“Doomerism” matters in the sense that a proper dialectical materialist analysis ought to take pessimistic signals into account and shouldn’t be blinded by pure delusional optimism. I’ve recently been on a reading binge of pre-1989 leftist books on the USSR. Their perspectives on things, untouched by the hindsight of the later Soviet collapse, was really quite fascinating (and depressing) and it was telling that, apart from those leftists like Harpal Brar (who passed a couple months ago) that were “Stalinist” and therefore rarely took post-20th Congress Soviet leadership at their word, most completely failed to see the problems with the Gorbachevite USSR which led to the capitalist restoration within half a decade.

One example that stuck with me was a Western Soviet-sympathetic cultural anthropology written in 1985 which focused on the non-Russian nationalities in the USSR and took Khrushchev’s claim as settled fact that the USSR had “solved” the issue of the nationality question. Then, in just 6 years after its publication, for various reasons, the entirety of the multinational Soviet Union was torn apart and, three decades later, what’s effectively a Soviet civil war between Russia and Ukraine began. That form of sheer optimism (akin to the non-Marxist anti-imperialists like Pepe Escobar who used to BRICS-post constantly about the imminent end of dollar hegemony) should be avoided and that’s why I think it’s good for “doomers” like XHS who (whenever they take a break from pitching MMT, that is) try to sift through both the typical China collapse slop and the constant “it’s so joever” stuff from places like Naked Capitalism to attempt to highlight some of the contradictions within China and the endurance of the existing hegemonic system.

That said, the extreme end of doomerism can be too much. Still, it’s often understandable. The important thing to always keep in mind is that the entire point of being a socialist is about believing that there is a possibility that “the future can be better than the past if we’re willing to fight for it” (to borrow a line from Steban, the Student Communist). Even with all the ongoing atrocities and depravity in the contemporary world, I think it’s honestly a miracle that we’re even in a situation like this at all where, very visibly, the current Western hegemonic structure is being eroded.

If the West had an actually capable piece of shit like FDR who had the capacity of imagination (such as his relationship with Stalin and his Four Policemen and UN ideas), rather than fail-sons like Clinton and Bush, the West might not have squandered its unipolar moment. Real despair was what people in the now formerly socialist countries felt in the 90s, when everything they’d worked for and believed in was suddenly ripped apart. Leftists in those places often have older family members that spiralled into life-long substance abuse or tragically took their lives from the sheer despair, hardship, cruelty and alienation of capitalist restoration. That was a level of humanitarian suffering unmatched in the entirety of our post World War 2 epoch. Someone from the r/trueanon subreddit recently posted about the WW2 veteran and Soviet poet Yulia Drunina who committed suicide in 1991.

If the neoliberals and neocons didn’t kick the cold warriors like Kennan and Kissinger, who were screaming in alarm, to the curb, they might have found a way past their greed, paranoia and aversion to even remote degrees of power-sharing to bring post-Soviet oligarchic Russia into the fold. It’s frankly astounding that they managed to alienate the likes Yeltsin and Putin, Russian history’s most unabashed Western sycophants since the time of Peter I. With Putin on board, they could have applied coordinated pressure on China and completed the maritime and territorial encirclement to block off projects like BRI, by blockading Chinese access to inland Eurasia through Western-aligned Russian sabotage. By the time the 2010s came around, China might have been coerced into accepting a subordinate position to the US, which was the nature of the so-called “G2” deal that Obama purportedly offered and China rejected. That would truly have been the darkest timeline.

The fact that the USSR’s catastrophic collapse didn’t end in some thousand year American reich, even though the West had held nearly all the cards in the 90s, and that China could rise to become a new successor counterweight to that Western hegemony, though its inaction or contradictions may at times leave leftists and anti-imperialists wanting, is frankly miraculous in of itself. Of course, the infamously misguided euphoria leftists had about the “weakened” US following its defeat in Vietnam should be kept in mind. History never ends and the potential for some form of US and Western hegemonic comeback is always within the realm of possibility.

We’re still living in a world shaped by 500 years of continuous Western hegemony, both direct and indirect, and to be able to see that come apart at the seams, especially after the setbacks of 1989-91, however much of a “long dureé” process this unravelling sometimes seems, is honestly something, by the very fact that it’s happening at all, enough to make sustained nihilism or defeatism hard to justify.

