Any tolerance of Europe breaking free from American vassalage is nothing but a means to one end: the European abandonment of Western hegemony. But that’s a quid pro quo that the gardeners of this continent will never accept and so, if that’s not the likely outcome, then it’s a dangerous, useless path for the Global South to entertain and all means should be expended to instead have “sovereign” Europe’s baby teeth kicked in while it’s still in the crib.

The constituent members of the EU want to preserve their near full national autonomy while still banding together under a united front whenever convenient. This half-assing makes the current state of the EU an emperor without clothes—a strong federative “state” in appearance, but not in any practical substance. The bridges it’s torched in its chauvinistic allegiance to Western hegemony leave little incentive for the rest of the world to humor it, much less ignore exploiting its contradictions by pretending it’s actually clothed. The only response they should have is to break and tear this continent apart so that the EU liberal’s dream of some “United States of Europe” can never come to pass. Russia and China seem to have gotten the message nowadays by using a diplomatic divide-and-conquer strategy through bilateral relationships while giving Brussel’s multilateral fantasies the cold shoulder. The EU wants to have its cake and eat it too and the world shouldn’t let it.

The sort of freaks running this continent wouldn’t lead to some partnership with anti-imperialism against America but a coordinated sharing of America’s world policeman role with delineated global boundaries of responsibilities akin to the Treaty of Tordesillas. An “independent” Europe would take care of northern Africa, Russia, perhaps also Central Asia and the Middle East while America can, at last, properly focus all its efforts in its decade-long delayed “Pivot to Asia” and fully concentrate on the much fantasized showdown with China.

Europe re-empowered alongside America would simply just replay the dynamic between the British and French Empires in the mid-19th century. As Victor Hugo depicted that partnership - “One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits” - so would be the exact dynamic of the modern two bandits of America and “sovereign” Europe.

Those countries (aside from allies and BRICS partners like Belarus, Pakistan, Serbia and South Africa) are all unironically valuable for aerospace through their geography. They seem to be largely purposeful choices (not sure about Azerbaijan other than potential Caspian Sea access for Russia). For the others, they’re all well within the tropics meaning the ILRS can develop rival equatorial launch sites to the French colonial occupation of Guiana in South America.

Aside from Bolivia (which is a good back up partner for maintaining telescope infrastructure in the Andes if Milei in Argentina is bribed by the US to sabotage China’s Argentine telescope there), they are all coastal countries meaning launch infrastructure can be transported by the same means the ESA does to Guiana and much latitudinally closer to the equator than Russia and China’s territorial manned launch locations in Baikonur in Kazakhstan or Wenchang in Hainan.

The truth is that much of the leadership and policy groups in the Global North have come to the implicit decision to see the “bright side” of climate change. Going from the US to Canada to the UK to Russia, there’s been numerous environmental studies published in those countries on how they would “benefit” from climate change. This is why there’s a fixation on Greenland and the Arctic. They’ve come to understand the unspoken truth about climate change, which is that the same Global North which has contributed the most historical emissions is also the same region estimated to be set to suffer the least through the coincidence of their geography. They’re more excited about the potential Italian vineyard country climates that the Midlands and Minnesota are estimated to develop towards as climate change is more and more exacerbated than the apocalyptic scenarios slated for elsewhere, like the submerging of Jakarta or the wet-bulb temperatures of South Asia.

SE Asia, Africa, Latin America are likely to suffer severe climate-induced hardships, but the most that the West needs to worry about (apart from the submerging of places like the US Eastern Seaboard, Florida, and the European Low Countries, which they believe they’ll always retain the national wealth to spam dikes and levees and sea walls) is “climate refugees,” which is telling in of itself. The arrogant conceit displayed here is also potentially backed by the current climate estimates, which is the danger of it all. You can see the falsehood that “everyone will suffer equally together so we must all work together, we’re in the same boat” that climate scientists have tried to defend starting to be pierced with climate change-enthusiast leadership like Trump coming to power. From a relativistic sense, so long as your enemies suffer more than you, this is acceptable for them. They don’t need to be better off than themselves in the past (and the Global North is absolutely not completely unscathed from climate-induced catastrophes like they want to believe) but they must be better off than the rest, which is enough for them.

