zazen

Hard to get proper information on Iran and it's quite polarized - apparently its on average a third (prob less) who are pro regime, another third anti-regime, and a middle third who fear total collapse and civil unrest so are the undecided middle. Don't think its close to regime change yet just by going on past history. In the revolution in 1979 the entire oil sector was shut down which impacted the state functioning. Protests were across classes, age groups and country wide. This seems to be more urban youth led but seems to be gaining traction? The regime can tolerate mass protest and riff raff via harsh policing but once state machinery starts getting affected and defection / walk outs from the IRGC (military) start happening is when things really break. The combination of a teetering undecided middle who hate chaos and fear what would come next + a loyal maybe 20-30% (or less who knows) + the IRGC being intact so far means the regime will most likely remain despite street level tensions. Oil sector boycott / strikes have to happen + IRGC defections. There's clearly economic grievances massively induced by Western sanctions + demands for reforms and loosening up of theocratic governance or for it to be abolished all together, maybe only remaining symbolically. I think that's what was sort of happening as Masoud Pezeshkian was a reformist voted in in 2024. Hijab enforcement wasn't there according to street vids: A country can be badly run (repressive, mismanaged etc) but also badass for resisting or not subordinating to Western imperialism (Venezuela, Iran). A lot of the conditions are unilaterally imposed via sanctions which are basically financial WMD. Theirs 3 kinds of WMD - kinetic (nukes), financial (SWIFT sanctions), geographic (choke points). The US and West have monopoly on financial WMD which is why BRICS+ is looking for a exit / optionality / off ramp / hedge against that veto. Iran has the suez canal as a important veto chokepoint - if it hadn't perhaps it would have been engaged with earlier n a military sense. Odd timing to have Bibi and Trump last month around new year speaking on Iran and how they need to get attacked if Iran is pursuing more missiles. It's as if the pre-text is being set up for action and so obviously amplifying the protests which seem to be hijacked by a media eco system of the West and on the ground provocateurs confirmed by Israeli media and Mike Pompeo himself saying Mossad's on the ground. They could be hoping for this to topple the government and if not, attack while the state is distracted and fractured internally. A lot of people talking of imminent attack and even Iran pre-emptively attacking Israel as to not be on the back foot. I still don't see how they could if 25% of Israel's interceptors got finished in 12 days last time showing how vulnerable Israel is. It takes millions + time to procure more interceptors. If Iran piles down missiles on Israel for 30 days they could be sitting ducks with no interceptors left. Two videos to get a decent sense of Iran. First - the bad of it ie theocracy (I know both of them have bias's but its still pretty decent: Second, the geopolitics of it in which its being boxed in by Western imperialism: Obviously also biased by omitting Iran's proxy strategy in the region. But the large structural driver is Western subordination coming to heads with a nation wanting to resist that - they have experience and memory of the past (1953 coup) which led to the revolution. Iran has a strong civilizational identity to rally around and a geography that protects them from easy invasions. The thing with giving a country hard times via economic warfare is that you entrench the hard liners under a seige mentality and give their resistance narrative fuel. The best way to loosen a country up is to create conditions of stability that lead to prosperity. That doesn't mean they become exactly like the liberal West, but they function at a higher level that's sensitive to their own culture. Why the global south and BRICS is even a thing.

lol true there are colonial leftovers. But now go over current US vassals. https://files.libcom.org/files/Michael Hudson - Super Imperialism - New Edition_ The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (2003).compressed.pdf What European island today has more impact on the world than the US dollar along with its financial WMD ie sanctions it can unilaterally impose on countries unwilling to subordinate - that a subordinate European continent tags along with? US’s global leverage is maintained through a monopolised financial system backstopped by force or the threat of it via US naval policing and 700+ bases. That’s the imperial arrangement. Both Europeans and Americans are scapegoating each other as the “real” imperial culprit, when in reality they co-created, benefited from, and enforced the same world order for decades. Moral finger wagging at each other is to blameshift and maintain their self image - because majority of the world can see this arrangement clearer than ever and more importantly - actually have some teeth and leverage to extricate themselves from it. That order no longer maps onto material reality. It’s being structurally challenged by rising powers making it brittle rather than dominant. Former European great powers, already post-imperial, are now tagging along a fading superpower that is trying to prevent decline. The US is moving from leadership to consolidation due to pressure and increasingly willing to cannibalize allies to preserve primacy. That’s why transatlantic unity is fracturing. It’s 15% of the world fighting to maintain primacy and privilege vs a 85% that are now contesting it.

