would you condemn seemingly imperialist behaviour from countries like Russia and China as much as you would condemn imperialist behaviour from western countries

The only example you produced of China’s “imperialism” was settling some uninhabited islands in the Pacific. Compare that to the unprovoked invasion and decades long occupation of Afghanistan, and the comparison is obviously spurious and if that’s really your position then you’re obviously trolling and can be dismissed without further comment.

Surely we should hold every country to consistent standards.

I don’t actually agree with that, for a number of reasons, some of which I’ve already expressed: you should of course hold your own country to a higher standard than any other country, because you have a greater responsibility for how it behaves.

On top of that, I’m also partial to Lenin’s arguments for “revolutionary defeatism”. Let me explain.

Before the first world war, a bunch of socialists and social democrats got together in the Second International, and they issued a statement called the Basel Manifesto. The Basel Manifesto warned of the looming conflict, and expressed that, should socialists fail to prevent it, they should use the opportunity to launch a global revolution - ideally, the threat of revolution would be a deterrent that would prevent the war in the first place.

But the war happened anyway, and the revolution did not materialize, at least not I’m Britain, France, or Germany. In fact, the social democrats of each country, who had previously agreed in principle to that course of action, all suddenly found reasons to rally around their respective flags and support the war effort. The British social democrats pointed to Germany’s more autocratic system, while the German social democrats pointed to Russia’s serfdom, and so on. Or they said, all sides are bad, and we’re not trying to win or conquer anybody, we’re just fighting “against defeat.” And so they all kept killing each other, and countless lives were lost for no good reason.

Lenin, however, argued that, in that situation, the proper response is for the socialists of each country to be primarily opposed to their own respective countries, to advocate for their own country’s defeat. I cite him here because he expresses it much better that I could:

On closer examination, this slogan [“neither victory nor defeat”] will be found to mean a “class truce”, the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s “own” bourgeoisie, one’s “own” government, whereas dealing a blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country. Those who accept the “neither victory-nor-defeat” slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of “disrupting the class truce”; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. The only policy of actual, not verbal disruption of the “class truce”, of acceptance of the class struggle, is for the proletariat to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by its government and its bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them. This, however, cannot be achieved or striven for, without desiring the defeat of one’s own government and without contributing to that defeat.

When, before the war, the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt correctly from their own point of view, that this would be high treason, and that Social-Democrats would be dealt with as traitors. That is true, just as it is true that fraternisation in the trenches is high treason. Those who write against “high treason”, as Bukvoyed does, or against the “disintegration of Russia”, as Semkovsky does, are adopting the bourgeois, not the proletarian point of view. A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the “foreign” country which is at war with “our side”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his “own”, imperialist “Great” Power.

Whoever is in favour of the slogan of “neither victory nor defeat” is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing governments, of the present-day ruling classes.

To put it another way, the most important conflict is class conflict, and my most immediate enemy is the ruling class of my own country. Even if the ruling class of another country is just as bad, or even marginally worse, that’s a bridge to be crossed later.

Once our own rulers have been justly tried but a revolutionary tribunal and received whatever punishment is deemed appropriate for hundreds of thousands of counts of murder, then after that we can deal with Putin next. Not before.

…is what Lenin would probably say, anyway.