None are more hypocritical than the Americans who say that Russia is waging an imperialist war. The same goes for when they say China is carrying out a colonial genocide, or when they say the DPRK violates its people's human rights, or when they say Cuba is anti-democratic. The biggest of these projections is the one in which Americans say the PRC is carrying out neo-colonialism. Because not only are the U.S. and its wealthiest allies themselves guilty of neo-colonialism, but the central motive behind their cold war escalations is to maintain this neo-colonial extraction.
The Ukraine proxy war is about maintaining parasitism
"Stand with Ukraine" is a euphemism for "we must defend neo-colonialism." The perpetual robbery of Africa, Asia, and Latin America is the indispensable economic basis for the USA, and for all the countries that have joined in the USA's effort to use Ukraine as a cudgel to destabilize Eurasia. Their riches aren't built off of their own merits, but off of the continuation of colonialism's siphonings from the vast majority of the global population. Since 1960 alone, $152 trillion have been transferred from the Global South to the imperialist countries, obviously without any transfers in the other direction apart from predatory loans. This has followed centuries of theft from these countries which was so extreme that Africa, an unfathomably rich continent, had come to be one of the world's "poorest" places by the standards of the colonial thieves who pretend Africans handicapped their own civilizations. With the emergence of neo-colonialism, in which capital rather than material goods is the primary export from the core countries, even the outlying colonial resistor Ethiopia got assimilated into the global market structure which makes up modern imperialism.
So was the case for countries like Haiti, which had managed to fight off domination by slavers during imperialism's previous era. No one was spared this new paradigm of enslavement. In the age of New Imperialism, the only way for an exploited country to escape its exploitation is by refusing to comply with the policy demands of foreign capital. Which comes at the cost of the imperialists using sanctions to try to starve its people, and bringing war to it if that's what's needed to subdue the disobedient government. The material assets that the imperialist powers find so much pride in possessing, from the USA's unparalleled wealth to the British Crown's jewels, all come from theft. And for the settler colonies among them, that includes theft via internal imperialism in addition to the external kind. The oil that U.S. executives are making great profits off amid the resource cutoff from the Russia sanctions is being extracted within occupied indigenous land. While the inhabitants of the exploited countries bear the humanitarian costs from the economic crisis the war has created, and the U.S. empire's internal colonies suffer the most from the wartime sacrifices, these parasites build their personal empires from the catastrophe's byproducts.
The liberal academics, activists, NGO members, and commentators who provide the "progressive" side of the Ukraine proxy war's narrative backing don't dispute that neo-colonialism is real. Yet their recognition of the existence of U.S. imperialism is rendered inconsequential by their promotion of imperialism's propaganda. The fact that they know imperial extraction is happening makes their pro-imperialist stances all the more reprehensible, because they're consciously complicit in the warfare which keeps global exploitation going. They would say that they're merely concerned about "human rights," or whatever other slogan the State Department is using. But they're not being truthful. They know the wars Washington is waging in the name of these "concerns" are what prop up the neo-colonial structure, as not even the most elite of the imperialists believe Washington invests its resources for altruistic reasons. It invests its resources in the hope to benefit capital.
Not only does their stance enable Washington's sanctions, backing of terrorists, support for genocidal proxy war states, military occupations, bombings, drone strikes, propagations of disinformation designed to sow violence, outright resource theft from places like Syria, and other criminal actions, but it enables the enforced poverty of billions. All of these crimes make the Global South vastly less equipped to absorb the climate crisis, which these liberals claim to take seriously.
The current imperialist scheme to break up Russia and recolonize China isn't going to work, as these powers are too strong and united to be beaten at this point. But the fact that liberals are backing this pathetically desperate maneuver, with all the human costs it's having, shows they'll do anything to try to preserve their share of imperialism's dwindling spoils. That includes condemning the working class in the core countries to further deterioration in their conditions from the sanctions blowback, even after half a century of neoliberal attacks on their livelihoods. It also includes exploiting the conflict to impose more privatization and austerity onto the Ukrainian people, even after they've suffered especially badly among those impacted by the post-Soviet corporate shock policies.
The imperialists are creating more neo-colonies in eastern Europe, while bringing those in the core ever closer to the conditions of the neo-colonies, in the hope that this will stop capital's demise. They also hope the Nordic states joining NATO will restore U.S. hegemony. In reality, these developments have accelerated the decay of the imperialist bloc, subjecting more places to militarization and austerity that will intensify capitalism's contradictions. Imperialism needs a social base of well-bribed labor aristocrats in the core to function, and neo-colonial extraction is the only way to maintain that social base. The more the imperialists lose control over the neo-colonies, the more they'll be forced to contract their capital, and the more those in the core countries will experience the harm from imperialism's inward turn. The great oil, arms, and financial profits our ruling class is enjoying can't reverse the system's decline as long as its global extractive base keeps disappearing. Imperialism's benefactors are living on borrowed time.
