Connexion
En cas d’invasion de Taïwan, Pékin utiliserait des drones sous-marins pour poser des mines dans le Pacifique, mais les conséquences
L’article Pas seulement Taïwan: le plan de la Chine pour dominer le Pacifique est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Origines Il semble que la guerre est apparue en même temps que l’Humanité1. La confrontation armée au profit de leur
L’article La stratégie de la décapitation : couper la tête du serpent permet-il d’affronter une hydre ? est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Le prix moyen du carburant en France a dépassé les 2 € par litre. Ce record est dû à l’envolée
L’article Pourquoi le prix de l’essence ne baisse jamais? est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Le 28 février 2026, Israël et les États-Unis ont lancé chacun une opération militaire contre l’Iran. Le chef d’État iranien,
L’article ICI MOSCOU ! Le changement de régime de trop est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
La guerre israélo-étatsunienne contre l’Iran présente des caractéristiques importantes pour la Russie, dont l’analyse met en évidence des similitudes avec
L’article Caracas, Téhéran puis Moscou ? Enseignements pour la SVO de la guerre contre l’Iran est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Le 24 février 2022, il y a 4 ans, débutait l’opération militaire spéciale russe en Ukraine. Alors que le déroulement
L’article ICI MOSCOU ! Quatre ans d’opération militaire spéciale est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Le cas du Donbass (régions de Donetsk et Louhansk) met en lumière toutes les tensions du droit des peuples à
L’article La problématique du Donbass ukrainien est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Je me demande si les prétendus « libéraux » finiront par être un peu gênés d’apprendre que Tsahal a elle
L’article Israël partage l’avis du Hamas : le bilan des morts à Gaza s’élève à au moins 70 000 morts. De quoi embarrasser les négationnistes de salon. est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Suite de l’analyse de notre expert militaire : Une position diplomatico-politique maintenue malgré les faits La gouvernance kiévienne aurait dû
L’article Rapport de situation Décembre 2025 – 2 sur 3 Ukraine est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Confrontée à des problématiques multi-causales l’esprit humain favorise généralement les solutions simples et donc parfois inappropriées mais davantage accessibles et
L’article Rapport de situation Décembre 2025, partie 1 sur 2 – L’Occident collectif est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
“Major hostilities erupted once again in early to mid-December in Southeast Asia along the borders of Thailand and Cambodia following a troubled “ceasefire” that included incidents and provocations for months since the last round of major fighting took place in July 2025.
Despite any resulting ceasefire, the fundamental issues driving the conflict remain entirely unresolved, primarily because these issues stem from foreign interests using regional conflict to complicate both Asia’s rise in general and China’s rise specifically.”
References:
Nation – Second Army Area suspects English-speaking foreigners flying suicide drones for Cambodian troops (Dec. 11, 2025): https://www.nationthailand.com/news/a… Reuters – Ukrainian operatives aided Syrian rebels with drones, Washington Post reports (Dec. 2024): https://www.reuters.com/world/ukraini… Nation – Three leaders’ statements diverge: US, Thai and Cambodian tones don’t match (Dec. 13, 2025): https://www.nationthailand.com/news/g… RAND Corporation – Extending Russia (2019): https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand… Reagan Presidential Foundation – Fireside Chat with General Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Dec. 7, 2025): • Fireside Chat with General Dan Caine, Chai… Irrawaddy – China-Backed Pipeline Facility Damaged in Myanmar Resistance Attack (2022): https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/… Naval War College Review – A Maritime Oil Blockade Against China (2018): https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi… CSIS – How Much Trade Transits the South China Sea?: https://chinapower.csis.org/much-trad… NEO – US Sows Chaos Across Asia as it Aims for China (Sep. 2025): https://journal-neo.su/2025/09/30/269… Bloomberg – Thailand Needs Hyperloop, Not China-Built High-Speed Rail, Junta Critic Says (2018): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl… Move Forward Party – Hyperloop Presentation (2019): • \7 ไฮเปอร์ลูป hyperloop คุณธนาธร ตอบคำถามน… iLaw – About: https://www.ilaw.or.th/en/about-us Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity (Thailand): https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore… China MFA – President Xi Jinping Meets with King Maha Vajiralongkorn Phra Vajiraklaochaoyuhua of Thailand (Nov. 2025): https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xw/z… China MFA – Wang Yi Meets with Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand (Apr. 2025): https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjbzhd/2… New Atlas – The Complete Guide: US Government Role in Thailand’s “Student Protests” (2020): https://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/20… Harvard AEC (Cambodia): https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore… Phnom Penh Post – The dominance of the dollar in Cambodia: Causes, effects, solutions (Jan. 2025): https://www.phnompenhpost.com/opinion… AP – Cambodian leader’s son, a West Point grad, set to take reins of power — but will he bring change? (2023): https://apnews.com/article/cambodia-e… CBS News – U.S. warship docks in Cambodia, a top Chinese ally, for first time in 8 years (Dec. 2024): https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-warsh… Diplomat – US Defense Secretary to Visit China-Linked Cambodian Naval Base (Jun. 2025): https://thediplomat.com/2025/06/us-de… Thai PBS – ‘Angkor Sentinel’ military exercises to return as US-Cambodia links thaw (Nov. 2025): https://world.thaipbs.or.th/detail/an… US PACOM – Royal Cambodian Armed Forces delegation visits USINDOPACOM for Bilateral Defense Dialogue (Jul. 2025): https://www.pacom.mil/Media/NEWS/News…
https://www.pacom.mil/Media/NEWS/News…
L’article L’inflation ralentit à l’approche d’une réunion décisive de la Banque de Russie sur le taux directeur est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Dans la plupart des discours publics occidentaux, la guerre en Ukraine commence le 24 février 2022, lorsque les forces russes
L’article La Russie, l’Ukraine et l’Occident (2014–2022), entre responsabilité juridique et responsabilité géopolitique est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Quick Telegram Update
Just like any other “peace deal” the US brokers (amid conflicts of its own engineering) the “peace” between Thailand and Cambodia collapsed (and really didn’t exist to begin with).
There have been constant skirmishes and incidents along the border all throughout the “peace,” and now open hostilities are escalating once again.
This includes mortars, grenades, small arms, warplanes, and the repositioning of rocket launchers and tanks.
It should be noted that at the time of the first round of fighting, there was a US-backed regime running both Cambodia and Thailand. The US-backed Thai administration was removed from power because of its involvement in the border conflict – Thailand now has a sort of interim government in place.
Unfortunately, Cambodia has over the last 1-2 years pivoted hard toward the US, its new PM (the former PM’s son) is a West Point grad and has signed a raft of military cooperation agreements with the US.
As the National Security Strategy has made clear – the US seeks to expand its containment of China in Asia-Pacific and will do so by enlisting its existing proxies and “expand” available proxies through “soft power” (proxy conflict, coercion, and regime change).
Keep ALL of this in mind as hostilities unfold along the Thai-Cambodian border.
« La réduction de l’inflation constitue une réussite majeure cette année », a déclaré le président russe Vladimir Poutine lors
L’article Poutine indique que la lutte contre l’inflation a commencé à porter ses fruits est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Le 47ème président des États unis d’Amérique, Donald Trump, sera probablement celui qui devra gérer la fin de l’ère de
L’article La position Trump dans le conflit en Ukraine a-t-elle évolué ? est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
L’économie russe se dirige vers une reprise contrôlée après une surchauffe, a déclaré la gouverneure de la Banque centrale Elvira
L’article Le cycle de réduction du taux directeur durera toute l’année 2026, affirme Nabioullina est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
L’industrie russe est au bord d’un effondrement sectoriel, le poids des remboursements de prêts sur les revenus des entreprises atteignant
L’article L’inflation russe stagne du fait de la hausse prévue de la TVA, de la crise du carburant et d’effets saisonniers est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
… Essentially, we need to do what the West is doing to us.
By Rostislav Ishchenko at Ukraine.ru.
(machine translation)
For those who always worry that there are too many words, I will express the meaning of this material in one phrase: don’t be complacent, it won’t get any better.
Now, for everyone else who doesn’t get it with just one phrase.
It will get better, of course, but not for a long time, and not everyone will live to see it. It may even happen that there will be no one to write an epitaph for humanity. At first, the survivors will be too busy, and then they will also be gone. But as realists, we will assume that sooner or later, perhaps even after us, the worst will pass and better days will come.
Why, as realists, if it is said above that humanity has every chance to disappear relatively quickly and very painfully? Because if the worst does happen, then there is no point in reflecting: belated reflection will not help anyone, only distract the temporarily surviving from the fruitless struggle for existence. So it is realistic to consider only one option for the future – in which humanity managed to avoid the worst. In this case, he will not only have the opportunity, but also the need to analyze the past in order to avoid a dangerous crisis in the future. Luck is not always on his side.
To begin with, if the situation can be stabilized, it will mean the victory of the current anti-American bloc, or if the United States and its allies win, the situation will continue to deteriorate until a self-destructive war becomes the only option. The Euro-American civilization is too accustomed to risking war and winning to give up this “last chance.”
From the Germanic tribes that attacked the Roman Empire to the conquistadors and the modern United States, Napoleon’s slogan “get in the fight and see what happens” has been a cornerstone of European civilization. The freedom-loving Chersusci of Arminius, the mighty Cimbri and Teutons, whose victories had brought fame to Marius, as well as dozens of smaller or less well-known tribes, were defeated by the invincible Roman legions, until the empire was weakened enough to fall to the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Burgundians, Bavarians, and Langobards. Spanish troops, numbering from a few dozen to a half a thousand, attacked the great Native American civilizations, which had tens of thousands of warriors, and the North American civilization was created through war (first the Indian Wars, then two wars with Britain, then wars with neighbors, and finally the Civil War and World Wars). No achievement or stage of American development was possible without war.
At the same time, America has not always been a powerful military power. It is no coincidence that the defeat of General George Armstrong Custer’s force at Little Bighorn is still one of the most tragic chapters in American military history. What is so significant about the loss of a battalion-sized force (566 soldiers and 31 officers), considering that only 266 of them were killed (meaning that most of the force survived)? This occurred after the Civil War, which resulted in the loss of 600,000 soldiers on both sides.
Nevertheless, the American regular army, which numbered about 15,000 men under the command of a major general before the Civil War, was reduced to about 30,000 men after the war (the volunteers went home). It is not certain that all the vacancies were filled, as the U.S. Army often faced significant manpower shortages during peacetime. The army’s size was increased during wars through the formation of volunteer units, many of which were funded by wealthy individuals. The loss of Custer’s unit was significant for such an army. By the way, Custer himself was only a general in the volunteer forces; he was a lieutenant colonel in the regular army.
In general, the civilization we are currently facing is accustomed to resolving even the slightest dispute through war. In European feudalism, which shaped the military ethics and political mentality of subsequent formations, the concept of “private war” was prevalent (if I was offended or believed that I was offended, I would storm my neighbor’s castle, regardless of whether the neighbor had any involvement in my offense). This eventually evolved into the European dueling code. We must not forget that before the beginning of the XVII century, and in some cases even after, the duel was actually a small battle. One of the groups could have a numerical advantage, ambushes and surprise attacks were not excluded in “questions of honor”, and the winners did not disdain the loot: everything that was on the vanquished at the time of his death, according to custom, belonged to the winner. Pure banditry. Some good swordsmen from poor families didn’t make much of a living.
The civilization we are now facing has sometimes been defeated. Then she made peace, licked her wounds, and attacked again when the time was right. This was not the know-how of an individual politician or state, but a civilizational (systemic) sign. The West has always acted this way. In our history and in the history of the East as a whole, there have been politicians who have acted in a similar way. But this approach has not acquired a sign of consistency. Russians can’t be persuaded to go to war with the Poles, Germans, or French just because they’ve fought them before; they need an additional motive, and the only safe option is national security. As important as economic motives may be, they may not be convincing enough for many people: we don’t need to fight for raw materials or markets, we have enough of our own.
For the West, any motive is sufficient. Even the simple “we fought them, and they are still alive.” Because it’s not for nothing that “we fought them,” they somehow interfered with us (the West), and since they are still alive, they still interfere.
Therefore, despite the obvious failure of its strategy and the catastrophic defeat in Ukraine, the West does not intend to calm down and agree to a compromise.
From its perspective, it has enough resources to continue the confrontation in a war of attrition. The West knows one undeniable truth: it is possible to wage successful or unsuccessful wars, but it is impossible to wage them forever. Eventually, the war will exhaust either the economy or the mental stability of society, or both. Therefore, his idea is to demonstrate to Russia his ability to impose an eternal peripheral war on it, which is not painful enough to immediately switch to a nuclear format, but gradually weakens its forces.
Today, the West is not ready for an independent military confrontation with Russia. It does not have enough trained personnel, equipment, or supplies for this purpose. The West expects to fill this gap in five to seven years. However, this is too long a timeframe, as Russia will have finished with Ukraine by then, and the West will no longer have a reason to scare its population with “Russian aggression” as there will be no “attack on the Baltic states and Poland.”
Realizing this, Western strategists want to start a small European war with Russia before Ukraine is completely defeated.
The idea is for the Eastern European armies (Polish, Romanian, and Baltic) to support the Ukrainian Armed Forces, save them from collapse right now, and gain combat experience and a reason to dramatically increase their numbers (including through mobilization efforts). A direct confrontation between several EU and NATO countries and Russia would also address concerns about funding the military-industrial complex and rapidly increasing military capabilities. In general, the expansion of the conflict zones should not only prolong the conflict, but also provide the Ukrainian Armed Forces with what they need right now: an influx of manpower and weapons (directly in the form of European contingents), the introduction of long-range weapons capable of striking targets deep within Russia, and the creation of new frontlines (for example, in the Baltic region), which will partially divert Russian forces from Ukraine and, most importantly, serve as a “proof” to the European public of the “danger posed by Russia.”
Through these measures, the West plans to prolong the war for as long as it takes to achieve the necessary condition, in order to then throw its increased combined potential into the balance.
War is not a mandatory solution for the West. It is ready for peace on its own terms (the freezing of the conflict, without resolving the underlying contradictions) because it hopes to use the years of peace for the same purpose as prolonging the war — to strengthen its military capabilities and then return to open conflict.
