Image is allegedly of the note Trump wrote while editing a speech while on the way back from the G20 summit.
The top Russian-Chinese agent, Donald Trump, has decided that the pace of dedollarization and the decline of American financial hegemony is going too slowly. He has therefore decided to put tariffs on everybody; from America's largest trading partners to uninhabited islands. In the process, he is trying to create an autarkic America. Jokes aside, interpretation and analysis of this has ranged across a wide spectrum. I think we can broadly agree that the most idiotic are the "true believers"; those that actually believe Trump's every word, and that this will somehow bring back American manufacturing and whatever other inane promises he has made.
However, there is a much more interesting debate. The first camp are those who believe Trump is acting as an inadvertent accelerationist due to his lack of understanding about how the world economy and dollar hegemony functions (and that this will subsequently ensure that countries flock to China instead). The second camp are those who believe that Trump does know what he's doing, at least to a certain extent, and that the effective result of this period of madness will be countries kowtowing to the United States; renegotiating trade deals to be even more in favor of the US in order to get tariffs reduced. There's even a yet more cynical camp who believes that in fact, this entire trade war is just theater for further national wealth redistributions from poor to rich; that all these monumental international trade wars are more of a sideshow. To quote the linked article: "[...] out of the mountain of tariffs that threaten to turn into a global trade war will emerge the mouse of further tax cuts."
I'm not embarrassed to admit that I have absolutely no idea which one of these is the closest model to reality. We're in new economic and political ground, and even if the tariffs are quickly renegotiated and/or dropped, the impacts will continue to reverberate around the world for years. I'm sure we'll debate this for months to come here, though!
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Yeah that's not gonna happen.
Not in the next five years, no, but China is planning a lot longer term than that. The prosperity of China will compel Taiwan to unify eventually.
America is going to push the situation and arm them directly with missiles, jets, anti-air systems, etc. before they ever decide to all do an about face on decades of policy and randomly stop being sinophobic reactionary compradors for some reason. If they ever do decide to swap to China their chip infrastructure will be destroyed and bombed by the US. Taiwan will never join China until it is forced to, and it will start a war and be a Ukrainian-like proxy in a much shorter time frame.
This is a situation where the Chinese official policy is delusional and naive. On many foreign policy issues they have their heads in the sand.
No it won't. Taiwan isn't nearly as corrupt is Ukraine. People here have shit to do, money to make.
You are being mislead by US propaganda. The stuff Taiwan buys is old and useless. Even the highly touted HIMARS is jammed 100% of the time by Russia right now. Taiwan has ZERO offensive ability and can't even do shit about a simple blockade. There is no equivalent between Ukraine and Taiwan. Ukraine has been and continues to murder it's civilians in the independent republics. What did Taiwan do? Get forced by the US to spread China-bad propaganda, thus hurting the feelings of CPC officials?
Taiwan buys arms from the US because it's a mafia racket where Taiwan pays the US "protection money" in order to get their "support" to protect it from China. This is common knowledge in Taiwan.
It's not like Ukraine at all because the ROC military will not die for a bunch of DPP shitheads on their one-way ticket to Tokyo and DC. The DPP are also facing political opposition from the TPP. The DPP has neither the military muscle nor political support from the populace to turn Taiwan into a true comprador state no matter how much Taiwanese separatists want this to be so.
Taiwan imports more than 95% of its energy. And every time these naval drills happen, Taiwan has to dig into its oil reserves since containers are obviously not going to sail through a live military exercise. I suspect this is what a blockade will look like. The drills will just happen more and more until it's a de facto blockade since ships will no longer want to sail for Taiwan. Once their reserves run out, they will capitulate, most likely by the ROC military orchestrating a coup and (re)establishing KMT one-party rule with Taiwanese separatism being outlawed (again). I could see some 5-d chess moves being played where a post-DPP ROC still exists as a separate geopolitical entity but has an identical foreign policy with the PRC and does what the CPC tells them to do. Libs will see Taiwan as a "Chinese neocolony."