Precisely brother This guy actually has a good vid on a plausible EU army operating without US approval (he still doesn't say who will lead the command though) political will is still a major issue but that could get there with both Russia and now the US acting the way it is: Ritter: ''The Camel’s Bloody Nose The other day I wrote a post which made use of an analogy involving a camel and a tent—in short, to keep the camel from entering the tent once it stuck its nose under the tent, one needed to smack it on its nose. Last night Russia punched the camel in the nose. The use of the Oreshnik missile against strategic energy targets located near the western Ukrainian city of Lvov, combined with a massive strike on energy infrastructure targets in Kiev, represents a crystal clear response to the west’s ongoing targeting of Russian energy infrastructure, including CIA-backed drone strikes on Russian oil refineries and US Naval seizures of Russian-flagged oil tankers. The Russian Ministry of Defense likewise linked the Russian attacks to the Ukrainian drone strike that targeted President Putin’s residence late last month. The use of the Oreshnik is always a major escalation not fully appreciated by those who casually encourage its employment. It is only the second time in history that an intermediate range nuclear-capable strategic missile has been used in combat (the first was the initial use of Oreshnik back on November 21, 2024.) This time, the Oreshnik struck a target close to the Ukrainian-Polish border. The signal this attack sent to NATO nations is clear—Russia has the ability to strike NATO nations with impunity using non-nuclear conventional weaponry. NATO has no ability to defend against such an attack. It was interesting that Russia opted to fire the Oreshnik from the Kaputin Yar missile test facility. Russia and Belarus recently announced that an Oreshnik-equipped brigade was put on combat duty at a base in Belarus. But the attack did not originate from this unit. Russia has indicated that it is fielding additional Oreshnik-equipped brigades. Kapustin Yar is a location where the combat equipment of the Oreshnik missile system is married with the personnel operating it for the final training and technical preparation necessary before a unit can be deemed combat ready. The recent Oreshnik launch on Lvov may have been an operational training event repurposed for the purpose of sending a message to the west. This was not a launch from a strategic asset that has been placed on combat duty. This was an operational training event. There is a difference. Russia once again appears to be sending a message to the west that it seeks to limit escalation. This time the camel got a bloody nose. The next time—if there is a next time—the camel may not survive. Let’s hope the west is sophisticated enough to comprehend the message Russia appears to be sending.''

Biggest obstacle beyond a domestic military industry is unity and leadership that isn’t contested: How US neutered domestic Euro military sovereignty:

Sometimes it takes a spray tanned loud mouth to say the quiet part out loud and cause an epiphany “oh, maybe we’re actually an imperial empire”. Or they scapegoat it as “this is just a bad phase with Trump, we’re really the good guys with democratic values” Meanwhile a Democrat: If people dig deeper they’d realise their living standards and democracies are maintained by un-democratic means and violence globally that props up an imperial arrangement in which they largely benefit. Michael Hudson the GOAT who wrote the book Super Imperialism:

Power and survival dynamics which are instinctual and reflexive are reality - and to buffer against that harsh reality humans reflected and created constructs such as law and norms. The reality of power precedes principle, but principle redeems power. Consciousness nurtures the unconsciousness of nature. That management of power and survival dynamics is conditional - civilization is a subscription we continuously pay for with human effort and isn't a end product utopia. Once those conditions deteriorate due to mismanagement or structural shifts then the base reality of power and survival re-assert themselves. This happened at Russia's red line in Ukraine, will happen at China's red line in Taiwan - and has not happened at any red line for the US. This move isn't national security but empire in-security - at their position in the system being challenged by rising powers demanding a more equitable world order - where one nation and it's allies don't have veto power to unilaterally sanction anyone that doesn't subordinate themselves to Western interests.

Sky news: https://news.sky.com/story/greenland-trump-white-house-live-venezuela-maduro-capture-strikes-colombia-latest-13489831 ”The US is attempting to seize a Venezuela-linked oil tanker after a more than two-week-long pursuit across the Atlantic, according to reports. A US official has told Reuters that the seizure is being carried out by the Coast Guard and military. Russian state news media outlet RT is also reporting that a helicopter, believed to be carrying US military forces, is attempting to land on the oil tanker.” From pirates of the Carribean to pirates of the Atlantic. Didn’t think a sequel would come this quick 😂 @BlueOak we both said it’s gonna be a turbulent year but fuck me we’re only a week in.

