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.

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Portugal's post election update.
With the votes from abroad not yet counted and with the likelyhood of the far-right CH obtaining 2 MPs more than the center-left PS and becoming the largest opposition party looming, the effects of the left's historic defeat and the far-right's rise last sunday are still being felt. Here's what all the main actors are up to.
The communists didn't rest on their laurels and immediately held a bunch of rallies right after the elections, its affiliated organizations are also still active, they've also already stated they'll propose a vote against the government's budget right away once parliament starts (which will clarify how he PS and CH will handle the center-right's minority government), the idea seems to be to give despairing leftists hope that there are people still fighting the right and inspire them to join. Hey, it worked with me, I did join after a moment like this but it was in 2022 when the PS got a historic absolute majority, I thought that was bad enough, and now they're basically in third place, funny how life works.
The post-trot demsoc BE, once having elected 19 MPs in 2019, is still reeling from having only electing its party leader, she basically blamed the "global right-wing shift" (which portugal has definetily joined) for the party's poor result. I maintain that their situation is very fucked, with a disloyal soft left of the party easily going to the europhile pro-war greens and a loyal hard left of the party too historically resentful of the "Stalinist" (according to them) communists to support their coalition, a shame because they still got 100k votes and a lot of activists that could be very useful.
The PS general secretary, who was from the left-wing of the party even though he ran a very centrist campaign, resigned and since only 1 guy ran for his job, he got it. A man named Carneiro will be leading the socialists, however in portuguese "Carneiro" means "sheep" and is also slang for "cuckold" or "someone who sheepishly follows orders", so following nominative determinism (WHICH IS REAL
) this man will never become prime minister. A Starmer-like figure (minus the transphobia hopefully) he's made it clear that the party wants to form an informal "central block" with the center-right AD minority government for stability and to allow with to govern without having to depend on the far-right for parliamentary votes.
About that though...the AD which for years maintained a "no means no" stance regarding collaborating with the far-right now has revised that to mean "no only means no...regarding the far-right joining government", they've opened the door to working with them in parliament, and even worse on possibly constitutional revisions. The right now has a 2/3 majority which means for the first time they don't need the PS to revise the constitution and the far-right could possibly have a say. The liberals are already building a proposal to remove the "ideological charge" of the constitution, which was written in the aftermath of the revolution in 75 and has already been revised a few times (like to remove the un-reversability of nationalizations and stuff)
Oh and the public prosecutor, which has publicly announced they were investigating several politicians in the past few years, even during campaign season, but so far haven't charged anyone, only NOW has said that they're asking for further documents from the PM's private business dealings and that ONLY NOW AFTER YEARS OF THIS SHIT they're FINALLY investigating the far-right's leader for "incitement of hatred" over 1 video he recently posted complaining about roma people, I doubt anything will come of it though.
It kinda feels like germany's situation a few years ago.
A dominant center-right in power.
A far-right being toe to toe with an increasingly centrist center-left, gaining ground on historically far-left regions on basically just anti-migrant discourse, shut out of government so it can always be in the opposition and with a lot of low education voters. With the key difference that unlike in germany the far-right here is a 1 man show and very personalistic.
A market-fundamentalist liberal party that pollutes discourse with easy solutions and can basically always be in the opposition (they've since lost their seats in germany but that won't happen here since there's no electoral treshold) and is very popular among well-to-do young people.
A socially liberal pro-war green party working as a stop-gap between the center-left and the far-left.
On the far-left is where I think there are the most differences, since Die Linke has definitely become a "normal"-ish party, pro-nato if a bit reluctantly, pro arms-shipments to ukraine and not very anti-israel.
Well portuguese people are always talking about how we suck and should be more like germany so there you go.
- Yeah this is basically 2010s Germany.

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