Washington's proxy war in Ukraine, which is only one among a series of destructive U.S. projects to counter the emergence of a multipolarity, was launched to try to maintain that neo-colonial equilibrium. The hope of the imperialists is that Russia will be destabilized. That would leave China vulnerable to getting subdued, and eliminate the BRI's threat towards neo-colonialism's enforced underdevelopment. The opposite will happen. When the exploited countries gain the ability to stand on their own feet economically, they'll be freed from the predatory relationship to the core which perpetuates their exploitation. This scenario would mean a drastic weakening of capital, so capital's allies from all parts of the ideological spectrum will never stop supporting imperialism's machinations. That's why this country's "left" has consistently united with the neoconservatives not just on the current funneling of weapons to Ukraine, but on the bombings of Syria, the murders of Libya and Yugoslavia, the coup attempts against socialist governments across Latin America, and Washington's hybrid warfare tactics against China.
U.S. & its proxies on the verge of being even further discredited
It's crucial that the benefactors of this parasitic global order foist the blame for our crises onto Washington's adversaries, because otherwise the truth of the situation would be apparent. Under no circumstances can the context of U.S. meddling that led up to the Ukraine conflict be recognized, or else the myths they depend on will become impossible to ignore. The 2014 phone call showing Obama's team facilitated Ukraine's transition towards an ultra-nationalist government can't be discussed. Neither can the evidence that the protests leading up to the power transfer were U.S.-backed. Neither can the over eight-year-long U.S. backing for self-described National Socialists in Ukraine. Neither can the stated intentions of post-coup Kiev officials to ethnically cleanse the Donbass, which (along with the regime's already consistent racial war crimes pattern) is what compelled Russia to intervene on behalf of the Russian-speaking population.
Apologia for neo-colonialism, in which the western economic and political model gets fetishized as the only proper option for the entire globe, is at the root of this denial of the U.S. interference in Ukraine. The reason behind why deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych declined to join the EU, provoking a U.S.-backed uprising by kulak descendants, is because the EU had offered Ukraine a deal of neoliberal restructuring. The imperialists were trying to turn Ukraine into a neo-colony, which they've ultimately succeeded at through their coup and the conflict it led up to. They've manufactured a domino effect of crises within the country, and then within the world more broadly, in order to force through their desires for full Ukrainian economic subjugation and Eurasian instability.
Ukraine has already been thoroughly looted by western corporations, so all the imperialists can now wring out of it is labor surplus from an increasingly destitute population. All while Zelensky turns Ukraine into a "big Israel," where the country's notoriously brutal National Guard gets inserted into daily life. Creating this police state is the only way the ultra-nationalists can hope to maintain control in the next few years, now that Ukraine's economy has been almost cut in half and Ukraine's military has been so effectively reduced in number. When Zelensky is freeing convicted torturers and child molesters so that they can fight, you know the Ukrainian imperialist compradors are getting desperate. Their blatant disregard for the laws of war, in which they've needlessly placed combat locations in places that put civilians at risk, has already discredited them to the point where even Amnesty International is talking about their war crimes.
The war will drag on through the winter, picking off ever more of Ukraine's generation of fighters as Europe suffers from the sanctions blowback. How long the imperialists will be able to keep it up after then is dubious. At some point, a breaking point will be reached. The conflict will be forced to shift towards an irregular kind, where the CIA's neo-Nazis carry out random terrorist attacks in place of any actual military strategy. NATO's propagandists will endlessly insist that the war can still be won, while manufacturing more atrocity stories to rally sympathy for their defeated fascist project. Ukraine will be a shell of itself even more than it is already, economically crippled and without the tools it needs to fulfill Washington's scheme for wider chaos.
Maintaining hatred for Washington's rivals is the only way this failing cold war endeavor can keep up its charade as something viable. False flags must routinely be directed against Russia, like they were against Serbia, Syria, and Washington's other past prolonged war psyops. As the imperialists routinely shift the focus of their propaganda between Russia and China, the same demonizing lens must be held up to the Belt and Road Initiative, and to China's policies in the crucial BRI node of Xinjiang. However conclusively the narratives of "rogue states" and "human rights abuses" can be debunked, the State Department's propagandists will never stop repeating their lies, as these lies are what hold together the extractive setup.
If these lies get sufficiently exposed, as the momentum of history amid U.S. imperial decline will ultimately make happen, the illusion of NATO's role as an innocent justice enforcer will be irreparably shattered. The Iraq and Afghanistan invasions have already cost the imperialists so much narrative ground that they've had to resort to concealable warfare tools, and a discrediting of NATO's fighting capacity in Ukraine would expose them even more damningly.
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