It’s pretty wild that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs is quoting Mao to hit back at the US tariffs. It really underscores what a huge mistake it was when Khrushchev, that “poison dwarf skinhead fuck” tore down Stalin’s legacy. You can almost hear all the Western “Sinologist” academics losing their minds right now, shouting, “No, you can’t quote Mao! You’re supposed to be just as ashamed of him as we made the Soviets feel about Stalin! Mao’s supposed to be an ideological weapon we use against you, not something you wield against us! Are all my Ivy League/Oxbridge-published University Press anti-Mao books for nothing?”

Yikes. You first responded to my whole post by starting off with a blunt “Broadly disagree.” Nothing wrong with that, in of itself, but in the light of your further response, that seemed intended more as a dismissal of my original post than an invitation for conversation, so it’s unfair to call others “pompous redacted-heads” given that initial approach.

The issue here is that we’re speaking on completely different registers. I can’t just accept the reductive view of Trump as that would invalidate the entire materialist analysis of him and the threat he poses to the Global South through his role in leading the U.S. empire. That’s why I pointed out the elephant in the room—because it’s not about personal attacks, but about the framework we’re working within. You seem to approach this from the perspective that Trump is just an incompetent buffoon, which is a viewpoint often pushed in spaces like r/politics. Not a criticism, just an observation. But my approach is intended to be a materialist view, where I see him as representing the class interests of his backers, while also helming a global empire with immense military, financial, and nuclear power.

To be clear, you might be entirely right in your own view, but leftists once thought the same thing about figures like Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Biden. Sure, they were often seen as incompetent or buffoonish on a personal level, but they still helmed the U.S. empire. That power allowed them to do enormous damage to the rest of the world, and other nations simply cannot afford to dismiss U.S. leadership, in a world still gripped by US hegemony, as just the actions of a hapless fool. A materialist analysis, even if it means giving them a bit of credit, is the best way to assess the possible latitudes of their capabilities and potential for harm.

So the real takeaway here is that the US military is basically that player in a video game who hoards all their health potions for the final boss, but keeps getting wrecked by the “mid-tier” opponents along the way because they’re “saving it” for the big showdown. Newsflash: there are no save points in real life. And that’s why smaller powers, like Yemen, can inflict serious pain on the US military, as the latter is trying to win a game it looks down on with one hand tied behind its back.

This also highlights why having a balance of power, like a bipolar system, is crucial for keeping Western dominance in check. After the USSR fell, that balance went out the window, but it’s slowly coming back now thanks to China. The key message being expressed here by these “worried US commanders” is going to show how important the role of China is in the world order.

Well, I believe you’re interrogating my comment from that r/politics interpretation of his administration which makes any materialist analysis a pointless non-sequitur. I won’t be sharing that characterization so we’d be talking past each other.

I’ll respond to some points though. The expectation of any real opposition from countries like Canada, vassal settler states, is honestly laughable. They’ll ride out the storm for this term, just as they did during Trump I, and then line up to kiss the ring of the next Democrat presidency. Yes, their sympathies towards America is likely once again shaken, the poor heartbroken sods, but the real material factor is their allegiance towards Western hegemony (and white racial and cultural supremacy, to put it even more frankly), which is unshakeable.

As for Sheinbaum, she’s walking on a daily tightrope of avoiding being painted alongside Morena as “uncooperative socialists” by the US media apparatus that would trigger US attempts to pull another Chile by some gusano freak like Rubio. The idea that Mexico, America’s direct south, is governed by anyone even a nudge more left and assertive than a comprador reactionary like Pinochet has been deeply grating for the American political class (and the West, given how rags like The Economist have rubbished her). I don’t like to overplay the capabilities of the Global South because it obscures the danger that the US empire poses fundamentally poses, as seen from the Gaza genocide.

