The gist of the interview is that Ukraine will lose unless it receives the level of support that the west is simply not capable of providing.
The gist of the interview is that Ukraine will lose unless it receives the level of support that the west is simply not capable of providing.
The collective meltdown that’s about to happen is going to be incredible to watch. I also suspect that that it’s going to radicalize a lot of people. Once the narrative collapses and people are forced to accept the fact that Russia won, they’re going to start asking how that could’ve possibly happened.
It’s going to be hard to reconcile that with the belief that Russia is in tatters and Ukraine is triumphant. And that’s going to make people feel stupid as they realize that they’ve been duped. People hate feeling stupid, and those who’ve been championing the narrative most publicly are the ones who will be the most upset.
For sure. I’ve been following this (as most tankies should be) since the beginning and it’s been absolutely wild seeing history happen in front of our eyes like this.
I said this at the end of February to my family and friends that the start of Russia’s operation represents the beginning of a new historical era, a clear sign that the west no longer controls the world. I also predicted that the clock has begun ticking on the reunification of Taiwan with China. I don’t know when it will happen but it has become an inevitability now that Russia has shown the “rules based international order” can be defied.
They mostly just looked at me funny. I got replies like “whatever, i don’t care about Taiwan but Ukraine is in our backyard, this kind of thing shouldn’t happen in Europe”. It will take a while to sink in with western liberals how monumental of a shift in the global balance of power has just taken place. They still think that if Russia can just be put in its place then things can go back to normal again and they can go back to brunch.
You may or may not be familiar with Michael Hudson and his theory of Superimperialism. It was so influential in the seventies when he first put it on paper that the US DoD and maybe State Department used his (Marxist!) economic theory to teach people how to do empire more effectively and even called in Hudson to teach them about it.
In February or March he wrote an essay about how this war symbolizes the end of Superimperialism and dollar hegemony.
Even for us MLs who think about and engage with this type of stuff regularly, I’m not sure we fully understand how different the world will look because of this development. It was inevitable at some point, but it’s crazy in many ways that the empire itself has in a way chosen to bring about its own end.