't win those even after decades. With China and Russia, nukes limit the West to economic sanctions and proxy fights.
Sanctions get less and less effective the more they are used, and their application of over the past 20 years has skyrocketed. We are already running up against the limits of them, and theit only response to states that don't play along (India, Turkey, even Saudi Arabia) with them is threatening to cut them off too. Which they know they cant really follow through on. It's not possible to win these conventional wars, and it's not possible to sanction half the world.
What's the plan anymore? The West seems to have no plan, or a bunch of competing plans running up against each other and failing. The realist wing of Kissinger, Mearsheimer, Kennan types never wanted this kind of alignment between China, Russia, and Iran; they wanted to use Russia against China. That idea hasnt been followed through since Maidan at least and now we're seeing the results. The US empire has bit off much more than it can chew by antagonizing these 3 simultaneously.
My fear is that they will double down on these sunk costs and commit to total destruction, a third world war, as their only option to overcome these deep failures.
He wasn't alone. The ham-fisted effort to form the League of Nations, as well as the continued ramping of military spending in the interm, signaled that the Armistice was only going to be temporary if material conditions failed to change.
For all the shit Russians get over the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, it was a sincere effort at avoiding a second continent-spanning bloodbath that occurred as Western military firms were salivating for another Great War.
Keynes is a liberal and all, but his book about the Armistice and the incapacity of Germany to pay back the war reparations demanded is quite good. That something dramatic and destabilizing would come from the end of the first world war wasn't just clear to Marxists, but Lenin's foresight of a US-Japanese war in conjunction with a European war and how it would delay socialism severely really impressed me in its specificity.
Keynes was one of those old-school liberals who actually sat down and tried to make the math work. And he did eventually manage it. Even a bad engine can trundle along with a good mechanic.
