It really depends on whether “TikTok” refers to TikTok Global, which is the entire worldwide platform beyond China, or some potential TikTok US entity geo-locked for Americans akin to Douyin.

If it’s the former, then China lost big time - no other way to put it. If it’s the latter, then it’s the next best case scenario other than taking the ball home entirely and eating the US ban threat. There would then be three TikToks: TikTok Global, TikTok US and Douyin.

To put it simply, China loses in every scenario because it’s important to remember that the US made up this TikTok threat out of nowhere. There’s no way something like this would have been tolerated in a UNO reverse card scenario and, in fact, it wasn’t with US social media forays in China. Facebook and Google chose to leave the Chinese market entirely rather than address basic Chinese concerns like “stop algorithmically boosting color revolution slop against us to your top results,” let alone concede to demands to access their core backend infrastructure. But this is the nature of being in a world subjected to US hegemony and the cost of doing business in a global system where the US market is held up as indispensable. Just like the tariffs, it’s a matter of fighting to concede and lose the least.

TikTok could just take the example of its US counterparts and simply leave the US market. There would likely be a bandwagon effect where the app is blocked from much of the West, but would largely remain for the Global South. For an ephemeral moment, this would be an undeniable moral victory in demonstrating Western censorship and hypocrisy - until the NYT inevitably cooks up a damage-control narrative about TikTok requiring daily Aztec-style human sacrifices of [insert the West’s repressed Chinese minority of the week] to run and this allows global libs the excuse to own and celebrate the censorship, “morality” really seems to be that simple nowadays. Though it’s possible that TikTok de-burgerfied would become some unique Global South social media haven, I think it’s more likely that the loss of the US user base would cause a slow overall decline in TikTok because (as we saw with us Euro sheep flocking to XHS in January simply because the Americans went there) some sections of the worldwide user base would flock to alternate apps to remain with their dominant US-based influencers, causing decreased engagement on the platform, causing more of a user drain in a cyclical feedback loop.

For whatever reason, China has decided against that. It’s interesting that the government has explicitly stepped in to negotiate for TikTok since it’s been speculated that Xi had skipped the Brazil summit this year when Lula’s wife broke diplomatic protocol by requesting that he intervene against TikTok’s lack of moderation, basically insinuating that the Chinese government had control over a private company, which (may be true, but also) would have been great ammunition for the West.

In a sense, I’d say the Chinese government intervened because it came to see TikTok as a test case for how Chinese companies can be begrudgingly accepted with gritted teeth by the West in the geopolitical climate of the New Cold War. With the contemporary hostility, there’s been only two choices for such companies: complete surrender to the US or accept a total ban from Western markets. If China handles this well, it could set a working precedent for a third path, allowing the US to take its victory lap and claim a face-saving win, while still relying on a system built by China. On the surface, the company might get an American flag sticker slapped on it, under “licensing,” but the actual substance remains firmly in Chinese ownership. This modus vivendi is just how the game has to be played until the moment comes when such hegemonic expressions of asymmetry no longer can hold such sway.

The dynamics of unorganized mass protests is that the movement will bend, in its internal contradictions, to the direction of the most well organized, motivationally driven and materially supported element.

Take the classic Tiananmen color revolution. It was originally an outcry against the runaway inflation of the 1988-9 period caused by the package reformers winning out against the gradualists. This led to an introduction of shock therapy by primarily Deng Xiaoping’s (I would indeed argue that his role played a major part) and Zhao Ziyang’s urgings, which led to historically high prices unseen in the history of the People’s Republic. Price stability was then re-introduced in late 1988 to prevent economic catastrophe but this led to backlash both from parts of the population that were outraged at this poorly conceived obsession with a “big bang” reform having taking place at all in the first place and the incipient liberal comprador-aspirants who thought the price stability initiative meant the end of the liberalizing reforms and their profit-seeking opportunities.

Both elements were present in the initial protests. The former (the Western journalistic and academic trick at the time was to dub every socialist and leftist element in socialist state politics as “conservative” to deliberately obfuscate their identity) were the socialist contingents, including Maoists and Ultraleft elements, who wanted a return to the Mao era rather than some capitalist restoration. Obviously, the color revolution elements, backed up by the West’s unfettered media penetration in China (which is how they captured those pictures they wave around nowadays), won out. They constructed that tacky Statue of Liberty clone “to Democracy” in Tiananmen Square, which appropriated and hijacked the imagery and messaging of the protests once the Western media started proliferating pictures of it, and the entire movement became a full blown color revolution aiming at capitalist restoration, even though large contingents of the participants wanted nothing of the sort.

This is how it works. Victor Bevins (a soc-dem), wrote a book called “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” that essentially dissects the systematic co-option of every single unorganized mass protest movement in the 2010s. The most infamous being the Hong Kong color revolution attempt, where public frustration over the affordability housing and the dynamics of the frozen economic and political system of Hong Kong due to China’s concession to Britain with the 50 year “1C2S” policy preventing any substantive mainland intervention or introduction of socialist governance to Hong Kong, which boiled over through an extradition case of a murderer. This was then easily was hijacked by the Trump I admin and the Western NGOs operating in Hong Kong, and co-opted as a “democracy” and “independence” protest.

As for Nepal, I incidentally made a comment three months ago back in May:

… the Trump administration specifically has had a long-running fixation on flipping Nepal into a Himalayan Baltic/Ukraine against China (and India as well, for that matter) since his first term. They got Nepal to sign onto the USAID “Millennium Challenge Compact” (the same name borrowed from the wargame against Iran) during Trump 1 and it was ratified by Nepal’s then-Communist Party coalition led parliament (Maoist-Centre and United-Socialist) in 2022. I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect of that $550 million agreement is primed to begin making waves in Nepal now, especially now with Trump 2 and the libs now leading the government.

It’s not to say that things will necessarily progress in that direction, but that the external interests have been clearly demonstrated and many of the requisite pieces have likely been set in place.

Given that Nepal is in the Western news, as can be expected, the kind of media coverage and narratives they’ll proliferate will be likely near entirely socialist-agnostic, with all the leftist elements of the given country’s historical background stripped out. So here’s a primer I wrote with some readings on the background of the Communist Parties in Nepal:

The entryist nature of the major Communist Parties in Nepal aside, the rarity of new leftist successes beyond AES following the end of the Cold War means that the condition of Nepal shouldn’t be entirely dismissed out of hand outright, despite their lack of significant achievements following the dissolution of the armed struggle.

