WESTERN HEGEMONY IS WEARING OUT IN UKRAINE AND GAZA

The political, military and economic elites of the West have been trying to stop and weaken what they consider to be the two powers challenging their hegemony in the world, Russia and China, for 15 years, when the so-called BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) was formally established, which at the time was seen as a global counter-elite, facing the West in all fields of power.

Led by the United States, Western powers and their allies in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Latin America have been attempting to destabilize and even provoke regime change in Russia, using mainly Ukraine as a spearhead, since the 2014 coup d’état, when the pro-Russian government of Yanukovich was overthrown and successive pro-Western governments (Poroshenko and Zelensky) have posed a major challenge to Russian security, eventually leading to the invasion of Ukraine’s eastern provinces by the Russian army in February 2022, allowing Western powers to attempt Russia’s total isolation from the international community and to increase military and economic support to Ukraine in order to wear down and inflict a strategic defeat on Vladimir Putin.

After 10 years of economic sanctions against Russia (since 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula after the coup against Yanukovich), and 2 and a half years of war between Russia and Ukraine, the military situation has been deteriorating for the Ukrainians, as Russia continues to occupy the eastern provinces (the Donbas) and has destroyed a significant part of the Ukrainian army and civilian infrastructure, not without suffering great human losses and now a surprise Ukrainian incursion into the Kursk region in western Russia.

However, the conflict continues and does not seem to end soon, as the many initiatives by different countries and the UN to end it have been rejected by both countries, and in addition, the Western powers continue to give massive military and economic aid to Ukraine to keep Russia worn down and stuck in this conflict.

But for the West, losses are beginning to mount, as cheap Russian gas, which was bought in most of Western Europe, has stopped flowing in that direction and is now heading to China.

As a result, Europe's largest economy, Germany, has stagnated, having to seek alternative energy sources by buying liquefied gas from the Middle East and the United States, which is significantly more expensive than Russian gas.

Also, the economic and military aid that NATO countries have given to Ukraine has begun to generate internal opposition in European countries and even in the United States, as they see no benefit to them, and so anti-European parties such as Germany's AfD, which oppose this aid, have begun to improve their electoral results (most recently in Thuringia and Saxony).

In the case of the United States, a section of the Republican Party is opposed to continuing to send aid to Ukraine, given that it is not clear that the Ukrainian government is using it in the war, and that it is not being diverted through corruption to the country's own rulers.

How long can the West continue to sustain this situation? Western elites expected the Russian government to collapse under economic sanctions, international isolation and the war effort itself, but it turns out that Russia has been able to adapt to the situation, maintaining economic and diplomatic relations with numerous countries in the Global South and especially with the world's second largest economy, China, which would not benefit from seeing Russia fall under Western domination, so it has maintained its diplomatic and economic support for the Kremlin.

The Zelensky government only needs to convince the West to provide it with weapons that can change the situation on the ground, so it is demanding long-range missiles, with which it could threaten the main Russian cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg); but this would lead Russia to reconsider its nuclear doctrine and would not rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine, if it were threatened with long-range missiles of Western manufacture.

All the above would escalate the conflict and would put NATO on the verge of open war with Moscow, so that the Russians would have no other option than to resort to nuclear weapons, given the great inferiority of their conventional army compared to those of the West.

Everything indicates that Washington wants to take the situation to that point, considering that Russia will choose to accept its defeat against Ukraine, that is, withdraw from the eastern provinces and even from the Crimean Peninsula, before facing a conventional war first and then perhaps a nuclear war with the West.

The Russian leadership has made it clear, time and again, that if the country's existence (and essentially the permanence of the current Russian government) is in jeopardy, they will not hesitate to use their nuclear arsenal.

Western elites insist that these are just threats that will not be realized, so they continue to arm Ukraine, and this increasingly brings the world into the possibility of a nuclear confrontation, even though Western elites feel very confident that Putin will never dare to use his nuclear arsenal.

In Gaza, the West is trapped in the strategy of Netanyahu and his ethno-nationalist government, which, taking advantage of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, has unleashed a final offensive against Hamas and the Palestinians of the West Bank, as well as developed clear provocations against Hezbollah and Iran, in order to start a regional war against its enemies in the Middle East, which would force the United States and some Western European countries (the United Kingdom, France and Germany significantly) to enter into its favor in said conflagration, which would allow the Israeli Zionists not only to finish off in one blow those they consider their enemies in the region, but also to achieve the long-awaited ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, thus finally completing the project of Greater Israel.

For the West, the genocide that Israel is committing against the Palestinians has meant a hard blow to its “rules-based international order”; for its propaganda in favor of human rights and democracy and for its supposed impartiality in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The West, led by the United States, has armed and financed the genocide committed by Israel in Gaza and now also in the West Bank, while at the same time lamenting the tragedy of the Palestinian people, as if it were caused by uncontrollable forces of nature or the universe.

The reality is that the powerful pro-Zionist groups and pro-Israel lobbies in the United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe have hijacked the diplomacy, military and economic policies of these countries, which are surrendering to the demands and priorities of the Israeli Zionists, who do not care about the protests and indignation of millions of people in the world over the devastation and genocide they are causing the Palestinian people.

These Zionist elites in the West and in Israel are convinced that this moment will not come for a long time to achieve their long-awaited goal of finishing off the occupation of Palestinian land with their Zionist colonizers and killing and expelling from that region as many Palestinians as they can.

However, the Global South and countries challenging Western hegemony, notably China, Russia and Iran, are not aligned with these destructive objectives of international Zionism, and together with the Palestinian resistance, they are beginning to exert pressure against this strategy of ethnic cleansing and territorial occupation driven from Tel Aviv.

Thus, the protests against this genocide that are taking place in the West and the Global South, the resources that the West has to continue sending to Israel to maintain this systematic killing and destruction, and the fierce resistance that the various pro-Palestinian groups continue to deploy, are already beginning to take a political, social and economic toll on the West and Israel, so that the calls for a ceasefire and a viable post-conflict strategy are multiplying, generating strong pressures in the West to stop the killing and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank.

Even so, the pro-Zionist elites and the pro-Israel lobbies do not seem willing to stop, despite the growing political, economic and social costs that they are already generating in the West and in Israel itself, so it is feasible that this conflict will continue for several more months, if the Western elites continue to be subordinated to the guidelines of international Zionism.