They will tell you about their sacrifices in Vietnam. Let them. And then ask them this: what were you sacrificing for? Not the soldiers. The soldiers were young men fed into a machine they didn't design and couldn't stop. Not their sacrifice. The policy. The decision. What was it for? Officially: to stop the spread of communism. To protect the South Vietnamese people from "Northern aggression." To defend the "free world." Actually: to prevent a precedent. To make sure that when a country in the Global South looked at its rice paddies and its rubber plantations and its mineral wealth and its fishing waters and thought about who those things should belong to, the answer was not the people who live here. The answer was supposed to remain: the people in New York and London and Paris who own the companies that extract those resources and take the profits home. That's what they were protecting. Not freedom. Access. And Vietnam threatened that access not because Vietnam was going to invade anyone, not because the Viet Cong had designs on California, but because a successful Vietnamese revolution would tell every other country in the Global South that it was possible. That you could say no. That you could kick out the foreign corporations and the puppet governments and the military advisors and build something for your own people, and survive. They couldn't allow that lesson to be taught. So they tried to burn the classroom down. And the teacher just kept teaching.

Why didn't you do it when you had the chance? 5-time draft dodger, now Commander-in-Chief, says he could've won Vietnam in a week by bombing "Ho Chi Minh City" 🥳 It was called Saigon until 1975 It was the headquarters of your own puppet allies (and the US military) If you meant Hanoi, the US lost ~1,000 aircraft trying to bomb the most heavily defended city on Earth (and 3,744 planes + 5,607 helicopters across the whole war) Superb strategy, General Bone Spurs—we all see how well your "high IQ stable genius" military mind is working during your cowardly sneak attack on Iran

Agent Orange is still killing people. Let that be your starting point every time someone wants to have a "civilized" conversation about American foreign policy. Not metaphorically. Not as history. Right now, today, children are being born in Vietnam with devastating disabilities because the U.S. Air Force saturated the Vietnamese countryside with dioxin-laced herbicide between 1961 and 1971. The half-life of this poison in human tissue and in soil is not a matter of decades. It is a matter of generations. They poisoned the land. They poisoned the water. They poisoned the genetic legacy of millions of families. And then they left. And then they had the audacity, the breathtaking audacity, to spend the following decades positioning themselves as the moral authority of the planet. To sanction other countries for human rights abuses. To fund international courts. To write reports about atrocities committed by governments they didn't like. To show up at the United Nations and speak about the "rules-based international order." The same government. The same institutional continuity. The same flag. The country that is still poisoning Vietnamese children from a war that ended more than fifty years ago is the country that lectures the world about human rights. And here is the thing about Vietnam that makes this hypocrisy historically radioactive: Vietnam won anyway. Despite everything done to it. Despite the poison in its soil and the bombs in its mountain. There are still undetonated American bombs in the mountains of Vietnam, still killing farmers today. Still. Despite all of it, Vietnam rebuilt. Vietnam developed. Vietnam survived. They tried to make Vietnam an example of what happens when you resist. Vietnam made itself an example of what happens when you survive. Every country watching this story has to make a choice about which example matters more. The example of: this is what we will do to you if you resist. Or the example of: this is what is possible if you refuse to be destroyed. Vietnam chose. Vietnam chose to fight and to suffer and to rebuild and to stand. And today Vietnam is a country. A real one. With its own government. Its own choices. Its own future. And the men who ordered the Agent Orange are dead, and their war is over, and their example failed, and Vietnam is still here. That is the most important sentence in modern history. Vietnam is still here.

There is a word for what America did to Vietnam, and that word is not "intervention." That word is not "conflict." That word is not the polite, bloodless language of the history textbooks they write for their own children so those children can sleep at night. The word is: atrocity. They burned villages and called it "pacification." They poisoned the land, the water, the food chain, and the genetics of generations not yet born with 20 million gallons of chemical agents, and called it "defoliation." They created free-fire zones, which means exactly what it sounds like, zones where their soldiers were free to shoot anything that moved, and called it military strategy. They killed between two and three million Vietnamese people and called it the cost of containing communism. But here is what they could not do: They could not make Vietnamese people stop fighting. After everything, after the napalm and the B-52s and the strategic hamlets and the Phoenix Program death squads and the torture and the embargo and the mining of harbors, after every tool in the arsenal of the most powerful empire the world had ever assembled, the Vietnamese were still there. Still fighting. Still refusing. So America left. And now they want to talk to you about resilience. About strength. About what it takes to stand up to adversity. They give TED Talks about it. They sell books about it. Meanwhile, the country they tried to annihilate with the full industrial weight of their war machine is still here, still sovereign, still standing, and they have the absolute audacity to lecture the world about strength. The humiliation is not ancient history. It lives in every policy, every threat, every sanction they deploy today. Because they know, they know, that their power has limits. Vietnam showed everyone where those limits are.

