When Cultural and Economic Hegemony Fails Violence Tends to Follow

In the mid-2010s, the internationalist elite of the United States understood that they were running out of time to rescue their global hegemony from the threat of a multipolar world. They had placed Iran on the back burner with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015, and they could now focus on step 1 of taking down the Axis of Resistance (Russia, Iran, China); crushing Russia to weaken China. In 2016 the think-tank of the US security state, the RAND Corporation, had produced a report War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable which noted that by 2025 the military gap between the US and China would be much smaller and any conflict between them may be inconclusive. Having control of Russia, together with Central Asia, would challenge China not just geographically but also resource-wise as Russia and Central Asia provide overland access for China to critical resources such as oil and gas.

But then Donald Trump happened, and Hillary Clinton did not make it into the Whitehouse in 2017. Instead of a provocation against the Donbass happening in 2017, Russia was given five more years to prepare and to deepen its relationship with China. It should have been less but then COVID hit, which both China and Russia seemed to handle a lot better than the West, and then the debacle in Afghanistan; a country providing a backdoor into China’s northwestern provinces. In the meantime, Trump had thrown away the JCPOA and imposed even tighter sanctions on Iran, ironically freeing that nation to follow its own path given that it was already enduring the “mother of all sanctions”. He had also raised tariffs against China, which only seemed to fuel US inflation.

Even with the changed circumstances, the internationalist elite stuck to the plan and had Ukraine line up its military ready to invade the Donbass. Russia struck first though, wiping out much of the Ukrainian army within a matter of weeks but not possessing the manpower to consolidate its territorial gains. The US and the West in general triggered what they considered would be their knock-out blow, massive sanctions against Russia and the seizure of its US and Euro foreign exchange reserves. But the ruble did not become “rubble” as President Biden had forecast and the other 7 billion outside the West refused to sanction Russia; with countries such as India happy to buy cheap Russian oil and even resell it for a handy profit back to the West. Financial and military resources were poured into Ukraine to rebuild its armed forces and keep its economy going, resulting in some significant territorial gains against the overstretched Russians. But the Russian economy stabilized, war production was drastically increased and hundreds of thousands of new troops were brought into the Russian military. By early 2023 much of the new Ukrainian army had been wiped out, as Russia fought a war of attrition where casualty rates were in its favour in some cases as high as 10:1; epitomized by the Ukrainian cauldron of death called Bakhmut (now Artymovsk). More financial and military resources were poured into Ukraine for a Spring/Summer offensive which turned into an utter carnage for the Ukrainian army with gains measured in handfuls of kilometres; a third new Ukrainian army was significantly destroyed.

The extreme sanctioning of Russia placed it in the same place as Iran, with nothing to lose. This naturally led to much deeper ties between the two, including military ties. It also allowed Russia to deepen its ties with another nation with nothing to lose, North Korea; a nation with an outsized Military Industrial Complex that could be a great addition to that of Russia. As the leaves started to change colour, a depleted Ukraine and a West that had emptied its munitions warehouses to supply Ukraine, faced a reinvigorated Russia that continued the process of bleeding the Ukrainian military dry; with a new cauldron of death being created in Avdiivka. The Western attempts to start fires on Russia’s periphery failed as the Georgian parliament started to reassert its own sovereignty and the turning of the president of Armenia only led to that nation’s loss of Nagorno-Karabakh and a greatly unexpected warming of relations between Azerbaijan and Iran. The Ukrainian War had also greatly diminished the esteem of the Western militaries as its wunderwaffe and tactical training were shown to be no match for a peer competitor such as Russia. A 2023 RAND Corporation report, Inflection Point: How to Reverse the Erosion of U.S. and Allied Military Power and Influence, stated that:

The U.S. defense strategy has been predicated on U.S. military forces that were superior in all domains to those of any adversary. This superiority is gone. The United States and its allies no longer have a virtual monopoly on the technologies and capabilities that made them so dominant against adversarial forces.

With mounting domestic resistance to providing yet more money and arms to Ukraine in the West, and the inability of the Western MIC to ramp up production to replace dwindling stockpiles, the fate of Ukraine seemed to be sealed; only the scale of the territorial loss seemed to be open to question.

In parallel, Russia and China were working together to bolster the seven billion against the golden billion. The peace agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the reopening of relations between Syria and the Gulf Cooperation Council Nations, the overthrow of the Western-oriented government in Ethiopia, and the incremental removal of Western influence in the Sahel, are all examples of the shrinking scope of Western hegemony. Even in Libya, Russia threatened to gain access to a naval base. Attempts to install a Western-oriented leadership in Thailand had been forestalled by the sovereign, and the Western-funded destabilization of Myanmar had produced an ongoing limited conflict rather than a full-blown conflagration on China’s border. The only real gain for the West was found with the new leadership of the Philippines which seems hell-bent on becoming the next Ukraine along with Taiwan.

