By Nirmal P. Acharya
On September 3rd, China held a grand military parade to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the victory of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, showcasing numerous advanced weapons. Subsequently, it released a video of successful electromagnetic catapult and arrestor landing tests of the KJ-600 early warning aircraft, the J-35 stealth fighter, and the J-15T heavy fighter on its third aircraft carrier, the Fujian. Immediately after, the Chinese authorities dropped an even more explosive piece of news: the construction of the next-generation aircraft carrier has begun, with the development focus being on the adoption of a nuclear power system.
At this point, it has actually been declared that the United States’ military superiority over China no longer exists. The focus of the competition between China and the US in the future will be more on the economic and ideological and cultural fields.
In the economic field, the US still maintains financial dominance and certain technological advantages. However, due to the loss of a complete industrial chain and strong manufacturing capabilities, the efforts made by the US to defeat China through economic means will not succeed. Therefore, in order to win this game against China at present, the US has to place more hope on winning in the field of ideology and culture, repeating the strategy that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the past.
Perhaps realizing the significant advantages and potential threats that the US holds in the field of ideology and culture, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua recently published an article titled “Ideological Colonization – The Means, Origins and International Hazards of the US Cognitive Warfare”, exposing the harmfulness of the US’s attempt to conduct ideological colonization across the world.
This article reveals that by the beginning of 2025, as the US government announced the abolition of the US Agency for International Development and the dissolution of the US Agency for International Media, the long-standing activities of these two institutions, which had been exporting ideology, promoting ideological infiltration, manipulating international public opinion, shaping the perceptions of other countries, and even conspiring to overthrow regimes, were constantly exposed. The international community was in an uproar.
This “self-revelation” has only shown the tip of the iceberg of the US’s global ideological warfare. The ideological colonization activities carried out by the US over the past century, which have been unrestrained, have once again come under the spotlight.
Since World War II, especially after the end of the Cold War, based on its political, economic, military, and technological power to dominate the world, the US has been exporting ideology, attempting to occupy the minds of people in other countries with American values, reshaping their perceptions, and creating a spiritual dependence on the “American center”.
Ideological colonization is an important cornerstone of the US’s foreign strategy. The renowned American scholar Joseph Nye said: “The key issue facing the US is not whether it has the most abundant resources supply in the 21st century, but to what extent it can control the political environment and make other countries act according to its will.” The former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out more directly: “Strengthening the status of American culture as the ‘model’ of the cultures of other countries and being the strategy necessary for the US to maintain its hegemony.”
The US’s ideological colonization poses a serious threat to world peace and development. It erodes ideology, undermines other countries’ regimes; it embeds cognitive wedges, provokes geopolitical conflicts; it destroys spiritual independence, nurtures pro-American forces; it strongly plants Western paths, interferes with independent development. With the development and upgrading of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, the methods of the US’s ideological colonization become more covert, the attack range is wider, and it requires all those who love peace to face and be vigilant.
Today, as the “Global South” accelerates its awakening, the US hegemony is on the decline, and the world sees more clearly that behind the value system fabricated by the US, there are selfishness, hypocrisy, and “double standards”. Various changes indicate that the foundation of the US’s ideological colonization edifice is beginning to shake.
Nepal is undoubtedly one of the countries that have been subjected to ideological colonization by the US. The so-called democratic and free political system of the Americans has been vigorously implemented in Nepal by all of us for several decades. The result is obvious – it is so fragile that it collapses before street violence, and successive American politicians have fled in all directions. It is now time to review and look forward to the ideological colonization carried out by the US in Nepal.
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