US War on Multipolarism: Turning the Gameboard Over

August 17, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US has pursued a policy of global primacy spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, enduring regardless of presidential administration or the balance between Democratic and Republican parties in Congress, carving out what is a modern day American empire. 

The US controls not only the entirety of the Western world (Europe, Australia, and New Zealand), but also proxies in South America, Africa, and all across Asia from east to west. It seeks to maintain - even expand its domination further through military and economic power, as well as through political subversion, infiltration and capture as well as through information dominance. 

Conversely - there emerges a multipolar world which favors a balance of power between nations rather than subordination to a single nation. 

Centered on the BRICS organization led by the rise of China and the reemergence of Russia, the multipolar world is not only creating the means by which to defend against US encroachment, encirclement, and eventual capture - it is creating an alternative global system holding the potential to entirely displace the toxic US unipolar system. 

Multipolar Ships Rise on China’s Tide 

China’s rise alone in terms of economic, industrial, and military power - has by nearly every metric matched or is now exceeding that of US power. 

China’s rise has created the opportunity for other nations targeted by US domination to trade with and benefit from a growing center of global power on par with the US and its proxies - allowing nations like North Korea, Russia, and Iran to sustain viable economies despite being cut off from US-dominated “global” economic systems, institutions, and services. 

China, together with a growing number of partner nations, are creating alternatives to these economic systems, institutions, and services long-since monopolized and perpetually abused by the US. 

Despite this, the US remains a powerful and dangerous global power - but a global power whose limits are increasingly exposed by the equally powerful and growing multipolar world. 

What has resulted is no longer a contest between two global players - but a player who inevitably faces defeat seeking to topple the gameboard altogether before that defeat fully materializes.  

Toppling the Global Gameboard

The US finds itself an aggressive global hegemon with a system built upon the perpetual pursuit of power and profit in a finite world where its means to do so are in decline relative to China’s rise alone - saying nothing of the multipolar world China is helping take shape. 

This can be defined in real-world metrics. 

China’ Long March 10B Rocket Closes Gap on Space Launch Capabilities

July 21, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - On July 10, 2026 China successfully launched a payload to orbit and recovered the first stage booster of its Long March 10B rocket system making China only the second nation after the US to do so. 

The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) through its commercial subsidiary - China Rocket Company - has developed the Long March 10B - featuring a reusable first stage recovered by landing under its own power on a recovery ship using a cable net system. 

In function, it is similar to the US-based SpaceX’s Falcon 9 which can return to landing pads on shore or land on recovery ships at sea using deployable legs. By eliminating the legs from the first stage booster and using the cable net system, the Long March 10B saves weight that can be used instead for additional fuel. 

Both the Long March 10B and the Falcon 9 use kerosene and LOX (liquid oxygen) fueled engines - though each system uses different types of engines. The Long March 10B has 7 engines, while Falcon 9 has 9. 

The Long March 10B can carry 16 metric tons into orbit in reusable configuration while the Falcon 9 can carry 17.5 metric tons into orbit - fairly comparable. 

China seeks to examine, refurbish and relaunch this recovered booster a second time by the end of 2026. 

This was only the second test of the Long March 10B - the first occurred in February this year featuring a planned soft-landing at sea next to the recovery ship after propelling China’s new manned spacecraft - the Mengzhou - to maximum dynamic pressure (the highest speed and pressures within the Earth’s atmosphere) before conducting a launch abort test which was also successful.

To have successfully designed, tested, and successfully recovered a first stage booster with capabilities on par with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 in just 2 attempts is a monumental achievement considering the multiple failures that took place when developing the Falcon 9 itself.  

Why China’s Success is Important

In 2020 and 2021 China was outpacing the US in space launches. By 2022 the US had surpassed China, and every year since the US has surpassed China solely because of SpaceX’s ability to launch, recover, and reuse its rocket fleet - where China - until now - has been forced to fully expend every rocket it launches.

Over the years SpaceX has launched and recovered its Falcon 9 rockets over 600 times. 

In 2025 - last year - the US launched a total of 181 rockets - China 92-93 - Russia 17 - meaning the US launched more rockets than both China and Russia combined. 

