How The War in Ukraine Threatens US Global Hegemony and Rent Extraction

After twenty years of an utterly failed occupation of Afghanistan, which cost the US government about US$2.3 trillion (part of the US$8 trillion cost of the post-9/11 US imperial wars), the US retreated in an utterly demeaning fashion. The Afghan army that they had spent so much money on training and equipping rapidly dissolved in the face of the Taliban. The blow to US, and Western, prestige was quickly memory holed by the Western media but not by the leaders of the Other 7 billion. Here is a reminder of the widespread corruption, incompetence, stupidity, arrogance and chaos that was involved over the two decades:

The US had supposedly invaded Afghanistan to “remove the Taliban” (the Taliban had offered to give up Osama Bib Laden and his cohorts to the US, so that certainly was not the reason for the invasion) but after two decades of US/Western occupation the Taliban has returned. In an utterly spiteful action, the US then froze all of Afghanistan’s foreign exchange reserves - money required to feed the population - in an attempt to bring the country to its knees. This backfired by pushing the Afghans into the arms of China and Russia; even the Western media and state propaganda organs have had to grudgingly accept the positive nature of the increasing economic and diplomatic links between the countries, here, here, here and here.

With respect to Iraq, the US invasion removed a leadership that had been a US ally and enemy of Iran which was then replaced by an Iraq-friendly regime which in the end pushed out most of the US occupiers. Only by controlling the disbursement of Iraqi oil revenues (placed into a US$ account controlled by the US Treasury) has the US been able to maintain some level of influence in the nation. The US and UK attempts to destroy the Syrian regime, with the help of the Saudi and Qatari monarchs, was forestalled by Russian and Iranian intervention. The US answer to this was swingeing sanctions designed to stop any rebuilding of a nation destroyed by a war with foreign-funded terrorists and then an earthquake, while keeping occupying troops there to steal the nation’s oil and food while protecting the terrorists. The Assad leadership now totally relies upon Iran and Russia for its survival, but has also been accepted back into the Arab League; underlining the realignment of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

With the China and Russia facilitated peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the increasingly friendly ties between the GCC countries and Syria, the US strategy in the Middle East is in tatters. The unwavering support for the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza has also served to make it impossible for even the vassal rulers of Egypt and Jordan to fulfil their imperial roles. Instead it opens up the possibility of a Turkish alignment with Syria to both deal with the issue of the Kurds (which are supported by the US) and to combat Israel’s aggression.

All of the above would have been unimportant though if the US strategy to drive regime change in Russia (and Belarus and Kazakhstan) had been successful. For eight years after the US-sponsored fascist coup that removed the elected president from office, the US (and the West) have been working to turn Ukraine into a wholly-owned Western colony while fashioning its population into a proxy weapon to be used against Russia. All of the rich soils, vast fossil fuel and mineral resources and industrial heartland of the Donbass would be owned by the Western elites, with a fascist government used to discipline the populace and provide a cheap, docile workforce for Western elite exploitation. Over eight years, a Ukrainian army was fashioned into a Western trained and equipped force targeted at the fascist-resisting Donbass. The Ukrainians would spend vast amounts of money on Western arms, filling the pockets of the US Military Industrial Complex that serves as a golden retirement plan for senior military and other government officials. Russia had spoilt the party somewhat by bringing Crimea back into Mother Russia (after Khrushchev’s political games had torn it from its true home on the 1950s).

In early 2022 everything was ready, a Ukrainian army of 150,000 directly pointed at the Donbass and getting ready to invade and decisively break the back of the Donbass resistance; or drag Russia into an intervention that would unleash the “sanctions from hell” that would destroy the Russian economy and trigger regime change. Then Russia would be returned to the vassal status it collapsed into in the 1990s and its vast natural resources could once again be plundered by the Western capitalist elites. With Russia defeated, both Iran and China would be severely weakened and thus much less able to withstand US imperial pressures. A complete reordering of the global chessboard in one single blow, perhaps even a third unipolar moment!

