By HUGO DIONÍSIO*
In a deep crisis, naturally and gradually, the exploitative base is removing the civilizational obstacles that separate greed from its object.
As we witness the worsening of geopolitical tensions, especially in the areas richest in natural resources, resulting in the rupture of diplomatic channels and the growing radicalization — at least discursive — of opponents, we are also witnessing a clarification of their respective strategic positions and their direction. All the mechanisms that we once thought guaranteed international security are historically out of date. The profound crisis of Anglo-American hegemony has decreed their obsolescence. No peace can survive a profound crisis of any system, much less one that lives off the exclusivity and priority in the plundering and exploitation of resources.
No matter how many fantastic reports are produced about how competitive the US economy is, how stable and consistent the dollar is and how resilient the Wall Street-based economy is, the fact is that these reports are far from being reflected where it matters most: in the lives of people, workers, their families, that is, the vast majority who are slow to benefit from such monstrous injections of democracy. The process that began with Bush’s War on Terror and was continued by Obama has found its epilogue in the current situation. The generic term “terrorism”, which was once aimed at containing some and appropriating others, has once again evolved into a concrete “axis of evil”. Time has finally shown us who the US was hiding behind so much “terrorism”.
The terrorist curtain, when it fell, revealed the real objectives of its uprising and its broad and multifaceted instrumental nature. Today, we know well how the term terrorist condemns, above all, the enemies of the USA and its hegemonic drift. The USA is continually losing economic (and productive) influence, and with it, its political power, still immense and based on a formal and informal army of agents — covered and uncovered — also fades away. “influencers” that move its immense formatting machine. The largest organizational machine in history is beginning to lack what is the basis of support for any political existence: the real productive economic base.
Ultimately, the economic base under US dominance no longer corresponds to the inversely disproportionate political power that is supported by it. The pyramid is inverted and not all the debt in the world will sustain it. The growing inability of the political apparatus to prevent the erosion of its relative position forces the US to make a survival effort to mitigate, contain and reverse its demise and, ultimately, the failure of an entire economic base that is largely deficient, which will necessarily be followed by political failure. And herein lies the fundamental reason for the worsening of tensions worldwide. In a deep crisis, naturally and gradually, the exploitative base is removing the civilizational obstacles that separate greed from its object.
One way to overcome these obstacles lies in its subversive capacity. Namely, by overthrowing legitimate governments and installing clients and other “sellouts” in them who ensure the betrayal of their people in favor of the Wall Street empire. Bangladesh, Indonesia, Georgia, Serbia and Venezuela are just some of the places where, if the leaders do not please the big corporations that finance political power in Washington, they find themselves harassed by the armies of NGOs, Think Tanks, mainstream media and social networks from California. Pavel Durov, co-leader of Telegram, had left Russia because he considered that Vladimir Putin’s demands for control were a violation of freedom of expression. Now he has learned the hard way that, in liberal-fascist Macronist France, failure to provide such guarantees results in imprisonment! The rights that are taken away in order to free expression! And all in the name of the “independence” of justice.
The indicators of decline are so evident and profuse that they deserve, in and of themselves, in-depth and even critical reflection. But let us put it this way: even in its own terms, according to its concepts and taking into account its data, the reality described does not smile on the US and its “leadership”. Not even in its own terms is it possible for the US to hide its progressive bankruptcy. The BRICS have surpassed the G7 in GDP and the volume of economic transactions that escape Washington’s control grows every day, even when these transactions are carried out in its own currency. A very clear example of the insurmountable contradiction that plagues the monetary and financial system controlled by the US lies in the use of the dollar by Washington’s own “enemies” to stabilise their economies and guarantee the stability of transactions and their respective mechanisms.
Maduro's Venezuela, once again struggling with another episode of the Shakespearean film "To win or not to win elections, that is the question?", has dollarized its economy, using China's dollar reserves and the oil it has in quantities unlike any other country. China, which is turning Hong Kong into a cryptocurrency transaction hub, is using the Tether — virtual currency indexed to the value of the dollar — as a stabilizing mechanism for the crypto market, ensuring the conversion of fiat money and without constant fluctuations like Bitcoin, Ethereum or Solana. Its capitalization value has already surpassed that of Bitcoin, for example. The much-touted “de-dollarization” may, after all, be nothing more than, at least in part, a “de-Westernization” of the dollar and the consequent withdrawal of dollars from banks controlled by Washington.
