Climate change: To save the world, first we had to destroy it

Beating ploughshares into swords — we’ve come full circle and reversed.

The military machine is a major polluter – why is the West turning to war and away from public need? 

First published at Substack, 3 August 2026

In the year of wildfire Europe, in the months of UK drought lamentations and parallel press cheers for intensifying conflict in Europe, may I reiterate that the military is one of the biggest polluters on the planet. Bigger than farting cows, bigger than the school run, bigger than your annual holiday flight. 

RESEARCH SHOWS:

• The US military is one of the largest polluters globally, managing approximately 39,000 contaminated sites.
• It produces more toxins than the combined output of the top five US chemical companies.
• Military activities are responsible for significant emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants.
• The main sources of military pollution and emissions include fuel consumption for military operations, equipment procurement, and the logistics of supply chains. Additionally, military activities contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for about 5.5% of global emissions.

Washington fiddles while climate change burns the world

How much did blowing up the Nordstream pipelines add to the carbon emissions tally? According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), an estimated 15 million tons of CO2 equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions, primarily due to the release of over 485,000 tons of methane. This amount of methane contributed to global warming comparable to the emissions from approximately 8 million cars driven for a year.

Wildfires are breaking out all over Europe. Huge swathes of France and Spain are being fried to a crisp. The UK is a tinderbox with some areas receiving only one percent of normal July rainfall. And a huge El Nino is gathering strength in the Pacific which will have devastating global consequences. But let’s not allow potential end of the world scenarios to dampen our testosterony predilections. All efforts are STILL set to turbo-charge the proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. 

Not only does the conflict add massively to global warming and climate change, it is ratcheting up to a direct clash with the world’s biggest nuclear power having pushed NATO right up to its doorstep. And that’s on top of the unhinged, unprovoked, illegal war on Iran and all the other arsonist’s points of ignition around the world as American imperialism goes for broke. 

Trump even blurted the quiet part out loud that Ukraine is rich in resources and ripe for plunder. “Could be worth $300 million. Could be more. Could be billions. We can take practically anything we want.” Just as they’ve done with Venezuela, and just as they intend for Russia and China.

Charge of the Light Brigade redux

Fat chance or not, the fallout from their attempts will be painful. Former NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg admitted that the war in Ukraine started in 2014, not 2022. (Yes, it has deeper roots going back further but that’s when the Obama administration made the big leap towards the proxy war on Russia with the Maidan coup.) But Europe insists on pursuing the race to war with Russia, with China targeted as a close second. 

Where’s the diplomacy? Where’s the public debate? 

We remember the war in Ukraine could have been over within the month until Boris Johnson crashed the imminent peace deal in March 2022. Thanks to him, it’s dragged on longer than World War II and threatens WWIII as Zelensky attempts to merge the Ukraine and Iran wars into one big mega ruck, drawing America back in to Europe. Was Johnson really Biden’s messenger boy? Or had the British deep state awoken to the opportunity to reenact The Charge of the Light Brigade into the valley of death and the land of Babi Yar? 

Climate change be damned, let loose the hogs of war

One way or another, whether from climate change catastrophe or apocalyptic world war, Western elites seem intent on burning down the world as they lose their hegemony. In a colossal act of cutting off its nose to spite its face, Chancellor Mertz has led Germany’s deindustrialisation with the loss of the cheap Russian energy that once fuelled the biggest economy in the EU. Washington chooses high food and gas prices for its people. The UK strains at the leash to follow suit. How are world leaders getting away with this national self-harm? 

Someone posted the Hermann Goering quote: 

“Naturally the common people don’t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Climate change is the price we can’t afford to pay

So there it is. We have always been at war with Eastasia. Orwell’s 1984 is proving to be something of an instruction manual. Two-minute hate? Tick. Emmanuel Goldstein hate figure? Tick. 

Andy Burnham lays out his intentions by appointing war fetishist John Healey to the role of Chancellor, and that other charmer, Wes Streeting to Defence, sewing up the interests of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Along with a government cabinet rammed with “Labour Friends of Israel”, I’d venture this is a pretty accurate indication of direction of travel. Politicians involved in such matters should show us their share portfolios and be banned from the MIC revolving door when they leave office. 

Calls for cuts to be made to the UK’s welfare state to fund warfare are being made. John Healey’s role heading up the Treasury cements that. Expect a rising wave of media shills herding us, the surplus labour, into the plutocratic elite’s cattle-pens.

Death Star Britain transforms into war machine

I’ve long made the case that Britain is turning into a Death Star. This is the logical outcome of a system rolling over and morphing into its essence which no longer relies on labour, much of which is now surplus to requirements. Devoid of imagination and common humanity, politicians John Swinney, John Healey and George Roberston are making the running on behalf of the MIC. Hermann Goering’s strategy is now openly in play: All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.  

Only a few days ago, Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney tested the waters by lifting the ban on public money going to weapons manufacturers, sweetening the turn to war with a pause (not a halt) in arming Israel. UK Defence Secretary John Healey has long been stirring up enmity and fear between us and Russia, and threatening to go to war with China over Taiwan. Yesterday, George Robertson, former defence secretary and Blairite NATO chief during the Iraq War, told the nation that we were in deadly “peril” and his mates in NATO and the MIC need more money. Lots of it. Our public money.

Keir Starmer has handed over billions to the Ukraine war and promised more without end. We’re raising our NATO payments from 2.7 percent to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2035. And he’s pledged Britain will actually raise defence funding to 5 percent, almost double what we’re paying now. 

How much global warming is that?

