Over this last month, we’ve entered a transitional stage within Washington’s new cold war against the Chinese geopolitical bloc. That things are beginning to change became apparent when the New York Times reported Ukrainian fighters do indeed habitually wear Nazi symbols, and when the Washington Post reported U.S. officials knew of the plans to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline months in advance. The propagandists will never talk about the full story, this being that Ukraine is pro-Nazi up to its highest levels of government and that the U.S. itself was the one which carried out the industrial sabotage. Yet it wouldn’t have been realistic for them to be this honest a year ago, when the Ukraine psyop was seen by the narrative managers as something that couldn’t at all afford to be challenged. Now, with the fall of Bakhmut and the wider grinding down of Ukraine’s resources, it’s become apparent to the commentator Pepe Escobar that Ukraine will likely turn into a catastrophe for NATO around mid-summer.
How narratively damaging this loss becomes for NATO depends on how well we expose the ways the pro-Ukraine side lied about its capabilities. If the narrative managers succeed at damage control, they’ll at least avoid one more disaster. What is guaranteed is a scenario where the imperialists wait until attention isn’t so much on Ukraine anymore, then finally stop aiding Kiev’s long-failed project of regaining its territories. By the time that happens, the empire will have already begun the next phase in its attempt at reversing multipolarity’s rise. A phase that the empire’s strategists won’t be embracing from a position of triumph, as the proxy war against Russia has failed both militarily and economically, but from a position of desperation. Because telling from the absurdly risky level of ambition that this next phase has, it’s clear the empire is out of its safer options for trying to undo its decline.
This upcoming phase is one where Washington effectively declares war against all of the BRICs countries, smaller “swing states” within the new cold war like Turkey, South Africa, and Indonesia, and ultimately Europe as a whole. We know the most short-term part of the strategy is to target BRICs and these “swing states” because the neocon think tank the Eurasia Group has articulated this strategy. We know the other, likely more long-term part of the strategy is targeting Europe because this is apparent from observing how Washington has been acting towards European “swing states” like Serbia. That being to appease these states for the time being, while preparing to bring destruction to them.
The intended way of creating chaos for BRICs and the other “swing states” the Eurasia Group talks about can be discerned from the tactics the Group describes, and from the history of how these tactics have been used to destabilize societies. I call these tactics the “aggressively friendly” ones, where the imperialists feign an interest in building a good relationship with the targeted countries and then use the non-cooperation of the targets as justification for waging war. Inviting them to G7, visits by U.S. diplomats, and (threatening) trade maneuverings are the things we can expect Washington to do. When the swing states don’t comply with Washington’s requests, it will start with the fabricated atrocity propaganda, the backings of terrorist groups, and the attempts to gain UN permission for intervention. It will try to turn places like Brazil and India into places like Ethiopia and Myanmar, where parts of the country have been captured by imperialist destabilization operatives. And that consequently have in those parts become failed states, where communities are unable to access necessities and criminal violence is massive.
Ethiopia has been able to limit these zones of chaos, successfully rendering the ethnic supremacist U.S.-backed terrorist group the TPLF unable to realistically regain control of the country. Ethiopia’s story of surviving Washington’s hybrid warfare, and continuing its Chinese-assisted development, shows many of Washington’s future targets won’t simply fall upon having pressure applied to them. Not any more than Russia has fallen after being faced with the proxy war. Brazil in particular could become the next great anti-hegemonic state, where the moderate Lula gets forced by the circumstances to adopt a more consistently anti-imperialist policy. This at least is true for the countries that have the social cohesion and strength in their anti-imperialist movements to be able to prevent civil war. A place like South Africa, where communists have been mobilizing to a notable degree, can resist the hybrid warfare. Much of the European countries are more vulnerable.
Beyond the ways Europe’s status within the global imperial hierarchy has made its anti-imperialist movements weak, from a historical perspective Europe is the part of the world with the most precedents for violence to occur. Over a 5,000-year history of conflicts, Europe has the greatest concentration of locations where battles have been fought. Even if World War III is avoided, which has been made more likely by how much China and Russia have built up their ability to defend from the USA, war could easily be brought back to additional parts of Europe. If not in the form of clashes between countries, then in the form of civil conflicts, created by U.S.-backed terrorist insurgents or by wars that U.S.-backed fascist regimes wage against their own people.
We’re seeing the potential for this in Germany, where the CIA-created Qanon movement is furthering fascist extremism. We’re seeing the beginnings of this in Italy, where Nazi terrorists with direct ties to the Ukrainian Nazis have been caught planning attacks. We’re seeing this in Kosovo, where a NATO-backed fascist regime is intensifying its violent oppression of the Serbs.
That NATO is keeping troops within Kosovo shows its claims of seeking to keep the Balkans stable are lies. It also shows that the only reason why Washington has been acting friendly towards Serbia is because now isn’t yet the moment it wants to bring war to the region. It needs more time to arm Kosovo, whether so that it can fight a war against Serbia or so that it can turn the repression of the Serbs into a genocide. At the point when Ukraine has been spent as a tool for harming the Chinese bloc, and Washington has started on its hybrid war against the swing states, a heavily armed and fanatically nationalistic Kosovo will act as a useful replacement for Ukraine’s fascist coup regime. Kosovo’s purpose will not be to destabilize Russia, which has proven unfeasible, but to destabilize Europe—the part of the globe Washington can’t afford to lose. And a chaotic Europe is better for Washington than a stable Europe that’s embraced partnership with the Chinese bloc.
This is the strategy that the empire’s strategists are advancing. It’s what makes the Biden administration’s accommodations of Serbia logical from the perspective of those playing on the geopolitical chessboard. This willingness by Washington to momentarily act respectful towards Serbia—which the imperialist narrative portrays as a country that perpetrated genocide during the 1990s and provoked that era’s conflict—has created an amusing upset among pro-imperialist commentators. Because these commentators, due to their emotionally driven liberalism, sincerely believe that these atrocity narratives should be taken seriously by the U.S. in a principled fashion.
This is what we’ve been seeing from Jasmin Mujanović, the writer who’s been decrying Biden from a moralist standpoint for pursuing good relations with Serbia. Mujanović has lamented: “While in the Ukrainian context the Biden administration insists on the principle of ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’—meaning that Ukrainians must be involved in any and all negotiations related to the war—and has framed its support for Kyiv as an expression of the U.S. president’s broader pro-democracy agenda, neither principle applies to its forays in the Western Balkans.”
I don’t know what’s funnier: that Mujanović is clearly coming from a genuine conviction that the demonization narratives against the Serbs are true (no competent malign actor believes their own propaganda), or that he also believes the USA should be expected to act morally. An empire doesn’t exist to do the right thing, it exists to advance its own strategic interests. And at this stage, it’s in the U.S. empire’s strategic interests to placate Serbia, so that it can make Serbia comfortable enough to not be guarded against the inevitable betrayal. A betrayal that’s already happened to an extent with NATO’s aiding the Albanian fascist regime within Kosovo.
The goal behind all of these maneuvers is the survival of the USA’s capitalist ruling class. The more these maneuvers fail to prevent the transition away from the dollar’s hegemony, the more our ruling class will be at risk of having their status taken away. We can make the hybrid wars less effective by disrupting the narratives that they require in order to remain tenable. Counter the lies behind their wars, and the liberation of ourselves and the rest of the globe can be brought closer.
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