Image is sourced from this article depicting the 28th ASEAN Plus Three Summit, which took place at the same time as the 47th ASEAN Summit.
Last week concluded the 47th summit of ASEAN in Malaysia as well as a swathe of concurrent summits surrounding ASEAN. For those unfamiliar, formally, China is not a member of ASEAN, but is part of the ASEAN Plus Three (as part of the “Three”, alongside Japan and Occupied Southern Korea). And while not really ASEAN, there is also a yet wider organization, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which tacks on Australia and New Zealand to the group of countries that are currently in ASEAN (which is the single largest trade bloc on the planet). At the summit, Timor-Leste was officially introduced into ASEAN, making it the 11th country to do and the first since Cambodia in 1999.
Many important figures throughout Asia, as well as Trump, Ramaphosa, and Lula, attended the event. As you can imagine, Trump’s appearance was not exactly positive - signing four rather coerced bilateral deals there, including with Malaysia, which forced those countries to buy American goods in exchange for certain exemptions from Trump’s high tariff regime. The US is currently in a bit of a panic due to China restricting access to rare earths, a critical component of many weapons technologies (and electronics in general) and is looking around for countries to help supply them. After the summit, the US and China signed a deal related to tariffs and rare earths, but it seems very unlikely that this is the end of the saga; the US politically, economically, and militarily cannot tolerate China’s existence as a sovereign actor and will try to overcome them until the American Empire topples.
Meanwhile, China did as they ordinarily do, and urged higher regional integration and trade without high tariffs, as well as adherence to the Global Governance Initiative (which, as we here never tire of noting, is an interesting thing to try and encourage while the US only more feverishly violates the sovereignty of nations everywhere). One hopes they’re supplying a bit more than just speeches to Venezuela, Cuba, and beyond, as the US prepares to start bombing.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I agree with most of your assessment other than the idea that anything between the american working class and it’s ruling class will improve. Working class dissent in america will increase rather than decrease, increasing manufacturing and exporting to europe or wherever will not result in the lives of working class americans improving, they will be exploited more than they are already on top of having to do more physically demanding work for longer hours.
It won’t, but it has also become an inherent contradiction of American capitalism that can no longer be ignored. In other words, it has to be addressed one way or the other.
I truly believe that the bourgeois establishment had entirely bought into the idea that Hillary already had it in the bag during the 2016 presidential election, but Trump’s unexpected victory sent a different message and a wake up call to the establishment. The dissent that propelled Sanders and Trump’s movements could no longer be ignored.
(Also note how coincident it was that the technocratic social control on the internet and the development on AI and its vast influence on controlling the flow of information also began to be picked up by the establishment around 2016.)
Hence the 2018 US-China trade war, which can be seen as an initial probing attacks to identify the global reaction. Then the 2020 Covid pandemic which very conveniently turned into a dry run for logistics disruption from China. The 2022 Ukraine war eliminates the EU as a potential consumer market and the euro as a direct competitor to dollar hegemony, and paves the way for the 2025 Trump’s global trade war.
All of these seemed like madness at the time, but if we look beyond the superficial “great industrial power struggle” and “geopolitical chessboard” and focus more on the Marxian dimensions of class struggle and industrial versus finance capitalism, you will notice the method in the madness that at least attempts to want to resolve or lessen this contradiction by sacrificing European industries to force some level of re-industrialization just enough to quell the internal dissent, but at the same time still maintaining its financial hegemony to extract surplus values from the rest of the developing world.
Of course, China is not stupid and you can see it constantly dragging the US back into the neoliberal status quo. Unfortunately, China just doesn’t seem to want to have radical change (understandable) and it wants to continue to enjoy being the beneficiary of dollar hegemony (and has no intention of disturbing that arrangement). Hence, we’re probably going to see a renewed status quo at some point, or the two will continue to fight it out until both are exhausted and are forced to compromise.
Finally, I should point out that history has shown us that the future is just as unpredictable. Say you’re in 1985, the Plaza Accord has just been signed. The Japanese thought they had outplayed the Americans at a small cost of sacrificing some exports, and win with the greater glory of financially owning the United States of America. The Americans also believed they had outplayed the Japanese in their goal to re-industrialize America. But who won?
At that point in time, nobody could have anticipated that what would later transpire would be so far off anyone’s expectations.
And amidst the longstanding US-Japan trade war that had been going on since the 1960s, which culminated in the fight for semiconductor dominance in the 1980s, very interestingly, it turned out to be South Korea and Taiwan that overtook the American and Japanese giants.