However aggressive, arrogant and belligerent they may seem, the U.S. — including Israel — has once again been placed in a defensive position.

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Shortly after the Iranian response to the Zionist attack that destroyed its consulate in Syria, killing senior commander Mohammad Reza Zahedi, it was the White House itself, and Biden, who pulled the reins from Netanyahu and told the world that the action had been properly “calibrated”. This happened, after the Zionist authorities spat fire, threatening apocalyptic consequences against the reborn Persian potentate.

This “calibration” in Washington’s discourse is the obvious consequence of what happened before the Iranian retaliation; in the 48 hours leading up to it, several European couriers called for “restraint” from Iran, warning to the serious consequences that this lack of “restraint” could trigger. The signs of concern were as obvious as the whitewashing and legitimization of Israel’s provocative action towards its neighbors, in the region, had been until then.

Ursula von der Leyen, however, was not one to mince her words. In yet another show of hypocrisy of biblical proportions, she threatened the only response she knows: sanctions packages against Iran for carrying out an “unprovoked attack”. Macron couldn’t be left behind either and came out to say that “we” must continue to “isolate Iran” with the usual sanctions.

If there is anything to take away from this behavior, it is this: Ursula Von Der Leyen and the Macrons of this world live in a reality that no longer exists, in which the “racially, morally and intellectually superior” West had the legitimacy to punish, persecute, invade, threaten and destroy all those who opposed it. But if, in their hateful blindness, they haven’t yet realized this, the same cannot be said of those who rule them. The world has changed and is undergoing an accelerated transformation.

Impunity ended when the Russian Federation said it would not accept the crossing of the red line it had imposed and which determined Ukraine’s neutrality; the world changed when Iran, Hezbollah, Huthis and Hamas declared they would no longer accept Zionist abuses against their populations and those of their allies; the world changed when China did not give up on Russia and Iran, demonstrating that the multipolar world was here to stay. To destroy one, you have to destroy all three. All interconnected by extensive strategic partnerships.

Consequently, Iran’s response signaled that it is prepared to give a decisive response to what it considers to be an escalation of abuses by Zionism and its supporters, and that it will not continue to tolerate genocidal disrespect from the Zionist entity that controls Israel.

This behavior on the part of Iran, previously unthinkable and intolerable by the “international community”, now finds a space of legitimacy that is absolutely revealing of how the world has changed in these years of growing multipolarity. Sanctions no longer carry the same weight, since Iran — like Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua — has learned to be self-sufficient, transforming aggression into a force of opposition; nor does the West now dominate the global South with the force it used to; nor do the U.S. and its vital space still constitute that military power that everyone was afraid of.

Today, powers like Iran can afford to raise the stakes and corner the arrogant West. The most interesting thing is that, from a strategic point of view, the U.S. had bet on a profusion of multiple provocations, ever more widespread and aimed at localized military escalations, whose function was to contain the expansion of the countries that constitute the central pillars of this liberation of the global south: Russia, China and Iran.

Resulting in the continued expansion of the multipolar world, the development of the “global south”, which is nothing more than the “global majority”; accompanied by the consequent loss of strategic positions by the west, that dictate access to the strategic labor reserves of Asia and Africa; the reserves of commodities in Russia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa; or the installed industrial capacity of Asia; the multipolar “Triplice Entente” that directs the anti-imperialist process, through its “calibrated” attacks, is provoking a progressive corrosion of the imperialist entity, announcing, somewhere in time, its collapse.

And this is the great merit of these three countries and their allies, South Africa, more convinced, India and Brazil, more perilous, which have now been joined by five other countries, and which will soon be joined by many others, including Vietnam itself, which has already made official its intention to join the BRICS. These countries have had the patience, wisdom and competence to act as concertedly as possible, but also as decentralized as necessary, without allowing themselves to become entangled in insurmountable internal contradictions that expose them to the nation-destroying machine that is the USA. In this way, decentralized expansion poses problems that are extremely difficult to overcome for those who want to destroy this process of expansion, which is also a process of liberation from neo-colonialism.

It cannot be said, however, that we are at a totally original historical moment. In fact, we should remember the words of Zbigniew Brzezinsky to the Nouvelle Observateur in 1998, when, in an interview, he acknowledged that not only had the U.S. knowingly contributed to the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR, but he was also delighted — as arrogant supremacists like to be — that even with a million dead, it was worth supporting the Mujahideen (Taliban), which they knew in advance would be seen by Moscow as something intolerable on its borders and which would not fail to provoke a war.

In a process similar to what happened in Ukraine — the formation of a deeply anti-Russian (or anti-USSR) ruling elite practicing a hateful and extremist ideology — the most important thing Brzezinsky said, however, was that the U.S., being ideologically on the defensive, with the human rights agenda it was possible to turn the tide and put USSR on the defensive side. Today, the idea of a multipolar world has recovered the Global South, as a whole, to an ideological offensive position and, at the same time, U.S. finds itself on the defensive side once again. And this time, they might as well come with the human rights agenda again, but no one is believing in them anymore.

From this position we can learn a valuable lesson for today: however aggressive, arrogant and belligerent they may seem, the U.S. — including Israel — has once again been placed in a defensive position. Everything they do is in response to a reality in which the multipolar world continues to expand and the “enlarged” West to contract. Whatever many “enlargements” NATO may propagandize, the living space of the Western monopolies, which are the roots of imperialism, has been progressively shrinking. This is an indisputable fact and only the brutal indebtedness on the part of the White House makes that the U.S. economy continues to grow artificially and, with it, fuels the process of “containing” the growth of the multipolar world.