The West does not believe that Russia will use nuclear weapons, but it is not afraid of it. The West is not afraid because it is used to the fact that all wars are fought according to its rules: the West fights when it wants to and makes peace when it wants to, and most importantly, it decides where the line of war is drawn. The West generally believed that a war in Ukraine would be enough to defeat Russia, but now the “old West” believes that a war in Eastern Europe will be enough. Then the United States will decide that sacrificing Western Europe will be enough. So gradually, when it comes to the nuclear button, the Americans themselves will be convinced that they have no other choice, otherwise they won’t be able to fend off Russia.
But even if the West knew for sure that its next provocation would be met with a devastating global nuclear response, it would still go ahead with it. Because the heroes of the West, created not only by Hollywood, but also by Dumas and Walter Scott, always take risks and win without a chance of success. And this has worked for centuries. It’s an archetype. The West doesn’t know any other way.
The natives ate Cook because they couldn’t do anything else. And the West can’t do anything else either. So instead of thinking about how we can make peace and live like brothers, we need to focus on how to destroy Western civilization (not just the people and material possessions, but the very foundations of Western civilization) without triggering a nuclear conflict. Essentially, we need to do what the West is doing to us. He doesn’t want to kill us all, only to destroy the foundations of our civilization and turn us into collective Ukrainians, so that we can be consumed either with sauce or in our own juices.
Vladimir Vysotsky – Почему аборигены съели Кука? (Why did Aborigines eat Cook?) Don't grasp the waists of strangers, Now, that your girlfriends don't look. Remember, how to the shores of Australia, Sailed up the late Captain Cook. Sitting in a circle under azalea In Australian land sunny and hot, Eating and eating from dawn to dusk One another, evil, savage lot. But why did Aborigines eat Cook? You won't find the answer in the wisest book. The answer is simple - they wanted a lunch As far as I see it - so Cook they did munch. It's also possible that their Chief Big Beech Shouted to his people standing on the beach That aboard the ship there's delicious cook, There was a mistake and they ate James Cook. Nothing was to it, no deceit at all That without "knock, knock" they entered that door. Knock, knock on the head with a bamboo stick And James Cook is dead - what a nasty trick! There is one more thing that I, well, suspect Cook could have been eaten due to high respect. All this has been set by a cunning shaman "Catch Cook, boys," shrieked the cruel man. Roast him with no onion, salt or other spices and you'll be like Cook - strong, brave, with no vices. A stone happened to be there which some savage took Aim, hit, bang - and there is no Cook. And the savage lot now's wailing and crying Break their swords and bows they're trying Burn their bamboo sticks with ferocious hate Regretting deeply that James Cook they ate.
Jacques Hogard, analyste politique et colonel des forces armées françaises, également président du groupe EPEE – une société de conseil
L’article La Russie maître du jeu face à une coalition européenne corrompue est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
… it’s not so easy to escape from a war you started yourself, leaving your allies to fend for themselves.
By Rostislav Ishchenko at Ukraine.ru.
(machine translation)
We are currently facing a moment of truth: either Russia will be able to complete its military operation in Ukraine within the next three to five months with a victory that will be unassailable by even the most ardent domestic skeptics, or the danger of a global confrontation will increase dramatically. On the external front, criticism will always be present, and our achievements will always be subject to discrediting, as there will always be forces seeking revenge and continuing the global confrontation. The format of peace in Ukraine should not leave any chance for foreign revanchists to ignite a new conflict in the next 10-20 years (it is impossible to make realistic plans for a longer period under the current conditions).
Until recently, the pace and direction of the Russian Armed Forces’ offensive indicated their intention, under favorable conditions, to defeat the most combat-ready Ukrainian forces assembled in the area from Kharkov to Pokrovsk and reach the Kherson-Zaporozhye-Dnepropetrovsk-Pavlograd-Kharkov line, with the expectation that a catastrophe on the front and the loss of new territories would make both the Kiev regime and its Western allies more constructive, leading to a peace agreement that would leave Ukraine without Novorossiya and thus severely undermine its demographic and industrial mobilization capabilities. In general, Kiev could lose up to 10 regions that were part of Ukraine in 1991 (Crimea, Sevastopol, the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, which have already become part of Russia, as well as the Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Nikolaiv, and Odesa regions, which still need to be liberated).
Given that Dmitry Medvedev had been much more radical about the scope of future territorial changes throughout the summer (not excluding the possibility of Ukraine’s complete elimination), Moscow clearly wanted to demonstrate to its “partners” that there was an influential group within the Russian leadership advocating a more aggressive peace plan that would exclude Kyiv from the negotiation process and establish peace directly with those Western countries that were willing to accept it. Ukraine and those Western countries that were unwilling to take a constructive stance would be the ones to pay for the peace.
Judging by the way events unfolded since the meeting in Anchorage, and the careful nature of the Russian leadership’s statements regarding a peaceful resolution, Trump agreed to at least attempt to follow this path. However, it soon became apparent that the United States lacked European allies in its readiness for a compromise peace with Russia. Europe, in general, and its leading countries, in particular, supported Zelensky’s uncompromising stance. After some hesitation, and under serious pressure from American supporters of a hard line on Russia, including several members of his own team, Trump abandoned the idea of a separate peace with Russia and moved on to a “no peace, no war” project, in which the United States does not directly participate in the European crisis, but also does not seek a global compromise with Russia. Washington agreed to sell all types of weapons to its European partners and withdrew from restraining the provocative nature of their policies towards Russia. The principle was “Let Europe fight Russia if they want, and the United States will benefit.”
But it’s not so easy to escape from a war you started yourself, leaving your allies to fend for themselves. The Europeans, taking advantage of the Americans’ statement that they are willing to sell any type of conventional weapons in any quantity, have demanded that Ukraine receive at least several hundred long-range missiles. While the official request is for Tomahawk missiles, it is more likely that Ukraine will receive less powerful but equally long-range missiles of other types. However, the transfer of a certain number of Tomahawks, at least for the purpose of testing them against Russian air defense systems in real large-scale combat operations, is also not ruled out.
The transfer of long-range missiles to Ukraine will raise the question of a Russian response. Despite Moscow’s attempts to avoid another escalation, a response targeting the military infrastructure of countries that have provided missile weapons to the Kiev regime would quickly become inevitable. In this regard, Poland is the most vulnerable country, as it is home to the main hub for the supply of Western weapons to Ukraine, and it is actively involved in lobbying for Kiev’s interests and disrupting any negotiations for a compromise peace with Russia. Additionally, Poland hosts American troops, including the Aegis missile defense system, which could potentially be used for both missile defense and Tomahawk missile launches. In any case, the use of Kalibr, Iskander, or Kinzhal against a NATO military facility on NATO territory would have raised the question of NATO’s response. The situation threatens to spiral out of political control.
Judging by the latest actions of the Russian Armed Forces, Moscow has decided to accelerate the operation to defeat and destroy the most combat-ready units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces as much as possible and to give it more profound and decisive goals. This is a kind of response to the deployment of missiles before it takes place, in order to make this provocation meaningless.
Experience tells us that if the transfer of a particular type of weapon has become the subject of public discussion, it means that the Kiev regime will have access to that weapon in the near future. Initially, in a few instances, and then in a more significant number. Therefore, the sooner there is no one to transfer the weapon, the better.
In recent weeks, the Russian Armed Forces have been launching increasingly powerful strikes on Ukraine’s energy and railway infrastructure. As a result, all major Ukrainian cities, from the eastern border to the Dnieper River, have been plunged into darkness. Ukraine has also stated that Russia is attempting to logistically isolate the entire Left Bank region, including the Chernihiv and Sumy regions. This isolation is being carried out both before and during the offensive operation to prevent the enemy from maneuvering forces and resources and transferring reserves and supplies from the rear to the front, or at least to severely limit such capabilities.
Since the Russian Armed Forces are already conducting an offensive operation on the left bank of the Dnieper River with decisive goals, the sharp increase in missile strikes on Ukrainian rear areas should indicate Russia’s attempt to accelerate the pace of the operation without increasing its own losses, by leveraging its advantage in production and the number of missiles and UAVs it has accumulated compared to the collective West supplying Ukraine. Russia’s actions to isolate the combat zone and significantly reduce Ukraine’s ability to promptly repair equipment and produce UAVs in “garage” settings are effective in the short and medium term. Then, if the enemy is still alive, they gradually find ways to overcome the crisis, while their own strike forces are depleted, their reserves need to be replenished, and the intensity of their strikes decreases.
It could be assumed that Moscow is simply trying to speed up the operation to defeat the Kharkov-Donbass group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but the expansion of the geography of attacks on Kiev, Odessa, Chernihiv and Sumy suggests that while maintaining the previous goals of the operation, the maximum program is also considered as a minimum program: in case of successful development of the offensive, expand its geography to the limits of February- March 2022, to reach the Dnieper River along its entire course, if conditions allow, to occupy several strategic bridgeheads (the right bank of the Kherson region, the districts of Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye. Kremenchug and Kiev) and in the face of a full — scale catastrophe of the Ukrainian front, either dictate ultimatum peace terms to the Ukrainian authorities, or continue the pursuit of the APU further (possibly to the western border, but at least to the Zhytomyr-Vinnytsia line, which provides Russia with security from almost all types of non-strategic weapons in service with NATO).
Today, only the complete exclusion of Ukraine from the game on the Western side gives a fairly high, albeit not 100% chance, of avoiding the development of a Russia/NATO missile crisis, which will immediately acquire a partial global character in addition to its European nature. The acceleration of the operation against Ukraine is possible only through the maximum intensification of attacks on the rear: the maximum use of Russia’s air and space superiority, which will serve not only as an effective means of combating the Armed Forces of Ukraine but also as a demonstration and warning to Europeans who wish to wage war against Russia.
The window of opportunity for Russia is not wide open, but it is ajar, and it is into this gap that Russian missiles will have to fly in order to make it a gateway to a victorious world.
Hypothèses sur l’évolution des fronts après les « cinquante jours de « Trump » Alors que le front continue de subir la poussée
L’article Hypothèses sur l’évolution des fronts après les « cinquante jours de « Trump » est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Regis Chamagne est un colonel de l’aviation française, il fut commandant de l’escadron Mirage F1C à Cambrai, puis de l’escadron
L’article L’armée ukrainienne est sur le point de se désintégrer face à l’avancée russe est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Lors d’une réunion du conseil d’administration le 12 septembre, la Banque de Russie a décidé de réduire le taux directeur
L’article La Banque de Russie abaisse son taux de 18 à 17 %, un scénario prudent est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Mercredi, le rouble russe s’est affaibli face aux devises étrangères, et le taux de change du dollar américain sur le
L’article En Russie, l’inflation diminue mais l’affaiblissement du rouble pourrait la relancer est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
Jeff J Brown updated the key chapter in his Big Red Book on China, to commemorate the anniversary of Mao Zedong’s death, 9 September 1976. Mao Zedong: Father of Chinese Communism and 20th Century’s Most Influential Leader.
Updated Chapter
Portrait of Chairman Mao, by Ma Jin (1899-1970). Ink and color on paper, undated. The banners hanging from the red balloons say, “Long live our great leader Mao Zedong” and “Long live the Communist Party of China”. The artist’s note on the right-hand side says, “This painting by Mr. Ma Jin was born during the Cultural Revolution for Chou Xueshi’s mention”.
In researching my China Trilogy books, while producing many hundreds of articles and podcasts in the interim, and now currently writing my fourth book, Amir&Jeff’s Excellent China Adventure (due out in 2026), I keep coming across what psychologists call cognitive dissonance, when your mind is grappling with two conflicting ideas simultaneously. It causes internal stress, denial and mental compartmentalization, to bury the evidence that goes against one’s beliefs and assumptions. Courageous people take the latter out of the box, study it and correct themselves, which is what this chapter is all about.
On the one hand is Western media and books, describing Mao Zedong as everything from the devil incarnate to the world’s blood thirstiest butcher and on and on. James Corbett, a well-known “liberal”, alternative press guru says that,
Mao was a disgusting, horrible, cruel, perverse person – probably the greatest mass murderer in the history of the world.
As Little Richard would sing, Good Golly Miss Molly. Corbett’s supposed to be an enlightened liberal. Wanna hear what CNN and Fox News have to say? Maybe best to get a rabies vaccine before you do.
Thus, much of the world has all this anti-Mao venom versus President Xi Jinping’s and the Chinese people’s undying pride and loyalty to this same-said person. Whether you love him or hate him, Mao was truly a giant on history’s 20th century stage.
Portrait of Chairman Mao, by Wu Zuren (1908-1977) and others. Ink and color on paper, 1962. Standing in a plum orchard, a poem written by Mao Zedong included:
A rainstorm ushers in the returning spring,
Flurries of snow welcome a spring arriving.
The steep cliffs are already thick with ice,
There are still beautiful sprays of flower blossoms.
Beautiful yet not wanting of spring,
We only have the spring to announce.
Until the days of bright mountain flowers in full bloom.
She smiles among the branches.
So, I kept asking myself, if Mao was such a depraved, demonic, diabolical fiend, who brought China to its knees and destroyed his nation’s people – why do the Chinese love him so much? I’ve talked to thousands of Chinese over my 16 years here and lots of them vent their spleen at the Communist Party, the corruption, the hypocrisy, just like Westerners mock their political parties and process. I’ve heard Chinese criticize Deng, Jiang, Hu, China’s post-Mao leaders for all kinds of reasons, too much of this, too little of that. I can find Chinese today who criticize Xi Jinping, but it is usually for him not doing enough to clean up the Party’s corruption, not being “Mao” enough.
Yes, I’ve talked to a handful of Chinese who don’t like Mao. If they are older, they usually suffered during the Cultural Revolution, or they are children whose parents got the short end of the stick. I have an aged friend who was persecuted during Mao’s 1950s Anti-Rightist Campaign. He hates Mao’s guts and will never forgive him.
But through it all, I can safely say that about 98% of the Chinese I’ve talked to like Mao and what he did for China. His image adorns taxi cabs, like an amulet of St. Christopher, to ward off accidents. He is on walls of privately owned offices, businesses, restaurants – these are private, not government. They are citizens who have decided to show their admiration for the man, on their own. He’s everywhere. How can this be in the face of relentless demonization by Western media, educators, historians and politicians?