It is against this backdrop that we must observe reality and not in the rose-colored cloth, which sings of enemy failures, insurmountable challenges and insurmountable obstacles, with which they paint us, unanimously and disciplinedly, every day, by all the organs.”mainstream”. Only in this way can we understand the “desperate” and apparently suicidal maneuvers that we see everywhere. Otherwise, taking into account the pink cloth, we end up saying that Netanyahu is crazy, but a democrat, Zelensky is corrupt, but brave, and that all the others are crooks, even though many are not corrupt, and even fewer are crazy.
Once again, the solution to the crisis of crises, and the consequent extreme positions, lies in the resurrection of the Nazi-fascist monster, but this time giving it a more comprehensive and diverse guise. However, it is the same monster that, with each crisis of the capitalist system, as in the 20s and 30s in Europe and the USA, after the First World War, emerges to resolve by force what others denied it peacefully: access to natural resources, that is, cheap energy, raw materials, food and labor. The solution to every crisis is repeated, once again. Some used the salvation of souls, others the salvation of people.
Immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Western imperialist bloc, as a whole, intended to lay its hands on that extraordinary reserve of all these things. Faced with the resistance encountered, an invasion organised by 14 imperial powers and a civil war, whose counter-revolutionary force was supported by the imperial West, were not enough to bring down such a “diabolical” regime. The Russian and Soviet peoples did not allow it. Perhaps a kind of Stockholm syndrome, which would, curiously, be verified time and again, right up to the present day. Despite the fact that even today, according to their accusations, these people live “harassed” by a “bloodthirsty dictatorship”.
It was necessary to prepare for war and this was done through demonization, stigmatization, fracturing of relations and sowing fear and hatred among the most unsuspecting European populations. Nothing new, therefore. Dehumanization, fermented in the economic crisis, in the concentration of wealth and in the unwillingness of the elites to share, through work, what they had previously accumulated through it, gave Hitler (and all the hidden “Hitlers”) the justification he needed when he looked to the USSR as the cure for the ills that plagued Germany: abundant oil and minerals, fertile land and cheap labor.
If it were not for the persistent fighting capacity of that people, the USA, England and Japan would have rubbed their hands together with glee at the upcoming deals. Once again, they were wrong. Once again, their chances were thwarted. And once again, the Russian Federation had to be seen as the aggressor. A victim of a Western invasion every 70 years, Russia goes from being invaded to being the invader. An agreement like Molotov-Ribbentrop, being only the last of all those signed between Nazi Germany and a European country, transformed the biggest victim of the Second World War into its co-author. A devastating and unexpected victory — by the West — over its newly created child, Nazi-fascism, transformed the USSR into a kind of red Third Reich.
In any case, and as planned by the reactionary elites that dominate — and have always dominated — the USA, due to the game on both sides, even if at different times, the Second World War left this colossal country in an extremely enviable position, just as the First had left it, resolving the damage caused by the 1929 crash and transforming it into a superpower, the only one. Only for this reason, and only for this very reason, has it been possible to avoid a large-scale war in Europe to this day. Until this enviable position had been destroyed or threatened and until the hopes of political dominance of Russia, China and Eurasia had definitively failed. With the triumph obtained with the fall of the USSR exhausted and the European Union benefiting from the continental cooperation that resulted from it, we are back to restarting the entire dehumanizing process, once again involving Russia, but this time Iran and China are also rewarded. After all, until very recently, the hope of political dominance by China and Iran prevailed, and each new season has a new attempt at a “color revolution”, usually from the Kurds, who have the support of… Israel.
The loss of hope in the functioning of “soft power” and the urgency of the situation, aggravated by the Russian economic recovery, China’s centrality and Iran’s regionality, caused the planetary “life insurance” to expire, which many believed to be the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” inherited from the Cold War. The doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” only worked because the US soon realized that it could supplant the USSR and that its hegemonic dominance would not be challenged yet. The USSR’s accession to arms non-proliferation treaties and the establishment of an international power architecture that benefited Washington gave hope and consolidated certainties of victory. The victor could afford to be magnanimous.
