- cross-posted to:
- news@hexbear.net
- geopolitics
- cross-posted to:
- news@hexbear.net
- geopolitics
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and it going to work too since the US can repeatedly kidnap/coup any country in latin america while china holds onto its non-interventionist foreign policy.
china is going to watch all of its investments in latin america wane into nothingness as the US keeps fomenting destabilization to scare away investors like they did in iran.
the belt and road initiative is dead if they don’t cook up a new strategy.
We’ll see what China does in response. One approach they could take is to put sanctions on the US and cut off supply of critical inputs like they’ve done with some rare earths already. It’s likely the biggest leverage China has over the US. That said, I just can’t see how the US can reverse course here. It would be an incredible humiliation for the US to have to release Maduro. It’s unthinkable that Trump admin would do that.
that leverage is going to disappear within one generation because of bolivia, mexico and the congo so whatever they’re going to do has to be quick.
also: i could see a future president kamala harris or president gavin newsome offering his release to mend political fences or gain favor like they did with orlando hernandez
At this point, I don’t expect the US to be around in a generation. There are too many structural problems in the economy, the society is incredibly polarized, and there’s no effective leadership. These are like the final days of the Roman empire where you had oligarch infighting and child emperors.
those final days lasted centuries. lol
That’s the thing, it’s very hard to know how close the US is to a rapid collapse right now. You can’t look at the surface and decide that because it will continue being stable right up to the point that it doesn’t. Think of it from a physics analogy. You heat water on a stove and it remains looking like water for minutes on end, and then all at once it starts boiling and turning into steam. If you look at a snapshot of that water at any given minute, then you wouldn’t get much indication of how close it is to boiling. You’d have to look beyond the surface level to understand when the inflection point will be reached.
Exact same logic applies to human societies. There is a lot of inertia, and underlying systems that amortize the shocks of the decline. As long as these buffers are able to continue absorbing problems, things are going to remain looking stable, but as these buffers continue to erode there will be an inflection point that will lead to a rapid and dramatic collapse.
And we can see that all the underlying economic factors are pointing to just such an erosion happening at an accelerating pace. The productive economy continues to shrink, infrastructure investments are declining, people are being pushed to ever thinner margins, standard of living is collapsing. All of these problem are actively building under the surface, and it’s likely going to lead to another event like a 2008 crash in the near future, which could topple the whole house of cards over.
agreed and the buffers that let the asshattery continue comes from people’s livelihoods and lives who they will fight w ever fiber of their being to keep both going; so i don’t believe that it’s going to happen in my lifetime, nor any of the generations after me.
I don’t have a crystal ball obviously. All I can go by are the economic trends that are developing, and I just can’t see how this can last even a decade longer, let alone a century. I personally lived through the collapse of USSR, and I can tell you that it felt a lot more stable than the US is today. Nobody expected that the whole thing could fall apart, life felt normal, there were few signs that anything would change, and then all of a sudden we found ourselves in a whole new world.