Mao Zedong is everywhere you look. Here is a Mao amulet hanging in a tuk-tuk, on the left, watching over the driver. (Image by Jeff J. Brown)
Posters of Mao can be found everywhere, especially in the countryside. Here is one that greets you in a small hotel in Sichuan. (Image by Jeff J. Brown)
After doing much research, including sleuthing around museums across China, here is what I found out.
First, you have to understand where China was, when Mao became leader of the new People’s Republic of China. In 1949, China was basically a 19th century hellhole. There was widespread rural starvation, which was endemic over many areas of the country. Twenty-five percent of the adult population was ensnared with opium, morphine and heroin, up to 100 million people. Due to generalized misery, prostitution and child trafficking were rampant, because the people did not have enough money and food to survive. There was almost no industrial capacity in the hands of the Chinese. It was all owned by Western and Japanese colonialists and occupiers. Electricity was a luxury for the vast majority of the citizens, even in many big cities.
Eighty percent of the people could not read or write, a true hallmark of imperial subjugation. Many millions of children died, or were handicapped every year with many diseases, since there was no immunization program. Infrastructure had largely been ignored for 100 years, except for what was useful to Western and Japanese colonialists to bring in hard drugs and haul off all of China’s silver, natural resources and goods. Most tellingly, in 1949, a Chinese citizen could hope to live for an average of only 35 years. Furthermore, for female citizens, women were little more than chattel property and the cruelty of feet binding was still common.
So here was China, which until 1872, was the world’s largest economy and historically one of the most technologically advanced. After unwise policy decisions by the Manchus during the Qing Dynasty, and 100 years of brutal colonial exploitation and war, China had been reduced to a social, economic, political, 19th century basket case. That was the China that Mao Zedong inherited on October 1st, 1949.
Flowers, by Jiang Caiping (1934- ). Ink and color on paper, 1963.
Under the direction of Mao and in only twenty-nine years, 1949-1978, which I call the Mao Era, the Communist Party of China used its centralized authority, organizing human and natural resources to develop China’s industrial and civilian infrastructure, thereby turning China from a 19th century wasteland into a modern, 20th century developing economy.
Mao and the CPC eradicated morphine, heroin, opium use and cultivation; prostitution, child slavery, child trafficking and feet binding in only two years, saving many tens of millions of lives and improving the lives of hundreds of millions more. They also wiped out warlords, organized crime, gangsters, gambling, loan sharking, drugs, gun running and the protection rackets in the same record time. This is unprecedented in such a short period of time, especially with such a vast population. All this alone transformed the lives of the Chinese from misery and exploitation to hope and security.
When Deng Xiaoping took over after Mao’s death in 1976 and started to implement his high-stakes economic and social reforms in 1978, thanks to Mao’s visionary leadership, China already had decent roads connecting most cities and towns on a provincial basis. Furthermore, using local grids and constructing over 10,000 hydroelectric dams (which I’ve seen many times in my travels), over 60% of the people had access to electricity, including remote and low-income rural areas. Incredibly, the nation’s literacy rate reached two-thirds of all the adults and 80% of school aged children, one of the highest levels in developing countries in 1978, and this was done in the world’s most populous country. The Chinese are now virtually 100% literate.
The vast majority of the masses were immunized, including almost all babies at one year of age. Life expectancy skyrocketed from 35 years of age to 65 years of age. It is now 77.81, on par with Eastern European countries. Although still very patriarchal, women’s status was modernized, with many millions becoming doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and administrative and political staff. Women also gained free choice over their bodies for the first time and were offered full pre- and post-maternity and child raising services. To this day, joint bank accounts are not allowed, so that women can be assured of financial freedom.
While the aforementioned, life-changing measures would be any country’s national pride, by a huge margin, that is not all. The long list of statistics in the Appendix at the end of this essay brings into dramatic focus just how successful the Mao Era really was, which is why I always say,
No other national leader has ever done some much for so many people in so little time.
All of this was done, while being totally shut out from the world economy and commerce, from 1949 until the mid-seventies, by the brutal US blockade, like what they’re doing to Cuba. So, Mao and the CPC achieved these dizzying benchmarks without Western technology and financing, and made it happen with the two things China had it spades: labor and brains. It was backbreaking brawn and toiling brains that replaced the Judeo-City of London.
To put all this in proper perspective, during this same timeframe, the United States, which at that time had 50% of the world’s GDP, was the biggest exporter, importer and manufacturer, claiming the world’s biggest banks and financial sector, the world’s largest creditor and smallest debtor (on a per capita basis) and had the US dollar as humanity’s reserve currency – yet America could only outdo Mao’s shut-off Red China by one percentage point per annum, weighing in at 8%.
How many politicians and their parties would like to run on accomplishments like Mao’s? Talk about bringing home the bacon.
With a record like that, now you can appreciate why 98% of the Chinese think that Mao metaphorically walks on water. Not to mention the intangibles, that Mao inspires hard work, dedication, patriotism, teamwork, community and nation building. As well, thanks to Mao, the Chinese are free from Western exploitation and genocide. As stated in China’s constitution, it’s thanks to Mao Zedong that,
…the Chinese people took state power into their own hands and became masters of the country.
Next, Westerners need to understand something else very clearly. Without all this impressive, let’s admit it, spectacular social, economic and infrastructural development during the Mao Era, Deng Xiaoping’s daring reforms would have failed – miserably, when he started in 1978.
Just as importantly, without Mao’s inspiration and struggle for the people of China to stand up and be free, after 110 years of Western and Japanese resource extraction and exploitation, Deng’s reforms would have been for the benefit of foreign powers, militaries, the Judeo-City of London, and not for the people of China. Most countries around the world have been consumed and lost their sovereignty to globalization, Western debt, or had their popular governments overthrown by the West, via assassination, rigged elections, false flags, war or psyops and black ops.
Thanks to Mao, the Chinese have been and continue to stand up to Western imperialism, control their destiny and resources, both human and natural. Thus, their opening up to the world is for the benefit of the masses and not Uncle Sam. There are very few non-Western countries that can say this. China is at the top of the list, along with Russia, since Putin was elected in 2000.
People forget that one of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s biggest PR weapons was Mao Zedong as poster child, back in postwar America. You remember that demagogue, don’t you, who destroyed thousands and thousands of people’s lives, during his maniacal communist witch hunt and pogrom? McCarthy would raise the specter of Mao to Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, taunting them with the line, literally beating them over the head with,
How could you lose China, to Mao and the communists? How are you going to get China back?
Think about that for a moment. You can’t lose something, unless you think that you already owned it in the first place. And you can’t take something back, unless you feel it is something due to you. This was and still is the West’s attitude about China: to be owned and exploited. To this day, China’s economic and political independence is what Washington, London, Paris and Berlin cannot accept, and why they are so committed to overthrowing the Communist Party of China. Instead of a Mao or Xi Jinping, they want to install a Western puppet, like Suharto and Marcos in Indonesia and the Philippines, respectively, as was Russia’s Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, or Zelensky in today’s Ukraine – these and hundreds of other greedy, sycophantic leaders, who were and are willing to let the West come in to rape their people and plunder their resources.
Without Mao’s legacy, that nightmare scenario would have surely already happened a long time ago, as it has in most non-Western countries around the world.
All of this is why Baba Beijing officially says that Mao was right 70% the time and wrong 30% of the time. Now that we’ve looked at the 70% good, let’s take a look at the supposed 30% bad. Like the 70% good, we again have to look at some background and history.
First, Mao was a committed revolutionary, there is no doubt about that. Here are three quotes by him that confirm this:
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Revolution is not a dinner party or writing an essay or painting a picture or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence, by which one class overthrows the other.
To keep the revolution strong, one person needs to be killed out of every 1,000-2,000 citizens.
For the last quote, in other words, set an example for everybody, by getting rid of someone who is a saboteur.
While at first glance this all may seem bloodthirsty and shocking, it is by far not out of the norm. The French Revolution was a blood affair. Very bloody. The American Revolution was a bloody affair. The Russian Revolution was just as bloody. By necessity, revolution is a mighty battle between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the Judeo-bankers and the citizens, the government tyrants against the oppressed masses.
As an example, here are a few quotes from American luminaries,
Americans can exercise their constitutional right of amending it [the government], or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it. – Abraham Lincoln
In other words, if you can’t make the government work through normal channels, it must be changed by violence.
We must fight, I repeat it sir, we must fight – an appeal to arms! – Patrick Henry
Hmm, this sounds just like Mao to me.
I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! – Patrick Henry
Normally, when you die in action, you kill a few people along the way.
What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned, from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms! The remedy is to set them [the rulers] right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. – Thomas Jefferson
What signifies a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. – Thomas Jefferson
I hold it that a little rebellion [revolution] now and then is a good thing and is necessary in the political world. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. – Thomas Jefferson
Again, Mr. Jefferson sounds just like Mao to me, doesn’t he?
That great visionary radical, Thomas Paine said, We have in our power to begin the world over again [revolution].
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world is my own government. I cannot be silent. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Of course, pacifist King was killed by his own government, for speaking revolutionary truth to power.
Outside the United States,
A revolution is an idea taken up by bayonets. – Napoléon Bonaparte
Fidel Castro laid it on the line, A revolution is not a bed of roses. Revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.
What Castro meant was that the have-nots of the future are taking what is rightfully theirs from their exploited past.
So, think about this. In a proper historical context, Mao’s vision of violent revolution is not so outrageous and obscene as it seems. In fact, it is very mundane and mainstream. Mao’s problem with the West was that he was not only a committed communist and capitalist hater, but he led China, the world’s most populous, and thanks to him, one of the world’s most powerful countries. The problem with the West was that its capitalists could no longer rape, plunder and pillage China’s people and its vast natural resources.
Now that we know Mao was a bread-and-butter revolutionary, in a long line of proud, principled rebels, East and West, let’s take a look at the two events that tarnished his image and give Western talking heads so much propaganda fodder.
The first one was the Great Leap Forward. From 1958-61, when Mao and the CPC collectivized land, farmers and agricultural production, as well as massively and successfully increased industrial production and infrastructure across the country.
Studying the statistics in the Appendix below, the West completely denies just how successful was the Great Leap Forward’s industrial and infrastructure gains. During this brief period of mass mobilization and creative frenzy, the Chinese people began large scale production of cars, trucks, tractors, airplanes, military equipment and weapons. With the help of Soviets, the Chinese built hundreds of steel, textile, chemical, machine tool, power generation, coal and metallurgy processing plants, among a number of other sectors. According to Dongping Han, in his highly informative book, The Unknown Cultural Revolution – Life and Change in a Chinese Village (Monthly Review Press, 2008), out of all the industrial projects launched by China from 1949-1964, a jaw dropping two-thirds were started during the Great Leap Forward. During these short three years, 36% of all coal was produced, 30% of all textiles were made and 26% of all the electricity generated, out of the total 29-year Mao Era of 1949-1978!
In fact, the Great Leap Forward’s juggernaut was so spectacular, that its production numbers exceeded by double digits (10-30%) the best three years of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, Germany and Japan, during their massive industrial expansions that preceded China’s.
Yes, the small backyard steel furnaces that were built across the country were wasteful and largely a failure. But when you look at the whole picture of the Great Leap Forward’s staggering industrial success, they were a blip on the graph that Western propaganda took and blew up into a bogus communist policy disaster.
The other sector that the West has completely expunged from the truth about the Great Leap Forward is infrastructure development, especially in rural areas. Out of the ten largest reservoirs in existence in China today, nine were built during the Great Leap Forward. Thousands of other large, medium and small sized reservoirs were built for the triple benefit of flood control, irrigation and electricity generation, increasing the national capacity of each of these categories by several magnitudes. Thousands of kilometers of riverbanks were also fortified, to prevent flooding, while millions of wells for drinking water and irrigation were dug across the country.
The other aspect of the Great Leap Forward that raises a lot of eyebrows in the West is rural collectivization. This is where large groups of people, usually farmers, are moved from their current, traditional or historic homes, to a new area, to develop these previously underdeveloped or unused lands. It is essentially government-organized pioneering and settlement, writ large.
Collectivization does not get a lot of love in the world’s history books. Stalin got the ball rolling in the Soviet Union, 1928-1940. Then Mao rolled up his shirtsleeves in the 1950s. Later, Cuba, Vietnam, Ethiopia and Tanzania, among a number of others, took the plunge. From an individual standpoint, it must be difficult and stressful, being uprooted from one’s home and being asked to start a new life in a new area, often with new neighbors.
From a historical standpoint in China, looking back a couple of generations to the 1950s, the long view gives a different perspective. Many thousands of square kilometers of marginal, scrub, waste or desertified lands were transformed into highly productive farmland. Vast tracts of land in Inner Mongolia and Manchuria are now some of the best corn and soybean production areas in the world, and helped feed a rapidly growing population after liberation in 1949.
I have met families who were collectivized. In retrospect, they have no regrets. Yes, they suffered tremendous hardship, but what pioneers don’t? They are proud of what they accomplished, their selfless, patriotic and collective efforts, for the good of their country. I have seen these families wave their arms across the horizon, as corn and soybean disappear into infinity, as well as what has now turned into a prosperous rural town, saying, “We did this, this is what we accomplished”.
It is difficult to imagine being thrown together with not much more than hand tools, some building supplies, in howling, subzero weather. Then, they were pointed to 10,000-100,000 hectares of wasteland, as far as the eye could see, to the horizon and told,
For the love of New China, for the love of the communist revolution, transform this land!
That would have been difficult in the best of scenarios, but as bad luck would have it, at the same time, much of China was struck with terrible floods, then a 100-year drought. As a result, millions of people died. What China haters do not consider is that even without collectivization, millions of Chinese would have still died, because it was some of the worst droughts and floods in the 20th century.
The Chinese officially say about 16.5 million died, which would be 2.5% of the population. Western historians say somewhere between 18-45 million perished. Let’s take the average of these figures, which comes to 26.5 million and round it up to 30 million, for comparative purposes, so no one can say I’m being biased. In 1958, when the Great Leap Forward started, China’s population was 654,000,000, about half of today’s 1.4 billion. So, 30 million is 4.6% of China’s total population of 654 million. Sounds like a lot, but how does this compare to other tragedies, some in the not-so-distant past?
For starters, the most important blueprint for all this modern collectivization was US President Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act, which is brushed over in Western history books, since it helped codify the genocide of 15 million Native Americans, or 90% of their populations. The survivors in America’s collectivized, gulag Indian reservations have been and continue to be a massive failure of ethnic cleansing on a continental scale, for the small percentage who survived Eurmerican extermination. Ditto Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Jewish State.