He’s desperately trying to salvage his reputation in any way he can, the American Prestige pod just platformed him for a guest interview, which incidentally was a good reminder for me to cancel my Patreon subscription. Soc dems always default to pumping out generic “but my institutions” commiseration slop with lib guests during Republican administrations.

As for Professor End of History, I can almost respect the sheer grind he’s putting in to try and clear his name, but he’ll always be the poster boy of 90s American unipolar hubris. Leftists always scorned him for what he exemplified and nowadays the neo-con and nat sec types also deeply resent him as well for “misleading” them and making them complacent.

Calling them the “ousted monarchy” is certainly a journalism school euphemism for the crown prince of Nepal Romanov-ing his own ruling parents and family.

That said, the Trump administration specifically has had a long-running fixation on flipping Nepal into a Himalayan Baltic/Ukraine against China (and India as well, for that matter) since his first term. They got Nepal to sign onto the USAID “Millennium Challenge Compact” (the same name borrowed from the wargame against Iran) during Trump 1 and it was ratified by Nepal’s then-Communist Party coalition led parliament (Maoist-Centre and United-Socialist) in 2022. I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect of that $550 million agreement is primed to begin making waves in Nepal now, especially now with Trump 2 and the libs now leading the government.

The Tricontinental wrote a pretty thorough piece on this: https://thetricontinental.org/asia/ticaa-issue-1-the-millennium-challenge-corporation/

The West is losing their great clash of civilizations to a country led by someone who is not only John Deere tractor-pilled but also human history’s first Iowa stan.

Seems like an unimaginative SDI copypasta. The space element is just extrapolating the US’ recent bout of LEO satellite spamming through Starlink as some success that lends a permanent perceived advantage in space that they just flatly assume China could not reciprocate. The plain thinking is that space is the new paradigm shift that elevates the US military above its adversaries—like gunboats shelling junks or drones bombing foot soldiers. To maintain this desperation for asymmetry, the Trump admin in particular, since his first term with the branding of the “Space Force,” has been diving headfirst into the pandora’s box of near space weaponization. The idea that space can be maintained as an exclusively US domain is not sustainable in reality and the US will inevitably regret giving its designated adversaries the permission, in international eyes, to match its near space ambitions.

From a technical perspective, it’s the latest cope against Russian and Chinese hypersonic glide vehicle technologies. The US strategic doctrine is fettered, just like Israel, to the psychological chains that adversaries “aren’t allowed” to touch the sacred land of CONUS. Everything else seems to be crafted to work backwards from that teleological endpoint.

During the 80s, the success of the ultimately non-existent SDI was the demoralizing psychological effect it had on the Soviet nuclear doctrine. The 70s saw the USSR’s nuclear stockpile surpass the US and this had been a major source of pride for the Soviets. Reagan coming along and insinuating “Nuh-uh-uh, actually your payload advantage is useless because we swerved in a new direction that makes that arsenal obsolete” provoked the Soviets into the panic of an exhaustive arms race which they could not industrially and economically sustain vis-a-vis the US from a budgetary standpoint. This budgetary black hole caused by the Soviet SDI psychological panic was what allowed Gorbachev the political room to militarily capitulate to the US through signing the USSR onto unequal nuclear arms agreements.

The issue for the US in trying to reuse this psychological bluff, because that’s what it’s really about, is that that it is now in a inverse position to its adversaries industrially and economically. The more important thing that this might effect is that any move by the US in this domain legitimates the PLARF to finally green light an expansion of the paltry Chinese nuclear arsenal to a level actually commensurate of comprehensive second strike potential. Additionally, it allows China the justification to continue to reject any of the recent “trilateral” US-Russia-China nuclear arms agreements that the US has been trying to bind it to, which would place it at a distinct disadvantage as the newcomer party still catching up.

I think this is a far sunnier depiction of Europe than the material reality and historical record allows to be tenably held. It’s worth going back to interrogate the sheer history of the notion. The idea of a scenario of inter-imperialist rivalry within the West posed by a resurgent Europe against America, to the benefit of the Global South, traces back all the way back to the immediate post-war period. Stalin himself speculated that:

The question is, what guarantee is there that Germany and Japan will not again rise to their feet, that they will not try to wrest themselves from American bondage and to live their own independent lives? I think there are no such guarantees. But it follows from this that the inevitability of wars among the capitalist countries remains.

Stalin was wrong because World War II turned out to remain the last inter-imperialist war within the West up to today.

