Yesterday was Mao's birthday and Chinese game developer Hoothanes released a new gameplay trailer for their game "The Defiant" set in WW2 China.
Pretty "Internationale" news worthy because this might actually make it the first time ever (at 5:00 in the video) I think the song has been used in a game trailer (I can't recall any games in general that used it at all either).
There's no such thing as "Bosnian sovereignty" given that, under the Dayton Accords, the country is a colony ruled by a viceroy dubbed the "High Representative." The current viceroy is an ex-CSU Merkel-era cabinet minister from Germany, Christian Schmidt. As is the case with all these washed up political low-rungers across the history of colonialism getting newfound authority under a colonial role, they turn into power-tripping freaks that would make subreddit moderators swoon.
In 2023, Schmidt used the "Bonn powers" proscribed under Dayton to amend the Bosnian criminal code to literally criminalize, in the actual legal header of the new article, the "Failure to Implement Decisions of the High Representative," which sets out a criminal charge for any "responsible person" that fails to:
implement, enforce or otherwise comply with a decision of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or who prevents or otherwise obstructs its application, implementation or enforcement, shall be punished by imprisonment for a term between six months and five years.
The present Republika Srpska issue arises because, in 2023, the autonomous region's president, Milorad Dodik, (the "Bosnian Serb leader") issued legislation blocking entry of the colonial viceroy's decrees into the autonomous region's gazette recording published acts and passed laws on defamation that had been previously annulled by Schmidt.
The colonial regime's legal appendage then acted to use the newly amended Criminal Code against Dodik. In February of this year, he was stripped of his presidential office and sentenced to a year in prison and banned from political office for six years. The sentence was appealed to the "Constitutional Court," a court of final appeal where three of the nine judges are foreigners appointed by the President of the "European Court of Human Rights," which upheld the sentence for "non-compliance with the decisions of Christian Schmidt" early this month.
Bosnia is a good case example of the Western liberal "rules-based order's" depravity, its utter moral bankruptcy and its innate talent for projection. On the one hand, you have them screaming bloody murder every time they see Chinese takeout food as "Chinese foreign interference" or "Beijing's growing influence," on the other hand, framing any resistance to literal modern day colonial projects as "Dodik’s defiance, echoed by Serbia, Hungary, and Russia, reveals an illiberal axis wielding sovereignty rhetoric to undercut EU authority". Incidentally, on the exact same day as this judgment, the European Council for Foreign Relations published an article about "Reading China's Playbook in the Western Balkans" where they congratulate themselves for rescuing "Montenegro from falling into debt bondage with China" and "raising fears that new member states could act as promoters of Chinese interests" in the region, which reads as satire when juxtaposed with what they've been doing with their actual colonial fiefdom in Bosnia.
If you remove the context, the legal argument Dodik used in his appeal, which was that "Schmidt had no authority to intervene in the criminal code, saying only the national parliament was empowered to do so," could easily be mistaken for one of those Western international law journal editorials railing against the "erosion of democracy" by strongmen in designated adversary countries like Venezuela. In case anyone feels an excess of individual sympathy for Dodik, he's one of those generic right-wing Eastern European Orban clones, down to his Israeli sycophancy, visiting the site of the October 7 "Nova Music Festival Massacre" to try to drum up support, so this is moreso one of those "worst person you know just made a great point" situations.
The case of Bosnia today really drives home that there’s no meaningful difference between the openly imperialist depravity of the West a century ago and the West today. The only real change since then is that, externally as a limiting factor, a few other nations nowadays have the military capabilities to deter Western expressions of our sociopathy from being directed them, because it really is just like Fanon said: "colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence."
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.
"[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.
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 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.
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?"
I think with the so-called "90 day pause" (not really a "pause" from what's so far discernible in the fine print) and the China-US tit-for-tat escalation, those those two developments should be stable enough to make it possible to finally analyze the situation of the past week for a bit without being being at the risk of rendered immediately outdated within the next hour.
With the 90-day "pause," this has in effect turned from a US trade world war into more of the same Sino-American trade war that has been ongoing since Trump I. What does this mean? It means that the pressure on China has risen far more now that the US has just stated it will fully concentrate against it, though it could be argued that the whole tariff gimmick was all about China in the end anyways.