From post-war liberal order to technocratic feudalism

So, here I am looking out over a parched UK landscape, the prospect of AI centres purloining our remaining drinking water and a nation descending into poverty and danger under the new technocratic feudalism. Our politicians willingly gave up the advances we made under a flawed post-war liberal order without any fight in a giant game of Risk. Socialism would have moved society forward but now it’s all been clawed back by robber baron elites.

As Joey 周乙 says, “‘It’s capitalism in crisis choosing to destroy ‘excess capacity’ through war rather than share prosperity”.

Washington’s favourite academic, Niall Ferguson, laid it out for the public in 2011 and 2012 shortly after Barack Obama made his Pivot to Asia. Essentially, shatter wealthy, stable Europe for pillage, power and the removal of a rival bloc. I flagged it up at the time: 

Working for the Clampdown: Niall Ferguson and his “Killer Apps”

https://www.annachen.co.uk/china/shakedown/niall-ferguson-tv-review/

None of this mayhem was either necessary or for our benefit. By 2018, the nations of the Eurasian landmass were emerging from America’s 2008 financial meltdown in sync, floated out of trouble by China’s huge economic and productive heft acting as a shock absorber. The future looked bright. Cheap Russian energy and peaceful trade with China ensured affordability for the masses: the twin engines of our stabilising economy on the Eurasia landmass, for the global south and for America. 

Western commentators were rejoicing that China had saved American capitalism from itself. A massive drive to coordinate combating climate change was planned with Joe Biden promising to work with the rising superpower. That is, until he performed a pivot, not unlike his old boss, and decided that clobbering China was more important.  

We could have stuck to ploughshares instead of swords in a peaceful and prosperous world. But, thanks to the elites, the only bright future we’re likely to see is the red glow of advancing flames and the flash of their nuclear toys.

It’s Empire reviving itself in its true form, like the Terminator’s endoskeleton emerging from the flames stripped of all human features. A cold killer machine, run by Cyberdyne Systems and the techbro billionaire class out of Palo Alto and the White House. 

YOUTUBE VIDEO: Anna Chen on America's transformation into the Death Star, 21 February 2026

See also this unique live timeline as it happened. Contemporaneous print and broadcast threaded on a historical through-line: Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st Century War on China, page 4 (current, latest first): 2024 to the Present — President Donald Trump’s second term turmoil: https://www.annachen.co.uk/china/shakedown/

Shakedown Timeline, page 1: 1997-2010 — Hong Kong handover & WTO to President Obama’s Pivot to Asia:https://www.annachen.co.uk/china/shakedown/

Shakedown Timeline, page 2: 2010-2010 — Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia to Trump’s first presidency:https://www.annachen.co.uk/china/shakedown/shakedown-timeline-page-2/

Shakedown Timeline, page 3: 2019-2024: Joe Biden’s presidency, Covid and Ukraine to the rise of BRICS and Donald Trump’s second term: https://www.annachen.co.uk/china/shakedown/shakedown-timeline-of-americas-21stc-war-on-china-3/

Donald Trump always wanted to play with the toys. 2018, I was early but the principle remains the same — none of us is getting out of here alive if Trump continues to be enabled by his feral support system: https://www.annachen.co.uk/2018/12/24/happy-new-year-will-donald-trumps-tiny-hand-press-the-big-red-button-in-2019/

Trump bullies world into disastrous Opium Wars 2.0

First published 30 May 2026

Can China trust the USA or is Trump laying a trap?

In a lively conversation with Jeff Rich about the American elite’s ultimate goal, we discuss Trump’s visit this month to China and his meeting with Xi Jinping. What did the Trump circus achieve? Why did Xi mention the Thucydides Trap? Where are all the women? 

The American superpower’s Opium Wars endgame

Why is the Trump administration seemingly defying logic and starting wars, destabilising the world and threatening to wreck America’s own economy? 

There are three imperatives dictating why America’s elite will never reverse now they know how much destructive power there is in the economic Armageddon they aim to bring on.

It’s no good just saying they’re mad, amoral or complete fash. They have a super-objective and they are following it blindly as if in a dream. Drunk on power, hypnotised by wealth, careless of consequences to others, this feral pack’s dream is our nightmare.

The US elite have no incentive whatsoever to stop.

i) They think they can repeat the enrichment of the Opium Wars in the 19th Century that financed the British in India, the East Coast dynasties and their industrial revolutions.
ii) They welcome the collapse of the global economy so they can buy up everything at fire-sale prices. 
iii) They think they will sit out wars that get too close and too hot in their luxury nuclear bunkers. They even plan deadly drone strikes from the gold ballroom roof in case their own people rise up. 

It is not in their interest to be well informed or wise – those are diversions from the path to “winning”. No wonder they hate experts and are happy to demolish 400 years of science-based Enlightenment.

Ultimate clash

But this impulsive behaviour has real world repercussions. Even without taking the Iran conflict into consideration, the global economy could tank 36 percent if Europe carries on targeting Russian refineries and oil infrastructure in the Ukraine war (MacGregor). The Great Depression saw a drop of 20 percent.

The start of the war in Ukraine in 2022 shot prices up to over $120. Attacks on Russian oil infrastructure have now knocked out an estimated 13-17 percent of its oil refining capacity. So, how is the oil price still hovering at around $90 to $105? Desperate to keep the oil price down to placate the voters, Donald Trump is using up US reserves to manipulate prices. At this rate, he’ll run out by July or August. 

However, as if that’s not bad enough, the Iranians have threatened to remove a further 25 million barrels a day from the global market if the US and Israel resume attacks. That could mark the end of us. Yet still they think they’ll teach Iran a lesson — big joke. Oblivious to the risks, America and Europe think they’ll recapitalise their battered system in the ultimate clash with China, as was done in the 19th century Opium Wars. If only they realised that the light at the end of the tunnel is a train speeding down the tracks. 