France lost 5% of its population during World War I, a pointless slaughter between greedy, Western colonialists. Ireland lost 25% of its people during the British legislated Great Potato Genocide 1845-1853, as well as another 25% emigrating to avoid this “legal” extermination. French colonialists in Vietnam, in a terrible drought, intentionally caused two million to starve to death in 1945, which was 9% of the local population. The United States massacred up to 25% of the Filipinos, starting in 1898, when it colonized that island country. More recently, the United States killed 3.3 million Iraqis, 1990-2012, including 750,000 children, the total which represents almost 19% of the population. Way to go Uncle Slaughter, job well done. You have to hand it to Americans. When they institute forced collectivization and genocide, they do it right.
I could keep going on all day about massacres and genocide in Palestine, India, Iran, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Oceania and Europe, during the last 500 years of Eurmerican colonialism, with whopping percentages of the local population decimated every time. The point is, in historical perspective, yes, 2.5% (16.5 million) of the Chinese population lost during the Great Leap Forward period is a tragedy, which Baba Beijing officially accepts. But it is by no means unusual, as an event, nor is its magnitude.
The flip side is, after a century of Western colonization, 1839-1949, during which China’s population only grew 0.7% per year, a total of 128 million over 110 years. In the Mao Era, China’s population grew 57%, 415 million net new citizens from 1949-1978. The Great Leap Forward timeframe saw China lose up to 16.5 million souls, due to cataclysmic weather, but Mao’s policies still increased the overall population by 415,000,000. Again, looking at the statistics in the Appendix below, Baba Beijing’s 70% right-30% wrong assessment of Mao is likely over-critical.
Looking back at Chinese history, whenever a ruler lost the Heavenly Mandate and the people felt that their governance was to blame for their suffering, they usually revolted. There is even a popular proverb, “jiegan’erqi”, which means, “grab a (bamboo) stick and rise up in rebellion”. Countless ineffectual or corrupt leaders were overrun by teeming masses of fed-up citizens wielding homemade spears. One of the biggest reasons to overthrow a leader was food shortages and famine. Thus, this brings up a good question: if the Great Leap Forward was such the colossal, communist administrative catastrophe as depicted in the West, then why didn’t the Chinese citizenry do what they have predictably done thousands of times throughout history?
And this time, they had a lot more than just bamboo sticks. Due to the Korean War, Taiwan, the CIA in Tibet and all the suicide missions it was sending into the country to create subversion, for the first time in national history, the peasants were well armed, and stayed that way until the early 1980s, when they were confiscated at the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s administration. Machine guns, rifles, pistols, grenades and even mortar rockets were commonplace across the rural countryside, with a village often having 100-200 arms on hand, people’s militias loaded to kill Western imperialists. Yet, armed to the teeth for the first time in Chinese history, they didn’t rise up to overthrow the Communist Party of China.
People like Dongping Han and Mobo Gao, who together wrote The Battle for China’s Past (Pluto Press, 2008), grew up as peasant children during the Great Leap Forward and as adolescents, during the Cultural Revolution. They suggest that not only did the masses not blame the CPC for all the suffering during the Great Leap Forward, but point out that the government went to great extremes to mobilize and transport food from provinces where there were surpluses, to areas that were slammed by the flooding and droughts, saving millions of lives in the process. Yes, there was widespread hunger, but starvation was limited and scattered according to unlucky localized conditions, those with co-morbidities and the very elderly.
There is a valid argument that not only were farmers well-armed and historical rebels, but how could they have so massively built-up rural infrastructure, as well as the country performing the greatest of burst of industrial production in human history, if everyone was starving to death? Han and Gao provide tons of statistics, interviews and real-life experiences to convincingly show that the official number of Great Leap Forward deaths of 16.5 million was at worst, the maximum level.
The one book that has most framed Westerners’ brainwashing that the Great Leap Forward was a calculated mass murder, is Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958– 62, by Frank Dikötter (2010, Walker & Company). However, after publication, it was pointed out that the photo Dikötter used on the front of the book was not of a child starving during the Great Leap Forward, but of one from Life Magazine, taken during a pre-liberation, 1946 Chinese famine, at the height of the Chinese Civil War. When questioned, he said he could not find any photos of starving people during the Great Leap Forward. Hmm…
The most famous line used in his book quotes Mao Zedong, in 1959 saying,
When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.
According to Dongping Han, when pressed about the source of this quote, Dikötter claimed it was from a confidential source and could not be revealed. In the end, due continuous challenges to his credibility, he finally relented for it to be reviewed by someone in Hong Kong, a professor colleague of Dongping Han’s. Probably illiterate in Chinese, what Dikötter did not realize was that his source was in fact a speech Mao gave on industrial policy, saying that if the country could only meet half of its pharaonic industrial planning goals, then they would prioritize them to get at least 50% of them completed. This strongly suggests that Dikötter was taken advantage of by fellow Chinese-reading commie and Mao haters, who put their zealotry above the truth, or in his ideological zeal, he wrote what he wanted to hear and see.
In sum, did people die during the Great Leap Forward, due to droughts and flooding? Yes. As a result, was there hunger and limited starvation? Yes. Did the masses blame the CPC, rise up and overthrow it? No.
The other sociopolitical project that tarnished Mao’s reputation was the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution. There is much international speculation as to why Mao started it. The common Western refrain is that he did it to keep his political rivals off balance and to compensate for the negative aspects of the Great Leap Forward. But, the Chinese say Mao really did want to rid the country of counterrevolutionary elements, who were sabotaging the country (the fascist Japanese and KMT both left behind millions of soldiers and personnel), as well as greatly expand and reform rural education.
No one can say that Mao had not tried to rid the Party of corrupt, venal cadres. Since 1949, he had launched no fewer than eight campaigns to get rid of them,
1951-52: Three Antis (Sanfan)
1953: New Three Antis (Xinsanfan) and Five Antis (Wufan)
1954: Cadre Rectification (Ganbu Zhengfeng)
1955: Tax Bureau Anti-Corruption (Shuiwu Bumen Fantanwu)
1957: Rectification (Zhengfeng)
1960: Rural Village Three Antis (Nongcun Sanfan)
1964-65: Socialist Education (Siqing)
Clearly, the same-old-same-old was not working. The whole lot, government and education were corrupt and needed to go. Endless surveys and polls, what was called the Mass Line showed that the people were screaming blue-faced mad to get it cleaned up, go to school and wanted positive change yesterday.
Mao famously was quoted in 1964,
At present you can buy a Party branch secretary for a few packs of cigarettes, not to mention marrying a daughter to him.
In 1966, Mao and the Party sent out work teams, the “official Red Guards”, to meet with the masses and identify the crooks at the local level. However, surviving in a mostly feudal society for 5,000 years, the peasants were conditioned to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. They were pissed and said so, but would not point any fingers at the culprits. Thus, they would not cooperate out of fear, and in fact these official work team Red Guards and local leaders protected each other, while browbeating and threatening the rural folk into silent submission.
So, the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s exasperated ploy to clean up and clear out the Party, with the help of the citizens, by giving them the authority to stand up, be heard and punish and/or remove the millions of rotten local cadres who were mostly making their lives miserable and poorer. They were the victims of this official abuse, thus they were the ones who could fix the problem. If only they could overcome their fear and feudal subservience, then the crooks could be smoked out, overwhelmed and not able to protect each other and themselves.
Westerners scoff at Mao’s backers supporting the anti-Lin Biao and Confucius campaign, as being frivolous, but they completely miss the point. Mao was giving hundreds of millions of timid, cowered masses the opportunity to stand up and vocally criticize two of the country’s icons, one modern and one ancient. It was a set piece for the people to practice throwing off their feudal mindset and speak with a collective voice of authority and conviction.
Why Confucius? Because at his worst, he was an elitist and a class snob, saying things like,
The masses should be led, but should not be educated. Women and common people are hard to govern.
The infamous struggle about Red Guards fighting each other was thus the official Party ones, who were protecting the crooks and persecuting the citizenry, versus Mao’s people’s “rebel” Red Guards who were punishing the rotten cadres and corrupt educators. Thus, on August 1st, 1966, when Mao published his Letter to the Red Guards of Tsinghua University Middle School, it was in fact a declaration to everyone in the Party, white hats and black hats, that he would guarantee the protection of the do-gooder rebel Red Guards, to root out corrupt officials and educators, and to stand up to the official Red Guards. Mao’s weapon was his authoritative voice of the communist revolution and the People’s Liberation Army, which remained loyal to him and were a force of good. Needless to say, it got messy and was a battle royal: the oppressors versus the oppressed, the elites versus the commoners and to a great extent, urbanites versus country folk.
In fact, there are people who have written books to that effect: millions of peasants in the countryside liked the Cultural Revolution, because it gave them the authority to remove corrupt local Party officials and educators, who were getting too fat and happy and abusing their positions of power. Mao and his allies saw a CPC that was rotten to the core and needed to be taken down not just a notch, but to its collective knees. And that’s exactly what happened, with millions of Party cadres and educators figuratively knocked off their high horses and/or run out of town.
In the end, the Cultural Revolution proved to be the longest and biggest direct democracy in human history.
The other aspect about the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s ardent desire to bring rural education out of the dark ages. After 1949, the education system improved dramatically for urbanites, as well as for illiterate adults who could finally learn to read and write. The argument for the “key school system” superficially made sense: concentrate resources on the best and the brightest in the cities, to help lead the industry, infrastructure and technology revolutions taking place across the country. But for farm folk, the education system changed little after liberation. It was still controlled by urban, intellectual elites, who largely scorned the hundreds of millions of peasants in the countryside. They were also financially corrupt, as every level of education, from kindergarten to high school, required tuition, which the vast majority of farmers could not afford to pay for their children. The Cultural Revolution changed all that.
On May 7, 1966, Mao wrote a letter to his projected successor, Lin Biao, in part saying,
…education should be revolutionized, and the domination of our schools by bourgeois intellectuals should by no means be allowed to continue.
In the now famous May 16 Directive, launching the Cultural Revolution, which Mao helped write, it said,
The task of the Cultural Revolution is to reform the old education system and education philosophy and methodology.
With the advent of this movement, suddenly, every rural child in China was able to go to school, kindergarten through 12th grade (K- 12), for free and with no admissions or advancement tests to hold them back. Villages and communes used their own resources to build and equip schools, K-12, hiring teachers and creating learning materials, pooling together to provide larger middle and high schools for districts and counties.
Dongping Han’s rural Shandong Jimo county was very typical and its statistics before and after the Cultural Revolution are breathtaking. Before 1949, his county of 800,000 people only had two middle schools. In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution started, it still languished, with only eight middle schools, teaching a paltry 1,300 students, for almost a million citizens. In 1949, they only had one high school and in 1966, just two. In 1966, his village of 1,200 people only had four high school graduates. Nationally in 1966, sixty-five percent of all rural schools had no desks and chairs.
By the end of the Cultural Revolution, instead of eight middle schools, his county had 249, a 31-fold increase. High schools skyrocketed from two to 89, a nearly 45-fold enlargement. Tens of thousands of students were graduating from middle and high school (including Dongping Han and Mobo Gao), contributing to the betterment of the local economy, both agricultural and industrial. Every village had at least one primary school. Students had desks, chairs, teachers and learning resources. Tuition-free classes were scheduled to be flexible with the passing of the seasons, so that the crops could be planted, harvested and processed, as well as rural industrial targets being met.
To say that the Cultural Revolution radically improved the educational foundation of rural China would be a gross understatement. And with real, true universal K-12 across the country, the masses felt politically and socially empowered to take their fates and destinies into their own hands, to finally stand up and be heard.
To this day, knowledgeable people inside and outside China say that the Cultural Revolution has brought long lasting, badly needed changes to the mindset of the Chinese masses. For millennia, even when the Heavenly Mandate was harmonious and peaceful, China’s peasants were often living in a feudal economic system, where they were mostly powerless. Their only recourse was to grab those bamboo sticks when it became intolerable and demand new leaders. Wherever in the world, feudalism institutionalizes society’s hierarchy for the common folk, the masses, to keep their heads down, backs toiling, bellies just full enough and mouths shut. If that sounds a lot like the West these days, you read it here.
For Mao, the corrupt CPC cadres leading up to the Cultural Revolution were no better than history’s feudal landlords and masters. To this day, it is argued that that celebrated decade of popular revolt, outrage and people’s direct democracy against the country’s elites has had lasting, beneficial results. After the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese lost their feudal serfs’ mentality. They were no longer afraid to take down the fat and the lazy, the rich and the corrupt, to justice. Living here for 16 years and knowing that these days, there are 300-500 daily public protests against the system, in reality, against the CPC, this kind of popular vigilance would never have reached fruition, without the Cultural Revolution’s baptism by populist fire.
Just as Mao Zedong’s amazing socioeconomic miracle from 1949-1978 was critical for Deng Xiaoping’s later reforms to succeed, it can be persuasively argued that the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution was just as necessary for the Chinese people to develop the attitude and sense of social justice needed, to implement these incredible changes and make them happen.
One could even argue that if it weren’t for the crucible of the Cultural Revolution to steel the Party and put its members on notice, it may have already been destined to the same fate as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On August 8th, 1966, Mao and the CPC issued the following proclamation, known today as The Sixteen Points:
Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture and customs, and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds, and endeavor to stage a comeback. The proletariat must do just the opposite: it must meet head on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society.
At present our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and transform education, literature, and art and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.
The masses of the workers, peasants, soldiers, revolutionary intellectuals, and revolutionary cadres form the main force in this Great Cultural Revolution. Large numbers of revolutionary young people, previously unknown, have become courageous and daring path-breakers. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution now unfolding is a great revolution that touches people to their very soul and constitutes a new stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country, a deeper and more extensive stage.
Since the Cultural Revolution is a revolution, it inevitably meets with resistance. This resistance comes chiefly from those in authority who have wormed their way into the party and are taking the capitalist road. It also comes from the old force of habit in society. At present, this resistance is still fairly strong and stubborn. However, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is, after all, an irresistible general trend. There is abundant evidence that such resistance will crumble fast once the masses become fully aroused.