The damage done to the markets will likely recover for a while due to political reasons since the "pause" was conceded precisely because of the one-two punch of the American world tariffs assault and China's unexpectedly resilient response, which made it unbearable for Trump's Republican oligarch backers to support, as Musk's panic illustrated. Trump and his lackeys like Navarro and Miran may have a chef's kiss plan all sketched out of restoring American manufacturing, but their great sorrow is that they and their perfect plan exist in the mud and dirt of reality, Hegelian idealism faceplanting into the material conditions of the real world. American leadership simply does not have the capacity to tell its oligarchic and financial backers to "shut up" and "bear the pain for the greater good" in the same way that China did during the first term trade war. This "pause" shores up the market from a state of total doom and gloom, which relaxes some of the political pressure on Trump.
I don't really have an opinion on whether the "pause" was a pump-and-dump market manipulation (it totally was) because regardless of the intentionality, it has wider consequences. In that way, it wouldn't be wrong to say that the Chinese response put Trump into a Catch-22. Retaining tariffs on the rest of the world to follow through with their grand plan would be politically untenable through the mounting financial damage to their financial backers, which is the ultimate limiting factor curtailing any US executive action. The US made itself into a capitalist oligarchy and it is forced to lie in the same bed it made through McCarthyist repression. Reducing and pausing tariffs on the rest of the world, as he has now chosen, would provide an avenue to retaliate and take revenge against China, but undermines his original strategic goal.
The point, as Trump's team revealed after people mocked them for tariffing random Pacific islands, was to exact a cost on manufacturers so long as they stay out of the US, no matter where else they set up. This was done to incentivize the profit-seeking calculus of manufacturing companies to determine that it was worth it to come to the US rather than anywhere else. Additionally, and more importantly, this was meant to combat China's manufacturing outsourcing strategy of "Made Abroad with Chinese Characteristics" where Chinese manufacturers went overseas to set up intermediaries in locations like Vietnam (which is why that country received among the highest tariffs), which effectively negated the entire point of the US trade war on China, which was to weaken the Chinese manufacturing sector.
I believe that Trump genuinely sought to "make a deal" with China, particularly in line with the Phase One trade agreement that he briefly secured before the onset of COVID-19 and his electoral defeat in 2020 derailed any lasting progress. Historically, the West's successes against China have often involved signing unequal treaties, which leveraged the centralizing strength of the Chinese state to enforce Western terms on China and its people. Whether Trump anticipated China's response or was genuinely surprised by it, the "pause" he was ultimately forced to concede—at the detriment to his re-shoring strategy—demonstrates the impact of China's reaction.
In any case, the US's focus is once again squarely on China, but this just represents a continuation of the Trump I trade war, a more familiar ground compared to the scenario of the global trade conflict, now put on hold. While China will suffer from this renewed US assault, its experience from the first trade war suggests it is better equipped to weather such pressures. The previous trade war allowed China to consolidate domestic capital around its self-sufficiency goals, making it more resilient. In contrast, the rest of the world, as seen during Biden's term, lacks defenses against US economic and political aggression. Trump can boast about other countries coming up to "kiss his ass," but those nations like Vietnam do so out of a lack of options.
During Biden, China largely took a passive stance, as the US lashed out indiscriminately at multiple targets. To be frank, I'd say that it would have been politically untenable, for the Chinese leadership to have voluntarily stepped forward to faceslap Genocide Joe and draw his attention towards them at that time. Now, however, the Chinese government has a compelling rationale for positioning itself as a shield to redirect American hostility away from the rest of the world and focusing it squarely on China - simply because it's been made a fait accompli through Trump's actions. Since this is what happened during Trump I, at least all the way until the one month prelude in 2020 before the beginning of the pandemic when the US assassinated Soleimani, an intensification against China can be expected to allow the rest of the world, the Global South in particular, some breathing room. This would be a disaster if China is weakened as a result, but the experience accrued from a near-decade of trade war means that China is better positioned than in any time ever and the speed of the Chinese response this time around suggests that the Chinese government knows it.
This thread has had enough West Asia doomers lately, but it is true that the outlook for the Palestinian cause is going to revolve around the US policies. Trump was much more clever than Biden with respect to Palestine. His gambit in Term 1 was the slow suffocation of the Palestinian cause by bribing countries to sign onto the Abraham Accords for Israeli normalization. The Saudis under MBS were giving strong signs of being imminently about to sign on when October 7th happened. This would have been the grand prize: if the "center of Islam" recognized Israel, then all the other Gulf monarchies could opportunistically ride in on its coat-tails and the notion of normalizing relations would have been itself definitively normalized. This was Trump's asphyxiation strategy against the Palestinian cause.