There’s still Cuba to come.

And, yes, they are mad, amoral and complete fash. 

Sorry for repeating myself but the US elite, along with their feral sidekicks, have sheared off from the rest of society. This being a class war, the surplus labour (that’s us) isn’t included in the party.

Trumped up forced labour charges against allies

EDIT 3 June 2026: Talk about always crashing in the same clown car. Trump can’t even keep his allies on board. In an amusingly cynical exploitation of unverified western claims of forced labour of Uyghurs in China, Trump has hoisted competitor economies by their own petard. He probably thinks this is a masterful martial arts reversal but it’s more like the Joker handing a snapped pool cue to his economic rivals and telling them to fight to the death for survival. Oh what a tangled web we weave. 

Of course, the US has nearly 2 million incarcerated felons. That’s the fifth biggest prison population in the world behind Rwanda, El Salvador, Cuba and Turkmenistan, 40 percent of them Black. They happen to be forced to make goods for the privatised prison system. The 13th amendment allows slavery for prisoners so that’s all right, then.

Further reading on the Opium Wars

Video discussion originally published at The Burning Archive Substack 

And The Burning Archive YouTube

The Steampunk Opium Wars in the belly of the beast, 2012: groundbreaking theatre at the Royal Maritime Museum in Greenwich, home of the Royal Navy. 

The Opium War by Julia Lovell: book review by Anna Chen, 2012. Western academia’s rationalisation of the coming war on the rising superpower resorts to victim blaming and defence of the narco-capitalists who carved up China in the 18th century Opium Wars. 

Shakedown: America’s 21st century war on China. The Opium Wars on steroids

VIDEO: How America wrecked Britain and China’s Golden Age

The Brexit trigger that changed the world

Our British Defence Secretary John Healey keeps up the Labour government’s war-on-China schtick with a “we’re ready to fight” battle-cry that was widely mocked. Was Britain always this aggressive and desperate for war with China? Anna Chen analyses how it got this bad after so much promise.

Britain scored a victory in Beijing in 2010, ushering in a “golden age” collaboration that was mutually profitable & peaceful, uniting the Eurasia landmass in Belt and Road trade. What followed was a concerted effort by the declining US to stop the prosperous stabilisation of Europe and Asia at all costs and stifle the emergence of BRICS. The results have been tragic and avoidable.

Article first published 30 July 2025: How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age”

“Ready to fight,” blustered British Defence Secretary John Healey, heady on the new car smell rising from a lone HMS Prince of Wales aircraft-carrier docked in Australia at the weekend.

To widespread mockery, Healey delivered his oration on the fantasy threat to Taiwan the moment Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stepped on Yellow Peril turf on his diplomatic trade mission to China.

Were Healey's lurid suggestions of China invading its own province designed to inject steel into an Oz government wavering under an AUKUS lash-up now shrunk to AUK?

Some Australians finally twigged the folly of an existential war with their biggest trade partner (not to mention regional superpower). It’s no surprise, therefore, to see them seeking an off-ramp. If only the same could be said of the UK.

Britain wasn’t always so aggressively determined to wage war on China. Certainly not since the Cold War or even the Hong Kong handover. What changed?

BBC: China, Britain and the Nunzilla conundrum

In 2010, the BBC allowed me to make another programme for Radio 4: China, Britain and the Nunzilla Conundrum. It pointed out that China’s days of making our tat were over and the new kid on the block was about to transition into a world-leading technological, giant.

How they laughed. What, with all those suicide factories?!

The timing turns out to be most telling. 2010 is the year of Obama’s Pivot to Asia (announced November 2011), following declaration of his status as the first Pacific President in a gargantuan territorial-pissing statement of intent.

Hillary Clinton kicks off the all-change with her incendiary speech at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi on 23 July 2010. She initiates the “smart power” strategy: stirring up enmity using carrot and stick to get the rising superpower’s neighbours on board to “contain China.”

Dubbing the Chinese end of the Pacific the “Western Pacific,” the US will later rename it the “Indo-Pacific,” removing China’ presence from its own coastal territory in favour of another Asian country completely round the corner. And as round the bend as Trump’s much-sneered-at renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.

All despite China saving the global economy from America’s greed-fuelled Great Crash of 2008 only two years previously. Oh, yes, who was it who did the damage? And who came to the rescue?

The BBC green-lighting my programme was a clear signal that, at that time, Britain had no intention of torpedoing their lifeboat and growth engine just on Obama’s say-so.

“Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.”
Anna Chen, 17 November 2011 after Obama’s Pivot to Asia

Britain not on the “contain China” bus

US and UK divergence is confirmed later that year after China floats the world economy out of danger.

In November 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron and his trade team score a victory in Beijing, ushering in a “golden age” with China. A collaboration that is mutually profitable, peaceful and helps knit together the Eurasia landmass end-to-end in Belt and Road trade.

Remember not so many years ago when food was cheap and plentiful? Interest rates were near zero? And supply chains were mwah!

In the geopolitical Three Body Problem of Europe, China and the US, Italy signs up to BRICS. Duisberg shapes up to become Europe’s busiest port. Crimea is granted pole position as a major BRICS hub, while China invests heavily in Ukraine’s agriculture. The first freight train from China running the entire length of Eurasia arrives in east London in 2017.