The country was an absolute monarchy for most of the Cold War. It slowly transitioned into a constitutional monarchy, a deal where the royals could be expected to retreat to their palace and parasitize off the public budget just like their welfare leech counterparts in Europe. Then, in 2001, their crown prince did a Romanov by going on a shooting massacre against his own family and parents in their palace, gunning down his parents, the reigning king and queen. He then shot himself and his uncle became the new king. This uncle then quickly demonstrated an autocratic obsession with reconsolidating the monarchy’s institutional power but this attempt to assert monarchical authority stumbled against the shattered prestige of the Nepalese royalty from the self-inflicted extermination of the royal household. This ultimately led to the complete abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic in 2008.

Meanwhile, as this was happening, there was a Maoist People’s War conducted through the leadership of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist, after the government’s violent suppression of attempted land reform in the 1990s. This period of armed struggle lasted twenty years from 1996 to 2006. In 2006, the CPN-M conceded to liberal reformers by agreeing to a bourgeois liberal republic and a constituent assembly, when the Maoists had the upper hand through its control of most of the countryside. This broke the party’s unity and some of its founding members left afterwards, who saw the party as having betrayed its goal of New Democracy. The armed wing of the Party, the People’s Liberation Army of Nepal was also disbanded and eventually integrated with the national army of the new bourgeois republic.

This is the major contradiction between the two major Communist Parties: CPN-UML (Unified Marxist-Leninist) and CPN-MC (Maoist Center). There’s also a rather plentiful amount of breakaway and splinter Communist Parties, who saw the 2006-8 establishment of the bourgeois republic as a betrayal of the armed struggle and comprador parliamentarianism.

You could say that the electoralist Communist Parties are merely working within the contradictions of the times. The establishment of a true New Democracy and an official Marxist-Leninist state during the 2000s right as the United States had its full attention on the region during its “War on Terror” nearby in Afghanistan would have been unwise. Nevertheless, despite the suppression of land reform in the 1990s having been the catalyst for the Nepalese People’s War, there is still no comprehensive land reform in Nepal to this day. This has been directly attributed to the concessions of the CPN-Maoists. Here is a criticism of the current “Land Bank” system, which is more akin to the liberal land reform of post-WW2 granted to Japan and Taiwan by the US’ permission as a concession to co-opt and destroy socialist sentiment (only the redistribution of land) than those of a socialist land reform (which entails a comprehensive breakdown of land relations, destruction of the landlord class and their intergenerational communal ties and power base).

Nevertheless, the difference between the Nepalese electoral entryism and that of the West’s leftists is their strong territorial control of the countryside and their military power prior to their swerve towards entryist politics which prevented the liberals in the bourgeois republic from suppressing them like what was done to the CPI in Italy and the KKE in Greece or from outright ignoring and sidelining them like what was recently done to the so-called French left coalition NPF by Macron. As such, the only way to suppress the various leftists by the liberals is through the parliamentary system itself. This original leading position in the parliamentary system has now indeed been slowly eroded with the liberal “soc-dem” Nepali Congress party ending with the most seats in the 2022 election.

As for geopolitics, Nepal is essentially the Mongolia of the Himalayas, a country between two larger ones, but with even worse geographical positioning. The majority of the country is near entirely on the southern side of the Himalayas, which means that it is almost completely dependent on India as a route to the sea and as a conduit for trade. It has been subjected to regular Indian interference, especially in its southern territories which are on the Gangetic plain and whose Madhesi ethnic minority population are said to be aligned more in interests with India than Kathmandu generally. India itself views Nepal as essentially a second Bhutan though slightly more “unruly,” the latter being essentially an Indian client monarchy whose foreign affairs are completely dictated by New Delhi. The Indian-manufactured annexation of the independent state of Sikkim right next door in 1973 has Nepal’s principal foreign policy objective being to avoid that exact same outcome.

In 2015, the newly elected BJP Modi government of India blockaded Nepal following a constitutional reform that, according to it, disfavored the aforementioned Madhesi ethnic minority. India was outraged because its appropriation of ethnic minority constituencies was how it had been able to historically annex Sikkim and this reform weakened its ability to potentially repeat it in Nepal if it ever wanted to utilize that option. India then froze fuel and goods imports into Nepal, demanding that the constitution include clauses of self-determination and an autonomous territory for the Madhesi. This had the potential of a humanitarian disaster in the making as Nepal had just suffered an earthquake earlier in the year and it relied on fuel imports through India for heating in the winter months. It was at this point that Modi’s India outplayed its hand and Nepal reached out to China. Nepal agreed to the construction of a railway linking Kathmandu to China’s national rail system with China’s rail gauge standard as a result of this blackmail. Nevertheless, a near decade long bureaucratic stalling has delayed the railway negotiations and construction which still continues to the present day. It was only in July of 2024 that an agreement was finally signed. As such, over 64% of Nepalese imports come from India and only 13% from China as of 2022, meaning that Nepal is still deeply dependent on India.

It also recently signed, during the Trump I period, the US State Department/USAID program, the Millennium Challenge Compact (also the name of that Bush-era wargame against Iran), controversially allowing for US infiltration of Nepal against China in the New Cold War. It was ratified by Nepal’s then-Communist Party coalition led parliament (Maoist-Centre and United-Socialist) in 2022. Here’s a piece that the Tricontinental wrote on this: https://thetricontinental.org/asia/ticaa-issue-1-the-millennium-challenge-corporation/

This external dynamic has had a sizeable dampening influence on the internal willingness of Nepal’s Communist Parties to pursue more significant socialist reforms such as the comprehensive land reform that the People’s War had been fought for in the 1990s to early 2000s.

Though I get the chauvinistic name of that city is rather obnoxious, it would represent a failure of imagination if China merely wanted to map-paint and retake Vladivostok. Taking advantage of a Russian moment of weakness to reclaim Outer Manchuria, even if nuclear weapons are taken out from consideration, would validate all the Russian anxieties about China hiding under the surface and unless Russia disintegrates or is pushed past the Urals back into Europe, the Russian polity would still be a permanent neighbor of China’s and this would engender hostilities and resentment that would last for a long time.

