Skip Navigation
news @hexbear.net
SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him] @hexbear.net

Bulletins and News Discussion from May 19th to May 25th, 2025 - The Beginning of the End of the Monroe Doctrine

Or perhaps the end of the beginning, if you're a little more pessimistic.

Image is from this Bloomberg article, from which I also gathered some of the information used in the preamble.

While Trump was off in the Middle East in an incompetent attempt to solve a geopolitical and humanitarian crisis, China has been doing something much more productive.

Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping, had a summit with CELAC (a community of 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries). There, he promised investment, various declarations of friendship, and visa-free entry for 30 days for citizens of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. Lula signed over 30 agreements with China. Colombia is joining the New Development Bank and hopes to gain the money for a 120-kilometer railway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific coasts as an alternative route to the Panama Canal. Even Argentina, ruled by arch-libertarian and arch-dipshit (but I repeat myself) Milei, was uncharacteristically polite with China as he secured a currency swap renewal to shore up their international reserves.

It wouldn't really be correct to say that Latin America is "siding with China over the US" - leaders in the region will continue to make many deals with America for the foreseeable future, and even Trump's bizarre economic strongman routine won't make them break off economic and diplomatic relations. What's significant here is that despite increasing American pressure for those leaders to break off all ties with China, few appear to be listening - and given that China is perhaps the most important economy on the planet right now, that is a very predictable outcome.

As the current American empire takes actions to try and avoid their doom, those very actions only guarantee it. As Latin America grows ever more interconnected with China and continues to develop, America will grow ever more panicked and demanding, and this feedback loop will - eventually - result in the death of the Monroe Doctrine.

Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

427 comments

  • Ok I need to know, why does pretty much every country go out their way to kiss zionist ass? From the gulf states to Vietnam and China, why is international politics so weak to try to do anything to barely slap "Israel"s hand? Serious, not shitposts.

    Its mind baffling, it goes outside any logic or reason and I would even consider it against materialism. It's like giving reason to all right wing talks about zionist control over the world lmfao.

    • From the gulf states to Vietnam and China, why is international politics so weak to try to do anything to barely slap "Israel"s hand? Serious, not shitposts.

      Because this is not about Israel primarily, its mostly about relations with the US. Just talking about China here, lets go by steps.

      First if you recall in 2022 for brief moment there was this "Chinese peace plan" which was just some sort of policy paper the Chinese threw around. Even that little misunderstanding was unacceptable for the US but most importantly China realized any action during the Ukraine war, action favorable towards Russia specifically would be seen as anti-western and face retaliation so that was abandoned(even though it was literaly nothing worthwhile) and China has stayed our of saying anything about Ukraine since then.

      Further back recall how China tried so desperately to restore relations during the Huawei exec stuff and the Trump trade war. China has always wanted to be on good terms with the US. This is incrinsingly difficult. That 2022 lesson culminated with the Pelosi incident. China talked big about consequences and eat an egg to the face. They're not actualy ready nor willing to fight the US period.

      But to continue, none of these recent bad experiences, from the Huawei exec(2021), to COVID racism(2020+), HK riots and international ONG intervention(2019), Xinjiang/Uyghur and literaly CIA funding ETIM terrorists inside China(that famous US general admitting this is from around 2015 or so IIRC ).

      None of this was enough to convince them that a good relation with the US is impossible.

      So when Oct 7th 2023 China already learned both from Pelosi/Ukraine that Chinese "protagonism" in the international stage will face real backlash.

      Therefore they adjusted, remember they flip flopped their Foreign minister Wang Yi/Qin Qang. I don't think there was anything beyond the official reasons but its hard not to speculate. Maybe that was one attempt to change course, but that was also exactly the period the Biden team doubled their efforts with the Chinese EV/batteries stuff and it worked really well for the US as China ultimately conceded i.e they've now turned to mainstream fiscal policy to boost spending because "everyone"(read:mainstream neoliberal economics) agrees China got too much industry. In short you could even say recent experience showed to them their foreign policy wasn't "working" to appease the US.