Ominously, a declining America, still on the naughty step for its global malfeasance, finds its influence jeopardised. What with being so well protected by two oceans that it’s cut off from the rest of the Northern hemisphere where all the action’s happening. And so dependent on sea and air. If only it had terrific High Speed Rail like that lot over there. What, not even one kilometre of HSR? And those pesky oceans keep getting in the way.

So g’wan, guess what happens next. Maybe America accepts China’s invitation to join in and keep the party going, as asked by ambassador Cui Tankai?

Nope.

Check out my Shakedown Timeline, compiling articles, analysis and programmes over two and a half decades as it happened.

Made in China 2025

Europe and China have stabilised Eurasia following recession and the near-fatal US crash harshing everyone’s economic mellow. The global economy is rising in sync and there are very few flashpoints to blow up. Slow and steady as it goes.

In 2015, Premier Li Keqiang signs Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025), announced by President Xi to great fanfare. This strategic plan aims to lift China out of its role as world’s factory by upgrading manufacturing and innovation, turning itself into a technological powerhouse, and earning a place at Top Table with the Big Boys.

We’ll make you so proud of us, they think naively. I remember shuddering a bit and wondering, did you get an okay from the alpha male? Not that you should be asking permission, but America might not be the proud parent you’re hoping for. You can feel the frisson of fury in the West as MIC 2025 throws the spotlight onto China’s beautiful cities, shrinking poverty, a growing middle-class and numerous achievements.

Oh, well, you must know what you’re doing.

Britain and the China Golden Goose

Britain continues to resist pressure to give up the Golden Goose they accessed in 2010. A big yah-boo-sucks to Obama’s neocon Pivot. Yay, bring on the Chinese tech. C’mon Huawei and your gorgeous 5G. Rah, Hinkley Point C nuclear power, you are so gonna make us world class. We might even get a Chinese built High Speed Rail.

China is throwing money at us, investing in lil old Britain because it loves us. It loves our style, our queen. Our status as former biggest empire the world has ever known. Forget the pokey embassy in Portland Place up the street from the BBC. We’re gonna need a bigger base. Let’s have us the Royal Mint as home from home.

And then … and then …!

2016. Prime Minister David Cameron snatches defeat from the jaws of victory and caves in to right wing pressure to hold a referendum to leave Europe. Brexit: just the move that would fracture Europe and halt progress in its tracks.

“In order to bring China to heel, Trump would have to break the European Union first. That affects Britain, too. Once we’re out of the EU, it’s unlikely that Trump will allow Britain to trade with China … What was that about Brexit ‘taking back control’?”
Anna Chen, What’s Donald Trump’s trade war with China REALLY about? 13 November 2018

Boris Johnson – London mayor (2008-16), Foreign Secretary (2016-18) and Prime Minister-to-be (2019-22) – and the Brexit bus promise to fund the NHS from money saved, 2016.

Brexit wrecks it

American-born Boris Johnson, who doesn’t care about anything except his own interests, is pulled both ways. He eventually campaigns for Brexit in front of a red London bus bearing the promise to save £350 million a year for the NHS.

Later, Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and the Donald Trump campaign (close to Nigel Farage) are all suspected of links to the outcome. Far from taking back control, 37% of Britons have voted to leap out of the EU frying pan and into the US fire, nailing us to the USS Titanic. Not burning but drowning.

Still, not to worry. Everyone knows it’s only a non-legally binding referendum to take the temperature of national opinion and not an actual deciding vote.

Over to you, leader of the opposition who is our last ditch defence against such xenophobic madness. Whatever you do, don’t press that big red Article 50 button.

Clown car reverses gear

The deed done, we may be losing the huge European market, as well as considerable political influence in the EU, but at least we have China as backup.

Taking us completely by surprise, however, unforeseen by everybody except those of us paying attention, the Right and far Right float to Europe’s surface, emboldened by the wave of xenophobic reaction sweeping the continent.

In Britain, Farage reverses sharply from using trade with a rising China as a bribe for leaving the European Union: “Look at lucky Iceland, able to make lucrative deals with China! Leave the EU and we can too”.

Overnight, post-Brexit vote, China is morphed from strategic partner to competition bogey man. Preaching conflict with China, Farage’s new pet project, sits in alignment with US neocons and isolationists like his hero, presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Britain hangs on to benefits

However, Boris Johnson isn’t blind to China’s great wealth. A massively overflowing trough, it awaits the likes of clever men like the Prime Minister to free up all that moolah. In addition to the benefits the country enjoys from our golden age relations, Johnson’s family has financial interests in China. Johnson holds out manfully.

In his 2005 Telegraph article, in which he scoffed at the Chinese for being incapable of original thought, he wrote: “It has become a cliché of geopolitical analysis to say that China is the next world superpower, that the 21st century will belong to Beijing, and that we had better get in tutors to teach our nippers Mandarin if they are to make it in the new world order.”

Boris Johnson writing on China in the Telegraph, September 2005

Britain has invested around £7 billion in Huawei 5G infrastructure which will secure our place ahead of the pack in the modern tech era. Helping our energy independence now that the North Sea is running out of oil (unfortunately privatised and no longer owned by the nation), there are several nuclear power stations in the pipeline, including Hinkley Point C, a third owned by the Chinese who are investing billions in the UK.

But there’s a new sheriff in town, a new clown in the driving seat, a giant bluebottle in the ointment. Choose your own metaphor and stir until shaken. Meet President Donald Trump, a throwback to 1950s nostalgia for a powerful America, Jim Crow and war on everyone who won’t bow down. Or am I confusing him with Nero or Caligula or Eric Cartman? Whatever, the prognosis isn’t looking good for anyone.

Superman versus Kryptonite

Brexit Day, 3 February 2020. Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives his famous Superman speech at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich about future trade agreements and championing free trade now that he’s lost us our key neighbouring market.