The primary reason why, in spite of this “natural friction” that Trump, Western think tanks and the contemporary wannabe Kissingerites like Mearsheimer have shouted to the skies about since 2022, Russia and China are not presently enemies is precisely because they were once historical enemies.

The Sino-Soviet border (including Mongolia which based Soviet troops) was the longest border in the world (longer than the modern Canada-US + Alaska border) and it was also completely militarized during the Sino-Soviet Split. For the Soviets, they had spent the entire early 20th century re-establishing a massive “buffer” between itself and its adversaries through the Warsaw Pact countries and the Central Asian SSRs, which was especially important in the ballistic age (as can be seen today, where the possibility of NATO missiles in Ukraine is one of the leading factors of the Russian escalation in 2022). Suddenly, with the Sino-Soviet Split, the Kremlin found the entire underbelly of the USSR directly adjacent to a new adversary with only Mongolia as a buffer (the geographic significance of this paradigm shift can been seen through the CIA establishing several posts in Xinjiang, irony of ironies).

Inordinate amounts of resources and manpower had to be redirected by both sides to this border. All the Chinese leadership from Mao and Zhou Enlai to Deng Xiaoping seemed to genuinely believe that the USSR was an existential threat that surpassed even the Chiang regime on Taiwan or the United States. The Sino-Vietnamese War was directly consequent of the Sino-Soviet Split and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which allowed the United States to trap the USSR in “its own Vietnam” quagmire and which was a contributing factor to the Soviet collapse, was largely due to Soviet pressure to respond to China’s demonstration of Soviet impotence in assisting its allies during its border conflict with Vietnam. In effect, the strategic agendas of both states ended up being completely hijacked by the military and security consequences of being right next to such a large adversarial state.

There’s a book on the Sino-Vietnamese War concludes that ‘If the Vietnamese should draw any lessons from the 1979 war with China, one is, as one Vietnamese general later remarked, “We must learn how to live with our big neighbor."’ One could say that the geo-strategic lesson that ought to be drawn from the Sino-Soviet Split is that both sides must similarly “learn how to live with their big neighbor.” This is the real pragmatic underlying reason why the “natural enemies” aren’t letting their “natural frictions” lead them by the nose, even more than any contemporary (and potentially ephemeral) geopolitical/anti-imperialist alignment or material economic relations.

Through this, the situation is actually quite similar to that of post-WW2 Europe in that it was mutual self-interest after the experience of war (in typical European obstinancy, we had to learn that lesson twice) and learning the cost of enmity rather than any “enlightened inclusivity” that led to the multilateral initiatives which culminated in the European Union. This is now verging on serious bloomer territory, but I would say that imagining the prospects for a similar eventual Sino-Russian “Eurasian Union” in a century’s or two’s time, just maintaining the current bilateral relationship tempo, are actually more plausible than imagining the creation of the EU was in the 1800s.

China doesn’t need Vladivostok nor Outer Manchuria at the moment but the pace of climate change means that, in a century or two, large parts of China will potentially reach wet-bulb climate and China’s topography means that the entire Central China Plains is nearly at sea level and therefore will likely be one of the most endangered regions in the world for sea level rise. Even if China somehow managed to seize the entirety of Outer Manchuria, that would possibly not be sufficient.

However, large swathes of Siberia, in that trajectory, would likely become agriculturally viable and more climatically hospitable. Migration of large parts of China’s population into Siberia then would not only be sensible from a strategic sense but also likely a humanitarian necessity. I’d say it would therefore be more in China’s interests to think big and develop the course of Sino-Russian relations so that, in the far future, the implementation of a Eurasian “Schengen” for the whole of Siberia, rather than just Vladivostok, would be socio-politically feasible right at the time that Siberia actually becomes a region of serious importance through climate change.

Also, it would be a rather poetic way to restore socialism to Russia, though I’d be getting ahead of myself.

“[Russia and China] are basically natural enemies […] China needs Russia land (sic) […] but because of pure stupidity they were driven together,” laments Trump in an interview about the “natural friction” that even a “minor student of history” would have recognized and exploited.

Given that this was on Trump’s mind following the summit, I’d be pretty sure all that talk during the conference about “Arctic cooperation” was likely about US propositions of shutting out non-Arctic Sea states like China (and potentially others) from the region, since China potentially developing the Arctic corridor through the Siberian coast would completely bypass the whole Canada-Greenland-Panama annexations scheme to control global shipping lanes from the “roaming Chinese and Russian ships” that Trump had been publicly obsessed over back in January.

Strictly speaking, all these things already came to pass and this merely formalizes what was already the de facto situation on the ground. IIRC, some air assets transited through Armenian airspace into Azerbaijan during the attack on Iran in June.

As for the BRI, China was already presented with the fait accompli of having the West Asian BRI route locked out when Syria fell in December. The aim had been to establish a corridor from Iran to Iraq to Syria to the Mediterranean, bypassing NATO Turkey and its karma houdini Sultan-wannabe leadership. This has been squashed and now the only option is the Azerbaijan/Turkey route; the so-called “Middle Corridor” that all the Western geopolitics commentators have been drooling over (media like Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Diplomat, etc. all have been openly talking about this).

As already seen with Azerbaijan, Turkey gets to parasitize the BRI by co-opting the trade infrastructure China builds to extend its influence (and Turanist fantasies) towards its “Turkic brethren” across the Caspian, which it incidentally had never been able to penetrate historically even under the Ottomans, due to Tsarist Russian and British counter-influence, so this is genuinely quite the coup for Erdogan. The West gets to tag along and so the real goal here for all co-conspirators is Central Asia, which the West had been locked out of since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Having been shut out, the West and Turkey are priming to re-enter through the very road that China will be “trapped” into building for them via the “Middle Corridor.”

All this had been previously irrelevant because China plainly had been more interested in rebuilding war-torn Iraq and Syria as its West Asian BRI route rather than going through a direction that Western think tanks were publicly gloating about, but now the choice has been taken out of their hands because that direction has now been intentionally set up to be the only “viable” option. Some responses I encountered back in December were to scoff at the notion that the West’s (and Turkey’s) flipping of “insignificant Assadist Syria” could in any way detrimentally affect the “great anti-imperialist keikaku” but I think it’s becoming evident that the fall of Syria really is an immensely consequential paradigm shift in the region.