Keep in mind that all this rethoric about Taiwan dependency on China is true, it also may not matter if you compare to Ukraine.
Russia occupied ZNPP almost from day one and that supplied a significant part of Ukrainian energy. Then they took the eastern regions that had most of the heavy industry and finaly they knocked out most energy grid repeatedly over the years.
For what effect? So that soon 4 years later it is still the US calling the shots, so that there is a nazi government still openly oppressing any political alternatives, so that even the liberal "democracy" fetishism doesn't hold up anymore because it doesn't matter how you justify it Zelensky still must remain etc.
The situation could and maybe is most likely to be the same in Taiwan too. Chinese blockade? Who gives a fuck, unless China does an actual amphibian invasion and a knockout the government by literally killing them all the war could take months.
China should absolutely learn by the Russian mistakes in Ukraine like Russia should have militarized straight during that Surovikin shit and gone for a full out war not this grinding out Ukrainian army nonsense. Mistakes were made and China should be learning from them, but what you write here is basically begging to repeat them. Putting your bets on a local citizen coup to win a war? Realy?
This entire block of comment you write is basicaly what the Russian mil bloggers were all saying about Ukraine in 2022. "Zelensky is finished" is almost a Russian mirror image of the Trump meme.
My prediction is that the ROC military will overthrow the DPP and reestablish martial law like how it was before liberalization rather than fight against the PLA. The brass pine for the days when Taiwan was still under martial law, career soldiers are ideologically and politically opposed to the DPP, and the poorly trained conscripts just don't want to die. The PRC already got caught bribing various ROC generals to lay down their arms in case of an invasion, and I don't see them stopping anytime soon. It doesn't matter if most of those generals are still loyal to the ROC in the end. All it takes is just one disloyal general.
Like I have said repeatedly in my time at this website, people think Taiwan is comparable to Ukraine. Besides the terrain being completely different (island vs large country), the biggest different is that the ROC military has ideological and political differences with the current ruling party. Most Western analysis of cross-Straits relations assume that the ROC military would actually fight and not just surrender or coup the DPP. Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun and the DPP doesn't have much of a gun. At best, they use lawfare to suppress the KMT and TPP, but they have little else other than "strong international goodwill."
This was 100% not true for Ukraine. The hardcore supporters of the two is different. Hardcore supporters of the current Ukrainian regime which brought them to power are neonazi paramilitaries like Azov Battalion and Right Sector while hardcore supporters of Taiwanese separatism are a bunch of pampered activists from petty bourgeois backgrounds. If Lai is stupid enough to formally declare a Republic of Taiwan, it will more or less go down like how Yoon floundered in the ROK.
There are a couple of key differences between Taiwan and Ukraine which may not allow them to pan out the same way in a potential war scenario.
The first is geography: Taiwan is a tiny island that has to rely wholly on ship and air transport to bring goods into the country, including military hardware. A Chinese blockade on the island would absolutely cripple their economy and fighting capacity, and would make a war of attrition very easy to win. Only a US intervention through sea and air supremacy could break this (something China is aware of and has been developing their missile tech for this reason).
On the other hand, Russia’s war of attrition dragging out for so long and Ukraine still not folding is due to Ukraine sharing a massive land border with the rest of Europe and can still easily receive military hardware and economic aid through land trade. Russia also cannot completely blockade the country due to NATO encirclement, which is why choosing to not rapidly take over the country but instead just park their troops outside Kyiv back in 2022 to pressure the government was a massive strategic mistake.
The second difference is the politics itself: Taiwanese politics is not the typical left-right continuum and is more about Reunification vs Independence. This is represented by the KMT-led pan-blue coalition, and the DPP-led Pan-green coalition. While the Pro-independence DPP is currently in power (largely due to public perceptions of KMT corruption and being more socially conservative), the idea of independence is still not popular in Taiwan based on 2024 census. Most Taiwanese are just waiting out to see how the US-China Cold War plays out while still officially being the Republic of China.
