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An 8-panel Phoebe Teaching Joey meme.
The first panel is Phoebe from Friends saying “Russia”.
The second panel is Joey from the same show replying with “Russia”.
The third panel is Phoebe saying “has invaded”.
The fourth panel is Joey repeating back “has invaded”.
The fifth panel is Phoebe saying “Ukraine”.
The sixth panel is Joey repeating back “Ukraine”.
The seventh panel is Phoebe saying the completed phrase “Russia has invaded Ukraine”.
The final panel shows Joey proudly proclaiming “NATO just started a proxy war”.
Your first mistake here is assuming that imperialism is only when the West does it. If Ukraine is forced to give concessions to Russia in any form, any wannabe imperialist now knows they can now chip away other countries’ land if they are willing and capable of enacting enough violence, whether that country is Western or not, and they might get away with it. Unstability weakens multilateralism; multilateralism disincentivizes unilateral aggression.
Multilateralism is the exact opposite of what would happen if the US manages to fend off Russia and China. The only way multilateralism can truly emerge is a confrontation between two or more blocks where there is no clear winner and thus big countries need to offer more autonomy to small countries in order to win them over. The US sparking wars to keep poor countries sending raw materials home, leveraging the dollar and nuking from orbit anything that even remotely looks like socialism as they’ve been doing right up to this point is the worst case scenario, and the global events that are weakening this should go on as much as possible. The best case scenario is that a revolution becomes easier due to instability, and cooperation between socialist powers appears as a new stabilizing force.