Marx actually also mentioned the Economist.

The reason why they probably don’t similarly post a cutesy little Twitter post about him “@ing them” is because he was denouncing their stance in lobbying for the Second Opium War, naval bombarding the city of Canton (modern Guangzhou) and supporting the Confederacy, so it would expose their “geopolitics understander” rag as having always been consistently on the wrong side of history.

The immediate flareup seems to have been exacerbated by Hun Sen, who is one of those corrupt dynasty building decades-long leaders that pop up in post-socialist countries. Hun Sen was a Khmer Rouge cadre who fled to Vietnam and returned to Cambodia with the Vietnamese invasion in 1979 and became Prime Minister of the SRV-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea and remaining in that position as Cambodia went through its capitalist restoration until 2023 when he passed the office to his West Point-educated son, Hun Manet.

A few months ago, there was a Thai soldier that was injured by a landmine while patrolling the border area which Thailand alleged was freshly planted by Cambodia. Paetongtarn Shinawatra, who was Thailand’s PM’s at the time, then called Hun Sen who was a family friend of her father, a former Thai PM himself. She downplayed the incident as the Thai Army trying to provoke trouble and tried to lean on her family history with Hun Sen during the call by calling him “uncle.” This call blew up in her face because it turns out Hun Sen had recorded the entire conversation and shared it with others in his staff, when it was leaked.

Paetongtarn caught flack from the Thai Army, the Thai population who were outraged at her conflict of interest relationship with Cambodia and she was subsequently suspended from office and her father, the ex-PM Thaksin is under criminal investigation for “lese majeste.” Now with the peacemaker out of the way, the Thai Army is making a show of force against Cambodia for the sake of its reputation as ASEAN’s second most “Westernized” military (after Singapore), which could escalate until both sides find a way to de-escalate with grace.

As for geopolitics, both are economic partners of China and are pivotal for China’s plan to diversify its trade away from the West into ASEAN through the international rail networks being constructed within both Cambodia and Thailand until they ultimately reach continental Malaysia and Singapore. Both countries have been subject to a fair amount of recent hem and haw from the Western national security think tank blobs. Thailand’s institutional apparatus rejected one of those cookie-cutter NED mass produced Harvard-educated Western sycophants as PM because he campaigned to curb the power of the Munich-dwelling Thai monarch.

Cambodia has been building a naval port at Ream that is allegedly open to hosting by the PLAN, which has all those Western think tanks foaming in the mouth. Additionally, China is funding a canal called Funan Techno diverting the Mekong that would allow Cambodia to bypass Vietnam’s Mekong Delta tolls and, for the West, it means that Yunnan Province in China would be theoretically connected to the SCS via the Mekong through a series of friendly countries in Laos and Cambodia. An ominous possibility (if you ignore the implausibly sheer elevation gradient from Yunnan down to the Mekong Delta).

Clearly there’s more going on than just this. Hun Sen might perhaps be shoring up domestic credibility for his Pentagon-raised nepo-baby heir by inciting a military skirmish because sabotaging a Thai PM who seemed on the surface level to have been amenable to him through their family connections is an eyebrow raising choice to make. Though the force disparity between the Thai and Cambodian militaries is worth highlighting, other than the typical escalation response ladder tit-for-tat spiral, there shouldn’t be any real incentive on either side for a full conflict.

I think many anti-imperialist leftists are increasingly coming to that conclusion. I recently finished reading Kyle Ferrana’s “Why the World Needs China,” and I can honestly say now that it’s one of the most insightful leftist books published since Domenico Losurdo and Samir Amin. Before Ferrana goes on to answer nearly every major leftist question about China, its contradictions and the atrocity propaganda against it, the book first goes through an impressively cogent assessment on the material conditions of the contemporary world and where things stand. Ferrana’s analysis concluded with the view that the “peace at all costs” principle of leftists and socialist states continuing up to today has been, in many ways, a consequential miscalculation. An excerpt:

Chapters One through Five showed that the United States is the strongest center of capitalist power in the world; Chapters Six through Ten showed that the PRC is the strongest center of proletarian power in the world. Though the super-empire’s mechanisms of exploitation and control have developed since the inter-imperialist rivalry era, financial capital still dominates the West, and its fundamental tendency that Lenin identified a century ago—to ever expand and ever increase its profits—is likewise unchanged. There is indeed a Thucydides Trap—not one determined merely by the military and economic power of states, but also by their class character. In order to grow, the Western bourgeoisie must eventually subdue China. If it cannot do so by subversion, sabotage, and trade manipulation, it will try to do so by force. The super-empire’s reaction can be delayed, if it can profit first by subjugating other victims (such as the Russian Federation and its other national-bourgeois enemies), but the world is finite, and as far as we know, the rate of extraction cannot increase much further; the most efficient paradigm of dispossessive accumulation yet discovered—neocolonialism—is already prevalent nearly everywhere.

A conflict therefore is inevitably coming, a death-struggle between the American financial capitalist and the Chinese peasant/worker that will span the entire planet. If the PRC declines to defend itself, it will be destroyed; but if the financial oligarchy cannot destroy the PRC, it will lose its own control over class society. Were the PRC an empire, the new Cold War would not fundamentally threaten capitalist rule; victory would simply mean one gang of capitalists replacing another, just as new, ascendant empires have absorbed old, decaying ones throughout history. But the Chinese capitalists do not control finance in their own country, the workers do, and they are not required by their class interest to seek profit and exploitation at others’ expense. A Chinese victory thus has the potential to be another paradigm shift—a progression between stages of history. We have been here before. The bipolar world of the original Cold War, dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, displayed exactly this dynamic, and the Soviet Union was defeated utterly. It would seem wise to avoid the same situation that has historically led to disaster; but this can only happen if the two superpowers cooperate in avoiding kinetic, economic, or proxy conflict, and the United States almost certainly will not. An examination of the Soviet Union’s errors, the errors of contemporary anti-imperialists, and of any qualitative differences between the conditions it faced in the twentieth century and those presently faced by the PRC, is therefore essential to predicting its surest path to victory.