But something went wrong, the Russians did not just intervene. They invaded taking large swathes of land from the Ukrainians and inflicting a stunning defeat upon the Ukrainian armed forces. At the same time, the Russian economy did not collapse under the weight of the sanctions from hell, but rather stabilized and then grew as the Other 7 billion ignored the West’s demands to respect the sanctions. The reaction of the West was to pour resources and weapons into Ukraine to rebuild its shattered army and replace the massive losses in equipment, while providing extensive surveillance and intelligence resources. Late in 2022 that army was able to take land back in the Kherson and Kharkov regions that were lightly protected by the Russians; due to the relatively small Russian military contingent committed to the war. That would be more a mirage of victory though, by May 2023 the Russians had inflicted huge losses upon the Ukrainians while taking the stronghold of Bakhmut.

But the West still had hope as it had trained and equipped yet another Ukrainian army for a Summer offensive, that started in June and petered out in December. These hopes were dashed as the assumed drive to cut the land bridge to Crimea turned into a bloody slog over a few kilometres at best as the Russian military deftly defended while inflicting appalling losses upon the Ukrainian forces. Three separate Ukrainian armies had now been destroyed by the Russians, the first in the opening few months of the war, the second during the Battle for Bakhmut, and the third during the Summer Offensive. Much of the whole Western armoury had been depleted, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and over half a million irretrievable losses inflicted on the Ukrainian military (with a population under Ukrainian control of perhaps 20 million, highly skewed toward the old, the young, and the infirm).

After two years of war the Russian Military Industrial Complex was starting to drive on all cylinders, showing an uncanny ability to pump out huge numbers of useful weapons at low cost (especially when compared to the Western MIC). Together with a conscription that had massively increased the size of the army, and large numbers of volunteers, the Russians were ready to incrementally turn up the heat on the Ukrainians. The result was a buckling of the Ukrainian lines, and then a slowly accelerating cascade of collapse as the fortress of Avdiivka fell; to be followed by an increasing number of other Ukrainian strongholds. Lots of cope and utter lies from the Western “analyst” below, as he refuses to acknowledge the huge Ukrainian losses and the many prisoners of war taken, nor the strategic significance if this fortress.

The Russian success has also been noted in Central Asia, with the perceived Russian ability to provide security in the region was greatly enhanced; building on the reorientation of Afghanistan toward Russia and China.

Russia’s stunning victory in the battle of Avdeevka and the rout of the Ukrainian military, boosts the credibility of Russia as provider of security for the Central Asian region. The point is not lost on the erudite Central Asian mind that Russia has single-handedly put the NATO on the back foot. 

This becomes a defining moment, as it complements the comfort level stemming out of the new normalcy in Afghanistan, thanks to Russia’s effective diplomatic engagement with the Taliban.  

At the same time, the appetite in the West for the financing and rearming (a fourth new army?) of Ukraine was rapidly dwindling, matched by the greatly reduced readiness of the Ukrainian people to throw their lives away at the front. A situation exacerbated by the US determination to give priority to fully supplying the Israeli genocide.

Instead of enjoying their plundering of the Ukraine colony and the new Russian vassal, while lording over the cowed Iranians and Chinese, the US elite is now faced with the probable collapse of the Ukrainian military and society; Russia will be the one that subsumes the Ukrainian riches. In addition, a perhaps fatal blow will be dealt to the perceived US military advantage. Together with the shredding of its soft power over the past decade, brought to a head with the rout from Afghanistan, the failure of the anti-Russia sanctions, and the Israeli genocide, the US may be faced with a severe retrenchment in its international position. Southeast Asia dominated by the Chinese economic juggernaut, Central Asia by China, Russia and Iran, and the Middle East by Iran and Russia. A Russia with a new border with Slovakia and Hungary would also be linked by land to Serbia, with perhaps a Bulgaria on the fence between Russia and the West. To add insult to injury, an increasing number of Northern Africa nations are asserting their sovereignty from Western vassalage; as with Ethiopia and Niger.

