Many years ago, The Simpsons aired an episode wherein Homer went into prize fighting. He didn't win because he was better than his opponent. He won because he outlasted his opponent, simply taking the beating until the opponent got too tired to continue--"gassing out" as some say--and then knocked the man out with a single piss-poor punch.
That episode was, in part, a parody of Muhammed Ali's famed "Rope-A-Dope" approach. It is as simple as it sounds; you minimize your energy expenditure, go full defensive, and make the other guy exhaust himself trying to get at you- and then when he's spent you take him out with ruthless efficiency as a flex.
This is what Globohomo is doing to Russia and the CCP. It is working. It is going to give Globohomo the win unless leadership in either or both rival Imperial states wise up and counteract before it's too late.
What It Is
In tabletop and electronic wargames, there is the concept known as "Damage Over Time". Abbrieviated as "DOT" (with "HOT" as its counterpart, for healing and recovery), a player whose man is optimized for playing a DOT strategy ensures that his opponent is too busy dealing with immediate concerns to properly address the DOT effects that erode the opponent's capacity to resist and ultimately lead to his defeat.
The Mithriadates Strategyis the geopolitical version of playing a DOT specialization in a wargame.
For this strategy to work, the opponent has to be rendered unable to address the damage accumulating over time to his capacity to resist. This means presenting some immediate threat or bait that proves bothersome to deal with, yet cannot be abandoned due to some non-trivial threat or penalty to doing so. As bait in fishing is best applied by tailoring the bait to the catch, so must baiting an opponent be tailored to the target.
How It Works
With the bait taken, the conflict is managed. The objective is to fully occupy the target's attention, and if the target can be induced to devote resources towards the distraction so much the better; the bait's safety is irrelevant, and once its usefulness is spent it is discarded- to be replaced if another is required.
The conflict is to be managed--sustained, massaged, tinkered with--until the DOT reaches a Point Of No Return past which defeat is a fait accompli. Once the target collapses due to the consequences of accumulative damage sustained, the survivor finishes off the target and takes his spoils from the defeated enemy.
The DOTs used to damage the target include damage to its ability to execute financial transactions, damage to its demography, damage to its cultural or narrative control, damage to its political capacity, and damage to its industrial output. Notice that these are all easily overlooked, especially if the target is distracted.
The geopolitical form of this strategy aims not only to bring a present regime to heel, but to sever it from its posterity; this is what the cultural attacks are for, to convert a critical mass of the target's population to Globohomo's position and thus groom a cadre of Globohomo-loyal elites to insert into place once the present regime falls.
This is, in fact, going on right now; YouTube is lousy with Globohomo shill channels fronted in earnest by Russian converts. This is what a lot of people thinking that Russia will win the peace do not comprehend; once you have a large enough cadre of cultural influencers, you can turn some of them into replacement Establishment figures and thus turn a defeated enemy into a loyal satrapy inside a generation post-defeat.
Why It Succeeds
It is this simple. This is from a Zeihan presentation made six years ago.
It has only gotten worse since then, and the very military action Peter talked about then is now going down.
Ukraine, for Russia, was the bait. That's why Globohomo put Zelensky into Kiev, covered up all the scummy shit his regime pulled (and pulls), and used it as a catspaw to provoke Moscow. They knew ALL ABOUT this very scenario.
Globohomo decided to force the issue on their terms, and those terms means using one terminal nation (Ukrainians) against another (Russians) for the purpose of poisoning a rival Imperial power (Russia) to death- and then to put a satrap in power in Moscow.
But not just Moscow. They fully intend to break up the Russian Federation into upward of a dozen smaller states, each of which too weak to resist Globohomo or the third Imperial power: China.
(We'll get back to Beijing below.)
The real DOT here is not economic or political. It's cultural.
Contra what Vox Day, Jackson Hinkle, The Duran, et. al. want people to believe the Russian demographic THAT MATTERS is already Globohom-aligned. That would be the folks comprising Russian's professional, technical, and managerial elite who are--at most--neutral or apathetic to Putin's regime and therefore the cohort of the population that would slide right back into government and corporate positions in Russia once Putin and his cohort fall from power.
Why?
Again, it is this simple:
He's someone that works with a Globohomo company (YouTube) and other such companies, which is part of the aforementioned cohort of Westernized Russians. He, and others who went abroad either for work or other reasons, did so because they could get the higher Western standard of living without having to be in a handful of locations in Russia.