The PRC currently enjoys a relatively better position than the Soviet Union at its height. It has a considerably larger share of the global economy and total world population, as well as far greater international trade leverage. Even more importantly, unlike during the First Cold War, it has pursued close cooperation with the Russian Federation despite the differences in the ruling class of each country. The infamous Sino-Soviet Split, which set the two largest socialist countries at odds with one another, has not continued into the twenty-first century, and the super-empire’s open hostility toward both Russia and China make that chapter of history unlikely to repeat itself in the near future. Political strategy, however, may still ultimately be the most decisive factor in the Second Cold War.

In the first months after the October Revolution, Lenin wrote:

“. . . until the world socialist revolution breaks out, until it embraces several countries and is strong enough to overcome international imperialism, it is the direct duty of the socialists who have conquered in one country (especially a backward one) not to accept battle against the giants of imperialism. Their duty is to try to avoid battle, to wait until the conflicts between the imperialists weaken them even more, and bring the revolution in other countries even nearer. . . one must be able to calculate the balance of forces and not help the imperialists by making the battle against socialism easier for them when socialism is still weak, and when the chances of the battle are manifestly against socialism.”

The fledgling Russian Soviet Republic, which at first had controlled only the urban centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, could not fight the forces of every imperialist power at once; indeed, the key to its survival was not war against them, but extricating itself from the First World War as quickly as it could. For the next two decades, it followed Lenin’s strategy, seeking to make peace and détente with the imperialists while it was still weak and they were still strong. Great sacrifices were made to consolidate and defend the revolution within the Soviet Union, to appear harmless before the capitalist world, and to sow discord between the empires, which were not yet united. The Second World War seemed to vindicate this strategy; as the imperialist governments of France and the UK deliberately “appeased” Nazi Germany in the hopes that it would destroy socialism in Europe for them, the Soviet Union’s maneuvering succeeded in broadening the war, such that even while encircled by Germany and the Empire of Japan, it did not face their might alone. As a result of inter-imperialist conflict, the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence expanded, bringing revolution and proletarian rule to Eastern Europe, China, Mongolia, and Korea.

Yet the Second World War was also the last inter-imperialist war. The Soviet leadership became the victim of its own success, believing that the same strategy would work again under the next stage of imperialism, which at that point had not been identified. In 1952, Joseph Stalin confidently dismissed any objections to the contrary: “[…] the capitalist countries’ struggle for markets and the desire to crush their competitors turned out in actuality to be stronger than the contradictions between the camp of capitalism and the camp of socialism. […]”

Stalin did not live to correct this error, and his successors also failed to recognize it, even as the Cold War’s imperialist bloc increasingly became not less but more united against socialism. In 1956, the Soviet Union officially adopted the policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist empires. Similarly, Deng advocated a foreign policy of “keeping a low profile”—which, after the collapse of the socialist bloc and the total encirclement of the remaining socialist countries, succeeded in keeping the Party in power at the cost of integration with the capitalist world—and ever since his passing, the PRC has officially forsworn seeking any form of hegemony and has scrupulously followed its self-imposed principles of non-interference in other countries’ internal political affairs. Yet it is now obvious from the remainder of twentieth century history that inter-imperialist war was not inevitable. […]

[…] The experiences of Japan are the clearest evidence that the inter-imperialist unity that outlived even the Soviet Union is in no danger. There would be no inter-imperialist war in the latter twentieth century, and one is not likely in the twenty-first. The greatest conflict between capitalist empires of the super-imperial era resembled nothing so much as the United States pointing a gun at an unarmed man. There is no reason to believe that the unprecedented unity among empires in the face of a socialist enemy that was a feature of First Cold War will not also be a feature of the Second, especially not now that the super-empire and neocolonialism are fully entrenched throughout the world. The PRC is therefore no more likely than was the Soviet Union to win simply through patience.

As described earlier in Chapter Eleven, the severing of the Nord Stream was in no country’s self-interest but the United States’ (and Norway’s); pipelines, railroads, bridges, ports, and other transport infrastructure of the kind that the PRC has been patiently and methodically building throughout the periphery are all vulnerable. What takes years to build can be destroyed in moments; without its own military and soft-power influence, the PRC’s long-term geopolitical strategy will soon be at a tremendous disadvantage, and it may lose what it has so painstakingly gained. In any war, hot or cold, the advantage usually lies with the side that takes the initiative. Though the PRC is still rising economically, militarily, and in every other respect, the United States has consistently acted first, through trade wars, diplomatic maneuvering, propaganda, and other provocations. It has retained its military outposts in Korea and is expanding them throughout the Pacific, […] the Cold War blocs are re-forming, and the PRC is the de facto leader of the opposition whether the Party is ready or not. The outcome of the Second Cold War will depend heavily upon whether and in what fashion the PRC will take on this mantle of leadership.

[…] When the stage of super-imperialism began, national-bourgeois states at first sought not to resist the super-empire, but to join it—on their own terms, rather than as subservient compradors. Khomeini’s successors attempted not only to privatize state-owned enterprises and infrastructure but to attract investment from the West. In 1995, the Iranian government signed a contract with a French company to develop oil fields in the Persian Gulf. The Tehran Stock Exchange was revived. Under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran first applied to join the World Trade Organization. In 1999, President Mohammad Khatami went even further, proposing a “total restructuring” of the economy, and spoke of the importance of making Iran safe for foreign capital. […]

[…] Despite its desire for reconciliation and development, the Islamic Republic has continually experienced rejection and aggression. In 1996, the United States blocked its application to the WTO, and the one time (more recently) that it applied for a loan from the IMF, it was also denied due to U.S. influence. Even during Rafsanjani’s relatively reform-minded presidency, in which the Islamic Republic pursued integration into the global economy, new sanctions on Iran were imposed both by President Clinton’s executive orders and by the U.S. Congress. In 2002, President George W. Bush declared Iran to be part of an “Axis of Evil.” When the United States and the Islamic Republic finally agreed upon the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015 to ease sanctions in exchange for guarantees regarding the Iranian nuclear program, the U.S. reneged almost immediately. In 2020, on orders from President Trump, the U.S. military assassinated the Islamic Republic’s most celebrated military leader, General Qasem Soleimani. Just as it had with regard to Gaddafi’s Libya, the super-empire designated the Islamic Republic to be its enemy, and nothing less than its destruction could ever suffice.

