Right now, the U.S. ruling class is trying to carry out a color revolution in Belarus, the only remaining former Soviet state that retains socialistic policies and a state-run economy. The imperialist propaganda machine is manufacturing consent for this regime change effort through the same propaganda approach that's been used against Syria, Venezuela, and Bolivia: stoke dissension and within the targeted country, and paint the opposition as an unambiguously noble force (even though the opposition in Belarus has praised Hitler).
This latest U.S. attempt at replacing a disobedient government with a neoliberal, pro-Washington regime comes at a time when Western imperialism is escalating its military buildup and hybrid warfare against all the global powers which challenge it. The U.S. is expanding on its military encirclement of Russia and China through Eurasian war games and navy buildup in the South China Sea. The U.S. has been tightening sanctions on Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, and other countries during the pandemic with the goal of causing harm to more of their people.
Lebanon and Thailand are also being targeted with color revolutions. The imperialists have formulated a new plan for a neoliberal coup in Nicaragua, the Trump administration remains committed to regime change in Venezuela, and last month Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even declared that regime change is Washington's goal for China.
The mission of the foreign policy strategists behind these moves is a long-term "great-power competition," one that ends with the U.S. re-securing its hegemonic global position. But such a goal isn't realistic at this point, nor are many of the regime change objectives that this scenario of restored U.S. influence would require. If the U.S. still hasn't managed to overthrow Venezuela's Chavista government, it definitely can't accomplish this in China. And Bolivia, which the U.S. carried out a coup in last year, is experiencing an indigenous uprising that's making it harder for U.S. corporations to use the country as a neo-colony. The regime that Washington has installed in the country can't even hold control over much of the lands within its borders, since they've been turned into strongholds of the indigenous militias.
For the U.S. ruling class, this means that their machine of global capitalism will for the most part have to continue to contract in the coming years. The depression that America and the rest of the capitalist world has entered into will be exacerbated by increased U.S. economic isolation from China, the collapse of the dollar, and other economic symptoms of imperial decline.
So the new cold war that the imperialists are waging-as well as the war of repression that they're waging internally-is taking on a desperate nature. This war is about staving off the unraveling of the capitalist-dominated world order, and the collapse of the capitalist hierarchy that would result from this shift in geopolitical power.
As Michael Parenti said, there can be no such thing as capitalism in one country. Corporations must expand in order to maintain a positive rate of profits-European colonialism was largely brought on by the demands from the region's new capitalist ruling class to broaden their operations. This is why the imperialists have been taking such drastic measures to subdue Syria, Iran, Russia, and China in particular, and why they're now attempting regime change in Belarus and Lebanon; if these countries forever slip from their grasp, they'll mostly lose control over the crucial market territory of Eurasia. China is treated as the West's greatest enemy because it's at the epicenter of the shift towards a multi-polar world, and thus towards a future where Africa, the Indo-Pacific, and South America break away from U.S. hegemony as well.
It's also why the U.S. and its proxy states have been increasing austerity and repression during the pandemic and the new global depression. Trump's recent reduction of unemployment benefits and plans to defund social security, the Bolivian coup regime's refusals to provide vulnerable people with the means to feed their families during the pandemic, the austerity measures that have been imposed throughout much of Latin America in the last year at the behest of Washington, and the recent EU bank bailout package that imposes austerity throughout Europe are all part of the effort to foist the costs of the crisis onto the lower classes. Gestapo-style arrests in U.S. cities, violent repression of pro-democracy protests in Bolivia, and the decline of civil liberties throughout NATO countries during the pandemic are also necessary to preserve the existing order.
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