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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
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The funny thing about this is that if you go to hyper liberal, atlanticist or pan european spaces you have this enduring discourse about Putin's Russia and Trump's America being a anti-european conspiracy. But this sort of mask off moment does actually create an imperative for european elites to get their shit together and actually do something akin to federalizing Europe.
This 'C5' has one American vassal in the form of Japan but no stakeholders from Africa or Latin America. It's like having one's cake and eating it too. The US gets to claim that 'the big boys all have spheres of influence' but then bring in a vassal state of theirs into the discussion. The Europeans aren't being discarded, they are just not relevant since the front for imperial competition should be anywhere but Europe.
What's not clear here is why the US thinks Russia and China would be at all interested in this arrangement. It's pretty clear that both are doing just fine without trading with the US. I imagine they're going to keep focusing on developing BRICS instead. They're probably going to make some deals with the US just to keep Americans pacified, but I doubt there's going to be any sort of a strategic partnership there.
I think the most we can imagine is the idea of a plan for a new security council. Meaning that Russia, China, India and the US would recognize each other as 'Great Powers' with their own 'Spheres of Influence'. Why this is being discussed is more or less purely ideological. It's not part of a grand strategy to extract more from Europe, secure Latin America or seek cooperation with China, India and Russia as traditional channels already exist to do all of that. They are just not being leveraged properly or being disregarded, again, due to ideological reasons.
Its a reflexive harkening towards old american isolationism, which was not isolationist at all and entailed the US 'retreating' to an already globe spanning empire that included the entire Western Hemisphere as well as the Phillipines and islands in the Pacific. The thing is though that just like with Britain before it, the people talking about pivots or downscaling or focusing forces away from being a global American Empire don't actually mean it.
I think that's the most realistic scenario. The US, China, and Russia will negotiate their respective spheres of influence going forward. Although, I'm don't really see Russia and China agreeing to leave Latin America which is something the US seems to be insisting on.
I think the open question is more towards to what extent the US will demand exclusivity. The Chinese and the Russians have complimentary spheres of influence in Central Asia in no small part because the Russians do not have the heft to be an economic guarantor and the Chinese do not have the desire to be a security guarantor in the region.
The US is a financialized oligarchy. The system of banking and finance which powers Chinese and Latin American investment and trade is theirs to destroy. They can't help themselves when it comes to, say, Venezuela's shitty oil reserves because stuff like that is easy to pillage and dole out in a centralized manner but I don't think anyone would dispute that China injecting US denominated capital into the continent to increase trade in US denominated debts, assets and goods makes the US stronger. And yet sanctions are issued anyways because at the end of the day the american oligarchy is not monolithic and the american state isn't supposed to plan or actually control anything.
People will say that the current deindustrialization of the US is untenable to the military caste and the working classes of the US so its politically unsustainable for the US to go on to remaining the asset manager of a world centralized on East Asian manufacturing. But, well, this whole Trump America First onshoring plan is turning out to be just another financial scheme to pillage the american commons and centralize assets in the hands of a sector of the ruling class. Much ado was spoken about grand plans to turn the world economy on its head but at this point if you only disregard personalized schemes like Lutnick's tariff deal it does genuinely seem like the US oligarchy just wants to use import taxes to ensure lower taxes on the wealthy which, incidentally, is the latin american way of doing things.
Agree with all that, the US is ultimately a kleptocracy and oligarchs at the levers of power are only looking after themselves. That precludes any coherent strategy a national level, hence why we're seeing the empire flailing. The big question is what arrangement they'll be willing to come to in the end.