Last month, the commentator Pepe Escobar speculated that the Ukrainian side’s full military humiliation may come by the middle of this summer. He didn’t feel this was guaranteed to be the moment when this happened; only that given how’s Ukraine victory was mathematically impossible from the start, its defeat in Bakhmut and its futile attempt at a counteroffensive could soon render the “Ukraine will prevail in time” narrative untenable. Now that we’ve gotten into mid-summer, the events Escobar was expecting have indeed come to be; what territorial gains Kiev has gotten have failed to take away Russia’s strategic advantages. What Escobar couldn’t anticipate was the wild twist which has since been added to this story; that being a revolt by a Russian private military company leader which ended up making the failure of Biden’s Ukraine proxy war even more assured.
When the PMC revolt occurred, it created excitement among the U.S. empire’s agents of destabilization, being celebrated both by the new cold warriors within the corporate media, and by the elements of the “left” that oppose international unity with Russia’s anti-hegemonic efforts. It looked like their hopes were coming true; Russia’s military project was undermining itself, in a way that may even lead to the demise of the Russian state as we know it! Then the true nature of the situation became apparent.
This bit of infighting within the Russian bourgeoisie tested the resilience of the institutions, both within Russia and within its partnered countries, that are behind the special operation in Ukraine. And these institutions prevailed. As the commentator Thierry Meyssan has observed about how the assistance Belarus provided in neutralizing the PMC threat has made Russia’s cultural narrative even more in favor of the special operation:
Prigozhin’s men did not march on Moscow. The Ministry of Defense apparently fired no missiles at Wagner’s soldiers. The Prosecutor General has closed the rebellion case. The Wagner militiamen who did not take part in the rebellion were immediately integrated into the regular army. Three units returned to the front. The fate of militiamen who took part in the rebellion will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. All in all, the state has not been weakened. The two winners are the Russian Federation and Belarus. The fact remains that, in the Russian mind, the whole affair was largely staged: we witnessed a threatening rebellion that immediately dissipated. The only thing that remained was the questioning of the quality of military command – a stubborn idea, despite the population’s faith in the self-sacrificing spirit of its soldiers.
I say “more in favor of the special operation” rather than “more in favor of the government’s leadership” because like Meyssan says, these events have placed greater scrutiny upon the ability of Putin’s government to effectively fight the hegemon. Which could pressure the government into taking greater advantage of its strategic strengths, bringing closer NATO’s already inevitable defeat within Ukraine. This acceleration of the collapse of U.S. military primacy is exposing its even more meaningful defeat, that being its loss of the economic war. The goal behind Washington’s efforts to provoke Russia was to bring the country’s destabilization, leaving China vulnerable on the geopolitical chessboard. For Russia’s economy to have survived the sanctions, then continue growing, has caused the empire’s strategists to look for another great-power competition battle plan.
The plan they’ve decided on is to continue the Ukraine aid project for now so that NATO doesn’t appear weak, abandon it when there’s no longer so much global attention being given to Ukraine, then shift towards attacking Washington’s rivals on different fronts.
These next fronts within the new cold war, as has been explained by the neoconservative Eurasia Group, will be a combination of the BRICS countries and the “swing state” countries which have a chance of siding with BRICS. Through the hegemon’s traditional mobster-style tactic of sending diplomats to make proposals, with the implication that the given country will soon find itself in a bad situation should it not accept these proposals, the State Department aims to adopt an aggressive posture towards any actor which doesn’t conform to Washington’s preferences. Turkey; Indonesia; South Africa; empire-disobedient Eurasian countries like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; the old European destabilization target Serbia; Egypt (which has applied to officially join the BRICS family); anybody who displeases the global tyrant is now either openly or semi-secretly a target. The goal is to stop the Ukraine proxy war’s failure from ending the dollar’s dominance, by coercing the world’s most decisive economic players into limiting their relationships with the empire’s three biggest targets. Those targets being Russia, China, and Iran.
If this is the next fight the hegemon wants, it won’t find the success in geopolitical maneuvering that it found in Germany; Germany was where destroying a Russian pipeline project came as easy as blowing up the piece of infrastructure, and then pressuring the country’s government into keeping up support for the Ukraine war effort. The cold war is only that easy for Washington in the countries that have a strong incentive to back it; with Germany being so swayable due to its status as a neo-colonial benefactor that doesn’t want Russia ending its access to super-profits. For over 80% of the world, such an incentive to help Washington crush Russia doesn’t exist; therefore, these countries don’t have their equivalents of Germany’s social fascist Green party, which has been willing to sacrifice its own people’s wellbeing in order to feed NATO’s military machine.
The vast majority of the world’s countries will react to being targeted with hybrid warfare the same way Ethiopia has: by uniting, both governmentally and culturally, in an effort to resist Washington’s attempts to manufacture chaos. Ethiopians have made the U.S.-backed TPLF terrorists unable to realistically win the country’s civil war, similarly to how most Russians have united behind the effort at defeating Washington’s Banderite fascists.
When Washington assails a place like Brazil in the same way, the given country’s anti-imperialist movement will rally to keep up social cohesion in the face of destabilization tactics; to eliminate whatever terrorists Washington has begun backing; and to have the government continue strengthening its ties with other U.S. target countries so it can survive the economic warfare. We’ve seen the people do these things in Syria, in Ethiopia, and now in Russia, making it implausible that Washington’s lackeys will come to power across the great majority of the peripheral or semi-peripheral countries.
One of the few places where Washington has so far succeeded at carrying out a coup during the new cold war is Sri Lanka, where last year imperialist NGOs exploited the country’s neo-colonial economic crisis to install a government that’s hostile towards China. But like in Germany, the further economic damage and destructive militarization that have come from the country’s alignment with Washington are threatening the U.S. comprador regime’s survivability. Any country that sides with the dying hegemon will join it in collapse, creating for itself the kind of unrest that’s been erupting within U.S. lackey states like France and Peru.
These are the consequences of trying to defy the progression of history, of trying to restore an American-led world that’s only going to continue vanishing. The reason why Washington has been accommodating Lula, despite his building a relationship with China, is because the USA has to coexist with Latin America in order to survive while maintaining the costly Russia sanctions. Either the Biden administration will lift these sanctions when it starts attacking Brazil—which it probably won’t do, given that the president is a cognitively declining prop leader who has to take guidance from his unhinged neocon secretary of state—or we’re about to see the empire self-sabotage to a degree it never has.
By refusing to admit how much they exaggerated the destabilizing effects of the PMC rebellion, or how the rebellion actually strengthened Russia’s standing within the conflict, the empire’s narrative managers are trying to demoralize anti-imperialists. They’re trying to convince us into not taking advantage of the great opportunities we have for weakening the hegemon. They want to fool us into believing there’s no way Russia can win, so that when Washington starts its hybrid war against BRICS+ we’ll believe Washington’s blusterous rhetoric about how it’s coming closer to subduing the anti-U.S. bloc.
This rhetoric will be nothing more than the attempts of a global actor that’s been driven to a point of desperation trying to appear like it’s stronger than ever. There won’t be any basis to its narrative about being on the verge of geopolitical victory; only lies that get increasingly absurd as the USA’s domestic situation keeps growing more dire, and its working class grows more at risk of coming to revolutionary consciousness.
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