The US has exploited this advantage in launch cadence by building the Starlink (approximately 10,000 active satellites) and now the Starshield (approximately 200 active satellites) low earth orbit satellite constellations used to wage war around the globe - from Russia to Iran and eventually against China itself. 

Russia and China have been deploying their own versions of these low earth orbit satellite constellations for low latency communication for both civilian and military applications - but because of their lower launch cadence - they have many times fewer satellites of this kind in orbit - thus coverage and resolution lags behind their US counterparts.

US Prepares Terrorist Army to Expand its Dirty War on China

June 23, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US media has invested in recent years in rehabilitating Uyghur Chinese extremists now based in Syria, depicting them as “freedom fighters” whose ultimate goal is to “liberate” (carve off) territory in western China, and are preparing to fight China across Eurasia - adding to an already ongoing dirty war the US has been waging against China over the 20th and 21st centuries.

  

A Familiar Pattern 

From the Cold War to present day, the United States has actively created and used the world’s worst terrorist organizations to advance US geopolitical objectives worldwide. This includes the creation and use of Al Qaeda (through local chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood) in the 1970s and 1980s in Syria and their export to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union until their withdrawal in 1989. 

It also includes the use of these same terrorists to divide and disrupt unified resistance to invading US forces in Iraq from 2003 onward, and the eventual region-wide US reordering of the Arab World spanning Libya and Egypt in North Africa to Yemen and Syria in the MIddle East beginning under the likewise US-engineered “Arab Spring” in 2011. 

From North Africa to Central Asia, the US has admittedly utilized terrorist organizations listed by the US State Department itself as such, to both target nations the US military cannot attack directly and to serve as a pretext for US invasions and occupations in nations the US seeks to attack more directly. 

Other episodes in which this US strategy has been employed include against both Russia in its southern Caucasus region and even as far as China in East Asia. 

While both Russia and China appear to have successfully neutralized this malicious method of proxy warfare utilized by Washington within their respective borders, the US continues not only arming and building up terrorist forces for future conflicts, but is also shaping public perception to depict such use of US-sponsored terrorism as somehow supporting “freedom fighters” against “authoritarian” governments. 

US Media Reintroducing Uyghur Terrorists as “Freedom Fighters” 

A troubling sign that the US continues seeking to use extremists specifically tailored for attacking China and its investments and projects across Eurasia, is a May 2026 National Public Radio (NPR) article titled, “The foreign fighters who helped topple Assad — and why China worries about them.” 

The article - only the latest of many spanning recent years - portrays the largest segment of foreign fighters involved in the US-backed overthrow of Syria in 2024 - Uyghur extremists from China’s western region of Xinjiang - as simply fleeing persecution in China and incidentally ending up aligned with and fighting alongside Al Qaeda. 

The article mentions the previously US State Department-designated foreign terrorist organization (until June 2025) Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Uyghur fighters were recruited into as an Al Qaeda affiliate which ultimately overran Syrian forces in 2024, toppling the Syrian government.

HTS’ figurehead Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (now referred to as Ahmed al-Sharaa) has even been designated as Syria’s defacto president by the US and its proxies and has even been invited to the White House by current US President Donald Trump despite previously having a 10 million USD reward on his head by the US government itself.

The moral flexibility of the US regarding Al Qaeda based on whether the US is trying to justify direct military intervention in Syria before the government’s collapse or cement a terrorist-led proxy regime afterwards is the central hallmark of the decades-spanning use by Washington of terrorist organizations to target, undermine, topple, then politically capture targeted nations. 

Afghanistan: America’s Other Ongoing Proxy War

May 11, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - A recent article published by the US arms-industry, big-tech, banking, and other Western special interests-funded Lowy Institute’s “Interpreter,” boldly claims “Afghanistan is surrendering its mineral wealth - and its future.” 

China is accused of simply digging up and removing raw minerals from Afghanistan for processing elsewhere - a process the article claims amounts to China robbying Afghanistan of its natural resources and deliberately leaving it in a state of perpetual destitution. 

What the article deliberately omits is the presence of armed extremists attacking Chinese investments, diplomatic missions, and personnel across the country, making it physically impossible for China to invest in and enable Afghanistan - for the time being - to process this raw mineral wealth domestically and export higher-value industrial inputs for greater profits. 

