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In the face of waning dominance of the dollar as the world currency, lacking options to sustain the dollars value in the global market, empire as a tool no longer viable, and alternatives to their Financialization schemes, and global sanctions driving a split in payment systems, the Hermit Kingdom known as the Burgerreich turns its economic policies inward, abandoning conquest of empire, imperialism, and third world Financialization, in favor of economic nationalism.
Which is very funny because we subsist almost entirely on imports.
The rulers of empire now believe the propaganda they feed to the proles.
We're going to go from worrying about the price of food to just being worried about its availability.
Does BRICS have an alternative payment system even? Not their own currency, just something that allows them to directly trade without ever using the $$$.
https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3283760/vladimir-putin-says-no-brics-plan-create-alternative-swift-banking-system
There was some talk last year about one but it sounds like that's not in the table. Still they won't be using swift out looks like either?
We're going to see a lot of economic activity domestically in the USA as part of this. It won't be enough to win. But it might be enough to convince the workers that things are improving. More people will get into laborious factory employment, more people will get into laborious field employement, and more people will get into gig employment to maintain the livelihoods of the others. It might actually look half way decent in a few years.
But it's never going to put the West on a trajectory to surpass China. So there will also be an element of a war drive, and a lot of that labor is going to go to industrialized munitions production. And that's going to require nationalism/patriotism, and that means culture war and domestic oppression.
Yeah I agree to an extent. I think the demands globally are going to change very soon. Our ability to sustain any form of conflict is going to be deeply hampered, to the point that I think any amount of rearmament that we engage with is going to be defensive in the truest sense. While we do that though, development in states we traditionally have subjugated will have advanced enough to become true contenders against our influence.
South America and Africa will rise in our absence, likely to be the next set of contender states. The middle east will likely go through a realignment as well. All with China leading the way. Our sanction regime will loose all its venom as different market avenues open. We've already seen decolonization begin in Africa, and I think with this and economic support through B&R, were going to see rapid and compressed development of the productive forces in Africa that might bypass capitalist accumulation and land right into socialist production.
This new diminished position on the world stage will leave us susceptible to meaningful sanctions and global market actions that will intensify class antagonism at home. Production at home especially industrial production will need to be accompanied with a massive deflationary period to justify reshoring our industrial labor power. Which could be what the goal is with the tariffs coming out of the whitehouse.
That amount of class conflict, open and unmasked, could backfire. How it backfires, who knows. How long all this plays out? Decades I'm sure.
It would be amazing if the USA focused on defense on the expectation of invasion. Talk about a collosal waste of energy and focus.
I think the tarrifs have multiple goals. I think deflationary pressure is one. I think bargaining is another. But we agree that the goal is "restoring" or rather simple domestic capital investment.
The class antagonism problem is solved with xenophobia, scapegoats, and white supremacy - just like always.
I disagree that South America will rise alongside Africa. I think both will be susceptible to disruption by black ops. I think South America will be more susceptible than Africa. I hope I am wrong but I imagine part of the USA's lebensraum will be death squads, coups, and assassinations throughout South America to prevent any sort of hemispheric threat from emerging.
I think between deleting things like USAid and a growing domestic "terror" problem the US will need to reinvest in domestic cointelpro style projects. I think the working class right isn't fully aligned with the drivers behind this current federal crisis. The eggs are about to get more expensive, and that's a problem. The deflections are not going to work if they're all done at the same time like what is happening now.
Our current efforts in destabilizing our enemies are failing, and we needed to rely heavily on allies to achieve any of it, dragging them down with us. They are facing a similar problem as the US. Their fascist rise is born out of similar contradictions.
There is a reason why the Trump administration is pushing for NATO to be less reliant on US funds and it is because they want to exit NATO, likely because they know we can't keep production up in the near term to meet defense needs. The chip conflict with China is only worsens this reality. They could make the importing of that technology for these advanced tech systems the DoD wants to build incredibly painful.
I wouldn't be shocked to see a "Starwars" like project out of this administration, just like Reagan. This time built by SpaceX using what we know about the iron dome. A good way to dump cash into private industry. Its not yet clear to me that the AI sector is going to recover and I'll bet we see the Stargate project axed in favor of something that's less of a bubble a defense aligned.
All this to say, it's going to be hard to exert foreign influence if we're facing major crisis at home. Our allies are going to be dealing with similar unrest.
Also I'm mostly talking out my ass here. I could be fully wrong about all this. It is interesting to speculate about, but it's more an exercise in figuring out how fucked we are.
I think this is a deeply inaccurate analysis. NATO is a transnational nuclear military that has functioning logistics networks, trained command structure and soldiers, and masses of material deployed all the way across Europe. Napoleon and Hitler spent so much blood and treasure to have a tiny fraction of the positioning that NATO has. The US will NEVER give up NATO.
The reason the Trump administration is pushing for NATO to be less reliant on US funds is because they want Europe to develop their own military AND transfer some of their treasury to the USA through weapons deals.
I would, because I don't see the current situation like a USA vs USSR situation. I see this situation a lot closer to Germany vs USSR right now.