Then the Al-Aqsa Flood took place and the Israeli rampage under Biden turned the Arab world completely against any arguments for normalization, to the point of potential violence against their governments if they pursued that course. Whatever military boondoggles that the US promised the Saudis became secondary to the risk of their own royal standing being threatened by alienating their populace and the fear of their prestige as the "Custodian of the Two Mosques" being diminished if they pursued normalization post-October 7th and so they put it on pause.
Trump will definitely try to restart the normalization campaign but public mood might still prevent countries like Saudi Arabia from signing on, even though MBS clearly would like to. This is the real achievement of October 7th, which is reigniting the Palestinian cause in the consciousness of the populace of the potential Abraham Accord countries. However, the overall West Asia situation is decidedly much less favorable than it was prior to October 7th. Hamas and Hezbollah are badly diminished and Iran is still evidently wracked by trauma at Soleimani's assassination by Trump and so their new "Reformist" leader is openly throwing everyone else under the bus to try to appease the US (including restarting the whole nuclear talks circus) so that it would turn its attention to another global theater. Syria has been completely flipped into simultaneously a comprador and a salafist entity and how this regime will appropriate Syria's resources, leftover military materiel and populace to serve US and Turkish interests once they've consolidated their grip on power is still unknown. The Russians are now completely out of the picture in West Asia after being evicted from their Syrian military bases. All in all, the only upside is the strengthening of Palestinian solidarity potentially stymying normalization efforts as the only thing the regional Arab governments care about more than taking bribes from the US is having popular discontent threaten their own positions.
The comical thing about this rag is that it is so consistent in its cheerleading agenda for Western imperialism and chauvinism since its creation in the early 19th century that both Marx and Lenin dunked on it.
"Having stood forward as one of the staunchest apologists of the late invasion of China" is how Karl Marx himself described "that eminent organ of British Free Trade, the London Economist" back in October 1858 regarding its support for the First Opium War. In October 1859, following the Anglo-French naval bombing of the city of Guangzhou during the 1857 Battle of Canton in the Second Opium War, Marx wrote "The Economist, which had distinguished itself by its fervent apology for the Canton bombardment" Over a hundred and sixty years since then, this rag has been just as anti-China today as it was back in Marx's time. Back then, it was the apologist of British "free trade," the pretext for both the Opium Wars it supported (along with supporting the Confederacy), now that the tables have turned, the "free trade" magazine's cover illustrations now depict Chinese EV exports as akin to bombarding the Earth like a meteor shower.
This closure is referring to the Economist's "Chaguan" column, penned by a single author in Beijing yellowface-cosplaying under that Chinese column name. It was analyzed in a January 2024 King's College London report as having not a single "clearly positive" story on China despite that this journalist "travels extensively in China to produce his reports, and on-the-ground anecdotes are a strong feature":
Another source of influential reporting on China is The Economist’s Chaguan column, launched in September 2018. It takes up one page of the print version of the newspaper (in the region of 1,000 words per article), and appears most weeks (The Economist is a weekly publication). Chaguan is written solely by one journalist, David Rennie, who is based in Beijing. [...] given that this period covered the COVID-19 pandemic in China, there were numerous reports on public health (12 in total) – particularly in 2020 (the first year of COVID) and again in 2022, when China’s COVID policy faced several challenges; when China was doing better than other countries in managing COVID, it was treated less by Chaguan and the media generally. Our framing analysis identified negative coverage in 84 per cent of Chaguan’s columns, with only four reports (1.5 per cent) being coded neutral-to-positive (and none clearly positive).
[...] Chaguan echoes the practice of other media in consistently repeating and emphasising particular terms or images of China, many of which are negative. For example, when discussing the economy, China’s economic behaviour towards foreign firms or governments is often described as ‘bullying’ or ‘threatening’. The use of negative terms is most common in reports on politics. Frequent keywords used in reports on Chinese domestic politics include ‘authoritarian’/‘authority’/‘autocracy’, ‘censorship’/ ‘controlling’/‘surveillance’, ‘irresponsible’ and ‘violate’/‘limit human rights’. Keywords regarding China’s foreign relations include authoritarian/autocratic, bully/cheat/harass, aggressive/reckless and blame/accuse foreign countries. These words directly define the nature of China or its behaviour as negative, and their frequent appearance in political coverage creates their links to Chinese politics, subliminally transforming the framework constructed by the media into the reader’s own perception. This constitutes a normalisation of a strongly negative picture of China’s politics.
The way that Hong Kong or Xinjiang are referred to across all of these media outlets reinforces this pattern. These two places, and the central government’s policies towards them, have become media bywords for repression and authoritarianism. They are frequently mentioned in passing in reports on topics that are not related to either place, in a way that frames China negatively: a template to plug into any story that needs evidence for Chinese ‘repression’, even if that story does not relate either to Hong Kong or Xinjiang.
