Image depicts the aftermath of a Saudi airstrike on a crowded market in Taiz, Yemen, in which dozens were killed and injured. Since the Saudis reignited the war in July, 270 civilians have been killed and 640 injured in Yemen due to Saudi strikes.

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My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preamble

As we’re all aware, the Republicans losing major ground in the midterms is relatively insignificant in the wider geopolitical sense. While many voters cited their dissatisfaction with the Iran War as a critical motivator for coming out to the polls (not out of any humanitarian impulse, but because, gasp, a foreign war is actually impacting them), the Democrats not only won’t do anything substantially different - they haven’t even pretended to promise to do so. They’ve merely been thrust into a position of power under the assumption that the Blue Team must, by definition, do the opposite of what the Red Team is doing. The situation inside the Zionist entity is relatively similar - Netanyahu and his government is outgoing, but replaced with a government that shares most of the preceding government’s ideology where it most matters. While some Iranian officials (including Araghchi) have attempted to pander to the idea that American voters have ‘voted to stop the war’ and that the US government would be betraying its base by continuing, the view by the current Khamenei seems to be more lucid, and I thankfully don’t get the sense that Iran has lowered its guard by a single iota.

What comes next in the war is now difficult to fathom. Any prediction of an immediate post-midterms strike has obviously not come true, which could be due to a combination of: such threats were always just a bluff; the Trump administration being in turmoil as it self-purges non-believers; and/or a simple lack of readiness (the third aircraft carrier, which may or may not be replacing one of the existing aircraft carriers, is still inbound to the region). Nonetheless, there are still signs that the US is trying once again to shape the battlefield. Over the last few days, there have been several - albeit limited - strikes on Iranian military equipment, particularly on Qeshm Island, as Iran brings down drone after drone and strikes tanker after tanker. They’re also meekly attempting to put the screws on land routes into Iran, but this isn’t really a viable strategy. Trying to outright stop trade between Iraq and Iran will only ignite a firestorm there with the myriad resistance groups. Meanwhile, Pakistan is critically reliant on Iranian fossil fuels and is already in an unstable situation. And finally, Russia has zero motivation to accede to US demands and stop their growing trade with Iran over the Caspian Sea.

To do a lightning round on geopolitical news: Ansarallah recently rejected a Saudi offer of 1 billion dollars to end the war, which is a lowball so insulting that Ansarallah responded by sending drones and missiles into, among other places, the Saudi Aramco HQ (and the widely distributed claim that Ansarallah demanded $51 billion doesn’t seem to be real, as far as I can discern?). Russia has been hammering Ukrainian infrastructure in a few large waves of missiles and drones, exacerbating water and power outages; Russia has also been gradually getting its Starlink competitor, Rassvet, in the sky. China held its Fifth Plenum in late October (for those unaware, there are seven plenums over each National Congress period, and each National Congress lasts five years), and this plenum was notable for having an abnormally high number of absences (~25%) - which, from what I can gather, is mostly due to purges, though it’s always hard to sift through the layers of propaganda - as Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption drive continues. Over the last few months, Algeria and the Alliance of Sahel States have buried the hatchet on their former misgivings and are now significantly cooperating in both the economic sphere (with new oil infrastructure being constructed in Niger) as well as militarily. Paraguay’s right-wing president, Santiago Peña, has been ousted due to the collapse of Ueno Bank - which about 2/3 of the population used - and into which his government funneled hundreds of millions of dollars. And France held a general strike involving 1.6 million people on November 5th, as anger against Macron’s feckless political, social, and economic governance continues to build. I’ll stop here or I’ll never get this megathread out.

Image depicts a summit in Tehran on October 26th, 2026 between Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council; Khalid bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Defense Minister; Asim Munir, Pakistan’s Defence Minister and de facto leader; and Ibrahim Kalin, head of the Turkish Intelligence Service.

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My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

spoiler

We remain at a precipice in the Middle East, with the return of US strikes expected just after the midterm elections finish on November 3rd - perhaps even as soon as November 4th. With American military might substantially diminished from earlier in the year, there’s been a ton of speculation in various corners of the internet about what they could possibly be planning that would produce results worth the sacrifice of Iran’s massive retaliation expected in response. These theories, once limited to MOABs and another attempt at a broad assassination campaign against IRGC officials, now include the possibility of outright nuclear strikes on Iran, in order to try and penetrate Iranian underground facilities which have proved impervious to conventional weaponry (and are also very probably impervious to nuclear weaponry from what I’ve read, though I am far from an expert), and also to try and degrade the up-to-this-point steadfast resistance that the Iranians have put up since the war began.

