Sven Antonsen

[Nel B. @noirnen]

On NATO 3.0
I just published a long essay I've been working on for weeks. It's called NATO 3.0: The Transatlantic Cage and the Rise of the Bunkerstate, and honestly, it started as a much simpler piece and then kept growing as I dug into the documents.

What I found, in short: the NATO summit in Ankara was the formal ratification of a qualitative shift in how the alliance functions. Europe is being systematically restructured as an operational node, a self-funding, self-industrializing garrison that will absorb the conventional burden of attritional warfare on the continent, while the U.S. ruling strata retain the command layer, the nuclear umbrella, the digital brain, and the strategic direction.

I trace this shift through the NATO declarations, through the Army War College monograph that calls for Europe to abandon "fragmented industrial nationalism" and shift to a "positional-defense framework," through the financial mechanisms (the NATO Innovation Fund, the ESG rewrites, the long-term procurement guarantees) that are channeling private capital into the defense sector, and through the historical record, the 1959 memo that already described this division of labor, the 1995 Libicki text on "vertical coalitions" that reads like a blueprint for today.

I also try to connect this to the Bunkerstate framework I've been developing. NATO 3.0 is the Bunkerstate at the transnational level, the same logic of securitization, the same hollowing of the civilian sphere, the same reorientation of the state toward war preparation, now scaled across a continent.

It's a long read. I don't apologize for that since the topic demanded it. But I tried to make every section earn its place. If you're interested in the (NATO-)machinery behind the headlines, I think it's worth your time.

As always, I welcome comments and questions. These are just frameworks through which we can see the world, but let's think and build together. (Link below)

[Nel B. @noirnen]

To treat any country as a unified rational actor is to fall back into the trap of traditional International Relations (IR) realism, the billiard ball model of geopolitics. This framework assumes the state operates with a single, calculating mind, which fundamentally erases the messy reality of class conflict, economic interests, and elite factionalism that actually drive a nation's foreign policy.
On the other hand, painting a targeted state as a heroic, unified monolith actually mirrors the historical error of indigenismo (a current of thought in early 20th century Latin America). Just as indigenismo romanticized indigenous populations as a single, homogenous bloc, treating any country as a monolith replaces actual political agency with a romanticized nationalist (and yes, anti-imperialist) aesthetic. It denies such a country the reality of their own internal contradictions.
Agency can be found in the internal class and factional struggles over how the state should respond to the current US-led empire. (And with response, I do not mean just "reactions" but also "construction.")

[Dances_with_Bears @bears_with]

Preparing Sweden to join NATO’s war against Russia started here; nothing from the Kremlin deterred. https://t.co/baoGbrpkZg

[Nel B. @noirnen]

A Note on Trump's Praise as a Signal of Concession

A reader asked me to expand on something I wrote recently: that there is a distinct pattern in which Trump's public approval of a foreign leader indicates a structural concession has already been made somewhere or will soon be made. I want to unpack that, because it's a pattern that holds consistently once you start looking for it, and it reveals something important about how the current imperial apparatus operates.

First, a clarification. I am not pointing to Trump because I think he personally drives US foreign policy. He is a signaler, a public face of a much larger apparatus that includes finance, the security establishment, and the transnational corporate networks that actually set the terms. But in the current media structure, his statements function as cues.

Venezuela is the clearest and most brutal case. Maduro was kidnapped. A concessionary framework was imposed: Treasury waivers, de facto control over oil revenues, the reintegration of Venezuela into US-policed financial circuits under the guise of "reconstruction." Trump publicly signaled approval of the new arrangement almost immediately. In Iran, we had a similar situation at the height of the war, when Trump tweeted praise about new leadership, while an article in Foreign Affairs by Javad Zarif titled “How Iran should End the War” came out, in which basically the terms of the current MoU had been written down. I’m not saying that this is a coup, but again, maybe just the possibility of the MoU was seen as a concession.

But the pattern extends beyond Venezuela and Iran. In Mexico, to a certain degree. In Colombia. In Brazil. Across Latin America, whenever a left-wing or progressive government grants a structural concession—something the public doesn't yet see, something not yet announced—Trump's tone shifts. He praises the leader. He says they're "reasonable," "doing a great job," "a very smart man." Shortly after, the action becomes visible: an increase in tariffs on Chinese products, a Chinese infrastructure project quietly cancelled, a critical minerals deal reopened, some form of military cooperation forcefully agreed to.