Tariffing all countries was essential to his logic of how restoring American manufacturing would occur, it’s not a bug but a feature. That plan might be shite but it is absolutely intentional done from Trump’s calculus. The important part of my analysis was that this concessional “pause” is a spanner in the works of his own plan. Meaning that there is no opportunity for his strategy to even play out and fail because, at the present moment, he can’t even get his plan up and running in the first place.

Above all, I’d caution against a class-agnostic interpretation of Trump. No man is an island and what his presidency has is the Republican MAGA and Neo-Con factions of the American political class, along with the Silicon Valley technocrat oligarchs, behind him. This is Trump II and no longer Trump I, so there has already been abundant historical reference to demonstrate that he is a lackey to his class interests, rather than some maverick allowed to singlehandedly dictate American policy as the Reddit liberals would portray. They guide his policies and strategies in the same way that, with his brain matter leaking out of his ears, the Democrats guided Genocide Joe through the genocide against Palestine. As such, it bears to keep in mind that whenever other countries deal with Trump, they are actually seeing past him at the class interests controlling American power which he represents. That power might bear the face of an incompetent, bumbling moron - but it is also the most dangerous geopolitical menace on this planet.

If you’re interested in a materialist analysis of Trump’s tariffs, I recommend watching Ben Norton’s video where he dissects the internal logic of Trump’s strategy

I think with the so-called “90 day pause” (not really a “pause” from what’s so far discernible in the fine print) and the China-US tit-for-tat escalation, those those two developments should be stable enough to make it possible to finally analyze the situation of the past week for a bit without being being at the risk of rendered immediately outdated within the next hour.

With the 90-day “pause,” this has in effect turned from a US trade world war into more of the same Sino-American trade war that has been ongoing since Trump I. What does this mean? It means that the pressure on China has risen far more now that the US has just stated it will fully concentrate against it, though it could be argued that the whole tariff gimmick was all about China in the end anyways.

The damage done to the markets will likely recover for a while due to political reasons since the “pause” was conceded precisely because of the one-two punch of the American world tariffs assault and China’s unexpectedly resilient response, which made it unbearable for Trump’s Republican oligarch backers to support, as Musk’s panic illustrated. Trump and his lackeys like Navarro and Miran may have a chef’s kiss plan all sketched out of restoring American manufacturing, but their great sorrow is that they and their perfect plan exist in the mud and dirt of reality, Hegelian idealism faceplanting into the material conditions of the real world. American leadership simply does not have the capacity to tell its oligarchic and financial backers to “shut up” and “bear the pain for the greater good” in the same way that China did during the first term trade war. This “pause” shores up the market from a state of total doom and gloom, which relaxes some of the political pressure on Trump.

I don’t really have an opinion on whether the “pause” was a pump-and-dump market manipulation (it totally was) because regardless of the intentionality, it has wider consequences. In that way, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that the Chinese response put Trump into a Catch-22. Retaining tariffs on the rest of the world to follow through with their grand plan would be politically untenable through the mounting financial damage to their financial backers, which is the ultimate limiting factor curtailing any US executive action. The US made itself into a capitalist oligarchy and it is forced to lie in the same bed it made through McCarthyist repression. Reducing and pausing tariffs on the rest of the world, as he has now chosen, would provide an avenue to retaliate and take revenge against China, but undermines his original strategic goal.

The point, as Trump’s team revealed after people mocked them for tariffing random Pacific islands, was to exact a cost on manufacturers so long as they stay out of the US, no matter where else they set up. This was done to incentivize the profit-seeking calculus of manufacturing companies to determine that it was worth it to come to the US rather than anywhere else. Additionally, and more importantly, this was meant to combat China’s manufacturing outsourcing strategy of “Made Abroad with Chinese Characteristics” where Chinese manufacturers went overseas to set up intermediaries in locations like Vietnam (which is why that country received among the highest tariffs), which effectively negated the entire point of the US trade war on China, which was to weaken the Chinese manufacturing sector.

