Thread by @caitoz

The Modern US War Machine Kills More Like A Python Than A Tiger

"Not like a tiger, pouncing on its prey with old-school ground invasions and ripping out the jugular, but more like a python: slow, patient strangulation and suffocation."
medium.com/@caityjohnston…

Forbes has published two back-to-back articles about the analysis of retired Navy captain and political scientist Bradford Dismukes titled “To Defeat China In War, Strangle Its Economy” and “If Russia Invades Europe, NATO Could Sweep The Seas Of Russian Merchant Ships”.

The articles were authored by a man named @Daxe, who is my new favorite small-time war propagandist because he’s so desperate to be recognized for his imperialist stenography that he often approaches his spin jobs in an informatively unskillful and ham-fisted way.

The best one I’ve found so far is this 2013 piece about the time he spent with the “rebels” of Syria, who he assures us are not terrorists or extremists but brave freedom fighters who’d successfully “liberated” large swathes of Syrian territory.
medium.com/war-is-boring/…

Both articles explain how “a coordinated effort by the whole of the U.S. government and its closest allies” can be used to “strangle” China and Russia economically via blockades which cut them off from trade and resources should the time come for an aggressive confrontation,

Unspoken by Axe and Dismukes is the fact that both Russia and China are nuclear-armed nations, so direct hot warfare is something the US power alliance would want to avoid anyway.

Indeed, the articles present a vision for confrontation with Russia and China that is not just realistic but probable, and not just probable but currently underway.

These are the chess pieces that have been put in place during the slow-motion third world war between the US-centralized empire and the governments which haven’t yet been absorbed into it.

This is how the US-centralized empire prefers to kill now. Not like a tiger, pouncing on its prey with old-school ground invasions and ripping out the jugular, but more like a python: slow, patient strangulation and suffocation.

From "The Modern US War Machine Kills More Like A Python Than A Tiger":

It’s a slow, suffocating strategy which only works if you’re the side in power, the side with all the resources and all the time in the world, the side which knows it can just relax and wait for the other side to starve to death.

Not with the “shock and awe” invasions of the Bush era, but with sanctions, blockades, coups, psyops, CIA-backed uprisings and the arming of opposition forces like @DAxe’s “rebel” friends.

This is one of many reasons you can be dismissive of any Trump supporter who defends their president by arguing that he “hasn’t started any new wars”. What they mean is he hasn’t launched any tiger-style old school ground invasions.

This is important to be aware of, because it changes what it means to be anti-war. We don’t have to just oppose direct hot war conflicts(which could still happen); we also need to aggressively fight the new strangulation-style war that is being increasingly favored by the empire.

When it rose to power with the Bush administration the neoconservative ideology of doing whatever it takes to ensure continued US unipolar hegemony was widely criticized. Now it’s the bipartisan beltway consensus, and if you question it you’re smeared as freakish and suspicious.

You never even hear the word neoconservative or neocon anymore in mainstream US discourse, not because it went away but because it became the normalized default mainstream worldview.

And while all these imperialist psychopaths are waving literal armageddon weapons around in the name of an imaginary god named unipolarism, we’re also hurtling toward ecosystemic collapse and any number of other potential armageddon-level events.

We’ve got to turn away from this trajectory as a species and begin collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem if we are to turn this disaster around.