The US only feared the USSR from a military point of view, but they knew that military power cannot survive without political power, that the latter depends on the economy, and that this relative economic capacity was insufficient to guarantee a victory for the USSR. On the other hand, even if this were not lacking, the economies were in fact separate, segregated, and the backdrop against which the US operated was not a dark backdrop of crisis, but a rainbow backdrop of expansion. It was this backdrop, this all-encompassing rainbow backdrop, embraced by the “uniparty” (single party) that brings together Democrats and Republicans, that kept the fiercest hawks at bay. Their economic dominance, their strategy of accumulation, were not threatened with death. “Soft power” was therefore sufficient. While the USSR remained strong, the world witnessed major crises such as the Cuban missile crisis. Towards the end, the US allowed itself the luxury of establishing the Washington consensus and beginning the neoliberal era.
Today, the reality is quite different. While China is not yet the military adversary that the USSR was, the US knows that it has the economy it needs to be. And it knows that, despite all the catastrophic propaganda, it is sustainable, stable and long-lasting. The threat to its dominance is simply formidable. Furthermore, to be such, China relies on Russia’s 75 trillion dollars of classified natural reserves. The largest in the world, by far. China, Russia, Iran and Venezuela have more, much more, than the US, Canada and Australia. The EU does not count towards this statistic. On the other hand, without China’s economic potential, Russia is a formidable military adversary, with growing political capital, which can be fuelled – as can be seen in the case of the thousands of sanctions against Moscow – by the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy is to Russia what its natural resources and military capacity are to China. They complement each other, to the point of symbiosis, if necessary.
Dominating the world, the production system and its supply chains, once again, requires cheap energy; the end of fossil fuels, which was part of a strategy to contain China, did not work, because China did not take the bait and never stopped ensuring its control of resources at home and abroad. Hegemony requires cheap labor, which China also has in abundance. And it requires food, lots of food. Which Russia also has, and plenty of it. To regain its hegemony, the US needs Russia and Iran, at least. More than ever. At any cost. Or risk defeat! The pressure we are seeing today being exerted on Lula da Silva, particularly in his betrayal of Nicolas Maduro, who has always been with him, even when the hordes of the extreme right called into question his electoral victory, demonstrates the importance that Brazil has for the US. Brazil may well be to Washington what Egypt was to Rome, an endless source of food, which, associated with the circus — and in the US the circus lasts 365 days a year — guarantees the appeasement of the masses.
But it is because of all this that the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” no longer seems so safe to us. Fear, panic, the mere glimpse of the possibility of defeat and the loss of what they call world “leadership”, equivalent to “comprehensive political dominance”, makes the hawks of globalist, hegemonic, super-federative capitalism fierce, obstinate and obsessive. Accustomed to ordering, threatening, dissuading, punishing, subverting, invading and annihilating entire nations, based on lies, and perpetrating it with impunity, it is not the possibility of mass death that stops them. What stops them is the guarantee of victory, a total, unquestionable, eternal and enlightening victory, like the one they sought and achieved with the genocide of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Faced with the possibility of defeat, nothing will stop them. The USA, like the British Empire, does not know how to live with half measures, impasses and appeasing logic. War, for them, is the means to peace. The only means capable of guaranteeing the enlightening victory they seek. No half measures, only certain victory.
And this is why we see Zelensky ordering the bombing of the Zaporozhye Energodar NPP and threatening the Kursk nuclear power plant, because his health – literally – depends on dragging Russia into a long-term, large-scale conflict. The goal, in my opinion, is to push Russia into a desperate action, for example, one that consists of using a nuclear weapon – tactical or strategic – and then one of two things: either the US uses this to isolate Russia factually and internationally and demonize it to the point where the Russian people themselves turn against President Putin, or, ultimately, if necessary, drag Russia into a large-scale conflict, in which the US will still believe it has the upper hand. If it did not believe it had the upper hand, it would not play this extremely dangerous game. It may be wrong, but its actions are based on its own convictions.