The super-empire, continually driven to increase profits by the Western financial oligarchy, cannot permit the loss of a profitable neocolony. When a national bourgeoisie develops to the point of attaining sole control of state power, and moves to end foreign dispossessive accumulation within its own country, this means less super-profits for the imperialists; and if this national bourgeoisie were to join the group of exploiters, there would be more imperialists among which to divide even less loot. To sustain its rate of profit, the super-empire must therefore remain an exclusive club, and finds it preferable to annihilate, rather than embrace, any potential new partner […]

[…] The Islamic Republic had on a similar basis become the leading exporter of armed revolution against the super-empire’s hegemony. By the early 2000s, the super-empire had fully encircled Iran. To the east and west, the United States’ military had invaded and occupied Iran’s closest neighbors. To the north and south lay willing collaborators (Turkey and Saudi Arabia). The U.S. government had openly announced to the world that Iran was its enemy, and perhaps the next to be invaded. Lacking a nuclear deterrent, the Islamic Republic, out of self-defense, had to heavily invest in anti-imperialism, by arming and bankrolling national liberation movements throughout the Arab world.

Deterrence, of course, only works if an aggressor believes in its target’s commitment to carrying out a threat; therefore the Iranian national bourgeoisie tied itself as closely as possible with the “Axis of Resistance,” both materially and ideologically. […] Under the conditions of super-imperialism, these national bourgeoisies are essentially stuck—perpetually unable to develop into imperialists, and frequently threatened with either annihilation or de-development. This is both a boon and a curse for the global proletariat. The workers and peasants in the neocolonies find national-bourgeois states to be their strongest allies in the struggle for liberation, yet within these countries, they are similarly stuck.

I think this is as good a time as any to share a fantastic Marxist analysis on the Islamic Republic of Iran, excerpted from Chapter 4 of “Why the World Needs China” by Kyle Ferrana, which is overall an incredibly brilliant book that has my full recommendation for everyone to check out.

CHAPTER FOUR

Bourgeois Anti-Imperialism

Chapter One identified the divisions in the global periphery between the comprador bourgeoisie who collaborate with an empire to extract resources from their own country, the national bourgeoisie who seek to retain these resources for their own exclusive benefit, and the lower bourgeoisie or petit bourgeoisie who aspire to join one of the other groups by attaining greater capital. Just as they did in Venezuela, the less prosperous bourgeois classes have a strong incentive to eliminate the restrictions on development that comprador rule enforces upon a neocolony. This chapter will explore their goals and limitations, their relationship with the other classes, and the nature of their conflict with the super-empire. […]

[…] The Iranian Revolution of 1978 is commonly oversimplified, often called the “Islamic” Revolution due to the theocratic system that eventually emerged. More fundamental to the Revolution’s development, however, was the ongoing class struggle. Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s reign, the population of Iran had doubled, and the working class became the most numerous—particularly in Tehran and other urban areas, as many peasant sharecroppers, unable to purchase enough farmland to live off following the Shah’s land reform program in the early 1960s, migrated by necessity to the cities. Without their support, the popular movement would have been unable to overthrow the comprador Shah. Rather than ideology—religious or communist—the essential causes of the urban proletariat’s mass mobilizations were low wages, rising rents, severe income inequality, and the insufficiency of the Shah’s reforms. Workers began a massive strike wave in 1978, culminating in a general strike in October and November which paralyzed oil production; 35,000 oil workers had gone on strike demanding wage increases. The Resolution of the Ashura March of December 1978, which the New York Times reported was attended by “several million” protestors, demanded “the right of workers and peasants to the full benefit from the product of their labor.” The Shah fled the country the following month, never to return.

As a remnant of feudalism, the landholding clergy were quite naturally conservative, yet by 1979 it was a demographic inevitability that feudalism would never be restored as the prevailing mode of production in Iran. The millions of new city-dwellers could not return to the countryside even if they wanted to, and reversing land reform was politically impossible even for a figure of Ruhollah Khomeini’s considerable influence. However, decades of repression by the Shah’s secret police had severely diminished every potentially revolutionary organization (liberal and communist alike), leaving only the clerics relatively untouched (with the exception of Khomeini himself, who had been arrested and exiled). At the height of the Revolution, the clergy therefore found itself in command of a broad alliance of classes—everyone, really—that had mobilized against the Shah.

This alliance quickly destroyed the Iranian comprador class and redistributed much of its wealth. Many wealthy pro-Western business owners followed the Shah, or else fled after the Islamic Republic was officially declared by referendum in April 1979. That summer, the revolutionary government moved to expropriate their assets, as well as nationalize all private or foreign-owned banks, insurance companies, and large-scale industry, all without compensation. Between 1979 and 1980, the nominal minimum wage was tripled, and when the rural peasantry seized 800,000 hectares of farmland from large private landholdings, the government was either unwilling or unable to return the confiscated land to its former owners.

Nevertheless, once their common enemy had been eliminated, the alliance gave way to the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. While Khomeini’s government gave to workers with its left hand, it ruthlessly crushed their independent revolutionary leadership with its right. All Marxist parties were banned and their leaders arrested. Even the Tudeh Party, a Marxist-Leninist organization which had supported Khomeini, was eventually suppressed in 1983. Throughout the 1980s, the government executed several thousand political prisoners, including not just the Shah’s former secret policemen and loyal military officers, but members of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (A militant organization that had attempted to overthrow the Islamic Republic, it joined the Iraqi side during the Iran-Iraq War, and has since become a willing tool of U.S. regime-change efforts), and many communists as well. Workers’ councils, which had seized factories and organized local proletarian resistance to the Shah, were gradually disbanded or replaced by Islamic Councils more loyal to the government. Meanwhile, Iran’s secular national legislature became dominated by the petit bourgeoisie. In A History of Modern Iran, Iranian-American historian Ervand Abrahamian writes: “the Majles, which had been a debating chamber for notables in the distant past and a club for the shah’s placemen in more recent years, was now filled with the propertied middle class. For example, more than 70 percent of the deputies in the First Islamic Majles [elected in 1980] came from that class. Their fathers included 63 clergymen, 69 farm owners, 39 shopkeepers, and 12 merchants.”

