The imperialist media’s big secret at the moment is that Washington is exhausting its arms supply for Ukraine. With a global series of occupations to maintain, and a military-industrial complex that prioritizes profits over outcome, the U.S. can no longer keep sending optimal or sufficiently numerous equipment. It’s having to tap into its lower-quality spare materials, send humvees in place of actual military trucks, and ship inadequate amounts of guns and rounds. The deindustrialization of Europe that the war has accelerated represents another obstacle in NATO’s project to keep Ukraine sufficiently armed. Operation Z isn’t just demilitarizing Ukraine, it’s demilitarizing NATO as a whole.
This is only the latest in the long list of reasons why Ukraine can’t win. Even before this decline in Washington’s capacity to send aid, the Ukrainians had lost the manpower to mathematically be able to beat Russia in the long term. Ukraine has had to expand its draft far beyond the optimal fighting demographics, mobilizing soldiers of ages up to sixty while recruiting torturers and child molesters. Russia had only used around a quarter of its population’s potential mobilization capacity prior to when it transitioned beyond the special operation phase. Now that Russia has intensified towards a real war, there’s no way Ukraine won’t be successfully demilitarized. The series of territorial gains Ukraine made during the fall were for the sake of optics, not for the sake of strategy. They actually created new liabilities for Kiev, forcing Ukraine and NATO to commit their dwindling resources in excess. Kiev’s illusion of advantage has consequently started to be broken, with Russia carrying out a series of new mobilizations that Kiev can’t adequately counter.
We know Kiev won’t be able to overcome this offensive because as the foreign policy commentator Paul Craig Roberts has observed: “It seems Russia won’t require a winter offensive to win the war.” Roberts says this not because Russia won’t continue its offensive throughout the winter, but because from an honest assessment, Ukraine has been so weakened that Russia could complete Operation Z’s demilitarization goal quite promptly. The only reason this hasn’t happened yet, says Roberts, is because Putin has been and will likely continue to hold back. Roberts sees this as a blunder on Putin’s part, one that serves to keep the conflict going longer than necessary. Nevertheless, he anticipates that Russia will win, because Kiev’s forces are so crippled that that’s the only logical outcome at this point:
The Western peoples have a totally false picture of the situation. Russia could destroy Ukraine in a day without using nuclear weapons. The Kremlin’s restraint–in my view a strategic blunder as it enabled the West to get involved and widen the war–in Ukraine has a number of legitimate reasons. Ukraine and the population there have been a part of Russia for centuries. There is much intermarriage. Most Ukrainians are not favorable to the neo-Nazis who have dominated Ukraine since the US overthrew the government in 2014 and have suffered at their hands. The Kremlin doesn’t want a poverty-stricken ruin of a country on its border, and the Kremlin doesn’t want the responsibility for rebuilding Ukraine’s infrastructure. It is inconceivable to me that “experts” and “reporters” in the West are so stupid and corrupt to have written the ridiculous accounts of the conflict that bear their names. It is total nonsense and has encouraged the false belief that Russia can be defeated and that “Ukraine can be in Crimea by Christmas.”
If NATO can’t win a proxy war against Russia even when Russia insists on showing mercy, U.S. imperialism has lost the geopolitical chess game in Eurasia. And by extension, it’s lost global primacy.
Washington’s destabilization attempt in Iran is a desperate ploy to fulfill the Ukraine proxy war’s goal of cutting off the Chinese trade network. The evidence that the U.S. ops in Iran have the intent of creating an equivalent of the Syrian war, with the CIA-backed actors carrying out spectacular acts of violence designed to provoke a civil conflict scenario, shows how frantic the imperialists are to sow more chaos. Their ongoing efforts to starve Syria and Afghanistan through sanctions are another facet of Washington’s operation to disrupt the reconstruction of the Silk Road. If they were to succeed at bringing civil war to Iran, as they have in Syria, they would better be able to sabotage Iran’s capacity for facilitating multipolarity’s rise. Yet even in Syria, there’s still an Assad government in place to work with China in the rebuilding effort.
There’s no way the imperialists will succeed at bringing Iran’s government under control. And it’s not a serious possibility that Iran will be brought to Syria’s situation of being ravaged by a conflict which allows the U.S. to gain a military foothold within its borders. The U.S. propaganda outlets act like such a collapse of Iran’s social stability could come, but their analyses are warped by wishful thinking. Iran will prevail against the U.S.-backed terrorists, and the emergence of a Chinese-aided new global economic order will continue.
These facts are encouraging, but they’re not cause for anti-imperialists to rest. Because until the USSR is restored, imperialism will likely continue to find post-Soviet states that are willing to work in its favor. This year, the U.S. instigated and backed an Azerbaijani invasion of Armenia. Kazakhstan’s government is headed in a pro-imperialist direction, giving Washington new chances to expand its influence within the country. Ukraine, aside from its eastern former areas that Russia has annexed, will remain under fascism indefinitely. The other Eastern European countries have been taken over by fascists as well, their governments tearing down communist monuments and persecuting opposition to the Ukraine proxy war.
The ongoing imperialist foothold within Kazakhstan and Ukraine is due to the problem which Roberts spoke to: that Russia’s government is not fully committed to carrying out interventions against imperialism, instead taking whatever actions it thinks will benefit its ruling class. Sometimes this self-interested mentality on Putin’s part works to imperialism’s detriment, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s an unreliable source of hope.
This problem is a consequence of the deeper issue, which is that the Soviet Union isn’t around anymore and Russia’s government (despite what imperialism’s propagandists say) doesn’t view Soviet restoration as worth pursuing. Putin doesn’t care about bringing back the USSR, as a bourgeois politician he has no incentive to. If the USSR returns, this will prevent Washington from using countries like Azerbaijan and Ukraine as launching pads for its militarist adventures. It will allow for fascism to be suppressed across Eastern Europe. It will keep Russia and Kazakhstan unified in their objectives. And it likely won’t produce a repeat of the Sino-Soviet split, as today’s Communist Party of China doesn’t share the ultra-left adventurism of the CPC from the Mao era. Modern China is prioritized around fostering international cooperation, and will do so whenever possible. The only thing preventing it from becoming friends with every country is that there haven’t yet been enough new socialist revolutions. Not in Eurasia, Africa, Latin America, or the imperialist countries that seek to perpetuate division between China and the peripheral countries.
The coming of multipolarity is only one step towards our end goal, which is global workers revolution. Class struggle is the ultimate solution to all of humanity’s crises, with multipolarity merely being capable of ending the threat of a third world war while making the global economy more equitable. With the next wave of revolutions, imperialism will lose the last of its global grip, and the transition into a new human developmental phase will be made possible.
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