I believe that Trump genuinely sought to “make a deal” with China, particularly in line with the Phase One trade agreement that he briefly secured before the onset of COVID-19 and his electoral defeat in 2020 derailed any lasting progress. Historically, the West’s successes against China have often involved signing unequal treaties, which leveraged the centralizing strength of the Chinese state to enforce Western terms on China and its people. Whether Trump anticipated China’s response or was genuinely surprised by it, the “pause” he was ultimately forced to concede—at the detriment to his re-shoring strategy—demonstrates the impact of China’s reaction.

In any case, the US’s focus is once again squarely on China, but this just represents a continuation of the Trump I trade war, a more familiar ground compared to the scenario of the global trade conflict, now put on hold. While China will suffer from this renewed US assault, its experience from the first trade war suggests it is better equipped to weather such pressures. The previous trade war allowed China to consolidate domestic capital around its self-sufficiency goals, making it more resilient. In contrast, the rest of the world, as seen during Biden’s term, lacks defenses against US economic and political aggression. Trump can boast about other countries coming up to “kiss his ass,” but those nations like Vietnam do so out of a lack of options.

During Biden, China largely took a passive stance, as the US lashed out indiscriminately at multiple targets. To be frank, I’d say that it would have been politically untenable, for the Chinese leadership to have voluntarily stepped forward to faceslap Genocide Joe and draw his attention towards them at that time. Now, however, the Chinese government has a compelling rationale for positioning itself as a shield to redirect American hostility away from the rest of the world and focusing it squarely on China - simply because it’s been made a fait accompli through Trump’s actions. Since this is what happened during Trump I, at least all the way until the one month prelude in 2020 before the beginning of the pandemic when the US assassinated Soleimani, an intensification against China can be expected to allow the rest of the world, the Global South in particular, some breathing room. This would be a disaster if China is weakened as a result, but the experience accrued from a near-decade of trade war means that China is better positioned than in any time ever and the speed of the Chinese response this time around suggests that the Chinese government knows it.

Meh.

Speaking from within, the EU needs to be kicked in the stomach when it’s been already weighed down by the Ukraine war and the American cannibalization. What Leyen, Macron, Merz and their sort want is to become, geopolitically, an independent carbon copy of Biden America. Teaming up with America whenever a Democrat is in the White House, including militarily through psychologically normalizing the increased national military spendings on an “independent” European army to alleviate the US European burden so the latter can consolidate on other fronts, and substituting to carry the torch of Western hegemony when a MAGA Republican comes in.

Their much tortured dilemma is that they simply lack the capacity and the capability, which is why their aspirations for economic recovery and geopolitical relevance should be given a cold shoulder. The existence of the EU as a geopolitical concept is a conceit predicated on the inherent assumption that other countries will play along with the charade and treat it as a unified bloc, rather than exploiting its internal divisions. The EU has thus enjoyed the perception of geopolitical strength as a unified bloc, reaping the benefits of collective power while avoiding the sacrifices required for the deeper integration needed to form an actual federation—something politically unfeasible at the national level.

For the time being, this fiction has been propped up by the goodwill of other countries, but the latent European chauvinism especially since the Ukraine war of defending their “garden” against the “jungle” has seemingly worn away some of that patience away. It would be better for this “United States of Europe” wannabe to be ripped apart at the seams, which is why it’s been interesting to see increasing diplomatic initiatives by countries like China at the bilateral level in Europe rather than multilaterally with the bloc as a whole.

Really fascinating, thanks for the writeup. I’ve read a book, “Deng Xiaoping’s Long War” by Xiaoming Zhang, on the Sino-Vietnamese War a while back, written by this Chinese-American professor at the US Air Force College, incidentally first book I ever read that had a “This book does not necessarily represent the views of the DoD or the Air Force” disclaimer on it.

He claimed that “A secret deal may have been made regarding how to address the unpleasant thirteen years so that the interlude would not imperil future Sino-Vietnamese relations. The two sides allegedly reached a tacit agreement that prohibited the media from publishing stories and scholars from conducting studies about the border conflict in hopes that the recent hostility would then fade from memory on both sides of the border. Both countries could then concentrate on rejuvenating their relationship.”