He has ignored US demands on several occasions, including from Mike Pompeo only the previous month, to drop Chinese investments such as Huawei’s 5G, to which Johnson had just given limited approval, excluding it from military and nuclear sites and keeping it to the uncontroversial phone mast system.

The cheeky monkey even has the temerity to comment that America’s trade war on China has been “letting the air out of the tyres of the world economy”. This will be the last time Johnson ever shows evidence of a spine.

A few days later, Johnson feels the wrath of Trump in a phone call.

US Vice President Mike Pence says that the Trump administration had made its disappointment with the UK “very clear to them”. According to the Sunday Times account of the White House delegation’s visit to London in May 2019, the GCHQ team whose detailed intelligence and technology assessment exonerated Huawei, was given the hairdryer treatment for five hours. Former British ambassador to the US, now Lord Kim Darroch, says there were no “compelling technical arguments that undermined GCHQ’s case” and that the US case was “political”.

Nevertheless, Johnson ditches Huawei in June 2020 after Trump bans the company from using US-made chips. Neither Theresa May nor Johnson gets a post-Brexit trade deal with the US out of this.

“The people who brought us AUSTERITY, then sold us BREXIT on the promise of a trade deal with China beyond the dreams of avarice, are the same Empire Crusaders who now want a war with it. China is the newly rich kid who’s strayed onto mafia turf and is about to be rolled.”
Anna Chen, The Sleep of Reason produces monsters from the West’s own id, 13 January 2021

Eurasia land mess

A far cry from the optimism of 2017, and in contrast to the pre-Trump era, Europe is shooting down the swannee.

The world is stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. Had Trump not won the 2016 election, the US might not have doubled down on Obama’s Pivot to China quite so fast. But had Hillary won, Russia would be back where it was after Gorbachev and Yeltsin sold out their own country. Pensioners going unpaid, children addicts living in sewers. Really bad Christmas-style jumpers being the height of fashion in Moscow. And quite possibly flattened.

With a four-year Trump pause, they’ve had time to build up defences against predatory NATO schemes.

In the Middle East, the Democrats have already shown their appetite for ruthless cruelty against the Palestinians, so no advantage there.

Ukraine is a proxy-war tragedy. “F**k the EU,” said Victoria Nuland to the US ambassador in Kiev just before their 2014 Maidan coup, as I am fond of reminding everyone. And they certainly did.

Europe, your nine lives are up

The EU bankrupts itself, throwing money at Zelensky even as he takes the anti-corruption agencies under his control. Germany is deindustrialised by the loss of cheap Russian energy, accepting the Nordstream pipeline being blown up by allies. Mertz wants a replay of Stalingrad with Russia and neglects domestic matters.

Ursula von der Lyen has more lives than a cat. She’s survived accusations of grift, dodgy Pfizer deals, war-mongering galore, and a humiliatingly bad deal with President Trump. A $700b commitment over three years to buying America’s expensive LNG even though declining supplies make fulfilling orders unlikely. A $600b “investment” tribute to Trump, and “only” 15% tariffs. What a bargain.

France has been shafted before by the US, previously over the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. Ursula’s agreement that the EU market be prised open for US aggrobiz has not pleased French farmers.

NATO chief Mark Rutte calls Trump “daddy” and dreams of fighting China. Presumably from the depths of a luxury bunker while the rest of us fry.

It would be ironic as well as suicidal for Britain to now rejoin the EU. Brexit did the damage. Is there really any point jumping into it as it circles the drain?

BRICS is now the largest trade bloc on the planet.

How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age” is also published at Anna’s Substack

About Anna Chen: Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. She has written for Asia Times, Tribune, Morning Star, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

The unfolding endgame: Gaza, rare earths and western decline

Anna Chen – First published 26 July 2025, rare earths

Glimmers of hope in the darkness

Rare earth mining

The relentless violence against Palestinians by Israel in Gaza continues to expose the brutal logic of Western imperialism, but two significant developments offer glimmers of hope in the unremitting darkness: the rise of a new UK political force challenging Labour’s complicity, and China’s rare earths squeeze that is crippling the US-led war machine. These forces, combined with a tornado of reckless reactions under pressure, suggest an accelerating decline of American hegemony.

The Corbyn-Sultana Party: forcing accountability on Palestine

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s newly launched left-wing party, temporarily dubbed “Your Party,” represents the most significant challenge to Keir Starmer’s Labour government from the left. Its founding declaration explicitly condemns a “rigged system” that funds “billions for war” while denying basic welfare, and demands a “free and independent Palestine”.

This isn’t mere rhetoric. Starmer is vulnerable. The party’s emergence follows Labour’s internal rebellions over Gaza and welfare cuts, with Sultana suspended for opposing the two-child benefit cap. Corbyn’s independent victory in Islington North proves grassroots support exists for anti-war, redistributive politics.

On Thursday, Starmer performed an abrupt U-turn from branding himself a supporter of Zionism “without qualification” to acknowledging what the rest of us can see: the suffering in Gaza is indefensible. Timing suggests this might have been stated to save his skin from the Hague, besides which, he is still resisting recognition of an independent Palestinian state. By calling out UK policy as complicit in genocide, the new party amplifies legal and moral pressure on him. With the ICJ investigating genocide claims, Corbyn’s alliance with pro-Gaza independents could provide a home for a fractured Labour’s base.

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana announce the formation of the Your Party, July 2025

China’s rare earths fightback: economic warfare against the war machine

Deng Xiaoping said in 1987 that the Middle East has oil but China has rare earth minerals.

