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america is killing the planet....

The World Bank’s Reboot Development report has belatedly confirmed what scientists have warned for decades: humanity is breaching the safe operating limits of the Earth.

Air, water, forests and oceans, the very foundations of life are unravelling under the pressure of unrestrained growth. Six of nine planetary boundaries have already been crossed.

 

Stewart Sweeney

Why the planet now needs China

 

At the same time, the world order that presided over this destruction is itself in convulsion. The US, once the anchor of the liberal international order, is now a declining hegemon. But instead of managing decline with prudence, it is doubling down on unpredictability, militarisation and irrationality – a politics of defensiveness, rather than responsibility.

Taken together, ecological overshoot and US decline create the most dangerous conjuncture in modern history. Saving a livable planet will increasingly depend not on Washington, but on whether China can help shape a more inclusive, sustainable and safe world order.

The US as destabiliser

The second Trump presidency has stripped bare the illusions of American leadership. The US has renounced climate agreements, fuelled trade wars, blocked multilateral reforms and escalated military tensions in Asia. It spends more on weapons than the next 10 powers combined, even as its infrastructure crumbles and its climate policies oscillate wildly between administrations.

This is not simply mismanagement. It is structural decline. US power has always rested on a carbon-fuelled industrial base, global financial dominance and a vast military footprint. Each of these pillars is now eroding. And as they do, Washington increasingly lashes out rather than leads.

For the planet, this is disastrous. The country most responsible for historic emissions is also the one least able and least willing to provide ecological security.

China as system-maker

China, for all its contradictions, is now indispensable to any viable path forward. Its scale alone makes it central: nearly one-fifth of humanity, the largest share of global manufacturing and a dominant role in clean energy technologies. Beijing’s investments in solar, wind, batteries and electric vehicles have pushed costs down worldwide. Its Belt and Road Initiative, for all its flaws, at least gestures towards South-South infrastructure and green finance.

If the 20th century was the “American century”, the 21st will be one in which China’s choices set the global trajectory. That includes whether the world tips into ecological collapse or whether we begin to stabilise the Earth system.

But China’s role will not only be economic or technological. As US unpredictability worsens, countries from Africa to Latin America to Southeast Asia are already looking to Beijing for stability, investment and alternative visions of order. A “multipolar” world may be the polite label; the reality is that China is increasingly the indispensable pole.

The unresolved challenge: democracy

Here lies the paradox. To save the planet we need China’s weight. Yet China’s political system raises profound questions about democracy, rights and accountability.

A sustainable order cannot simply be authoritarian modernisation on a planetary scale. If ecological limits demand restraint, democracy is needed to decide whose consumption is restrained, whose industries are wound back, whose lifestyles are transformed. Without voice and participation, ecological transition risks becoming eco-authoritarianism: efficient, perhaps, but brittle and unjust.

Thus the great challenge of our century is not only how to avoid collapse, but how to reconcile ecological survival with democratic flourishing.

Between dependency and agency

Australia, perched between an irrational ally and an indispensable neighbour, embodies this dilemma. Canberra clings to Washington through AUKUS even as the US drifts into chaos. Yet our export dependence on China, from iron ore to lithium, is undeniable.

The lesson of Reboot Development is that the old growth model, extractive, carbon-heavy, developer-driven, is itself unsustainable. If Australia wants to thrive in a livable world, it cannot simply trade ore to Beijing while outsourcing security to Washington. It must cultivate independent capacity to align democracy with sustainability.

That means strengthening democratic institutions against capture by property developers and fossil lobbies. It means investing in public housing, clean industry, canopy cover and cultural renewal. And it means contributing ideas not just commodities to the shaping of a new world order.

A new global bargain

If China is to become the system-maker, it too must change. Its Belt and Road must green itself in substance, not just rhetoric. Its surveillance-heavy political model must find ways to incorporate deliberation, participation and rights. Its diplomacy must move beyond transactionalism towards genuine multilateralism.

Equally, the West must shed the fantasy of perpetual primacy. The US is not returning to 1945. Europe cannot wall itself off from Asia or Africa. A livable planet requires a global bargain: Chinese scale and technology, Western institutions and norms, Southern voices and demands, all woven into a more plural, sustainable order.

This is not a naïve hope. It is sober necessity. The alternative is ecological collapse amid militarised rivalry, an outcome in which democracy and prosperity alike wither.

Conclusion: democracy or eco-authoritarianism?

The World Bank has admitted that infinite growth on a finite planet is a formula for disaster. What it has not admitted is that avoiding disaster requires more than efficiency and cleaner production. It requires new political forms that combine ecological limits with democratic voice.

China will be central to this new order. But unless democracy is part of the settlement, not as a Western export model, but as a plural, evolving practice of participation and accountability, then the world we save may not be worth living in.

The task, then, is double: to survive the crossing of planetary boundaries, and to renew democracy in the process. Between ruin and renewal lies the space we must fight to inhabit. And, paradoxically, whether we succeed now depends less on Washington, and more on Beijing.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/09/why-the-planet-now-needs-china/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

disarray....

 

Donald Trump corrects Victor Hugo: “Those who live are those who surrender”

Lama El Horr

 

The torment that Washington and its satellites inflict on the peoples of the world is so outrageous that it reveals the disarray of the supremacist bloc, which seems to be playing its final card: The resuscitation of a wrecked Empire.

 

This playbook for restoring fallen hegemony consists of “negotiating” with Beijing through a means of coercion dear to Washington: blackmail. This is done by orchestrating, directly or through proxies, state terrorism of unbridled savagery in every corner of the world where the supremacy of the Euro-Atlantic oligarchy is threatened. In other words, in every corner of the world.

