The overthrow of the regime in Syria and the passing of the Syrian state into the US-Western camp are the latest episodes in the long-running battle between unipolarity and multipolarity. The former represents American policy, while the latter represents the position held by countries that do not accept US hegemony.
Our era is characterized by an objective retreat – natural and well-known in history – and questioning the predominance of a great power, but it is also illustrative of the fierce struggle waged by the United States to reverse the trend and perpetuate a status quo that serves its primacy and artificially secures its control and profits on the production of wealth developed abroad. This objective of unipolarity is a first characteristic feature of its imperialism.
An Offensive Policy
Since they will have more and more difficulty competing with the most dynamic and productive forces in the world, their policy is to bring them down by all possible means. It ranges from open war to chaos, including control and satellization. It is an offensive policy conducted for the purpose of defending the established order. Its spokesmen try to pass it off as an enterprise of extending “democracy,” in its Western sense (purely political electoral process with socio-economic status quo). One only has to look at the American oligarchic system to understand what this travesty of democracy is all about.
The Real Issue
This so called ‘spreading of democracy’ is just a diversion and a smokescreen to justify expansion and takeover efforts against targeted countries. The issue in the global conflict is not “democracy” but the perpetuation or not of the contested hegemony of the United States by the neutralization of countries that do not submit to American control. The conflict is a geopolitical one and not a clash of “values”, as the United States and its camp would have us believe. It constitutes an attempt at forced integration of the rest of the world in a position of subordination relative to American-centric globalized capitalism. This hegemonic ambition is another aspect of imperialism. The ideology is neoliberal. The process has accelerated following the dismantling of the USSR, but it then encountered growing opposition due to its intrinsic vices and dysfunctions: economic crises, enrichment of wealthy minorities and mass impoverishment, endless wars to continue its expansion.
The Center and the Periphery
It is in this general context that the battle is waged by the United States against China and Russia, the two most powerful challengers to the American order and the poles of global opposition to their hegemony. Overcoming them is an immense adventure that cannot be attempted without methodical preparation. In the meantime, operations are taking place to take over weaker and anti-hegemonic countries or those likely to join this current. This is how we must understand the offensive actions against Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, Georgia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Syria, and many others. All these countries have relations and affinities with Russia and China, or are contiguous to them. The aim is to weaken Russia and China by turning their neighborhood against them. The Ukrainian case is clear: instrumentalizing neighboring Ukraine to make it an enemy of Russia, a battering ram and a military launch pad against this country. Added to this is the encirclement of Russia by NATO. A similar scenario is emerging with the use of Taiwan and the countries of Asia against China. The ultimate targets are therefore Russia and China, rightly identified as the main centers of resistance to the American project. It is in this context that we must place the war waged against Syria since 2011 and which resulted in its fall in 2024.
Strengths and Weaknesses
In this global confrontation, the United States and those they target are not in the same position and do not have the same means. Although it is historically in decline, the United States is in an offensive position. Conversely, although they are in phase with the evolution of history, anti-hegemony forces are in a defensive position. At first glance, the United States and its camp have more means of all kinds than their targets, but this situation is fluid and susceptible to rebalancing. Moreover, it is gradually changing.
We will try here to give an overview of the means and actions of each of the parties. At the raw military level, the balance is acquired in terms of weapons of mass destruction, in the sense that each is able to destroy the other. The existence of these weapons ensures that a direct and frontal war will be avoided for as long as possible, despite the speculations of some hotheads who believe it is winnable and the efforts to find miracle weapons that would instantly put the adversary out of action, with a minimum of damage to oneself.
Most of the current war is taking place at a level below that of total war. The current wars waged by the United States are aimed at making their adversaries collapse without a direct and massive attack. Those who have nuclear weapons can retaliate. Those who do not have them still enjoy a certain protection coming from the fact that, even after invasions and occupations, they are almost impossible to control and they cost the army of the occupier lives, as Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated. The United States seems to have cured itself of the habit of putting “boots on the ground ”.
This is why current wars are hybrid and are waged for the purpose of destabilization rather than conquest. They deploy a range of means to bring the targeted country to its knees. The modus operandi includes fomenting disorder, stirring up demonstrations, the personalization of situations, the demonization of leaders, the creation of opposition leaders fawned over in the West, a deluge of propaganda, “color revolutions,” the instrumentalization of neighboring countries, the fostering of ethnic-regional unrest, the use of terrorist auxiliaries/proxies (Contras, jihadists) to disarticulate societies and provoke civil wars, without excluding military pressure, threats and air “strikes.” This is the new way of waging war. These techniques are the de facto monopoly of the West (the United States and its camp) because they are on the offensive.
The group of targeted countries does not wage hybrid wars. It resists as best it can, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. It cannot be said that they have found a way to protect itself. Their greatest weakness lies in their defensive position. They take blows without being able to give any. A glaring shortcoming is the failure to articulate and disseminate their point of view. Faced with the Western uproar about “democracy”, they are content to underline their sovereignty without explaining its importance, without explicitly unmasking the enterprise of subjugation to which they are subjected and without responding to the criticism of their societies with detailed criticism of Western society. They are content with legalisms and the use of official channels (embassies, UN, communiqués, formal press conferences), counting on rationality and law, and leaving the public sphere and public opinions entirely under the control of Westerners, who are more experienced in marketing. The targeted countries do not even try to penetrate the sphere of “communications”. This is where the Western advantage is most evident: the possibility of imposing its “narrative”, however improbable and demagogic it may be, and of labelling its adversaries as it pleases through the omnipresent mass media (“dictator”, “authoritarian”, “ultra conservative”, etc.), while addressing the public rather than official circles.
Finally, there is a major asset at the West’s disposal, namely that of being able to use relay countries to do part of the work for it. The elites of these countries are integrated into the Western system and they turn the states they lead into extensions of the West. This is the fruit of the West’s long colonial experience, of its domination of the world and its wealth, as well as the fact that it entered early into continuous development and was thus able to establish long-standing loyalties and complicities. Russia and China do not have any significant relays.
Conclusion
These relays are “peripheral” to the main targets that are Russia and China. The latter are the real fortresses to be taken, protected and dangerous pillars for anyone who would try to attack them directly. Still, they can be isolated and have not really resolved the dilemma of the destabilizing action of the West in their near and distant environment. The success of this action brings the world closer to a direct confrontation between the United States, Russia and China. The latter could find themselves having to fight with all their potential in order to ensure their survival.