If that allegation was true, it would be a very illuminating insight on the private nature of the inter-party relationship that, after wartime animosities, they could mutually cooperate towards such a pragmatic and far-sighted goal - especially given the narrative of the public animosities between the countries, to near war levels according to the Western media coverage.

My first question then would be if there’s a sense whether the jingoism and animosity, which the Western media constantly trumpets, from the domestic perspective in Vietnam emanates more so from the private media, general population, liberal elements of the government rather than directly from the CPV itself?

My second question is whether the geographic political trends of pre-unificiation Vietnam still persist today. From what I’ve read, one consequence of the general amnesty given by the DRV as it liberated the South and became the unified SRV is the persistence of the South’s bourgeois class dynamics and liberal consciousness in a way that the north had more successfully eliminated. Then the enactment of Doi Moi not long after unification further allowed the persistence of those strains. So would you say the stereotype holds up that the south is generally more liberal, West-worshipping and bourgeois-concentrated than the north these days?

While it’s interesting that the Russian leadership would make an explicit statement like this when they have the opportunity to leverage a degree of strategic ambiguity to prey upon the hopes of the Trump admin’s Kissinger-wannabes trying to explicitly manifest such a thing - in my cynical interpretation, this signals a certain anxiety within the Sino-Russian relationship that such a thing might actually be possible, which Lavrov is thereby compelled to go out and publicly reassure - the issue is Russia’s historical track record.

Under Gorbachev, it threw all of socialist Europe under the bus. I’ve been reading Honecker’s prison memoirs lately and he personally attested how the DDR government was not even given a place at the table in the negotiations for German “reunification.” Gorbachev went over a Soviet ally of half a century because he was so desperate for the likes of Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl to shake his hand and chose to negotiate with them directly in the same way, ironically, that the Trump admin is sidelining the Ukrainian regime in recent weeks. A statement like this could very well have the same lack of worth as Brezhnev’s saying that the “USSR would never betray its Warsaw Pact allies.” It’s a frankly trite truism, but also one that already rang true for Russia in the past, which is that no one can predict the personality of future leadership.

The real impediment in the attempts to foment a Sino-Russian split 2.0 is the American desire to have its cake and eat it too by refusing to give the Russians any long-term geopolitical concessions. What the current Russian government led by Putin has always wanted is a “G2” with the US over Europe. This naturally goes against the American objectives in Europe, dating back to the Cold War NATO founding principles of “keeping the Russians out.” A “G2” relationship requires concessions and strategic sacrifices that the US is fundamentally and psychologically unwilling to make. This is what scuppered the Obama era “G2” proposals with China, which basically ordered China to remain in place as a permanent toy and clothing factory while denying the Chinese even the concession of reclaiming Taiwan.

The pathway to “split” the Sino-Russian relationship is actually there, in my view, so long as the following conditions are achieved:

1. Allowing Putin the room to attempt to reclaim a sphere of influence over Eastern Europe in the same way Churchill in his memoirs alleged he brokered with Stalin the post-war European orientation on napkin paper.

2. Forcibly ordering the economic binding of NATO Europe to Russia and solidifying this dependency to wean Russia off the material conditions of its partnership with China, which is primarily the immensely expanded economic ties.

3. Forcing through bi-partisan domestic American allegiance to this “G2” alignment by enshrining it as treaty or legislation, so that it can’t be repudiated by a later presidency, as this would be the only way to ensure Russian trust to any such arrangement.

I’d say this latter point is actually easier done than might be believed: the anti-China agenda is the leading bipartisan consensus in Washington and a coordinated narrative campaign framing such a move as “owning China” and blasting any political opposition as “surrendering to China” would overcome even the Democrats’ Russophobia through their even more fanatical Sinophobia.

The outcome, however, would not be a Russo-American grand Christian white alliance against “the East,” that Nicholas II dream of the Republicans, but a geopolitical paradigm where Russia is incentivized to openly hedge against China and the US as a much more “neutral” party.