There you have it. This revolutionary declaration offers hope for positive change in China’s future. The leadership should rightfully be fearful of the people, not the other way around; a great definition of effective, participatory democracy. As well, the Chinese people are not going to put up with their leaders turning their proud, independent country into a continent-sized Indonesia or Honduras, letting itself be raped and plundered by Judeo-bankers, corporations and militaries. Thus, the Party had better work its butt off to make sure those who would sell out the communist revolution for a few crumbs of Western empire are rid of, or at least neutralized.
If one looks at the May Fourth Movement from 1917-1921, leading up to the founding of the CPC, and its rallying cry to modernize and throw off the shackles of Western and Japanese imperialism, it can be well argued that it finally succeeded in the Cultural Revolution.
The other aspect that is lost to most outsiders concerning the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s sincere belief in continuous revolution. This was based on his and Baba Beijing’s total trust and respect held for the masses, especially the peasants. They did and still do truly believe in the Chinese’s specialness and uniqueness, as the world’s most resilient, most adaptable people on Earth. When looking back on China’s 5,000-year civilization, this devotion to their people is not grounded in egotistical delusions, but in the amazing tapestry of trial, tribulation and triumph, woven in the pages of the country’s history books.
When Mao did launch the Cultural Revolution, it probably went in directions that he did not think would ever happen. It is safe to say that at times, it got out of control of the leadership, especially when the Red Guards were charged to rid New China of The Four Olds (customs, culture, habits and ideas). This is the famous episode which caused so much of the outrage against adults, teachers, civic leaders, as well as extensive damage to Chinese heritage sites, temples and museums. In the West, it is depicted that this went on for years. In fact, the majority of this vandalism happened during a brief six-week period in the summer of 1966. They did do a lot of damage in such a short period of time and the leadership quickly sent out the People’s Liberation Army to stop it.
It was one of the big reasons that Mao, soon thereafter, sent these city youths into the countryside, for rural education, as a way to neutralize these urban Red Guards, who were out of control. It was a great way to get these overzealous kids, including future presidents Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, out of the cities and take some starch out of them. In fact, it worked like a charm.
This rural education program for city slickers is still highly valued in China. If you ask Xi Jinping, in spite of the hardships and suffering, it was a big success. His seven years living and working with dirt poor peasants helped make him the man he is today. This is a point of view to which I can personally relate. I was a Peace Corps volunteer for 25 months in Tunisia. All of my personal sacrifices living like a peasant in rural Tunisia were life-changing for the better.
Pictured above: even with the 100-year droughts and floods in 1959-1960 and the first year of the Cultural Revolution, China still outpaced the United States, the latter which held all the global cards.
It must be said, the Cultural Revolution set China back economically the first year. Overall, GDP growth slowed to an average of 6% per annum, 1966-1976, after torrid economic growth from 1949-1965, with numbers that make the Deng Era look anemic. Innocents, along with the many more guilty were persecuted, tortured, imprisoned and many died during what the Chinese call their “decade of chaos”. Rural education was going through an amazing renaissance. But instead of learning grammar and math, some urban school children spent time stabbing straw effigies with bamboo spears, and screaming,
Down with Deng Xiaoping! Down with Liu Shaoqi!
This being the memories of Chinese friends I know, who grew up during such an infamous decade. And then the ultimate mockery of the Cultural Revolution’s name, some schools in China’s urban and town education system shut down for intermittent periods, 1966-67, and many universities were closed up to 1968-1970. Not the best way to advance the cause of New China, even though Western propaganda has conflated this into there being no education for a whole decade across the entire country, which is clearly a big lie. While very popular and largely successful in the countryside compared to the cities, urban people who lived through it tell me the period was a muddled and dispiriting mess for many metropolitan Chinese, even if they kept out of harm’s way. It did not end officially end until Mao’s death, on September 9th, 1976.
Old habits lingered on until Deng Xiaoping kick-started his reforms and opening up in 1978.
Baba Beijing officially admits that the Cultural Revolution got out of hand at the beginning, and puts up acceptable figures on the number of people wrongfully persecuted, imprisoned and killed, as well as an inventory of the damage done to cultural heritage sites. Baba Beijing has officially apologized to all the victims. Furthermore, they even instituted a national program to find and return stolen goods to their original owners.
After that burst of angry frenzy against all the bad guys in early 1966, for nine-plus more years, the Cultural Revolution was a huge economic, industrial, scientific, social, educational and agricultural success. This is denied in the West and largely ignored by Baba Beijing, although with Xi Jinping as president since 2012, the criticism and denial of the Deng Era have greatly abated. Textbooks have been updated to reflect this. I think this trend will continue. The productive and technological achievements of the Mao Era need pages to list them all, not to mention there was no corruption, crime, homelessness, hunger (except during the 100-years droughts and floods of 1959-60), inflation, nor unemployment.
Behind the Great Western Firewall, the mainstream media’s coordinated intention is to deliberately focus China’s modern history on only three galvanizing events: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the fictitious Tiananmen “massacre”, in order to tarnish and discredit its jaw-dropping communist-socialist success. They sure don’t want you to get any ideas that cut into their power and profit off the backs of the people.
But, looking back, this brings the Cultural Revolution into current day perspective.
We know the horrors and misery in pre-liberation, colonial China. The accomplishments, numbers and statistics are bulletproof: in only 29 years, 1949-1978, Mao and the CPC transformed China into a modern, developing, agricultural and industrial powerhouse, proudly self-reliant and without any help from the West. This is more than incredible. In fact, one could say that a second Great Leap Forward was these almost unimaginable socioeconomic gains that the Chinese benefitted from, during the generation of Mao’s leadership.
Even more importantly, the Chinese people are continuing to stand proud, independent and free of Western occupation and balkanization. This is what makes Mao’s supposed 30% wrong totally forgivable. Even if he was pegged 10% right/90% wrong, China’s independence alone would be worth the sacrifice. No country can put a price on the freedom of not being a Western whore. Just ask the scores of invaded, occupied and exploited countries around the world about working on their knees, under the boot heel of the West’s phony “democracy” and “free markets”, just to survive. The Chinese lived this humiliation for 110 years.
Post fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall, the Russians were sodomized by the West for a mere ten years. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Nigeria, Ukraine, Palestine and many other countries are still getting the West’s “enslavement program” shoved down their throats. A century or a decade is relative. One day of subjugation and humiliation is too long.
Appendix of statistics
Numerically, Mao and the CPC, from 1949-1978, which is only 29 years, or about one generation,
Sextupled China’s GDP (+600%), an average of 7% per annum.
Increased China’s grain production 300%, from 100MMT (million metric tons) to 300MMT.
Increased rail lines by 266%, from 22,677km to 60,367km.
Increased passenger train traffic by 750%, from 102,970,000 passengers to 814,910,000.
Increased rail freight tonnage 2,000%, from 55,890,000MT hauled to 1,101,190,000MT.
Increased the road network 1,000%, from 80,000km to 800,000km.
Postal and telecommunications increased 800%, from 600 million to 48 billion letters, calls, telegrams, etc.
Most of China’s current flood control systems were built during the Mao Era. These include about 85,000 reservoirs of different sizes, which have been constructed in upstream reaches of rivers. Most of them have been built for flood control, integrated with irrigation and power generation. On top of this, a system with 250,000 kilometers of levees built in the middle and downstream reaches of rivers has been constructed, mainly to control floods and protect 34,000 square kilometers of farmland and 400 million people, who live along the rivers. These 100 levees along China’s major rivers take in excessive flood waters. Another important tool to reduce flood disasters is large pumping systems. These have made significant contributions in areas where natural drainage is limited in the flood seasons. These pumps can also be used to suck up and store water that can be used to irrigate land during dry season. They are still working and saving lives to this day. Thank you, Mao Zedong.
From 1949 to 1978, China invested nearly 100 billion yuan (US$14bn) into water infrastructure, which accounted for 6.9% of the national total investment in infrastructure. This investment led to a significant increase in effective irrigated land areas, tripling from 16 million hectares in 1950 to 48.05 million hectares in 1978, equaling a percentage increase from 16% in 1950 to 48% in 1978. They are still feeding the people to this day.
Population increased 57% from 542 million to 956,000,000. From 1840-1949, the population only increased from 413 to 542 million, due to all the Western imposed opium, morphine, heroin addiction and subsequent misery from colonial exploitation and wars.
Nearly doubled life expectancy, from 35 to 65 years.
Doubled caloric intake.
Quadrupled literacy from 20% to 80% in school-age children and more than tripled literacy in adults.
The Mao-Era GINI Index was 0.15, the lowest in any large, modern economy in history. Sweden, after WWII, and at its most socialist had a GINI score of 0.25. All Chinese had jobs, (free) housing, health care, food, clothing and K-to-post-doctoral education, in a crime-free living environment.
Steel production went from almost zero, which was destroyed during WWII, to 35MMT/year.
Increased gross industrial output forty-fold, 4,000%.
Increased heavy industry ninety-fold, 9,000%.
Increased industry’s contribution to China’s net material product (GDP less services) from 23% percent to 54% percent.
From zero level, in just 29 years, made China the fifth biggest industrial powerhouse on Earth, after the US, Japan, Germany and UK.
Of all the industrial projects launched by China from 1949-1964, a jaw dropping two-thirds were started during the Great Leap Forward. During these short three years, 1958-1960, 36% of all coal was produced, 30% of all textiles were made and 26% of all the electricity generated, out of the total 29-year period of the Mao Era, 1949-1978!
In fact, the Great Leap Forward’s juggernaut was so spectacular, that its production numbers exceeded by double digits (about 10-30%) the best three years of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, Germany and Japan, during their massive industrial expansions that preceded China’s.
To this day, nine of China’s biggest hydroelectric dams were built during the Great Leap Forward. The only one bigger? Three Gorges Dam.
During the Great Leap Forward, the Red Flag Canal was built entirely by hand as an irrigation canal, diverting water from the Zhang River to fields in Linzhou in northern Henan. Completed in 1965, the main channel is 71 kilometers long, winding around the side of a cliff and through 42 tunnels. By hand.
According to the historical record, 1,092 large flood disaster events occurred 206 BC to 1949 in China, averaging once every two years. Since the end of the Great Leap Forward’s massive flooding and droughts, 1959-60, China has had no incidences of hunger to this day.
The video accompanying this article is with Glen Diesen and it is here: https://globalsouth.co/2025/07/17/michael-hudson-with-glen-diesen-the-economics-of-a-civilizational-conflict/
The two pieces of work are stand-alone but together form the bigger picture quite eloquently and elegantly. This article is the key chapter in Michael’s new book. The article is also on Ben Norton’s site: https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/07/17/michael-hudson-global-majority-us-financial-colonialism/
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Industrial capitalism was revolutionary in its fight to free Europe’s economies and parliaments from the hereditary privileges and vested interests that survived from feudalism. To make their manufactures competitive in world markets, industrialists needed to end the land rent paid to Europe’s landed aristocracies, the economic rents extracted by trade monopolies, and interest paid to bankers who played no role in financing industry. These rentier incomes add to the economy’s price structure, raising the living wage and other business expenses, thus eating into profits.
The 20th century saw the classical aim of clearing away these economic rents rolled back in Europe, the United States, and other Western countries.
However, today, land and natural-resource rents in private hands are still rising and even receiving special tax advantages. Basic infrastructure and other natural monopolies are being privatized by the financial sector — which is largely responsible for carving up and de-industrializing economies on behalf of its real estate and monopoly customers, who pay out most of their rental income as interest to bankers and bondholders.
What has survived from the policies by which Europe’s industrial powers and the United States built up their own manufacturing is free trade. Britain implemented free trade after a 30-year fight on behalf of its industry against the landed aristocracy, aimed at ending the protectionist agricultural tariffs, the Corn Laws, which had been enacted in 1815 to prevent opening the home market to low-priced food imports, which would have reduced farming rents.
After repealing these laws in 1846 to lower the cost of living, Britain offered free-trade agreements to countries seeking access to its market in exchange for these countries not protecting their industry against British exports. The aim was to deter less industrialized countries from working up their own raw materials.
In such countries, Europe’s foreign investors sought to buy rent-yielding natural resources headed by mineral and land rights, and basic infrastructure headed by railroads and canals. This created a diametric contrast between rent-avoidance in the industrial nations and rent-seeking in their colonies and other host countries, while European bankers used debt leverage to gain fiscal control of former colonies who had won independence in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Under pressure to pay the foreign debts that were run up to finance their trade deficits, development attempts, and deepening debt dependency, debtor countries were obliged to relinquish fiscal control of their economies to bondholders, banks, and creditor-nation governments, which pressed them to privatize their basic infrastructure monopolies. The effect was to prevent them from using revenue from their natural endowments to develop a broad economic base for prosperous development.
Just as Britain, France, and Germany aimed to free their economies from feudalism’s legacy of the vested interests with rent extraction privileges, most of today’s Global Majority countries need to free themselves from the rent and debt overhead inherited from European colonialism and creditor control.
By the 1950s these countries were being called “less developed” or, even more patronizingly, “developing.” But the combination of foreign debt and free trade has blocked them from developing along the balanced public/private lines that Western Europe and the United States followed.
The tax policy and other legislation of these countries has been shaped by U.S. and European pressure to observe international trade and investment rules that perpetuate geopolitical domination by Western bankers and rent-extracting investors to control their national patrimony.
The euphemism “host economy” is appropriate for these countries, because the Western economic penetration of them resembles a biological parasite feeding off its host.
Seeking to maintain this relationship, the U.S. and European governments are blocking attempts by these countries to follow the path that Europe’s industrial nations and the United States took for their own economies with their 19th-century political and fiscal reforms that empowered their own takeoff.
Without these countries adopting fiscal and political reforms aimed at developing their own sovereignty and prospects for growth on the basis of their own national patrimony of land, natural resources and basic infrastructure, the world economy will remain bifurcated between Western rentier nations and their Global Majority hosts and held subject to neoliberal orthodoxy.
The success of China’s model poses a threat to the neoliberal order
When U.S. political leaders single out China as an existential enemy of the West, it is not as a military threat but for offering a successful economic alternative to today’s U.S.-sponsored neoliberal world order.
That order was supposed to represent the End of History, succeeding through its logic of free trade, government deregulation, and international investment free of capital controls, while detouring away from industrial capitalism’s anti-rentier policies.