Efforts by some in the Trump administration to engage in diplomacy are embarrassingly transparent; both the US and Iran know (and know that the other knows) that it’s just meaningless theater in preparation for further conflict. If a nuclear strike on Iran is indeed carried out - which I currently think is quite unlikely, but still the likeliest it’s been since February - then the reactions of other nuclear-armed countries around the world to the breaking of the nuclear taboo are difficult to predict; as is whether the US would receive meaningful economic/political/diplomatic consequences from countries with the power to deliver those consequences, most notably China and Russia.

My personal expectation is that the US will start hitting some Iranian refineries and power stations and conduct impressive-but-ineffectual strikes on Pickaxe Mountain. Iran, meanwhile, has planned to strike US and Zionist economic interests across the whole region, military bases outside of the region (namely, those in eastern Europe), and even suggested that they’ll cut the undersea cables feeding into the Persian Gulf. A preemptive strike by Iran now also seems to be a strong possibility, as they have hopefully gotten over their anxiety of being seen as an aggressor in the court of international opinion. The West’s ability to repel these potential strikes is now a shadow of even its limited ability in February, with many radars destroyed and interceptor stockpiles unable to be restored quickly due to American industrial bottlenecks. Iran’s leverage is now the highest it’s ever been as global oil and LNG buffers are very much drained. Pakistan, Turkiye, and Saudi Arabia recently sent various officials to Iran to discuss regional security (image above), a telling indication of the growing recognition that the future of West Asia relies on a security arrangement outside of the West’s dictum, but it seems unlikely to be a significant event in the short-term.

The protests continue throughout Europe, with every major country seeing a share of riot police facing down people angry at the economic hardship and the lack of even a gesture towards conditions changing; the neoliberal rot has set in far, far too deep for even the most tepid of reforms at this stage. Poland has been the latest political battleground - I won’t pretend to fully understand the situation after just some cursory reading, but it’s essentially an battle between pro-EU liberals and not-so-pro-EU conservatives calling each other totalitarian dictators after the former started off a constitutional crisis by remaking the Constitutional Tribunal.

Over in the US, tech stocks (most notably Intel’s) faced carnage mostly due to the ongoing lack of profitability of AI and the enormous amounts of debt that is accumulating to support the ever-increasing lack of revenue. This market plunge follows the one earlier in October in Asian (especially South Korean) markets; Michael Roberts has had great coverage of these dynamics over the last year, so I won’t go too far into it here. There’s also been a variety of interesting contingencies and warnings, such as that the electrical grid may be critically vulnerable and that US military bases should be able to last for at least 90 days off the grid in the event of war. The combination of the fact that NATO ran a nuclear exercise period in mid-October and all the myriad internet PHP vulnerabilities that are being discovered and hurriedly patched explains a great deal of the ominous warnings and preparations that we’ve been seeing, but there’s been some intriguing speculation whether Iran has figured out some major vulnerabilities in the US and might exploit them if the US strikes their own power grid.

Image depicts Kim Jong-un accompanied by China’s Wang Huning, crossing the New Yalu River Bridge on a day’s visit to China.

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My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preamble

The situation in the Middle East remains very tense, with the two major points of speculation being 1) whether the war will resume at all, or if the US is bluffing to try and get Iran to concede on their demands, and 2) assuming the war will resume, whether the US will conduct strikes on Iran before or after the elections within the Zionist entity; the point being to try and further delay the elections by citing the war they started as an emergency and therefore keep Netanyahu in power. Quite frankly, if Netanyahu wants to risk destroying the whole Zionist project just to save his own skin, then I have no objections - aside from the part where he might do immense damage to the world economy in the process by prompting Iran’s promise of regional retaliation, of course. Meanwhile, the Saudis keep getting pummelled, with Ansarallah landing missile after missile on pipeline pumping stations, airbases, military officials, and troop accumulations. Even the Western media is becoming dour about MBS’s prospects. Attempts to isolate Iran economically are becoming rather spotty. Pakistan briefly halted their border exchange with Iran, but once Iran splashed cold water on their face by restricting their fossil fuel exports into Pakistan - which is already in a politically unstable situation - they wised up quickly and reopened them.