The sanctions against Russia have also blown back massively on Europe, and especially a Germany deeply dependent upon cheap Russian fossil fuels. Unlike a growing and re-industrializing Russia, Europe is now entering a recession and significant deindustrialization made worse by the significant fall in European car sales in China due to the rapid EV transition there. With interest rates rising in response to inflation, the possibility of a new European debt crisis is very real; especially with respect to an Italy seemingly unable to grow its economy as its youth find better possibilities abroad and have less and less children. In the US, just as rising interest rates threatened recession and a bursting of the QE/zero interest rate bubble in late 2022, the US government came to the rescue with additional fiscal stimulus; aided by a Federal Reserve that blinked the following January then somewhat panicked in the face of regional bank collapses. In fiscal 2022 (2022-2023), the US government ran a deficit of 5.8% of GDP on the verge of what seems to be an approaching recession; without that extra stimulus the US economy would have already been in a deep recession. As the recession intensifies that deficit may explode far beyond the 9.75% of GDP experienced in 2008, or even the COVID-lockdown driven 14.7% on 2020; on top of a US government debt to GDP ratio of 120% and record levels of private indebtedness.

Given the above, the best option for the West would seem to be one of retrenchment. Find a way out of the Ukrainian debacle, even if it means more territorial losses to Russia, and stabilize government finances and the economy. But that would take time, while the window of opportunity for taking down China (and Russia and Iran) keeps passing by! Even the attempts by the US to hold back China within the “middle income trap” through high technology sanctions have backfired as China redoubled its efforts to develop its own domestic high technology capabilities with great success; as with the new Huawei phone that has overcome the high technology sanctions to once again challenge Apple. Then came the new conflict between Israel and the 2.2 million Palestinian inhabitants of its open-air concentration camp called Gaza…

The Israeli Zionists had been looking at their own window of opportunity passing for cleansing Occupied Palestine of the Palestinians, and also the leader Netanyahu was incentivized to find a distraction from the internal troubles that threatened his political position and his freedom. The peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran completely changed the balance of power in the region and the ongoing decline of relative US/Western power threatened Israel’s military superiority. The evidence that the Israeli leadership Let It Happen On Purpose (LIHOP), that is the Hamas incursion, is now quite compelling. Just as with 9/11, the response is of a completely different scale to the attack, the carpet bombing of civilians in Gaza and the attempted ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population by making Gaza uninhabitable (e.g. cutting off water and electricity supplies, restricting aid convoys, attacking Palestinian fishermen, destroying the majority of homes and other buildings).

The full dysfunction of the US power structure now came into play, with Zionists (both Jewish and non-Jewish, such as the new Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives) embedded at the highest levels in US society. The statement of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken when arriving in Israel, that he came first as a fellow Jew rather than as US Secretary of State, showed for all to see that the US was not to be trusted as a good faith player. His, and President Biden’s, treatment by Arab leaders showed that they very much understood that reality. The absolute support of the US and the West for the Israeli carpet bombing and ethnic cleansing of Gaza is both redirecting military supplies and financial resources from Ukraine and erecting a funeral pyre for Western cultural hegemony. Concepts such as humanitarian intervention and right to protect (R2P) are now seen as the self-serving Western BS that they are by the other 7 billion and an increasing share of Western populaces. Western complaints about the mythical “genocide” of the Chinese Moslem Uyghurs are shown to be utterly hypocritical as Palestinian Muslims are openly murdered by an Israeli military directly aided by Western military supplies and Western special forces. Even so-called Democratic progressives such as Bernie Saunders, Robert F. Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard have shown their bigoted pro-Zionist true colours.

Gramsci posited that as capitalist elite cultural hegemony fails, that elite will turn to greater levels of compulsion and state violence to remain in power; fascism. We are already seeing ever greater levels of state and private censorship, such as the banning of pro-Palestinian voices from YouTube together with state security forces attempts to disrupt and arrest pro-Palestinian demonstrators and label such voices as “antisemitic” and espousing “hate speech”. An example is the British Home Secretary attempt to brand a planned pro-Palestinian march as a “hate march”:

Faced with condemnation and resignations in disgust from senior UN and even US officials, alternative media platforms such as even TikTok turning into effective Hasbara propaganda debunking mechanisms, and a rapid decline in President Biden’s polling figures especially among the young and Arab-Americans, the internationalist wing of the US capitalist elite finds itself in a domestic place that it did not expect to be in twelve months before the 2024 presidential election.