We can now see the absurdity in this self-satisfying evangelical view that had emerged just as Western economies were deindustrializing, as a result of the dynamics of their neoliberal finance capitalism.
The vested financial and other rentier interests are rejecting not only China but the logic of industrial capitalism as described by its own 19th-century classical economists.
Western neoliberal observers have closed their eyes to recognizing the ways in which China’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” has achieved its success by a logic similar to that of the industrial capitalism advocated by classical economists to minimize rentier income.
Most late 19th-century economic writers expected industrial capitalism to evolve into socialism of one form or another, as the role of public investment and regulation increased. Freeing economies and their governments from control by landowners and creditors was the common denominator of the social-democratic socialism of John Stuart Mill, the libertarian socialism of Henry George focusing on the land tax, and the cooperative mutual-aid socialism of Peter Kropotkin, as well as Marxism.
Where China has gone further than earlier socialist mixed-economy reforms has been in keeping money and credit creation in the hands of government, along with basic infrastructure and natural resources.
China SOE composition sector industry IMF
Fear that other governments might follow China’s lead has led U.S. and other Western finance-capitalist ideologues to view China as a threat by providing a model for economic reforms that are precisely the opposite of what the 20th century’s pro-rentier, anti-government ideology fought against.
The foreign debt overhead owed to U.S. and other Western creditors, and enabled by the 1945-2025 international geopolitical rules designed by U.S. diplomats at Bretton Woods in 1944, obliges the Global South and other countries to recover their economic sovereignty by freeing themselves from their foreign (mainly dollarized) banking and financial burden.
These countries have the same land-rent problem that Europe’s industrial capitalism faced, but their land and resource rents are mainly owned by multinational companies and other foreign appropriators of their oil and mineral rights, forests, and latifundia plantations, who extract resource rents by emptying out the world’s oil and mineral resources and cutting down its forests.
Taxing economic rent is a precondition for economic sovereignty
A precondition for Global South countries to gain economic autonomy is to follow the advice of the classical economists and tax the largest sources of rental income – land rent, monopoly rent, and financial returns – instead of letting them be sent abroad.
Taxing these rents would help stabilize their balance of payments, while providing their governments with revenue to finance their infrastructure needs and the related social spending needed to subsidize their economic modernization.
That is how Britain, France, Germany and the United States established their own industrial, agricultural, and financial supremacy. This is not a radical socialist policy; it always has been a central element of industrial capitalist development.
Recapturing a country’s land and natural-resource rents as its fiscal base would enable it to avoid taxing labor and industry. A country would not need to formally nationalize its land and natural resources outright; it simply needs to tax the economic rent over and above actual “earned profits,” to cite the principle of Adam Smith and his 19th-century successors that this rent is the natural tax base.
But neoliberal ideology calls such taxation of rent, and the regulation of monopolies or other market phenomena, an intrusive interference into the “free market.”
This defense of rentier income inverts the classical definition of a free market. The classical economists defined a free market as one free from economic rent, not as one free for the extraction of economic rent, let alone as freedom for creditor-nation governments to create a “rules-based order” to facilitate foreign rent extraction and stifle the development of financially and trade-dependent host countries.
Debt remission is a precondition for economic sovereignty
The fight by countries to free themselves from their foreign debt overhead is much harder than Europe’s 19th-century fight to end the privileges of its landed aristocracy (and less successfully, of its bankers), because it is international in scope, and is now confronted by a creditor-nation alliance to maintain the system of financial colonization created two centuries ago, as former colonies sought to finance their independence by borrowing from foreign bankers.
Starting in the 1820s, newly independent countries like Haiti, Mexico, and other Latin America nations, as well as Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, and other former Ottoman colonies, won nominal political freedom from colonialist control. But to build up their own industry they had to take on foreign debt – on which they almost immediately defaulted, which enabled their creditors to establish monetary authorities in charge of their fiscal policy.
The governments of these countries were turned into collection agents for international bankers by the late 19th century. Financial dependency on bankers and bondholders replaced colonial dependency, obliging debtor countries to give fiscal priority to foreign creditors.
World War II enabled many of these countries to accumulate substantial foreign monetary reserves as a result of supplying raw materials to the belligerents. But the post-war order designed by U.S. diplomats, based on free trade and free capital movements, drained these savings, and obliged the Global South and other countries to borrow to cover their trade deficits.
The resulting foreign debts soon came to exceed the ability of these countries to pay – that is, to pay without surrendering to the destructive IMF demands for austerity that blocked the investment needed to raise their productivity and living standards.
There was no way that they could meet their own development needs to invest in basic infrastructure and provide industrial and agricultural subsidies, public education, health care, and other basic social spending that is characterized by the leading industrial nations. This still remains the case.
Their choice today, therefore, is between paying their foreign debts – at the cost of blocking their own development – or claiming that these debts are odious and insisting that they be written off.
Creditor debt developing countries region UN 2024
At issue is whether debtor countries will gain the sovereignty that is supposed to characterize an international economy of equals, free of foreign post-colonial control over their tax and trade policies, as well as their national patrimony.
Their self-determination can only be achieved by joining together in a collective front.
Donald Trump’s tariff aggression has catalyzed this process by drastically reducing the U.S. market for exports from debtor countries, preventing them from obtaining the dollars to pay their bonds and bank debts, so these won’t be paid in any event.
The world is now busy de-dollarizing.
The need to create an alternative to the U.S.-centered post-war order was expressed in 1955 at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, and then later by the Non-Aligned Movement. But these countries lacked a critical mass of self-sufficiency among themselves to act together.
Attempts to create a New International Economic Order in the 1960s faced the same problem. Countries were not industrially, agriculturally, or financially strong enough to “go it alone.”
Today’s Western debt crisis, de-industrialization, and coercive weaponization of foreign trade and financial sanctions under the dollarized international financial system, capped by the “America First” tariff policy, have created an urgent need for countries to collectively seek economic sovereignty, to become independent from U.S. and European control of the international economy.
The collective BRICS+, with Russia and China taking the lead, have just begun talking about making such an attempt.
BRICS 2024 summit Kazan Russia participants
China’s success has made a global alternative attainable
The great catalyst for countries to take control of their national development has been China. As indicated above, its industrial socialism has largely achieved the classical aim of industrial capitalism of minimizing rentier overhead, above all by publicly creating money to finance tangible growth.
Keeping money and credit creation in government hands, via China’s state-owned banks, prevents financial and other rentier interests from taking over the economy and subjecting it to the financial overhead that has characterized Western economies.
China’s successful alternative for allocating credit avoids making purely financial gains at the expense of tangible capital formation and living standards. That is why it is viewed as an existential threat to the current Western banking model.
Western financial systems are overseen by central banks that have been made independent from the Treasury and government regulatory “interference.” Their role is to provide the commercial banking system’s liquidity as it creates interest-bearing debt, mainly for the purpose of making wealth financially by debt leveraging (asset-price inflation), not for productive capital formation.
Asset price inflation real economy
Capital gains – rising prices for housing and other real estate, stocks, and bonds – are much larger than GDP growth. They can be made easily and quickly by banks creating more credit to bid up prices for buyers of these assets.
Instead of the financial system being industrialized, Western industrial corporations have become financialized, and that has occurred along lines that have deindustrialized the U.S. and European economies.
Financialized wealth can be made without being part of the production process. Interest, late charges, other financial fees and capital gains are not a “product,” yet are counted as such in today’s GDP statistics.
Carrying charges on the rising debt overhead are transfer payments to the finance sector, by labor and businesses, out of wages and profits earned by actual production. That shrinks the income available for spending on the products produced by labor and capital, leaving economies debt-ridden and deindustrialized.
The strategy of creditor-rentier nations to prevent withdrawal from their global control
The broadest strategy to block countries from avoiding the rentier burden has been to wage an ideological campaign from the educational system to mass media. The aim is to control the narrative in a way that depicts government as an oppressive Leviathan, an inherently bureaucratic autocracy.
Western “democracy” is defined not so much politically as economically, as a free market whose resources are allocated by a banking and financial sector independent of regulatory oversight.
Governments strong enough to limit financial and other rentier wealth in the public interest are demonized as autocracies or “planned economics” — as if shifting credit and resource allocation to the financial centers of Wall Street, London, Paris, and Japan does not result in an economy planned by the financial sector in its own interest, with the aim of creating monetary fortunes. Its aim is not to improve the overall economy and living standards.
Global Majority officials and administrators who have studied economics at U.S. and European universities have been indoctrinated with a value-free (that is, rent-free) pro-rentier ideology to frame the way they think about how economies work.
This narrative excludes consideration of how debt polarizes economies by growing exponentially at compound interest. Also excluded from mainstream economic logic is the classical contrast between productive and unproductive credit and investment, and the related distinction between earned income (wages and profits, the main components of value) and unearned income (economic rent).
Beyond this ideological campaign, neoliberal diplomacy uses military force, regime change, and control of the main international bureaucracies associated with the United Nations, the IMF, and World Bank — and a more covert network of non-government organizations (NGOs) — to prevent countries from withdrawing from today’s pro-rentier fiscal rules and pro-creditor laws.
The United States has taken the lead in using force and regime change against governments that would tax away or otherwise limit rent extraction.
It should be noted that few early socialists (except anarchists) advocated violence in pursuit of their reforms. It has been the vested interests, unwilling to accept loss of the privileges that are the basis of their fortunes, who have not hesitated to use violence to defend their wealth and power against attempts at reform to check their privileges.
To be sovereign, nations must create an alternative that enables them to be in charge of their own economic, monetary, and political development. But American diplomacy views any attempt to enact the necessary political and tax reforms and strong government regulatory authority as posing an existential threat to U.S. control over international finance and trade.
This raises the question of whether it is possible to achieve reforms and a strong public economy without war. It is natural for countries to wonder whether they can achieve economic sovereignty without a revolution, such as the Soviet Union, China, and other countries that fought to end their domination by their foreign-supported landlords and creditors.
The only way to protect economic sovereignty against military threats is to join an alliance for mutual support, since individual countries can be isolated in the way that Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran have been — or destroyed, like Libya.
As Benjamin Franklin put matters, “If we don’t hang together, we will hang separately.”
American writers characterize the attempt of other countries to join together to achieve economic sovereignty as a civilizational war. While this is indeed a civilizational contest, it is the United States and its allies that are waging aggression, against countries trying to withdraw from a system that has provided the United States and Europe with a huge inflow of economic rents and debt service from host countries subject to U.S.-backed diplomacy.
How U.S.-centered financial colonialism replaced European colonial occupation
After World War II, the era of settler-state colonialism gave way to financial colonialism, with the international economy dollarized under U.S. leadership.
The Bretton Woods rules established by 1945 enabled multinational corporations to keep economic rents for land, natural resources and public infrastructure out of domestic fiscal reach. Governments were reduced to the role of acting as collection agents for foreign creditors and as protectors of foreign investors from democratic attempts to tax rentier wealth.
The United States was able to weaponize world trade by monopolizing oil exports through U.S. and allied oil companies (the Seven Sisters), while U.S. and European agricultural protectionism and World Bank “aid” policy steered food-deficit countries to focus on tropical plantation crops instead of grain to feed themselves.
President Bill Clinton’s 1994 NAFTA free-trade agreement swamped Mexico’s market with low-priced U.S. farm exports (highly subsidized by strong government support). Mexican grain production plummeted, leaving it food-dependent.
To block governments from taxing or even fining foreign investors to recover compensation for damages to their countries, today’s rentier powers have created Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) courts requiring governments to compensate foreign investors for increasing taxes or imposing regulations that reduce foreign-owned income. (I provide the details of this in Chapter 7 of my 2022 book The Destiny of Civilization.)
This system blocks national sovereignty, including by preventing host countries from taxing the economic rent of their land and natural resources owned by foreigners. The effect is to make these resources part of the investor-nation economy, not their own. (The Saudi oil company Aramco, for instance, was not a corporately distinct corporate affiliate but a branch of Standard Oil of New York (ESSO). This legal nicety meant that its income and expenses were consolidated into the parent company’s U.S. balance sheet. That enabled it to receive a tax credit for the “depletion allowance” for oil, rendering the company effectively free of U.S. income tax, although it was Saudi oil that was being depleted.)
Other nations permitted the United States to dictate the post-World War II order, with it promising generous aid to support free trade, peace, and post-colonial national sovereignty, as spelled out in the United Nations Charter. But the United States squandered its wealth on military spending abroad and financial wealth addiction at home.
That has left America’s post-industrial power based mainly on its ability to harm other countries with chaos if they do not accept the U.S. “rules-based order” designed to extract tribute from them.
The U.S. imposes protectionist tariffs and import quotas at will, and subsidizes agriculture and key technologies as potential global high-tech monopolies, while forbidding other countries from implementing such “socialist” or “autocratic” policies to become more competitive. The result is a double standard in which the U.S. “rules-based order” (its own rules) replaces adherence to international law.
U.S. agricultural price support policy initiated under Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s provides a good example of double standards. It made farming the most heavily subsidized and protected sector. It became the model for the European Economic Community’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) introduced in 1962.
However, U.S. diplomacy opposes the attempts of other countries, especially Global South countries, to impose their own protectionist subsidies and import quotas aimed at achieving self-sufficiency in basic food production — while U.S. “aid lending” and the World Bank have (as indicated above) supported the exportation of tropical plantation crops by Global South countries by lending for transportation and port development. U.S. policy has consistently opposed family-owned farming and land reform throughout Latin America and other Global South countries, often with violence.
Moves toward a multipolar world order
It is not surprising that, inasmuch as Russia has long been the United States’ main military adversary, it has taken the lead in protesting against the unipolar U.S. order.
Advocating a multipolar alternative to the U.S. neoliberal order in June 2025, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described the post-colonial economic subjugation of the countries that achieved political independence from colonialist rule in the 19th and 20th centuries but which are now facing the next task needed to complete their liberation:
Our African friends are paying more and more attention to the fact that their entire economies are still largely based on siphoning off natural resources from these countries. In fact, all value added is produced and pocketed by the former Western metropoles and other European Union and NATO members.
…
The West is using illegal unilateral sanctions, which increasingly become the harbinger of a military attack, as this has happened in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya and is now happening in Iran, as well as the instruments of unfair competition, initiating tariff wars, seizing other countries’ sovereign assets and taking advantage of the role of their currencies and payment systems. The West itself has actually buried the globalization model, which it developed after the Cold War to promote its interests.
