War on Three Fronts

First of all I want to express my sincere appreciation to all those of you who have subscribed to this channel whether as paying or free subscribers. I greatly value yours words of encouragement; they mean a great deal to me.

As you clearly are all very aware, the enterprise of making meaning of our signal global conflicts is a treacherous business that frequently exposes my own and others’ weaknesses of judgment, confusion of emotional reaction with reason, and the fragility of a highly corruptible (and all too frequently corrupted ) informational infrastructure and environment.

The principal framework that I have advanced recently is that we are living through a period of counterrevolution fought by the principal and up until now most successful 19th and 20th century imperial nations (and the interests that feed and even drive their actions), namely the USA and UK and France, and Germany and Belgium. Some, like Japan, tried to imitate them, and crashed. Some, like the Ottomans and the Austrian-Hungarians were vanquished by more powerful rivals. The footprints of others - like those of Portugal, Spain and Italy, are less discernible as the ocean of history advances upon the collective memory of their atrocities. Some, like Russia and China are frequently cited as empires, yet the evidence supporting that judgment so far as recent Czarist, Soviet and post-Soviet eras are concerned, or even less, those of the late Chinese dynasties, the Maoist and post-Maoist eras, is far from compelling in my view.

So what I shall very loosely describe as the white imperialists (as always, an exceptional status for Japan) are engaged in a counterrevolution against the very forces of multipolarity that they themselves generated in their lust for the short-term benefits of the penultimate manifestation of imperialism - globalization - driven as it always is, by the need to enhance profit in capitalist market conditions that always tend towards monopoly and a reduction in the rate of profit.

Currently, and this is really striking, we see an alliance between the current Hegemon, the USA, and a cluster of former European empires that together we can refer to as the globalists, and some of their former colonies. Since China revealed and rediscovered its enormous economic capabilities following the Communist Party’s adoption of the capitalist road , symbolized and validated by its 2001 membership of the WTO (ironically an institution now frequently disdained and violated by the globalists), the white imperialists have struck out against those who stubbornly refuse to bow down before their globalist version of a “global” financial and trading architecture.

Far more than the first Cold War, this second so-called Cold War is creating a much harder division of nations into one or another camp - the “rules-based” order of US imperial self interest, or the order of a global majority based on UN charter internationalism.

This may serve the purpose of sharpening competition between the two camps in a manner that could conceivably but almost certainly will not prove to be a benefit to the human species. Unless the whole geopolitical development is itself a hoax perpetrated across the world by an unaccountable, maniacal plutocratic elite, this development seems more likely to lead to nuclear annihilation and a lethal divergence of scarce resource away from the challenges of climate change and environmental pollution. I acknowledge there are those who would rather apply transhumanist mechanisms and climate engineering to adapt the species to these challenges and maintain, as they fondly imagine, the rate of profit in a planet of finite resource for the benefit principally of western corporations.

This Great Conflict, a clash of the Titans indeed, is currently playing out in Ukraine (NATO-instigated war for the wealth and markets of Russia); the Middle East, where the West struggles to maintain dominance of influence over primary sources of fossil fuel energy, using Israel on the land of Palestine as a permanent source of division weakening and dividing Arab and Islamist nations; and in the East where the globalists struggle to contain China by using Taiwan in much the same way as it has used Ukraine, to needle, provoke, divide and incite.

The Biden administration is approaching hot war in all three of these warscapes. In recent weeks the US has attacked China, by funneling more military aid to Taiwan, by forcing a divestment of ownership of Tik Tok from Chinese to US ownership and by preparing to hammer China with a new regime of sanctions.

(To be developed)