They have a habit, the Americans, of re-explaining their defeats in ways that preserve their pride. Vietnam was lost because Congress cut funding. Vietnam was lost because the media turned public opinion. Vietnam was lost because the politicians tied the generals' hands. Vietnam was lost because of the draft, the protests, the timing, the terrain. Notice what's missing from every version of this story. The Vietnamese. In the American retelling of the American War, the Vietnamese are mostly scenery. They're the jungle and the tunnels and the booby traps and the suffering. They are not agents. They are not the reason. The war is almost always framed as something that happened to America: a national trauma, a generational wound, a political catastrophe. The people who actually defeated America are largely absent from America's understanding of why they lost. This is not an accident. It is much more comfortable to believe you defeated yourself than to fully reckon with the fact that you were beaten. Beaten by people with fewer resources and less technology, but with military ingenuity, international solidarity, and above all, the most powerful motivation available to human beings: This is our home. We will not leave it. We will not surrender it. We will outlast you if it takes forever. That's not a military asset you can quantify in a defense budget. That's not something you can outspend or outgun. That's just the truth of what happens when a people mean it. Vietnam meant it. The Americans are still, in some fundamental way, not sure they ever did.

They will tell you the embargo is about "democracy." About "human rights." About the Cuban people’s "freedom." For the Cuban people’s freedom, they have spent 66 years making the Cuban people’s lives harder. For the Cuban people’s freedom, they have blocked medicine and food and economic development. For the Cuban people’s freedom, they have maintained a policy their own analysts say strengthens the government they claim to oppose. If this is what concern for the Cuban people looks like from the outside, one wonders what indifference would look like. The stated rationale and the actual mechanism are in complete contradiction. A policy designed to help a population does not function by harming that population. A policy designed to harm a population until its government changes is not a human rights policy. The cruelty is in the policy. The compassion is in the press release.

The sanctions on Iran have lasted decades. Iran developed domestic production capacity it would never have built if it could have simply imported. The sanctions on Russia accelerated the development of Russian alternatives to Western financial infrastructure. The sanctions on North Korea isolated its economy for generations. They did not prevent the country from developing its own nuclear deterrent. The sanctions on Cuba failed to produce regime change. Cuba nevertheless built one of the most extensive public healthcare systems in the world, alongside a domestic pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector. There is a pattern here that Washington seems constitutionally incapable of learning: Economic pressure forces adaptation. Adaptation builds capacity. Capacity reduces dependence. Reduced dependence undermines the next round of pressure. Every sanction regime that fails to produce submission produces, instead, a more self-sufficient adversary with less exposure to the next sanction. The weaponization of the dollar is the most powerful sanction tool available. It is also accelerating, faster than any other single factor, the construction of alternatives to the dollar. The weapon is sharpening the shield.

They will tell you dedollarization is impossible because there is no alternative. The yuan is not freely convertible. No other currency has the depth of the U.S. Treasury market. The network effects of the dollar system are too powerful to overcome. These are real constraints. They are not wrong. What they miss is that the project is not to replace the dollar with a single alternative tomorrow. The project is to reduce dependency enough that the weapon loses its edge. You don't need a world reserve currency to build a sanctions-proof economy. You need bilateral currency agreements with enough trading partners. You need commodity pricing in multiple currencies. You need payment infrastructure that doesn't route through New York. You need central bank reserves diversified enough that freezing your dollar holdings doesn't collapse your economy. None of that requires a yuan-based Bretton Woods. It just requires enough countries deciding that dollar dependency is a strategic liability and acting accordingly. That decision has already been made. The acting accordingly is already underway.