Marco Rubio made the same point in the U.S. Senate hearings to confirm him as Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, explaining that the “postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us.”
Violating the rules of foreign trade and investment that the United States itself dictated in 1945, and yet another instance of Washington resorting to the “rules-based order” of its own rules, President Trump’s unilateral tariffs aimed both at shifting the New Cold War’s military costs onto other countries, which are expected to buy American arms and provide proxy armies, and at reviving the U.S.’s lost industrial power by forcing countries to relocate industries to the United States and to permit U.S. companies to extract monopoly rents by controlling the leading emerging technologies.
The United States aims to impose monopoly rights and related rentier privileges uniquely favorable to itself on the entire world’s trade and investment. Trump’s “America First” diplomacy demands that other countries conduct their trade, payments and debt relationships in U.S. dollars, instead of their own currencies.
The U.S. “rule of law” is one that permits unilateral U.S. demands to impose trade and financial sanctions dictating how and with whom foreign countries can trade and invest. They are threatened with economic chaos and confiscation of their dollar reserves if they do not boycott trade and investment relations with Russia, China, and other countries refusing to submit to U.S. control.
The United States’ leverage to obtain these foreign concessions is no longer industrial leadership and financial strength, but its ability to cause chaos for other countries. Claiming to be the indispensable nation, the U.S.’s ability to disrupt trade is ending its former international monetary and diplomatic power.
That power originally was based on U.S. holdings of the world’s largest monetary gold reserves in 1945, its status as the largest creditor nation and industrial economy, and, after 1971, its dollar hegemony, arising in large part as a result of its financial market being the safest for other nations to hold their official monetary reserves.
The diplomatic inertia created by these former advantages no longer reflects the realities of 2025. What U.S. officials do have is the ability to disrupt the world’s trade, supply chains, and financial arrangements, including the SWIFT system for international payments.
The U.S. and European confiscation of $300 billion of Russia’s monetary deposits has darkened America’s reputation for financial safety, while its chronic trade and balance-of-payments deficits threaten to disrupt the international monetary system and free trade that made it the major beneficiary of the 1945-2025 world order.
us current account percent gdp 1970 2024
In keeping with the principle of national sovereignty and non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs that underlay the creation of the United Nations (the basic principle of international law grounded in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia), Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov described (in his speech cited above) the need “to establish foreign trade mechanisms [that] the West will be unable to control, such as transport corridors, alternative payment systems and supply chains.”
As an example of how the United States had paralyzed the World Trade Organization, which it had created on the basis of free trade at a time when America was the world’s leading export power, he explained:
When the Americans realized that the globalized system they had created – one built on fair competition, inviolable property rights, the presumption of innocence, and similar principles, and which had allowed them to dominate for decades – had also begun benefiting their rivals, primarily China, they took drastic action.
As China started outplaying them on their own turf and by their own rules, Washington simply blocked the WTO’s Appellate Body. By artificially stripping it of a quorum, they rendered this key dispute settlement mechanism inactive – and it remains so to this day.
The United States has been able to block foreign opposition to its nationalist policies by having veto power in the United Nations, IMF, and World Bank. Even without such power, U.S. diplomats have been able to block United Nations organizations from acting independently of U.S. wishes by refusing to appoint leaders or judges not primarily loyal to U.S. foreign policy.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), charged with keeping nuclear proliferation in check is the most recent notorious case in point. Iran published documents showing that the agency’s leader Rafael Grossi provided U.S. and Israeli intelligence with the names of Iranian scientists who were killed, and details of the Iranian nuclear refinement sites that were bombed.
The U.S. veto has prevented the UN Security Council from condemning Israeli attacks on the Palestinian population. And when the International Criminal Court (ICC) brought charges against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in a genocide against the Palestinians, U.S. officials imposed sanctions on the ICC and demanded the removal of the prosecutor.
The world no longer is to be governed by international law, but by unilateral U.S. rules, subject to abrupt change depending on the vicissitudes of American economic or military power (or loss thereof).
As Russia’s President Vladimir Putin described this new state of affairs in 2022, “Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations,” yet the “unipolar world is inherently anti-democratic and unfree; it is false and hypocritical through and through.”
The United States’ self-image depicts its long dominant world position as reflecting its democracy, free market, and equality of opportunity that has enabled its power elite, in their view, to acquire their status by being the economy’s most productive members, through their management and allocation of savings and credit.
The reality is that the United States has become a rentier oligarchy, one that is increasingly hereditary. Its members’ fortunes are made mainly by acquiring rent-yielding assets (land, natural resources, and monopolies) on which they make capital gains, while paying most of their rent as interest to their bankers, who end up with much of these rents and have become the new oligarchy’s leading managerial class.
Summary
The real conflict over what kind of economic and political system the Global Majority will have is just gaining momentum.
Global South countries and others have been driven so deeply into debt that they have been obliged to sell off their public infrastructure to pay its carrying charges. Recovering control of their natural resources and basic infrastructure requires the fiscal right to impose an economic-rent tax on their land, natural resources and monopolies, as well as the legal right to recover environmental cleanup costs caused by foreign oil and mining firms, and to implement financial cleanup costs (i.e., write offs and cancellation) of the foreign debt burden imposed by creditors who have not taken responsibility to ensure that their loans can be paid under existing conditions.
U.S. evangelistic rhetoric describes the imminent political and economic fracture of the world economy as a “Clash of Civilizations” between democracies (i.e., countries that support U.S. policy) and autocracies (i.e., nations acting independently).
It would be more accurate to describe this fracture as a fight by the United States and its European and other Western allies against civilization — assuming civilization entails, as it seems it must, the sovereign right of countries to enact their own laws and tax systems for the benefit of their own populations within an international system that has a common set of basic rules and values.
What Western ideologues call democracy and free markets has turned out to be an aggressive rentier-financial imperialism. And what they call autocracy is a government strong enough to prevent economic polarization between a super-rich rentier class and an impoverished population at large, such as is occurring within the Western oligarchies themselves.
En Russie, l’inflation a recommencé à ralentir en juin 2025 après une légère accélération en mai. Selon Rosstat, la croissance
L’article L’inflation ralentit sensiblement en juin, selon Rosstat est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
“War does not determine who is right — only who is left.”
— Bertrand Russell
During the time of presidents angling for Nobel Peace Prizes, and daily news of ceasefires, this is where we stand. I’ve done a study of war or conflict using two points:
the end of January 2025, and
the current date, in other words, two snapshots separated by more or less six months.
Then I realized I lost the intermediate shorter conflicts and listed those separately. I was not searching for PhD-level accuracy, but for the states of war and conflict in our world, and wanted to determine whether it is on the rise. It is on the rise, and more conflicts have a perpetual nature. Currently, we have 18 conflicts raging. At the end of January, we had 16. During the period, nine short-term intermediate conflicts raged. Some of these you may recognize, and some may be new to you, but they fit the definitions.
This does not include economic war.
Afghanistan 45+ years
Somalia 34+ years
Palestine 76+ years
Eastern DRC 30+ years
But it demands courage beyond ceasefires: addressing stolen resources, healing trauma, and dismantling the machinery of hate.
As of July 11, 2025, there are numerous active armed conflicts worldwide. Defining a “war” precisely is complex (often requiring 1,000+ battle-related deaths/year), but here is a comprehensive list of major ongoing armed conflicts and wars causing significant violence, based on data from organizations like the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), and major international news sources.
Fluidity: Conflict intensity and front lines change rapidly. A “ceasefire” today could break down tomorrow.
Definitions: This list focuses on conflicts with sustained, organized armed violence causing significant casualties (often >100 or >1000 battle deaths/year). It includes interstate wars, civil wars, and major insurgencies, lower-level violence, and criminal conflicts.
“Frozen” Conflicts: Areas like Eastern Ukraine (pre-2022), Nagorno-Karabakh (post-2023 ceasefire), and Transnistria (Moldova) remain tense with unresolved political issues and military deployments, but large-scale active fighting is currently paused.
Casualty Thresholds: Many organizations (like UCDP) distinguish between:
War: >= 1,000 battle-related deaths per year.
Armed Conflict: >= 25 battle-related deaths per year.
This list includes conflicts meeting the “war” threshold recently and significant ones near it.
Information Challenges: Data from active war zones is often incomplete, delayed, or biased.
The deadliest and most widespread conflicts currently are generally considered to be: Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Hamas/Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, and the Sahel Insurgencies (Mali/Burkina Faso).
Databases searched:
What we would consider western-style information from these databases was not necessarily removed. Israel was missing everywhere, and I added that entity, which is clearly running four wars, depending on how you count.
1. Russia-Ukraine War: Full-scale invasion ongoing since February 2022. Front lines remain active, heavy casualties continue.
2. Israel’s genocide: Intense conflict – major Israeli military operation in Gaza continues, with significant spillover violence on Israel’s northern border with Hezbollah (Lebanon) and exchanges with Houthis (Yemen). A severe humanitarian crisis persists.
3. Sudan Civil War: War between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since April 2023. Widespread fighting across the country, ethnic violence, massive displacement, and famine conditions.
4. Myanmar Civil War: Intensified nationwide conflict since the February 2021 military coup. Numerous Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs) and People’s Defense Forces (PDFs) are fighting the military junta (Tatmadaw). Control of significant territory is contested.
5. Sahel Insurgencies (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger): Intense Islamist insurgencies (linked to JNIM, IS-GS) against military governments and local forces. Extremist violence, ethnic massacres, and widespread instability dominate the region. Military coups have reshaped the landscape.
6. Syrian Civil War: Although reduced in scale, active conflict continues the Northwest (Idlib): Syrian government (+Russia) vs. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and Turkish-backed rebels, Northeast: Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) vs. Turkish forces & Turkish-backed rebels. Occasional ISIS resurgence, South: Sporadic clashes, ISIS cells.
7. Yemen Civil War: While the main front lines between Houthis and the internationally recognized government (+Saudi-led coalition) have been relatively quiet since the 2022 truce (not formally ended), violence persists. This includes Houthi attacks on shipping, US/UK strikes on Houthis, internal conflicts within anti-Houthi factions, and attacks by AQAP/ISIS branches.
8. Tigray War (Ethiopia) Aftermath: The November 2022 ceasefire largely ended large-scale combat between the Ethiopian government and Tigray forces. However, significant tensions remain, sporadic clashes occur in border areas (especially involving Amhara forces), and the situation is fragile. Other conflicts in Oromia and Amhara regions continue.
9. Somalia Conflict: Ongoing war between the Federal Government of Somalia (backed by AU Mission – ATMIS) and Al-Shabaab militants. Al-Shabaab controls significant rural areas and launches frequent attacks in urban centers.
10. Mexico Drug War: While often classified as criminal violence, the scale and intensity (30,000+ homicides annually for years) involving cartels vs. state forces and cartel vs. cartel warfare meets many definitions of an armed conflict, especially in specific regions.
11. Afghanistan Conflict: The Taliban government faces persistent insurgency from ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K), primarily targeting Taliban forces and minorities. Resistance groups (NRF) also engage in sporadic clashes.
Other Significant Armed Conflicts (Varying Intensity)
12. Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): Multiple overlapping conflicts, primarily in the east. Key actors include M23 rebels (allegedly Rwanda-backed), numerous other armed groups (FDLR, CODECO, ADF – linked to ISIS), Congolese military (FARDC), and UN/east African forces. Violence is extreme, involving massacres of civilians.
13. Cameroon (Anglophone Crisis): Separatist militias in the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions fight government forces. Widespread human rights abuses by both sides.
|4 Pakistan Insurgency: Baloch separatist groups and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) carry out frequent attacks against security forces, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces.
15. Colombia Conflict: Despite the 2016 peace deal with FARC, conflict continues with remaining FARC dissidents (ELN, EMC), other guerrillas, paramilitaries, and cartels, particularly in rural areas.
16. Haiti Gang Violence: Powerful armed gangs control large parts of Port-au-Prince and other cities, engaging in brutal warfare against each other and state forces, causing a catastrophic humanitarian and political crisis. Often exceeds thresholds for “armed conflict.”
17. Central African Republic (CAR) Conflict: Despite peace deals, fighting continues between government forces (often backed by Russian Wagner Group mercenaries) and various rebel coalitions (CPC) controlling large rural areas.
18. Mozambique Insurgency (Cabo Delgado): ISIS-Mozambique continues its insurgency in the north, despite significant counter-offensives by government forces and regional allies (SADC, Rwanda).
High-Intensity Conflicts (1,000+ battle deaths/year)
1. Russia-Ukraine War
2. Israel-Hamas genocide
3. Sudan Civil War (SAF vs. RSF)
4. Myanmar Civil War
5. Sahel Insurgencies (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger)
6. Yemen Civil War
7. Syrian Civil War
Significant Conflicts (25–1,000 battle deaths/year)
8. DRC (Eastern Congo)
9. Cameroon (Anglophone Crisis)
10. Pakistan Insurgencies
11. Colombia Conflict
12. Haiti Gang War
13. Central African Republic (CAR)
14. Mozambique (Cabo Delgado)
15. Nigeria (Banditry & Separatism)
16. Ethiopia (Oromia & Amhara)
*(Active political/military tension but low fighting in Jan 2025)*
1. Nagorno-Karabakh: No fighting since Azerbaijan’s Sept 2023 offensive; ~120K ethnic Armenians fled. Russian peacekeepers are present.
2. Tigray (Ethiopia): Nov 2022 ceasefire held, but Amhara-Tigray border disputes simmered.
3. Eastern Ukraine (Pre-2022 lines): Static trench warfare since 2015; minor skirmishes.
Important Context for January 2025
Gaza dominated headlines: Regional escalation risks (Lebanon/Yemen) were the top geopolitical concern.
Sudan’s collapse accelerated: Famine was declared in parts of Darfur by late January.
Sahel military regimes solidified power: France entirely withdrew; Russia filled the vacuum.
Myanmar’s junta was near collapse: China brokered a temporary Shan State truce.
Houthi Red Sea attacks disrupted global trade: 15% of shipping rerouted via Africa.
—-
1. India-Pakistan Border Clashes (Nov 2024)
Duration: 4 days (Nov 17–20, 2024)
Location: Jammu & Kashmir (Line of Control)
Trigger: Attack by suspected Jaish-e-Mohammed militants in Poonch (India) killing 5 soldiers → Indian retaliatory strikes across LoC.