Now, let me be clear about something important. The US-led imperial core still prefers right-wing governments outright. Full stop. They are more reliable, more compliant, require less management, and align ideologically with the project of deregulation, extraction, and militarization that the core requires. The concessions extracted from left-wing or progressive governments are a second-best outcome: a way to secure leverage when outright regime change is temporarily unfeasible, too costly, or diplomatically inconvenient.

That is why, across Latin America and the Caribbean right now, we are seeing a parallel process. On one track, soft coups and hybrid warfare against governments that resist: lawfare, economic strangulation, media campaigns, the mobilization of comprador factions. On the other track, integrationist deals with factions that are willing to negotiate their country's insertion into the imperial financial and logistical architecture, most likely under threat of kinetic action. Cuba is the extreme case—a full siege.

The pattern, then, is not about Trump's whims or his personal deal-making prowess. It is about what his public statements reveal about the concessions that have already been extracted behind closed doors. When he praises a leader who was previously an adversary, the deal is already done or they are at least quite sure, that some steps will be taken toward it.

This is part of what I mean when I talk about the fragmentationist grand strategy and the multi-layered cage. The empire needs compliant elites, open financial circuits, and the quiet, incremental surrender of sovereign leverage.

[Nel B. @noirnen]

We are currently stuck in analytical binary when observing imperial power: we either assume the US-led imperial bloc is executing a flawless, omnipotent masterplan, or we assume it is collapsing into chaotic blundering.

Both assumptions potentially breed passivity. But regardless:

In my latest essay for Worldlines, I apply a geographer’s lens to try to demystify imperial strategy. The US-led Bunker State operates through mundane, iterative institutional planning, legislative mandates, and NATO bureaucratic feedback loops. (Not smoke filled rooms…)

If we want to understand how the imperial infrastructure adapts to a multipolar reality—and more importantly, if we want to build the capacity for actual counter-planning—we have to learn to read its paper trails.

"Planning, Not Masterplans" is out now. I invite you to read it and join the discussion in the comments. (Link below)

[Nel B. @noirnen]

A Note on the Iran-US Memorandum of Understanding (MoU)

(This Note is not an equation of the Islamic Republic with the United States. The asymmetry of imperial pressure is the entire premise of Worldlines, and the asymmetry has not changed because a piece of paper. Iran has been the object of a siege; the United States has been its architect. Nothing in what follows softens that.

This Note is not a claim of imperial omnipotence. The operation that began with the Israeli-American strikes failed in its declared maximalist objectives — regime change, full nuclear destruction, collapse of the axis. The argument here is precisely that imperial planning is rarely organised around the maximalist objectives. The MoU is what the empire settles for in the meantime.

This Note is not asking for suspended solidarity. I support Iran's resistance to imperial pressure. I support that resistance more, not less, the more clearly I can see. Analysis is the form solidarity takes when it is serious. The alternative — the demand that one suspend judgement in the name of the resisting state — is what produces strategic blindness in the anti-imperial space and erodes the possibility of meaningful solidarity over time.

This Note is not a demand for the utopian-pure anti-imperialist state that nowhere exists. Iran is a real state with real class composition, real bureaucratic factions, real material interests inside its leadership. To analyse those means to insist that they are visible in what gets signed and what gets surrendered.

I base my preliminary reading of the MoU on what I have read so far coming from Iranian sources only. You could argue those sources have a particular reading. Granted. Still, it is worth considering.)

The official summary of the MoU lets us sharpen the debate. The text, read closely, tells a different story from the headline of victory. Even setting aside the obvious — that the US-imperial bloc rarely adheres to terms — the more interesting question is what the text itself signs Iran into, before any reneging.

If you look only at the headlines — lifting of the naval blockade, suspension of oil sanctions, $24 billion in frozen funds released with half upfront — you might think Iran has “scored” a victory. But we should also take a look at the fine print, and above all the temporal sequencing within the MoU.

The key to the text is the immediate versus the deferred. Iran commits to opening the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days under its own "arrangements" — a word that, as Iranian analysts have pointed out, does not explicitly preserve the sovereign control or the exclusive right of management that the Leader's red lines established. The opening is unconditional, while the withdrawal of US forces from "the areas surrounding Iran" — a deliberately vague term — is made contingent on a "final agreement" whose negotiation can stretch out with no fixed deadline. The concrete is handed over now; what is promised is deferred.