Next up, we have the surprising victory of Lula in the second round of the Brazilian elections. A loss in the first round into a victory in the second round is unprecedented in Brazilian history - as is a president winning a fourth term via a democratic vote - and I fully confess that I went into this thinking Bolsonaro was gonna scrape by with a ~0.5% lead, so I will publicly and gladly admit to being wrong. The regular suite of electoral irregularities and not-quite-illegal tactics took place to try and prevent Lula from gaining the requisite votes, including a swathe of widespread interruptions to public transportation in cities that typically vote for Lula, as well as Meta putting a thumb on the scale by apparently reducing the visibility of Lula’s online campaign. However, countering that was an upsurge of people who were otherwise unengaged who presumably went “oh shit” when they saw the first round results, as well as an emergency two hour extension to voting in order to counter the aforementioned public transportation interruptions. The next year or two will determine if Lula’s victory is a curious aberration or instead a breakwater to the rising tide of conservatism in Latin America, fueled somewhat by explicit American intervention but mostly by the populace themselves finding little hope in lukewarm social democrats and instead finding community in, among other places, right-wing evangelical religious groups. I recommend RedSails 2023 piece, Reformists, Revolutionaries, and Social Liberals, which delves into the broad contours of the Latin American and particularly Brazilian political landscape, and how even reformism has been essentially abandoned in many countries in the region (and, therefore, why ground has been ceded to the right-wing lately).

It remains difficult to keep track of global events as the crisis worsens. The Hormuz oil glut prophesized by the US military and its quislings is still yet to show signs of being founded in reality, with Brent oil prices now reaching highs resembling those in the period of outright war in April, and emergency fuel supplies in the US being increasingly dipped into. While the biggest cause of this price increase is obviously the literal scarcity of oil, some of this trend is due to comically high tanker rates (which are that high due to a number of factors but which all still ultimately stem from Iranian strikes on tankers trying to slip through the strait), and some of it is due to China amping up their oil imports just in time for the US midterms, which puts further stress on world supplies. All of this pressure continues to feed protests and riots, of which those in Europe have received the most attention. The pressure on populations is coming at the exact same time that broader financial conditions reach points that usually prompt austerity measures, creating a pressure cooker of contradictions which governments will have to attempt to survive. Some have already failed to do so, such as Serbia’s - however, as I said last week, the root cause of the dissatisfaction is typically another factor that the economic problems are merely fueling (i.e. in Serbia’s case, a student movement).

As a more positive final note, Kim Jong-un visited the Chinese border city of Dandong to commemorate the 76th anniversary of Chinese troops marching to help northern Korea during the Korean War, with both countries reportedly seeking to deepen their industrial and trade cooperation. The New Yalu River Bridge between the two has finally formally opened after a 12 year delay, shortly after a bridge between the DPRK and Russia was completed last month.

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My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preamble

To start as usual with the West Asia, I get the sense that we’re once again teetering on the edge of war between the US/Zionists and Iran, with Iran putting itself on high alert and conducting a major military exercise using dozens of ballistic missiles. I greatly struggle to see for what possible reason the US would try and attack Iran again when it’s been repeatedly proven that it simply isn’t going to work and that the consequences you receive are much worse than the damage you deal. The only conceivable motivation is a near-manic short-term desperation to try and bend the curve upwards on upcoming electoral results. Trump apparently covertly asked Iran if he could symbolically bomb Pickaxe Mountain without retribution and was denied - for those unaware, it’s a site in central Iran where the US speculates Iran is rapidly creating a nuclear enrichment facility for nefarious purposes.

The situation in Yemen continues its positive trend for Ansarallah, with their forces now entering Taiz proper after having taken all the territory around it, while also cementing their hold on the coastal plains near the Red Sea by taking some of the mountainous heights there. Egypt has made signals that it may get involved militarily, joining the club of countries that are trying and failing to stop Ansarallah. It’s a situation that, if you’ll excuse an imprecise historical comparison, is reminiscent of the situation in the then-newborn USSR, where an international coalition tried and failed to save the losing, reactionary side of the civil war there. With oil and transportation infrastructure getting hit all the time and various international meetings and summits getting cancelled and MBS seeming (rightfully) quite paranoid, the Saudi position is looking increasingly untenable. It has similarities with the Zionist entity in late 2023 - their choice is to stop their genocide, engage in diplomacy, and survive a bit longer; or continue their genocide and, in the process, anger everybody, and risk being destroyed in the process.