Reality isn’t purely material darwinianism and law of the jungle. Might makes right is pre-concious, although utopian liberals think being concious means rejecting the reality of power/survival dynamics existing or that they are above it. Power needs to be buffered by principles that come from our own conscience intuition of what is “right” and “wrong”. A lot of the right wing just want to default to our animal nature because it’s simpler than dealing with the complexity of having to nurture nature to more humane ends that actually create civilization.

I generally likes his takes but he assumes a level of coordination that isn't there and is way too confident about the conclusion. There's also quite a few holes and contradictions in his argument. The incentives are also incoherent - he correctly says US companies can't be profitable from Venezuelan oil and don't want low oil prices to destroy their own heavy investment in US/Canadian oil. But then says the Gulf countries will come in with the investment and drive prices lower to kill off their competition which they can then consolidate and buy up. He somehow squares that the gulf and Western capital elite are on the same page here - but how can they be? Firstly, even if finance elites like Blackrock etc aren't as exposed to oil stocks - having very low oil affects other things that indirectly can affect the financial system through credit risk and contagion etc. Finance want boring stable oil prices not low prices. Secondly, why would gulf countries invest billions into a asset they they themselves are trying to diversify away from because the macro trend of the world is to go to push towards renewable? Just because gulf countries can extract oil at much lower prices doesn't mean they want those lower prices - they need higher priced oil to fund their own budgets and projects. That's something Shahid always talks about - how the Gulf countries through their sovereign wealth funds are shaping the region to become the new Europe 2.0 - but with what money if their main revenue stream is cut because they ''deliberately flooded the market with cheap oil and lowered the price of oil''. The logic may be that lower the price and sell more oil - but oil is a commodity and doesn't work like a retail product. It's inelastic. Which means if the price goes down, the demand isn't going to all of a sudden jump to the same degree - people aren't going to all drive 50% more because its cheaper. That's why OPEC+ have always kept prices within a stable band that's profitable for them. His framework assumes these transnational elites use the state for their own interest but then underestimates or overlooks the national security state (deep state) which thinks more in empire logic and not always in capital logic. Also - these same OCGFC (Blackrock etc) depend on the platform of the US itself (that the empire maintains) - but by his logic they are transitioning away from it and eroding it by shifting to the east. No other platform as yet exists with the depth of capital markets and law and order of Western finance for them to jump away from and towards - and if they did they are dealing with BRICS and Gulf type countries running those platform who will subordinate private capital more than Western platforms.

Europe has all the ingredients to be powerful yet it isn't considered a great power because it has no unity or ability to command that power - specifically militarily. And military is the hardest dimension of power and sovereignty which they outsourced. To resolve inter-Euro rivalries after the world wars US took the lead in the security domain via NATO - no Euro nation trusts the other to lead so they sub-ordinated that function to a allied superpower placing them under its security umbrella. The fact that this superpower is across the pond and may have its own interests means it can use Europe for its own geopolitical adventures in containing rivals (Russia) and not have to suffer the consequences. Europe isn't a great power because it refuses the moral and political costs of being one. It's structurally paralyzed because the position to lead the military command would be contested between France, Germany and UK which also disbanded via Brexit. Unity is just noise without a command - armies don't function on consensus but authority. A company can have multiple stakeholders or directors but only one CEO. In a military showdown you can't wait to get consensus from 27 capitals with 27 different threat perceptions and 27 different domestic political situations. A army needs a hierarchy designed to make violent decisions faster than the other side. Consensus is a luxury only democratic civilians can enjoy. NATO isn't even European defense exactly but is American command of European forces - with the assumption that the US will lead those forces in a direction that benefits European interests and security. If US and European interests diverge - Europe's security architecture is still beholden to being US led via NATO. US also has a kill switch to the military eco system Europe depends on. If the US wanted to take Greenland what could Europe actually do? Militarily not much due to that dependency and operational paralysis around who would lead the charge against the US anyway. The first to take US's side would be Atlanticist Britain, then what? All they could do is political (protest with words) or economic (sanctions and decoupling) which assures tanking the continent. This is why it's important to have military sovereignty but also never have total dependence on a single power, but instead play them off and spread the risk. In a way this is what India has done - it hedges itself by maintaining economic ties with China, energy and military ties with Russia, and both military and economic ties to the US along with its tech stack. That allows it a level of strategic autonomy Europe doesn't have despite Europe being much more richer and advanced than India.

