Maybe this is too fedposty (and let me know if it is), but I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially with how things are going in Iran. It seems like modern warfare is basically just “my drones strike your drones”, and if either side has drones free to not strike other drones, they can instantly kill whoever they like. With this in mind, is it even really possible for a revolution in the US to escalate into a civil war without simply being air-superiority’d into oblivion with modern sensors? Is guerilla war viable anymore? The main counterpoint I can think of to this possibility is that the US military is A: incompetent and B: mostly a colonial garrison force, but I don’t know.
(And yeah, I know a revolution in the US would have a whole laundry list of prerequisites and is significantly hindered by the fact it can’t be tied with anti-imperial nationalism. I’m talking strictly in terms of if it actually happened.)
It’s a lot more complex than that. Modern warfare is Asymmetrical warfare. Economic, Military, Moral. Key aspect in maintaining imperialism is keeping labor aristocracy happy, presenting the military as a force for good, giving everyone treats. You’re not wrong that it’s a paper tiger, but enough consciousness has to manifest for people to see it’s a paper tiger. Like come on even libs have to realize if their country could win WW3 and dominate the world they’d have already done it. They know they can’t win.
I mean the US basically does dominate the world. This war may finally crack that truth, but until then, the US goes everywhere and does anything they want anywhere. Their currency is universal, and their culture and neoliberal ideals even penetrate China.
The entire world order can’t defeat Iran? Excellent news.
And the funniest/saddest part is that Iran, at least the bourgeois has wanted to be a part of this currency, culture, and ideals for years, it is the U.S. that continues to hold them at arms length and beat them, until they actually started fighting back.
The world order requires the creation of pariahs, because market penetration and destruction has to be complete in order to achieve the largest profit margins. However, if everyone competes evenly, the rate of profit will decline and the system will go into collapse.
That is the contradiction at the heart of imperialism, which is the highest stage of capitalism. It requires the creation of frontiers where the profit margins can be kept high through primitive accumulation (see theft), but in order to do that, it must hollow out the imperial core through the MIC, which weakens the empire, which leads to social and cultural collapse as the material culture that created the conditions for empire cannot be replicated.
Therefore, you can never ‘win’, as new frontiers must always be created. Even without the environmental factors, capitalism is a completely unsustainable social order for humanitarian progress, as the cycle is stationary and self-defeating.
Same with Russia, the neoliberal economist sects of Shanghai, and probably India in the future lol. They just don’t seem to understand that not everybody can be Int he club, as much as they want to be.
We really need more countries with Marxists in control because that seems to be the only way to understand this.