I admit that it took about two months longer than I predicted, but the spark that was the US attacking Iran is now a conflagration spreading around the world. Several of the protests didn’t begin due to problems with fossil fuel supplies, to be clear, but it’s certainly contributing to the public anger in pretty much every case. It’s hard for me to even be aware of all the protests and riots going on, let alone mention them, let alone analyse them, so to just go through a smattering of the ones that have received a lot of press coverage, we have: France, which began as students protesting an idiotic attempt at education reform and now involves at least over 500,000 and perhaps closer to a million people; in Albania, where protestors are demanding the resignation of their Prime Minister and are now burning down state buildings; in Italy, Portugal, and Belgium, which are simultaneously protesting education and/or austerity; massive protests in India which began months ago due to economic hardship in general and the Chief Justice calling the unemployed “cockroaches” in particular; in Indonesia, with protestors angry at the lack of a meaningful response to the extreme wildfires; in Pakistan, protesting the slide into de facto dictatorship under Army Chief Asim Munir; and lots of smaller scale protests and strikes around the world usually consisting of people who directly depend on diesel (truckers, farmers, etc) who simply cannot afford to keep working while fuel is so expensive.

Without the influence of socialist organizations, it’s likely that many protests will be at least temporarily repressed; however, while the situation in the Middle East goes unresolved and the Zionists continue to refuse to accept Iran’s conditions, Lenin’s dictum of “every society is three meals away from chaos” may start to apply regardless. We’re still at least a good few months away from that in most countries, but the trend line is definitely visible.

Students in front of the Mujahidin Grand Mosque in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, with an ominous, thick haze obscuring vision.

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My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preamble

The last week has been quite a busy one for world energy markets. The first big piece was the reveal that the US is removing sanctions on Russian fuel exports until April 2027. This has been yet another fascinating collision of the Ukraine and Iran Wars, and, of course, another example of all the complicated situations that countries that are otherwise geopolitically aligned can get themselves into, as obviously Russia being allowed to export more diesel does bend the curve on shortages to a degree. China “helping” the West by reducing their demand for foreign oil purchases for much of this year as they drew from their enormous domestic oil reserves is another example of this kind of dynamic. Given how much Russia has helped Iran - especially now, with large increases of Caspian Sea vessels helping Iran mitigate some of the blockade’s impact - I don’t view this as a betrayal, but more of a unfortunately necessary geopolitical tactic, particularly if increased Russian state revenue lets them defeat the NATO-backed forces they’re fighting a bit easier. Regardless, it would be very unfortunate if most of Russia’s diesel went directly to the US and not to other struggling countries (not least among them, Cuba), as that would give the US a bit more road to kick the can down.

Ukraine has not taken this news well. It can be hard to figure out to what degree Trump is using kayfabe in any particular situation, but Ukraine immediately striking a Russian diesel export station (to which Russia retaliated by knocking out power throughout much of Kiev) seems to have genuinely annoyed him, e.g. saying that Ukraine should get a new leader. He also tried his classic move of willing a ceasefire into existence purely by social media decree. This worked during the Twelve Day War, but not here - at least not yet. I’m currently cautiously disregarding rumors that the US is going to actually take away intelligence or material support from Ukraine. It’s not impossible, and would actually be another data point in the trend of the US withdrawing from Europe (with their bombers evacuating their UK base very recently too), but this antagonization of Russia has been a plot in the making for over a decade, and I would be surprised if Trump was allowed by the powers that be to interrupt this plan in any meaningful way. Perhaps there will be some largely symbolic move instead.