Europe’s fundamental problem is that it has never been held accountable for the original sin of 500 years of colonialism and imperialism. Rather than facing any retribution, it has been rewarded. The continent has managed to retain the material wealth gained through its imperial past, and even now, it continues to benefit from neo-colonial economic structures that give subsidy to its luxury through the continued unequal exchange with the rest of the world.

On the other hand, the only thing it really ever has been punished for is the cautionary lesson of inter-imperialist infighting when Europe turned its guns against itself. The lesson Europe took from the 20th century, and continues to hold today, is this: karma hasn’t ever punished its external violence, but it strikes if it turns on itself. Europe was the victor of history—until the victors began fighting among themselves.

This is the etiological source of its cultural and racial alignment with Western hegemony. It’s a self-perpetuating cyclical logic that was only broken through the alternative presented through socialist internationalism that provided a different narrative of Europe that allowed coexistence and solidarity with the rest of the world beyond the now increasingly bankrupt paper facade of liberal “internationalism.” Socialist internationalism (though itself insincere at times) offered Europeans, the first time, a way to reimagine our identity beyond the deeply entrenched cultural and racial divide of “the West and the rest,” a paradigm that had shaped the idea of “Europe” for centuries, if not millennia.

Incidentally, as a result, this is a contributing factor to why the entirety of all Eastern European states, as if eager to make up for lost time now that they’re in the club, have become uniformly some of the most ideologically extreme and right-wing chauvinistic freaks within Western hegemony today.

Lenin’s prediction of inter-imperialist infighting only came to pass once, during WWII, and hasn’t happened again since. Europe does learn lessons but the wrong ones. Stalin’s succession to Khrushchev meant the USSR never updated Lenin and Stalin’s analysis, which led to the policy of “peaceful coexistence.” This approach utterly failed to account for the solidarity among imperialist powers under Western hegemony, which ultimately contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse.

The plain reality from the history of post-war inter-imperialist solidarity, for which the USSR already paid the price, should indicate that unless the original sin of our continent is addressed in one way or another, Europe will never be a protagonist of any scenario of multipolarity against the existing hegemonic paradigm. If it had the chance, Europe would happily loot China alongside the US just as it did in the Opium Wars and the Boxer Uprising. It doesn’t do so today not because of a lack of any will, but a lack of capacity and capability. Unless it discovers a new narrative of its identity, as it did once through socialist internationalism, the rest of the world should prevent it from ever regaining that capability - and should reject as realistic any notion of an “independent Europe” willing to repudiate Western hegemony.

Any tolerance of Europe breaking free from American vassalage is nothing but a means to one end: the European abandonment of Western hegemony. But that’s a quid pro quo that the gardeners of this continent will never accept and so, if that’s not the likely outcome, then it’s a dangerous, useless path for the Global South to entertain and all means should be expended to instead have “sovereign” Europe’s baby teeth kicked in while it’s still in the crib.

The constituent members of the EU want to preserve their near full national autonomy while still banding together under a united front whenever convenient. This half-assing makes the current state of the EU an emperor without clothes—a strong federative “state” in appearance, but not in any practical substance. The bridges it’s torched in its chauvinistic allegiance to Western hegemony leave little incentive for the rest of the world to humor it, much less ignore exploiting its contradictions by pretending it’s actually clothed. The only response they should have is to break and tear this continent apart so that the EU liberal’s dream of some “United States of Europe” can never come to pass. Russia and China seem to have gotten the message nowadays by using a diplomatic divide-and-conquer strategy through bilateral relationships while giving Brussels’ multilateral fantasies the cold shoulder. The EU wants to have its cake and eat it too but there’s no reason for the world to let it.

The sort of freaks running this continent wouldn’t lead to some partnership with anti-imperialism against America but a coordinated sharing of America’s world policeman role with delineated global boundaries of responsibilities akin to the Treaty of Tordesillas. An “independent” Europe would take care of northern Africa, Russia, perhaps also Central Asia and the Middle East while America can, at last, properly focus all its efforts in its decade-long delayed “Pivot to Asia” and fully concentrate on the much fantasized showdown with China.

Europe re-empowered alongside America would simply just replay the dynamic between the British and French Empires in the mid-19th century. As Victor Hugo depicted that partnership - “One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits” - so would be the exact dynamic of the modern two bandits of America and “sovereign” Europe.