I suspect that that imagery is not entirely unintentional here.

Once again the “tankies” were right all along. Cassandra’s curse strikes again.

Now we see that a second Civil War is likely brewing in Syria and this time the only way for the Kurds to win is

I think that civil war is already happening and by the way things are going it looks like it will be over very soon. The Kurds have already lost. There is no path for them to win anymore now that the US has abandoned them.

I’m not going to go so far and say that Rojava is worse the Jolani

Both are Zionist collaborators, so it’s hard to say which is worse. All else being equal, i’m going to have to say that the ones begging for the Zionists to bomb Syria are worse.

The lesson here: unity in the face of an existential enemy is absolutely necessary, even if it requires compromising your own narrow group interests. This is why anarchism and other decentralized projects will always fail as long as the threat of imperialism still looms, whereas states with centralized authority can defend themselves and survive.

Too little too late. Rebuilding Germany’s nuclear energy would take at least a decade now. And we don’t have the political will to do it anyway.

This exactly how they think.

Wealth distribution in the US appears to be heading in that direction as well, in case you haven’t noticed. If you have two systems that are both extremely unequal and both hollowed out by corporate oligarchies, neoliberalism and deregulation, the one with the larger population has an advantage just by virtue of manpower resources. The biggest structural advantages the US still has over India are a much more developed infrastructure and a legacy of historical investment in human capital, and it is exactly these two aspects which have begun to be catastrophically neglected in the US. If India can fix these shortcomings it can overtake the US.

There is no reason why the average Indian, given sufficient investment in human capital and infrastructure, should not be able to generate just as much value as the average American, European or Chinese. The same goes for those Sub-Saharan African states which are rich in natural resources and whose climate allows them to support a large population. It’s just a question of development.

The border disputes between China and India or Pakistan and India are a nothing-burger. They were useful for the Western imperialists during the Cold War as points of friction to prevent regional integration and stoke confrontation. Now they are mostly used by the political elites of India and Pakistan to distract from domestic economic issues.

As the region sees increased development and economic integration, and as the economic situation of the people improves, those points of friction cease to be as relevant, as none of the parties involved will want to rock the boat of lucrative economic ties. The remaining disputes can then be resolved via simple bilateral negotiations just like China and Russia resolved their own long-standing border disputes.

Japan and South Korea are likely to decline significantly in relevance as the global south rises. They are after all relatively small in the grand scheme of things and relatively resource-poor. They have been artificially propped up by the American empire due to their geostrategic position, but US power is now receding and allies are becoming liabilities.

Russia is not subordinate to anyone, they are the world’s largest country, a nuclear superpower with the largest abundance of natural resources on the planet. And with climate change opening up the arctic transport corridors they are looking to rise to an even more powerful position of global economic importance, even post-fossil fuels.

As for the EU, it is unclear how long it can even still last for. It will probably break up at some point, same as NATO. Until then, yes, Europe will remain marginal and subordinate, having tied their boat to the sinking ship of the American empire.

However, in the short term the yuan is the obvious choice here because China makes things absolutely everybody needs. So, if you’re holding yuan, you can always convert it into some usable good.

This is also, in a very simplified way, essentially how the dollar became the global reserve currency. It was simply that, for a time, the US was the world’s number one manufacturing power. Everyone needing to buy US goods meant they needed to hold dollars.

Later you had the petro-dollar, but even that was predicated on the global US dominance that was built on that manufacturing power. Once the center of world manufacturing shifts - and it clearly has - the foundations of the old global reserve currency begin to crumble, same as happened with the British pound.

There is obviously a lot of inertia in the current system which is why the loss of financial primacy can lag decades behind the loss of manufacturing primacy, and residual global military dominance also plays a role in artificially prolonging the process, but ultimately it is inevitable.

How exactly this transition will happen is complicated and you can get lost in the weeds discussing all sorts of details like currency swaps, bond yields and the like. It’s a bit like that experiment where you drop a ball through an array of pins where the exact path that the ball takes is very hard to predict. But you know that sooner or later it ends up at the bottom because there is a force of gravity pulling it down.

The shift of the world’s industrial manufacturing center away from the US is that inevitable force of gravity, and no matter how convoluted the path is or how much certain global forces struggle to delay the process, the broad trajectory toward de-dollarization is determined by the fundamental material reality of production.

That being said, i am not necessarily convinced that the Yuan will become the new dollar because China has a very different philosophy in their approach to monetary policy than the US, but we will definitely be living in a post-dollar world, one where the Yuan has perhaps a sort of primus inter pares position in global currencies.

Agreed.

Indeed. And bad governance is not just a humanitarian problem, it actively hampers development. Many of the economic resources that could go toward China-style development are instead squandered, siphoned off by oligarchs and foreign capital. Ethno-religious tensions and nationalist demagoguery are used to distract the population. It’s the same trick that any sleight of hand magician uses: keep the attention of the audience focused on one hand while the other steals your wallet.

In the long run India will be the number two global power. It’s inevitable. It’s just math. They have four times the population that the US does. Once the West’s technological force multiplier is erdoded away, the main determinant of global power will be population (as well as the land to feed that population) and access to resources. And India has both.

Allies aren’t there to help encircle China or Russia anymore - they’re there to be tapped: their markets opened to American goods, their industries subordinated to American priorities, their resources extracted to revitalize a declining hegemon.

The relationship has gone from predominantly strategic to overwhelmingly parasitic.

This logic explains what otherwise looks like incoherence. Why is Washington harsher on say Europe than on Russia? Because Russia has power - and continuing confrontation risks accelerating American decline. Europe does not (or, rather, it could have power but it prefers to bend the knee), making it a safer target.

Glad to see there are more people out there than just us communists who understand what is actually going on.

I agree. They were forced to make a choice, just like Europe was. India chose sovereignty. Europe chose subjugation.

If you don’t watch a single other video this week, watch this one. This is definitive proof that Europe has gone fully “totalitarian” dystopia. Everything they accused Russia and China of doing, European countries are now doing to their own citizens!

EU citizens to pay €3B a year.

And you know it’s only a matter of time until the EU starts directly taxing us. That and Eurobonds…

As if on cue, here is Germany’s FAZ just today putting out an article basically doing the Ukraine version of the “Here’s How Bernie Can Still Win” meme:

EU Stronger Than Russia: Why a Victory of Ukraine Is Possible With the Help of the EU (Archived)

They’re again insisting that the battlefield situation is a stalemate because supposedly the Russian and Ukrainian armies are “evenly matched”, insisting that Russia lost half a million soldiers taking one city, that Ukrainian losses are much lower, that Ukraine can innovate better than Russia, that Russia is going to collapse economically on account of the sanctions if we just keep piling them on, and the EU can help Ukraine win by essentially throwing a bunch of money at it…just really delusional stuff, but we’re used to this by now.

The point is that even as some in Germany are starting to admit they’ve lost, others are still clinging to the same narratives they had three years ago. This is indicative of Europe as a whole, vacillating between being in deep denial and glimmers of acceptance.

They’ll be doing this dance right up until the point Ukraine completely collapses.

Europe and Germany have no interest in peace. They will continue to try and prolong the conflict as much as possible, but they are hitting hard limits to what is possible for them to do. All they have succeeded in doing is completely sidelining themselves from any potential negotiations and rendering themselves irrelevant.