Today, there can be little doubt that the Iranian bourgeoisie has developed and holds state power with a grip that is stronger now than it has ever been. In 2006, the Islamic Republic’s constitution was amended to allow the privatization of 80% of shares of government businesses (excepting the National Iranian Oil Company and several other key state-owned entities). Though implemented at a slower pace than neoliberal shock therapy, privatization has nonetheless proceeded over the last two decades, even despite strikes and protests by the affected workers. Within a few privatizing the banking sector, including Bank Saderat Iran, one of the largest state-owned banks. According to the Tehran Times in 2014, hundreds of state-owned businesses had been privatized or were slated to be privatized; by 2017, the government had privatized over half the country’s power plants, and further planned to privatize at least 80% in total. By 2019, the government formally held only a minority share—which it pledged to sell entirely by 2021—in Iran Khodro and SAIPA, two of the largest domestic car manufacturers.

Poverty has declined considerably since the Revolution, recently aided in large part by substantial direct cash transfers from the government during the early 2010s; yet hard limits to this willingness to redistribute wealth have emerged. A combination of U.S. sanctions, declining oil prices, and the COVID-19 pandemic caused economic disaster in Iran during the latter part of the decade. GDP per capita plunged; in 2020, the World Bank downgraded Iran back to its “lower-middle income” classification, and despite the still-existing welfare state, inflation likely outpaced wage increases, according to analysis from Iran’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs. Yet Iran’s new rich went unharmed; while two decades of progress in reducing rural poverty were erased, the government’s priority during the crisis was to support the stock market with large infusions of cash from its sovereign wealth fund, in effect sustaining private fortunes with public money. […]

“Doomerism” matters in the sense that a proper dialectical materialist analysis ought to take pessimistic signals into account and shouldn’t be blinded by pure delusional optimism. I’ve recently been on a reading binge of pre-1989 leftist books on the USSR. Their perspectives on things, untouched by the hindsight of the later Soviet collapse, was really quite fascinating (and depressing) and it was telling that, apart from those leftists like Harpal Brar (who passed a couple months ago) that were “Stalinist” and therefore rarely took post-20th Congress Soviet leadership at their word, most completely failed to see the problems with the Gorbachevite USSR which led to the capitalist restoration within half a decade.

One example that stuck with me was a Western Soviet-sympathetic cultural anthropology written in 1985 which focused on the non-Russian nationalities in the USSR and took Khrushchev’s claim as settled fact that the USSR had “solved” the issue of the nationality question. Then, in just 6 years after its publication, for various reasons, the entirety of the multinational Soviet Union was torn apart and, three decades later, what’s effectively a Soviet civil war between Russia and Ukraine began. That form of sheer optimism (akin to the non-Marxist anti-imperialists like Pepe Escobar who used to BRICS-post constantly about the imminent end of dollar hegemony) should be avoided and that’s why I think it’s good for “doomers” like XHS who (whenever they take a break from pitching MMT, that is) try to sift through both the typical China collapse slop and the constant “it’s so joever” stuff from places like Naked Capitalism to attempt to highlight some of the contradictions within China and the endurance of the existing hegemonic system.

That said, the extreme end of doomerism can be too much. Still, it’s often understandable. The important thing to always keep in mind is that the entire point of being a socialist is about believing that there is a possibility that “the future can be better than the past if we’re willing to fight for it” (to borrow a line from Steban, the Student Communist). Even with all the ongoing atrocities and depravity in the contemporary world, I think it’s honestly a miracle that we’re even in a situation like this at all where, very visibly, the current Western hegemonic structure is being eroded.

If the West had an actually capable piece of shit like FDR who had the capacity of imagination (such as his relationship with Stalin and his Four Policemen and UN ideas), rather than fail-sons like Clinton and Bush, the West might not have squandered its unipolar moment. Real despair was what people in the now formerly socialist countries felt in the 90s, when everything they’d worked for and believed in was suddenly ripped apart. Leftists in those places often have older family members that spiralled into life-long substance abuse or tragically took their lives from the sheer despair, hardship, cruelty and alienation of capitalist restoration. That was a level of humanitarian suffering unmatched in the entirety of our post World War 2 epoch. Someone from the r/trueanon subreddit recently posted about the WW2 veteran and Soviet poet Yulia Drunina who committed suicide in 1991.

If the neoliberals and neocons didn’t kick the cold warriors like Kennan and Kissinger, who were screaming in alarm, to the curb, they might have found a way past their greed, paranoia and aversion to even remote degrees of power-sharing to bring post-Soviet oligarchic Russia into the fold. It’s frankly astounding that they managed to alienate the likes Yeltsin and Putin, Russian history’s most unabashed Western sycophants since the time of Peter I. With Putin on board, they could have applied coordinated pressure on China and completed the maritime and territorial encirclement to block off projects like BRI, by blockading Chinese access to inland Eurasia through Western-aligned Russian sabotage. By the time the 2010s came around, China might have been coerced into accepting a subordinate position to the US, which was the nature of the so-called “G2” deal that Obama purportedly offered and China rejected. That would truly have been the darkest timeline.

The fact that the USSR’s catastrophic collapse didn’t end in some thousand year American reich, even though the West had held nearly all the cards in the 90s, and that China could rise to become a new successor counterweight to that Western hegemony, though its inaction or contradictions may at times leave leftists and anti-imperialists wanting, is frankly miraculous in of itself. Of course, the infamously misguided euphoria leftists had about the “weakened” US following its defeat in Vietnam should be kept in mind. History never ends and the potential for some form of US and Western hegemonic comeback is always within the realm of possibility.

We’re still living in a world shaped by 500 years of continuous Western hegemony, both direct and indirect, and to be able to see that come apart at the seams, especially after the setbacks of 1989-91, however much of a “long dureé” process this unravelling sometimes seems, is honestly something, by the very fact that it’s happening at all, enough to make sustained nihilism or defeatism hard to justify.

He’s desperately trying to salvage his reputation in any way he can, the American Prestige pod just platformed him for a guest interview, which incidentally was a good reminder for me to cancel my Patreon subscription. Soc dems always default to pumping out generic “but my institutions” commiseration slop with lib guests during Republican administrations.

As for Professor End of History, I can almost respect the sheer grind he’s putting in to try and clear his name, but he’ll always be the poster boy of 90s American unipolar hubris. Leftists always scorned him for what he exemplified and nowadays the neo-con and nat sec types also deeply resent him as well for “misleading” them and making them complacent.

Calling them the “ousted monarchy” is certainly a journalism school euphemism for the crown prince of Nepal Romanov-ing his own ruling parents and family.