Over in West Asia, Ansarallah is tidying up their encirclement of Taiz, with the noose tightening around PLC forces. The Saudi counteroffensive was very Ukrainian; i.e. it existed mostly as a media phenomenon, but somehow even more half-hearted. Their sole territorial acquisition up to me writing this is 10-20 miles of largely empty coastal plains and an airstrip that Ansarallah, without an airforce, has no real use of. In return for Saudi bombing, Ansarallah has continued hitting oil infrastructure, and additionally escalated by striking terminals at King Khalid airport. Ansarallah gave several warnings to immediately evacuate everybody inside, and the Saudis did not even bother to sound the alarm of an incoming missile, which is emblematic of their desperation to maintain the illusion of the pre-war status quo. The strike on Terminal 3 killed about a dozen people and injured a few hundred. While Saudi airlines are trying to maintain operations, several Western airliners are pausing flights for now, which mirrors the air blockade that the Saudis have forced on Yemen for several years. Meanwhile, Iran has escalated strikes on tankers both inside the Strait of Hormuz and far outside it, as it truly starts to slam the hammer down on what limited illegal transits were making it through. This comes in the form of both missile/drone strikes and naval mines and will keep physical oil prices elevated well into the short and medium terms if maintained. Additionally, the US continues its reported buildup of forces for another try at striking Iran, possibly before the midterms, but I sincerely don’t know what they could possibly hope to achieve beyond trying to get more votes from chest-thumping jingoistic morons while yet further degrading their position in the region militarily and economically.

Meanwhile, over in Southeast Asia, air pollution has dramatically increased over the past few months due to manmade wildfires in Indonesian forests and peatlands, which were caused by profit-seeking slash-and-burn farmers clearing land with fire, and then further exacerbated by one of the worst El Ninos on record. This bourgeois idiocy has caused untold environmental damage, hundreds of thousands of cases of respiratory illnesses throughout Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, prolonged closures of major institutions like schools, and required the distribution of oxygen cylinders throughout parts of the populace to try and keep them alive and at least vaguely healthy.

Image is of the Central Bank of Iran.

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My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preamble

The so-called “Economic D-Day” is set to start this week, which is the term trotted out by the US to describe what it regards as the most crushing sanctions ever unveiled in all of human history against a foreign state. Up to me writing this, nobody appears to have many guesses as to what precisely this would entail, but a confirmed aspect is secondary sanctions - i.e. the sanctioning of any country that does business with Iran. China is Iran’s largest trading partner, and has previously explicitly ordered their oil/refining companies to keep receiving and processing Iranian oil regardless of US sanctions. Assuming China maintains this relationship, and the ever-sanctioned Russia does likewise, it’s difficult to see how these sanctions could not only 1) be significantly more effective than the current sanctions on Iran, which are very substantial and yet are being successfully sidestepped and mitigated, albeit at a meaningful cost to Iran’s citizens, and 2) outright bring Iran to a position of surrender when it is in the midst of an existential war. The only conceivable way would be if the US did genuinely sanction China in response, which even the US, in this phase of baffling idiocy, is not yet so stupid as to attempt. Other suggestions I’ve seen is that the sanctions aren’t so much about trying to keep China away as much as stopping the Gulf states from ever economically, politically, and indeed militarily reconciling with Iran; essentially saying “At the end of this war, you may not be on our side, but you certainly won’t be on Iran’s either.”

Nonetheless, ever since Iran militarily proved themselves back in March and April, and, in particular, their missile cities proved effectively indestructible, I and many others came to the conclusion that the only way to destroy Iran would be some kind of internal political or economic crisis - likely both, going hand-in-hand - and it appears that US war planners now agree. A resumption of missile fire is still plenty possible, mind, but if I was the US, it would be in support of that hypothetical internal crisis, were it ever to start, rather than putting the cart before the horse. Therefore, one does have to take the threat of some kind of overwhelming economic offensive at least a little seriously, simply because it’s the only non-nuclear vector left that has even the vaguest possibility of success. From all the analysts I take seriously, I’m getting signals that trend towards optimism that Iran will survive whatever the Bessents of the world can cook up; however, mere survival should not be Iran’s medium/long term goal. Imaginary tankers transiting Hormuz notwithstanding, and with global diesel prices now skyrocketing notwithstanding, it’s still unclear to me what the end result would be if Iran and the US simply decided to stop fighting from now on and apply maximum sanctions/energy disruption for weeks, months, or even years on end. Would China eventually pressure Iran to make concessions, for example? Could a critical portion of Iran’s population, or a segment of the Iranian bourgeoisie, be tempted to try and overthrow the government to end the pain, long before the economy truly internally collapsed?

