These terms are used strictly euphemistically. A country that is declared to be “undemocratic” may not be any more undemocratic than any Western nation in which the voters decide almost nothing of importance. A country that is declared “undemocratic” is simply disobedient. Similarly, “human rights” is a ruse for applying pressure by governments that are themselves incorrigible and unrepentant human rights violators.

What lies behind the self-righteous façade created by these euphemisms is a well-oiled, industrial system of forcing nations to comply. Those who operate this system are a diverse group in the US and in Europe that includes politicians, transnational corporations, banks, insurance companies, ratings agencies, universities and global financial institutions. Those they force to comply with their demands may be sovereign states, regional blocs or even a single, large corporation. The moment they embark on a path to independence or attempt to form an alternative economic space, they automatically come under attack.

What happens next is the execution of a well-defined organizational algorithm. It has been fine-tuned over many years as an effective system. As it was being put together, it required quite a bit of creativity. But since then it has become ossified and degenerated to the level of knee-jerk reactions and groupthink.

Its stated purposes is to secure compliance with all demands issued from the imperial centers in Washington, London and Brussels. It is best described as a set of stages. The failure to secure compliance at each stage automatically advances the process to the next stage. There are just two possibilities for the end result: economic and political destruction of the rebellious entity, or its complete and unconditional surrender and compliance with imperial dictates.

Here, then, is the complete, step-by-step algorithm of this conveyor belt of subjugation.

Phase 0 involves intelligence-gathering. Prior to initiating the program of bringing a disobedient nation under control, a comprehensive audit of the victim is conducted. Various entities are involved, from government, corporations, international agencies and academia. The agencies involved include the CIA, the US State Department, the US Treasury and the International Monetary Fund. The objective is to identify pain points, vulnerabilities, and potential internal agents of influence. Private intelligence and analytical centers such as RAND and Stratfor also take part.

They compile a map of the political elites and the main actors. They determine who holds or makes the most money, where they keep it, where their children are sent to school, who are their mistresses, and what their tastes and their vices are. They evaluate a country’s dependence on the global markets for raw materials, manufactured goods, weapons systems and foodstuffs. They study its income flows and invent ways to disrupt them. They analyze its debt burden and determine who its creditors are and how their confidence can be undermined to drive up borrowing costs.

They study public sentiment. They look for social divisions, be they cultural, ethnic, religious or generational. They look for those divisions which they can exploit most easily and cheaply, then use these divisions to foment conflict and disorder in order to exert pressure on the government of the disobedient nation.

They evaluate the investment potential of the entity in question, looking at it as an asset that can be seized and placed under external control. They determine which particularly valuable resources, such as oil, gas, rare earth metals or transport corridors, can be seized as the prize after the subjugation process is complete.

This phase is strictly preparatory and cannot be said to ever fail. But it is at this stage that the seeds of eventual failure are often planted. The culprits here are ignorance and unjustified self-confidence. There is simply too little understanding within Western institutions of ancient and complex civilizations, be they China, Russia or Iran. There is not even the language needed to describe their internal processes. Instead, a reductionist, purely materialistic model is used, ignoring ancient mental and spiritual aspects and principles of organization that may be of key importance. A model of Western rationality is applied to peoples whose idea of a rational choice may be drastically different. As a result, the people in question fail to act as expected when the time comes.

However badly this homework is done, it is then time to move on to Phase 1: the charm offensive. During this phase, the local elites are purchased, corrupted or otherwise compromised.

This is soft power in its classic form. The targeted elite is offered what seems like a good deal: “You gain access to our market and technology. In return, we gain control over your economic policy.” The goal is to bind national elites to the Western financial system through a set of contracts. Already at this stage, the algorithm may begin to falter. Because the market is now a global market and the technology is often available from non-Western sources, this honeypot strategy fails to attract.

The instruments used include global banks such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, investment funds such as BlackRock and Vanguard, “golden visas” and US and British passports for the fully compliant members of local elites while the courts in London and The Hague help to settle property questions in their favor.

What “control over economic policy” means is, invariably, debt servitude. The IMF issues loans under onerous conditions such as tariff increases, privatization of public services, cuts to social programs, and the opening up of markets to the disadvantage of local producers. There follows offshorization of national wealth. It involves the crafting of schemes, both transparent and opaque ones, for local oligarchs to transfer their capital to London, Delaware and other offshore tax havens.