With the Republican Party being even more full-in with the Zionist position, all parts of the US establishment including even the fake “progressives”, are charting a course that is directly against the wishes of an increasing section of the US populace. If the situation in the Middle East escalates, requiring direct US military intervention, the US establishment may require the very actions that President Wilson carried out to enter WW1 against the wishes of the general populace; three years of what Hochschild typified as “Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis”. A quasi-fascist state replete with 250,000 goons from the Nazi-SA like American Protective League and extensive censorship. The only real difference between the internationalist elites (represented by the Democratic Party and the “Never Trump” part of the Republican Party) and the more domestically oriented elites is whether or not to continue funding for Ukraine. The Republican dominated House of Representatives has passed a funding bill for Israel only while the Democrat dominated Senate refuses to pass any such bill that does not include funding for Ukraine. Both sets of elites are in agreement that China is the main enemy that must be vanquished, and that Israel must be supported nearly unconditionally.

At the international level, any US and Western soft power among the other 7 billion is being significantly diminished; with the West now seen as declining in economic, social and military terms while directly supporting a very public genocide. At the same time, the IMF has raised its 2023 growth forecasts for Russia and China to 2.2% and 5.4% respectively; so much for the calls for yet another “China crash”, while both nations are seen as honest brokers with respect to the Gaza conflict and Russia was recently ranked by global correspondents to a US News “best countries” survey as having the strongest military in the world (the US was #2, China #3, Israel #4 and Iran #7). The US capitalist elite foreign policy consensus with respect to both Israel and China, while overseeing a crumbling society at home for the many, does not bode well for its legitimacy both at home and abroad. The same can be said for the elites of Germany, France and the UK.

The Chinese strategy continues to be one of seemingly endless patience with US provocations, while continuing to build peaceful relations and greater legitimacy with the rest of the 7 billion. The Ukraine and Gaza conflicts are greatly to its benefit as they both delay any meaningful US actions against China and serve to pull the 7 billion further and further away from the West; with US legitimacy most probably being damaged even more by the domestic political chaos that may surround the 2024 US elections. All the while, the West becomes economically and financially weaker while China continues to gain strength. Russia benefits from the Gaza conflict as attention and Western funding is taken away from Ukraine, and its reputation as an honest broker is reinforced. Any escalation that included an oil and gas embargo against Israel and the West would of course greatly benefit Russia, while China may not be affected that much by such an embargo as a two-tier oil and gas spot market may develop and China has many longer-term fixed price oil and gas contracts in place, as well as a very extensive strategic oil reserve. The greatest loser would of course be a fossil-fuel deficient Europe.

One ray of hope for the US and world peace may be provided by the current Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, who is increasingly looking like a replacement for the floundering Biden as the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate. Newsom’s recent visit to China, and the warm reception given to him by the Chinese elite, may provide an avenue for the US elites to step away from the chasm that would be a war with China. As Biden continues to show little concern for his core constituencies, including Arab, Black and young voters who are increasingly aghast at his unconditional support for Israel while he does nothing for their own interests, he is slipping further behind Trump in the polls. A continuation of that trend may open the way for a significantly younger Newsom, who seems adept at smoothly handling multiple hypocrisies and conflicting views in parallel. Time is running out though, as the many show trials aimed at Trump have only served to reinforce his base and delegitimize the current administration in the eyes of many.

Can the US and Western elites resign themselves to a multipolar world where they may have to accept the remit of international law rather than their self-serving “Liberal International Order” and a significantly lesser global role? After five centuries of Western dominance such a world will require a huge adjustment to the self-image of Western elites and the general populace that has been extensively propagandized with beliefs in Western civilizational superiority; echoed in the differential treatment of the deaths of “European” Israelis and Arab Palestinians. It will also require an acceptance of a significantly reduced ability to exploit other nations, as France has recently had to accept with respect to Niger. These challenges may be too much to bear for the Western elites, and a turn to violence in the face of the continued loss of cultural and economic hegemony is still very much on the cards. The distractions and delays provided by the Trump presidency, the Afghanistan debacle, the Ukraine debacle, the Gaza conflict and the 2024 US elections, together with Chinese, Russian and Iranian patience and intelligent diplomacy, may be seen in the future as some of the main factors that forestalled a global war. Time is on the side of the other 7 billion.