I want to hear you reasons, why do you think that.
I think we’re going through Cold War 2 before World War 3. China and Russia have been testing krill fishing limits recently while American private equity has entered the field, and the TikTok showdown is testing Internet authority.
America will take Greenland, and then Canada is next being surrounded on three sides.
Can a NATO country invoke the defence pact if it’s attacked by another NATO country?
NATO vs America wasn’t on my bingo card.
The class war never stopped.
Not WW3, but Cold War 2.
Already there
No, we are not headed for WW3.
The military-industrial complex must be fed, our weapons sold or used. But, a large magnitude hot war has far more social and economic risk and not enough return on investment relative the alternative of multiple proxy wars. We’ve currently proxy wars in Israel and Ukraine. Economic growth is optimized by beginning a proxy war with China.
If Trump was smart then he might internally convince others in his administration to diplomatically and operationally over-commit. Then we could have WW3. But, he’s a puppet ruling by fear. We’ve been fighting our proxy wars since Reagan. Trump isn’t capable of overcoming capitalism’s mandate for optimized growth.
This might be his exit strategy. This is how he can get a third term.
I feel like we’re already in WW3 but everyone has to pretend we’re not to avoid escalating it to nuclear.
Perhaps. Depends, ultimately, on if the US Empire goes down with a bang, or a whimper. Its grip on the world is spilling through its fingers like sand, so either it will watch it fall out helplessly, or will attempt to strike and retake what it’s losing.
“and now class I would like to draw your attention to a footnote that existed between the ancient empires of Britain and the Glorious Peoples Empire of China… for a time there was a thing called ‘America’…”
I don’t think the PRC will be taking on the mantle of “Empire.” Hegemon, sure, but their strategy thus far has been starkly different from the British and US Empires with respect to the Global South. The current US Empire dominates the Global South largely through massive Financial Capital and control of the World Reserve Currency, and is largely de-industrialized, while the PRC focuses more on selling to other countries as a heavily industrialized country. For example, in the US, “Made in USA” is a rarity, and usually just assembled in the USA, while in China “Made in China” goods are by far the norm.
UK went through industrialization leading to its empire, and the US was the industrial power during its ascent. Same thing with Japan before WWII.
Many imoeralistic powers seem to go through big industrial growth before expansion.
Sure, but that evidently doesn’t seem to be the course the PRC is taking. Rather, as Marxist-Leninists, they appear to be more interested in building up the Global South through favorable trade deals as an investment in future customers for their exports. This is fundamentally a different strategy from focusing on exporting financial and industrial Capital to the Global South. Further, China is too populous to offload their productive forces to the Global South, even if we doubt them as dedicated Communists it doesn’t appear to be an economically viable strategy to adopt an Imperialist stance to begin with.
Belt and roads is China’s attempt to do exactly what we’ve been doing with the global south, invest for influence and put them on a debt treadmill. Build infrastructure, pressure them to take on more debt with new projects, say it’s time for austerity, open up more foreign investments, use pressure to buy up raw resources, etc
It’s worth mentioning Coca-Cola… You can get American products everywhere, opening them up as a new market isn’t a different strategy, it’s part of the process
This is bullshit projection.
- The Atlantic, 2021: The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth
- Geopolitical Economy Report, 2022: China forgives 23 loans for 17 African countries, expands ‘win-win’ trade and infrastructure projects
Is there actual evidence of these debt traps, or is that just an assumed motivation? Again, China’s financial Capital is largely held by the State, not private entities. Big difference in motivation compared to, say, US finance Capital, which is largely Private. Furthermore, Coke largely produces in the Global South, China produces in its own country.
Probably. Too many hot spots in the world right now where a minor mistake can result in a chain reaction.
In the long term, yes. The bourgeoisie are rich and comfortable with no desire for a war that could jeopardize their position. However, they have lots of financial incentives for military spending because it’s rife with corruption. As such, they do a lot of saber-rattling to make WWIII seem like a genuine possibility, while also fighting in proxy wars around the globe.
But the problem is, they’re playing with forces beyond their control. If you have a generation raised on constant propaganda to genuinely hate other countries, then all it takes is a couple people in the wrong positions at the wrong time who aren’t in on the game. Right now, the rabid dog is on the leash of the bourgeoisie, but the gamble they’ve been making is that they can keep pumping steroids into it forever and never lose control.