China’s attempts to work with Afghanistan - providing it immediate and desperately needed income to rebuild the nation comes after 20 years of US military occupation and abuses - coupled together with the US seizure of over 9.5 billion USD in Afghan assets from 2021 onward and the use of US-backed extremists to sabotage any attempt to stabilize, rebuild, and perhaps even develop the Central Asian country.  

The US, having created the death, destruction, and poverty Afghans currently suffer under, through its propaganda organs are attempting to shift the blame onto nations like China attempting to work with Afghanistan despite the challenges deliberately created by the US to do so in the first place. 

Washington’s Long History of using Extremists to Destabilize Others

While the US wages high profile wars and proxy wars around the globe - from attacking Venezuela in Latin America, to attacking Russian energy production, storage, and export facilities and attributing it to “Ukraine” in Europe, and its ongoing war of aggression against Iran in the Middle East - the US is also waging a number of dirty wars everywhere in between. 

America’s Future: A Prosperous, Peaceful Nation, or a Bankrupt, Violent Empire?

May 7, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US is at a juncture faced with two choices. It can either manage a transition from global hegemon to a prosperous, peaceful nation working together as equals with all other nations, or it can double down on its continuation as a bankrupt, violent empire seeking continued control over all other nations. 

To answer the question as to which path the US will take requires understanding the structural features that underpin US hegemony in the first place. 

A System Built on Domination 

The current US system is predicated on global domination. 

The US dollar as the global reserve currency is what has allowed the US to accumulate a multi-trillion dollar debt and still maintain immense power and wealth not only within its borders but far beyond them. 

This resulting hegemony allows the US to set “global norms” regarding global trade, human rights, and the development of and control over key technologies - especially in terms of exercising immense hypocrisy and selective enforcement while doing so. 

It has also allowed the US to create a network of what it calls "security guarantees” in which US military forces occupy nations around the globe, from Europe and the Middle East, to Southeast and East Asia - predicated in principle on ensuring the security of these “allies,” but in practice simply serving as cover for what the US calls “power projection” - the ability of the US to exercise military aggression virtually anywhere on Earth at a moment’s notice.

Often this US “power projection” comes at the cost of the security of nations hosting US troops. 

The threat or use of US military aggression around the globe is essential for maintaining the US dollar as the global reserve currency and thus American hegemony overall. 

US military aggression serves to degrade or eliminate potential rivals and the alternative financial and monetary systems they inevitably seek to create to work their way out from under subordination to Wall Street and Washington. 

This has been US policy spanning decades - including from the end of the Cold War to today. 

The growing power of alternative systems across what many call the emerging multipolar world has forced the US to embark on not only unprecedented wars of aggression around the globe including wars and proxy wars against Venezuela, Russia, Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran, but also unprecedented military spending with the current US military budget hovering around 1.5 trillion US dollars and growing. 

While at face value this appears to be unsustainable and irrational - there are several reasons why the US refuses to adopt a more rational course of policy. 

The US military industrial base is composed of immensely wealthy and influential corporations.  The US dominance stemming from the military aggression worldwide they enable, helps establish and expand monopolies across other US industries including big-oil, big-agriculture, the auto industry, big-pharmaceutical corporations, big-tech and many more. 

These industries together serve as the foundation of US economic, military, political, and informational power. Each corporation’s trajectory is guided by shareholder primacy - meaning each and every one of these corporations are required by law to constantly expand profit for its shareholders. 

Because perpetual growth is both irrational and unsustainable in a finite world, with a finite population, and finite resources - this creates structural necessities to constantly expand markets and growth at any cost - including through war, exploitation, predatory lending, and many more toxic practices. 

While this economic system drives the pursuit of US primacy around the globe, ideology serves as structural reinforcement - this includes the notion of “American exceptionalism” which insists the US is not only inherently superior to all other nations, but that it has a moral and even “divine” duty to assume global hegemony. 

Not only is perpetual growth within a finite system irrational and unsustainable - there are other external reasons the US pursuit of hegemony is dangerously unrealistic. 