What is impossible to hide is that the U.S. problem is more complicated this time around. It won’t be as easy to go “on the offensive” as it was with the USSR. Although the USSR was a formidable challenge and one that the ruling elite in Washington soon identified as a matter of life and death, the fact that the Soviet power was, at the time, the only pillar on which the challenge rested, made things easier. It was very easy to split the world in two and demonize the other side. Unlike today, the USSR could not support itself in China.

The challenge posed by China, Russia and Iran, seconded by India, South Africa, Brazil and many others, is much more complex and dislocated. Firstly, they are not a monolithic bloc with the same ideology. These are countries with very different systems of governance, from the most liberal, like Brazil and South Africa, to the socialist like China or the national developmentalist like Russia, or even Iran, with its theocratic and democratic dimension. From the point of view of propaganda, this poses many difficulties, which is why in recent months we have seen a growing line of propaganda develop, according to which China has an interest in Trump’s victory — him that wants to destroy it — and that it is the European extreme right that supports China and is supported by it. It’s a kind of “Russiagate”, this time in a Chinese version. Fitting everyone into the same hat and demonizing them has not been easy.

What’s more, these countries, each in their own way — Iran least of all — are connected to Western value chains, which prevents decisive and brutal action, regardless of the consequences. Look what happened with the sanctions on Russia, now think what would happen if that level of aggression were to hit the Chinese economy.

This is the essence of “multipolarity”, which others call “multiplexity”, which consists of its enormous capillarity, like mushrooms multiplying all over the world, each with its own morphology but all with the same nature, making it virtually impossible to contain its growth. As the U.S. learned from Russia, it’s not enough to attack one, you have to attack all, but it’s impossible to attack all, as they’re now realizing. This diversity is absolutely challenging to the totalitarian and unicist logic of the U.S., which saw itself as dominating a uniform world.

If there’s one thing the monopolistic West doesn’t understand, it’s how to unite things that are different, how to accept other people’s differences, how to create a common force between different people, united only by one sentiment: freedom. In order to unite, U.S. imperialism feels an imperative need to standardize, disrespecting and destroying cultures, traditions, beliefs and ideologies, in order to impose its own.

These multipolar countries, founded on an interventionist state (something common to all and which rejects the Western proposal of the neoliberal minimal state, replaced by monopolies), which controls the strategic sectors of the economy and is committed to economic sovereignty, turns the control of their economies very complicated. It’s no wonder that one of the U.S.’s lines of attack on China is the need to abolish “capital controls”. The whole “liberalization” thing is to the advantage of those who have the most purchasing power. We know who has the most accumulated money, the result of 500 years of pillage and slavery.

The truth is that the U.S., looking at this reality, realized that Brezinsky’s strategy would have to be adapted to the current reality, namely, it would have to be deconcentrated or disperse, opting for relocated provocations, taking advantage of the dispersion of military bases around the world. For Russia, it would be Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, closely followed by NATO; for China it would be Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan and slippery India; for Iran, Israel.

The dispersed provocations, through very well-armed proxies, pose a problem, a problem now demonstrated by the Iranian retaliation. The blanket is short for a West that doesn’t have the industrial capacity of the past, relocated through no fault but its own, through an unpopular policy of destroying jobs, at the service of the monopolies. And this is happening against a backdrop of financial, economic and social contraction. Even from the point of view of financing these operations, the West ends up trapped in its own contradictions: unlike states, monopolies don’t invest in the common good, only in the concentration of wealth. Taking from the state to give to the monopolies ended up in what we are seeing.

Founded on military-industrial complexes in which the main companies are state-owned and, even when they are private, forced to compete with state-owned companies, Iran, China and Russia produce very cheaply what is very expensive for the West (the air defense of the Iron Dome, on the night of the Iranian retaliation, cost around a billion dollars). This reality allows for a relatively low-value “calibrated” response. In comparison, those who spend the most on these operations are the ones whose economies are falling; those who spend the least are the ones whose economies are growing. Once again, this is a consequence of the neoliberal minimal state, which emerged from the Washington consensus.

That’s why the great challenge facing the multipolar world will be to continue betting on responses that are sufficiently “calibrated” to put the aggressor in its senses, without escalating to life and death, but keeping the aggressor busy, eroding itself more and more, and whose activity leads it to believe that it is advancing, when in fact it is retreating. Russia has done this masterfully with the Special Military Operation and China is also doing it from a non-military point of view.

That’s why listening to Ursula von der Leyen with her proverbial arrogance, threatening Iran with ineffective sanctions, listening to Trump and his MAGA, Sunak wanting to talk big and Macron playing Napoleon, while saying “the world is with Ukraine”, “Russia is isolated”, “we’re going to contain China” or “Iran attacked Israel”, shows just that: the servants of monopolies are busy playing with small lead soldiers without realizing that they are doing so on an increasingly smaller board.

If the multipolar world can continue to deliver its “calibrated” attacks, in whatever form they take (some more militarized, others more commercial and technological), we can be sure that they will be able to complete the task that others have already begun: to put an end to the neo-colonialism that still gags the global South.

Come on, Kalibr!