Equally important is the replacement of personnel for the managerial class. Harvard and Yale special program graduates are inserted into key administrative positions. They bring with them Western management standards and loyalty to Western financial and economic institutions. To make sure that no escape is possible, international auditing firms — the Big Four — are brought in. Their function is to gain an in-depth understanding of the country’s financial position, making it vulnerable to financial speculation.

If the soft power techniques of Phase I fail to produce the intended result, Phase II begins. Its goal is political destabilization. At this stage, some of the national elite has been compromised, but the country’s political course still displeases the Western stakeholders. In that case, cognitive warfare comes into play. The goal of this cognitive warfare is to compromise the national government in the eyes of its own constituents.

An additional goal is to erase the people’s sense of national identity and historical memory by substituting a fake history based on narratives concocted by Western think thanks. A typical ploy is to take the worst dictator in history — Hitler is the canonical choice — and equate him to various national leaders such as Mao or Stalin. Such narratives serve to undermine a nation’s sovereign past, in turn undermining its sovereign future.

This is best done by creating a controlled opposition — ideally, a foreign-trained one — that recasts foreign intervention as liberation. The institutional tools employed at this stage are National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, global media conglomerates such as the BBC, CNN and Deutsche Welle, and social media companies such as Meta, Google and Elon Musk’s X.

The narrative shift typically targets children and students whose cognition is still malleable and easy to manipulate. A typical ploy is to introduce new, Western-sponsored textbooks in schools and universities that interpret the country’s history as a series of colonialist, imperialist crimes. Older textbooks, which contradict this falsified history, are often bought up and destroyed, as was done in Russia by the Soros foundations. Numerous non-government organizations are brought in to help. Tens to hundreds of non-profit organizations, paid for by Western grant money, establish operations under the guise of protecting the environment, the rights of ethnic or religious minorities, of homosexuals, or women’s rights. Their real goal is to create a parallel, externally controlled, illegitimate system of governance which the legitimate government cannot control.

To give this fake liberation movement a focal point, a charismatic protest leader is often recruited and groomed for the job. An already remote-controlled figure best serves this function. Examples include Alexei Navalny or Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia, or Nikol Pashinyan in Armenia, or Vladimir Zelensky in the former Ukraine. This leader is provided with fawning international press coverage, lavish grants and legal protection. Paid visits from Western film and pop stars are often arranged as well.

If the government continues to resist, it is time for Phase III: a color revolution. The techniques of nonviolent resistance à la Gene Sharp are well known by now, and can still be effective. They include blocking roads, seizing administrative buildings and creating parallel government structures that are provided legitimacy by Western governments and media. To ramp up the color revolution, activist groups are prepared in special training camps in the target country and abroad. To help delegitimize the government, snipers are shipped into the country and kill some number of protesters, placing the blame on the government and forcing it to step down, as happened in the former Ukraine in 2014.

But what if none of this works? What if the people of the nation being targeted are united around their government? What if they regard the participants of the color revolution as traitors? What if the country has its own, strictly internal and effective national media supported by political experts, commentators and bloggers? What if the population of the country sees the West as the enemy along with the foreign-financed parallel government structures and activist groups?

Well then, the color revolution fizzles. Some of its leaders — those who can be conveniently tried for embezzlement, cheating on their taxes or forgery — are imprisoned. The rest are declared to be foreign agents and given a chance to leave the country — quietly or not so quietly.

And then it’s time for the next phase — Phase IV — which consists of economic asphyxiation through sanctions and currency devaluation. Once it becomes clear that soft power doesn’t work and the “color revolution” fizzles or never even starts and the government remains stable it is time to deploy a “financial atomic bomb.” The goal here is to make the pursuit of an independent economic and foreign policies suicidal for the country in question.

The tools brought to bear are the US Office of Foreign Asset Control, the SWIFT interbank message exchange system and the ratings agencies such as S&P and Moody’s. Sanctions are imposed against key economic and financial institutions, and a few key individuals in an attempt to paralyze the economy. Blocking of bank wires prevents the settlement of accounts for import and export, causing cash flow problems and product shortages. Speculative attacks against the national currency reduce its value while ratings downgrades drive up borrowing costs for domestic businesses and lay the groundwork for their hostile takeovers by foreign financial conglomerates.