Furthermore, wasting all this money on war and militarism has allowed China to emerge as a credible threat to their global hegemony. China is sitting back and focusing on domestic economic development, and they are winning the peace while the US burns itself out. What happens when the only area in which the US has an advantage is the military? Are people really going to accept becoming #2, or are they going to force a confrontation? Given that we’re talking about Americans, who are 1) Riled up on propaganda, 2) Preoccupied with being “#1,” and 3) Unused to experiencing the effects of fucking around firsthand, it seems almost inevitable. Ofc, it’s true that we somehow maintained a Cold War with the USSR for decades, but it’s different today because conditions are declining and the far-right is growing stronger every day.
I mean, unless there is no major global war from now until the heat death of the universe or some other extinction level event, aren’t we just perpetually going towards WW3?
We’ve been in it for decades it’s just more covert and low intensity. The war never stops until we overthrow capitalism I’m afraid
As the Axis, yes
I’m going to look at it more in terms of how long a European peace lasted.
The Napoleonic wars ended with the Concert of Europe, a peace that was able to last until World War I and depended on a balance of power that lasted for almost a century.
An equivalent system was set up after World War II with a peace anchored by the Allied Powers, decolonization, and the US-Soviet rivalry. That system has lasted for about 80 years and is showing significant strain.
I don’t know how long this system will last, but it doesn’t seem like it will last for much longer. Trump’s election seems to be hastening that end.
An equivalent system was set up after World War II with a peace anchored by the Allied Powers, decolonization, and the US-Soviet rivalry. That system has lasted for about 80 years and is showing significant strain.
What? No it hasn’t. The cold war ended by 1992 at the latest. At that point the US achieved total, unipolar hegemony over the world and began exercising it. Clinton’s “interventions” in Kosovo, Africa, etc. The Bush era Neo-Cons, those were all results of a new era of unchallenged American power and hegemony. That marked a new era.
Right now the world, led by China and Russia as well as other members of BRICS are trying to buck that total dominance and hegemony of the US and set up a multi-polar world but the US is not letting go, it is not ceding power, it has replaced international law as set out in agreement with the victorious powers of WW2 with “rules based order” which means its way or the high-way, the rule of their might and their wants and nothing else matters. Trump is flexing that built up power, the fact they control SWIFT, the fact the dollar is world reserve currency, their incredible ability to do sanctions to anyone anywhere and put a big hurt on them for defying US interests and wants. He’s unleashing the full might, threatening sanctions, tariffs, straight up invasion to take Greenland or the Panama Canal, etc. All to do what? To maintain US primacy, to prevent the emergence of a multi-polar world where the US doesn’t dominate everyone else and set the terms and rules for the entire world.
So there are movements to try and strive towards a Westphalian (multi-polar) order led by China, Russia, and followed in those steps by other BRICS nations but they are cautious, they don’t want to anger the US and even China still backs down if the threats of sanctions gets too big. So right now we’re in a struggle to determine what kind of world we have either a continuation, a hardening of US empire and unipolar hegemony, unchallenged dominance of the world and its peoples to their dictates and benefits or else a multi-polar world structured around Westphalian principles of sovereignty of individual nations and cooperation and peace born out of multiple strong powers checking each other’s ambitions against other weaker nations.
The US ended an era of struggle and some independence for nations on its own after it won the cold war, it chose to build up its power, to break international law (Yugoslavia, Iraq, war on terror, sanctions regimes galore, etc), to replace it with “rules based order” which no one can solidly define the rules of because they’re ever shifted based on the wants and needs of the US.
It has still been a relatively peaceful time in human history post fall of the Soviet Union even when you include Iraqi and Afghani deaths as a proportion to the world’s population. Wars still happened in that relative time of peace, but those conflicts were relatively contained to not create a new great power war.
Great powers haven’t entered in open conflict on the scale of World War II, which was chosen as a bench mark.
It has if you think only conflicts in western land matter. What’s more, the US might launder its military operations within proxy organizations and banking institutions but it absolutely has wars going on even outside Iraq and Afghanistan. Whistleblowers have confirmed the CIA as being behind every major terrorist attack in Chechnya and Xinjiang, and financing paramilitaries all over the world, as well as dealing with narcos and creating huge waves of drug violence in México, Ecuador and Colombia just to name a few.
Millions are dead as a direct result of US intervention in Iraq alone.