China’s rise is driven by several core realities the US cannot readily change including the fact that China has a population over 4 times greater than the US thus a vastly larger workforce, a vastly larger industrial base, better infrastructure, deeper and better developed supply chains, a better education system producing millions more graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and growing military power - both conventional and nuclear - that make the application of US military aggression less and less likely to succeed in coercing or containing China. 

“What if…”

What if the US were to decide to abandon this irrational and unsustainable pursuit of global hegemony? 

Analysts imagine the US could achieve this by retreating to the Western Hemisphere, reshoring industrial capacity, auditing and cutting the US “defense” budget, shifting from global “power projection” to investing in domestic infrastructure, and rebuilding the strength of the US dollar on productivity rather than global military aggression. 

The US War for Energy Dominance Leads to Dominance Over Europe and Asia

May 3, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US war on Iran - at face value - appears to be a catastrophic tactical and strategic US failure demonstrating the limits of its military power and further exposing the limits of its military industrial capacity. 

However, just as with its still-ongoing proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, its inability to overwhelm targeted nations with outright military power distracts away from the many ways the US is still advancing its geopolitical objectives by other means. 

In Ukraine, the US has categorically failed in defeating Russian forces through its support of its Ukrainian proxies. However, it has used the war to lock Russia into an expensive, prolonged, high-intensity conflict that has demonstrably compromised Russian interests beyond Europe - especially regarding the 2024 collapse of Syria.

The war has also succeeded in cutting Europe off from cheap, reliable, and plentiful Russian energy and is placing Europe under increasing, and likely irreversible energy dependence on the United States. 

This energy dependence on the US obviously benefits US-based energy corporations financially but also enhances Washington’s strategic leverage or even outright control over Europe. This control is being used to successfully create a united front across Europe against Russia. 

In a similar manner - the US is using its war on Iran to strangle energy exports from the entire Middle East to Asia to decouple Asia from cheap, reliable, plentiful gas and oil and place it under US energy dependence, thus providing the US strategic leverage over Asia to create a similar united front against China. 

Decoupling Europe from Russian Energy Through War Was Planned 

In the 2019 RAND Corporation paper titled, “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground,” a number of “economic” and “geopolitical” measures were laid out, designed to “extend” Russia and possibly precipitate a Soviet Union-style collapse like that which ended the Cold War.

Under “economic measures,” the paper lists “hinder petroleum exports,” “reduce natural gas exports and hinder pipeline expansions,” “impose sanctions,” and “enhance Russian brain drain.”   

The paper first argues that one of the main methods of implementing these measures is to expand US oil and gas production and its export to Europe. 

However, under a section titled, “likelihood of success," the paper explicitly admits:

“Reducing European peacetime consumption of Russian gas has a medium to low likelihood of success. Diversifying away from Russia is expensive, and projects might be difficult to accomplish.”  

It should be remembered that at the time, the US was already investing in LNG export facilities and even exporting LNG targeting markets in Europe - at a time US policymakers admitted it made no financial or economic sense to do so. 

However, the paper was far from finished. Under “geopolitical measures,” the paper lists first and foremost, “provide lethal aid to Ukraine.” 

The paper admits that: 

“Expanding U.S. assistance to Ukraine, including lethal military assistance, would likely increase the costs to Russia, in both blood and treasure, of holding the Donbass region. More Russian aid to the separatists and an additional Russian troop presence would likely be required, leading to larger expenditures, equipment losses, and Russian casualties. The latter could become quite controversial at home, as it did when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.”

In other words, by providing lethal aid to Ukraine - which the US began doing under the first Trump administration - the US would be knowingly attempting to provoke a war with Russia in Ukraine. 

Not only would the resulting war generate high costs for Russia militarily, it would also obviously transform the chief obstacle to reducing/hindering Russian oil/gas exports and expanding US LNG exports - that chief obstacle being “peacetime” - into unending wartime.

The US War on Iran is a US War on Multipolarism

April 3, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - The US war of aggression launched against Iran on February 28, 2026 is only the most recent US aggression launched to undermine and dismantle the multipolar world. The US has not only threatened the existence of Iran as a nation state as well as the security of the entire Middle East, but the death and destruction it has caused has already begun to radiate out across the world in terms of disrupted or destroyed energy exports and rapidly unraveling economic stability.