China’s restriction of rare earths exports, controlling 90% of global processing and 70% of mining, is a masterclass in asymmetric economic statecraft. It’s a determined throttle rather than an immediate military face-off, pre-empting US stated intentions to go to war with it by 2027. Never do what your enemy wants you to do, a lesson underlined by Russia’s incursion into Ukraine under provocation.

Its impact cascades through the Western war apparatus:

Israel’s Iron Dome is at Risk. Raytheon, manufacturer of the Iron Dome system, relies on Chinese-sourced terbium and dysprosium for guidance systems. Export controls have already slashed US rare earth magnet imports by 58%.

There’s panic in the Pentagon as supplies run dry and weapons are used up on the European and Middle Eastern fronts before they even have a taste of China, the neocon elite’s ultimate objective.

This month’s $400 million investment in MP Materials, America’s sole rare earth producer, is a desperate, unsustainable stopgap. MP’s refining capacity remains years behind China’s, and its California mine lacks heavy rare earth reserves essential for advanced weaponry.

Western powers losing their composure

In Europe, Ursula von der Leyen’s dire threats of WTO action are a bark worse than any bite she can muster, and echo the failed 2012 case against China. EU High Representative and Vice President Kaja Kallas is reduced to screeching at Wang Yi and accusing China of enabling Russia which is clearly winning the West’s proxy war in Ukraine.

Beijing now frames restrictions as “environmental protections” and “security measures,” utilising WTO rules while accelerating BRICS mineral independence. Why on rare earth would you enable openly hostile forces to tool up against you?

The rare earths battle is part of an existential problem for China but one which they’ve tackled with martial arts dexterity without a shot being fired.

China’s high prices allowed US and European companies to set up competitive rare earth mining enterprises, including Chevron’s Molycorp Mountain Pass mine in 2008. When China lost the WTO ruling in January 2015, it had to drop its export restrictions. Its response was to massively lower its prices until its competition could no longer compete, and sent Chevron’s mine into bankruptcy. Two years later, MP Mine Operations LCC, which had a Chinese minority interest, bought it up: it’s now better known as MP Materials Corp; trading as MP on the New York Stock Exchange.

Raytheon makes Israel’s Iron Dome and declared the war on Gaza as “good for business”. But it is running out of rare earths.

The Military-Industrial Complex under stress

The war economy’s insatiable greed now collides with material reality.

War profiteering has been exposed. Raytheon’s CEO openly declared the Israel-Gaza war “good for business” as Biden sought $14 billion to restock the Iron Dome. “ He said, “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking. On top of what we think is going to be an increase in DOD top line”. Yet China’s export controls have triggered artillery shortages in Ukraine and delayed F-35 deliveries to Israel; systems dependent on Chinese-refined scandium (restricted April 2025).

While 700 defence lobbyists swarm over Washington, MP Materials’ $400 million Pentagon bailout can’t resolve its dependence on Chinese processing. Apple’s parallel $500M deal with MP underscores corporate panic over supply chains.

Apart from which, Israel and the Ukraine are running out of weapons from sheer disproportionate overuse. Nato members are being compelled to send their own Patriot systems to the Ukraine while chucking money at the Military Industrial Complex in order to keep Israel armed. US General Witkoff’s abrupt withdrawal from truce talks with Hamas on spurious grounds shows how panicked they are as they race against time.

The death spiral of American hegemony

It didn’t have to be this way. China’s gratitude for Nixon-Kissinger and genuine affection for America was an equilibrium that could have rolled on for ages with America enjoying its twilight years as venerable elder.

My wishful thinking on this, however, may be belied by the dynamics of imperialism and the tragic inevitability of the failing power lashing out in its death throes.

China inadvertently tested US relations when it gave the benefit of the doubt and hoped for the best. It showed more than good will by rescuing the global economy from America’s Great Crash of 2008, taking a hit itself and kicking off the longest market bull run ever. It was promptly rewarded two years later by Obama’s world-changing Pivot to Asia to “contain” China, an act of aggression that, far from revivifying US fortunes at the end of its capitalist cycle, has accelerated its own demise. All that affection, admiration and support destroyed by the hegemon’s paranoia and, paradoxically, its hubris: the worst possible combo.

Nixon-Kissinger’s triangular diplomacy once balanced China against the USSR, securing US twilight dominance. But Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” shattered that balance, revealing imperial hubris. America’s proxy war against Russia, beginning with the US-backed Maidan coup in 2014, ensured China awakened to its own position as final target once Russia was dispatched.

The rare earths boomerang effect

By treating China as a threat after it rescued global capitalism in 2008, the US accelerated BRICS consolidation. Russia now supplies 70% of China’s palladium; China processes 59% of the world’s lithium.

It has resulted in Capitalism’s auto-cannibalism. The dollar’s weaponisation hastened de-dollarisation. The US prints money to fund MP Materials and Ukraine aid, but inflation erodes this lifeline. As Raytheon lobbies for more wars, the economy strains under $1.7 trillion F-35 programmes.

The Global South’s Answer: BRICS embodies collective resilience. China’s rare earths strategy isn’t aggression; it’s self-defence against a dying hegemon’s lashing out.

The path ahead

Gaza’s suffering is not an anomaly but a template: the Palestinians today are the Global South tomorrow. Yet the tools of resistance are crystallizing. Corbyn’s party fractures the political cover for genocide. China’s rare earth stranglehold exposes the war machine’s material fragility.

The U.S. still dreams of a 2027 war with China, but Beijing refuses to play by Washington’s script: never do what your enemy wants. China’s rare earths throttling is a masterful evasion; a peaceful, systemic counterstrike that collapses the war economy from within. The Erysichthon Curse takes hold: the empire, gorging on its own institutions, now consumes itself.