      So again, Oct 7th happens and China is now committed to being just a voice at the UN because they believe this is the most they can do without consequences. It is not just about Israel, its about the extremely consistent Chinese commitment to the current "rules" based order. During the first Trump term they were saying the same thing, how "populism" is bad and we must have a stable global community etc.

      Our perception of change came from the brief moments of Chinese frustration and pro-China activism, specialy with Xinjiang stuff since ~2018 and also their apparent strong support Russia in 2022, that maybe now we're ready and willing to fight the western consensus. That was just wrong.

      As it turned out the support for Russia is just rethoric too. US sanctions successfully stop Chinese banks from doing business in Russia etc, The most we can say is the sanctions were not 100% effective, but they were at least impactful enough. You can definitely be sure if Russia wasn't the USSR's corpse laying around with 2000 nukes NATO would already be fighting in Ukraine imo and all we would see is more US bad talk.

    • I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Israel, is in fact, USA/Israel, or as I've recently taken to calling it, USA plus Israel. Israel is not a country unto itself, but rather another illegal occupaton of a fully functioning USA empire made useful by the US Armed Forces, the Central Intelligence Agency and vital imperial components comprising a full empire as defined by any competent dictionary.

      Many Palestinians get murdered by the USA empire every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the illegal occupation which is widely used for murdering Palestinians today is often called Israel, and many of its victims are not aware that it is basically the USA empire, developed by the colonizers who genocided almost all of the Native Americans a few centuries ago.

      There really is an Israel, and these people are getting murdered by it, but it is just a part of the empire they are victims of. Israel is the illegal occupation: a part of the empire which resides on land that belongs to someone else who did not consent to getting murdered or having their land taken away. The illegal occupation is an essential part of the empire, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete empire. Israel is normally used in combination with the USA empire: the whole empire is basically USA with Israel added, or USA/Israel. All the so-called Israel distributions are really distributions of USA/Israel!

      copypasta bit aside, it would be a blunder to openly state your hostility to Israel because it will only make you the next target of the US sanctions regime (a sanctions war is already being doled out to the entire world). The US would most likely use any Chinese sanction of Israel as the excuse for all out war which neither side would be able to control not to mention what the stage would be like for smaller AES/Global South nations like Vietnam.

      The WPK in the DPRK having the most consistent position on Israel (does not exist has never existed) stems from them already being made into a global pariah for decades by the US (which has led to millions of deaths). Many capitalist Global South countries with centrist or socdem governments have so much more to lose.

    • Honestly, it probably came down to economics.

      Everyone seems to have forgotten that there is still a 10% global tariffs on every country other than China, and Trump has made it clear that support for Israel is non-negotiable, not only for their foreign “partners”, but also for domestic US citizens.

      This is one place where I think the US ruling imperialist class really leaned in on Trump’s pompous performance to psychologically manipulate the world’s reception towards US policies.

      If Trump had just announced a 10% global tariffs, there would have been huge public outcry across the world.

      Instead, what we get was at first, an insane Trump tariff plan where everyone laughed at how stupid it is “haha he’s imposing 150% tariffs on the penguins!!” and then Trump would “walk back” to “only 10%” and the world suddenly breathed a sigh of relief and quietly accepted the rate - for the fear that any noise could irritate a vindictive Trump to raise tariffs against their particular countries again.

      A tariff is a tax on US consumers, it would raise the price, but on the flip side, it also means that the exporting countries have to deal with surplus export capacity. Every country now hopes for a deal with Trump because the first countries that manage to bring their tariffs down to 0% would be the winners against their exporting competitors.

      Trump’s global tariff is actually threatening to unleash a mercantilistic fight among the exporting countries, and this is very dangerous because you can’t just keep adjusting the prices - at some point, overproduction leads to price collapse, and economic recession.

      And while this is all playing out, the US is reshaping the global supply chain to its own interest.