Scale: Heavy mortar/artillery duels, drone incursions.
Casualties: ~35–50 killed (military + militants).
End: De-escalated after U.S./UN mediation; no territorial change.
Source: ACLED, Reuters.
2. Libya: Tripoli Factional Warfare (Jan 2025)
Duration: 12 days (Jan 8–20, 2025)
Factions:
Government of National Unity (GNU) (Tripoli-based)
Libyan National Army (LNA)-aligned militias (from Zawiya/Tarhouna)
Trigger: LNA groups attempted to seize Tripoli port after GNU delayed elections.
Scale: Urban combat, artillery, drones. Turkish-backed GNU forces held key areas.
Casualties: ~200+ killed, 40k displaced.
End: Ceasefire brokered by Egypt/Turkey (Jan 20).
Source: Al Jazeera, Libya Observer.
3. Armenia-Azerbaijan Border Skirmish (Oct 2024)
Duration: 3 days (Oct 4–6, 2024)
Location: Syunik Province (Armenia) / Nakhchivan border.
Trigger: Azerbaijani troops advanced toward Armenian positions near Vardenis.
Scale: Artillery, drone strikes, infantry clashes.
Casualties: ~24 soldiers killed (both sides).
End: Russian-brokered truce; Azerbaijan withdrew.
Source: Caucasus Watch, OC Media.
4. Chad-Sudan Proxy Border War (Dec 2024)
Duration: 2 weeks (Dec 1–14, 2024)
Factions:
Chadian rebels (FACT) backed by Sudan’s RSF
Chadian army backed by SAF remnants
Location: Adré (Chad-Sudan border)
Scale: RSF artillery supported FACT incursion → Chadian airstrikes in Sudan.
Casualties: ~180+ killed, 10k refugees fled into Chad.
End: Chad pushed back rebels; RSF redirected focus to Darfur.
Source: The New Humanitarian, France 24.
5. Ecuador Cartel Uprising (Jan 2025)
Duration: 5 days (Jan 8–12, 2025)
Trigger: Cartels (Los Choneros, Tiguerones) launched coordinated riots/jailbreaks after leader “Fito” transferred.
Scale: Prison riots, police assassinations, car bombs in Guayaquil/Quito.
State Response: Military deployed under “internal armed conflict” decree.
Casualties: 500+ killed (cartels/security forces/civilians).
End: Cartels retreated after military seized prisons.
Source: BBC, ACLED.
6. India-Pakistan: Short but high-risk (nuclear powers).
7. Libya: Part of ongoing power vacuum since 2011; elections still stalled.
8. Chad-Sudan: Spillover from Sudan’s civil war (RSF vs. SAF).
9. Ecuador: Classified as “non-state conflict” (cartels vs. state) but reached war-like intensity.
Short duration → Excluded from annual “ongoing war” datasets (e.g., UCDP thresholds require sustained violence).
Localized impact → Often overshadowed by larger wars (Gaza, Ukraine).
Fragmented Power – Non-state actors (warlords, militias, cartels) profit from chaos. No one can “win,” so violence becomes an economy (e.g., Eastern DRC, Libya).
Proxy Dynamics – External powers fuel conflicts to advance influence. (This is a highly risable statement, that came out of one of the databases searched. Israel and the US were omitted, but let’s add them and repeat the list: (Russia, Iran, Turkey, Gulf States, US, Israel)
Climate Collapse Multiplier –
Droughts → farmland loss → youth join militias (Sahel).
Floods → mass displacement → ethnic violence (South Sudan).
Tech-Enabled Insurgency
Drones ($500) can paralyze armies. So says the databases but I verified that with an expert only to receive a wonderful explanation of the part and function of drones in modern warfare. Drones are an organic development of yet another iteration of air power. In cases, they can act as the poor man’s substitution for massive artillery power. Drones cannot win wars.
I added this to the information from the databases: Gaslighting and major false media campaigns in other words hasbarra and intelligent propaganda. This was a glaring tech-enabled issue when Syria fell and it is continuing.
Social media recruits globally (ISIS, Al-Shabaab).
Ceasefires address symptoms (guns), not causes (injustice, resource theft).
Example: 13 peace deals in DRC since 1999 — all failed.
Consequence: Children who know only trauma → and develop into the next wave of fighters.
Rare bright spots:
Colombia’s 2016 deal cut homicide rates by 1/3 (though fragile).
Northern Ireland’s peace held 26+ years — proof hatred can be outlived.
Aceh, Indonesia — post-tsunami peace ended 30-year war.
Inclusion of women & youth in talks (research shows 35% more durable).
Economic alternatives to war economies (jobs > demobilization cash).
Local peacebuilders — unsung heroes rebuilding trust village by village.
This needs a much deeper discussion as clearly peacemaking fails.
Late entry now threatening but not quite at the shooting stage:
Thailand, Cambodia border dispute
Final Reflection – May we bear witness wisely as we in our world kill others faster than ever before.
Les opérations militaires engagées par Israël et les USA contre l’Iran opposent des parties qui ont leurs raisons de considérer
L’article Réflexions sur le conflit irano-israélien et ses implications pour la Russie est apparu en premier sur STRATPOL.
By Andrew Cainey and Chengkai Xie
Andrew Cainey is Director and Co-Founder of the UK National Committee on China and Senior Associate Fellow, Royal United Services Institute. Chengkai Xie is Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University.
Republished in South China Morning Post, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3313403/china-global-conflict-mediator-ambition-action
In recent years, Beijing has increasingly taken on the role of conflict mediator on the world stage — hosting negotiations, proposing peace plans, and even deploying personnel to oversee ceasefires. Once reluctant to engage in UN peacekeeping activities, it now provides more troops than any other P5 member. These are dramatic shifts for a country that was once a staunch advocate of non-interference. As its economic and security interests now reach far beyond its borders, China’s engagement on the world stage has understandably grown accordingly. It has a strong incentive to resolve conflicts that threaten its trade, overseas investments, citizens abroad, or simply regional stability.
The Six-Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear issue, beginning in 2003, marked China’s first major foray into multilateral conflict mediation. It provides a good example of Beijing’s approach to conflict mediation, summarised in its foreign policy lexicon by the phrase “劝和促谈” (persuading for peace and promoting dialogue): while Beijing had no coercive leverage over Pyongyang, it served as a consistent convener—urging North Korea to halt its nuclear ambitions while pressing the U.S. to address DPRK security concerns.
China’s ambitions are now broader. It has been positioning itself as a leader of the Global South, representing a more inclusive multilateralism than the West. The Global Security Initiative (GSI), launched in 2022, rich in principles but deliberately ambiguous in substance, signals Beijing’s growing appetite to reshape security diplomacy around its proposed set of global norms, which prioritise non-interference, dialogue, and cooperation.
As conflicts drag on from Ukraine to Gaza, the global demand for effective mediation has never been higher. At the same time, the U.S. under Trump is retreating from sustained engagement, giving China the space to step in. However, as mediation requires time, resources, and political capital, the questions are where, how and with what effect China chooses to engage.
Where to resolve conflict
Rather than espousing universalist approaches to peace, China has been engaging most where it sees potential benefits – for itself and for others – that merit the resources and effort required. The cases of Saudi-Iran, Myanmar and Russia-Ukraine provide illustrations.
The Saudi-Iran agreement was hailed as a diplomatic success and a shift from China’s traditional non-involvement. Yet, while China did facilitate engagement behind the scenes, both sides were already on a path to improved relations. The agreement represented a tactical rapprochement rather than a fundamental reconciliation. It did not require China to resolve deep-rooted conflicts or manage volatile post-agreement transitions. China scored a diplomatic win that advanced relations in the Middle East and gained kudos for its contribution with limited risk and effort.
By contrast, Myanmar highlights the deeper drivers – and limits – of China’s mediation ambitions. Earlier this year, it brokered a ceasefire between the military junta and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army – and, in a striking departure from its longstanding policy of non-interference, dispatched a monitoring team to supervise enforcement. This shift from quiet facilitation to active oversight underscores how China’s mediation is rooted in its own economic and security imperatives. Stability in Shan State matters not only for border security, but for safeguarding China’s access to rare-earth minerals critical to its high-tech industries.
Finally, given the Ukraine war’s significance for Europe, the U.S., and Russia, it is difficult for China to avoid taking a stance on how the conflict should be resolved. Yet the differences between Russia and Ukraine are stark, perhaps irreconcilable. China has therefore limited itself to outlining rather ambiguous proposals instead of making a full-fledged effort at mediation. In 2023, it issued joint peace proposals with Brazil emphasizing dialogue without preconditions and mutual security guarantees, diverging from the West’s rights- and sovereignty-based frameworks. Special Envoy Li Hui’s shuttle diplomacy in Brazil, Egypt, and Indonesia aligned China with the Global South’s call for alternative, stability-focused approaches to conflict resolution. Some Western analysts have questioned China’s willingness to act as a truly impartial broker that engages Russia and Ukraine on equal terms, considering Beijing’s close ties to Moscow.
How to resolve conflict
China argues that it adopts a different approach to conflict resolution than the West; that it emphasizes facilitation over prescription, flexible processes over rigid frameworks, and economic incentives over normative demands. China stresses the need to avoid what it sees as the risk of hegemonic overreach and argues that it deliberately avoids imposing its will, preferring to facilitate dialogue instead of applying pressure or imposing norms tied to democracy, human rights, or governance reform.
This approach draws on Confucian philosophy, which emphasizes “和谐“(harmony) over confrontation and sees conflict as a rupture in relationships rather than a clash of rights or ideologies. This outlook is amplified by the concept of ”关系“ (relationship) which prioritizes trust and mutual benefit over public adjudication or moralizing. Consistent with this worldview, China’s diplomacy emphasizes the quiet management of tensions and the need to preserve face for all parties rather than assigning blame.
Indeed, prominent Western mediators also emphasize trust, common interests, patience and symbolic gestures – principles not so different from a Confucian-informed ethos. Moreover, attractive as a Chinese alternative may appear, especially to the Global South, China’s ‘non-intrusive’ style may be less a deliberate philosophy and more a reflection of its limited experience in conflict resolution.
Demonstrating impact
China’s coming of age as a conflict mediator is both inevitable and consequential: its willingness to engage in conflict diplomacy offers new possibilities as its global footprint grows and traditional Western leadership evolves. Wherever and however China engages in conflict resolution, what matters is the practical impact: fighting stopped, lives saved, people safe and back to living prosperous lives.
However, unlike the U.S. or European Union, which have spent decades working on complex peace processes, China is relatively new to the arena. It has yet to demonstrate whether it can manage the intricate work of post-conflict institution-building, transitional justice, or ensuring implementation of fragile agreements. Performative efforts issuing peace plans that lead nowhere will bring at best transitory benefits for China and soon lead to greater cynicism about any engagement by China.
China’s ability to be a truly effective mediator rests ultimately on three foundations. First, its ability to build trust with all parties involved. Indeed, the presence of such trusted relationships helps identify those conflict situations where China is best placed to play a constructive role. Second, its willingness to acknowledge where its own interests are aligned with those in conflict and where they are not. This is not a uniquely Chinese challenge. All mediators, including the U.S., pursue their own interests to some degree; what matters is transparency, balance, and credibility. Finally, success requires the willingness to persist and put in the effort required to secure lasting agreement: as Xi Jinping might put it, the need to ‘struggle’ in order to end conflict. In a multipolar world starved of effective diplomacy, the opportunity for China is real. Success will demand not just ambition, but patience, impartiality, and a willingness to struggle for peace, even when it tests China’s own interests. Turning ambition into action is now China’s diplomatic test.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.
« Nous sommes au bord du gouffre, tout dépend de nos décisions », a déclaré Rechetnikov. De son côté, le
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The inexorable decline of the American Empire has arrived at an Imperial Paradox. It must either fight a war and die, or not fight a war and die.
By William Schryver at imetatronink.
The inexorable decline of the American Empire has arrived at an Imperial Paradox. It must either fight a war and die, or not fight a war and die.
Here are the options:
Neither South Korea nor Japan want anything to do with a war against China, leaving only the Philippines dumb enough to play along.
The US apparently pulled another brigade out of South Korea. They’ll pull out more in the future. They know damn well the North Koreans could easily conquer the entire peninsula if they chose to do so.
China and its local seas are a vast ocean away from America, and its capacity to defend its local seas is enormous and growing.
The Pentagon must understand it cannot sustain logistics in a war against China in the western Pacific. It simply cannot be done. Anyone who thinks otherwise must upgrade their proficiency in basic arithmetic.
In the context of a war against Iran, all the geography is against the US.
Iran is an exceedingly mountainous country that has, over the course of millennia, learned to use those mountains to defend itself against would-be conquerors.
They can field a satisfactorily well-equipped million-man army.
They have learned in the 21st century to burrow deep heavily fortified tunnels into their mountains.
Iran is also much more technologically advanced than most people understand. They have become impressively capable in terms of both offensive and defensive missiles. They pose a far greater challenge than the Yemeni have been over the past year and a half.
Indeed, they pose a “near-peer” challenge against US overseas power projection.
The US Navy could only operate at extreme risk in the southern Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Persian Gulf.
Every US base in the region is well within range of Iranian missile strikes.
The US Navy very demonstrably cannot secure seaborne logistics into the Persian Gulf. They lack both the sealift ships, and the ability to protect them.
They cannot even open the Bab-el-Mandeb!
From a geographic and logistical standpoint, the only remotely conceivable war is one in Ukraine against Russia.
The US at least has bases and forces already in place in the UK, Germany, Poland, Romania, Finland, and in Baltic chihuahua fantasy-land — and what has served until now as a reasonably secure logistics pathway into all those places.
Of course, whether or not such a condition persists long in a war scenario is another question altogether.
Because, you see, the Russians are now unquestionably the most formidable and battle-hardened military on the planet — at least in the context of a war fought on their doorstep.
So if you’re an empire that thinks it needs a war to reaffirm at least its short-term relevance and fading glory … well, these are your choices.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
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Brian Berletic: “The US is preparing to subject its own population as well as those of its supposed “allies” to immense long-term economic, social, and political pain. The cost-of-living crisis in the US will only grow worse. The US hopes that it can endure economic pain and disruption at home and abroad better than the emerging multipolar world can. Multipolarism’s survival will depend on proving otherwise.”
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