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Just look at China-Iran trade numbers, it’s plunging by 20% this year. Chinese investors are pulling away because they cannot see profitable return in Iran and the surrounding regions. This worsens the economic condition in Iran, and months later, we see the Iranians protesting as a result.

This has been more-or-less my read of the current US strategy in countering China. The US has largely decided that it will not be able to compete with China in terms of productive capacity, so instead, it will seek to take control of all of China's customers and investment markets. Instead of trying to fight China for monopoly power over the production, the US is seeking monsopony power over Chinese goods. If China doesn't do what the US wants, it will have nowhere to sell its goods or invest its capital. And what markets the US can't take control of, it will destroy entirely.

I definitely agree and I've sounded off on this myself in the past. Trump's push for control of key waterways among other things signals a desire to act as gatekeepers. If they can control the raw resources (like oil, minerals) and the markets then China can only exist and thrive as a manufacturing power via going through the US, paying the US toll (not necessarily money for every product but submission, not disrupting the dollar, not crossing core US interests, etc), then the US stays on top and China is forced into an awkward position of needing to maintain this to prevent the collapse of conditions at home. The US is not far from being positioned to be able to just cut China off from most of both its suppliers and buyers and inflict horrible pain on China.

With the fall of Venezuela and Iran the US would totally control world oil and petrochemical markets. I fear China's planners may have made the dangerous mistake of thinking the end of history was WW2, that the renunciation of violence and of respecting states and the UN international laws enshrined at the end of that war would carry on forever and the US would abide by them and fear to openly violate them as it is now doing and that bound by that their economic warfare against the US would bring capitalism to its knees. But not bound by that, plans need to change, the US is not far gone at all and has plenty of ways to regain strength and put China in an isolating chokehold.

Another thought I have on those celebrating certain figures escaping death. Splits are what the US wants, they want factions, in-fighting, etc. But there's another thing, the problem with being an enemy of the US is you have to get lucky every single day. The US only has to get lucky once in killing or kidnapping you. They get to keep on trying and being on the defensive all the time while they get to rest and relax wears you down (Maduro's undoing I presume was this, he refused to be in hiding for what could be months or a year while the US may or may not make a move and didn't want to be worn down by living like that and well he really should have it seems). And shuffling leadership leads to pawns of the US or compradors who wouldn't have passed vetting normally getting close enough to the levers of power for the US to use them in a future play for power.

When you don't have control of your skies, when the US can assassinate from above, infiltrate special forces from above at will at their pleasure you cannot maintain much of a state. They can continually undermine and destabilize and shuffle up the deck of cards that is your government and movement at their pleasure until they get a deck they like. This may take decades and never work but it often only takes years.

Syria did not fall in a day or a month or a year. It took a decade of persistent effort but the US won.

Iran likewise I do not see continuing to stand long-term if the economic pain continues, they're even weaker than socialist states because they're based on an unpopular fundamentalist/traditionalist religious movement that is increasingly out of date and step with the beliefs and wants of average people there and refuses to really moderate or reconcile as a good socialist state would do. And if Iran falls it will have been because of persistent US effort, decades of sanctions, economic and hybrid warfare, undermining, targeted assassinations, operations to inflict trauma and dispirit the Iranian leadership and people, bribes, blackmail, hacking, infiltration, etc shifting enough right pieces into place that it actually happens. With any luck Iran won't fall this decade but I wouldn't be surprised if it fell this year either.

This stuff (hybrid warfare) is always going on out of sight all the time by the US and when we see history moving disastrously like in the fall of Syria it was because of these many hidden factors we rarely see or hear about and often fail to piece together into a larger picture.

Too many so-called Marxists forget the primacy of material conditions. The revolution has the support of the people as long as it improves conditions or alleges it will do so in a short while when conditions are already bad. The revolution that's come and gone and who loses material improvements to peoples' lives and sees impoverishment, misery, lessening of living conditions, etc and can do nothing to stop it over a decade or decades is hard to maintain.

In certain societies like Cuba where you have had more than half a century of revolutionary education and you prevent the imperialist propaganda from reaching the eyes and ears of the people you can hold out quite a bit longer, but in many places they don't control the media, they don't prevent the whisperings of the US and they don't educate the population properly on imperialism, its tactics, historical and dialectical materialism, etc.

So Cuba, DPRK, both can stand up quite well because they educate their populations in a Marxist way and they prevent the propaganda whisperings and they are isolated from the world economy and cannot be subject to significant further outside economic warfare and pressure.