That’s likely why, in response to the proposed sanctions on Iran, there have been signals coming out of the country (as always, hard to verify in the fog of invented/misattributed statements and exaggerations) that Iran could counterstrike by attacking US economic interests in the region - which, if correctly done, sounds much better to me than simply sitting there with thousands of missiles not being fired while you gradually bleed out over the medium term, hoping that the other guy will bleed out first. This would be a pretty profound step for Iran, though. Aside from maintaining the Hormuz blockade, they have always held the (somewhat strategically dubious) “moral high ground” of being the guy to respond to military attacks, perhaps due to an anxiety of being seen as a warmonger either internally or in countries throughout the world, not least their major allies.

So after all that bloviating, I have little more to offer than a shrug in terms of my predictions about what comes next.

Image shows a display of Changjian-1000 missiles, which are hypersonic cruise missiles with high manuverability and quick launch times. The linked archived article has several more images and descriptions of Chinese missile technology.

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My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.

preamble

Aside from the virtually daily Iranian strikes on the Oman route, the main threat that the US is facing in this newest phase of the war is logistics. With Bahrain and the UAE unsafe, the closest safest port in the theater is Diego Garcia, which is over 2000 miles away. Either the aircraft carriers would have to go to Diego Garcia to restock, which would be even less planes and missiles available should hostilities restart suddenly, or goods have to be shuttled to the aircraft carriers from Diego Garcia. This latter option appears to be too much for the US to handle, with widespread reports of dwindling supplies and morale on the USS Abraham Lincoln (and, to a lesser extent, the USS George HW Bush). These reports have culminated in the USS George Washington being sent from the Pacific to replace the Lincoln, which was the sole aircraft carrier in that whole theater. There are six more carriers in maintenance, leaving two carriers left that could even hypothetically be called upon should the USS George HW Bush need replacement; both are currently undergoing training, and of these two, the USS Theodore Roosevelt might be available soon; perhaps even as soon as September. I’m unsure whether the Roosevelt will be sent to the Pacific to replace the Washington, or if it’ll be sent to the Middle East to replace the Bush. Nonetheless, that the situation has deteriorated to the point where we can speculate on how very limited naval vessels are going to be distributed is yet one more indication among many of the decline of US naval power. The symbolism was too much for me to ignore, hence the title: the last aircraft carrier in the Pacific being forced to leave, and not under military pressure in some hypothetical war against China, but to try and relieve logistical burdens elsewhere in a war of the US’s own making.

This joins Trump’s statements that the US will only be taking a very limited part in the South Korean military exercises. This is nominally because of the “great ties” the US shares with the DPRK, but this is an embarrassingly transparent face-saving statement. The DPRK is an increasingly major potential threat to South Korea, a major regional power and economy, but are also helping Russia with both manpower and materiel and getting military experience and data on their missiles’ effectiveness in return.

The US’s Under Secretary of War, Elbridge Colby, recently visited the Philippines. There, he gave a speech that promised to continue the construction of a defensive network that would deny China the possibility of militarily advancing through the Pacific by stationing US forces inside friendly countries. This is the NATO approach: our mere presence will deter the enemy because they would not want to start a direct war with us, and in exchange, you have to hand over billions upon billions of dollars. Colby gave the Philippines that most backhanded of compliments, the “model ally”, and stated that the US was “definitely not disengaging from Asia”. My “We aren’t pivoting away from Asia” shirt has people asking a lot of questions that are already answered by my shirt.

If you’re a US-friendly country in the Pacific and possess even the slightest sense of self-preservation, you are surely feeling nervous. The US is moving its aircraft carrier out of the theater. Overseas, you’ve seen how Iran - a very strong regional country, to be sure, but not as powerful as the industrial juggernaut and nuclear superpower that is China - has nonetheless crippled several undefendable US bases, has exhausted a very large amount of American air defense missiles, is holding the global economy hostage, and the US can seemingly do nothing to stop them. You have to be looking at your own US bases, likely expensive and unpopular, and all the money you’re handing over to the US, and glancing at how the Gulf states are bickering of being betrayed by their ally who promised them protection and immediately retreated. You have to be looking at your economy and its dependence on China. You have to be looking at Ukraine, and the unenviable state of destruction it has been driven to as a puppet of the US. You have to be looking at China itself, and how its military is rapidly developing in all fields, and how it’s even catching up on microchip development. In all, you have to be really hoping that China is serious that they only plan a peaceful reunification with Taiwan, and that the US will not do something incredibly, stupidly reckless in their decline.