That said, the Trump administration specifically has had a long-running fixation on flipping Nepal into a Himalayan Baltic/Ukraine against China (and India as well, for that matter) since his first term. They got Nepal to sign onto the USAID “Millennium Challenge Compact” (the same name borrowed from the wargame against Iran) during Trump 1 and it was ratified by Nepal’s then-Communist Party coalition led parliament (Maoist-Centre and United-Socialist) in 2022. I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect of that $550 million agreement is primed to begin making waves in Nepal now, especially now with Trump 2 and the libs now leading the government.

The Tricontinental wrote a pretty thorough piece on this: https://thetricontinental.org/asia/ticaa-issue-1-the-millennium-challenge-corporation/

Seems like an unimaginative SDI copypasta. The space element is just extrapolating the US’ recent bout of LEO satellite spamming through Starlink as some success that lends a permanent perceived advantage in space that they just flatly assume China could not reciprocate. The plain thinking is that space is the new paradigm shift that elevates the US military above its adversaries—like gunboats shelling junks or drones bombing foot soldiers. To maintain this desperation for asymmetry, the Trump admin in particular, since his first term with the branding of the “Space Force,” has been diving headfirst into the pandora’s box of near space weaponization. The idea that space can be maintained as an exclusively US domain is not sustainable in reality and the US will inevitably regret giving its designated adversaries the permission, in international eyes, to match its near space ambitions.

From a technical perspective, it’s the latest cope against Russian and Chinese hypersonic glide vehicle technologies. The US strategic doctrine is fettered, just like Israel, to the psychological chains that adversaries “aren’t allowed” to touch the sacred land of CONUS. Everything else seems to be crafted to work backwards from that teleological endpoint.

During the 80s, the success of the ultimately non-existent SDI was the demoralizing psychological effect it had on the Soviet nuclear doctrine. The 70s saw the USSR’s nuclear stockpile surpass the US and this had been a major source of pride for the Soviets. Reagan coming along and insinuating “Nuh-uh-uh, actually your payload advantage is useless because we swerved in a new direction that makes that arsenal obsolete” provoked the Soviets into the panic of an exhaustive arms race which they could not industrially and economically sustain vis-a-vis the US from a budgetary standpoint. This budgetary black hole caused by the Soviet SDI psychological panic was what allowed Gorbachev the political room to militarily capitulate to the US through signing the USSR onto unequal nuclear arms agreements.

The issue for the US in trying to reuse this psychological bluff, because that’s what it’s really about, is that that it is now in a inverse position to its adversaries industrially and economically. The more important thing that this might effect is that any move by the US in this domain legitimates the PLARF to finally green light an expansion of the paltry Chinese nuclear arsenal to a level actually commensurate of comprehensive second strike potential. Additionally, it allows China the justification to continue to reject any of the recent “trilateral” US-Russia-China nuclear arms agreements that the US has been trying to bind it to, which would place it at a distinct disadvantage as the newcomer party still catching up.

I think this is a far sunnier depiction of Europe than the material reality and historical record allows to be tenably held. It’s worth going back to interrogate the sheer history of the notion. The idea of a scenario of inter-imperialist rivalry within the West posed by a resurgent Europe against America, to the benefit of the Global South, traces back all the way back to the immediate post-war period. Stalin himself speculated that:

The question is, what guarantee is there that Germany and Japan will not again rise to their feet, that they will not try to wrest themselves from American bondage and to live their own independent lives? I think there are no such guarantees. But it follows from this that the inevitability of wars among the capitalist countries remains.

Stalin was wrong because World War II turned out to remain the last inter-imperialist war within the West up to today.

Europe’s fundamental problem is that it has never been held accountable for the original sin of 500 years of colonialism and imperialism. Rather than facing any retribution, it has been rewarded. The continent has managed to retain the material wealth gained through its imperial past, and even now, it continues to benefit from neo-colonial economic structures that give subsidy to its luxury through the continued unequal exchange with the rest of the world.

On the other hand, the only thing it really ever has been punished for is the cautionary lesson of inter-imperialist infighting when Europe turned its guns against itself. The lesson Europe took from the 20th century, and continues to hold today, is this: karma hasn’t ever punished its external violence, but it strikes if it turns on itself. Europe was the victor of history—until the victors began fighting among themselves.

This is the etiological source of its cultural and racial alignment with Western hegemony. It’s a self-perpetuating cyclical logic that was only broken through the alternative presented through socialist internationalism that provided a different narrative of Europe that allowed coexistence and solidarity with the rest of the world beyond the now increasingly bankrupt paper facade of liberal “internationalism.” Socialist internationalism (though itself insincere at times) offered Europeans, the first time, a way to reimagine our identity beyond the deeply entrenched cultural and racial divide of “the West and the rest,” a paradigm that had shaped the idea of “Europe” for centuries, if not millennia.

Incidentally, as a result, this is a contributing factor to why the entirety of all Eastern European states, as if eager to make up for lost time now that they’re in the club, have become uniformly some of the most ideologically extreme and right-wing chauvinistic freaks within Western hegemony today.

Lenin’s prediction of inter-imperialist infighting only came to pass once, during WWII, and hasn’t happened again since. Europe does learn lessons but the wrong ones. Stalin’s succession to Khrushchev meant the USSR never updated Lenin and Stalin’s analysis, which led to the policy of “peaceful coexistence.” This approach utterly failed to account for the solidarity among imperialist powers under Western hegemony, which ultimately contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse.

The plain reality from the history of post-war inter-imperialist solidarity, for which the USSR already paid the price, should indicate that unless the original sin of our continent is addressed in one way or another, Europe will never be a protagonist of any scenario of multipolarity against the existing hegemonic paradigm. If it had the chance, Europe would happily loot China alongside the US just as it did in the Opium Wars and the Boxer Uprising. It doesn’t do so today not because of a lack of any will, but a lack of capacity and capability. Unless it discovers a new narrative of its identity, as it did once through socialist internationalism, the rest of the world should prevent it from ever regaining that capability - and should reject as realistic any notion of an “independent Europe” willing to repudiate Western hegemony.

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 Brussels’ multilateral fantasies the cold shoulder. The EU wants to have its cake and eat it too but there’s no reason for the world to 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.

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?”