In accordance with the standard playbook, the central bank’s gold and foreign exchange reserves in accounts in Europe and the US are frozen, sometimes along with some large private funds. The country’s banks are disconnected from SWIFT, isolating the banking system and hindering international settlements. A ban is imposed on the imports of high-tech components such as microchips. Cancellation of software licenses for computer-aided design systems and automated machine tools halts high-tech manufacturing. Price ceilings are imposed on the country’s exports, artificially capping the price of exported raw materials such as oil and gas, and forcing these resources to be sold at a discount. Finally, there is ratings manipulation: instantly dropping a country’s sovereign rating to junk status. This forces Western funds to dump the country’s bonds, driving up interest rates and borrowing costs.

But what if a certain country’s fiscal position is solid? What if it has almost no foreign debt and no need for foreign deficit financing. What if it is replete with foreign assets on its territory which it can nationalize in response to hostile actions? What if it has enough allies around the world to circumvent most sanctions? What if its accumulated trade surplus provides it with a sufficient financial cushion lasting many years? What if it has its own high-tech software and manufacturing industries that is sufficient to safeguard its national interests?

Well, then it is time for Phase V: a logistics blockade. If sanctions fail to do the trick, attempts are made to physically close resource arteries. If a country finds export workarounds, be it through a “shadow fleet” or via alternative pipelines, then the infrastructure itself comes under attack. The goal is to deprive the country of the physical ability to export its commodities. The tools brought to bear are: NATO naval forces, intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the MI6, private military companies, sabotage groups of unknown origin, all the way down to desperate or simply stupid people who are willing to cause petty mischief for a small fee.

The targets during this phase include all manner of commercial infrastructure. Gas pipelines are sabotaged. Seaports are attacked. Nuclear power plants are subjected to rocket and bomb attacks. A regime of inspection of vessels in international waters is imposed. This may include seizure and sale of the cargo, and arrest of ships under any pretext, such as environmental issues, suspected smuggling or sanctions violations.

Another ploy is an insurance blockade: Western insurers are prohibited from working with vessels bound for the country being targeted. Without insurance, vessels cannot enter the country’s ports, complicating logistics and making trade less profitable. Political and military pressure is applied to close key straits such as the Bosphorus, the Denmark straits in the Baltic and, of course, the Strait of Hormuz.

But what if these efforts result in counter-efforts that are no less effective? What if seaports continue functioning, albeit at a temporarily reduced capacity? What if effective workarounds for pipeline closures are quickly found? What if attempts to stop and seize ships at sea result in symmetrical actions against Western shipping? After all, Britain is the country with the largest “shadow fleet” and Russia can quite easily stop it from sailing around the Pacific rim along sea lanes which skirt Russian territory. What if a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz against Iran results in a virtual blockade of the Bab el Mandeb and the Suez Canal, hurting Western logistics?

Then there follows a bit of an impasse. Of no help are hollow claims of victory against Iran and bogus celebrations of rather superficial damage caused to Russian infrastructure.

If the restrictions imposed on the recalcitrant state were to succeed, its money would soon run out. With its infrastructure destroyed and its supply chains disrupted, the state would go bankrupt. This is when the “vultures” – the largest investment funds – would swoop in on the now helpless prey. The goal is to buy up the remaining assets at fire sale prices and to impose a new, foreign-controlled, corporate ownership structure. Then it would automatically be time for asset stripping, privatization of state resources and infrastructure, and domestic market capture by Western importers. The institutions brought to bear in this phase are transnational financial conglomerates: BlackRock, Vanguard, private equity funds and the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF provides crisis management, providing the country with emergency financing, but only on the condition that a technocratic Western manager be appointed to the government. The result is relentless asset stripping and subsequent permanent debt servitude. The condition for the aid is the transfer of national ports, pipelines and production facilities to Western corporations for a term such as 50 years. Transnational corporations buy up strategic enterprises that by then would have lost something like 90% of their capitalization due to sanctions and disrupted export logistics.

Along the way, the ruling elite of the country is replaced. Power is transferred to an entirely new technocratic class. It owes its position not to the people of the country, but to Western entities. Sovereignty is eliminated as a concept, and the country becomes a colony in all but the name.

