check their foreign investments. they have certainly been forcibly divested from the western sphere of influence, but they have responded by increasing investments in wealthy eastern countries and the eastern global south

I don’t understand this line of logic, is China imperialist then? A lot of countries invest in other countries.

The post-1971 world is arranged in such a way that every other country is subservient to a single, super-imperialist power that is the US empire.

This condition did not exist in the pre-WWI “multi-polar” order between the European imperialists. Previously, the global imperialist hegemons (e.g. the British Empire) were net creditors to the world, today, the hegemon (the US empire) is a net debtor to the world. It literally just prints dollar out of thin air to control the world. This is the major difference.

Today, the US controls key global financial institutions that dictate the economic policies of the rest of the world.

The US controls the IMF - which uses monetary imperialism to control the fiscal and monetary policies of other countries (the Russian Central Bank, for example, is particularly obedient to the IMF recommendations even to this very day - which is why you see the ruble depreciated, an act that only benefited Western imperialism).

The US dollar comprises 85% of the world’s transaction - the world runs around dollar, like it or not. There is not a single country, not even China, can compete with the US on financial capital.

Russia’s finance capital is a drop in the bucket in a sea of global capital dominated by the dollar. If you look at what the Central Bank of Russia is doing, it is literally helping the US with its monetary policies (rate hikes, ruble depreciation) and a direct antagonism Putin’s nationalist policy that focuses more on the real sector (industrial capital).

The US controls the World Bank - which controls the agricultural policy of the developing world and forced them to invest in export crops that can be sold cheap to Western consumers, rather than food for self-sufficiency. If you do not obey their policies you can be cut off from importing essential goods (like energy).

The US controls the WTO - which controls the trade policy (and thereby the economic and industrial policy) of the developing world, forcing countries to lower the wages of their labor in order to become competitive exporters and allowing Western capitalists to enter their market for exploitation.

Russia does not and will never have control of these global financial institutions. In fact, the goal for Russia is dedollarization, which means to weaken the hold of the financial institutions on to their own country and the world, such that they can take actually a breath after being choked by neoliberalism for almost half a century.

Even if they have the ambitions, Russia has to realize that there is no way to become an imperialist power even after they succeed in dedollarization (and that’s a big IF). Nobody can really afford to get rid of the dollar, and in order to convince them, you actually have to offer real, tangible benefits - and this means the Global South will have a lot to say in shaping new multi-polar order. Russia cannot survive the sanctions without deepening cooperation with the Global South, and in this process, the rest of the world will ensure that not a single country can exert their imperialistic ambitions like the US does today.