The issue for the US is that it is fundamentally unwilling to pay the high price for such an arrangement. Going from having defeated the USSR, shattering it into partitioned pieces and successfully making those pieces fight against each other for US interests to being forced to share Europe with the territorially diminished Russian successor state is too much dramatic a psychological transition for Washington’s foreign policy blob to contemplate. This Western chauvinism of being unable to accept a relationship of true equality with a non-Western state, with all the implications and sacrifices that entails, is the colossal impediment to the “Reverse Kissinger” aspiration of “getting Russia to betray China.”

Very nice. I was just listening to Adnan Husain’s new independent podcast where he was discussing the anti-imperialist bloc’s frustrating military projection asymmetry with the West, where China still holds the view that it lacks the capacity to confront the West by sending a ship to park off the coast of Gaza and whether this belief of “asymmetry” actually still holds true and that ship would just get sabotaged ala USS Liberty or if it might actually have done some part in deterring the West from the genocide. A move like this is a positive sign that phase is ending.

Also, occupied Australia and occupied Aotearoa will both have their inevitable day. The delusional idea of those Baltic-mentality settler colonies squatting in Asia and acting like they have the capability to impose a Monroe doctrine against Asia will eventually lead to the liberation of Oceania in one way or another.

I think the current administration is an example of being wannabe realists trying to emulate the line of Kennan, Kissinger, and Brzezinski just like Mearsheimer who spent the entire three years since the Ukraine War impotently shouting “we should be focusing on China” to the Biden government. I’ve seen some articles highlighting Rubio’s recent public statements and how that gusano, who made being anti-China his entire political career after his humiliation of being bullied by Trump calling him a “robot” off the Republican Presidential convention in 2016, is now quite firmly in the “clear-eyed realism” camp of the US “China threat” lobby.

The weird American nationalist conservative David Goldman wrote a piece framing Rubio as a “China realist” and covering some of Rubio’s recent Congressional report writings:

If this report conveys any message, let it be that the United States cannot be complacent about Communist China. Think-tank scholars and economists may bank on China’s coming collapse. Beijing is taking the other side of that wager.

[…] And Communist China will still be a more formidable adversary than any the United States has faced in living memory. At this point, the burden of proof should be on the critics who insist the CCP’s project is doomed to fail.”

https://archive.ph/hezZ0

B of MoonOfAlabama also recently gushed over Rubio’s “pragmatism” in the past couple weeks when he spoke about how the unipolar moment was over in a recent speech. He highlighted some of Rubio’s comments:

I think the mission of American foreign policy – and this may sound sort of obvious, but I think it’s been lost. The interest of American foreign policy is to further the national interest of the United States of America, right? […] [A]nd that’s the way the world has always worked. The way the world has always worked is that the Chinese will do what’s in the best interests of China, the Russians will do what’s in the best interest of Russia, the Chileans are going to do what’s in the best interest of Chile, and the United States needs to do what’s in the best interest of the United States. Where our interests align, that’s where you have partnerships and alliances; where our differences are not aligned, that is where the job of diplomacy is to prevent conflict while still furthering our national interests and understanding they’re going to further theirs. And that’s been lost.

[N]ow you can have a framework by which you analyze not just diplomacy but foreign aid and who we would line up with and the return of pragmatism. And that’s not an abandonment of our principles. I’m not a fan or a giddy supporter of some horrifying human rights violator somewhere in the world. By the same token, diplomacy has always required us and foreign policy has always required us to work in the national interest, sometimes in cooperation with people who we wouldn’t invite over for dinner or people who we wouldn’t necessarily ever want to be led by. And so that’s a balance, but it’s the sort of pragmatic and mature balance we have to have in foreign policy.

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/02/rubio-its-not-normal-for-the-world-to-have-a-unipolar-power.html

I think through this tone alone, it’s clear that Rubio is gunning to be a Kissinger/Brzezinski clone. Goldman talked about how “a credible anti-Communist like Nixon could make a deal with China without accusations of selling out, and Secretary of State Rubio could repeat the exercise, according to this line of thinking.”

