ABSTRACT
The intensifying conflict between the US and China and their respective allies (Europe and Russia) has been driven by inter-capitalist competition that turns into inter-imperial rivalry resembling the conflicts between Britain and Germany a century earlier. While the conflict originates from overaccumulation and contest between capital exporters, the US and its allies try to frame it as a conflict between democracy and autocracy. China and its allies, on the other hand, portray the conflict as a showdown between a reviving communalist Eastern civilization and a declining individualist Western civilization. These ideological imaginations of the conflict, despite their deviation from reality, do constitute their materiality by shaping the trajectory of the conflict. These essentializing and polarizing imaginations are making the conflict less irresolvable than it actually is and making war more plausible.