      This is happening because the world (many Global South countries) have bought into the “export led growth” model (lie) proposed (imposed) by the IMF. The idea that you have to earn export revenues before you can invest domestically can only work as long as there is a country willing to run a huge trade deficit at all times so you, the exporting country, can accumulate the trade surplus.

      This was how Taiwan and South Korea “won” the race back in the 1970s-90s (the Four Asian Dragons), before the rise of China, and every other country has since flocked to emulate that strategy, believing that one day they will also become like Taiwan and South Korea.

      Trump is now saying “I’m bored of the old winners, they no longer benefit me, I’m now reshuffling the board to pick a new set of winners. Here is your chance to rise to the top if you stroke my ego enough.” Pure mercantilism.

      This is also why you see so many pro-BRICS, pro-China “alt media” people are now going through their cognitive dissonance. “US import only comprises 2% of China’s exports lol! Who cares??” But somehow many countries found themselves unable to just stop exporting to the US and replace their demand somewhere else. Strange.

      I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but for the 25th time this week (lol), if there is no country willing to take on the net importer role to replace the US as a net deficit spender, then the US will always have a say on global trade.

      That’s simply how the world has been shaped over the past several decades with the US and China enjoying running huge trade imbalances at the expense of the rest of the world. One of these two countries have to decide they no longer want to be part of this cursed marriage, and the shocking revelation is that the US seems to be the one who wants to break off from this marriage, and China doing everything it can to save it.

      Also, bonus: there used to be another economic bloc that could challenge US’s dominance, and that is the EU. The euro is a far more acceptable saving currency for the rest of the world compared to yuan - and the real threat to the dollar hegemony in recent years. (If you somehow think I’m a “chauvinist” for China, you’ll see here that this is not the case).

      However, very conveniently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine just had to happen, and with the EU losing their cheap gas supply from Russia, it’s all but over for Europe:

      The Russia-Ukraine war killed the euro and subjugated the entire European subcontinent to the US. This is what allowed Trump to advance to the next stages of US imperial strategy.

      • If you somehow think I’m a “chauvinist” for China, you’ll see here that this is not the case

        This is quite probably a reference to me calling you a national chauvinist over you supporting the destruction of the USSR and the establishment of the 'cursed marriage' between the PRC and the US, as you were evidently concerned solely with the well-being of people in the PRC, and were fine with colonial exploitation of the rest of the world.

        Supporting the EU becoming this net importer so that the PRC gets to continue to enjoy the status quo would, in fact, be chauvinist of you.

        • How is saying that China should raise its wages so that the Chinese working class has the purchasing power to import from other Global South countries, a “chauvinist” position?

          This is going to cause the Chinese manufacturing industries to be redistributed to the Global South. At the same time, living standards in China and the countries they import from will improve because of increased wages. How is that a bad thing?

          Alternatively, a Chinese-style Marshall Plan that floods the Global South with yuan, which gives people from the other Global South countries the purchasing power to purchase Chinese goods, and this will in turn raise the wages of the Chinese working class, raising their own purchasing power, and this back and forth will lead to a more balanced and equitable development between countries.

          This is way better than China investing in some poor countries to extract their minerals and resources to fuel their own manufacturing sector at home, and in effect, just another form of colonization. What I am proposing is actually going help develop and industrialize the other poor countries, like what the US did to post-war Germany through Marshall Plan.

          Currently, China wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want to be the global export superpower (which squeezes the wages of the other Global South countries because they simply do not have the production of scale to match China’s) and at the same time they don’t want other countries to save in yuan, because they want other countries to import Chinese goods, not to save in its currency. This is leading to the exporting countries competing with one another, and why they all still depend on the US to become the “buyer of the last resort”, because there is nowhere else for the surplus goods to go. How is that “chauvinist”?