The same pattern holds on the nuclear file: Iran reiterates its NPT commitment not to manufacture nuclear weapons (a concession that in the earlier draft already included "neither to produce nor to acquire"), and the fate of enrichment and of the enriched materials is referred to future negotiation. Meanwhile, the actual sanctions relief — the full lifting of primary and secondary sanctions and of the Security Council resolutions — is deferred to that same final agreement, as is the $300 billion in reconstruction, which moreover will come from Washington's allies, not from the US Treasury.

This temporal asymmetry is the heart of what I call the fragmentationist strategy. The empire does not need to destroy the Iranian state immediately (besides, it doesn’t have the ability to do so which is precisely why it uses other methods, too); it suffices to induce a fraction of its elite to reintegrate into global financial circuits in exchange for surrendering the asymmetric levers — Hormuz, enrichment, support for the Resistance — that made Iran a structural threat. The state survives, yes, but its sovereign deterrent capacity is hollowed out. The multi-layered cage — sanctions, maritime insurance, ratings agencies, the future Security Council resolution that will lock the agreement in — closes its lock while "victory" is celebrated.

The elite faction that pushed the MoU — and here I am not speaking in the abstract: this is the reading made by Iranian analysts like Nabavian, Hosseini and other critical voices within the Islamic Republic itself — preferred the rapid reopening of Hormuz and the flow of foreign currency to holding out a few more months. Instead of that, they chose the pact that protects their immediate interests, even as it erodes long-term bargaining power. That is fragmentation in action: finding an internal elite that acts as the vehicle of imperial reintegration. (Something we surely see in Mexico as well. Speaking as a Mexican myself.)

So no, the United States has not "won" the war in the military sense, nor in the classical diplomatic sense. But the imperial fabric — which is not a country but a transnational complex of finance, energy, technology and security — has (apparently) obtained what it was after: an Iran that voluntarily opens Hormuz, freezes its nuclear escalation and accepts a framework where its immediate gains are revocable and its concessions are irreversible. At least for the short and maybe long-term, Iran’s asymmetric leverage has been seriously diminished while the US-led imperial bloc can replenish itself.

Lastly, this does not mean total defeat. The MoU can be understood as the conversion of an inconclusive war into a political restructuring of the Iranian elite balance which is a quieter, more durable form of imperial outcome. Of course, we must understand that we are talking about a fragile process in every way. So, whatever the case, the Iranian state, the Resistance and the IRGC still stand.

[Nel B. @noirnen]

Where has all the class analysis gone?

If you listen to much of today's anti-imperialist commentary, you might think the US empire is inevitably collapsing simply because it doesn't have the right kind of crude oil refineries, or because it depleted its missile stockpiles.

But mistaking tactical friction for systemic collapse….well, I’m not saying the US-led empire is invincible or omnipotent. Not at all, rather that there are things missing still for that systemic collapse phase. (At least if we understand that an empire is not a country, otherwise, ….)

There seems to be a substitution of historical materialism with geopolitical accounting. Nations are treated as unified monoliths, erasing the global working class, and reducing imperial power to the physical characteristics of commodities.

The 21st-century Bunker State does not rule through the viscosity of oil or the number of missiles. It rules through financial chokeholds, algorithmic infrastructure, and the deep integration of Global South elites into its architecture.

Before we dive into the next framework, I’ve published a short commentary on the "inevitability myth," the fetishism of data, and why a shifting balance of power is not the same as dismantling the imperial cage.

Read the short commentary here (link below):

[Nel B. @noirnen]

Pouring the Concrete: Vulgar Material Realism and the Architecture of the Bunker State

There is an interesting and critical asymmetry operating within the US-led imperial core.

While the liberal Atlanticist faction operates in the realm of bourgeois idealism (believing that history is driven by narratives, norms, and shared values), the core’s ultra-right faction operates in the realm of vulgar material realism.

They do not believe in their own stories (well, some do though); they understand that power is organized capacity, material infrastructure, and physical force. They use "civilizational" and culture-war stories purely as a tool for mass mobilization and cross-class alignment, but their actual labor is spent building the physical, technological, and institutional walls of the Bunker State.