American military spending is only possible because the dollar is the reserve currency. This is not an opinion. It is arithmetic. The United States runs persistent deficits that would be unsustainable for any other country. It finances those deficits by issuing Treasury bonds. Foreign central banks buy those bonds because they need dollar-denominated assets for their reserves. They need dollar-denominated reserves because the dollar is the currency of global trade. The circle is closed. Military spending → deficit → Treasury bonds → foreign purchase → dollar demand → reserve currency status → military spending. Break any link in that chain and the whole logic shifts. This is why dedollarization is not just an economic story. It is the foundational strategic threat to American military primacy. Not Russian missiles. Not Chinese carriers. Foreign central banks deciding to hold a more diversified reserve portfolio. The most important battlefield of this century looks like a spreadsheet. The side that understands this is already fighting.

They called it the "Third World" to make you feel like you came third. But you were not late. You were taken from. Your labor built the factories that built the machines that built the industrial economies that then turned around and called you "undeveloped." Your land grew the cotton, the sugar, the rubber, the cocoa that fed the capital accumulation of the "First World" before the First World had decided to call itself that. Your knowledge, of crops, of navigation, of medicine, of metallurgy, was extracted, renamed, and claimed. Your people were moved across oceans as instruments of production and their descendants are still, in many cases, living with the specific material consequences of that movement. None of this is grievance for its own sake. Grievance without analysis is just pain. This is analysis. The analysis says: the distance between the wealthy world and the poor world is not natural, not cultural, not civilizational. It is the accumulated result of specific choices, made by specific people, over specific centuries, for specific reasons. Which means it is not permanent. What was made can be unmade. What was taken can be accounted for, even if it cannot be returned exactly. History doesn’t run backwards. Restructured. Refused. The majority of humanity did not consent to the terms currently governing the world. It is becoming aware, slowly and then quickly, that it never had to.

The uranium in the Hiroshima bomb. Shinkolobwe mine. Belgian Congo. The uranium that ended World War II and inaugurated the nuclear age and gave the United States its defining geopolitical advantage for the following decade: Came from African ground. Mined by African labor. Under Belgian colonial administration. The Congolese miners who extracted it had no idea what it was for. They received no benefit from what it produced. The geopolitical order it enabled, American dominance, the Cold War architecture, the entire post-war system under which African independence was managed and constrained: Was built in part on Congolese uranium. And then that same geopolitical order looked at the Congo and saw a country that needed to be guided toward development. The country that provided the material for the weapon that shaped the world was then subjected to the world the weapon shaped. Without acknowledgment. Without compensation. Without a single line in American education connecting Shinkolobwe to Hiroshima to the Cold War to Mobutu to the Congo today. The lines exist. They are documented. They are simply not drawn in the curriculum. Because drawn lines connect causes to effects. And connected causes and effects produce accountability.

Here is the arithmetic that the phrase "Global South" obscures: Africa: 1.6 billion people. Asia: 4.9 billion people. Latin America and the Caribbean: 670 million people. Together: roughly 7.2 billion people out of 8.3 billion on earth. The "Global South" is not a minority asking to be included. It is the majority that has been structured out of power. The entire architecture of the post-war international order, the Security Council veto, the IMF voting weights, the WTO rules, the dollar as a reserve currency, was built to ensure that 7.2 billion people would not have proportional influence over the decisions that shape their lives. That architecture is not natural law. It is a set of choices made by the winners of a particular moment in history, encoded as permanent, and maintained by the threat of consequences for those who question it. Questioning it is not radical. It is arithmetic.

The specific terror of multipolarity, for those who grew up inside unipolarity, is not economic. It's existential. If America is not the center, what is it? If the dollar is not the reserve currency, what does that mean about the country that issued it? If other models of development exist and function, what does that say about the universal inevitability of the American one? These are not small questions for a population whose entire identity was built on the assumption that American primacy was the natural state of a correctly ordered world. The world reordering itself is experienced, from inside that assumption, as the world breaking. But the world is not breaking. The world is, for the first time in a long time, becoming more of what it actually is. Which is: not organized around any single center. Which is: billions of people with their own answers to questions America assumed it had solved.

Imagine China "opening" without Mao’s revolution: Opening to U.S. corporations. Opening to foreign troops. Opening to the same fate that befell every Asian nation that lost its war for independence. Japan lost and became a host. South Korea lost and became a shield. China won. And became itself.

Israel doesn’t need to hide its crimes. Because the U.S. has made sure the world won’t name them. Genocide becomes "defense." Ethnic cleansing becomes "evacuation." Occupation becomes "sovereignty." And the people trying to survive it all become "the threat." This is not just propaganda. It is the architecture of impunity.