Furthermore, a Chinese invasion would likely greatly embolden the KMT and push the public towards them (they could say something like “see? This is what you get for allowing the DPP separatists to move away from Chinese reunification, we will end this war by offering a quick peace with the PRC”). It also doesn’t help that America already signalled that they are more than willing to throw Taiwan under the bus if China forces their hand by bombing their semiconductor facilities. They didn’t do the same for Ukraine (at least until this year) because muh White Western civilization being attacked by evil eastern hordes.
Finally, Zelenskyy was able to stay in power by suspending elections and banning all opposition parties that challenged his pro-war/ pro-west narrative. The DPP is in no position to do that given much of the military is still loyal to the KMT thanks to the Chiang Kai-Shek military dictatorship-era, and trying to ban the KMT (which has a different foreign policy to the DPP) would very likely cause the KMT to seize power and declare marshal law with the backing of the military instead.
Good post. Here's what I would also add.
IMHO, they only lost the election because the blue-white coalition fell through at the last minute. Lai only won like 40% of votes. Most Taiwanese commentators I've seen have speculated that Ko winning only 26% of the votes undercounts the amount of support the TPP actually has because a lot of his supporters were too young to vote. This is also the motivation behind their lawfare against the TPP and their attempts at busting Ko on corruption charges. The lawfare has a cost because the people most supportive of the TPP and Ko are also the same people being conscripted. This means that the ROC military is comprised of KMT generals and career soldiers alongside conscripts that are slightly biased towards the TPP.
You think America will be backing Taiwan in a decade? Come on.
You also lack the long term perspective on this. By long term I mean decades.
Yes America will provoke WW3 with China within the next few decades due to its internal contradictions and need for war to destroy fixed capital. Every single American politician and general has been saying it loud and clear. Taiwan will be their foothold, and China will be at a strategic disadvantage if they don't seize it before hostilities escalate fully. It's the difference between WW3 battles taking place in the Pacific or on the Chinese coasts.
At the first opportunity China must seize Taiwan by force. Otherwise they are dooming probably millions to death from a longer and more drawn out war closer to the mainland. Just like Putin seizing Crimea by force in 2014 was the correct move, and the current Ukraine war would be much larger if he had not done that - and failing to take the Donbas in 2014 proved a costly mistake.
Still won't prevent voluntary reunification.
WW3 is coming before your fabled "voluntary reunification" which has 0% chance of happening currently
I'm not sure how every single fucking American politician (in both parties) and military spokesmen say on repeat "we are preparing for a war with China in 10 years" and you just don't get it. WW3 is coming. This trade war is part 1, the economic decoupling. Part 2 is using Taiwan as a launching pad for an actual kinetic proxy war. The only smart play is to proactive and remove the Taiwan card from the imperialists hand.
more like :head-in-sand:
You don't know what I think about the possibility of a world war, I haven't said anything about it. You're just guessing that's why I'm not bothering to engage with your silly reddit guessing.
"Silly reddit guessing" is when you listening to Imperialists saying "We're gonna do an Imperialist war at this time and in this place" and say "damn better prepare"
No, it's when you say I think something without any evidence besides that you disagree with another thing I said. Keep projecting whatever you're mad about at me and imagining I'm oppositional to it, it's a great use of your time.
It will literally NEVER happen because that's not how things work. China is a foreign country to Taiwanese. Why would they let a foreign country take over? Keep in mind I'm the only Taiwanese person on hexbear (probably). I know what people here think, what the media is saying.
There IS possibility of Taiwan relations warming with the CPC but they need to DROP their dumbass claims from the 60's. They are simply not reality based. The KMT does NOT represent Taiwan. They were invaders. Nobody asked them to take over Taiwan. CPC officially needs to stop LARPING that KMT and their claims somehow represents Taiwan. Chinese nationalists here and on reddit also do this larping.
I want Taiwan to be independent from the US mafia and handing your country to a foreign country is not the solution.
You don't need to convince me, you need to convince the Chinese. I'm sure they've got a tip line somwhere.