The majority of the world does not want or accept U.S. hegemony and is prepared to face it down rather than submit to its dictates, writes Jeffrey D. Sachs.

Stuff like this gives me hope looking forward. Sure, USA is now mask-off facism, but the rest of the world is leaving it behind. Our job in the imperial core is to simply ensure that the decay takes down as few as possible with it.

I still find myself surprised that Jeff Sachs, an architect of shock therapy, has come to some of these conclusions and writes op eds for common dreams lol

Good article, this is a tangential question that i thought while reading it - is there a fundamental difference even worth noting these days between neoliberal and neocon?

I really hope so but I’m a little pessimist. China keeps letting the US encircle them and screw them out of deals while doing nothing about it.

It seems like Russia and eventually India (with Brazil as a wild card) will be the faces of anti-imperialistic actions. But all these countries have a neoliberal problem, even China. I guess we can only wait and see if they actually make a turn left

Brzezinski was decisively wrong, and his misjudgment helped to lead to the disaster of the war in Ukraine. Russia did not simply succumb to the U.S. plan to expand NATO to Ukraine, as Brzezinski assumed it would. Russia said a firm no, and was prepared to wage war to stop the U.S. plans. As a result of the neocon miscalculations vis-à-vis Ukraine, Russia is now prevailing on the battlefield, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead

I agree with Sachs that Brzezinski was wrong. Sachs does not present the actual reasons why. Brzezinski claimed Russia was incapable of creating an anti-hegemonic collaboration in 1997. That was true, and it was true in much of the 2000's. At one point that obviously stops being true, Brzezinski's statement isn't evergreen that's simply now how history works.

However Brzezinski's statement could have been evergreen had the United States asked Russia to join NATO in 2000's. The NATO-Russia Council was the first step towards making Brzezinkski's statement evergreen. In 2000 there was a real potential for Russia to join NATO, Putin asked about an invite, NATO said a noncommittal "just apply" response. Had NATO rolled out the red carpet for Russia like they do for Ukraine now, Brzezinksi would have been right forever.

The United States would have extinguished Russia as a competitor had they allowed them a seat at the table comparable to other "Great Powers" of Europe. They did not. When the US picks partners like this, they want bootlickers and grovelers. They want the opposing party to know that they are subservient and to act accordingly, that the US is their savior. That's been the interaction between the US and most NATO expansion countries in the 2000's.

The US simply shot themselves in the foot with this one. The reality is that the US is incapable of running an amazing hegemony because of its obvious political neuroses. Those are problem #1, they can't even handle the #2 problem of the obvious contradictions in the world order and capitalism because they're stuck viewing it through a neurotic lens of their ideology. Those first order problems of neuroses have weakened the hegemony long before the second order contradictions start nipping at the seams. Those second order contradictions have been nipping, especially with Turkey.