But if the country manages to continue to resist, making this phase impossible, then it is time to jump straight ahead Phase VI: fashioning the country into a permanent global pariah — at least in the eyes of the part of the world the West still controls. This is done so as to discourage anyone from attempting to restore relations with this country even into the remote future. An additional goal is to legitimize all manner of illegal actions and offensive behavior toward the country in the eyes of the West’s own population and to stigmatize any attempts at resistance. For example, currently, anyone in the West who voices the opinion that Russia has legitimate reasons to resist NATO’s attempts at eastern expansion all the way to Crimea is automatically labeled as a Russian agent and shunned.

The tools brought to bear in this delegitimization effort are the UN, The International War Crimes Tribunal, the International Criminal Court, the European Parliament and the European Commission. Resolutions are adopted (or, failing that, endlessly proposed) to officially declare the country’s leadership, labeled a “regime”, as “criminal” and its leaders as “war criminals.” There usually follows legal castration of the country’s leadership through war crimes tribunals (such as against Serbia) and issuing in absentia verdicts that subject the country’s representatives to seizure and extradition worldwide.

And let us not forget reparations for alleged war crimes. The country’s frozen assets are transferred to the benefit of the alleged “victims.” This is currently being endlessly discussed with regard to the transfer of the principal from frozen Russian assets to aid the former Ukraine. The principal from these assets is already being spent in this manner. The discussion remains inconclusive for two reasons. First, Russia holds more Western assets than the West holds Russian assets. If Russian assets were stolen, Russia would nationalize Western assets in the same or greater amount. Second, much of the frozen Russian sovereign reserves are held at Euroclear in Belgium. If these accounts were looted, a run on Euroclear from sovereign depositors from around the world would inevitably follow.

The process of turning a country into an international pariah is not without its complications and compromises either. More and more often, Western attempts to shun and to stigmatize countries such as Iran, North Korea or Russia fail to produce the intended result. Stealing a country’s sovereign assets tends to boomerang on the thieves by ruining the international reputations of their financial institutions.

Beyond this last phase lies a bit of a policy wasteland. But an additional bit of damage is often attempted: cultural cancellation. It involves knocking down monuments, banning films and concerts, renaming streets, banning the teaching of the country’s language and culture and generally attempting to erase the very memory of a country’s greatness. However, this does not make the country in question any less great. It does, however, make the West’s own supposed “experts” on this country quite a bit more ignorant and liable to make even more embarrassing mistakes in attempting to formulate foreign policy when it is time to go back to square one and do intelligence-gathering for the next attempted onslaught.

What else is there to do? The West could, of course, start World War III. The West has a proven track record of starting world wars in an effort to solve its otherwise unsolvable problems. The two World Wars did help the United States abscond with virtually all of Europe’s colonies, making Western Europe itself into a colony along the way. But this trick wouldn’t work again. The US is no longer the strongest either militarily or economically, either alone or with all of its allies. Also, it faces a horrible fiscal mess and is internally divided and conflicted.

There is, however, a danger that, facing the complete failure of its global dominance algorithm, the West will continue to ignite conflicts around the world as the last thing it could try. You see, this algorithm is not the creation of any one US president or political party or think tank. It is the standard, well-established business practice of the entire Western transnational financial system. If the elites can be bought, Phase 1 is activated. If the elites are uncooperative, but the people succumb to manipulation, Phase 2 is triggered. If the people are unified and patriotic, the country is relegated to the status of “enemy” and undergoes Phases 3, 4, and 5, attempting to destroy it physically, politically and financially. If these phases don’t work either, Phases 6 and 7 may be tried. And, if these fail too, there is always Phase 8: World War III. I don’t see the danger of World War III as particularly huge because it would be a suicidal move. But an endless series of provocations does not seem altogether unlikely. With each one, the West will grow weaker and weaker. What remains to be seen is whether there is enough of a brain left in the West to realize that doing so is suicidal.

For now, the algorithm remains in place. This is not because it is still effective. This is because the level of degradation in the West is such that no new algorithm can be formulated. There are simply no new ideas anywhere. And this is precisely the reason why “negotiations” and “compromises” with the West are no longer possible. This system does not negotiate with those it has already placed on its conveyor belt of subjugation or destruction. Only two options remain: complete capitulation (which returns the country to Phase 1, but under harsher conditions); or physical destruction.

The understanding of this algorithm is the key to why so many diplomatic efforts end in an impasse. It is a deaf, blind machine that will continue spinning its wheels until it runs out of fuel. The fuel, in this case, is money. More specifically, it is debt. At this point, the debt has to keep growing to continue paying interest on the existing debt. When the debt stops growing, the machine will stop.