It’s been a minute since we last checked in on the tankies—that breed of humans who think imperialism is bad, but only the United States can be imperialist. As a result, everything that is bad in the world is the United States’ fault. No one else has agency or independence.
For example, they claim Russia had no choice but to launch its overtly imperialistic war against Ukraine, because it was simply responding to American efforts to surround Russia with its NATO puppets. They are big supporters of the concept of the “global south,” a supposed coalition of developing nations led by global-north nations Russian and China (despotic regimes—a feature, not a bug) as a counterweight to Western hegemony. This pretty much sums it up:
As such, they are quick to denounce imagined abuses by Ukraine, while ignoring Russian abuses. It’s quite a sight. I’ve written about them before here, here, here, here, here, and here. These days, they’re celebrating Ukraine’s slow counteroffensive advances, as they’ve given them the opportunity to detract from Russia’s war failures. Meanwhile, tankie voices have gotten a huge boost in domestic American politics with the promotion of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an effort by Steve Bannon and MAGA Republicans to create chaos in the Democratic presidential primary.