When we look closely at what this faction has been doing over the last several decades, we can see that they are executing a coordinated, material strategy across three distinct spheres: the elite, the coercive, and the technological spheres.

The Elite and Populist Institutional Infrastructure

Unlike the liberal-Atlanticist faction, who rely on decaying legacy institutions (the UN, the WTO, traditional media) that are losing their grip (they lost their consent), the ultra-right has spent decades building a highly resilient, cross-border counter-infrastructure.

The Elite Node: Networks like CPAC (which has expanded globally to Hungary, Brazil, and Japan) act as transnational coordination hubs where ruling-class elites, right-wing strategists, and multi-billionaire funders align their agendas. They don't just sign joint statements; they exchange legal frameworks, campaign strategies, and policy blueprints.

The Populist Node: In the working-class sphere, they have (or try to?) capitalized on the vacuum left by the collapse of traditional left-wing labor organizations. Through youth projects around the MAGA movement, the AfD in Germany, and similar formations across Europe, they have successfully channeled legitimate working-class anger away from the capitalist system and into xenophobic, protectionist channels. They understand that a bunker needs a loyal domestic (and aggressive) population to guard its perimeter.

The Armed Wing: Co-opting the Coercive Apparatus

Here, Matt Kennard’s book Irregular Army is a case in point. The ultra-right has long understood a truth that liberals ignore: at the end of the day, (state) power relies on a monopoly of violence. (In the case of a potential anti-imperialist resistance, that would be a collective and cooperative infrastructure of defense.)

As Kennard meticulously documented, the structural strains on the US military during the multi-decade "War on Terror" forced the Pentagon to lower enlistment standards, allowing white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and gang members to enter the ranks and gain advanced combat training. Right-wing networks have actively organized within the military, the police forces, and private security apparatuses for decades (Not only in the US, even in European countries).

They are building a cadre within the coercive state apparatus that is ideologically aligned with a post-liberal, hard-power future. When the structural crisis of the empire deepens, they know they cannot rely on legalistic "rules." They rely on the fact that the men with the guns and the tactical training share their civilizational worldview.

The Technological Vanguard: The Rise of Infrastructure Oligarchs

The most dangerous and material aspect of the ultra-right's strategy is their deep alignment with a specific faction of Silicon Valley—represented by figures like Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Elon Musk. These are the infrastructure oligarchs of the modern Bunker State.

They do so by providing, for example: AI-driven surveillance, data integration, and military targeting software., Low-Earth orbit satellite constellations, rocket launch monopolies, and mass communication platforms (X)., Autonomous drones, smart border walls, and algorithmic defense systems.

And this serves the Bunker State well because it provides the digital nervous system for the empire's remote-control warfare, border enforcement, and domestic intelligence, it controls the planetary communication infrastructure essential for modern drone warfare and hybrid operations, while simultaneously holding the levers of the digital public square, and because it replaces high-cost legacy military hardware with low-cost, automated, permanent automated surveillance and coercion systems. (Unless rival infrastructures are build at scale that is that function on a different logic and shared horizon.)

These oligarchs build the actual algorithmic, logistical, and physical systems through which the empire enforces its gatekeeping. They are creating an infrastructure of domination that requires zero popular consent and operates entirely outside the oversight of traditional democratic institutions.

The Meaning for The "Bunker State"

The Atlanticist liberal faction might be trying to preserve an empire that no longer has the material base to sustain itself, fighting a losing rearguard action using the language of 1990s globalization. They are terrified of the Russia-China normative declarations because they think the words are what is killing their world. They are lamenting themselves.

Meanwhile, the ultra-right faction knows the old world-system is dead. They have accepted multipolarity as a material reality. They are not trying to save globalized liberal capitalism. They are systematically preparing for its fracture into another type of capitalism. They are building a leaner, meaner, technologically supreme, and deeply coercive core that can lose the territorial United States as a functional society but survive as a global corporate-military syndicate (or something similar, I won’t say that this is exactly what will happen).

They are the ones actively pouring the concrete for the bunker. They don't care if the Global Majority hates their narrative (a supremacist civlizational narrative), because they are building a world where, thanks to Palantir, Starlink, and an ideologically aligned coercive cadre, the Global Majority's consent is no longer required.