          The reason I brought up the EU is because the euro is still a far more acceptable currency for most countries to save in (see the figure in my previous comment) than yuan (how many Global South countries do you think would prefer to hold euro than Chinese yuan? The vast majority of them!), and quite frankly, the real concern for the US imperialists if the dollar is ever going to be challenged. I seriously think that the US has calculated that China is never going to weaponize its yuan, and so far they have been proven right.

          • This is way better than China investing in some poor countries to extract their minerals and resources to fuel their own manufacturing sector at home, and in effect, just another form of colonization.

            Currently, China wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want to be the global export superpower (which squeezes the wages of the other Global South countries because they simply do not have the production of scale to match China’s) and at the same time they don’t want other countries to save in yuan. ... How is that “chauvinist”?

            Come on I know you can do better than that. You damn well know the modern Chinese rethoric is literaly, and I'll quote Xi in 2017,

            You do understand "economic globalization" here is a vulgar term right? Its the mainstream economics and neoliberal version of what Marxists and socialists call Imperialism.

            I'm not saying China is necessarily imperialist nor that they defend it in all cases, but they kind of do somewhat here and that they have already made their bed with its existence and even praise it as a necessity, calling for us to just merely iron out the bad edges.

            Its impossible to unironicaly call for peace and conciliation with the western imperialists and it realy is almost no better than doing it yourself. Almost because we're not idiot liberals, yeah by all means China would rather act to liberate these countries than not, but at the same time they very openly have made the bed with the fact imperialism exists and its beneficial to them, therefore there is no alternative.

            Their only message, for a decade now is only the same naive liberal-left idea that all we need is better Capitalism 2.0 maybe if everyone is at peace and the starving miners can get a good wage it wouldn't be so bad.

            He literally says "Its true globalization has brought new problems but its not a reason to abandon it altogether". This is vulgar liberal mainstream economics garbage.

            The only difference from our socialist position from reddit/western liberals is that liberals claim China is colonizing Africa with silly predatory loan etc That is amateur shit.

            Our socialist critique is that China while not directly supporting or directly endeavoring in Imperialism themselves, they nevertheless already express support for the continuation of the current "globalization" trend, openly saying there is "no alternative" and that the best we can hope for is to iron out the bad aspects. This is not principled at all period and yes if the current system only works for them then it is chauvinism.

          • How is saying that China should raise its wages so that the Chinese working class has the purchasing power to import from other Global South countries, a “chauvinist” position?

            Not sure why you are asking this question, considering that I never raised issue with that.

            The issue that I do have is that you quite literally supported the destruction of the USSR and anti-colonial movements of the world, with the justification being that that helped the PRC.

            Also, on a minor note, do you still use the words 'liberal' and 'neoliberal' as synonyms?

      • Whenever I'm like half a page down reading a single comment I always think to myself "God damn this must be xiaohongshu" and I am right 100% of the time.

        Appreciate you

      • Hey I don't disagree and your analysis are very good. I do have a question though, do you see a source of optimism in the current context? Cause I usually sense a kind of continuous pessimism in your analysis, which funnily enough is not that common even in alternative media.

        • This is going to come across as a bit of incoherent rambling, but let me try:

          Honestly, I think the take that “China already has a strong economic base and financial system to challenge US hegemony” is far more optimistic than what I’ve commonly heard in Western leftist spaces like “nooo China still needs MORE primitive accumulation of capital to become socialist!” and “China is playing the long game and this liberal policy is actually a WIN for BRICS”.

          Like, my friend, China already has a global manufacturing share of 31% (compared to 18% in the US, and 5% each for Germany and Japan). If this is still not enough, then our entire socialist project is doomed. How else are other countries ever going to achieve socialism?

          I’m also not going to sugar coat it: China’s economy is the only one that can directly challenge and realistically replace the US, at least in short-intermediate term. It is a policy choice. The key challenge is how to get the world to accept the yuan, and to get the local bourgeoisie who have accumulated trillions of dollars over the past decades to give up their huge privilege.