Edit: Also just found out that this particular journalist is the son of a MI6 director, John Rennie. His brother was caught in the Hong Kong heroin trade which caused their father to resign from MI6. The fact that the Economist chose a literal MI6 failson as their "Beijing bureau chief" and that the son of Britain's top spy was permitted and trusted to "travel extensively" in the country at all and LARP as a "journalist" for six years is an excessive tolerance by the Chinese government and sinks whatever sob story they spun about being finally being shown the door.
I think after nearly a month now, the dust has settled enough to try at some material analysis of the consequences of Maduro and Cilia Flores’ abduction. This will not be a very "bloomer" ‘el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido’ post, but I’ll try not to unnecessarily stress any grim pronouncements.
The point (or rather, benefit) of the episode for American objectives isn't necessarily regime change (though this has, of course, been technically accomplished with the abduction of the elected executive), but to personalize geopolitics. There exist contradictions between the interests of a nation (including but not exclusively its collective people), its state apparatus, and its individual leadership. For the most part, these interests are generally aligned, but there will always exist gaps and material differences. This can be (and historically has been) exploited.
The consequences of this range from a complete (though generally temporary) disorientation of an adversary’s leadership dynamic (such as the Romans kidnapping/eliminating Germanic chieftains like the famous Arminius and his family or Armenian/Parthian kings), to engendering shifts in grand strategy and geopolitical policy (such as the Ming becoming insular and defensive after the capture of the emperor Yingzong), to creating interpersonal compromises that would not otherwise be possible (Churchill allegedly working out the European balance of power with Stalin, including the abandonment of the Italian and Greek communists, over "a napkin paper").
This latter point is why Trump insists on person-to-person meetings with top leadership from designated adversaries like Xi or Putin (or Kim during his first term). This is also how the USSR was brought down by the likes of Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl; the personal rapport they built with Gorbachev manifested an intense anxiety within the latter not to "disappoint" his "friends," which limited his scope of actions (not just feasibly but even cognitively) in response to the secession of the SSRs and the likes of Yeltsin (who himself would fall under a similar snare with Bush and Clinton). Analyses ranging from liberals like Zubok to Marxist-Leninists like Keeran & Kenny have all commented on this relationship dilemma as a reason why Gorbachev (deliberately and consciously) did not follow in Deng’s footsteps (noting that the Chinese response to the Tiananmen counter-revolution, and the subsequent Western propaganda backlash, actually preceded most of the counter-revolutions that would follow in other socialist states, which is a chronological relationship not often fully appreciated).
This does not imply the "Great Man of History" thesis is actually valid, but rather that the influences of the individual and the collective exist in a dialectical relationship instead of a zero-sum state.
With a month’s distance, it can be argued that Maduro’s abduction successfully serves as an example to cow the rest of the world, but this statement requires further nuance. Yes, Venezuela still largely endures and the PSUV hasn’t yet become compradors, but those would have been secondary benefits. The message isn’t to the Venezuelan people but to political leadership in especially (but not limited to) the Global South: the taboo of the personalization of geopolitics not only no longer exists as a deterrence, but that there are also no true consequences to breaches of that taboo against them and their loved ones.
It shows that the country doesn’t necessarily need its particular leadership to endure, but this fact serves to isolate that particular leadership from its people and government, by driving a cognitive and material wedge between the alignment of their interests. This fact has been repeatedly pointed out by leftists since the episode as a way to bolster morale, but without appreciation that the particular leadership being personally captured, humiliated, and treated as a criminal (alongside their partner) won’t share that view. Overall, there has been zero real blowback in general, but also none whatsoever to the benefit of Maduro’s rescue and liberation. It shows that the US could walk in, remove the top leadership, and yet leave the country alone; the country moves on, but the leadership is effectively abandoned to the whims of the United States. This exerts a moderating and coercive influence on any successors.
This abduction takes advantage of the contradictions between the interests of a political leadership and the country’s own interests by honing in on and weaponizing the gap. People are obviously loath to give Trump and his minions any credit, but this doesn’t even need to be the Trump administration’s original intent. The important thing is that these consequences are always retrospectively self-rationalizing, and this is an inevitable perception that will manifest particularly within the leadership of any designated adversaries vulnerable to what was done in Venezuela.
This may provide a material basis to explain any future actions by political leadership not just in Venezuela, but also elsewhere in the Global South that appear to go against the interests of their country, even and especially if that particular leadership has seemingly demonstrated their “bona fides” to certain principled positions in the past.