Lastly, some, of these factions are not so clear cut, and there might be other factions, and more hybrid ones within the US-led empire, but I would say these developments are observable regardless.

[HandsOffPalestine @Handsofftunisia]

This is an excellent read. The US oligarchs are desperate to spare the U.S. population from any involvement in its imperialist aggression, while leaving thousands of what might have been useful cannon fodder to die from overdoses and criminality. Conscription brings about mass politicization of the dominated U.S. people against the oligarchs in a way drugs and criminality do not.

[Liberation News Network @l_n_n_26]

One of the key purposes of this project is to make accessible to as many comrades as possible the true nature of modern imperialism. It is not just a question of ghastly Brits in pith helmets raising the butchers apron in distant lands anymore. There is an imperialist bloc which the US leads in some respects but is not anything like as dominant as it once was. This bloc is integrated into global systems of trade and finance that bind even nations like Russia into it, even with all the sanctions that are place upon them. It binds various BRICS members to greater or lesser degrees into dependent relationships with the imperial bloc as well. To help outline this system and how it works I've done a series of videos analysing different nations over the last couple of months.

Firstly there's this analysis of Indian capitalism

https://t.co/aKudYg2Tlm

[Donald J. Gorbachev @donaldgorbachev]

TEN-SECOND EPISTEMOLOGY -
The iPhone is designed in Shenzen, not Cupertino. Dispense with the canard.

The iPhone is not designed in California. The CAD file on the screen in Cupertino is not the design. The idea is not the design. The PowerPoint at the all-hands is not the design. The design is the tooling. The design is the prototype that fails seven times before it works on the eighth. The design is the surface-mount line that produces ten million units without drift. The design is the engineer in Shenzhen who knows which alloy holds up to the press at the eighth iteration and which cracks on the third.

The acronym is ODM. Original Design Manufacturer. The Chinese supply base — Foxconn, Pegatron, Wistron, Luxshare, BYD Electronics, Goertek — designs the product, sources the bill of materials, runs the DFM revision, builds the tooling, operates the line, and ships the unit. The Cupertino contribution is a sticker on the box and a junior who flies out to nod at a fixture he does not understand.

The actual American skill at the engineering company is knowing how to call Shenzhen at midnight without insulting anyone. That skill is real. It is also not what the engineering company is selling.

What it is selling is the meeting. Ten executives in a conference room explaining how the work will be done. Two engineers in the back row who actually have to do it. The ten have equity. The two have carpal tunnel. Half of the ten hold a Lean Six Sigma certification issued by an institute that has never operated a line. The Toyota Production System is what lean is. The American version is a binder.

This is already the situation at the shelf. The Anker charger is Chinese. The Roborock vacuum is Chinese. The Insignia television is a Chinese ODM with a Best Buy badge. The Onn. headphones are a Walmart sticker on a Shenzhen reference design. Half of Amazon Basics is a rebadge of the original SKU sold for a third of the price on AliExpress with a different logo. The sunglasses too — the acetate is Wenzhou, the hinge is Dongguan, the lens is from a Chinese optical house Essilor pretends not to source from. Luxottica's job is to put an Italian name on the temple and charge four hundred dollars for the frame the factory ships to a Korean buyer for twelve.

Real American manufacturers exist. Pratt & Whitney builds the F135. Caterpillar builds the dozer. Boeing still builds the wing when it has not lost the drawings. But anything with a printed circuit board in it has been designed and built in China for a decade.

That is the canard. The story that the design is American, that the manufacturing is just labor, that the value is in the brand. It is inverted. The brand is the markup. The design is the line.

The dock price says it. The landed cost at Long Beach of a Chinese-built EV — chassis, pack, BMS, motor, controller, harness, interior, freight, duty, insurance — is closer to fifteen thousand dollars. The American thirty-five thousand of additional retail price is the rent layer.

[Helmut-Harry Loewen @LoewenHelmut]

After spending decades in Soviet and Western archives, historian Michael Jabara Carley (Professeur émérite, Université de Montréal) has released a magnum opus three part trilogy on the Soviet diplomatic struggle - and ultimate failure - to create a defensive alliance and collective security arrangement against Nazi Germany in Europe in the years prior to the outbreak of World War 2. On today’s episode he discusses how Soviet diplomatic efforts for an anti-Nazi alliance failed, the intransigence of Western powers, what led to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, the ultimate causes of World War 2, the uses and abuses of history today and much more.