You'll find similar stories with every single Russian expatriate, especially those working in the cultural end of things, and these people (and their families) tend to have skills, wealth, or both- as evidenced by the massive influx of Russia capital into Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
When Zeihan talks about Russian demography, he includes all of these skilled and educated people dipping out leaving only fuckups, hardcore regime loyalists, and those still on the make behind to fill in the gaps- and the consequences of institutional incompetence take time to fully manfiest.
Globohomo knows that if it can keep Moscow focused on the Ukraine War long enough, there won't be anything left to rebuild with at home. All of the skill and acumen needed is out of their reach and loyal to Globohomo, so when they return they will be happy to (as a class) seize power and rebuild Russia (and whatever splits off it of this time) into a Globohomo satrapy that they run and enjoy being the boss(es) of.
It almost worked in the 1990s. This time it will succeed.
About That China Issue
The CCP has a serious problem in that a lot of its most talented and skilled people tend to leave China and not come back. Once settled, usually in the West or Southeast Asia, they begin bringing family over; this swiftly forms Mainlander Chinese enclaves in those countries.
Why do they come West? Some of it is earnest believe in Globohomo propaganda about freedom, liberty, and Enlightenment values. Most of it is flat-out Securing The Bag; they're here for the money, specifically to take what they slipped out of China and making it work for them via investments into even more money.
The CCP, knowing how this settlement pattern works, exploits it to attempt counter-operations via "Overseas Police" operations in addition to other fronts such as the Confucious Institutes (found on or near university campuses) and classic honeypot operations targetting Western officials.
But, while not to be dismissed, the real tell that the CCP is more aware of Globohomo's real strategy comes from its pervasic media controls.
The Mainlanders love Hollywood; media piracy is still endemic, despite the Great Firewall, and it is no surprise that bootleg copies of Top Gun: Maverick can be found sold on disc therein- along with other censored or banned movies, shows, and other media from outside the mainland.
In short, the Chinese today--as so many others have for so long--have seen Western affluence in Western media and desire it for themselves, so they do what it takes to get out of China and make their way West, including following Central and South American illegals to the US-Mexico border.
There are exit bans in place, but they are not properly used or enforced.
This contributes to China's own worsening economic and political instability, not at all helped by the disasters made worse by incompetent land and water management.
Globohomo knows it has superior cultural appeal over China. That's why monied Mainlanders all flee into the West as fast as they can with as much as they can, legally or not, despite how terrible the Chinese passport is. It's also more difficult to get the better visas for Mainlanders than for diasporan Chinese.
Therefore, Globohomo knows that China is in the same boat as Russia: a young would-be elite cohort culturally aligned with the West and disfavored by the regime, biding its time in exile, and willing to go back once the CCP is gone to (for all intents and purposes) turn China into a Glohomo satrapy.
All Globohomo has to do is wait, and it uses the bait of Taiwan as well as potential naval conflicts elsewhere in waters it claims, to keep Beijing distracted from the eroding cultural control it's suffering from. Economic damage comes from disinvesting from the Mainland and into its nearby rivals instead, such as Vietnam, rerouting global trade influx and maximizing outflows from China. If Beijing doesn't resort to war soon--within the next year or two--it will slip past its No Return point and become unable to do so.
And Then We Wait For Them To Gas Out
The final part of the strategy is the most dangerous because if you don't wait for the target to hit total exhaustion, you can screw it up and give them the win by allowing them a shot at you that takes you out before they go down. This is a Fabian-style strategy, which is why Globohomo conceals its presence entirely and denies that it's doing anything of the sort; maintaining deniability ensures that no one can throw wrenches into the works, at home or abroad.
It doesn't matter how much gear you throw into the grinder. It doesn't matter how many insults you take. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at the fake problem. You get all of that back with interest when they gas out and you roll them over to take everything, put your puppets into position, and reconfigure the land, the people, the polities, and the economies into Globohomo-prefered forms.
And once you have your hooks into a target polity's elites, you can guarantee control by ensuring that their elites attend your universities and train alongside your Imperial leadership classes- because once you've converted their culture to accept yours as greater, then they accept that your morality is superior to theirs and you can convert the elites. Then the elites will convert the masses for you and thus enforce your Imperial rule invisibily. Neither Russia nor the CCP truly comprehend this, which is why they'll both die to DOTs.
Conclusion
This is why I write of Empire as something separate and distinct from any polity; it can, and it does, sit above it as a competing force in human existence. Its power comes from presenting a compelling moral paradigm to those it holds as Thralls. If you have a strong and resilient moral force--a religion--than you can do great things so long as that force can back the effort and thus make the costs worthwhile, including justification for subjugating one's own kind to the yoke of an alien religion or a foreign power.
If you want to defeat Empire, you must have a superior religion. I know of only one.
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