Ever since 1989, America’s China policy had been hijacked by the “human rights” warriors so it is true that it has been a while since America donned up the Kissinger pragmatic realpolitik mask for its relationship with China. I personally think there would be nothing that China could gain from another hypothetical “grand bargain” with America as the fundamental contradiction of American hegemony over the world is not something that can be kicked down the road under the guise of “peaceful co-existence,” as the errors of the post-WWII Soviet leadership with their constant searching for “detente” under Khrushchev ultimately amounting to nothing but some actor freak like Reagan calling them a “evil empire.” Some parts of the Chinese government was able to recognize this back in the 2010s when China rejected Obama’s proposal for a “G2.” As the Russian term “agreement-incapable” hints at, I don’t believe even a pragmatic veneered American China policy will be able to tolerate giving any real concessions to China.

As such, I think it’s much more likely that a more geopolitically pragmatic American foreign policy will simply be a MAGA Republican flavor of the China containment objective, primarily through attempting to pull Russia away from China (as Trump had talked about many times explicitly on the campaign trail and his special advisor to Russia Kellogg recently publicly fantasized about). The pragmatism realpolitik angle will be that anything is a possible candidate to be thrown under the bus for the goal of convincing Russia to distance itself from China, as what is happening right now with the EU vassals and the Ukraine fascists. Whether the modern Sino-Russian relationship, built on economic ties this time around rather than the ideological solidarity of the Sino-Soviet era, can withstand these American overtures under Trump will be the open question of the day.

Personally, I think that rationally speaking, China has done decent material work over the past three years since the Ukraine war in making itself economically indispensable to Russia, but given that past Russian leadership dissolved the USSR because they saw the inside of a Walmart and wanted to get pats on the back from the likes of Reagan, Bush and Thatcher, I frankly put nothing past the Westanbetung Russian ruling class.

The core issue for Trump and Rubio and their ilk in the current administration is that just because you know the recipe, as they claim to do, doesn’t necessarily mean you actually have the ability to bake the cake in the end. I think that will be the defining trait of their foreign policy.

There’s definitely an internal contradiction within America’s elite classes that has ballooned with the monumental capital accumulation from, especially, the past decade through the seismic technological gains. The paradigm of America’s upper class composition was indeed one of finance for most of modern American history, but I do suspect that the rise of Silicon Valley has suddenly created a new power base that has the capacity to come into friction with the traditional institutional elite.

The fact that many of these tech oligarchs like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg eclipse the traditional financial elite in wealth means that they have no interest in falling in line at the bottom of the pecking order as “New Money.” The recent TrueAnon episode about them really highlights the sense of “persecution” these narcissistic freaks obtained during the Biden government.

To be frank, they do have a compelling case to sell in that the state apparatus firmly believes technology is the primary means to secure American hegemony and sees their much fantasized ultimate showdown with China as one defined primarily by technological capabilities. So this is a contradiction in which they believe in their own self-importance as the lead actors of modern America and much of the state apparatus also believes the same thing. If that is true, all those avenues you highlighted of the further “technologification” of American society would be inherently to their interest and would cyclically entrench their explosive influence in modern America.

Fantastic read, thank you for that link.

Given that Thiel supposedly injects himself with Gen Z blood, coming from that crowd, it was probably meant as a compliment.

I don’t see the difference and splitting the hair seems irrelevant. The US military isn’t just an imperialist fascist force, it’s also a jobs program for millions of Americans. It’s dialectical to acknowledge all relevant facets and the existence of those orgs as a institutional golden parachute is one of them. I don’t care if someone weighs it as “just that” or “primary” or “secondary” or “whatever” it’s simply a crucial element that should be highlighted.

Yes, the Reddit Democrat “analysis” or the Hasanabi interpretation of this as just “evil dumb racists” doing “evil dumb racist” things isn’t necessarily wrong. There’s no value in framing this under that sole paradigm, however.