          And just to dispel the idea that my analysis is frequently “China centric”, I’ll remind everyone that this source of optimism that we have for the past few years was only because of Russia’s valiant defiance against the entire Western-dominated economic and financial system. People often under-appreciate what Putin had done that, while the Ukraine war was provoked and caused mass casualties, its defiance to unprecedented global sanctions forced the US to take a high risk gambling approach to protect the hegemony of the dollar.

          You’ll often see me praising Putin for canceling $23 billion of Africa’s debt, because that’s absolutely the right thing to do, if only China had followed up with its trillions of dollar reserves - it can achieve a lot for the Global South just by making the big numbers of its bank statement to go down. And Russia indeed had rallied many Global South countries to its call for de-dollarization (anyone remembers the summer of 2022? It was nice, albeit a bit naive in retrospect) Unfortunately Russia’s economy was simply too weak to take on the global hegemon, and China’s eventual doubling down for preserving the dollar hegemony sealed the fate of this unprecedented opening never seen in decades.

          I will also give it that Putin’s willingness to let the world sanctioning its oligarchs is far more of a baller move than China has ever done in recent years. Too bad, when your economy is weak, and doesn’t help with the liberal economists continuing to sabotage from within, there is only so much energy you can exert on a global scale - exactly what I have said about most countries simply being too weak to take on the global hegemon.

          On the flip side, I often wonder how much longer can China keep going with the charade? No, this is not the right wing’s “China’s going to collapse because of COMMUNISM” lol. While the US economy itself seems teetering on an impending crisis, my pessimism is more a reflection of what many people around me have felt in recent months: the initial surge (often fueled by nationalistic propaganda) of “China is defeating Western countries in handling Covid!” in 2020 had gradually turned into “the economy’s gonna recover after Zero Covid, we just need to give it some time” in 2023 to the more pessimistic “welp, the recovery that was promised isn’t happening, I’m gonna be careful with how I spend with so much uncertainty in the world” last year. With the uncertainty of getting laid off at any point, people chose to save instead, because a lack of welfare means that people fear their current level of income, once lost, cannot be easily replenished.

          The plunging property market (it’s cooked) and the deflationary spiral despite multiple rounds of subsidies have fueled a lot of disappointment, if not resentment. For many people, it’s almost as if the government will do anything just to avoid raising the wages of the people. Lots of big charts showing the economic recovery, but people continue to feel their wallets getting lighter (reminds me of the Bidenomics propaganda in the US not too long ago).

          Meanwhile, the two key economists who pushed for the whole property market investment scheme for the past decade, Justin Lin Yifu and Meng Xiaosong, continued to be revered by the leadership, doubling down on rhetoric like “we need to double down on more investments to raise the wages of the people so they can consume”, when one should be asking: “how is producing even more goods going to raise wages when nobody has the money to buy them?”

          It doesn’t help that for those paying attention to left politics, Xi’s ten years of reining in private capital and cracking down neoliberalism have ended in complete reversal over the span of the past few months, with Xi now doubling down on affirming the “sanctity” of private capital (that the COMMUNIST Party of China will DEFEND lol) and disgraced capitalists like Jack Ma have now returned to the altar.

          There has been a lot of nationalistic propaganda about how China’s consumption has recovered “look at the record turnout to watch Ne Zha 2” lol and “wow look so many people traveling on May Day holiday, who says China has a consumption problem?” as if people aren’t frontloading their vacations to take advantage of promoted subsidies. But, how long can these “feel good” propaganda last?

          There is now a lot of technocratic push to promote a technological revolution like EVs (the price wars are decimating hundreds of companies and suppliers), solar panels (the industry registered one of the worst losses last year) and AI and robotics, hoping that a technological revolutiom is going to bring forth an economic transformation, magically propeling the country to a high income country. Too much emphasis on STEM (too much worshipping Elon Musk) and too few attention paid to social policies and reforms. Anything to avoid giving people money and welfare.