Reimagining Soviet Georgia - Episode 68: The Soviet Struggle for Collective Security 1930-1941 with Michael Jabara Carley
https://t.co/i2KZo15jwG

[Nel B. @noirnen]

Short Note on Empire, Survival, and Multipolarity

There is a blind spot in how the dissident and multipolar space talks about the end of US hegemony.

Right now, there is a pervasive assumption that the shift to a "multipolar world" is the ultimate, fatal defeat of the Western ruling class. The narrative is that the US-led empire is collapsing under its own weight, multipolarity is inevitable, and we just need to wait for the dust to settle. (Maybe, however, it is just the end of US-hegemonic unipolarity that is being celebrated by others, and in that case, that’s a real process. Multipolarity is here.)

But what if a specific kind of multipolarity isn’t a threat to the transatlantic empire at all? Or rather one type of multipolarity is less threatening than another one to the US-led ruling strata.

We desperately need to distinguish between two different versions of the future.

The first is Anti-Imperialist Multipolarity. This is a world built on genuine equality among nations, the dismantling of coercive financial hierarchies, and a total rejection of the "might makes right" logic. This version is a lethal threat to the transatlantic ruling class because it abolishes the extractive class structure they rely on.

The second is Elite-Competitive Multipolarity. This is essentially the 19th-century Concert of Europe updated for the AI age. Power is distributed among several great powers, each brutally managing its own sphere of influence, (while the transatlantic ruling strata will attempt to get the biggest share of the pie regardless, constantly, and violently) its own proxy conflicts, and its own hierarchical supply chains.

The Western ruling class can survive the second scenario. They wouldn’t be the sole hegemon, but they could potentially remain the wealthiest, most institutionally entrenched bloc on the board, still gripping the levers of global finance, surveillance, and military tech. A world of competing powers is still a world of empire.

Once you realize that the US-led system can survive Elite-Competitive Multipolarity, the current media and political landscape suddenly makes perfect sense.

Look at who is currently permitted to be the loudest "anti-establishment" or "anti-imperialist" voices in the algorithm. True anti-imperialists—the ones who actually connect the dots between military adventurism, settler-colonialism, and the mechanics of Western finance—are systematically starved of oxygen.

Instead, the algorithm heavily amplifies a right-wing, nationalist opposition. These figures oppose the current managers of the empire, but they do not oppose the mechanics of empire itself. They have no problem with coercion, military dominance, or civilizational hierarchy—they just want it run more ruthlessly, stripped of its liberal, therapeutic PR.

This is a highly successful cognitive capture. By algorhithmically elevating nationalist-imperialists as the "true resistance," the system channels the very real energy of public dissent into a form that the empire can easily absorb. It naturalizes the idea that the alternative to US hegemony is a different set of powers carving up the map.

This isn't a grand conspiracy or a flawlessly executed masterplan. The transatlantic strata operates probabilistically—it shapes the distribution of likely outcomes without determining any specific one.

The celebration of the empire's apparent fall is the empire's preferred form of legitimacy-maintenance during its restructuring and attempt at survival.

The empire is shedding the things it can no longer afford—the pretense of universal liberal values and the maintenance of a comfortable domestic middle class—and retreating into a hardened "Bunker State" of tech, defense, and finance. It is preparing to operate in a violent, multi-polar arena. And it benefits immensely from a dissident class that mistakes a structural adaptation for a terminal collapse (yes, the US as a country might collapse and is most certainly declining as is Europe). The strata benefits from the discourse; the discourse is largely produced by people who genuinely believe they oppose the strata; both things can be true simultaneously.

The goal of political analysis is to raise the cost of the transatlantic ruling strata’s preferred trajectory at the margin. We must make the conceptual distinctions—that multipolarity is not necessarily anti-imperialism, that a country's decline is not a ruling class's displacement, and that post-liberal is not post-imperial—so legible that audiences can no longer blindly enjoy the spectacle without recognizing exactly what they are consuming.

The task should be to reject the complacency of "inevitable collapse," and build the invisible, difficult infrastructure of a world that actually operates beyond the logic of empire, more cooperatively, cohesively, about the common good.

