To see that multipolarity represents a serious threat towards U.S. capitalism, and that therefore we must further multipolarity’s rise by any means necessary, look at how the Biden administration is reacting to the developments around “Israel.” The strategy the White House has adopted is to try to narratively reduce the Gaza genocide to simply being Netanyahu’s deed, as opposed to being the product of a larger settler-colonial project. U.S. officials are making a show of confronting Netanyahu about about improving the humanitarian situation, while meeting with the “Israeli” opposition leaders. The idea the Democrats hope to convey is that that the problem will be solved if “Israel” just gets better leadership.
That’s the idea about Israel-Palestine which liberal-minded people often want to embrace, and the U.S. empire is gambling on whether it can manage to make that idea dominate public consciousness. Now that most U.S. Americans have come to oppose the Gaza proxy war, the empire’s best option is to convince this majority that the genocide has been an accident of history, one “Israel” will learn from. If they fail at selling this narrative (as absurd as it is), then Zionism’s path towards defeat will be further accelerated, because the USA’s paradigm of majority support for “Israel” won’t be restored. Though Zionism’s pro-censorship attack dogs will then intensify their efforts to intimidate Palestine supporters, this will only escalate the ideological conflict around Zionism that’s exploded throughout the last six months. The genocidal and anti-democratic nature of our government will be further exposed, giving the anti-imperialist movement an opportunity to have a substantial effect on the conflicts the empire perpetuates.
This is the uncertain situation that our imperial ruling class finds itself in, and Biden officials are showing an equivalent kind of anxiety in relation to Ukraine. Since majority support for Ukraine aid went away last summer, Biden has resorted to new tactics for prolonging the proxy war, like putting Ukraine funding into a bill for Maui fire aid. Now the White House has adopted a practice of compromising with the Republican opposition, for the sake of ensuring that aid at least gets to Ukraine at some point. Even though the White House hates how slow the aid approval process is, it’s letting the Republican speaker operate without scrutiny for fear of creating further delays.
The smartest of the new cold warriors see that Russia has won, and that it truthfully won a long time ago. The Ukrainians are admitting they’re desperate for the aid they would need to continue fighting as they have so far. And Washington is transitioning the conflict to a new, terrorism-centered stage that’s driven by underhanded types of attacks, like last month’s Russian concert massacre. This is now the best way the imperialists can hurt Russia, because Ukraine has long been unable to sufficiently counter Russia with its official armed forces. The Ukrainian Nazi militias are in the long term going to be the only ones left fighting this war.
Whatever future terrorist attacks the empire’s proxies commit aren’t going to be enough to undo Washington’s strategic losses. Losses which have mainly had to do not with the armed conflict itself, but with the economic war. That Russia’s economy has continued to grow is enough for Washington to have failed to meet its goals with Ukraine, which were to destabilize Russia and then subdue China. That Russia hasn’t been destroyed means Washington’s sanctions haven’t had the effect of changing the global power balance; only of accelerating the decline within U.S./European society, provoking greater resistance from the working class.
Out of these sanctions, the imperialists have gotten no growth in their capacity to exploit the Global South, forcing capital within the core to keep contracting. Which has brought the core closer to capital’s nightmare scenario, where our ruling class can no longer use imperialism to displace capital’s problems. The crisis of overproduction can only become a bigger hindrance to our economy, making revolution a practical necessity for the workers trapped in this dying system.
This is why the imperialists are now seeking to escalate tensions with the DPRK, the geopolitical “immovable object” that’s already outmaneuvered the U.S. by getting nuclear weapons. Will the empire’s latest provocations against socialist Korea lead to any actual lost lives? Given how impotent the hegemon’s anger towards the DPRK has become now that the Koreans can threaten the U.S. back, I won’t be surprised if Washington’s bluster again ends up being empty. And because of how impractical a modern military draft in the U.S. would be, the empire can’t handle wars of the scale it used to. Whatever major conflict the hegemon next instigates, whether it’s in Korea, Taiwan, southwest Asia, Mexico, or another eastern European proxy state, Washington is going to be more vulnerable to blowback than ever.
That means it’s becoming increasingly likely that multipolarity will crush Zionism. Because even though such a great new war would be overwhelming for the hegemon, winning one may be its only hope for maintaining “Israel,” and all the advantages the Zionist state gives Washington. The imperialists and the Zionists are drawing themselves closer to a conflict that will be the end of them, but that they’ll find themselves fighting if they keep operating as they have been.
“Israel” is so closed off to any realistic peace deals, and to the idea of limiting its settlement expansions, because in order to win a major war against the surrounding Arab nations it would need to become stronger than it is now. It would need to have more clearly defined borders, and to neutralize Hamas. To try to reach these goals, it’s intensifying its genocide against Palestine. It’s imposing extreme repression onto all Palestinians under its jurisdiction, while pursuing the equivalent of Hitler’s “final solution” for Gaza. But these things are provoking so much resistance that the Houthis have been compelled to establish a massive global blockade, exacerbating the U.S. empire’s internal economic crisis. And by the admission of their own media, the Zionists haven’t even beaten Hamas. The “Israelis” say they can handle any threat from Iran, but they’ve made this statement in the hope that their confrontations with Iran remain relatively small. If they can’t beat an army which is functioning in a tiny strip of land that’s under blockade, they can’t beat Iran and the Axis of Resistance.
The Zionists have come to be so vulnerable because the globe has progressed this much towards multipolarity; because the geopolitical forces capable of challenging the hegemon have been able to get this strong. This is why Palestinians have been demonstrating with portraits not just of Kim Jong Un, whose country has directly aided Palestinian fighters, but of Vladimir Putin, whose image represents Russia’s efforts to shift the power balance away from the imperialist countries. The rise of multipolarity has been an absolutely crucial factor in the progression of the Palestinian resistance towards its present stage. And when the developments it’s made possible bring about the final defeat of Zionism, even more parts of the unipolar order will go away. The U.S. military occupation of Syria will be doomed, the region’s anti-imperialist countries will be enabled to develop without the “Israeli” threat, and BRICS will gain more of a role amid the vacuum Washington has left.
All efforts by the idealists within the “left” to devalue multipolarity, and to portray it as an obstacle towards revolution, have been discredited by these events. When multipolarity has proven to be so practically necessary for the liberation of Palestine, and for the weakening of our class enemies, there’s no way to argue that it’s against the proletariat’s interests. The value in furthering Palestine’s struggle against occupation, and in shrinking imperial control, is far too great to ignore.
What these developments have also shown is that the success of anti-imperialist ideas in the information war can tangibly impact global affairs. Now that both Ukraine and “Israel” have lost majority support in the USA, we’re seeing the imperialists scramble to find ways to keep advancing their foreign policy designs. And they may fail in these endeavors, if we put in the work towards combating the new stage of imperialist propaganda.
The psyops in this stage partly consist of deceptions around the conflicts themselves, but another crucial part of them is an effort at discrediting anti-imperialism as a movement. The liberal narrative managers want to convince leftists and Marxists that multipolarity’s supporters are “fascists,” and that we should therefore reject all real anti-imperialist coalitions. We need to reject such nonsense, and join in on the efforts to weaken the hegemon. Our opportunities for gaining new victories in this fight grow all the time.
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