Another hypothesis is that a provocation could be created by bombing Kiev, causing a radioactive leak that would affect other countries and, in this way, the US would have “plausible” justifications to accuse Russia of having deliberately provoked it, either because they say that it was Russia itself that did it, or because they say that the leak was not from a nuclear power plant, but from a dirty bomb used by Moscow. You might say to me: but Russia’s partners would not fall for something like that. Yes, but the US’s objective is also played out on the national chessboards of these countries and with their peoples, namely by leading these same peoples to reject governments that do not respect anti-nuclear rules, human rights, anti-genocide and nuclear proliferation conventions, and so on.
There are many possibilities and the US has already demonstrated that it is playing with them all. Let us not be naive about why there was such a great “anti-nuclear” consensus in the 80s. The US was not desperate, leaving the information field freer, nor did it have real nuclear parity. It needed to stop nuclear proliferation and development on the Soviet side. This would also be convenient for the USSR, as it would result in a relief from its coffers. The US was therefore playing both sides: it tried to drag the USSR into a costly arms race, but in a way that would not constitute a strategic threat. There are records from the time of the “democrat Yeltsin” that demonstrate the US’s intention to make Russia dispense with its strategic nuclear naval forces, keeping only its aviation and land forces. Hence the logic of the “anti-missile shield” that fit like a glove. After all, what the US considered to be a tremendous threat were nuclear submarines. And Yeltsin indulged them.
In the case of Iran, the game is similar. We have Netanyahu, Zelensky’s political twin, one a Zionist, the other a Nazi-fascist, both Anglo-American patriots at heart, whose political health — literally — depends on a long-lasting, large-scale conflict. In this case, too, the nuclear card is being played. All it took was for Blinken to say that Iran is “one or two weeks away” from a nuclear weapon, and that became an indisputable truth set in stone. They refer to “confidential reports” from the IAEA, which no one has ever seen and whose links lead to a description of the nuclear agreements with Iran itself, even going so far as to say that it was Iran that failed to comply with the terms of the JCPOA.
In both cases, it is assumed that if the US says it, it must be true. The US says that Iran almost has nuclear weapons — despite Al-Khomeini’s Fatwa banning military nuclear development — and no one doubts it; the US talks about a confidential IAEA agreement, no one knows about it, it is confidential, but it is from a “transparent” and “independent” public agency, and no one doubts it; the US says that Russia is bombing its own nuclear power plant, no one doubts it. In fact, Grossi, the president of the IAEA, goes even further: he says that it is “beyond science” to prove the origin of the attacks on the Zaporozhye plant. Call in the CSI team now, and Putin will be prosecuted by the ICC again.
The same game is being played with China. The news that claims that China is modernizing its nuclear forces and “doubling” its warheads are certain objectives that the US “cannot turn a blind eye to,” as the White House said. Even if the US has 10 times more warheads than China will have when it doubles — if it doubles — the number it already has.
For now, Zelensky has guaranteed the impossibility of any peace negotiations in the near future, and not even Modi’s visit — as if he were keeping promises — changes the scenario. Like Siamese twins, Zelensky and Netanyahu demonstrate that cooperation between Nazis and Zionists is not only possible but desirable, and that the anti-Semitism that characterised the 30s was a case-by-case contingency and never a deeply contradictory reality in itself. Zelensky proves that the hegemonic interests of the US seal the deal between Zionists and Nazi-fascists. At the time, the imperial hawks saw Jewish assets as a wealth to be had; today they see Jews as a wealth in themselves that is already theirs, and they dominate them as an instrument of territorial occupation, monetary stabilisation and control of energy sources and other natural resources.
Both are playing a dangerous game, in which they are strategic players. It is up to them to create a reality that makes coexistence impossible, to the point where “mutual assured destruction” ceases to be a limitation. The prospect of a nuclear Iran is one such case and will justify everything. Remember the “weapons of mass destruction”? “Terrorists, madmen” and Muslims with access to nuclear weapons? So, after all the Islamophobia being prepared in the West and capitalized on by neo-fascist currents, who declare Muslims and Asians — poor, only the poor — a sub-human species, an invasive plague? It is just a detail. The ground is plowed and well prepared.
Does anyone still believe in red lines?
*Hugo Dionísio is a lawyer, geopolitical analyst, researcher at the Studies Office of the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP-IN).
Originally published in Strategic Culture Foundation.
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