Road to WW3. Part 4: ‘Only Connect’

The West is still in denial. The Guardian – Sep 3, 2025 – says China is grandstanding

*

Let me offer the distilled wisdom of my fifteen years of hard reflection on where the world is at:

• The West is in economic, political, moral and intellectual decline consequent on failure to acknowledge just how much a prosperity now coming to an end is due to five centuries of exploiting the global south. As are its attendant “Enlightenment values”.
• The authors and prime beneficiaries of that exploitation were Western capitalists, though over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries Western labour-sellers gained sufficient bargaining power to negotiate a social contract – higher real wages than in the global south, plus state welfarism reaching its zenith around 1950-80 – which gave them a stake in a colonialism reinventing itself, post WW2, as modern imperialism; defined by export from global north to south of monopoly capital, and south to north repatriation of profits.
• The past five decades have seen the steady dismantling of that social contract as labour bargaining power has been weakened by automation, collapse of the Soviet Union (and with it the case for ‘bribing’ Western workers away from socialist solutions to capitalist crises) and the offshoring of wealth creation by rentier  oligarchies which found it more profitable to have the global south make our stuff and grow our food.
• Those corporate oligarchies became immensely powerful as super profits from Asia were recycled in the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors which now drive Western economies:

Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.

Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.

Chris Hedges (abridged)

Inequality (read Piketty) soared to levels as economically dysfunctional and democracy-incompatible as they are morally abhorrent. But with trade unions reduced to offering club perks, and social democrat parties jumping aboard the Neoliberal Express while Mr Fukuyama declared the end of history, too few were complaining. Workers had for profit leverage been recast as consumers on a crack cocaine of easy credit, house price bubble and cheap flights to sun-kissed beaches. Few noticed a burgeoning underclass out in the cold, or gave time of day to the doom-mongering of a tiny and perennially discontented subset of the intelligentsia.

• Of the constellation of factors conspiring to call time, not only on these dizzying decades but on half a millennium of Western dominance, I have focused on two. The first is China. Having for decades seemingly accepted its place alongside other Asian economies in the manufacturing value chain of an imperialised world, its aspiring for so much more went unnoticed by a West whose most powerful state – drunk on post Soviet unipolarity and confident of its military and dollar supremacy – planned for ‘full spectrum dominance’ in a New American Century. When its elites were awakened from this reverie their response was predictably aggressive, Obama announcing a ‘pivot to Asia’. China posed no threat to Western publics but had outgrown – technologically, scientifically and economically – its assigned role as the obedient assembler of Westbound goods. Worse, its “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – eschewing neoliberalism, not least by keeping banking under state control while looking to earlier models of capitalism as espoused by Smith, Ricardo and Mill – had not only freed 800 million of its people from extreme poverty. Its wider initiatives – Belt & Road, Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and BRICS – look set to do the same for the global south at large. The implications are immense for Western elites addicted to super-profits from Asia’s cheap labour and ‘business friendly’ regimes, and for home economies unable to reindustrialise in anything like the required timeframes. ¹

