It feels like theres a bunch of things that are simultaneously heating up, but not boiling over.
1.AI bubble
Honestly I’m wondering if this’ll be a “pop” like 2008 or Dotcom, or if it’ll be more like 1929 where you had the intial crash and then the cascading effects across the economy. But in any case, at this point AI is not going to give many returns, and either start ups will run out of investment money or the larger corporations will cut both ai usage and development, leading to a domino effect from the top down.
- Venezualan war
Honestly what the US is doing is both the most and least transparent thing. It’s very obvious the US wants to topple Maduro and the Bolivarian government, but how they intend to is kinda beyond me, since [to my knowledge] they haven’t deployed large enough ground forces for a genuine invasion. Honestly if i had to guess, they might be wanting to go for a Libya/Syria strategy of propping up local rebels, then intervening with non-occupational forces. But when or how this’ll happen, I’m not sure.
3.Taiwan Crisis
We haven’t reached the point of another straight crisis yet, but the US has recently passed and introduced more measures in relation to the rogue government [https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1512 and https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3452]. Of course there’s also been the Japanese saber rattling too. Of course these issues have been a thing for a while, but I’m unsure what Japan specifically is getting out of it, and Trump has, as always, been very opaque about the issue.
4.Russia-Europe
The current situation with the SMO seems to be a chicken with its head cut off. It’s walking like it’s alive but there really is no way the situation is going to improve for Europe. But the recent “Russian” drones and technical airspace violations seem to be something that’s trying to reignite tensions. For what? I’m also not sure. A full military intervention seems unlikely, as Europe’s equipment is currently already in Ukrainian hands. A full scale war with Russia [and probably Belarus] would be catastrophic at best and suicidal at worst. If I had to guess, Europe wants to keep pushing austerity and needs nationalist war drums to drown out the noise of german economic collapse and starving British kids.
There’s also the current situation in west Africa [with a military coup in Guinea-Bissau just being reported today] and other things. But really it feels as though the world is stuck, and when something gives, everything else is going to snap to. But idk, I also didn’t get enough sleep last night so maybe I’m just being paranoid
I would compare it to climate change. It’s not a thing you see happen all at once. In fact, you can go years without seeing (much) direct impact to you. “Oh, the weather is bad this year, how strange, but it has been bad in the past, right? Oh, the prices are going up, but inflation has long been a thing, right?”
But if it passes tipping points, like the transition of water going over into the boiling state, more drastic shit can start occurring in a short space of time. What that entails is difficult to say because capitalism is already a self-centered house of cards and it doesn’t have loyalty to any one nation-state. But I am hopeful that China and others like them have the power to prevent it from morphing into full on barbarism; not in a direct intervention way, at least not to the imperial core itself, but they can (and already are to some extent) helping the imperialized peoples have an alternative. So while the imperial west is shifting more toward fascistic barbarism in order to compensate for collapsing capitalist bubbles, the anti-imperialist regions are shifting toward building an alternative world order, one that is not dependent on that bubble and one which has some sustainability baked in.
I fully expect the empire to be vicious even as it declines, but the will to be vicious alone does not enable its viciousness and every time it overextends and damages its own brittle, unsustainable logistics, it makes its viciousness a little bit harder to successfully carry out in the future. A lot of the harm it’s still able to do probably comes from inertia, but it sucks at maintenance, so that can only last for so long.