Food queue of starving Palestinians in Gaza due to Israel’s blockade of aid trucks. Even medics and press are starting to succumb.

Further reading

Shakedown: A Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China: Page 4, 2024 to the Present — President Donald Trump’s second term turmoil

Shakedown Timeline 2010-2020: Page 2, Obama’s Pivot-to-Asia to Donald Trump’s first presidency

Anna Chen — Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. Asia Times, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

High anxiety from Hollywood’s first Chinese superstar to China

Anna Chen – First published 11 July 2025, Anna May Wong and containing China

Anna May Wong and China facing the same western fears

Anna May Wong Must Die! but the China dynamic lives on

China catches up and America fires off a frenzy of Yellow Peril mania ever since Trump’s first trade war doubled down on Obama’s Pivot to Asia.

Western anxiety about Chinese getting too big for their foot bindings has been with us ever since the Opium Wars of the 19th century. The mountain of guilt, fear, loathing and desire that went into defining them as a dehumanised Other is still with us today, turbo-charged by neocon ambitions.

Yep, desire is in there as well: you fear the thing you crave. And, so often, vice versa. Powerful it may be, but the impulse is also paralysing.

One way to escape the pain is to destroy the object of desire. What was Captain Ahab’s vengeful pursuit of Moby Dick about if not the control of the entity that was more powerful than him, making off with his leg in a classic image of castration? Some societies eat their enemy. Some have hot wars. Many seek resolution in territorial pissing turf wars.

Green Hornet Syndrome

In the light of all-pervasive sinophobic insanity, I’m coining the term Green Hornet Syndrome to designate the white saviour cohort which insists on Chinese being underlings, or invisible even –— especially! — when outclassed by them.

Be a sidekick or die.

At the macro level, it means tearing down China for being so damn good.

At the micro level, it means tearing down Chinese for being so damn good.

And that’s across the political spectrum.

It’s not just the usual suspects of the usurped Masters of the Universe who cling on to the delusion of supremacy. Purported progressives who can’t resist the system’s white domination blandishments, even subconsciously, are also doing the work of the state. If there’s no visibility, there’s no empathy. No empathy means less resistance to war on a group you barely recognise as human. Look what happened to Muslims after 9/11.

Colonialism rules

Deletion, cancellation, erasure and invisibility are the boss group’s boys-club stock-in-trade in the New Colonialism. But it’s not a recently-minted strategy — it has a tedious history.

In America’s economic downturn of the 1870s, it took ten “Chinamen” to equal the voice of one white man. Demagogues like Denis Kearney were able to whip up a diversionary wave of hate among European workers who were losing their livelihoods, culminating in the Exclusion Act of 1882, specifically aimed at the Chinese.

We see the same attitudes today despite the lip-service of enlightenment. Chinese are written off as copyists, incapable of original thought. They lack an inner life. The ruling group must speak for them. Nothing is true until a white person says it is true.

This regression into archaic relations from a bygone era exposes a widespread lowering of consciousness that’s depressingly become the norm in what we vainly think of as our sophisticated age.

The template currently coded into the Matrix seems to be: occupy the space and clear out the inhabitants. Absurdly, in the face of World War III, the urge to be an asshat eclipses urgent communal efforts for the collective good. A colonial mindset prevails when more self-knowledge, generosity and solidarity in the face of disaster might be more helpful than indulging residual Gamergate impulses.

Mandelbrot Set’s repeating China patterns

It’s an imperialist throwback that needs challenging. In 2005, I wanted to make a programme about Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first Chinese screen legend, for her 1905 birth centenary. I was astonished that so few knew who she was. It was disappointing when the BBC’s commissioning editor turned down our first pitch on the grounds that “No-one’s heard of her”. Fortunately, my brilliant producer persisted and we eventually made A Celestial Star in Piccadilly in 2008, broadcast in 2009.

Anna May Wong’s story beautifully illustrates the dynamic of imperial power relations which remain embedded in the cultural codes. Our perceptions are invisibly shot through with it at every level like a repeating pattern in a Mandelbrot Set and, as it is ubiquitous, the situation is accepted as a given.

China has been suppressed and degraded in the public eye through the press, literature and the screen arts, ever since the Opium Wars carve-up by Britain and the Eight Nation Alliance which put down the Boxer Rebellion. Yellow Peril untermenschen tropes abound in the cultural undergrowth. Wong’s oppressive experience provided a miniature synechdochal example of the whole process.

I wrote a poem (below) about Wong’s unique pioneering position, wanting to satirically distil its essence and flag it up to a wide audience. It’s not something I was aware of doing while writing it. I was simply unloading what I immediately felt about the hypocrisy and oppression to which I could relate. But the subconscious is an amazing thing. Only in reading it back did I realise what was nailed, the heart of the matter coalesced and exploding out of the final two lines.

The West’s Heart of Darkness

Wong was born third-generation Chinese-American in Los Angeles, 1905. Not only did she face race discrimination in her everyday life, her successful film career in early Hollywood turned her into a symbol of it. The same forces present in Anna May Wong’s life-long struggle within and against a hostile system are here today in America’s bid for supremacy over a rising China.

In her movies, whether playing angel or devil, she had to be punished for the white hero’s attraction to her, sex being one of our fundamental drivers. From a 17-year old playing a tragic Madam Butterfly character in Toll of the Sea, to the daughter of Fu Manchu, her character always had to die.