[Theo @theomovies]

Carl Theodor Dreyer (13 films)
Figure out how to find those fucking subtitles yourselves
https://t.co/8WRk2QxbZH

[Nel B. @noirnen]

The Map Preceding the Territory
One could say that this is an emergence of a hyper-reality in the multipolar information space. So, it is not false to say, that the US-led empire is eroding in the long-term, or that there are shifts happening, real decline in the US itself. At the same time there is a simplified, accelerated and inevitable version of this reality. Almost, like as if "collapse" were a spectacle. And this reality of the spectacle has become more real to its participants than the messy, dangerous, contingent actuality.

This is like creating the map preceding the territory. The discourse creates a reality that is internally consistent, morally satisfying, and partially, algorithmically reinforced. At the same time, it still may misalign with the terrain on which actual strategic competition takes place.

My fear is that the US-led empire is different from what this inevitability of collapse-myth shows (I mean this transatlantic empire will fall and be replaced, the question is time), it is more adaptable and more capable of mutation, maybe more dangerous precisely when we begin to underestimate this. And the current media ecosystem might be structurally optimized to produce this underestimation and maybe even passivity in terms of resistance in core countries. What's more, even if we take all of this as a given, there can be no passivity by saying, everything will take care of itself. That's not how empires collapse...an alternative system needs to exist beforehand.

Also, the "empire" is not the same as any nation state. The current empire is a historically grown social entity, that emerged with modernity and capitalism, its center of gravity adapts and changes. It is not bound by a country, and will not fall and stand with one country, it is bound by a historically formed class (what I call transatlantic ruling class, but maybe Anglo-European ruling class could also be suitable). And a real collapse of an empire will only intitiate if the organization of societies fundamentally changes. If the US "falls", there is no alternative system yet to reincorporate the remenants. So, the transatlantic ruling strata will adapt in the meantime, just as they have prevailed through the Spanish, the Dutch, the British "collapse", and so on.

[Club des Cordeliers @cordeliers]

Here's Rome at night, before and after installation of cold LED lighting. The streets now look like scenes from a grim dystopian movie.

[Club des Cordeliers @cordeliers]

From 1972 and more relevant than ever. "Weather: Calamities of Nature & Weather Modification as a Weapon of Imperialism"

[Nel B. @noirnen]

Venezuela has not collapsed yet. Yes, Maduro has been kidnapped. But so have unfortunately and sadly many Iranian leaders been murdered by the US-Israeli axis. In Venezuela much of its state apparatus and communal structure remain functional. It is specifically the hydrocarbons that have been folded back into a US‑designed sanctions‑management regime that licenses, monitors and effectively trustees its main source of export revenue.
Iran is facing the same empire. But Venezuela and Iran have been doing so on a different map and timeline altogether. Iran had four decades of war‑preparation, geographical distance from the continental US, and proximity to Russia and China. A Venezuela-style asset grab is far more dangerous and difficult.
(Venezuela’s timeline from Chávez (early 2000s) to 2026 is ~20–25 years of counter‑hegemonic experiment under very tight US proximity and a “long peace” regional context.
Iran’s path from Khomeini (late 1970s) to now is ~45 years of war‑preparations and regional conflict in a geography bordering Iraq, the Gulf, the Caucasus, and within reach of multipolar Russia and China in the 2000s and onwards.)
What we are watching now is a slower, more contested version of the same structural capture: sanctions architecture that never really lifts, temporary waivers to manage global prices, narrow negotiations that leave the coercive framework intact, a long campaign to reshape Iran’s internal balance of forces, and cognitive warfare operations.

The fact that Iran has not yet been reorganized like Venezuela means that history, geography and prior state formation matter and that the crumbling empire has to work harder, and for longer, to achieve the same thing. As soon as Iran manages to achieve their 10 points (or parts of it), we can say, it has, indeed, succeeded to survive and repel this empire, and has succeed in not being structurally captured.

Lastly, the US ruling strata are probably seeking an “Islamic Republic” that still exists on paper, a security apparatus that is either pruned, segmented or partially co‑opted, and Oil and gas exports routed through a web of licences, accounts, and monitoring arrangements designed in DC and enforced via secondary sanctions; a sanctions‑managed dependency. Whether they can get there is an open question.

[William M Briggs - Statistician to the Stars! @FamedCelebrity]

https://t.co/shH8DTxfUI