The ensuing funeral ceremonies, also orchestrated by the Axis of the Fallen Hegemon, aim to impose as an irreversible reality the losses of territory, fundamental rights, and power that these destructions and killings are supposed to inflict on the BRICS, the global South, and, of course, China.

“Give me the moon,” Trump asks Xi

Observing the conflagration of conflicts surrounding China, there is no doubt that Washington has raised its level of aggression a notch. The nature of the crises encircling Chinese territory indicates that the US administration has moved from “courteous” blackmail to “martial” blackmail.

Clearly, the imperialist bloc is going through a phase of such acute megalomania that it is incapable of making rational decisions 

“Courteous” blackmail is a traditional coercive tool used by Washington. It might look something like this: “China will be able to strengthen its cooperation with the European Union if it renounces buying Russian energy,” and aims, in this case, to kill two birds with one stone, i.e., to subjugate both Beijing and Moscow.

But this type of blackmail also manifests itself in more ambiguous ways: this is the case with Trump’s announcement of an agreement with Armenia, which has reportedly ceded the development and management of the Zangezur corridor to Washington for a period of 99 years. It goes without saying that such an agreement, if confirmed, can only arouse the fears of Beijing and Moscow and the categorical rejection of Tehran, since it leaves open the threat of an American presence in the South Caucasus. Admittedly, this may be a warning to Beijing and Moscow regarding their security collaboration with Iran: “If you strengthen Tehran’s defense capabilities against Israel, we will deploy troops between Armenia and Iran.” But it may also be that Washington has drawn a parallel with South America: “If China goes ahead with the bio-oceanic rail corridor project, which is supposed to link Brazil to the port of Chancay via Bolivia, there will be a NATO presence on Iran’s northwestern borders”—with all the security implications that such a deployment would entail for Iran, for the North-South corridor, and for the BRI network in Central Asia.

When this “polite” blackmail fails to achieve the set objective, Washington changes its modus operandi. Most recently, for example, Trump asked his satellites to outsource pressure against Beijing: “The G7/NATO/EU bloc must impose sanctions on China and India to force them to turn their backs on Russia.”

But the American modus operandi can also involve resorting to “martial” blackmail. This type of blackmail is more complex than the previous one. While it also involves coercion, it relies on brute force, and it is not always easy to discern the actors or their true level of involvement.

Suddenly, a succession of violent events occurs in more or less strategic areas, which seem to reshuffle the cards of the regional geopolitical chessboard. This is the case of the countless military assaults in West Asia—Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Qatar. It is also the case, in South and Southeast Asia, of the India/Pakistan or Cambodia/Thailand conflict; of the declaration of martial law by former President Yoon in South Korea; of the color revolutions in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal; of the sporadic riots in Mongolia; of the war of attrition in Myanmar; or of the insurrection in Indonesia, a member of the BRICS, on the eve of the Tianjin summit.

From these upheavals, in which Washington’s involvement through regional and local channels has been widely demonstrated (see the work of Brian Berletic), Washington’s ulterior motives become apparent. Although the terms of this “martial” blackmail are never fully acknowledged, it is easy to guess its content:

  • If you ostracize the dollar in your trade with the BRICS and Africa, we will undermine the BRI infrastructure all around your borders;
  • Give us shares in your strategic companies, or we will escalate the trade war against Chinese technology and the maritime industry;
  • We demand the lion’s share of the New Polar Silk Road, or failing that, we will form a military alliance with Somaliland and Taiwan;
  • Stay away from South America and Venezuela, or we will provoke “incidents” on your borders, like in Qatar and Poland, to strengthen the defenses of the countries hosting our military bases.

And so on. These muscular blackmails—in this case, fictions, even if they are inspired by reality—are based on objectives so extreme that they are completely out of reach. They therefore resemble far-fetched threats. Yet, the Axis of the Fallen Hegemon continues to resort to these methods of intimidation, no doubt because they provide it with an excellent pretext to pursue its real objective, which is to intensify hostilities against China.

The objective, in fact, is not the resolution of crises, but their intensification, the Atlantic bloc being convinced that the spread of chaos is the only means within its reach to restore its supremacy. Moreover, the United States is all the less inclined to renounce subjugation by war, or “peace through strength,” as it demonstrates daily through its Israeli clone, its true ambition: to annihilate any desire for diplomacy – even if it means bombing the place where the negotiations are to be held.

For Washington, mourning must precede death

In the midst of these hostilities, it is important not to lose sight of the ultimate goal of the Empire in its death throes: to shift toward a fait accompli by decreeing the death of struggles that are still ongoing. The objective is therefore to push China—and, with it, the rest of the world—into confusing the destruction and killings caused by Atlanticist savagery with defeat.

Clearly, the imperialist bloc is going through a phase of such acute megalomania that it is incapable of making rational decisions. The slightest sign of life from its geopolitical adversaries is perceived as an existential threat. One need only look at the unspeakable abominations that torment the Palestinian people, and that torment us all, to realize how worrying it is to leave the fate of humanity in the crime-hungry hands of the Axis of the Fallen Hegemon.

Under these circumstances, it is up to China, the BRICS, and the Global South to restore what can be restored of human dignity, since “Those who live are those who struggle.”

 

Lama El Horr, PhD, is the Founding Editor of China Beyond the Wall. She is a geopolitical consultant and analyst specializing in Chinese foreign policy and geopolitics

 

https://journal-neo.su/2025/09/20/donald-trump-corrects-victor-hugo-those-who-live-are-those-who-surrender/