As in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the ultimate threat to the white man’s world is embodied in a non-white woman of Freudian nightmare: mysterious, untamed and powerful. The horror! A feminised China in Western eyes similarly represents to timid minds the unknowable, unconquerable entity at the centre of their own id: their fears made flesh.

Even though the white hero could flirt with Wong, find her amusing, be besotted with her exoticism, they were never allowed to kiss onscreen. Similarly, the West may play with the exotic East, admire China’s cleverness and buy its cheap goods, but will never recognise it as an equal. As long as the object of desire never excels, reminding them of what it is they lack, it is tolerable.

However, being cleverer, more able when let off the leash, repositories of secret knowledge held in dark corners of the mind alien to the big lugs who seek dominance, is not tolerable.

Never mind that this threat is mostly paranoid projection. How insecure do you have to be to hold Chinese from Anna May Wong to the nation of China responsible for your own neurosis surrounding their outstanding distinction? Never truly welcomed as a strategic partner, China will always be defined as the strategic competitor; forever smacked down for someone else’s inadequacy.

As above, so below.

So here is a poem: my political analysis, cultural response and artistic endeavour in 32 lines.

Anna May Wong Must Die!

By Anna Chen, 2009

Down in the alleys of old Chinatown,
In the gawdy bawdy backstreets of sinister renown,
Dope pedlars peddle, the dragon gets chased,
It’s the same old story, the same yellowface
The Man with the Fu Manchu opium embrace
Could kill you in an instant and never leave a trace.
He knows all the tricks how to get you high
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Down in the sewers of Chinatown way,
Chinamen get chinkified every single day.
Little yellow people all merging into one,
You eat their rice for punishment, their noodles are no fun.
Robotic ant-like army with phasers set to stun,
Marching cross the countryside, nowhere left to run.
Here’s a tall poppy soaring in the sky
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Silver screen dreams in black and white
But without the black bits, so that’s alright.
Along came a flapper, a cute little score,
The women went ‘Ooh!’ and the boys went, ‘Phwoah!’
Black hair, almond eyes, a figure to adore,
Yellow skin glistening, sticking in their craw,
There’s a comet in the heavens, the end is nigh
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

Who’s that upstart flouting all the rules?
Not one thing or the other, fall between two stools.
It’s Anna getting cocky, Anna out of line,
Anna take your punishment, Anna do your time,
Scary Chinee nemesis looking mighty sly
Crush the Dragon lady, the mastermind of crime.
Anna kissed a white boy and made him cry
And that’s why Anna May Wong must die.

More about Anna May Wong in the BBC profile: A Celestial Star in Piccadilly (2009)

Anna Chen — Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. Asia Times, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and the Curse of Erysichthon

Anna Chen – First published 5 July 2025, Big Beautiful Bill

Capitalism eats itself: Erysichthon of Thessaly, cursed with an insatiable hunger by Demeter, goddess of the fertility of the earth. Trump’s Big Beautiful bill

Big Beautiful Bill burns the Earth to pay the rich

Not only does Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill turn his Blackshirt boot-boy ICE forces into his own army, bigger than the FBI, DEA, US Bureau of Prisons put together (as AOC points out), it takes money from vital climate change policies to give to his already bloated elite backers.

Trump’s promised huge tax cuts for the rich will be directly paid for by cutting tax incentives for renewable energy designed to save the planet. You’d think he’d baulk at ending climate change measures that created jobs in red states like Texas, but, no. Along with cuts to medicaid, MAGA are being hit by a triple-whammy from their hero.

A walking casebook of Greek tragedy character flaws, Trump sports inverse parallels with a raft of mythological and folk characters. One that often springs to mind is a composite Robin Hood and King Midas: robbing the poor to pay the rich and everything he touches turns to sh*t.

The curse of Erysichthon

Why do they do it? Loved One tells me of 700-800 US billionaires, 33 are estimated to make over a $billion a year. Millions suffer to enrich a tiny band for whom being the richest on the planet will never be enough.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast once related a conversation with a vulture capitalist and one-time Trump backer (worth: $6.1 billion). Asked why he bilked a petrol pump attendant when he was already so rich, he replied, “I want it all”.

That, dear reader, sums up the mindset of what we’re dealing with. I want it all.

The elite’s elite are stricken with a relentless hunger that can never be satisfied.

The most apt classical analogy in this instance is probably King Erysichthon of Thessaly. Demeter, goddess of the fertility of the earth, cursed him for being destructive and greedy. Disrespecting the gods by cutting down a sacred grove to build a feasting hall was surely gagging for a fitting punishment. She invoked Limos, the spirit of insatiable appetite, until he consumed everything he had and ended up devouring himself. Unfortunately, it’s us they’re feeding on.

Reverse Robin Hood in Britain

Similarly in Britain, PM Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves operate from the Monsters Handbook. They relentlessly take money from the poorest and most vulnerable whom capitalism had left behind and shovel it into the defence industry, whose stock is rocketing. Coincidentally, £5 billion a year “saved” in social funding cuts is the same amount given to Ukraine. No mandate, no discussion.

Starmer refuses to fund his pet projects and proxy wars by taxing the billionaires whose wealth has soared since Covid.

He won’t touch Amazon, which notoriously pays no tax in the UK despite the country making him £27 billion a year. Jeff Bezos is worth $220 billion, and makes $8.99 billion per month, $31 million per day, $8 million per hour, $3,715 per second. He can rub our faces in it by spending 34 million dollars or pounds or whatever fantasy profligacy it takes for a three-day wedding jamboree in Venice like the last days of the Roman Empire while the world burns.

Gloves are off. This is naked Class War.

See also The Trump Heist: the fall of the American Empire

Anna Chen — Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. Asia Times, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.