And in the background the seemingly unstoppable Trump machine throws aside every challenge, whether from political opponents, the fake news media, or from politicized and partisan District Attorneys and Judges. Pushing for a retreat from Ukraine and even perhaps the Middle East, to focus on what he sees as the main enemy: China. As a representative more of US domestic capitalists, such as the real estate sector, domestic fossil fuel and mineral extraction, domestic manufactures, and domestic financiers (as against the global behemoths such as Citibank and Blackrock), he cares much less for the spoils from a client-state Ukraine and a vassal Russia. The US global capitalist interests are more represented by the Democratic Party and Republicans In Name Only (RINO) that have been repeatedly non-plussed at his ability to survive their intensive and repeated attempts to undermine and destroy him.

So now the panic of the European, Japanese and US global capitalist elites intensifies. The former are especially desperate having ruined their industrial economies by turning their back on cheap Russian hydrocarbons on the promise of an endless US supply, and wasted so much government money on the Ukraine project that could have benefitted their own citizens. But on an even more personal level, many of the Western elites are facing the loss of the fat extractive flows not only from the Ukrainian client state and the assumed Russian vassal, but also from many others that now perceive that the time is ripe for them to use their resources for the benefit of their own populations rather than for rich Europeans, Japanese and Americans. For example with Niger’s uranium resources and Indonesia’s nickel and bauxite deposits.

Such moves will keep an increasing amount of the value of the resources, as well as the industrial value added within the non-Western nations, greatly reducing Western extractive flows. Niger has for a long time been exploited by the French, kept among the poorest of the poorest nations in the world while its mining riches were extracted and taken for pennies on the dollar. Recently, it has also become a major hub of the fake US “war on terror” which purports to fight groups actually created and/or supported by the West as an excuse to locate US military bases in the region. The obfuscation and outright lying about this is redolent in this NBC piece about Niger.

The “expert” guest is actually an employee of a US state and military funded think tank in Washington D.C., the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. His resume from the CSIS web site.

He is also a lecturer in African studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Prior to CSIS, he was the Africa senior adviser at the International Republican Institute. Previously, he served as the course coordinator for central and southern Africa at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute. He was also a Peter J. Duignan distinguished visiting fellow and a national fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution … He is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve

A native of Congo, he also has an MBA and MPP from the University of Chicago. About as “House African” as you can get.

The US may still have general extractive dominance in Latin America, as evidenced by the lawfare removal of Rousseff and imprisoning of Lula in Brazil (now returned as a better capitalist disciplined president), and the victory of Milei in Argentina, but outside the West and the Western Hemisphere it is being increasingly challenged. A full defeat in Ukraine would not only move that nation into the opposing camp, but also greatly embolden the Other 7 billion to take their fair share of their own resources and build their own value added (i.e. industrialization). This is economic and financial poison for the US elites and the US economy.

Trump may think that he can pull of a “deal” with Russia that will forestall such an eventuality, but after four years of the reality of a Trump presidency and the all out economic, financial and proxy military war of the past few years, the Russian leadership will require concessions that Trump will find extremely disagreeable. And to accept such terms would undermine the US reputation and power around the world, while stoking intra-capitalist civil war at home. The time when Russia could be used as a Western ally against China are long gone, if they ever existed. And in the meantime, the Russian army may make any such agreements mute by achieving total victory. The Ukrainian front-line fortified villages and towns keep falling as the Russians continue their advances (Orlivka to the west of Avdiivka and Makivka to the south of Kupyinsk being the latest, with Berdychi, Ivanivske, Krasnohorivka and Terny on deck).

So the European capitalist elites and their courtiers increasingly panic as they see the future of Europe as a declining archipelago off the growing EurAsian continent, with an increasingly independent Africa attached. The US Democratic and RINO capitalist elites see the area open to their extractive activities shrinking inwards toward the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Oceania, Japan and North Korea. And even in Europe, the Balkans may be slipping from their grasp. The Japanese elites see a declining population and a declining global economic presence. Will the Western elites continue to escalate in a desperate attempt to maintain their wealth and power, or will they step back from more destructive self-defeating mistakes? The recently floated trial ballon about the possibility of European troops on the ground in Ukraine (i.e. official ones rather than sheep-dipped ones) is a marker of the desperate thrashings of these elites in the face of a Russian victory.