• The second disruption to US hegemony was brought about, ironically, by Washington’s attempts to shore it up. I refer of course to its proxy war against Russia, provoked over decades. Since I’ve written a thousand times on this I’ll confine myself to noting that its antecedents lie in the replacement of the compliant Boris Yeltsin by a proudly nationalist Vladimir Putin who committed Russia – then at its lowest point in modern times due to IMF-prescribed disaster capitalism – to economic and spiritual renewal. Putin’s desire for western acceptance made him enemies at home, while his refusal to kowtow earned him Western loathing; even our intelligentsia buying cartoonishly demonising narratives. But economic turnaround and restored national pride make him, outside the West, one of the world’s most admired leaders. Significantly, Ukraine seems finally to have brought home to him the folly of seeking to appease the unappeasable. In Greek tragedian style, efforts by that wing of the US ruling class which thought to prise apart its two most formidable foes – a logical approach whose ineptitude of execution is now being repeated vis a vis Mr Modi – served only to unite them as Russia turned decisively eastward; a new reality tacitly acknowledged in my opening screengrab from the Guardian.
• The West underestimated Russian military and economic strength, including the ability of her manufacturing sectors to support a long war of attrition and resist – even to thrive on – sanctions intended to “reduce the rouble to rubble”. At the same time the war exposes, not least through inability to match Russian production of materiel, how poorly served Western economies have been by neoliberal policies which confuse the bloated GDPs of hyperfinancialisation with real wealth. We’d forgotten, you see, that we can no more sell an electric car made in Germany to a world able to buy better, cleaner and cheaper from China than we can digitally print wheat or drinking water.
• Washington had not only seen Ukraine as utterly expendable in its aim of weakening or at least tying down Russia to enable a more resolute pivot to China. It viewed Europe the same way. (How it cultivated the latter’s leaders to the point of willingness to act against their countries’ interests is the subject of Road to WW3. Part 3: capturing minds.) But this is a truth not confined to the Ukraine bloodbath. At a more general level the US (and for that matter Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are capable of economic recovery. It will be long and hard and probably violent, but possible. Spacious, abundant in natural wealth, and with a tradition of immigration whose current unpopularity is not structural, the decades ahead look set to be bleak rather than dire. Europe is the real loser, and not just because its leaders are on a career-suicidal path of selling ‘austerity’ with one hand, ‘defence’ spending hikes with the other. That, the career-suicide part, is the good news. The bad is that after decades of reliance on super-profits abroad, FIRE at home, Europe, unlike the new world, has no way back. Yes, the von der Leyens, Starmers and Macrons have to go but the problems run deeper. Ousting a quisling leadership, and the neoliberal Atlanticism sustaining it, is the easy part: a necessary but insufficient condition for hope anchored in reality. With little to trade, and having foregone cheap and plentiful energy to please Washington, a Europe incapable of feeding itself – or facing into such truths in mainstream political discourse – has yet to open its eyes to the severity of its plight. Until it does, and breaks free of the US imperial orbit to pursue its interests unfettered, there’ll be neither peace nor hope of prosperity. ²
• Meanwhile the West backs its genocidal beachhead in the Middle East and US warships threaten Venezuela on bogus pretext. (At the very least Washington is doubling down on the Monroe Doctrine in the face of rising Chinese and Russian commercial presence in its back yard.) As an Iran no longer isolated prepares for renewed US-Israeli attack, Africa’s mineral rich Sahel – where Russia’s Wagner Group has real chops – has expelled France, chastened the US and, through leaders like Mali’s Assimi Goïta, Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré and Niger’s Abdourahamane Tchiani, served notice of intent to end centuries of exploitation. In the Caucasus tensions simmer. US and EU colour revolutions, seen off in Georgia and Belarus, now threaten Serbia. Some say WW3 has begun. Some look to the eve of WW1 for parallels, some to ancient Rome for object lessons in how overextended empires behave – their Gods having first made them mad – though neither Rome nor its challengers had nukes.

The above list is not exhaustive; I’ll be adding to it in future posts. Still less is it orthogonal. That last bullet is my unoriginal insistence that none of earth’s plethora of flash points and weeping sores should be be viewed in isolation. Not Ukraine, not the cancer that is Israel. Not Syria nor Sahel nor Venezuela … Iran nor Xinjiang nor drillings in the Arctic. None can be truly understood outside the context of so far undeclared war between the US empire, and what it pleases Helen Davidson to dismiss as a ‘grandstanding’ axis of resistance.

Only connect.

* * *

1. Reindustrialisation is not just a matter of money, plant and technology. Workers have been deskilled for generations, while one obvious solution, immigration, is political dynamite. Meanwhile a Patrick Armstrong piece recently cited by reader Dave Hansell notes that “an apprentice machinist on an assembly line 50 years ago was taught by a master machinist taught by a previous master and so on back to the mid 1700s when industrial production was invented. Each in the series advanced the technique, of course, but it’s still a chain you could trace back, machinist by machinist, for all that time. If that sequence of teacher-learner-teacher is broken, if the teacher has retired or died leaving no apprentices, how long will it take to get it back?”
2. I’ve resisted many temptations to litter this post with footnotes; ditto my customary side-swipes at how corporate media keep us clueless at best on all the critical stuff. But I must say this: when Queen Ursula peddles the Alice-in nonsense that bottled LNG shipped to Europe from the US will be cheaper than the piped Russian gas Washington sabotaged – while VDL’s fellow Atlanticists first blamed Moscow, then sagely declared it a mystery to rival the Marie-Celeste – not a single media outlet calls this out for the industry strength gaslighting it so manifestly is. I rest my case: when the stakes rise for the powers they are systemically obliged to answer to, all sections of corporate media, no exceptions, show their true colours.