          So, how long before people are going to endure before they have had enough? How long can the liberals continue to sell their snake oil economics before the central leadership (which unfortunately is full of them right now) decides that they can no longer be trusted? Furthermore, how long before the central government rein in on the outsized authorities of the local governments (a sequelae of decentralization since the post-Mao reform), that have continued to cause troubles at the national level?

          No, I’m not saying that China’s economy is going to collapse lol, that’s never going to happen. But if you had asked me if China is treading the path of Japan, even just two years ago, I would have thought ridiculous. Now, I’m not so sure anymore.

          Sorry for the long rant. I hope it gives you some perspective from my end.

      • This is also why you see so many pro-BRICS, pro-China “alt media” people are now going through their cognitive dissonance. “US import only comprises 2% of China’s exports lol! Who cares??” But somehow many countries found themselves unable to just stop exporting to the US and replace their demand somewhere else. Strange

        It's also because that 2% figure is a percentage of GDP. In terms of actual goods manufactured, Chinese exports to the USA make up 15-20% of total exports. And here is some more cognitive dissonance from the alt media. They've been going on for years about how GDP is "fake" and not a useful metric (there is a bit of truth here, but not as much as they say), and then the first statistic they use to say that China can just cut off the USA is a % of GDP statistic lmao. I guess GDP is no longer fake. Same thing with Trump and the stock markets. Alt media were going on for years under Biden how the rising stock market meant little and was an unreliable indicator for economic growth, and that the US economy was actually doing terribly (again, some truth here, but exaggerated), and yet the first indicator the alt media uses to say that the US economy is crashing under Trump, is the stock market falling. I guess the stock market is a reliable indicator now lol.

        Ultimately these alt media people don't view things objectively or have a coherent ideology, they just want to push out a narrative. We saw the same thing with the fall of Syria. Alt media denying how bad the situation was until Assad was literally chased out of the country.

    • Almost every nation on earth has an entrenched oligarchy/compradore/capitalist class that massively benefits from continued US Dollar hegemony and therefore the Zionist occupation and extermination campaigns. Whether those oligarchs run the country (the West, India, Gulf countries, etc) or simply hold varying degrees of internal power within the country( Russia, China, Colombia, Brazil, even to a lesser extent Iran & Venezuela) or are running parallel governments (Yemen, South Korea, takfiri proxies in North/West Africa) the issue is pervasive.

      We must understand that the fight against Zionism is truly a class-struggle on a global scale (the Palestinian Resistance and Yemeni Government of Change and Construction are the global vanguard.) It is for this reason that the defeat of the zionist colony will transform the world geopolitical and economic landscape in favor of socialism insha'allah. This is, to my understanding, the position held by the Masar Badil organization.

    • Because Israel is the 51st state. Going against Israel means going againt the United States.

    • Regime Radio did a book review on The World For Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources.

      One of the host said that in the cold war a lot of the commodities traders are Israelis who played a role in funneling resources and money to regimes that are not West friendly during the cold war.

      My guess is that Israel was an important strategy partner that is useful to curb Arab nationalism in the region as petroleum is a vital resource in the region. As Petrol played a less and less important role in the future, the West-Israel relation will decrease, but there might be some probability that Israel will hedge their bets with BRICs countries for its survival.

    • I mean they sure arent helping. But Israel is allowed to do what they do, because its advantageous for the west to allow them to do so. China & Vietnam can be easily justified with the sentiment that no country should intervene in another countries internal politics, otherwise that line of thinking could lead to people using the fake "Uyghur genocide" or like the conflict of the lowland peoples with the người Thượng/degar inside vietnam to justify intervention/sanctions.

      The anti-west states arent really looking to be the next world police, more so a multipolar world where states are left alone or so goes the thinking.

    • they libs

      surveillance tech

    • I don't think they are kissing ass, they are treating them pretty similarly to every other nation they deal with. One thing is for sure, if Israel collapsed today and became a fully independent Palestine, China and Vietnam would continue their relationship all the same and probably even offer way more investment and support if I had to guess

427 comments