Late stage USSR and post-USSR Russia under US puppet Yeltsin (opening to neoliberalism shock therapy) are a parallel to this. “The Brezhnev Doctrine was a Soviet foreign policy stated by Leonid Brezhnev, asserting the Soviet Union's right to intervene militarily in any Warsaw Pact nation to preserve communist rule, justified by the idea that reforms in one socialist country threatened all. It justified the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia (Prague Spring) to crush liberal reforms, solidifying Moscow's control over its satellite states and reinforcing Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe.” Replace Brezhnev doctrine with Donroe doctrine. What’s possibly to come: Funny seeing US empire clowns talk of how they’re gonna nation build and help the people benefit from oil revenues. Just like how corporate oligarchs re-invest into the US population and care so much. Listen to Rubio at 10-12 min: If the presence of other powers isn’t tolerated in their hemisphere why should China tolerate US in Japan, Phillipines etc. Same was said by Trump the Buffon about Greenland “lots of Russian and Chinese ships over there” no shit, Russia borders much of the artic. The presence of something alone isn’t a “national security threat” - a militarised power projection presence is. Child logic is “dollars are everywhere bro, US is a global threat”. No, not by itself - coercion or the future threat of violence to use the Western financial financial system where the US and it’s allies have veto power via SWIFT sanctions is the threat - back stopped by the force of global naval policing and 700+ bases. Globalisation naturally brings global presence - that presence wants to be denied or made conditional to benefit US empire interests - with force or the threat of it. That presence (Russian, Chinese) wasn’t an existential national security threat (yet), it was a threat to imperial architecture. It’s about the oil but also not in the way most think. It’s more about platform (system) dominance than the product (oil) itself. More money will be made through financialization of future claims to oil flow than ramping up production to max capacity - which will destroy big oil investments in Canada and US who require higher prices to profit from - thus are against flooding supply to market. With Venezuelan resources folded into the system with political alignment - it can then be utilised. Just to show the power of financialization - yesterday €100 billion in market cap was added to US oil stocks - simply through signal, not supply. Good listen from a oil guy:

@BlueOak Yeah most likely if no political resolution comes it looks like it will be a frozen conflict eventually. The thing about drones is true - but I don't know how much they obsolete manpower. If drones were enough we wouldn't have seen Russia makes the territorial gains they made in 2025, which before that had been barely anything for a good two years. I think drones make it very costly to push the front line and slow down the tempo, but don't erase it completely. Russia also came back to match Ukraine with its own improvement in drones so it seems like the side that can keep feeding into the grinder is wins ground - drones can't hold territory only manpower still can, though under the cover and with the help of drones and at greater cost and caution from incoming drones from the other side. It usually takes a average 3;1 ratio to offensively take ground, which is why Russia suffered more in taking what they did. If drones were enough of a game changer we'd surely have seen Ukraine be able to push back and re-take ground from the Russian's but that still requires manpower which is why they didn't. And now that initial advantage of a gap with drones has shrunk as Russia's caught up with their own. Soldiers still matter but drones heavily tax the movement of those soldiers and increase the cost of attrition. They increase the attrition - but the end is still that the side with more meat to grind endures and makes ground or fortifies any taken positions. This is also why Putin or Russia trying it with any other EU country (which legit has article 5) let alone attempt to take all of Ukraine is so over blown. At best, they may push to the river which is logistically a nightmare to cross, and consider that a natural border to draw the line. Perhaps attempt Odessa to further secure black sea, but even that would be very costly.

Multiple factions have their reasons to approve of this move in Venezuela. For Trump who's commercially minded and thinks very simplistically from a lens of power and money it was an easy sell = take oil get rich lol. For neocon hawks like Rubio and Lindsey Graham its more ideological (anti-socialist, Monroe Doctrine, exceptionalism). The financial and industrial (big oil) elite aren't thinking they've hit a jackpot of oil supply - largest oil reserves doesn't mean profitable oil because type of oil, cost of extraction, political cost etc all matter. It would cost time and 10s of billions to re-vamp the infrastructure - all in a revolutionary minded jurisdiction that's not secure. Those investments could just be taken and nationalized down the line. What it's thought to provide US capital elites and the US empire more broadly is dollar dominance and system compliance. It protects (tries to) the platform their wealth relies on. The platform being US reserve currency and treasuries underpinning it - which is more essential than simply the product (oil). Apple cares more about the dominance of the platform (OS) than the apps (product) on it. The idea is to signal to the world that the US (OS) is still strong and that flirting with playing outside the system can have consequences. This can obviously and most likely will backfire. The US flopped on the trade war with China, has struggled dealing with the Houthis in the Red Sea, hasn't managed to eradicate Hamas via its ally in Israel, and still has a defiant Iran after their little party trick hitting a mountain which they framed as victory. Russia despite being sanctioned is chugging along with trade and India hasn't bent the knee to follow suit with those sanctions either. Seems a show of force out of desperation was in order. It's not a full on regime change yet, but a regime adjustment by taking out the leader. The regime still stands and Trumps notion of running Venezuela from the US whilst warning the new head is basically saying ''your our puppet now and must follow orders. If not, then we'll come in with round 2 for a full regime op” - which he's also threatened. What happens next we'll have to see. If the people don't see any improvements in their living standard within a reasonable time they could revolt, including insurgency, which may happen regardless against US actions. The issue is improvements takes time - especially in a petro-state which needs oil refinery investment and revenue + nation building. If the new head opens up Venezuela we could see a very similar parallel to Yeltsin in Russia that caused a shit show of asset stripping and privatization that caused in-equality etc and eventually gave rise to Putin who came in hard fisted against that neo-liberal shock therapy to stabilize things. Or we could just see US entanglement and Vietnam 2.0 which will seal the end of the empire.

