yeah we'll see if this is actually a negotiated settlement or if it's typical US style request for capitulation followed by obstinance.
in any case, the US's strategic objectives in eastern europe have largely been accomplished anyway - nordstream 2 is dead, russian-euro relations are shattered, ukraine is a sucking wound as a backstop to shattered russian-european relations, europe's industry is destroyed, and europe needs to buy a new military from the US. the only thing the US didn't get out of the deal is a breakup of russia and a second chance to vulture over moscow, but that was always an outside chance.
I already wrote about how the Fed rate cut + a global recession will allow the US imperialists to take a big bite on the globe a while back, so I will just skip the entire essay here
Post in question I believe https://hexbear.net/comment/5579978
I'm not sure a US recession is as baked in as you say. I appreciate that lowering interest rates will stop or slow the big pump of $ into the US economy and world, but couldn't the trump admin moderate this with deficit spending and stimulus that is targeted to the American economy?
She was only vocal like that after the debates. She supported president sundown without remark for the 3.5 years before that. She's a savvy enough political operator to understand things 2 weeks earlier than others. You don't in fact have to hand it to her
“Digital authoritarianism — that’s absolutely what China is doing,” she said. “You’ve got a Communist government selling these 5G solutions. They don’t respect the rights of their own people and we somehow think they will do that for [us]”.
Wouldn't it be crazy if we found out that American tech companies and telecoms had a super close relationship with the US security state and that they built backdoors for law enforcement and surveillance institutions to comb through all kinds of nominally private traffic, foreign and domestic? That would be nuts right
I am a proponent of the "Americans don't care about foreign policy" line. In this case, I don't think foreign policy helped, but at least the one exit poll set of data I saw had 4% of people saying it was their top issue compared to 33% or something saying the economy and 15% or something saying immigration. The American electorate is insulated enough from the most direct outcomes of American foreign policy by way of geography that its just not as big a driver of how people live day to day as other things. Like lots of things, the actions of the imperial state are generally not popular with the electorate, but other topics trump it.
Also, people care about foreign policy for different reasons. Here on this anti-imperialist/marxist news forum, we care because we support global liberation movements as a way to improve the lives of people everywhere and disdain the moral depravity of imperialist policies. That to me is different than someone in the US thinking "damn we're pissing away money on Israel, they should fight their own wars so we can have more health care/tax cuts/infrastructure". In this framing, which I don't think is uncommon, foreigners aren't peers with the American voter, they're just an obstacle to Americans getting what they want.
Finally, Americans are an insulated nation by way both of geography and material conditions. Most Americans don't travel outside the country, their education system is myopic and bad, and since they make all the TV, they aren't encountering culture from elsewhere on the globe.
All that said, you're right that for the purposes of actual agitating in the imperial core, as anti-imperialists we can't just indulge in a thought terminating cliche and then stop explaining. We must never stop explaining.
And anyone who can read the news has a dim awareness that the younger you are, the shittier things are going to be in general for the rest of your life. Material conditions matter
I don't even know it would be mutually assured. I mean sure if the US just decides to first strike nuke Iran, but they won't do that. If they try to do things with massive conventional air strikes based in Israel, off aircraft carriers and from bases in the mid-east, I think they will hit a real logistical wall quick. They can do an alpha strike, but even a week into a for-real airstrike war over the strait of hormuz would see the US losing aircraft carriers and rapidly decreasing strike capability. It wouldn't be murder suicide, it would just be suicide.
See the edit. Choose wisely - avoid electoralism altogether, pull yourself up by your post-straps with high effort electoralism or be banished to the shadowlands
One problem with the above is that the reverse is true also. Iran, hezbollah and Yemen can launch rockets and missiles and damage Israeli infrastructure etc., but it will be very hard for them to affect political change in Israel over this. Perhaps they can degrade military facilities enough to materially limit the number of planes and bombs Israel can drop, but I doubt it. Neither gaza or Lebanon have air defence capable of fending off the Israeli air force, so the amount of physical damage from resistance air strikes needed to stop their bombing campaign would be immense, if its possible at all. I can see Hamas and hezbollah inflicting enough damage to drive back Israeli ground forces - they clearly have had that level of success already. However, stopping the brutal Israeli bombing campaign is another matter.
yeah he's a chud through and through. I'm curious to see how he digests trump doing the same thing as biden in ukraine. him and that crowd of english speaking pro RU milbloggers have a reasonable eye for military measures that are just for public consumption (i.e. idiotic gestures that don't change the course of the war) but I question whether he'll have that same cynical eye when applied to god emperor trump
this is clearly electoralism slop, but in a shocking display of mod tyranny and hypocrisy, I'm going to leave it up because it actually made me laugh out loud
if you are a poster who is mad about me deleting your low effort posts or if you are a mod who wants to do purity tests, please debate me
that article doesn't have anybody actually with the campaign floating her name, it's just some idiot with the heritage foundation
this reads like the kind of thing a savvy media operator would 'leak' so that everyone flips out, making trump's actual choice of steve "chicagoboy" mcraytheon the third seem like normal
I agree with you, I don't think there is a lot of room for the american state to maneuver here, despite donny's penchant for wriggling his way out of jams.
on ukraine, there are three paths - 1) massive escalation and mass use of US soldiers/materiel, 2) capitulation on russia's terms and 3) status quo leading to ukraine as a failed state. 3 continues to serve the US's consistent strategic objectives viz a viz europe and russia (maintains antagonism between russia and europe, leaves ukrainian nationalists in a position to poison and threaten any detente with Russia from disaffected euros, and continued profits for US defence/energy conglomerates). sure the US doesn't get to colour revolution russia and pick its bones clean a second time, but that was always an outside chance anyway. 3 is obviously preferable to emptying every other theatre to fight russia (1) and to a contemptible defeat (2).
in palestine, I don't think either the israelis or the iranians want a large scale war and it doesn't appear the more sober elements of the US security state want that either. nevertheless, I think there is the greatest risk of escalation here as there is a lot of gas in everyone's tank and trump and his administration's likely staff are such open and vile racists. I don't think that the difference between dem technocratic racism and GOP vile racism will be a huge driver of the conflict's future, but it doesn't help. more importantly, there's still so much that iran and hezbollah are holding back and so much still yet to be won or lost. compare this to russia-ukraine where russia is clearly winning and there's little or no capacity for escalation in the short term (except nuclear war).
on china, trump would clearly rather be president deals and I think that suits china fine. china won't escalate to a hot conflict unilaterally and I don't think trump has the stones or attention span to do it either.
I stand by my longstanding decision to remain ignorant of the rest of the site
It's news or nothin'