Like, yeah, they can ‘get away with’ ending soft power. They can ‘get away with’ extrajudicial killings. They’re operating off of pure machismo right now. They’re getting drunk on their vices. They’re stripping masks where masks wouldn’t be advised to be stripped. I feel like I understand now that Fascism is, in part, an expression of weakness. They wouldn’t be doing this unless they were scared. It’s too volatile. It feels both too late on a power-level and too early on a popular-level. Never mind the ticking time bomb that is AI data centers. It feels like, and I’m sure this is cope, there is a timer on their ability to run the circus much longer.
My first instinct here is to doubt myself, intellectual pessimism and all. In that vein, maybe this is just revolutionary optimism, but we’re at the point where it feels like there is a palpable anger brewing in the basement. I don’t know. Maybe Palantir works as an anti-communist panopticon and we just death spiral forever. I don’t want to lose hope.
This is not true for the entire world, though. I’ve seen the Eye of Sauron analogy made a few times and it’s accurate. If the Eye lands on you, there is very little you can do to resist it. When the empire has its attention focused on your destruction, your best bet - unless you’re China or Russia - is just to hunker down and try to survive. There has never been a more brutal and terrifying killing machine in human history than the US military today and it will wield that (with a bit of reluctance due to cost) when it needs to. But to do so, it has to direct its resources from elsewhere. It has to reposition navies, redirect its declining industrial production, shift away its trade leverage, etc. That means everyone not under the Eye’s gaze gets a bit more breathing room. You see this most of all in Africa right now, which Sauron has been forced to de-prioritize. The AES is operating with a pretty free reign and carrying out an anti-imperialist developmental project (with strong socialist undertones in Burkina Faso) because the Eye can’t look everywhere at once. And, most importantly, China is simply so big and so economically dominant that the cost of competition in many theaters is too high for the empire to really contest.
Unfortunately, and as has been the case for 200 years, the Eye will focus where it can operate most freely: in Latin America. They will pay the price of the empire’s rage in the next few years unless it can be drawn in enough directions around the world - including, perhaps most importantly, within its own borders - that it simply can’t keep up with all the different challengers to its power.