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In Marxist terminology, socialism is a transitional stage where existing capitalist relations persist, but the working class holds power in society. So, if Russia can get to a place where there is a communist party firmly in charge the way there is in China, then it would enter socialist stage of development.

my thoughts exactly

Exactly, and as we see with Pakistan, you don’t even need large government programs anymore. People start getting panels themselves because they’re cheap enough and their local grid is not terribly reliable.

O7

indeed

I’ve been learning Chinese for the past three years here, and I can definitely see how it very much differs structurally in the way he describes. It’s not that English doesn’t have these turns of phrase or that you can’t say things in a direct way in Chinese. It’s about the way you phrase things as a default. Every language I’ve learned had structural differences and affects the way I think when I use it. That’s the most interesting part about learning languages I find.

I can’t really see him embracing communism to be honest. He’s been fairly vocal in saying he thinks USSR was a failure. But, people are starting to realize that not everything was bad in USSR, and that it got a lot of things right.

The German Way of War explains Bewegungskrieg influenced western military thinking. Mission Command directly addresses how the US Army adapted German mission command philosophy. The Challenge of Command discusses leadership concepts including German influences on US officer education. Finally, Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era directly contrasts American attrition warfare with German maneuver concepts that the US later adopted.

Agree with all that, the US is ultimately a kleptocracy and oligarchs at the levers of power are only looking after themselves. That precludes any coherent strategy a national level, hence why we’re seeing the empire flailing. The big question is what arrangement they’ll be willing to come to in the end.

The US selectively adapted many aspects of the nazi playbook after the war.

One of the key ideas they adapted was the concept of Auftragstaktik which translated into mission command. The US Army used to be very rigid, waiting for orders from the top. The German model relied more on a culture of trusting junior leaders out of necessity, was all about telling a unit what to do as opposed to how to do it. NATO planners were imagining a fast, chaotic war where communications would break down. They baked the idea of decentralized initiative into the 1980s AirLand Battle doctrine. It was about deep strikes and agile counterattacks which is a direct mirror of German Bewegungskrieg.

But here’s a huge opportunity cost. By building the entire US Army around this big tank war in Europe, they let other skills wither on the vine. The army became an instrument for fighting the Soviets and almost useless for anything else. They gutted their own knowledge of counterinsurgency and irregular warfare. When Vietnam happened, and later Iraq and Afghanistan, their doctrine proved completely ineffective. All that focus on maneuver warfare meant they deprioritized the human element languages, civil affairs, understanding local politics.

Basically, they took a lot of German ideas on command and deep battle and welded them to American industrial military complex. But the cost was a kind of institutional tunnel vision. They built a rigid army for fighting USSR and were then surprised that it kept failing in messy, smaller wars that their expensive, complex machine wasn’t built to handle.

I think that’s the most realistic scenario. The US, China, and Russia will negotiate their respective spheres of influence going forward. Although, I’m don’t really see Russia and China agreeing to leave Latin America which is something the US seems to be insisting on.

It’s worth noting that Europeans largely played themselves by being completely intransigent.

that’s what I expect as well

Yeah, that’s my big hope as well. Now that the western liberalism is largely discredited in Russia, and all their core allies are socialist states, maybe it’ll start to rub off.

They will beat us because we are too smart…

You gotta love how the US is literally following in the footsteps of German nazis here. I guess it has to do with the fact that they brought a whole bunch of them over after WW2, and they architected much of the US military doctrine after. Naturally, they didn’t see anything wrong with what they were doing. 🤣

lol right

What’s not clear here is why the US thinks Russia and China would be at all interested in this arrangement. It’s pretty clear that both are doing just fine without trading with the US. I imagine they’re going to keep focusing on developing BRICS instead. They’re probably going to make some deals with the US just to keep Americans pacified, but I doubt there’s going to be any sort of a strategic partnership there.

I think this primarily stems from Europe losing its strategic value for the US. When it was a powerful bloc that was becoming economically integrated with Russia and China, that was something the US was deeply invested in preventing. However, now that European economies are ruined, the US isn’t really worried about Europe being a problem anymore. Their shift is towards figuring out how to deal with Russia and China.

There would need to be some significant political shift in Europe to patch things up with Russia, but China seems almost certain. That said, if the US actually bailed on Europe then I expect the current neoliberal parties to collapse and the EU along with them. At that point, individual countries could start making deals with Russia, especially if nationalist parties get in power.