The liberal explanation is that Trump is a big dumb dumb and doesn’t understand the role of those orgs in US hegemony.

The fact that relatively few institutional voices from the US state apparatus are stepping out to denounce this move, collectively running out waving their arms for the bull to stop running around the china shop, if it was really done out of sheer ignorance, shows that there is likely more of an internal power struggle at play rather than some “comrade Trump” working against US empire.

There’s still no real indication whether Trump will actually follow through on any of this. Regardless, however, one thing that should be noted is the reality is that those orgs are essentially the sinecure of the US institutional elite, where their spawnlings that are too incompetent even for some Wall Street board seat or STEM lord Silicon Valley company management are fobbed off to. Those like Anderson Cooper and the like. If you get a liberal arts major in the wasteland of the American job market nowadays, you’re likely in for a struggle as a normal individual. If you get a liberal arts major as a failson/faildaughter of some US institutional elite, you get a job at USAID/NED and the Radio Free Whatevers. These “non-partisan” NGO careerist positions were their golden parachute and they had all largely swung in the Democratic camp over the years as they had alienated Republicans with objectives like rainbow imperialism.

There was this big news story a while back about the “Chaguan” column for the Economist (a cushy one-man job journalist position in Beijing that also funded travelling around China writing anti-China propaganda hitpieces by doing cherry-picked interviews) being shut down. Amidst all the Economist’s whining about the “hostile journalism environment,” it inadvertantly revealed that this “journalist” was the son of a MI6 director, John Rennie.. These are the kind of places that the failsons of Western institutional elite drift into and Trump’s actions against them is essentially a form of blackmail to cow them and attempt to make them fall in line. The important thing to note is that new institutions more closely aligned with the MAGA Republican flavor of US imperialism will inevitably be created, whether wholesale or more closely under the government’s leash within the State Department, and the intent of these purges is enforce a reset so that anyone who wants to regain their old spots would need to pay fealty to the new order of the day.

To add onto this, though this is clearly just the early stages, I think what we’re seeing with the consolidation of the Silicon Valley elites and Big Tech giants under the Trump faction is, in many ways, a coup by America’s “New Money” Tech oligarchs against the traditional 20th century financial/industrial institutional elite that the MAGA Republicans had moved away from and therefore had visibly coalesced under the Democrats. I was listening to TrueAnon’s take on the Republican “shift” of Big Tech and they highlighted the persecution complex that Silicon Valley had under Biden, where people like Zuckerberg were dragged into Congress and made to endure a televised grilling. This was something that would have never happened to the likes of Dimon, Soros or Buffett.

Given that explosive stock market capitalization had made these Tech oligarchs far wealthier than the “Old Money” ever had been, it must have been humiliating for narcissistic freaks like Zuckerberg who have megalomaniacal messiah complexes from usually being just in their Silicon Valley yes-men echochambers to experience being treated this way when they’re also the new overwhelming power in America’s elite. These deeply resentful individuals then saw in Trump’s admin a way to finally have the Big Tech power base institutionally reconstituted at the top of the hierarchy, above the “Old Money.”

Rather than LARPing as a character in some British drama about “New Money” losers spending the entire series trying to ingratiate their way into the “Old Money” elite nobility, they’re deciding to simply flip the table and pull down the entire superstructure to rebuild from the rubble something that can acknowledge the powerbrokers. The destruction of all these old levers of American institutional power and the government careerists that have decades of networks with the “Old Money” elite (including in places like USAID, RFE and VOA - though it shows a bottom line of US imperial consensus still exists as RFA is untouched and unmentioned in all this) is to pauperize the latter’s connections within the US state and to reset the playing field in a way favorable to the recognition of the overwhelming wealth of the new Big Tech oligarchy. The intent is to demonstrate an overwhelming show of force that demonstrates their political power through what Trump is able to do with their sponsorship, rendering it impossible for the Big Tech elites to be alienated and treated the way those like Zuckerberg were under Biden.

You know it’s been a rough week for the liberal empire when @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml posts an Economist article.