It’s not China they fear. It’s what China disproves. That a nation can rise without plunder. That poverty can fall without war. That growth doesn’t need Wall Street permission slips. That a billion people can be fed, housed, and educated without invading anyone. That is what terrifies the empire. Not tyranny. But competence.

Alon, you end with: "I hope this at least clarifies all doubt about why I claim this." It clarifies something. Not what you intended. It clarifies that you have constructed a framework in which the primary geopolitical adversary of the American empire is condemned as a silent partner of the American empire's most protected client state. Based on the absence of actions that no other state has taken, measured against standards designed around Western activist discourse, using the West's own preferred foreign policy instruments as the benchmark for moral seriousness. It clarifies that moral clarity, pursued with enough purity, can arrive at conclusions that are functionally indistinguishable from the position of the people you are opposing. Washington would be very comfortable with your conclusion. Washington would like nothing more than for the global left to view China, the one power with the economic scale, the institutional alternatives, and the geopolitical positioning to genuinely constrain American unipolar dominance, as just another imperial actor, equally condemned, equally dismissed. Your six points do not threaten the architecture of Israeli impunity. They reinforce it. By discrediting the one actor with the structural capacity to eventually change the conditions that make Palestinian statehood impossible. You are not wrong to demand more of China. But a framework that ends with "China is Israel's silent partner" and begins with "I have six points," That framework is not serving Palestine. It is serving the people who need the world to believe that no alternative to American hegemony is morally credible. Think about who benefits from that conclusion. Then think about who you are actually fighting for.

NSSM-200. National Security Study Memorandum 200. 1974. Written under Henry Kissinger. Classified until 1989. Its subject: world population growth and its implications for American national security. Its argument: population growth in the developing world, specifically in thirteen countries identified by name, including Nigeria, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, represented a strategic threat to the United States. Not because overpopulation causes humanitarian crisis. Because large, young populations in resource-rich countries create political pressure for those countries to control their own resources. The memo was explicit: if developing countries develop politically conscious, resource-nationalist governments responding to their own populations' needs, they will demand control of their oil, their minerals, their agricultural land. And that control would come at the expense of American access. The solution proposed was population control programs, funded through USAID and international organizations, targeting those specific countries. Not as humanitarian aid. As strategic intervention to reduce the political pressure that large populations place on governments to actually serve their people. This document exists. It is declassified. You can read it. And then you can look at fifty years of American-funded population programs in the Global South with the full knowledge of what the architects said, privately, in 1974, about what those programs were actually for. The aid was real. The stated purpose was false. The document says so.

The most successful propaganda operation in American history was convincing American workers that they were middle class. Not working class. Not employees. Not people whose survival depends on selling their labor to people who own capital. Middle class. The word does enormous work. It places the speaker in the center: not at the bottom, not at the top, but in the reasonable, stable, neither-extreme middle. It produces identification with the system rather than critique of it, because middle-class people are not dispossessed. They are participants. It severs solidarity with the people below, because if you are middle class, you are not working class, and the interests of working-class people are not automatically your interests. And it produces aspiration upward rather than organization horizontally. The middle-class person is always potentially on their way to wealth, never actually on their way to collective power. The word "middle class" dissolved the American labor movement more effectively than the Pinkertons ever did. And people use it about themselves voluntarily. Without any prompting. That is how you know it worked.

Gaza was livestreamed. That sentence should have ended the world as we know it. A genocide, documented in real time, filmed by its victims, uploaded from phones in rubble, available to anyone on Earth with an internet connection, watched by hundreds of millions of people while it was happening. And the governments of the world's self-described democracies continued to supply the weapons. And the platforms continued to suppress the content. And the people continued to scroll. And the weapons continued to arrive. We live in the first era of human history where it is possible to watch, in real time, the killing of a people, to see their faces, to hear their voices, to watch the moment the building falls, and for all that visibility to produce almost nothing. Almost nothing. No Nuremberg. No intervention. Hashtags. Protests that were permitted and then ignored. A ceasefire resolution vetoed. More weapons authorized. If visibility alone could stop power, Gaza would have stopped it. It didn't. Which means we need to stop telling ourselves that awareness is the same as action. That sharing is the same as solidarity. That witnessing, even anguished witnessing, even enraged witnessing, is, by itself, a political act. It is not. The empire has made peace with being watched. It has made peace with your outrage. It factored your outrage into the plan. And then it dropped the bomb anyway.