Katie Miller is Stephen Miller's wife (the White House deputy chief of staff for policy). See what she tweeted about Greenland and what Denmark’s Ambassador to the US responded: https://x.com/dkambusa/status/2007607563601273179?s=46&t=DuLUbFRQFGpB8oo7PwRglQ Russia’s special military op at least has some security logic behind it that can be understood - even if the response to events on the ground are completely unjustifiable and aggressive. This US special op doesn’t and is blatant imperialism. Had China or Russia placed bases and missiles pointed to US then it would have introduced a security logic making it more understandable. Maduro may be bad (many Venezuelans are happy for his removal) but the system that decides who’s “bad” is even more dangerous because it’s unaccountable and selectively applied by a US led Western hegemonic order that can unilaterally impose sanctions - that deteriorate conditions that render the leader of a country less legitimate and thus more ripe for overthrow. All the Euro leadership is barking and toeing the same line “Maduro was illegitimate and we believe in international law and democracy” LOL Maduro was a democratically (maybe contested) elected leader governing a fragile petro-state, whose legitimacy was eroded through external economic warfare that created the very conditions later used to justify his removal. Now ya’ll know what BRICS and the global south are trying to extricate themselves from and why. https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2025/9/3/us-and-eu-sanctions-have-killed-38-million-people-since-1970 ”The Lancet Global Health, which gives us a global view for the first time. Led by the economist Francisco Rodriguez at the University of Denver, the study calculates the total number of excess deaths associated with international sanctions from 1970 to 2021. The results are staggering. In their central estimate, the authors find that unilateral sanctions imposed by the US and EU since 1970 are associated with 38 million deaths. In some years, during the 1990s, more than a million people were killed. In 2021, the most recent year of data, sanctions caused more than 800,000 deaths. According to these results, several times more people are killed by sanctions each year than are killed as direct casualties of war (on average, about 100,000 people per year). More than half of the victims are children and the elderly, people who are most vulnerable to malnutrition. The study finds that, since 2012 alone, sanctions have killed more than one million children. Hunger and deprivation are not an accidental by-product of Western sanctions; they are a key objective. This is clear from a State Department memo written in April 1960, which explains the purpose of US sanctions against Cuba. The memo noted that Fidel Castro – and the revolution more broadly – enjoyed widespread popularity in Cuba. It argued that “every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba,” by “denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. The power of Western sanctions hinges on their control over the world’s reserve currencies (the US dollar and the Euro), their control over international payment systems (SWIFT), and their monopoly over essential technologies (eg satellites, cloud computation, software). If countries in the Global South wish to chart a more independent path towards a multipolar world, they will need to take steps to limit their dependence in these respects and thus insulate themselves from backlash. The recent experience of Russia shows that such an approach can succeed.”

China plays the long game - it won’t move unless the timeline gets compressed with the crossing of red lines on the US’s part - which they haven’t yet. Chips alone won’t be fought over because a war means the loot (fabs) will be destroyed anyway. Both US and China are also heavily investing in domestic capacity for semi’s so Taiwan will lose that monopoly. Chips are critical but not existential to the point of going to war against a peer competitor over. Taiwan hasn’t formally or de facto integrated into any sort of rival military architecture - no permanent US bases, defence treaty flirtation, or NATO style command integration. Independence rhetoric is mostly symbolic but not crossed into being cemented structurally by law or UN recognition - red lines haven’t been crossed the way they were in Ukraine where the time to act was compressed. China has so far tolerated plenty of ambiguity and so has Taiwan maintained it without clear defection because all parties involved know the line. “Lay low and bide your time” - some Chinese don.