yogthos

The balloon was pure political theatre, but if there was an actual threat they couldn't understand then they would keep quiet I suspect.

lol it gets even better https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/04/biden-white-house-pardons-00192610

Pretty much, Russia won the war and now the empire has to deal with that.

You gotta remember that European regimes don't care any more about their people than the one in Ukraine. They exist to serve US interests.

That was always going to be the inevitable outcome. As the empire shrinks, the core starts to devour the periphery.

other possibility is that one of the adversaries has some new toys

very plausible

👏

lol probably

hard to say

A new cheap labor market is about to open up for the US.

I think we're well past the point of the west having any sort of dominance. Russia showed that you can trade outside SWIFT just fine, and now that's only going to accelerate. Once you figure out how to do it with one county, it becomes much easier to scale that to others. Everybody understands the risks of being stuck in western financial system, and everybody except the vassals is trying to derisk.

The west is a tiny percentage of the global population, and most of China's trade growth is already coming from the Global South https://asiatimes.com/2024/05/2-words-explain-china-export-surge-global-south/

There's also no technological dominance to speak of. China has either caught up or is leading in most technologies. China is slightly behind in chips, but that won't last long. https://archive.is/knQyl

Meanwhile, Russia is now far ahead in military tech. For example, the west has nothing comparable to Oreshnik or Iskanders. Russian military now has by far the most experience fighting a serious war, and the military industry is outpacing the west.

The empire is now stuck in losing proxy war in Europe, it's got trouble in West Asia, it's getting squeezed out of Africa, and their allies in places like Korea are becoming unstable. While the US would love nothing more than to focus on China, there are too many existing pressure points for them to do that.

The reality is also that the west is utterly deindustrialized. Russia is able to produce three times artillery shells of all the western countries combined, and Chinese industry absolutely dwarfs Russia. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-shell-production-us-europe-ukraine/index.html

It will literally take decades for the US to build out industry at that scale, and that's assuming there was sustained political will to do that.

What I expect to happen is that we'll see economic blocs forming around G7 and BRICS. There's likely to be decoupling going forward, but BRICS is simply a bigger economy with more resources and people. The west is on the losing end of this equation.

The reason the west pulled ahead after WW2 wasn't because the US is smarter than everyone else or they're supremely competent. It was simply because the US got to sit the war out because they were across the ocean. Europe burned, USSR burned, China burned. All the while, the US built out its industry and then when the war was over it became an economic powerhouse by virtue of being spared the destruction.

Today, the situation is completely different. China has a far stronger economy than the US, and it's far more politically stable. It's the biggest trading partner for majority of the world, and it produces essential things that the west does not.

The bite of sanctions and tariffs is going to mostly affect the public in US. It's going to be exact same scenario Europe finds itself with Russian energy today. Europe still buys it, but it has to go through intermediaries driving up prices. People in US will still be buying Chinese goods, but they're going to see even more inflation coming their way. This will only further feed into political instability within the US.