 

The US - being energy independent itself - has forced much of the world into an American energy monopoly - having placed sanctions on Russian energy exports and now either seizing, disrupting, or destroying all other potential competitors. 

This includes a US invasion of Venezuela just earlier this year, kidnapping the Venezuelan president and holding the remaining government hostage while openly seizing the nation’s natural resources - including oil - for the US itself. 

The current US war of aggression against Iran is not only targeting Iranian energy production but has resulted in regional conflict damaging or destroying energy production across the Persian Gulf altogether. . 

Because the US produces nowhere near the amount of oil and LNG required to make up for disrupted or destroyed energy production and exports from the Middle East, this will result in global energy shortages and subsequent collapses in both industry and consumer demand. 

The world which had been collectively rising above and beyond the reach of US primacy now faces the prospect of being deliberately destabilized and dragged down by the US. 

The US itself, incapable of competing within the very world order it created following the World Wars, has decided to use its remaining military, economic, financial, and political strength to demolish it in the hope of emerging from the settling debris once again “strongest.” 

Far from an obscure theory, this is an observation made even by Russia’s top diplomat, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who in a recent interview would say that, “the events in Latin America and the Middle East directly stem from the West’s attempts to preserve the remnants of its dominance,” and that, “the elites of Western countries, continue to invest whatever political and economic resources they have left in their confrontation with our country.” 

Far from a last minute plan, the US spent much of the 21st century preparing not only for the now ongoing war with Iran but also its ongoing proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, and its growing encirclement of China in the Asia-Pacific region - targeting all of multipolarism’s major pillars and many in between. 

On the Path to Persia 

To encircle and weaken Iran, the US invaded Afghanistan to its east and Iraq to its west in 2001 and 2003 respectively under the Bush Jr. administration. During that same administration, the US began preparing armies of extremists to wage proxy war against Iran and its regional allies including Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the nation of Syria, and Ansar Allah in Yemen. 

American/Ukrainians Caught Arming Militants in Myanmar and the US Dirty War on China

March 20, 2026 (NEO - Brian Berletic) - India’s national media reported the arrest by Indian security services of US mercenary Matthew VanDyke and six Ukrainians for illegally crossing the border into neighboring Myanmar to provide military training to armed groups fighting Myanmar’s central government. 

Indian security services have also linked the suspects to “importing huge consignments of drones from Europe to Myanmar via India” for “ethnic armed groups,” matching the established pattern of US proxy war waged around the globe throughout the 21st century. 

The military support provided by groups like VanDyke’s “Sons of Liberty” and other US-linked organizations like former US Special Forces operator David Eubank’s “Free Burma Rangers,” together with overt US government funding and support for political opposition groups the US seeks to install into power, have fueled decades of conflict inside Southeast Asia’s nation of Myanmar. 

US-Backed Militants in Myanmar

VanDyke has gravitated toward US wars and proxy wars of aggression around the globe including the US war on Libya in 2011, against Syria also in 2011, and in Ukraine from 2022 onward according to Western sources like Newsweek.  

VanDyke’s recent operation in Myanmar involved not only training militants, but also equipping them with “huge consignments” of drones, indicating a significant source of funding. Because the funding is not disclosed by VanDyke’s “non-profit security contracting firm” it is very likely - as with all other aspects of Myanmar’s opposition - it is funded by the US government and simply laundered through fronts like VanDyke’s. 

Other similarly US-backed operations training and equipping militants in Myanmar include David Eubank’s “Free Burma Rangers” (FBR). US diplomatic cables made available by Wikileaks revealed Eubank regularly reports to US government representatives at the US consulate in neighboring Thailand (here, here, here, here, and here). 

While FBR poses as some sort of nongovernmental organization (NGO) which “assists ethnic resistance groups” with “humanitarian operations,” videos produced by Free Burma Rangers themselves and those by the militant groups they help train and equip, depict the organization providing military training (including weapons training), as well as FBR members themselves carrying weapons on patrol with local militants.

The political opposition these armed groups seek to install into power, the so-called “National Unity Government” (NUG) is itself a documented wholecloth creation of the US government.